The Man with the Iron Heart

know his ass from third base?”

“How am I supposed to tell? Do I look like Einstein?” Frank returned. “One thing I will say is that making a bomb seems to take a lot of fancy equipment. Heydrich’s baboons have all kinds of shit, damn them, but I don’t see ’em having that kind of gear. So I’d bet against it.”

“Mm.” Lou nodded. That made sense-a certain amount of it, anyhow. “If they can’t make a bomb, how come the diehards nabbed ’em?”

“Maybe to make us yell and scream and jump up and down like we’ve got ants in our pants,” Captain Frank answered. “Or maybe just for the hell of it-they don’t think the slide-rule boys can pull a rabbit out of the hat, but they don’t want to take the chance they might be wrong. If you were in Heydrich’s shoes, what would you do?”

“Hang myself and save everybody else a lot of trouble,” Lou said promptly. He won a snort from his superior. After a moment, he went on, “Been a week since they made the snatch, right?”

“Yup,” Frank said.

“And nobody’s caught any physicists since. Not many diehards, either.”

“Nope.” The captain turned downright laconic.

“Well, shit,” Lou said. “Chances are that means they got away clean.”

“Yup,” Frank said one more time. “If we’d caught ’em, people like you and me never would have got to see this report. Now it’s gonna be up to us to try and track the bastards down.”

“My aching back!” Lou said. That didn’t satisfy him, so he added, “Gevalt!” Howard Frank’s head bobbed up and down. Lou took the name of the Lord in vain. “The fanatics’ll stash ’em underground somewhere way the hell down south. How many places have they got in the mountains there?”

“Too many-and we haven’t found a tenth of ’em yet,” Frank said. “They were ready for the collapse, damn them. They started getting ready two years before the surrender. That’s what the interrogation reports say, anyhow. Way things look, you’ve got to believe it, too.”

“Uh-huh.” Lou sounded as uncomfortable as his superior. Interrogators didn’t always bother playing by Geneva Convention rules when they caught diehards alive. The Reich had surrendered, after all. And they needed information, and didn’t much care how they got it-especially since the krauts weren’t playing by the rules, either. If a hotshot lawyer or a reporter who sided with the let’s-run-away-from-Germany people back home found out what went on questioning fanatics, the fur would fly. Oh, boy, would it ever! And the Chicago Tribune and the other anti-administration papers would print every goddamn word.

“Well, now you’ve got all the good news,” Captain Frank said. “Where we go from here, God only knows.”

“If He does, I wish He’d tell us.” Lou scowled. God didn’t work that way. If anybody’d had any doubts, what went on during the war would have quashed them. “And I wish He’d tell us why He decided to throw all the Yehudim from France to Russia into the fire.” Nobody knew how many were dead for no other reason than that they were Jews, not even to the closest million.

“Nobody has a good answer for that,” Frank said heavily. “God doesn’t have a good answer for that.” The words should have sounded like blasphemy. To anyone who’d seen the inside of a German concentration camp, they seemed only common sense. Reputable German firms had taken contracts for crematoria and bone crushers and all the other tools that went along with industrialized murder. Lou had followed more paper trails than he cared to remember. And they all led back to businessmen who said things like, We didn’t know what they’d be used for. And how could we say no to the government? The scary thing was, they meant it. Sometimes saying no to the government was the most important thing you could ever do, but try and explain that to a German.

“And Heydrich wants to start it all up again, only worse this time,” Lou said.

“Worse. Yeah,” Captain Frank said gloomily. “Who woulda thought that was possible after the Nazis surrendered? Nothing could be worse’n what they already did, right? Then along comes the atom bomb, and we find out maybe that’s not right after all. Swell old world we got, huh?”

Before Lou could answer, the phone on his desk rang. It was an Army field telephone, patched into a network that also included what was left of the German national telephone system. He picked it up: “Weissberg here.”

“You da guy in charge o’ going after the fanatics?” By the way the GI on the other end of the line talked, he was from New Jersey, too, or maybe Long Island.

“I’m one of ’em,” Lou said. “How come?”

“On account of I got a kraut right here who’s ready t’swear on a stack o’ Bibles he seen that Heydrich drive through town a little while ago.”

“Jesus Christ!” Lou exploded, this time altogether unselfconsciously. “Put him on.”

The German knew some English, but proved more comfortable in his own language. “He had a beard, but I recognized him,” he said. “His picture was all over the papers when the English tried to kill him in the war. There is a reward for me if you catch him, ja?”

“Jawohl,” Lou agreed. The reward for Heydrich, dead or alive, was up to a million bucks. Lou had no idea who this German was or what he’d done between 1939 and 1945. Whatever it was, it was nothing next to Heydrich’s list.

“What’s cooking?” Frank asked. One hand over the mouthpiece, Lou told him. The captain almost jumped out of his skin. “We can catch him! We really can! Find out how long ago this guy saw him and which way he was headed. We can spread the net ahead of him so tight a hedgehog couldn’t sneak through.”

Lou got back on the phone. He asked the Jerry Captain Frank’s questions, then relayed the replies he got: “Less than an hour ago, and heading southeast.”

“Son of a bitch!” Howard Frank said reverently. “We’ve got him!”

Reinhard Heydrich had served in the Navy before the war-till he left it abruptly after not marrying the senior officer’s daughter he’d seduced. He’d flown combat missions over Poland and the Soviet Union. The only experience he had as a foot soldier was getting away from the Ivans after his 109 crash-landed between their lines and the Germans’.

Squelching through a swamp and ducking down into the mud and the water plants wasn’t his idea of fun. But Hans Klein had the perfect spur for him: “Do you want the fucking Amis to catch you, sir?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Heydrich admitted.

“Well, then, don’t stand straight up and down like a heron looking for frogs. Get down here with me,” Klein said. He hadn’t had much ground combat experience himself-certainly none since he became Heydrich’s driver. But he sure talked like somebody who knew what he was talking about.

“If you’d been able to fix the Kubelwagen when it broke down for real-” Heydrich began peevishly.

But that didn’t wash, either. The Oberscharfuhrer let out a derisive snort. “Ja, doch, then what? I’ll tell you what…sir. I’d’ve driven us straight into a Yankee ambush, that’s what, and they’d’ve filled both of us full of holes.”

Again, he was altogether too likely to be right. That made Heydrich love him no better when freezing water filled his shoe…again. Maybe infantrymen really were the heroes of the war, even if pilots and panzer commanders got more ink from Goebbels. Infantrymen put up with more shit-no possible doubt about that.

The Kubelwagen had flatulently expired about ten kilometers outside of Nuremberg. The horrible noises it made told Klein he didn’t have the tools to fix it. They started off for a farmhouse they could see a couple of kilometers off the road. Maybe the farmer would have the tools. If he didn’t…If he didn’t, they would think of something else, that was all.

They’d just trudged into a grove of apple trees not far from the farmhouse when Klein looked back over his shoulder and said, “Mm, Herr Reichsprotektor, I think maybe we don’t want to go back no matter what.”

“Are you out of your-?” Heydrich had begun. Then he’d looked over his shoulder, too. American jeeps and an armored car and U.S. soldiers in their pot helmets and ugly greenish khaki uniforms swarmed around the dead Kubelwagen. When Heydrich turned to say as much to Klein, Klein wasn’t there. He was