The Man with the Iron Heart

II

Reinhard Heydrich hardly noticed the distant put-put from the generator any more. He hardly noticed the faint smell of the exhaust, either. He hoped he-or somebody-would notice if that smell got stronger. The ventilation system down here was supposed to be as good as anybody knew how to make it, but carbon monoxide could still get you if your luck turned sour.

His mouth twisted. This past month, Germany’s luck had turned sour. The Fuhrer, dead by his own hand! Himmler dead, too, also by his own hand! The whole country prostrate, surrendered, occupied from east and west. Almost all the important officials of State and Party in the Western Allies’ hand; or, worse, in the Russians’.

I’m on my own, Heydrich thought. It’s up to me. If they think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost. If we think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost.

Thinking of the Western Allies’ hands, and of the Russians’, made him glance down at his own. The light from the bare bulb was harsh. Even so, he was amazed how pale he’d got, this past year underground. He’d always been a man who rejoiced in the outdoors. He’d always been a man who tanned as if someone had rubbed his skin with walnut dye, too.

When he proposed this scheme to Himmler, when he proposed himself to head it, he hadn’t grasped everything it entailed. If you were going to fight a secret war, a guerrilla war, against enemy occupiers, you had to disappear yourself. And so…he had.

“I’ll come out in the sun again when Germany comes out in the sun again,” he murmured.

“What was that, Herr Reichsprotektor?” Hans Klein asked. His onetime driver was with him still. After the assassination attempt in Prague, Heydrich knew he could count on the veteran noncom. Klein had loudly and profanely turned down promotion to officer’s rank. The mere idea affronted him.

“Nothing.” Heydrich said it again, to make himself believe it: “Nothing.” But it wasn’t. He shouldn’t have let Klein see what was going on inside his head, even for a heartbeat.

The Oberscharfuhrer had too much sense to push it. Instead, he asked, “Anything interesting in the news bulletins?”

Of course they monitored as many broadcasts as they could. Their own signals were few and far between, to keep from leaving tracks for the hunters. Since the Reich collapsed, they had to do the best they could with enemy propaganda and the military traffic they could pick up and decipher. Heydrich fiddled with some papers. “They’ve found paintings and some other art that Goring salted away.”

That made Klein chuckle. “The Fat One wasn’t in it for the money, but he sure was in it for what he could grab.”

“Ja.” Heydrich admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But when I said he salted stuff away, I meant it. They took this art out of an abandoned salt mine.”

“Oh. Scheisse.” Hans Klein might not have much book learning, but he was nobody’s fool. “Does that mean they’ll start poking around other mines?”

“I hope not,” Heydrich answered. “We have ways to keep them from finding the entrance.” He sounded confident. He had to, to keep Klein’s spirits up. But he knew things could go wrong. Anyone who’d survived in Germany knew that. And, of course, one traitor was worth any number of unlucky chances. He had endless escape routes, and didn’t want to use any of them.

“What else is in the news?” Klein inquired. Maybe he didn’t want to think about everything that could go tits- up, either.

“The Americans say they’ve almost finished conquering Okinawa.” Heydrich had needed to pull out an atlas to find out just where Okinawa lay. He had one to pull out; when Germans set out to do something, they damned well did it properly.

His former driver only sniffed. “They’ve been saying that for a while now. The little yellow men are making them pay.”

“They are,” Heydrich agreed. “And these suicide planes…If you can use an airplane to sink a warship, that’s a good bargain.”

“Not one I’d want to make myself,” Klein said.

“It all depends,” Heydrich said in musing tones. “It truly does. A man who expects to die is hard to defend against. The Russians taught us that, and the Japanese lesson is a different verse of the same song. We have men dedicated enough to serve that way, don’t you think?”

“You mean it.” Klein considered the question as a senior sergeant might. “Well, sir, I expect we could, as long as they saw they were taking a bunch of those other bastards with ’em.”

“Our enemies need to understand we are in earnest,” Heydrich said. “One thing to win a war. Quite another to win the peace afterwards. They think they can turn Germany into whatever they please. The Anglo-Americans go on about democracy-as if we want another Weimar Republic! And the Russians…”

“Ja. The Russians,” Klein echoed mournfully. One thing Stalin’s men were doing in the lands they’d occupied: they were proving that all the frantic warnings Nazis propagandists had pumped out were understatements. And who would have believed that beforehand?

“Well.” Heydrich pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “We have some more planning to do. And then-to work!”

Bernie Cobb had played baseball in high school. All the same, nobody would ever confuse him with Ty. For one thing, he was no Georgia Peach; he’d grown up outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. For another, even in that light air he was no threat with the bat, though he could field some.

He wasn’t as fast as he had been then. He’d frozen his feet in the Battle of the Bulge, and they still weren’t back to a hundred percent. Instead of short or center, he played third in the pickup game outside of Erlangen.

The town, northwest of Nuremberg, had come through the war pretty well. The way it looked to Bernie, it wasn’t big enough to plaster. Maybe it had a few more people than Albuquerque-which ran about 35,000-but that didn’t make it any threat to New York City, or even Munich.

They played on a more or less mowed meadow just outside of town. The pitcher on the other side claimed he’d spent three years in the low minors. He could throw hard, but he needed a road map and a compass to find the plate. Maybe that was why he never got to the high minors. Or maybe he was talking through his hat.

A fastball at Bernie’s ribs made him spin out of the box. “Ball four! Take your base!” the ump bawled. He was a first sergeant with a face like a clenched fist. He wasn’t much of an umpire, but nobody had the nerve to tell him so.

Tossing the bat aside, Bernie trotted down to first. “Way to go, man!” one of his teammates yelled. Bernie was just glad he hadn’t got drilled. A couple of GIs clapped. They weren’t buddies of his; maybe they had money on his team.

Along with the American soldiers were a few Germans: mostly kids out for candy or gum or C-rats or women out for whatever they could get. Fraternizing with them was against regulations, which didn’t stop it. Bernie hadn’t come down venereal, but not from lack of effort. He knew half a dozen guys who had. They hardly cared-not the way they would have while the war was on. They only wanted to go home. If they couldn’t do that, they wanted to fuck. Well, so did Bernie. Why not? Even if you caught something, pills or shots could cure you quick nowadays.

No more than three or four German men watched the game. One was an old fart in a suit, a town councillor out to see what the conquerors did in their spare time. Another was talking to a GI Bernie knew, a guy who spoke no German. Maybe the kraut had spent time in the States before the war.

“Strike!” the ump yelled. Bernie thought the pitch was high by six inches, but what could you do?

The pitcher threw over to first. Bernie dove back to the bag. You stupid asshole, he thought as he picked himself up. With my bad feet, am I gonna run on you?

“Ball!”

To Bernie, that pitch looked better than the one before. If he said so, the umpire would probably rip out his spleen.

He took a very modest lead. The pitcher stared over at him anyway. Bernie ignored the big dumb rube. There