The Man with the Iron Heart

“Very good, Comrade Colonel. What about Germans assigned to camps?” Bokov asked.

“Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about them,” Shteinberg said with a certain savage satisfaction. “They won’t be going any place where they can endanger people who matter.”

Bokov nodded. “Makes sense to me. We won’t have to take any of these counters away from important work, then.”

“We’ll be stretched thin enough as is,” Shteinberg agreed.

“Can we borrow Geiger counters from the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov wondered. “They’re imperialist powers, I know, but they’re still our allies against the Fascist jackals.”

Shteinberg pondered, then clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Not a good idea, Comrade Captain. We will not show England or the United States that we are weak in any way.” When he put it like that, Bokov couldn’t possibly argue. Even trying would have been dangerous, so he didn’t.

XVII

Ravens were nasty birds. Lou Weissberg hadn’t seen many-truth to tell, he couldn’t remember seeing any- back in New Jersey. He hadn’t even seen that many crows. But he’d found out more than he ever wanted to know about ravens in the months before the German surrender. They pecked out corpses’ eyes and worried at wounds to make them bigger and get at the exposed flesh. Sometimes they didn’t wait till what they were pecking at was a corpse.

Here they were again, on the road between Nuremberg and Munich. The day before, a squad’s worth of fanatics had tangled with about an equal number of GIs. More often than not, the krauts’ assault rifles and Schmeissers would have given them a firepower edge over American troops. Not this time-three of the dogfaces were BAR men. The Brownings chewed up the fanatics and left them…ravens’ meat.

Vultures prowled the grass along with the ravens. European vultures were hawkier than their American equivalents. They looked as if they wouldn’t mind going out and killing something when the carrion ran short. Well, they didn’t need to do any extra work today. The GIs with the BARs had taken care of that for them.

The Americans had lost one dead and three wounded. The Germans were mostly dead. They’d given themselves a nasty surprise, sure as hell. But the GIs had captured a couple who were only wounded-he didn’t get to interrogate fanatics all that often.

Plenty of U.S. soldiers surrounded the tent that housed the wounded Aryan supermen. Most of the time, the Jerries would have gone to a hospital in Munich or Nuremberg. Not today, Josephine. So soon after the radioactive attack on Frankfurt, the brass wasn’t sure Heydrich’s goons wouldn’t try another one. A tent in the middle of nowhere didn’t make a promising target for that kind of thing.

Jumpy troopers made Lou show his ID three different times and frisked him twice before he got inside the tent. In the Far East, he’d heard, Army discipline was going right down the crapper. The Japs actually believed they were licked. American troops might not want to be in Europe, but they didn’t get slack and dick around here. Nothing concentrated the mind like the possibility you might get your head blown off.

A medic-no, a doc: he wore captain’s bars-looked up when Lou ducked into the tent. “You Weissberg? Heard you were coming.”

“Call me Lou.” Lou had captain’s bars of his own, brand new ones. That was more for time served than for anything he’d actually accomplished, and he knew it too well. He went on, “I wish your watchdogs woulda got the word. They wouldn’t’ve felt me up like I was Jane Russell. How’re the krauts?”

“One of ’em’s got a sucking chest. He’s in bad shape-dunno if he’ll make it,” the Army doctor answered. “Other guy’s got a smashed-up leg. Maybe I’ll have to amputate, maybe not. Penicillin and sulfa give him a chance to keep it, anyhow. Ten years ago, it would’ve been gone for sure. You can talk to him-he’s with it. The one with the chest wound keeps going in and out, know what I mean?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen fellows like that before,” Lou said.

“Our guys waxed these assholes-cleaned their clocks,” the doctor said. “Sure hope it gets into the papers.”

“Me, too, but I can’t do a thing about that,” Lou said. “So, I can talk to this one, huh?” He pointed to the German with a leg wrapped in bloody bandages.

“Yeah. He’s got plenty of morphine in him, too-he needs it. So if he’s flying, maybe he’ll sing for you. You can hope, anyway.”

“I sure can.” Lou leaned over the German, who wore a neater, less raggedy Feldgrau tunic than he’d seen for a while. And the man still had on a set of shoulder straps, with a senior sergeant’s rank badges, which had been against regulations since the dreadfully misnamed V-E Day. Well, the Jerry had bigger things than that to worry about.

Lou switched to Deutsch: “Hey, you! Herr Feldwebel! Can you hear me?”

The kraut’s eyes opened. They were aluminum-gray, a genuinely scary color. But they also looked back at Lou from a million miles away. Plenty of morphine and then some, Lou thought. “I’m not a goddamn Feldwebel,” the German said. “I’m a Scharfuhrer, and don’t you forget it.” Contempt and weariness warred in his voice.

He had to be doped out of his skull, or he’d never admit to owning Waffen-SS rank. Lou decided to roll with it. “Sorry, Herr Scharfuhrer,” he said. “Tell me who sent you out on this dumbheaded mission that got you shot.”

“God damn Egon to hell and gone. He can lick my asshole, the son of a whore.” Lou thought the Scharfuhrer would bust right open, but he didn’t. No matter how full of drugs he was, he knew what he was supposed to say when somebody started interrogating him. “My name is Bauer, Rudolf Bauer. I am a Scharfuhrer, Waffen-SS.” He gave Lou his serial number. “By the Geneva Convention, I am not required to tell you more.”

“Pigdog!” Lou yelled, loud enough to make the doctor jump. “Do you think the Red Army gives a rat’s ass about the Geneva Convention?”

Bauer’s aircraft-skin eyes widened. Lou watched him try to fight the morphine. “But-” he sputtered. “But-I am in the American zone. You are wearing an American uniform.”

Shit, Lou thought. But shit wasn’t what came out of his mouth. Once upon a time, somebody who’d come back from a visit to smashed Berlin had taught him how to cuss a little in Russian. He’d never imagined that would come in handy, but maybe it did now. “Gavno!” he yelled, and, for good measure, “Yob tvoyu mat’!”

Hearing him, a real Russian likely would have laughed his ass off. A drugged and wounded SS man was in no position to realize what a lousy accent he had. Rudolf Bauer gulped. The way his Adam’s apple swelled and contracted, he might have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He started to give his name, rank, and pay number again-he had nerve.

“Shut up!” Lou yelled. “Tell me who sent you out! What’s Egon’s whole name?”

Had he been a real Russian interrogator, he probably would have kicked that wounded leg about then. Morphine or no morphine, Bauer would’ve gone right through the roof of the tent. Lou didn’t have the stomach for it, even if the doctor wouldn’t have reported him. But Bauer didn’t have to know that.

The Scharfuhrer gulped again. Then he whimpered; the leg had to hurt in spite of everything. “Talk, you stinking turd!” Lou screamed. In a horrible way, it was fun. He could see why SS and NKVD men enjoyed what they did for a living…and he wondered if he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved tomorrow morning.

In a very small voice, Bauer whispered, “He is Hauptsturmfuhrer Steinbrecher.”

Aha! “Where do I find this cocksucker?” Lou demanded.

He’s dead. A BAR blew his brains out. If Bauer said that and stuck to it, how could anybody prove he was lying-short of kicking his leg, anyhow? But once a prisoner started talking, he often sang like a nightingale. “He lives in the town of Pforring, outside Ingolstadt,” Bauer said. “He is a mechanic there.”