The Man with the Iron Heart

had time to shoot three men, and one of them isn’t badly hurt. Oh, and shell fragments killed the pilot and wounded the copilot and one passenger.”

“Too bad, but it’s the cost of doing business,” Bokov said.

Colonel Shteinberg nodded. “Cheaper than dealing with hijackers any day.”

A moment later, the Li-2 caught fire. Blasting the cockpit had pretty much wrecked it anyway. The Red Army soldiers and the surviving people who’d been aboard pulled away in a hurry. Vladimir Bokov impassively watched the fat column of black smoke rise into the sky. The plane was part of the cost of doing business, too.

And as for Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov…Go fuck yourself, Yuri Pavlovich, Bokov thought happily. The senior NKVD man had given Bokov and Shteinberg this assignment hoping they would botch it: Shteinberg was bound to be right about that. But they hadn’t. They’d done as well with it as anyone could reasonably hope to do. They’d given no concessions, the hijackers were dead, and most of the passengers were alive. If Vlasov didn’t like it…Drop dead, cuntface. Bokov grinned. Maybe he’d said it out loud, because Moisei Shteinberg smiled, too. Or maybe the Jew was just thinking along with him. After what they’d managed here together, that wouldn’t surprise him at all.

Seeing what his hijackings had wrought, Jochen Peiper was more happy than not. One thing was clear: taking over a Russian plane didn’t yield enough to make it worthwhile. The Russians, as he already had painful reason to understand, proved at least as remorseless and relentless as his own people. To them, the hijacked aircraft and the people aboard it were expendable. As long as they got rid of the hijackers, they didn’t care about anything else.

“All right,” Peiper muttered. “We won’t mess with them again. Not like that, anyhow.”

But the plane that landed in Madrid, and the one that came down in Lisbon…Both of those were successes, no two ways about it. The German fighting men aboard had killed a few fat, rich fools. They’d got wonderful publicity. Every airline that flew anywhere in Western Europe was frantically revamping security procedures. That would cost piles of dollars or pounds or francs or whatever currency they used. It would also cost them endless wasted time and uncountable passenger goodwill.

The team in Madrid had even managed to torch their Constellation as they walked out. They were in jail now, as were the hijackers who’d gone to Lisbon. The USA, and UK, and France were all screaming for their heads. Jochen Peiper didn’t think they’d get them. The Reich still had friends in high places in Spain and Portugal, even if those friends had to work quietly and discreetly these days. His best guess was that the hijacking teams would stay locked up till the foo-faraw died down, and then, without any fuss, someone would open the door, shove them out through it, and do his goddamnedest to pretend the whole thing never happened.

That suited Peiper fine. He didn’t think he would have any trouble recruiting people for more hijackings.

And the rest of the German Freedom Front’s business seemed to be going well enough. Most important, the Amis hadn’t brought bulldozers and steam shovels into this valley to dig out Peiper’s headquarters. Nobody the enemy had caught when they dug out Heydrich must have known where this place was. Peiper had hoped that would prove true, but he’d known too well there was no guarantee. Either Heydrich had paid proper attention to security, or luck meant no one who knew what he shouldn’t had survived. Peiper didn’t-couldn’t-know which, but either would do.

Roadside bombs, sabotaged vehicles and railroad lines, poisoned liquor, brave men in explosive vests who could take out a platoon of Amis or Tommies or Ivans if they pressed the button at the right time…All that was the small change of partisan warfare-unless you had to try to stop it. Peiper’s side had had to do that in Russia and Poland…and Yugoslavia, and Greece, and France, and the Low Countries, and Norway. Unfortunately, the Reich hadn’t made a popular overlord.

Now the Germans got to jump up and down on the other pan in the scale. If the Anglo-Americans and the Russians (oh, yes-and the French, too) didn’t like it, let them have the joy of figuring out what to do about it. The Americans had already decided they didn’t know. The English weren’t likely to be far behind. And then…

Then what? Peiper wondered. But he knew. Then we take over, that’s what. The Anglo-Americans would leave behind political parties and policemen to try to keep the National Socialists from reclaiming the power that was rightly theirs. Peiper chuckled. How long would that last? Not bloody long!

In the German-occupied East, how many Russian policemen had also served the Red Army or the NKVD? Way too goddamn many-Jochen Peiper knew that for sure. And how many German policemen in the occupied Reich also served the German Freedom Front? Quite a few-Peiper also knew that for sure.

“The fight goes on,” he murmured, and nodded to himself. “Whoever has the most patience-he wins.” He nodded again. The Americans and the English had already seen more trouble than they’d ever wanted. Before too long, the French would, too. Without the Anglo-Americans to prop them up, they weren’t much. The Russians… Jochen Peiper grimaced. The Russians were a different story. Against the Russians, you had to look a lifetime down the line if you were going to accomplish anything. But a free and independent and National Socialist Deutsches Reich in western Germany would do for a start. Peiper thought they could win that much pretty soon.

Anybody could go to New York city to interview troops coming home. Since Tom Schmidt couldn’t go to Germany, he didn’t want to go to New York. Yes, lots of people-and lots of reporters-did, but wasn’t that the point? What were your chances of finding an interesting story if you did the same thing as everybody else? Pretty goddamn slim, that’s what.

And so Tom went to Baltimore instead. It was a major port, nobody else except people from there gave two whoops in hell about it, and it was only a little more than an hour by train from Washington. How could you not like the combination?

It was chilly and rainy there, as it had been when he set out from Union Station. Winter wasn’t on the calendar yet, but it sure was in the air. He stood under an umbrella a few paces beyond the tent that called itself a deprocessing center and waited for demobilized soldiers to come by. Out at the end of the pier squatted the Peter Gray, as unlovely a rustbucket as shipfitters had ever slapped together. Tom wondered who the Liberty ship was named for. Not the one-armed outfielder on the 1945 Browns, surely? But what other even slightly famous Pete Gray had there been?

MPs discouraged him from getting to the returning soldiers before they went through the deprocessing center. That irked him. “I happen to know other people have been able to talk to them beforehand,” he fumed.

All he got back from the sergeant in charge of the MPs was a shrug and a dismissive, “Sorry, sir.” The three- striper didn’t sound one bit sorry. Tacking insult on to injury, he added, “You understand-we’ve got our orders.”

So did the guards at Dachau and Belsen. Tom almost said it. He would have if he’d figured it would do him any good. But the boss MP’s dull eyes and blunt features argued that he would have made a pretty good concentration-camp guard himself. That being so, hearing himself compared to one would have pissed him off all the more. He had no real reason to run Tom in, which might not stop him from inventing one. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was keep your mouth shut.

Here came a soldier proudly wearing a shiny new Ruptured Duck on his lapel. “Talk to you a minute?” Tom asked. “Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune.” Taking notes, he realized, would be a bitch. It was like driving the hills of San Francisco, where you needed one foot on the gas, one on the brake, and one on the clutch. Here he needed one hand for the umbrella, one for the pencil, and one for the notebook.

As things turned out, he didn’t need pencil or notebook this time. The GI shook his head and kept walking. “Sorry, Mac. All I wanna do is haul ass for the train station, get aboard, and head for home.”

“Where is home?” Tom was nothing if not persistent. It did him no good this time. The soldier or ex-soldier or whatever he was shook his head again. He splashed every time his Army boots came down on the concrete. That had to be better than slopping through mud, though. Slowly, as if in a Hollywood dissolve, the curtain of rain made him disappear.

Here came another tired-looking GI. Tom took another shot at it: “Tom Schmidt, Chicago Tribune. Can I talk to you for a little bit?”

The GI-one stripe on his sleeve made him a PFC-paused. “Okay. Why not? You gonna put me in the