The Man with the Iron Heart

“Remember to take your Vitamin D tablet,” Heydrich said. “But I don’t think we’ll still be down here then. We have the will for the struggle, however long it takes. Do our enemies? I don’t think so.”

Sound trucks blared Jerry Duncan’s message to the people in his district: “Reelect Duncan! Bring our boys home from Germany! Keep us prosperous!”

Jerry knew Reelect was the magic word. Once you got in, you had to do something pretty stupid to make the voters want to throw you out. Or things had to go into the toilet, the way they had in the Depression. Herbert Hoover dragged his whole party down the drain with him.

But they had a chance to come back here in ’46. At last! Jerry thought. Germany was Harry Truman’s mess, nobody else’s. More and more Democrats winced every time they stood up to support the President. Douglas Catledge’s posters said DON’T THROW VICTORY AWAY! How much of a victory was it, though, when the Eiffel Tower lay in ruins?

“President Truman doesn’t want to listen to the American people!” Duncan shouted at a speech in a park in Anderson. His wife stood on the platform with him, along with the mayor of Anderson and a couple of councilmen. The weather was gray and cool: summer giving way to fall. The forecast had said it might rain, but that seemed to be holding off. Jerry was glad-he had a good crowd on this Saturday afternoon. “Truman doesn’t want to listen!” he repeated, louder this time. “He doesn’t want to bring our soldiers home from Germany! Well, if he doesn’t want to, we just have to make him, that’s all!”

People clapped their hands. They cheered. Oh, a few hecklers lurked in the crowd. They jeered and hooted. Some of them tried to start a “Sieg heil!” chant. That was Truman’s best argument- tarring people who’d had enough with the Nazi brush. But Jerry’s backers didn’t let the “Sieg heil!” chorus get started. They hustled the chanters away. A few scuffles broke out, but cops kept things from getting out of hand.

“When you don’t have a plan of your own, you smear the man who does,” Jerry ad-libbed, and got another hand. He went on, “We don’t have any business in Germany any more. We’re just getting sucked deeper and deeper into this swamp.” He held up a newspaper. “Yesterday, six more GIs got killed in what people call the American zone. Another thirteen got wounded. Lucky thirteen, right?”

The laugh that rippled up was bitter, scornful-not at him, but at the President. “No more Truman! We need a new man!” somebody yelled. That won a hand, too-a bigger one than Jerry had got.

“We do need a new man,” Jerry agreed. “But we have to wait two more years for that. In the meantime, we have to bring the man we’ve got to his senses. No more blank checks for our stupidity across the Atlantic. No more money to keep our soldiers in Germany unless we start bringing them home right away!”

That did it. The crowd erupted. More hecklers tried to break up the tumultuous applause. They got shouted down. “Take a look at what’s happening in the French zone,” Jerry said. “The French tried to get revenge for the Eiffel Tower, and what did they end up with? Their very own shooting war, even worse than the one we’re stuck with in our zone. And do you know what’ll happen next? I’ll tell you what. They’ll come begging us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We had to do it in 1918. We had to do it two years ago, too. They sure can’t take care of themselves. They’ve proved that over and over again.”

More cheers. You couldn’t go wrong taking shots at France. Jerry had thought about trotting out the French war debt from World War I, but held off. Clobbering Truman was more likely to get his followers all hot and bothered.

And he had plenty to clobber Truman about. Foreign policy was one thing. If you had a son or a brother or a husband stuck in Germany, it mattered to you. But if you didn’t, what happened overseas didn’t seem to count so much.

On the other hand, everybody had to eat. “How many of you’ve tried to buy hamburger any time lately?” Jerry asked. A forest of hands went up. “How many of you managed to do it?” he asked. Quite a few of the hands went down. “How many of you paid less than a dollar a pound?” he inquired. Not a single hand stayed up. Jerry waved to show he got it. “Didn’t think so. I know my wife paid a dollar and seven cents-didn’t you, sweetheart?” Betsy Duncan nodded. Jerry finished, “And I’ll tell you something else I know, too. I know that’s a shame and a disgrace and a crime!”

Had he got hands like that every time he went up onto the stump, he could have been elected President himself. President? Hell, he could have been elected Pope-and he wasn’t even Catholic.

Vladimir Bokov felt himself cast back in time to the bad days, the dark days of 1941 and 1942. The Hitlerites had had the bit between their teeth then. They did whatever they chose to do, and the Soviet Union had to react to it.

Well, the Soviet Union did react, and react well. Otherwise, Captain Bokov wouldn’t have been prowling through the ruined streets of Berlin. Instead, some Sicherheitsdienst officer would have stalked through wrecked Moscow, trying to keep stubborn Soviet partisans from damaging the city any more.

“Bozhemoi!” Bokov muttered, shaking his head. This work had to be getting to him if pictures like that formed in his head.

It was. He knew it was. And he knew why. Despite the biggest military victory in the history of the world, the USSR was reacting to the Nazis again. The Heydrichites blasted radium all over the heart of Frankfurt. Soviet technicians had to check everything and everyone bound for the motherland from Germany to make sure no radium went along. Inconvenient? So what! Expensive? So what! Time-consuming? Again, so what! So said Moscow, against whose orders there was no appeal.

Now the Fascist bandits had managed to knock over the Eiffel Tower. Which meant…To Moscow, it meant all prominent cultural monuments in Eastern Europe needed special guards to keep the same thing from happening to them. Inconvenient? Expensive? Time-consuming? So what! Stalin had decided that the USSR wouldn’t be humiliated the way France had been.

Bokov had heard that Stalin couldn’t stand de Gaulle. Visiting Moscow, de Gaulle had called the battle of Stalingrad “a symbol of our common victories over the enemy.” Stalin hadn’t asked, What French victories? — though Bokov thought he himself might have, were he in the Marshal’s position. But Stalin never took de Gaulle seriously again after that, either.

More guards protected the monument commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin than any others. That was the one that had to gall the Heydrichites the most. The troops around it understood. “Oh, yes, Comrade Captain,” said a Red Army major commanding a battalion. “We know they may try and hit us. Well, they can try, but they won’t get through unless they’ve gone and stashed some tanks nearby.”

“There’s a cheery thought!” Bokov exclaimed. “Do you think they could have?”

“No. That, no.” The major shook his head. “And even if they did, they wouldn’t get far. Everybody in our T- 34s and Stalin tanks would start shooting off everything he had the second he laid eyes on one of those slab-sided Nazi contraptions.”

“Da,” Bokov said. The bandits had stowed away small arms and antitank rockets and mortars in truly horrendous quantities. But those were all small and easy to hide. Panzers weren’t. Which didn’t mean you couldn’t play games with them. Bokov remembered one stunt the Wehrmacht and the Red Army had each used against the other before the surrender. “Are you sure the Fascist hyenas can’t steal any of our tanks and use them to fuck us over?”

The major blinked, whether at the idea or the language Bokov wasn’t sure. “Comrade Captain, I am not responsible for tank security,” the man said slowly. “I command infantry. The tanks are under the jurisdiction of the division’s armored regiment.”

Not many Red Army officers were willing to move even a centimeter beyond their stated duties. They would follow orders (no matter how harebrained or suicidal) or die trying (knowing there was no excuse for disobedience). When it came to showing initiative…They didn’t. Say what you would about the Germans, they could think for themselves in the field. This major wore decorations on his chest. He still dared not do anything outside his assigned sphere.

And do I? Bokov wondered. He looked west. If the Soviets worked with the Anglo- Americans (and even the French) against the Heydrichites instead of apart from the Western Allies…If he proposed it, his superiors would tell him no; Colonel Shteinberg was dead right about that. If he tried to do it without