The Man with the Iron Heart

here. No stinking dago who still loved Mussolini’d chuck a German potato-masher grenade into his foxhole. He didn’t need a Sten gun or a fighting knife or an entrenching tool-which could be a lot more lethal than a knife if you knew what to do with it, and he did.

A fellow in American pinks and greens-khaki trousers and olive-drab jacket-looked left before he stepped out into St. Margaret’s Street. “Watch yourself, Yank!” PC Mitchell shouted. The American froze. A truck rumbled past from the direction in which he hadn’t looked.

“Jesus!” he said. “Why don’t you guys drive the right way?”

“We think we do,” Mitchell answered. “And since you’re over here, you’d jolly well better think so, too.”

“That’s the third time the past two weeks I almost got myself creamed,” the Yank said.

Do you suppose you ought to suspect a trend? But Mitchell didn’t say it. Even though the Americans were two years late getting into the war-a year better than the last time around, at that- they’d done all right once they got going. He’d fought alongside them in Italy, so he knew they’d paid their dues. And Britain would have gone under without the supplies they sent. So…

“Well, have a care crossing,” was what did come out of Mitchell’s mouth. His sergeant would have been proud of him. He beckoned the American on. “Seems safe enough now.”

“It seemed safe enough before,” the Yank said darkly. But he made it from the houses of Parliament to Westminster Abbey without getting run down. Not that many cars were on the road. Petrol was still rationed, too, and hard to come by.

PC Mitchell wondered how long the country would need to get back to normal. Then he wondered if it ever would. India wanted to leave the Empire, and nothing short of another war seemed likely to keep it in. Without India, what was left wasn’t worth tuppence ha’penny. And there wouldn’t be a war on the far side of the world when Germany, only a long spit away, had turned into a running sore.

Blam! No sooner had Mitchell heard the explosion than he was flat on his belly. It hadn’t knocked him over-he’d hit the dirt. That was a hell of a big bomb going off somewhere not far enough away- not close enough to hurt him, but nowhere near far enough away.

Across the street, the Yank in pinks and greens had also flattened out like a hedgehog smashed by a lorry. He’s seen action, too, then, Mitchell thought as he started to scramble to his feet.

Lorries. No sooner had they crossed his mind than a big one-one of the kind the USA had built by the millions during the war-came tearing down the middle of the street toward him. It was as if the driver knew he ought to stay on the left but had trouble remembering. “Jesus!” Mitchell said, furiously blowing his whistle. Just what the poor sorry world needed: a drunken Yank driving a deuce-and-a-half like he’d just been let out of the asylum.

Then PC Cedric Mitchell got one glimpse of the driver’s face as the fellow swerved across the street toward Westminster Abbey. The bloke was a nutter, all right, but not that kind of nutter. Not barking mad but exalted mad. He had the face of someone about to do something marvelous, and the devil with the consequences. He had a face that made PC Mitchell hit the dirt again.

Right after Nazi fanatics bombed the Eiffel Tower, soldiers had appeared in front of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s and a few other places. Then, when nothing happened, they vanished again. Mitchell had most of a second to wish men with rifles and Sten guns were anywhere close by- or even that bobbies like him carried firearms.

Then the fanatic in the truck-and he couldn’t have been anything else-touched it off. The other explosion had been too close for comfort, frightening but not dangerous. This one…When this one went off, it was like getting stuck in the middle of the end of the world.

Much too much like that, in fact.

Blast picked PC Mitchell up and slammed him into something hard. “Oof!” he said, and then, “Ow!” He could barely hear himself, even though that second noise came closer to a shriek than a yelp. Blast had also smashed at his ears.

Had the Nazi struck at Parliament, Mitchell would have been nothing more than a smear on the sidewalk. But he’d steered his truck into Westminster Abbey before detonating it…and God help that poor bloody American in his smart uniform.

Broken glass clattered and clinked down around the bobby. A big, sharp shard shattered between his legs. He shuddered. A foot higher up and that one would have cut it right off him or left him with no need to shave for the rest of his days.

He snuffled as he staggered to his feet. A swipe at his nose with his sleeve showed he was bleeding there like a mad bastard. No great surprise: he realized he was lucky he was still breathing. Blast could tear up your lungs, kill you from the inside out, and not leave a mark on you. He’d seen that more than once, fighting north through Italy.

No broken ribs grated and stabbed when he moved. That was nothing but fool luck. And his bobby’s helmet had kept him from smashing his head. It wasn’t anywhere near so tough as an army-style tin hat, but evidently it was tough enough.

Across the street…Every English or British sovereign since William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The bulk of the structure dated from the reign of Henry III, in the late thirteenth century. Not all of it was ancient; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the last war was in the west nave.

No. Had been in the west nave. The Abbey’d come through the Blitz and the later unmanned German Doodlebugs and the even more terrifying V-2s without much damage. But Cedric Mitchell couldn’t imagine a building in the world that would have come through unscathed if a deuce-and-a-half stuffed to the gills with high explosives blew up alongside it. And Westminster Abbey hadn’t.

Through rags of mist and through much more roiling dust-literally, the dust of centuries-he saw the Abbey was nothing more than rubble and wreckage. But for the size of the pile, it might have been an Italian country-town church hit by shellfire. Flames started licking through the brick and stone and timber. Wood burned-Mitchell shook his head, trying to clear it. Of course wood burns, you bloody twit. So does anything with paint on it.

To his slack-jawed amazement, people came staggering and limping and crawling out of the rubble. A priest in bloodied vestments lurched up to him and said-well, something. Police Constable Mitchell cupped a scraped hand behind his right ear. “What’s that, mate?” he bawled. His mouth was all bloody, too. Was he also bleeding from the ears? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

“More caught in there,” the priest shouted, loud enough this time for Mitchell to make out the words. “Will you help?”

“I’ll do my damnedest,” Mitchell answered. The words didn’t seem blasphemous to him till later. The injured priest took them in stride.

Another wall went over with a crash that made Mitchell flinch. Anything loud enough for him to hear was liable to be frightening. He followed the priest across St. Margaret’s to the ruin. They both had to skirt the crater the exploding lorry had blown in the pavement. Water was rapidly filling it.

“Bloody Nazi must have wrecked the pipes,” Mitchell said. The priest, a pace in front of him, didn’t turn around. The other man’s ears must have suffered in the blast, too.

A woman’s legs lay under some bricks. Together, the bobby and the priest pulled some of them off her. Then Mitchell twisted away, wishing they hadn’t. What was left of her upper body wasn’t pretty.

“How do we get revenge for this?” he bawled into the priest’s ear.

“I don’t know,” the man answered. “It may be un-Christian of me to say so, but we need to do that, don’t we? Here and St. Paul’s-”

“That’s where the other one was?” PC Mitchell broke in. The priest nodded. Mitchell swore, not that that would do any good, either. Would anything? He didn’t think so.

Now Lou Weissberg had seen both Stars And Stripes and the International Herald-Trib. No English shutterbug seemed to have matched the photographer who’d snapped the Eiffel Tower in mid-topple. No picture of St. Paul’s splendid dome collapsing, nor of Westminster Abbey falling down. Only rubble and wreckage and bodies.

And rage. Some of it came from Clement Attlee’s Labour government. “The Germans show why their ancestors were named Vandals,” Attlee thundered-as well as a mild little bald man with a scrawny mustache could thunder. “Destruction and murder for the sake of destruction and murder will settle nothing, and will only rouse the