Neither would a Silver Star, even if Lucius Clay presented it with his own hands. A quarter of a million dollars were bound to be a different story.
“What will you do next?” a reporter asked.
“Soon as I get out of the Army, I’m going back to New Mexico,” Cobb answered. “I’ll buy me a house, buy a car, maybe go to school, find a girl, find a job, settle down. No offense to anybody, but I’ve worn a uniform as long as I want to.”
“The Army needs men like you, but I have to admit I understand-and I sympathize,” General Clay said. Then he turned to Lou. “Captain-no, Major-Louis Weissberg!”
“Sir!” Lou blinked-he hadn’t expected the promotion. Down in the crowd, Howard Frank grinned and waved and gave him a thumbs-up.
Lou wasn’t sure he deserved a Silver Star, either. Unlike Bernie Cobb or Lieutenant Davenport, he’d spent a hell of a lot more time in Heydrich’s valley getting shot at than shooting. Then Lucius Clay said, “You earned your share of the reward for ending Reinhard Heydrich’s career not just in the valley last week but also in your relentless pursuit of him and of other war criminals since V-E Day. As I told Sergeant Cobb, the Army needs more men like you. Well done!”
“Thank you, sir!” Lou’s salute was as snappy as he could make it. He felt about ready to bust his buttons with pride. If America wasn’t the greatest country in the world…No, it damn well was, and that was all there was to it. His folks had come through Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. He wished they could see him now, college-educated and exchanging salutes with a four-star general. If something like this wasn’t the dream of every hard-working immigrant’s son, what would be?
“Hey, Captain-uh, Major!” a reporter called. “You’re in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Lou said uncomfortably. The one thing wrong with getting your name in the paper was that you weren’t so useful to the CIC after you did.
The reporter didn’t care-or, more likely, didn’t even think about it. “Those Nazi so-and-so’s gonna dry up and blow away now that Heydrich’s dead and gone?” he asked, poising pencil above notebook to wait for Lou’s reply. A good story…That, he cared about.
Lucius Clay leaned toward Lou, too, anxious to hear his answer. It wasn’t an enormous, showy lean: only an inch or so, two at the most. But any lean at all from the straight-spined general seemed remarkable. With Clay leaning, Lou picked his words with even more care than he would have otherwise. “Nobody
What was
Bernie Cobb was drunk. He was drunk As a Lord,in fact-or he thought so, even if no lords were around for comparison. He couldn’t remember ever buying drinks for so many other guys before, either. Of course, he’d also never had a quarter of a million bucks burning a hole in his pocket before.
He didn’t exactly have a quarter of a million bucks now. In spite of the fancy ceremony with General Clay, the money was going into a Stateside bank account for him. The idea was to keep him from blowing the wad before the Army shipped him home. Whoever’d decided on that knew what he was doing-and knew Bernie much too well.
So what he was spending was back pay and poker winnings and whatever other cash he could scrape together. You had to throw some kind of bash when $250,000 came your way, didn’t you? Bernie thought so. And the Silver Star didn’t hurt.
“So when do they turn you loose and send you back?” asked one of his many new-found close friends.
That set Bernie laughing. Right now, almost anything would, but this was really funny. “Y’know the medal they pinned on me? Even with the way they’re bumping up points, that gave me enough for my Ruptured Duck. So as soon as they find me a ship or a plane, I am fucking gone!”
People laughed and cheered and pounded him on the back. Why not? He was still slapping money down on the bar. Somebody else asked him, “Did you know it was Heydrich when you opened up on those Jerries?”
“Shit, no,” Bernie answered. “All I knew was, they were Germans and they weren’t supposed to be there. I figured I better get ’em while they were still all bunched up, like, so I did.”
“Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” The other GI sounded jealous. And he had a quarter of a million reasons to sound that way. No, a quarter of a million and one, because Bernie had a ticket home, too. Well, the way things were going, everybody’d be heading back from Germany soon. Bernie didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked going home himself just fine.
Engines roaring, the big triple-tailed Constellation rolled down the runway outside of Amsterdam. The TWA airliner took off smooth as you please. It would stop at Paris to let passengers off and take on new ones, and to top up its fuel tanks. Then it would cross the Atlantic-eight or ten times as fast as the fastest ocean liner-and land at New York City.
Over the intercom, the pilot explained all that in English and French and Dutch. Before the war, he surely would have used German, too. He didn’t think he needed to now. Konrad could follow English, and Dutch after a fashion, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of what the pilot thought the flight would be doing, Konrad and his friends had other plans.
Konrad and Max carried Dutch passports-or excellent forgeries of Dutch passports, anyhow. A couple of rows farther back, Arnold and Hermann flew on Belgian passports-or equally excellent forgeries. Along with the false documents, all four men had also brought cut-down Schmeissers onto the plane. But the submachine guns weren’t on display, not yet.
A steward came down the aisle with a tray of drinks. It was almost empty by the time it got to Konrad and Max. Plenty of people needed help forgetting they were three or four kilometers up in the air. Max took a cocktail. Konrad didn’t.
They landed at Orly Airport. Like the rest of the people going on to New York, Konrad and Max and Arnold and Hermann sat tight while other stylish men and women got off and on. If you couldn’t afford stylish clothes, odds were you couldn’t afford a plane ticket, either.
After the layover, the L-049 took off again. The pilot came on the intercom to brag in his three languages about the meals TWA would be serving. Then he explained how to fold the seats down into reasonable approximations of beds. No matter how much faster than a ship it was, the airliner would still take a long time to get to New York City.
It would take far longer than the pilot expected, but he didn’t know that yet. Time he found out.
“Ready?” Konrad asked quietly. Max nodded. Konrad twisted and looked back over his shoulder. He caught Arnold’s eye, and Hermann’s. They nodded, too. All four Germans took their Schmeissers out of their travel cases. No one had searched them before they boarded. Except for a few panicky editorial writers, no one had seen the need, even after the German Freedom Front flew that captured C-47 into the Russians’ Berlin courthouse.
A stewardess-quite a pretty girl, really-was drawing near when Konrad and Max, Arnold and Hermann, all stood up at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding more curious than alarmed.
Then she saw the Schmeissers. Her eyes-green as jade-opened so wide, Konrad could see white all around the irises, as he might have with a spooked horse on the Eastern Front.
“Don’t do anything dumb,” Konrad said-he was lead man in this operation not least because he knew English. “Take us to the cockpit.”
“What-What will you do?” The girl’s voice quavered, which was hardly a surprise.
“Nobody will get hurt if people do what we say,” Konrad answered, which committed him to nothing. He gestured sharply with the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Now go on! Move!”
When the cockpit door opened, the pilot grinned at the stewardess. “Hey, beautiful! What’s going on?” Then
