The Man with the Iron Heart

rest of his men quietly retreated to the south. Far fewer locals would pay them any attention. Far fewer would be able to tell the Tommies where they’d headed. And, with luck, the British would be slow to figure out they were the important group. How important could they be if they didn’t fire off everything they were carrying?

One of the scientists-a middle-aged fellow with rumpled, greasy hair and thick glasses-asked, “Why did you shoot poor Heisenberg?”

“Shut up, Professor Diebner, or we’ll shoot you, too.” Heydrich was pleased with himself for recognizing who’d spoken. “Heisenberg was an accident.” An unfortunate accident, too, he thought. Heisenberg was-had been-a high-horsepower physicist. Coldly, Heydrich went on, “We will shoot you on purpose, though, if you slow us down or give us away.”

“Give you away? I don’t even know who you are,” Diebner said.

“A man who believes in a free, strong Germany,” Heydrich answered. “A man who doesn’t believe the war is over yet, or lost.”

Behind the spectacle lenses, Diebner’s eyes were enormous. Maybe the lenses magnified them; Heydrich wasn’t sure. He didn’t care much one way or the other. “But-” Diebner began, and then clamped his mouth shut. That made sense; he was in no position to argue.

He and the others had probably spilled their guts while the enemy held them in England. Heydrich didn’t even reckon it treason. Obviously, the Anglo-Americans were ahead of Germany in nuclear physics. He would have grabbed American scientists if he could. But his countrymen were the best he could get his hands on. Maybe they’d be able to come up with…something, anyhow.

Out of Alswede. Into the woods. The raiders divided into smaller groups, splitting the physicists among them. Gunfire broke off to the north. Heydrich smiled wolfishly. His distraction was working just the way he’d hoped it would.

“Be damned, sir,” Hans Klein said. “I think we pulled it off.”

“I said we would,” Heydrich answered. Klein kept his mouth shut. Officers and leaders said all kinds of things. Sometimes they delivered. Sometimes…Sometimes your Vaterland ended up occupied by unfriendly foreigners. But Heydrich had delivered. And maybe Germany wouldn’t stay occupied too much longer.

XIII

Cold rain pissed down out of a gray, curdled sky. Bernie Cobb manned a checkpoint outside of Erlangen and steamed. The rain blew into his face and dripped down the back of his neck, which did nothing to improve his mood. He looked this way and that-he tried to look every which way at once. Visibility wasn’t much more than a hundred feet, so looking didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good. The only consolation was, a Nazi sniper couldn’t see any farther than he could.

“What did they stick us out here for?” Mack Leff asked for about the tenth time.

Leff wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d got here after V-E Day, so Bernie didn’t trust him as far as he would have trusted somebody who’d been through the mill. “Beats me,” Bernie said. “Something’s screwed up somewhere, though-that’s for goddamn sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put so many of us out on patrol at once.”

“Yeah,” Mack agreed mournfully. His left hand moved inside the pocket of his field jacket. Bernie knew what that meant: he was feeling a pack of cigarettes in there and wondering if he could keep one lit in this downpour. He must have decided he couldn’t, because he didn’t try to light up.

Bernie had already made the same glum calculation and come up with the same answer. He wasn’t twitchy from missing a smoke yet, but he sure wanted one. “The orders we got are all bullshit, too,” he went on-he could always piss and moan, even if he couldn’t light up. “Check everybody’s papers. Hold anybody suspicious for interrogation. Suspicious how?”

“You come out in this weather at all, you ought to have your head examined,” Mack Leff opined.

“Got that right.” Bernie wondered if he could peel the paper off a cigarette and chew the tobacco inside. He’d always thought a chaw was disgusting (to say nothing of hillbilly), but out in the open in weather like this…. “Rained this hard when we got over the Rhine last year. Then, at least, we could lay up in a house or a barn or somethin’ and stay out of it sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.” Leff nodded. “Musta been good when you knew who the enemy was, when you didn’t have to worry about everybody from the grocer to the old lady with a cat. You didn’t have to watch your back so hard then.”

“Fuck,” Bernie muttered. Mack actually thought he’d had it easy when the real war was on. How was that for a kick in the nuts? The really weird thing was, the new guy might have a point. You kinda had to look at things sideways to see it, but when you did….

He became aware of a new noise punching through the endless hiss of rain off paving and fields. “Heads up, Mack,” he said. “Car’s comin’.”

The jeep they’d ridden out here made a decent obstacle after they’d pulled it across the road. If you wanted to go around it, you’d probably get stuck in the mud and you’d probably get shot, too. Bernie had the safety off on his M-1. If Mack Leff didn’t, he was too dumb to deserve to live.

Only worry was whether whoever was in the oncoming car could spot the jeep in time to stop. They did, which impressed Bernie-that Kubelwagen had seen plenty of better years. Hitler’s equivalent of a jeep could do most of the stuff a real one could, only not so well.

Two men sat in the Kubelwagen. If they weren’t vets, Bernie’d never seen any. “Cover me,” he told Leff as he came out from behind the jeep. He raised his voice and used some of his terrible German: “Papieren, bitte!” Then, hopefully, he added, “You guys speak English?”

Both krauts shook their heads. Bernie sighed; he might’ve known they wouldn’t. It was that kind of day. They passed him the papers. The guy behind the wheel was Ludwig Mommsen, the documents said. The other fellow, whose long, thin nose kind of leaned to one side and who needed a shave like nobody’s business, was Erich Wisser.

“You-in Krieg?” Bernie asked them. They looked at each other. “Where?” he said. “Uh, wo?”

“Ostfront,” Wisser answered. “Danzig.” Mommsen nodded again, to show he’d served over there, too.

Bernie grunted. You couldn’t get a Jerry to admit he’d ever taken a shot at an American. If you listened to those guys talk, nobody’d fought between Normandy and central Germany-not a soul. Bernie wished he didn’t know better.

These guys seemed legit, though. He handed back their documents. “Wo gehen Sie?” he asked.

“Nurnberg,” Mommsen answered, pronouncing it the way a kraut would instead of Nuremberg like an American.

They were on the right road. “Okay,” Bernie said, and then, louder, “Move the jeep, Mack!”

Leff did. The Germans put the Kubelwagen back in gear and drove off to the south. “That wasn’t so bad,” Leff said.

“Sure wasn’t,” Bernie agreed. “They should all be so easy.”

Lou Weissberg read the report howard Frank Gave him. Then he handed it back to his superior officer. He didn’t have rank enough to get his own copy. For that matter, neither did Captain Frank. He’d have to give the report to his own superior, who would stow it in a stout safe where no unauthorized eyes could see it.

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exclaimed. He and Captain Frank exchanged self-conscious half-smiles. That was a hell of a thing for a Jew to say, but plenty born in the States did it all the time. “Did the limeys screw the pooch or what?”

“They sure did,” Frank said. “They screwed it like you wouldn’t believe. And so now the fanatics have nine first-rate atomic physicists…somewhere.”

“Can they make a bomb?” Lou asked. “The guy who wrote your little paper doesn’t think so, but does he