The Man with the Iron Heart

“We’ll worry about that when it happens, all right?” The Bavarian didn’t lack for nerve.

The boat began bobbing in a new way. It was floating down the stream now. Pretty soon, the Bavarian sat down and started rowing to help it along. The oarlocks creaked. Time stretched, all rubber-like. Heydrich didn’t know whether to be terrified or bored. Beside him, Klein started snoring softly. Heydrich found himself jealous of the underofficer. Sometimes not thinking ahead made life simpler.

After a while, Heydrich jerked awake and realized he’d been dozing, too. Hans Klein laughed softly. “You snore, Herr Reichsprotektor.”

“Well, so do you,” Heydrich said. “How far do you suppose we’ve come?”

“I dunno. A ways.”

“Shut up, you two,” the Bavarian hissed. “Amis on the banks.”

Sure as hell, a voice called out in accented but fluent German: “Hey, Fritzi, you old asslick, you running Luckies again?”

“Not me,” the Bavarian answered solemnly. “Chesterfields.”

He got a laugh from the American. But then the enemy soldier went on, “You seen a couple of guys on the lam? High command wants ’em bad-there’s money in it if you spot ’em.”

“Your high command must want them bad if it’s willing to pay,” the Bavarian observed, and won another laugh. “But me, I’ve seen nobody.” He kept rowing.

If the American called for-Fritzi? — to stop…But he didn’t. The boat slid on down the stream. Heydrich wished he could see what was going on. He could see the bottom of the boat, the tarp, a little of himself, and even less of Hans. It wasn’t enough. He kept his head down anyhow.

After a while, the Bavarian said, “We gave that lot the slip. Shouldn’t be any more for a while. And even if there are, I can make it so they never see us.”

“Good by me,” Klein said.

“And me,” Heydrich agreed. One of the basic rules was, you didn’t argue with somebody who was saving your ass. Heydrich had broken a lot of rules in his time, but that one made too much sense to ignore.

Lou Weissberg could count the times he’d been on a horse on the fingers of one hand. He thought of a jeep as the next best thing, or maybe even the equivalent. A jeep could go damn near anywhere and almost never broke down. The Stars and Stripes cartoon of the sad cavalry sergeant putting a hand over his eyes as he aimed his.45 at the hood of a jeep that had quit only reinforced the comparison in his mind.

Mud flew up from under this jeep’s tires as it roared toward the edge of a two-bit stream. The PFC driving it gave it more gas. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” the guy said cheerfully. “I’ll get you there-and I’ll get you back, too.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Lou answered, and he was telling the truth-about that, at any rate. He was worried about Heydrich getting away. If the report was true, they should have grabbed the son of a bitch by now. They’d found the Kubelwagen, or a Kubelwagen, not too far from here. That much checked out. But no Heydrich. That Jerry hoping for a big chunk of change had to be sweating bullets right now, for all kinds of reasons. If the kraut was bullshitting, the Americans would come down on him hard. If he wasn’t, who’d want to sell him life insurance?

The jeep half skidded to a stop. Lou hopped out. Carrying a grease gun, he trotted over to the GIs by the side of the stream. The mud tugged at his boots, but he’d been through plenty worse, plenty thicker. “Seen anything?” he called to the dogfaces.

He’d been thinking of Stars and Stripes. One of the soldiers had a bent nose and a dented helmet, just like Joe of Willie and. “Not a goddamn thing,” he said, adding, “Uh, sir,” a beat later when he noticed the silver bar painted onto Lou’s steel pot. “Only Fritzi running smokes like usual.”

“Who’s Fritzi?” Lou asked.

The GIs looked at one another. Lou could tell what was going through their minds. This guy is supposed to help run things, and he doesn’t know stuff like that? Patiently, the one who looked like Joe explained, “He’s this kraut who lives in the swamp around here. He gets cigarettes-hell, I dunno where, but he does. And he makes his living turning ’em over, y’know what I mean? He’s a good German, Fritzi is.”

“How do you know that?” Lou had met any number of Germans who’d done things that would make Jack the Ripper puke, but who were kind family men and never kicked the dog. You just couldn’t tell.

“Oh, you oughta hear him cuss Hitler and the generals,” the soldier answered. “Far as he’s concerned, they screwed things up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Terrific,” Lou said tightly. “You searched the boat, right?”

They eyed one another again. At last, the guy who looked like Joe said, “Nah, we didn’t bother. Fritzi’s okay, like I said. And we woulda had to notice the cigarettes, and that woulda just complicated everybody’s life.” His buddies nodded.

“Suppose he was carrying Heydrich?” Lou snapped.

“Then we fucked up,” the GI said, shrugging. “But what’re the odds?”

“Okay. Okay. But when the prize is this big, we gotta tie up all the loose ends,” Lou said. “If all he’s got’re cigarettes, I don’t give a shit. But all the krauts hate Hitler-now. Ask ’em five years ago and you woulda got a different answer. So which way did this goddamn boat go?”

“Thataway,” the soldier said, as if he’d watched too many Westerns. He jerked a thumb toward the southeast.

“Then we’ll go after him,” Lou declared. He had a radio in the jeep, and turned back towards it. “I’ll call in reinforcements.”

“Call in a bunch-sir,” the dogface told him. “You go much farther and things start getting tricky-like.” Again, his pals’ heads went up and down.

Lou shrugged, too, in a different way. “Fine. So things get tricky. I will call in a bunch.” And he did.

Then he had to wait for the reinforcements to get there. When they did, his heart sank. They were new draftees-you could always tell. They didn’t want to be there, and barely bothered to hide it. They squelched into the swamp like guys ordered to take out the Siegfried Line with slingshots.

“Just remember the price on Heydrich’s head, guys,” Lou called to them. “A million bucks, tax-free. You’re set for life if you nail him.” Anything to get the reluctant soldiers moving. If he thought they would have believed him, he would have promised them a week of blowjobs from Rita Hayworth.

They did move a little faster, but only a little. One of them said, “Yeah, like this fuckin’ kraut’s really in there. Now tell me another one.” Like any other soldier with an ounce of sense, the American GI was a professional cynic. These fellows didn’t know much about soldiering yet, but they’d sure figured that out.

Sometimes there was no help for a situation. Sometimes there was. Lou knew one that front-line officers had often used before the surrender. “Well, follow me, goddammit!” he snapped, and plunged past the draftees into the swamp himself. They muttered and shook their heads, but they did follow.

That accomplished less than he wished it would have. He rapidly discovered why the troopers who knew Fritzi had set up their checkpoint where they did. Past that, the stream split up into half a dozen narrow channels that crossed and recrossed, braided and rebraided, like a woman’s pigtail woven by a nut. Some of what lay between the channels was mud, some was bushes, some was rank second-growth trees. All of it was next to impossible to get through.

“Have a heart, Lieutenant,” one of the draftees panted after a while. “If that what’s-his-name asshole came this way, he’ll never make it out again.” Several of the other new fish nodded.

“My ass,” Lou said sweetly. “You wouldn’t be dogging it if the Jerries were plastering this place with 105s-I guarandamntee you that.”

Behind him, the GIs muttered. Nobody directly answered him, though. He knew what that meant. It meant just what he’d thought: these guys were fresh off the boat from the States. They’d never been under fire, and they had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Something fair-sized and brown splashed into the water and swam away. Lou came that close to opening up on it before he realized it was an animal…one that walked on four legs. Most of the GIs came out with variations on “What the fuck was that?” But one of them said, “Hey, Clifton, that a muskrat or a nutria?”

“Muskrat, I betcha. Nutria’s even bigger.” Clifton sounded froggier than most of the Frenchmen Lou’d met.