The Man with the Iron Heart

he saw the four men with submachine guns behind her. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

“I will shoot you if you do not do everything I tell you,” Konrad said. “The plane will crash. Everyone will die. If you do what I tell you, I think everyone can live. Is it a bargain?”

“Who the hell are you?” the pilot demanded.

That was a fair question. He meant Are you a pack of crazy people? If he decided Konrad and his friends were, he wouldn’t see any point to dealing with them. He might think crashing the plane now would be the best thing he could do, so they wouldn’t try to make him fly it into a building or something. Since Konrad didn’t want to die, he spoke quickly: “We belong to the German Freedom Front. We were soldiers in the war. We still fight to liberate the Fatherland.”

Pilot and copilot looked at each other. Neither seemed to like the answer very much. “What do you want us to do?” the pilot asked after a considerable pause.

“Fly this airplane to Madrid. Land there,” Konrad replied. “We will-how do you say it? — use the airplane and the passengers as poker chips to move our cause forward. We will not shoot unless you try to overpower us. Everyone in that case will be very unhappy.”

“When we go off course, the radar will see it,” the pilot said. “They’ll call us up and ask us what’s wrong. What are we supposed to tell ’em?”

“Tell them the truth. Tell them you have men from the German Freedom Front on your airplane. Tell them these men require you to fly to Spain,” Konrad answered.

The pilot eyed him. “You son of a bitch! You want everybody to know!”

“Aber naturlich,” Konrad said. “The world must learn we are still fighting for a free Germany, and we are serious in what we do.” As he had with the stewardess, he let a twitch of the Schmeisser’s muzzle make his point for him. “Now-to Madrid.”

“Right. To fucking Madrid,” the pilot muttered. The L-049 swung from west to south.

Not five minutes later, a voice on the radio said, “TWA flight 57, this is Paris Control. Why have you changed course? Over.”

The pilot grabbed the microphone. “Paris Control, this is TWA57. We have four men from the German Freedom Front aboard. They are all armed, and they have directed us to fly to Madrid. To keep our passengers and crew safe, we are obeying. Over.” He clicked off the mike and looked back over his shoulder at Konrad. “There. Happy now?”

“You did what was needed. That is good,” Konrad answered. The pilot’s eyebrows said he didn’t think so.

“Jesus Christ!” Paris Control burst out. “Say that again, TWA57.” At Konrad’s nod, the pilot did. “Jesus!” Paris Control repeated. Then he asked, “Have the assholes hurt anybody?”

“Negative. They say they won’t if we play along with ’em. You might watch what you call ’em, since they’re in the cockpit with us.”

“Er-roger that,” Paris Control said. A different voice came over the air: “Shall we scramble fighters?”

“Negative! Say again, negative!” the pilot replied. “Not unless you aim to shoot us down. What else can fighters do?”

A long silence followed. At last, Paris Control said, “You may proceed. We will inform Spanish air officials of the situation.”

“Thank you,” the pilot said. He looked disgusted. Paris Control had sounded disgusted. Some of the Anglo- Americans had wanted to clean out Franco’s Spain after the Wehrmacht surrendered. They hadn’t done it, though, even if Spain sheltered more than a few German refugees and other Europeans who’d supported the Reich’s crusade against Bolshevism. Maybe they remembered that Franco hadn’t let the Fuhrer come in and run the English out of Gibraltar. All by itself, that had gone a long way toward costing Germany the war.

“Can we tell the passengers what’s going on?” the copilot asked. “They’re bound to be wondering by now.”

“Go ahead,” Konrad said, and then, in German, to his comrades, “If anybody back there makes trouble, kill him.”

Word went out over the airliner’s intercom. The copilot warned people not to do anything silly, and nobody did. The Constellation flew on, almost at right angles to its planned course.

After a while, Konrad saw the peaks of the Pyrenees ahead. The L-049 flew high above them. The land on the other side was Spain.

He and his fellow hijackers grinned at one another. Everything was going according to plan. The Spanish ground-control man who came on the radio hardly spoke English. He and the pilot went back and forth in French. Konrad didn’t know any, but Max and Hermann did. They nodded to show nothing was wrong.

Spanish planes came up to look the airliner over. “Son of a bitch!” the pilot exclaimed. “Thought I’d never seen another goddamn Messerschmitt again!”

To Konrad, the German design carried happier associations. “We sold many of them to Spain,” he said. “The Spaniards must use them yet.”

“I guess.” The pilot still sounded shaken.

He wasn’t too shaken to land smoothly, though. Tanks rolled toward the Constellation. They were also German-outdated Panzer IIIs-which did nothing to reassure Konrad. “Tell them to go away, or the passengers will answer for it,” he said sharply. The American relayed the message. The tanks pulled back.

“People are hungry. May I serve a meal?” the stewardess asked.

“Ja. Go ahead. Hermann, keep an eye on things,” Konrad said. Hermann smiled and nodded. Plainly, he was happy to keep an eye on the cute stewardess. That wasn’t what Konrad had meant, but…. The lead hijacker turned back to the pilot. “You can talk to the control tower, yes?”

“Yes,” the man said. “They finally found a guy who really knows some English, too.”

“Good. Very good. Get in touch with him.” When the pilot had, Konrad took a folded sheet of paper out of his inside jacket pocket. “Send to the tower the just demands of the German Freedom Front. Tell the tower to send these demands on to the troops unlawfully and improperly occupying Germany. Have you got it?”

“Take it easy. Let me give ’em that much before I start forgetting,” the pilot said. Konrad waved agreement. The pilot spoke into the microphone. Then he looked back to the hijacker to find out what came next.

Konrad was only too happy to oblige him. “First, all demands must be met within seventy-two hours. After that, we cannot answer for the safety of the passengers.”

“You’ll start shooting people, you mean,” the pilot observed bleakly.

“Ja,” Konrad said. “If we do not do this, no one pays attention to us. Send the warning.” After the pilot had, Konrad resumed: “We demand the immediate liberation of all prisoners captured while resisting the unlawful occupation. We demand also an end to the unlawful ban against National Socialist participation in German political life. And we demand-”

“Maybe you should start shooting now,” the pilot said. “They won’t give you any of that stuff.”

Konrad hefted his Schmeisser. “You had better hope they do.”

XXXII

Had Lou Weissberg tried for a year, he would have had trouble coming up with a photo he less wanted to see on the front page of the International Herald-Tribune. There was the big four-engined airliner parked at the edge of a runway in Madrid. There was the doorway, open. There was a faint view of a Nazi bastard with a submachine gun standing in the doorway. And there on the tarmac below the doorway lay a crumpled corpse in a spreading pool of blood.

“Motherfuckers even picked a Jew to murder first,” Lou snarled in helpless, frustrated fury-the story beside the photo said the dead man’s name was David Levinsky. “Probably the only Jew on the plane, but they found him, all right.”

“Sure they did,” Howard Frank agreed. “After everything you’ve seen since you got here, how come you’re surprised now?”