The Man with the Iron Heart

“You don’t need to tell me, Lou. I already know.” Frank might have been on the point of saying something more, but the doors to the jail opened. Out came MPs with grease guns, followed by the Nazi prisoners in civilian clothes. Goring and Hess were easy to recognize, even though they’d both dropped a lot of weight. The rest… Without their uniforms, without the power those uniforms conferred, they looked like a bunch of small-town shopkeepers and tradesmen, with maybe a lawyer and a doctor and a preacher thrown in.

There were almost two dozen of them all told. The MPs hustled them into four halftracks. Guards also scrambled up into the armored personnel carriers. The tanks and other armored vehicles rolled away to take the lead in the convoy. One by one, the halftracks with the important captives followed. The rear guard was at least as strong as the force that had gone before.

More American troops and vehicles waited along the route the armored convoy would take. Still more were posted along routes it might have taken but wouldn’t. “I wonder how much this little move is costing the taxpayers,” Lou remarked.

“You’ll find out,” Captain Frank said. “As soon as the jerks who want to make Heydrich happy and go home hear what the number is, they’ll shout it from the housetops. Grab a copy of the Chicago Tribune or any Hearst paper and you’ll see it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lou said. “Don’t people understand the war’s still cooking even if the krauts did sign a surrender?”

“Hey, if you get a scoop, who gives a shit what happens to the poor goddamn dogfaces on the other side of the ocean?” Yeah, Frank was in a cynical mood, all right.

Lou also had a strong opinion about what people like that could do to themselves. It violated several commandments and other Biblical prohibitions, to say nothing of the laws of anatomy, physiology, and probably physics. He expressed it anyhow. His superior laughed. “Sideways,” Lou added.

“Well, it’s not like I don’t feel the same way,” Howard Frank said. “But I’m just a poor goddamn dogface on the other side of the ocean, too, far as they’re concerned.”

“Uh-huh.” Letters from Lou’s family-and, even more, letters he’d tried and failed to write to them-had painfully proved to him that he wasn’t a civilian any more. He wondered if he ever could be again. He had his doubts.

“But I think they’re just what you called ’em,” Frank said. “I’m not gonna worry about ’em-not unless they make so much noise, they don’t let us do what we’ve gotta do over here.”

“Sounds good to me, too, sir,” Lou said. The last Pershing-finally, an American tank that could match up with a Panther, only it got to the battlefield a couple of months before Panthers went out of business-rumbled away. Exhaust fumes choked the air.

“I just hope everything goes good on the other end, too,” Captain Frank said.

“Boy, me, too,” Lou said. “Next stop…” He dropped to a whisper. He wasn’t supposed to say where, even if the only guy who could possibly hear already knew anyway. Bringing out the place had a thrill of the forbidden: “Frankfurt.”

The truck was a deuce-and-a-half painted olive drab. Well, what the hell else would it be in Germany these days? The English used them. So did the French. So did the Russians. And the Jerries had used all the big American brutes they could capture. These babies beat the crap out of the Opels and the other hunks of tin the krauts had manufactured for themselves.

“Papers?” said the guard at the entrance to the American compound in Frankfurt.

Without a word, the driver passed them to him. The guard looked them over. They were in order. They looked in order, anyhow. It wasn’t the same thing, but the guard didn’t think of that.

“I’ve got to inspect your cargo,” he said. The driver only nodded. The guard eyed him. “Watsamatter? Cat got your tongue, buddy?” The driver mimed tipping back a stein, or maybe a bottle. He held his head in both hands and rolled his eyes. The guard laughed. “Okay, okay. I’ve tied one on a few times, or maybe a few times too many. But I still gotta look at your stuff.”

With a hesitant nod, the driver waved him on. The man was as pallid as if he’d got plastered the night before-that was for sure. The guard went around to the back of the truck. He scrambled up onto the rear bumper so he could look over the gate at what the canvas-covered truck body held.

Then he jumped down in a hurry. His own face felt as if it were on fire. He knew it had to be beet-red. Carton after cardboard carton, all with KOTEX printed on them in big, embarrassing scarlet letters. Soldiers’ wives, officers’ grown and mostly grown daughters…Sure, they’d need stuff like that, but a nineteen-year-old draftee didn’t want to get reminded of it.

“Well, go on, goddammit.” He tried to make his voice rough and deep, but it broke in the middle of the curse. Mortified anew, he waved the deuce-and-a-half forward.

It should have headed straight for the PX, which was for all practical purposes a supermarket. Instead, it made for the community center, right in the middle of the American compound in Frankfurt.

“Hey,” the GI said to his companion, who hadn’t bothered coming out of the guard shack. “What does he think he’s doing?”

“What is he doing?” The other guard emerged to look. He was a year older, which only meant his whiskers rasped more when he rubbed his chin. “Sure doesn’t know where he’s going, does he?”

“No, and he oughta, unless…” A sudden, horrid suspicion filled the kid who’d waved the truck through. He raised his grease gun, and his voice. “Hey, you! Halt, or else I’ll-!”

Too late. If there are two more mournful words in the English language, what could they possibly be? The truck was out of voice range, and almost out of grease-gun range. It hadn’t been full of Kotex after all. It blew sky- high.

I’m in deep shit, the guard thought as he went ass over teakettle. That was pretty goddamn mournful, too, but it needed more than two words. Then he slammed into what was left of a wall across the street from the compound. A rib broke. It stabbed him from the inside out. “Motherfuck!” he gasped, and got stabbed again. That wasn’t mournful; it was half automatic, half furious.

At that, he was one of the lucky ones. When the German fanatic pressed the button on the steering wheel or wherever the hell it was, he’d got 300 yards-maybe even a quarter mile-into the compound: almost to the community center. He blasted himself to kingdom come, of course. He blew up twenty-nine U.S. soldiers, and seventy-three women, and nineteen children under the age of ten. The papers were very particular about that, for some reason. Children under the age of ten, they all said. The exploding truck wounded more than twice as many as it killed.

So the papers proclaimed right after the fanatic killed himself to strike at the USA. The luckless guard lay on a cot in a crowded room in a crowded Army hospital. His chest was bandaged so tight, he could hardly breathe. He had nothing to do-nothing he could do-but read the papers and listen to the radio that sat on a wall shelf in one corner of the room.

A broken rib. That wasn’t so much. After a while, you’d get better. Except the guard didn’t. He lost his appetite-easy enough to do with Army chow, but still…. When he scratched his head, his hair started coming out. He didn’t feel good at all, not even a little bit.

A frowning nurse gave him a blood test. Not too much later, a frowning doctor came in and asked him, “How long have you been anemic, son?”

“Huh? What? Me?” The guard didn’t even know what the word meant. “How come I’m going bald?”

The doctor didn’t answer, which pissed him off. It would have made him even madder if he’d felt better. He threw up that night, and the vomit had blood in it.

A tech sergeant walked into the ward much too early the next morning. He carried a metal box with…things attached to it. The guard, still nauseous, wasn’t inclined to curiosity just then. One of the…things was a set of earphones. The tech sergeant steered the other one over the guard. Something clicked in the earphones; even the sick guard could hear it. The sergeant looked down at a gauge on top of the metal box. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered, and got out of there in a hurry.

They carried the guard out of the ward later that day. The medics who moved him wore gas masks and thick gloves. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “I ain’t Typhoid Mary. I ain’t got smallpox or nothin’. I know I ain’t-I been vaccinated. All I got’s a coupla cracked ribs, right?”

“Well, no.” Coming through the gas mask, the medic’s voice sounded otherworldly.