The Man with the Iron Heart

Lou sighed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe ’cause they’re still exactly the same assholes they were before, even though Heydrich’s dead. Why did Clay bother giving me a medal and all that cash if killing the bastard didn’t change anything?”

“He must have hoped it would, too,” Major Frank said. “And if you don’t want the money, I’ll take it off your hands. I bet I can figure out something to do with it.”

“You know what you can do with it-sideways,” Lou said. Chuckling, Frank lit up, too. Lou went on, “And the goddamn Spaniards just stand around watching with their thumbs up their asses.”

“Portuguese, too,” Major Frank said. A DC-4 had been hijacked to Lisbon. The Nazis aboard that plane hadn’t started shooting hostages yet.

“Yeah, the Portuguese, too. We shoulda gone into both countries after V-E Day. Then the krauts wouldn’t have anywhere to hide-I don’t think you can fly nonstop from Europe to Buenos Aires,” Lou said. “But you know the real pisser?”

Howard Frank suddenly seemed fascinated by the glowing coal on his cigarette. At last, without much wanting to, he said, “Nu?”

“The real pisser is, we’re still loading GIs onto troopships and taking them home,” Lou said. “That hasn’t slowed down one goddamn bit. I mean, why should it? We knocked the crap out of the Nazis, so they aren’t dangerous any more. Sure makes sense to me! Must make sense to you, too, right?”

“Riiight.” Frank stretched out the word like a train whistle fading in the distance. “Go close the door to my office, willya?”

“Huh? How come?” Lou said. Major Frank just looked at him. “Okay, okay. All right, already.” Lou walked over and shut it.

By the time he got back, Frank had produced an almost-full pint of bourbon from nowhere-more likely, from a desk drawer. He took a knock and handed Lou the bottle. “Here. Get the taste out of your mouth.”

“Thanks!” Lou was glad to drink. It wouldn’t help the poor SOBs in Madrid or Lisbon, but it made him feel better. “Ahh! You’re a mensh.”

“Well, I try.” Major Frank tilted the pint back again, not so far this time. “Russians have the same worry we do-just before you came in with the paper, I heard on the radio that there’s a hijacked plane in Prague.”

“Fuck!” Lou said. That made him want more bourbon himself, so he took some. “Fanatics have a new toy, don’t they?”

Howard Frank nodded. “Looks that way.”

“But what can they accomplish?” Lou asked. “No matter how many hostages they kill, we won’t do what they say. That’d be asking for even more trouble, if such a thing is possible. And they’ve gotta know the Russians’ll tell ’em to piss up a rope.”

“Sure.” Frank nodded again. “The kind of publicity they’re getting, though-you can’t buy headlines like that. And if they’re pulling this crap on regular airline flights, they’ll make us start patting people down and going through everybody’s luggage and stuff like that. It’ll cost millions of dollars and flush even more millions of man-hours down the shitter.”

“Lord, will it ever!” Lou exclaimed, picturing the mess in his mind. “Millions and millions of dollars.”

“Uh-huh.” Major Frank eyed the bourbon longingly. This time, though, he didn’t pick it up. “And I guess that’s why nobody’s stormed the planes in Madrid and Lisbon. If a bunch of hostages get shot, who do we blame? Franco and Salazar, right? That’s how they’re bound to see it, anyway.”

Lou grunted. He also wanted another snort, and also hung back. “Makes sense. I almost wish it didn’t, but it does. But if the fucking SS men are shooting hostages anyway…”

“Hey, it’s happening in Europe. A bunch of the people on those planes are bound to be foreigners. So it’s nothing anybody in the United States needs to worry about, is it?” Frank said.

“Of course not.” But Lou reached for the bourbon after all.

Vladimir Bokov had all kinds of reasons not to want to go to the Prague airport. He’d had plenty of work on his plate back in Berlin-important work, too, not just stuff to make time go by. Dealing with Czechoslovakian officials was still tricky. Too many of them thought they could restore the bourgeois republic they’d had before the war. They didn’t see that, with Soviet troops occupying their country, it had to accommodate itself to the USSR. And dealing with the Nazi terrorists who’d hijacked this Li-2 and ordered it flown here might be even trickier.

None of which had anything to do with anything. When Bokov and Colonel Shteinberg got orders to drop everything, to go to Prague, and to recapture the passenger plane without making concessions, they went. What other choice did they have? None, and Bokov knew it.

Which didn’t keep him from complaining. “Why us?” he groused, peering at the Li-2 through captured German binoculars (better than any the Soviet Union made).

“Why us, Volodya?” Moisei Shteinberg’s chuckle said he was amused to find such naivete in a fellow NKVD officer. “You mean you don’t know?”

“If I did, would I be pissing and moaning like this?” Bokov answered irritably.

“I’ll tell you why, then.” And Shteinberg proceeded to do just that: “Lieutenant General Vlasov, that’s why. We did well giving Birnbaum to the Americans after he didn’t want us to. So now he gives us this mess. If we don’t make a hash of it, we solve his problem for him. And if we do, he’s even with us, and he writes something good and foul on our fitness report.”

“Well, fuck me!” Bokov said, and not another word. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to admit he should have seen that for himself. And he should have. As soon as Shteinberg pointed it out to him, he knew it was true. In Yuri Vlasov’s shoes, Bokov would have done the same thing.

All the troops ringing the Li-2 belonged to the Red Army. The Czechoslovakians had grumbled about that, which did them no good whatever. The plane was Russian. That gave the Soviet commandant in Prague all the excuse he needed to use his own men. If some pimp of a Czech colonel who’d probably get purged once the other shoe here dropped didn’t like it, too goddamn bad.

The radio crackled to life. “Do you read me, Prague airport?” one of the Nazi hijackers asked.

“We hear you, yes,” Bokov answered in German.

“You’d better get cracking on our demands, then,” the fanatic said. “Time’s running short. If we don’t know for sure that you’re freeing prisoners and moving soldiers out of the Vaterland, it’s too bad for the people on this plane.”

“We are doing what you told us to do,” Bokov lied. Not even the Americans were stupid enough to yield to the hijackers’ demands. If you did that even once, you set yourself up for endless trouble down the line.

“We’d better see some sign of it, or we start shooting,” the German warned.

“There’s no hope for you if you do,” Bokov said. That was true, but there’d been no hope for the fanatics once they commandeered the airplane.

“Maybe not, but there’s no hope for your important people, either,” the Nazi said. The passengers were important: officers, engineers, agricultural officials, a prominent violinist. No one but important people flew, not in Soviet airspace. But that also had nothing to do with anything.

A Red Army lieutenant handed Colonel Shteinberg a note. He read it and nodded to Bokov. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Bokov told the fanatic. “We’ll do what you want, and we’ll get you the evidence you need. Out.” He made sure he’d switched off before asking Shteinberg, “Everything’s ready?” The Jew nodded again. Bokov switched frequencies on the radio and said one word in Russian: “Now!”

Three 105mm shells slammed into the Li-2’s cockpit. They blew off most of the plane’s nose. A truck with a scaling ladder-taken from a Prague fire engine-sped down the runway. The ladder went up. Red Army men with submachine guns swarmed into what was left of the cockpit.

Another truck raced over to the Li-2’s right-side doorway. This one needed a shorter ladder. The first soldier up it sprayed the lock with bullets from his PPSh. Then he threw the door open and sprang into the plane. The rest of his squad followed.

It was all over in less time than it took to tell. The Russians threw two hijackers’ bodies out of the Li-2’s shattered nose. One more corpse came out through the side door. They were bound to be dead already, but men on the ground filled them full of lead anyway, just to stay safe.

Then live soldiers and passengers started coming out. Another lieutenant hurried back to the tower to report to Shteinberg and Bokov. “Your plan worked very well,” he said, saluting the NKVD men. “The sons of bitches only