The Man with the Iron Heart

proposing it…He sighed. If he was lucky, they’d shoot him for espionage. If he wasn’t, they’d spend a long time hurting him and then shoot him for espionage.

So much for my initiative and moral courage. Chastened, Bokov dragged himself back to the business at hand. “I will consult with the officers in armor, then,” he said. He saw the relief in the major’s gray eyes as he took his leave. The Red Army had more guns, but the NKVD still made people shiver.

Talking with the commanders from the armored regiment turned out to be a good idea. They hadn’t thought the bandits might try to hijack a tank or two. “We will strengthen the guard force around the tank park immediately, Comrade Captain,” a lieutenant colonel-Surkov, his name was-said. “Thank you for bringing this to our notice. If something had gone wrong-” He made a small choking noise. That was about what would have happened to him, all right-again, if he was lucky.

Even now, the lieutenant colonel might get reprimanded for inadequate readiness. But he wouldn’t get his shoulder boards torn off. He wouldn’t get shipped to a gulag. And Vladimir Bokov went back to his office and drafted a memo about alertness in the armored forces.

It went out to units all over the Soviet zone-and, for all he knew, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, too. It might do some good. Whether it would do as much as cooperating with the Anglo-Americans…he didn’t have the initiative to find out.

“Oh, this here was cute,” Sergeant Toby Benton said.

“Watcha got?” Lou Weissberg asked. They were only a couple of hundred yards outside the barbed-wire perimeter around American headquarters in Nuremberg.

“You see how this painting’s got a wire coming off it-looks like it might be part of the wire that hung it to the wall,” the explosives expert said.

“Right.” Lou nodded. He saw it when the Oklahoman pointed it out. He’d learned a lot from Benton. But he wouldn’t make an ordnance man if he lived another fifty years. And he wouldn’t live anywhere near that long if he tried the trade.

“Painting’s old. Looks like it might be worth a little somethin’. But the dogface who found it reckoned it might be booby-trapped, so he didn’t pull it off the wall. He called the explosives guys-me-instead. Good thing, too, on account of that wire leads to a Bouncing Betty in the wall.”

“Oh, my!” Lou said in shrill falsetto. He crossed his hands in front of his crotch like a pretty girl surprised skinnydipping. Some Nazi engineer must have won himself a bonus for the Betty. When the mine went off, a small charge kicked the main charge up in the air. The main charge blew up at waist height and sprayed shrapnel all around. Too many American soldiers were singing soprano for real.

Benton nodded. “Uh-huh. But that ain’t the worst, Captain.”

“Gevalt!” Lou said. Toby Benton had worked with him often enough to have a notion of what that meant. After a moment, Lou went on, “So what’s worse than a Bouncing Betty?”

“I tore up the wall to get at the son of a bitch,” Benton answered, “but I didn’t want to lift it out right away, y’know? Maybe I watched too many movies or somethin’. I kinda got to thinking, This here is mighty slick-maybe even a little too slick. So instead of taking out the Bouncing Betty like I usually woulda done, I dug down underneath the bastard instead.”

“Yeah?” Lou said.

“Yeah.” Sergeant Benton nodded. “And I found me another wire, goin’ down below the building. An’ that son of a bitch was attached to a ton and a half of TNT, with a delay fuse so it woulda gone off after there was a good old crowd here takin’ care of the poor sorry shitheel who blew his nuts off with the Bouncing Betty…or to pat the explosives guy on the back when he really wasn’t smart enough.”

“Wow!” Lou said. That didn’t seem remotely adequate. He tried again: “I’ll write you up for a medal.”

“Write me up so I can go on home, sir,” Toby said. “I’d like those orders a fuck of a lot better, an’ you can sing that in church.”

“Yeah, well, I believe you,” Lou said. “Shit, I’ll even try. God knows you just earned yourself a ticket to the States. But it won’t do any good. I can tell you right now what the brass’ll say. ‘This guy is good. We can’t afford to discharge him, ’cause too many people’ll get hurt if we do.’”

“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Benton said disgustedly. “If I do me a crappy job, I get my sorry ass blown up. If I do me a great job, they make me stick around-so’s I can get my sorry ass blown up.” He spat on the filthy floor. “Ought to be a name for somethin’ like that, where you get fucked over comin’ an’ goin’.”

“Yeah, it’s a heller, all right. One of these days, I bet there will.” Lou got a strange kick out of thinking like an English teacher instead of a counterintelligence officer. “A guy who’s been through the mill will write a story or a book about it. He’ll hang some kind of handle on it, and from then on everybody’ll call it that.”

Toby Benton let out a thoughtful grunt. “Well, maybe so. Till then, ‘fucked over comin’ an’ goin’ ’ works good enough.”

“Sure does,” Lou agreed. He shook his head. The classroom inside it vanished. He was back in bombed-out, stinking, fanatic-infested Nuremberg again, doing Uncle Sam’s job, not his old one. Aw, shit, he thought wearily. “How long would it’ve taken for Heydrich’s fuckers to set this up?”

“Well, you don’t sneak in a ton and a half of explosives an’ bury ’em overnight, not if you don’t want the sentries yonder and the patrols and all to spot you while you’re doin’ it,” Benton answered.

“Yeah.” Lou’s voice was sour. “I figured you’d say something like that. So we’ve got fanatics hiding out inside of Nuremberg, huh? And there’s bound to be ordinary krauts who know just who the assholes are, too. Only stands to reason. But have they said anything to us? Don’t you wish?”

“Ain’t there a reward for that kinda information?” Toby asked.

“Certainly.” It came out more like Soitainly, as if Lou were Curly from the Three Stooges. “You know how long a German who turns stoolie usually lives afterwards?”

Sergeant Benton chewed on that. He grunted again. Then he said, “Likely makes my line of work look downright safe by comparison.”

The average guy in his line of work had a life expectancy measured in months-sometimes in weeks. He was far above average, which (along with fool luck, especially at the start) was why he was still breathing.

And, unfortunately, he was dead right here. “We have to make the Jerries like us better than they like the fanatics, or we have to make ’em more afraid of us. So far, we haven’t managed either one. You find an answer there, Sergeant, and I’ll get you home if I have to carry you on my back,” Lou said.

“Won’t hold my breath. You smart guys can’t fix it, don’t expect me to,” Benton said.

Lou sighed. “I will write you up for the medal. Whether you want it or not, it’s something I can do.” It seemed a GI could only get what he didn’t want. Fucked over comin’ an’ goin’ rang in Lou’s mind again.

XIX

Bernie Cobb was not a happy man. Occupation duty in Erlangen hadn’t been so bad. Oh, you looked sideways at about every third Jerry you passed on the street, but he’d kind of got used to that. And Erlangen wasn’t a big city. Yeah, the fanatics had bumped off that Adenauer guy there, but that was just one of those things. (Half- remembered bits of Cole Porter spun through his head-something about gossamer wings. He wished he had some right this minute.)

What he was doing now wasn’t occupation duty. It was war-no other name for it. He was part of a skirmish line combing through a valley somewhere in the Alps, looking for-well, anything that didn’t belong there. Some of the things that didn’t belong here were krauts with rifles and Schmeissers and machine guns. Not all of them were Heydrich’s diehards. The rest were just brigands. They’d lived by robbery all through the war, and hadn’t felt like quitting after the surrender. But they could kill you every bit as dead as any fanatic.

Yeah, those gossamer wings would come in handy, all right. Bernie imagined flying above the rocky landscape, spying out trouble that’d be hard to spot from the ground. Then he imagined some asshole in a ragged