which was a major piece of good fortune. It would have squashed him like a cockroach if it had.
As if from very far away, he heard people screaming. Shaking his head like someone who’d been sucker- punched, he lurched upright. He needed two tries, but he made it.
Colonel Shteinberg had a cut on his forehead and seemed to be missing the bottom of one ear. Blood dripped onto his tunic-ear and scalp wounds were always gory, even when they weren’t serious. Whatever had clipped his ear might have taken off the top of his head had it flown a few centimeters to one side.
No sooner did that thought cross Bokov’s mind than he got a look at Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov, or what was left of him: not much, not from the eyes up. The Red Army man’s blood pooled on the pavement. Bokov gulped. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen blood, or spilled it, before. But how much a man held always surprised you. Kuznetsov’s steamed in the cold.
Shteinberg shouted something at Bokov. Cupping a hand behind his ear, Bokov shouted back: “What?”
The Jew cupped a hand behind his ear, too. That was how he discovered he was missing part of it. He looked absurdly astonished. Limping over to Bokov-one of his knees didn’t seem to work right-he bawled in the ear the junior officer had cupped: “Nazi swine planned it this way!”
When Bokov heard that, he knew he was hearing truth. It was just the kind of things the Germans would do. It had their complicated cleverness all over it. Use one blast to create chaos. Wait a bit. Let rescuers and firemen gather. Then take them out with a second bomb.
German tanks were far more complicated than Soviet T-34s. They were easier to drive. They had better fire- control systems. But they broke down more often, too. In tanks, in submachine guns, in strategic plans, the Soviet option was usually the simple one, the one that reliably did what was needed. Complicated gadgets and plans had so many more ways to go wrong. When they went right, though, they could go spectacularly right.
This one had.
Something else occurred to Bokov. “More cars here. Is a third bomb waiting?”
He had to say it three times before Moisei Shteinberg understood. The NKVD colonel clapped a hand to his forehead-and found out he was cut there, too. “We have to make them pay,” he said.
Boris Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov would have agreed. But Kuznetsov was dead. So were-how many other Russians? How many Germans? The Heydrichite hyenas didn’t care about that. They only cared out hurting the occupiers. They were much too good at it, too.
The budget was usually about as exciting as…well, the budget. You voted for it or you voted against it. You tried to fish something out of the pork barrel for your district-or your state, if you were a Senator. Jerry Duncan had played the game, and played it well, ever since he came to Congress. Not even he could claim he’d got excited about it.
This session of Congress, things were different. The GOP held the majority. It ran the Ways and Means Committee. The budget started there. And the Republicans were bound and determined that the War Department’s appropriation would start without one thin dime for the occupation of Germany.
Oh, how the Democrats screamed! (Actually, some of them didn’t-more than a few Southerners, and some others, were sick of the occupation, too. And some northeastern Republicans wanted to leave the troops in place. But the fight came closer to Republicans versus Democrats than anything else.) The Republicans were less than sympathetic. Jerry watched the fur fly. “You people made this mess,” the Ways and Means Committee chairman said. “Now you’re blaming us for trying to get the country out of it.”
“You’re getting the country into a worse mess, and you’re too blind to see it,” the ranking Democrat retorted. “Do you want to fight the Nazis again in twenty years? Do you want to fight the Russians sooner than that?”
“We don’t want to fight anybody any more, and we don’t have to,” the chairman said. “That includes wasting thousands of lives and billions of dollars on an unwar that the administration has proved incapable of ending. And we don’t have to fight anybody, either, not in a big way. In the atom bomb, we have Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick. If we’ve got to use it again, we will, that’s all.”
“What happens when somebody uses it on us?” the ranking Democrat demanded.
Jerry Duncan’s hand shot up. “Mr. Duncan,” the chairman said.
“Last year, General Groves testified before the Senate that Russia had next to no uranium and was at least twenty years away from making one of these bombs,” Jerry said. He’d had people beat him over the head with Leslie Groves. Now he got to quote the general himself. That was a lot more enjoyable.
“And what about the Germans?” the Democrat inquired. “Will they sit quietly like good boys and girls, the way they did from 1939 to 1945?” He got a laugh. The chairman’s gavel stifled it. “Will they sit quietly, the way they’re still doing now?”
“Who said the surrender in 1945-almost two years ago now! — was the end of the war in Europe? Wasn’t that Mr. Truman?” Jerry said. “How right was he? How right has he been about anything?”
“That isn’t what you were talking about. You were talking-I should say, not talking-about the chances the Nazis would get the atom bomb if we ran away from Germany,” the Democrat said. “They already used one, remember, or close enough, on Frankfurt. Even cleaning up the mess there will take years.”
“It wasn’t an atom bomb. It used radium, not uranium. The only explosive was TNT.” For somebody who’d never heard of uranium before August 6, 1945, for somebody who’d practiced law before going into politics, Jerry’d learned a hell of a lot since. Well, so had plenty of other people, but he’d learned more than most. “You can’t call it an atom bomb, not if you want to tell the truth.” By the way he said it, he didn’t think his Congressional opponent gave a damn.
Said opponent only shrugged. “Okay, fine. Say it wasn’t an atom bomb. What if they drop one just like it on midtown Manhattan?”
“Okay, fine,” the Democrat repeated, and shrugged again. “Suppose one of these radium-not-atom bombs goes off inside a freighter in New York harbor?”
Jerry’s ears got hot. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“The Secretary of the Navy sure doesn’t think so.”
“Then he’s jumping at shadows,” Jerry said. “If the Germans tried a stunt like that, we’d blast their country off the face of the earth. You know it. I know it. They know it, too. So why are you talking silly talk, unless you’re just trying to scare the American people?”
“Mr. Chairman!” The Democrat raised his voice in appeal.
In Congresses gone by, that would have been plenty to get Jerry’s ears pinned back. Here in the Eightieth Congress, the chairman came from the GOP, too. “Sounds like a reasonable question to me,” he said.
Debate-no, argument-went on. But both sides knew what would happen long before it did. The appropriations bill with no money in it for the U.S. occupation of Germany would come out of the Ways and Means Committee. It would pass the House. If the Democrats in the Senate wanted to filibuster, they could. Then they’d get blamed for holding up the people’s business. Sooner or later, a bill pretty much like the one the Republicans wanted would hit the President’s desk.
And Harry Truman would veto it. He’d already promised that. And then the fun would really start.
No noise from overhead. No explosions echoing down the long, lovingly concealed mineshafts. Reinhard Heydrich breathed a little easier. No repair crews rushing to check the latest damage, or to repair the ventilation system after the confounded Americans screwed it up.
Had the Amis known which shafts were blind holes, which ones led to mines that were nothing but mines, and which ones led to pay-dirt…But they didn’t, and they were unlikely to find out. The Jews and other camp scum who’d expanded this old mine probably hadn’t had any idea why they were digging here. Just to stay on the safe side, afterwards they’d been exterminated anyhow-all of them, as far as Heydrich knew. And their SS guards had gone to the Eastern Front once this little stint was over. Not many of them were likely to survive, either.
Business as usual, then, at the same old stand. Well, almost as usual. The German Freedom Front had to do without a whole mine’s worth of munitions and small arms. Two valleys over, the miserable Americans had collapsed the whole thing when they touched off their damned charges up near the surface. That should never have
