The Man with the Iron Heart

the fan somewhere.

“Son of a bitch!” Major Frank’s mouth thinned to a pale, furious line. He must have understood the shout, where Lou hadn’t. “Those stupid bastards! Boy, are they gonna catch it!”

“Huh?” Lou said brilliantly.

Howard Frank didn’t answer. He didn’t need to, because the shout rang out again, louder and closer this time. Lou made it out with no trouble at all.

“We want to go home!” The roar was ragged but unmistakable. A moment later, here it came once more, louder still: “We want to go home!”

“Oh, good God!” Lou said. If that wasn’t mutiny…

Major Frank jumped to his feet and hurried to the window in his office. Lou followed more sedately. With corset and cane, he couldn’t hurry, but he wished he could now.

And here they came, around the corner toward the command center. There might have been fifty or sixty of them. Most were privates, but Lou saw several corporals and at least one sergeant. “We want to go home!” they bawled again.

Quite a few of them carried picket signs, as if they were on strike against, say, an auto-parts factory. And damned if some of the signs didn’t say UNFAIR! Others said WHY ARE WE HERE? and demanded HOW COME WE’RE DYING AFTER THE SURRENDER?

“We want to go home!” the unhappy soldiers yelled one more time.

They’d attracted MPs the way a magnet attracted iron filings. But, once attracted, the snowdrops stood around trying to figure out what to do next. They had billy clubs on their belts. Some carried grease guns, others Tommy guns. But the soldiers they confronted weren’t rioting. They were demonstrating. Both went against orders, but you couldn’t beat demonstrators or shoot them…could you? Lou imagined the headlines if the MPs tried. By the unhappy look on the military policemen’s faces, they were imagining the headlines, too.

“We want to go home!” Some of the GIs probably had struck at auto-parts plants or the like. The line they formed in front of the command center seemed highly practiced. They chanted in rough unison. The picket signs bobbed up and down. “We want to go home!”

“What are they gonna do?” Lou asked hoarsely, meaning not the demonstrating soldiers but the MPs and the top brass.

Major Frank understood him perfectly. “I don’t know,” he answered. “They’ve gotta do something. If they don’t, the nuts are running the loony bin.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. That was one way to put it, all right. Another way was that, if the brass and the MPs didn’t do something, and do it pretty goddamn quick, the U.S. Army in Germany wouldn’t be an army any more. It would be a mob.

The door to the command center opened. An officer came out and said something to the GIs marching in front of the place. They stopped chanting long enough to listen to whatever he came out with. When he stopped, they hesitated, but not for long.

“We want to go home!”

It rocked him back on his heels. Maybe he’d thought he would get them arguing among themselves, or something. No such luck. They were more united and more determined than he’d figured. It wasn’t the first time the powers that be had underestimated the rank and file.

When the officer spoke again, the soldiers quieted long enough to hear him out. Then they gave forth with their much louder counterblast.

“We want to go home!”

Okay. You asked for it. The officer didn’t say that, but Lou read it in every line of his body. He gestured to the MPs. They waded in with their billy clubs; just about all of them, by then, had slung their submachine guns. Some of the demonstrating soldiers tried to resist. They used the handles on their picket signs to hit back at the military police.

But, while the ordinary soldiers had shown pretty good discipline for protesters, they couldn’t match the well-trained military policemen. The MPs grabbed and handcuffed as many GIs as they could, clobbering them whenever they thought they needed to. Some of the soldiers who threw away their picket signs ran and escaped. The others were quickly overcome.

“How long in the stockade d’you think they’ll earn?” Lou asked as the demonstration came to pieces before his eyes.

“Depends on what they charge ’em with,” Major Frank said. “If it’s making a mutiny, that’s not the stockade. That’s Leavenworth-if they’re lucky.”

“Urk,” Lou said. “You can draw the death penalty for making a mutiny, can’t you?”

“Don’t ask me. I’ve got nothing to do with the judge advocate’s office, and I’m damn glad I don’t.” Having denied everything, Frank pontificated anyway: “But I think you can, at least during wartime.”

“Is this wartime?” Lou asked. “I mean, yeah, the Nazis surrendered and all, but what’s the shooting about if it’s not?”

“Those guys can figure that out, too.” Having pontificated, Frank started denying again. “Only thing I know is, we’ve got a mess on our hands.”

“Yeah, like we didn’t before. I wish,” Lou said.

“Okay. We’ve got a bigger mess on our hands now,” Major Frank said. “There. You happier?”

“No. I’d be happier if Heydrich was dead. I’d be a hell of a lot happier if I was going home,” Lou said. “Only difference between me and those dumb assholes is, I know better than to lay my neck on the block.”

“If we kill Heydrich, maybe we do get to go home,” Frank said.

“If Congress kills the budget, maybe we get to go home any which way,” Lou said. Howard Frank frowned but didn’t try to contradict him. Lou wished he would have.

XXII

“Well, boys, here I am again,” Harry Truman said. One eyebrow quirked up toward where his hairline had been once upon a time. “You’ve got to have more fun talking with me than you do with Joe Martin. My God! That man makes oatmeal look like it’s made out of chili peppers.”

Along with the rest of the press corps, Tom Schmidt chuckled. Truman knew what he was talking about, all right. Joe Martin wasn’t the most exciting man God ever made. All the same…“How does it feel to be working with a Republican House and Senate?” somebody called.

“I’m going to do something a good Democrat probably shouldn’t: I’m going to quote Abraham Lincoln,” President Truman replied. “He said he was like the boy who’d got a licking-he was too big to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

More chuckles. FDR would never have told a cornpone story like that-Tom was sure of it. But FDR was a year and a half gone: more than that now. Truman was on his own. By all appearances, he was in over his head, too. He was the only one who didn’t seem to think so.

“What will you do if Congress passes a bill cutting off funds for U.S. soldiers in Germany?” another reporter asked.

“Veto it,” Truman said calmly. “And they know I will.”

“What if they override?” the man pressed.

“They haven’t got the votes,” the President said. “Even with a few Democrats who can’t see their nose in front of their face, they haven’t got ’em. So let them try.” He sounded like a tough little terrier. Roosevelt would have stuck out his chin, but Roosevelt had more of a chin to stick out than round-faced Truman. Roosevelt never had to deal with a Republican Congress, either. Maybe he’d picked the right time to die, or he probably would have.

“What about the soldiers’ strikes in Germany, sir?” Tom asked when Truman nodded at him.

“What about ’em?” the President said. “Some of our boys drank some bad schnapps, if you want to know what I think.”

“A little more than that going on, isn’t there?” Tom said. “Marches, picket signs, petitions? Sounds like more