The Man with the Iron Heart (27 page)

The
Kubelwagen
had flatulently expired about ten kilometers outside of Nuremberg. The horrible noises it made told Klein he didn’t have the tools to fix it. They started off for a farmhouse they could see a couple of kilometers off the road. Maybe the farmer would have the tools. If he didn’t…If he didn’t, they would think of something else, that was all.

They’d just trudged into a grove of apple trees not far from the farmhouse when Klein looked back over his shoulder and said, “Mm,
Herr Reichsprotektor,
I think maybe we don’t want to go back no matter what.”

“Are you out of your—?” Heydrich had begun. Then he’d looked over his shoulder, too. American jeeps and an armored car and U.S. soldiers in their pot helmets and ugly greenish khaki uniforms swarmed around the dead
Kubelwagen.
When Heydrich turned to say as much to Klein, Klein wasn’t there. He was down on the ground, and reaching out to tug urgently at Heydrich’s trouser leg. Heydrich needed a second to get it, which proved him no infantryman. Then he hit the dirt, too.

They crawled away from the car that had chosen such an opportune moment to crap out. No bullets chased them, so the Amis hadn’t spotted them before they went down.

“Have they got dogs?” Klein whispered as they slithered away.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any,” Heydrich replied, also in a low voice. Low voice or not, he had trouble hiding his scorn. The Russians would have had dogs. The Russians, damn them, were serious about this twilight battle. The Americans didn’t seem to be. They thought his men annoyances, nuisances. They wanted everything peaceful and easy and smooth. Well, you didn’t always get what you wanted, even if you were an Ami.

After a while, Klein found another question: “Do you know of any bunkers around here?”

A map formed inside Heydrich’s mind. He had an excellent, even outstanding, memory and a knack for visualization. After a moment, he nodded. “
Ja.
There’s one maybe three kilometers east of here.”

“Can you find it? Shall we go there?”

“I can find it,” Heydrich said confidently: what he promised, he could deliver. The other half of Klein’s question wasn’t so easy to answer. After some thought, the
Reichsprotektor
said, “I’d rather not go to ground if I can help it. If they track us to the bunker, we’re trapped like a badger inside its sett.”

“Well, yes,” Klein returned, also after a pause to think. “But they can run us down in the open, too, you know.”

If Heydrich made it back to his underground headquarters, he didn’t plan on coming out again any time soon. In the meanwhile…“As long as we’re above the ground and moving, we’ve got a chance to get away. I think the risk that they can follow us to the bunker and dig us out is just too big.”

Had Klein argued, he might have convinced his superior to change his mind. As things were, the
Oberscharführer
only sighed. “Well, you’re right about one thing, boss—we can get screwed either way.”

They weren’t screwed yet. The Americans made a ham-fisted job of going after a pair of fugitives. Without false modesty, Heydrich knew the SS would have caught up with him and Klein in short order. For that matter, so would the NKVD. Professionals knew what they were doing. The Americans…

How the devil did they win? They were brave—Heydrich couldn’t deny that. And there were lots of them. And what came out of their factories…Few Germans had imagined just how much the USA could make when it set its mind to it. Bombers, fighters, tanks, jeeps, trucks…Yes, each man from the
Wehrmacht
or
Waffen
-SS was better than his enemy counterpart. But he wasn’t enough better, not when the other side had so many more troops and so much matériel.

And, however clumsy the other side was, it hadn’t given up here. American soldiers stumbled across the landscape. How far south and east the search extended, Heydrich didn’t want to think. Sooner or later, the Amis were much too likely to blunder across him and Klein by sheer luck. If they did…

If they do, I’m a dead man,
Heydrich thought. So was Klein, but Hans could do his own worrying. If the noncom did, it stretched no further than himself. Heydrich also worried about the fate of the whole National Socialist uprising. It would go on without him; he knew that. Whether it would go on so well and sting the enemies from the east and west the way it had was a different question. Yes, Jochen Peiper was capable—he wouldn’t have been second in command if he weren’t. Still, Heydrich didn’t think anybody could match Heydrich.

“What are you idiots doing screwing around in this swamp?” The question came in such a broad Bavarian dialect that Heydrich barely understood it.

He almost plugged the man who asked it any which way. He’d had no idea anybody but Hans was anywhere within half a kilometer. But this wizened little grinning bastard appeared from behind a tussock as if he were a sprite in one of Wagner’s lesser operas. Now, was he a good sprite or the other kind? He was a sprite who was wary of firearms, that was for sure—he stood very still and kept his hands where Heydrich could see them.

“Hey, buddy, you don’t want to do that,” he said, his grin slipping only a little. “You shoot me, all the American pigdogs’ll come running this way.”

“Are you loyal to the
Grossdeutsches Reich
?” Heydrich demanded. He knew about the ever-rising price on his head. If this scrawny son of a bitch decided to play Judas, he’d get a lot more than thirty pieces of silver.
But he won’t live to enjoy them if he does,
the
Reichsprotektor
promised himself.

“Got out of the Ukraine in one piece. Got out of Romania in one piece. Hell, got out of Hungary almost in one piece—they grazed me while I was hightailing it over the border. Got stuck in Vienna after that, and got away there, too,” the Bavarian said. “We still owe folks a thing or three.”

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he was spinning a line to lull Heydrich and Klein. The underofficer came straight to the point: “Can you get us out of here without tipping off the Amis?”

“Not a sure-fire deal, but I think so,” the Bavarian answered. “Want to come along and see?”

Heydrich and Klein looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time. Heydrich didn’t see how he could leave somebody who might be a betrayer at his back. He also didn’t see how he could quietly dispose of the fellow. Yes, the man might take them straight to the Amis. Sometimes you just had to roll the dice.

“Let’s go,” Heydrich said after a barely perceptible pause.

“Get moving, then,” the Bavarian replied. Off they went.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Klein whispered.

“No,” Heydrich returned. “Are you sure it isn’t?” The
Oberscharführer
answered with another shrug.

After a few minutes, Heydrich became convinced the Bavarian wasn’t going straight to the Americans. He wasn’t going straight at all. His turns seemed at random, but they all took him and the half-trusting men at his heels deeper into the swamp. Bushes and scraggly trees—the edges of the Lorenzerwald—hid them ever more effectively.

“Right season, you can get all kinds of mushrooms around here.” Their guide smacked his lips.

“I believe it.” Hans Klein sounded more as if he was thinking of death and decay than of a thick slice of boiled pork smothered with mushrooms. Since Heydrich’s train of thought ran on the same track, he couldn’t very well tell Klein to shut up. The Bavarian chuckled. Not only was he at home in this miserable countryside, he was enjoying himself.

“How will you get us past the enemy?” Heydrich asked. One of his wet shoes was rubbing at the back of his heel. Pretty soon, like it or not, he’d start limping. He wondered if he’d do better barefoot. If he had to, he’d try that. But running something into his sole wouldn’t slow him up—it would stop him cold. He resolved to hang on to his shoes as long as he could.

“Oh, there are ways,” the other man said airily.

They came to a shack beside a little stream. The shack might have been built from junk salvaged after the surrender, or it might have been leaning there in growing decrepitude since the days of Frederick the Great…or Frederick Barbarossa. “Nice place,” Hans Klein said dryly.

The Bavarian chuckled. “Glad you like it. Follow me around back.”

Around the back, a stubby wooden pier stuck out into the stream. Like the shack, it might have been there a few months or a few hundred years. The boat tied to the pier wasn’t new, but also wasn’t obviously a remembrance of things past.

“Get in,” the Bavarian told Heydrich and Klein. “Then lie flat. It’s roomier down there than it looks.”

And so it was. This fellow probably didn’t smuggle fugitive National Socialist fighters every day. If he didn’t smuggle something every day, or often enough, Heydrich would have been astonished. Just to make sure of things, the Bavarian draped a ratty tarpaulin over them. The tarp smelled of mildew and tobacco. Heydrich nodded to himself.
Thought so—cigarette smuggler.
These days, cigarettes were as good as money in Germany. In a lot of places, they were money, near enough.

“Off we go.” The man’s voice came from the other side of the tarp like the sun from the far side of a cloud.

“What happens if the Americans make you stop?” Klein asked.

“We’ll worry about that when it happens, all right?” The Bavarian didn’t lack for nerve.

The boat began bobbing in a new way. It was floating down the stream now. Pretty soon, the Bavarian sat down and started rowing to help it along. The oarlocks creaked. Time stretched, all rubber-like. Heydrich didn’t know whether to be terrified or bored. Beside him, Klein started snoring softly. Heydrich found himself jealous of the underofficer. Sometimes not thinking ahead made life simpler.

After a while, Heydrich jerked awake and realized he’d been dozing, too. Hans Klein laughed softly. “You snore,
Herr Reichsprotektor.
”

“Well, so do you,” Heydrich said. “How far do you suppose we’ve come?”

“I dunno. A ways.”

“Shut up, you two,” the Bavarian hissed. “Amis on the banks.”

Sure as hell, a voice called out in accented but fluent German: “Hey, Fritzi, you old asslick, you running Luckies again?”

“Not me,” the Bavarian answered solemnly. “Chesterfields.”

He got a laugh from the American. But then the enemy soldier went on, “You seen a couple of guys on the lam? High command wants ’em bad—there’s money in it if you spot ’em.”

“Your high command must want them bad if it’s willing to pay,” the Bavarian observed, and won another laugh. “But me, I’ve seen nobody.” He kept rowing.

If the American called for—Fritzi?—to stop…But he didn’t. The boat slid on down the stream. Heydrich wished he could see what was going on. He could see the bottom of the boat, the tarp, a little of himself, and even less of Hans. It wasn’t enough. He kept his head down anyhow.

After a while, the Bavarian said, “We gave that lot the slip. Shouldn’t be any more for a while. And even if there are, I can make it so they never see us.”

“Good by me,” Klein said.

“And me,” Heydrich agreed. One of the basic rules was, you didn’t argue with somebody who was saving your ass. Heydrich had broken a lot of rules in his time, but that one made too much sense to ignore.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG COULD COUNT THE TIMES HE’D BEEN ON A HORSE ON
the fingers of one hand. He thought of a jeep as the next best thing, or maybe even the equivalent. A jeep could go damn near anywhere and almost never broke down. The
Stars and Stripes
cartoon of the sad cavalry sergeant putting a hand over his eyes as he aimed his .45 at the hood of a jeep that had quit only reinforced the comparison in his mind.

Mud flew up from under this jeep’s tires as it roared toward the edge of a two-bit stream. The PFC driving it gave it more gas. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” the guy said cheerfully. “I’ll get you there—and I’ll get you back, too.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Lou answered, and he was telling the truth—about that, at any rate. He was worried about Heydrich getting away. If the report was true, they should have grabbed the son of a bitch by now. They’d found the
Kubelwagen,
or
a Kubelwagen,
not too far from here. That much checked out. But no Heydrich. That Jerry hoping for a big chunk of change had to be sweating bullets right now, for all kinds of reasons. If the kraut was bullshitting, the Americans would come down on him hard. If he wasn’t, who’d want to sell him life insurance?

The jeep half skidded to a stop. Lou hopped out. Carrying a grease gun, he trotted over to the GIs by the side of the stream. The mud tugged at his boots, but he’d been through plenty worse, plenty thicker. “Seen anything?” he called to the dogfaces.

He’d been thinking of
Stars and Stripes.
One of the soldiers had a bent nose and a dented helmet, just like Joe of Willie and. “Not a goddamn thing,” he said, adding, “Uh, sir,” a beat later when he noticed the silver bar painted onto Lou’s steel pot. “Only Fritzi running smokes like usual.”

“Who’s Fritzi?” Lou asked.

The GIs looked at one another. Lou could tell what was going through their minds.
This guy is supposed to help run things, and he doesn’t know stuff like that?
Patiently, the one who looked like Joe explained, “He’s this kraut who lives in the swamp around here. He gets cigarettes—hell, I dunno where, but he does. And he makes his living turning ’em over, y’know what I mean? He’s a good German, Fritzi is.”

“How do you know that?” Lou had met any number of Germans who’d done things that would make Jack the Ripper puke, but who were kind family men and never kicked the dog. You just couldn’t tell.

“Oh, you oughta hear him cuss Hitler and the generals,” the soldier answered. “Far as he’s concerned, they screwed things up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Terrific,” Lou said tightly. “You searched the boat, right?”

They eyed one another again. At last, the guy who looked like Joe said, “Nah, we didn’t bother. Fritzi’s okay, like I said. And we woulda had to notice the cigarettes, and that woulda just complicated everybody’s life.” His buddies nodded.