The Man with the Iron Heart

A woman screeched and clutched at her arm. The ricochet must have got her.

Three or four Red Army soldiers, most of them carrying PPSh submachine guns, trotted purposefully in the direction from which the gunfire had come. The Germans in the work gang-except the wounded woman-started making themselves scarce. They knew the Soviet Union took hostages when somebody fired at its troops. They knew the Russians shot hostages, too.

Bokov didn’t have time to worry about that right now. He wriggled behind the burnt-out, rusting carcass of a German halftrack that had sat there since the last battle. One of these days, somebody would haul it off for scrap metal, but that hadn’t happened yet.

He waited for another shot. Unlike a soft-skinned vehicle, the halftrack really would protect him against small-arms fire. But the sniper didn’t shoot at Bokov or at the Red Army men now going after him. Since he’d failed, he seemed to want to get away and shoot at somebody else another time.

Cautiously, Captain Bokov peered out from behind the halftrack’s dented front bumper. If the sniper had outguessed him, if the son of a bitch had drawn a bead on the front end of the halftrack and was waiting for him to show himself…Well, in that case Bokov’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

But no. Bokov’s sigh reminded him he’d been holding his breath. The soldiers were heading for a block of flats that had to be almost a kilometer away. Yes, a marksman could hit from that range. Bokov didn’t like turning into a target-which wouldn’t matter a kopek’s worth to the damned Heydrichite with the scope-sighted rifle.

No more gunfire from the distant apartment block. Bokov stood up straight and brushed dust and mud off his uniform. He started toward the flats himself. His eyes flicked back and forth. If the sniper missed him again, he wanted to know where to dive next.

More soldiers came around a corner. They also headed for the apartments. They went in. Germans started coming out. Any of them over the age of twelve might have been the gunman. Bokov didn’t think any of them was. If the shooter wasn’t long gone, he would have been surprised.

A senior sergeant who’d been with the first bunch walked up to him. Saluting, the man said, “Well, Comrade Captain, we have enough of these bastards for the firing squads.”

“Good enough,” Bokov answered. “Did your men find any weapons or anti-Soviet propaganda in the flats?”

“No weapons, sir.” The underofficer suddenly looked apprehensive. “We weren’t really searching for propaganda. We could go back….”

“No, never mind,” Bokov said. The sergeant’s sigh of relief wasn’t much different from the one he’d let out himself behind the German halftrack. “If you had found something like that, it might have told us who’d want to harbor one of the bandits. Since you didn’t…” He shrugged. “Question the lot of them. If you don’t learn anything interesting, give them to the firing squads. If you do, bring the ones who know something over to NKVD headquarters and execute the rest. Have you got that?”

“Da, Comrade Captain!” With another sharp salute, the senior sergeant repeated Bokov’s orders back to him. He wore several decorations. Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d led a company during the war. More than a few underofficers had, casualties among lieutenants and captains being what they were. His look and manner proclaimed him a competent man.

“All right, then. Carry on,” the NKVD officer said.

“Da,” the sergeant repeated. Then he added something he didn’t have to: “Glad the son of a bitch missed you, sir. This kind of crap just goes on and on. There doesn’t seem to be any end for it, does there? And too damned often we’ve got to carry off the poor bastard who stopped one. That’s no good, you know? We won this fucking war…didn’t we?”

Bokov could have sent him to the gulag for those last two imperfectly confident words. He could have, but he didn’t. The senior sergeant made it plain he cared whether an NKVD man lived or died. From a Red Army trooper, that was close to miraculous. By the way they talked, most Soviet soldiers had more sympathy for Heydrichites than they did for Chekists.

When Bokov got back to his office, Moisei Shteinberg greeted him with, “Well, Volodya, I hear you had an adventure this morning.”

“Afraid so, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov agreed. “Sniper missed me-missed me twice, in fact. He got away afterwards, dammit. The Fascist bandits will probably reprimand him for bad shooting.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” Shteinberg was so serious, he destroyed Bokov’s small pleasure at his own joke. After a moment, the colonel went on, “We’ve been lucky over here for a while now. The Heydrichites haven’t used any radium against us, and they haven’t pulled off any outrages against us, either, the way they did in Paris and London.”

“How long can that last?” Bokov wondered aloud.

Colonel Shteinberg’s eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and narrow (not slanted like a Tartar’s-or like those of so many Russians, Bokov included-but definitely narrow). They were also very, very knowing. A Jew’s eyes, in other words. Bokov had never thought of them that way before, but when he did the notion fit like a rifle round in its chamber. Yes, a Jew’s eyes.

After studying Bokov a long moment, the Jew-the senior NKVD officer-gently inquired, “Have you no confidence in the ability of the Soviet system to defend itself against the Fascist bandits?”

What a minefield lay under one innocent-sounding question. “I have perfect confidence that our system will triumph in the end.” Captain Bokov answered with the greatest of care-and also took care not to show how careful he was. “But no one can know ahead of time the road by which it will triumph, or how strongly the reactionaries will be able to resist.”

“Khorosho, Volodya. Ochen khorosho.” The smile that flickered across Shteinberg’s face said he appreciate the response no less than he might have savored a particularly lovely passage in a new Shostakovich symphony. “Still, even if it’s a good answer, it doesn’t tell us how to keep such disasters from happening to us.”

Shrugging, Bokov said, “We work hard. We hope we stay lucky.” He paused, wondering whether to press his own luck. With Colonel Shteinberg pleased with him, he decided to: “And maybe we really ought to work more with the Anglo-Americans.”

No matter how pleased Shteinberg was, he shook his head without the least hesitation. “Nyet,” he said firmly. “Don’t even waste your time thinking about it. It won’t happen, and you’ve got no idea how much trouble you’ll end up in if you suggest it to anybody but me. I keep trying to tell you that, but you don’t want to listen.”

“All right, Comrade Colonel.” By the way Bokov said it, it wasn’t, but his superior wouldn’t come down on him for that. “Still seems a shame, though…”

“Sending a good officer to Kolyma would be a shame, too,” Shteinberg observed. Since Kolyma, in far eastern Siberia, was one of those places that lay well above the Arctic Circle, Bokov decided not to press the argument any further. Too bad, but you did have to live if they’d let you.

“Stand clear!” the demolitions guy yelled.

Bernie Cobb figured he was already well beyond anything the charge in the throat of the old mine could throw. He backed up a few more paces just the same. Some chances he got paid-not enough, but paid-to take. This wasn’t one of them.

Several other GIs also retreated a few steps. The first sergeant with the detonator looked around one more time. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, and rammed the plunger home.

Boom! Bernie had heard a lot of explosions like this one. He watched dust and a few rocks fly out of the mouth of the shaft. None of the rocks came anywhere near his buddies and him. They all knew how far to back up by now.

As the dust settled, he saw that the shaft was closed, presumably for good. He nodded to himself. The fellow with the explosives knew what he was doing, which was reassuring. If you handled that shit, you needed to know what was going on. Anyone who didn’t would end up slightly dead, or more than slightly. And a butterfingers was liable to take some ordinary dogfaces with him, too.

The thought had hardly crossed Bernie’s mind before something out of the ordinary happened. Most of the time-all the time up till now-there’d been the explosion, and the roar as the mouth of the shaft fell in, and that was it.