The Man with the Iron Heart

Nothing wrong with her complexion, by God-she was radiantly pink. She had meat on her bones, too: luxuriantly curved meat. Her dress didn’t cover all that much of her, and clung to what it did cover. The American soldier on whom she bestowed her favors looked as if he’d invented her-but not even Thomas Edison was that smart.

“Some hardass MP spots them, he’ll get in trouble for fraternizing,” Sergeant Benton said.

“Worth it,” Bernie declared. The ordnance specialist didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.

Right in the middle of Frankfurt, behind a barbed-wire fence nine feet high, was another world. The Army had built what amounted to an American suburb for something close to a thousand families of U.S. occupation officials and high-ranking officers.

Close to half a million Germans lived in postwar misery all around them, but they had it as good as they would have back in the States-better, because they couldn’t have afforded servants there. Except for those servants, the enclave was off-limits to Germans. Electricity ran twenty-four hours a day there, not two hours a day as it did in the rest of Frankfurt. The enclave boasted movie theaters, beauty shops, a gas station, a supermarket, a community center, and anything else the homesick Yankee soul might desire.

“Holy Moses,” Bernie said as he drove up to the gate in front of the guardhouse. “No wonder they keep this place behind barbed wire. If you were a kraut, you wouldn’t need to be one of Heydrich’s goons to want to blow it to kingdom come.”

“Yeah, that’s crossed my mind a time or three, too,” Toby Benton agreed. “But if you’re just a little guy like us, what can you do about it? Try and make sure the fanatics don’t sneak in any bombs-that’s all I can see. And that’s what I’m here for.”

Guards inspected the jeep with microscopic care before they let it into the enclave. The kids playing there didn’t wear rags. They didn’t look as if a strong breeze would blow them away. Fords and De Sotos rolled along the clean, rubble-free streets. Bernie wondered for a second where the hell he really was.

Yeah, if the Jerries saw this…But Bernie Cobb shook his head. If they don’t like what they’ve got now, they shouldn’t have lined up behind Hitler back then, he thought.

XVI

Vladimir Bokov watched Germans go back and forth between the Russian and American zones in Berlin. The spectacle struck him as too anarchic for comfort. He turned to Moisei Shteinberg. “Comrade Colonel, we need to tighten this up,” he said. “People we should keep can get into one of the Western Allies’ Berlin zones easy as you please, and from there they can leave the Soviet zone of Germany altogether. And the Western Allies have such bad security, bandits can hide in their zones for as long as they want. Then they cross over and attack us.”

Shteinberg nodded. Captain Bokov hadn’t expected anything else. No NKVD man could go far wrong talking about the need to tighten up. And Shteinberg worried about things Bokov hadn’t even thought of: “It wouldn’t surprise me if the Anglo-Americans let Heydrich’s hyenas move about freely in their zones here. There always was talk about the USA and Britain lining up with the Hitlerites against the Soviet Union.”

“Da. There was,” Bokov agreed. No NKVD man could go far wrong by assuming all the enemies of the USSR were plotting together, either. “If we have to, we ought to build a wall between our zone and theirs, to make sure only the proper people pass from one to the other.”

“I’d like that,” Shteinberg said. “I’d like blockading the Western Allies’ Berlin zones to force them out of here even better. They didn’t spend their blood taking this city. We did. It should be ours by right of conquest. But…”

“But what?” Bokov said. “That’s a wonderful idea, sir! We ought to do it! We ought to start right away!”

“Unfortunately, the international situation does not permit it. Believe me, Comrade Captain, I’ve had discussions with our superiors about this.” Shteinberg sighed mournfully. “They fear deviating from the Four-Power agreement on Berlin would touch off a war. The military’s judgment-and the Politburo’s-is that we can’t afford one now.”

“Well…” Bokov had trouble arguing with that. Anyone who’d seen what the fight against the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union would. Yes, Eastern Europe obeyed Marshal Stalin’s every wish and busily remade itself on the Soviet model. Yes, the hammer-and-sickle flag flew in Berlin. But oh, the price of planting it here…!

“And there is another concern,” Shteinberg continued inexorably. “If we fight the United States, we risk the atom bomb. Till we also have this weapon, we have to be more cautious than we would if it did not exist.”

“Well…” That also made more sense than Captain Bokov wished it did. “How long till we build our own?”

“I don’t know, Volodya,” Shteinberg said with a shrug. “Till the Americans used one, I never dreamt anything like that was possible. I’m sure our people are doing everything they can.”

“Oh, so am I!” Bokov exclaimed. If all the free physicists in the USSR and all the ones who’d gone into the gulag for one reason or another (or for no reason at all-nobody knew better than an NKVD man that you didn’t always need a reason to end up in a camp) weren’t working twenty-one-hour days in pursuit of uranium, he would have been astonished.

“And we will have taken some German physicists back to the motherland, I’m sure, the same as we’ve taken some rocket engineers,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov nodded. “No doubt. Everybody knows the German rocket engineers are good, though-the Americans have grabbed the ones we didn’t. But the Fascists couldn’t make an atom bomb-”

“A good thing, too, or they would have used it on us,” his superior broke in.

That seemed too likely even to rate a nod. Bokov went on with his own train of thought: “How good are their physicists? How much can they help us?”

“If they can’t, they’ll be sorry.” Cold anticipation filled Shteinberg’s voice. A German brought to the USSR who earned his keep might get good treatment. A German who didn’t…was gulag fodder. If he died in a camp, well, the gulags never ran short of bodies.

But Bokov found something else to worry about. “What about the physicists the Heydrichites snatched up, the ones England turned loose in Germany?” he said. “How much harm can they do? They’re probably better men than the ones we took.” He was resigned to the fact that the more capable German scientists and engineers had wanted to get captured by the Anglo-Americans, not the Red Army.

“They can’t make Heydrich a bomb.” Shteinberg sounded completely confident about that. “And if they can’t make him a bomb, they’re a nuisance, a propaganda coup, an embarrassment to what passes for England’s security system.”

“We understand propaganda. So do the Fascist jackals-Hitler made a point of it in Mein Kampf. But the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov shook his head. “Only when it bites them.” He went on, “Do you think the bandits can actually make them take their troops out of the zones they occupy? The last thing we need is a Germany where the Nazis are running free again.”

“You think so, do you?” Shteinberg’s irony had as many barbs as a porcupine’s quill. He was an NKVD man. He was a Soviet citizen. Though no doubt officially an unbeliever, he was a Jew. Even Jews who didn’t believe remained Jews; like most Russians, Bokov was convinced of that. The colonel continued, “I have no idea what the Anglo-Americans will do next. I often think they have no idea what they’ll do next.”

“But if they should walk away from the occupation?” Bokov persisted. “What do we do then?”

Moisei Shteinberg’s gaze put Bokov in mind of Murmansk winter. The junior officer was glad it wasn’t aimed straight at him. “In that case,” Shteinberg said quietly, “we do whatever we have to do.”

“No, no, no,” a democratic Congressman said, exasperation filling his voice. “No one is talking about pulling American troops out of Germany, and-”

“If the distinguished gentleman from New York doesn’t think anybody is talking about bringing our boys home from Germany, I suggest that he’d better pull his head out of the sand,” a Republican broke in.

Bang! Sam Rayburn rapped loudly for order. “That will be enough of that,” the Speaker of the House declared. “As a matter of fact, that’s too much of that.”

“Sorry, Mr. Speaker.” The Republican sounded anything but. Still, he observed the forms.