The Man with the Iron Heart

A young, able lieutenant or captain from 1917 would be a colonel or a general or even a marshal now…if he’d lived through all the purges in the generation between. Some would have made it. Some could-what did people say about Anastas Mikoyan? — some could dance between the raindrops and come home dry, that was it.

Something else Shteinberg had said made Bokov mutter to himself. “How many of our people are secretly on Heydrich’s side?”

“Not many Russians. You’d have to be a Vlasovite-worse than a Vlasovite-to side with the Nazis now,” Shteinberg said. Bokov nodded. The Germans had captured General Andrei Vlasov in 1942, and he’d gone over to them, even if they never quite trusted him. Anyone who’d served in his Russian Liberation Army was either dead or in a camp wishing he were dead.

“But the Germans who say they’re on our side…” Bokov said. He felt the same way about those Germans as the Hitlerites had felt about Vlasov and his fellow Russians: they might be useful, but would you really want to have to rely on one of them at your back?

“Yes. We shall have to go through them. That seems all too clear. Heydrich’s men want us to think they’re ordinary mushrooms when they’re really amanitas.” Shteinberg would have gone on, but he had another coughing spasm. “This damned grippe. I don’t think it’ll ever let go.”

Bokov displayed a vial of benzedrine tablets. “They still help-but I have to take more to get the same buzz.”

“I have some, too,” Shteinberg said. “I try not to take them unless I have to. Sometimes, though, there’s no help for it. So, Volodya-how do we get the amanitas out of our mushroom stew?”

Reinhard Heydrich’s chin and cheeks itched. He’d let his beard grow for a couple of weeks before emerging from the mine where he’d sheltered for so long. He wore beat-up civilian clothes, with an equally ragged Wehrmacht greatcoat over them: the kind of outfit any German male of military age might have.

Hans Klein sat behind the dented, rusty Kubelwagen’s wheel. Heydrich hadn’t wanted to risk using an American jeep-it might have roused suspicion. “Are you sure you should be doing this at all, sir?” Klein asked.

Since Heydrich wasn’t, he scowled. But he answered, “The operation is too important to leave to anyone else.”

“If you say so.” Klein didn’t believe him. Klein thought he was using that as an excuse to come out and do his own fighting. Klein was much too likely to be right, too. But Klein was only an Oberscharfuhrer. Heydrich was the Reichsprotektor. If he decided he had to come out, none of the other freedom fighters had the rank to tell him he couldn’t. And if anything went wrong, Jochen Peiper, fidgeting inside another buried command post, would take over and do…as well as he could, that was all.

So far, everything was fine. They’d already made it from the American zone up into the one the British held. Their papers had held up at every inspection. Things would have been harder where the Russians ruled. The Russians did Heydrich’s men the dubious courtesy of taking them and their uprising seriously. Neither Amis nor Tommies seemed eager to do that. They wanted the fighting to be over, and so they did their best to pretend it was.

A jeep with four British soldiers in it came down the road toward Heydrich and Klein. The jeep carried a machine gun. The Tommy behind it aimed it at the battered Kubelwagen. Heydrich had seen that was only an ordinary precaution. The fellow wouldn’t open up for the fun of it. He just feared that the Kubelwagen might be full of explosives, and the men inside willing to blow themselves up to kill him and his mates, too.

Not today, friend Tommy, Heydrich thought as the vehicles passed each other. We’ve got something bigger cooking.

After a while, Klein pulled off onto the shoulder. He started messing around in the Kubelwagen’s engine compartment, as if he’d had a breakdown. Heydrich watched the road. When it was clear in both directions, he said, “Now.”

They jumped back in. Klein drove into the woods till trees screened the Kubelwagen from the road. “You’ll know where the bunker is?” he asked.

“I’d better,” Heydrich answered confidently. Inside, though, he wondered. How far out of practice was he, and how much would finding out cost?

To his relief, a scrap of hand-drawn map in his greatcoat pocket (written with Russian names, to make it look like a relic from fighting much farther east if he were searched) and a compass brought him to a hole under a fallen tree. The hole led to a tunnel. The tunnel took him to the bunker.

Three men waited there. Despite exchanged passwords, they all pointed Schmeissers or assault rifles at the entrance till Heydrich and Klein showed themselves. “All right-it is you,” one of them said, lowering his weapon.

“Ja,” Heydrich said. “Let’s get what rest we can. We move at 0200.”

The underground hideout had bunks enough for all of them. Alarm clocks clattered to wake them at the appointed hour. They armed themselves and went up and out into the quiet German night. No blackouts any more, which seemed unnatural to Heydrich. He could see the little town ahead, even though it was mostly dark in the middle of the night.

Soft-voiced challenges and countersigns showed more Germans gathering around Alswede. This assault would be in better than platoon strength. The fighting wolves hadn’t shown their strength like this before.

Into the town they strode. Some wore the Stahlhelm. Others used American or Russian helmets instead. Their weapons were a similar blend. And the Tommies didn’t even seem to realize they were there.

The British had converted the fancy clothier’s emporium where they housed the German physicists into a residence hall. It stood near the center of Alswede. Heydrich hoped to bag all the brains, because they had to be back at their new residence by sundown every day.

As his ragged little force converged on the emporium, he imagined himself a field marshal on the Eastern Front, moving armies and corps like chessmen on the board. But those methods had failed the Reich. Maybe this platoon’s worth of men would do more for Germany than an army group had in the Ukraine. It had better, Heydrich thought.

Yawning Tommies stood sentry outside the physicists’ quarters. The British weren’t altogether idiots. But the sentries didn’t expect trouble.

“Hands up!” an English-speaking German called to them. “If you surrender, you will not be harmed.”

A burst from a Sten gun answered him. Unlike the tin Tommy gun that had almost murdered Heydrich in Prague, this one worked fine. But so did the Germans’ assault rifles and Schmeissers and grenades. The sentries went down one after another. Lights came on all over Alswede as people woke to the firefight and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Heydrich’s raiders charged into the haberdashery. “Schnell!” he called to them. “We have to be gone before the Tommies come in force.” He didn’t know how long they had. Fifteen minutes, he judged, would be uncommon luck.

Long before fifteen minutes were up, the raiders came out again, herding along men middle-aged and elderly in their nightclothes. “We’ve grabbed nine of them!” a captain yelled to Heydrich. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where’s the last one?” As long as they were in Alswede, Heydrich wanted to make a clean sweep.

But the captain answered, “He’s kaput-caught a bullet in the head, poor bastard.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ground.

“All right.” As long as the loose end was cleared up, Heydrich wouldn’t fuss. He’d known going in that they took that chance if the British resisted. They were lucky-more than one of the slide-rule boys might have stopped something. Heydrich raised his voice: “Withdraw! Plan One!”

Some of the raiders left Alswede heading north. They made a hellacious racket, whooping and shouting and firing their weapons into lighted windows. Everyone in town could tell exactly where they were-and could tell the British exactly where they’d gone.

Along with the captured physicists-who were now starting to shiver in the late-night chill-Heydrich and the