The Man with the Iron Heart (45 page)

“Americans always squawk. It’s what they’re good for—that and jeeps and trucks and Spam.” Kuznetsov’s bulging belly said he’d probably put away a lot of Spam. Since Bokov liked it, too, he couldn’t mock the Red Army man. Kuznetsov went on, “This is just a fucking mess. They blow us up, and there’s nobody around to avenge ourselves on. What kind of chickenshit way to fight is that?”

“A damned nasty one,” Bokov answered. Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov blinked. Bokov continued, “What do you want us to do? We shoot people by the thousands. We’ve shipped so many to Siberia, pretty soon everybody north of the Arctic Circle will speak German. We’ve captured the Devil’s grandmother’s worth of Nazi artillery.”

“This Nazi officer we captured used to intercept our signals. He said that whenever we started talking about the Devil’s relatives, it was a sure sign things were really fucked up,” Kuznetsov said. “Looks like he was right.”

“Huh,” was all Bokov said. So even the Germans knew that!

Before he had to come up with anything more, an explosion rocked the already-battered building in which he worked. All the windows rattled. One of them fell in with a tinkle of shattering glass. Only luck it hadn’t speared him and Kuznetsov with flying shards. Frigid February air streamed in through the sudden new opening.

“Bozhemoi!”
Kuznetsov burst out, and then loosed a stream of
mat
that proved
zeks
in the gulag didn’t know everything there was to know about cussing. He finished, “That was too cocksucking close.”

“No shit.” Bokov jumped to his feet. “I’m going to see what happened—and if I can help.”

“Well, you talk like a soldier, even if you’ve got that blue band around your cap,” Kuznetsov said. Instead of wanting to deck him as he should have, Vladimir Bokov felt obscurely pleased. The two men dashed out of Bokov’s third-story office together.

They couldn’t get down the stairs as fast as they would have wanted, because other NKVD and Red Army men clogged them. Some would be useful when they got to the bomb site. Others would just stand around rubbernecking. Bokov had seen that before.

The crater was in a small square a couple of blocks away. A market of sorts had sprung up there. Berliners traded whatever happened to have come through the war in one piece for food and firewood. Sometimes women who didn’t have anything else traded themselves. More than anything else, that was what drew Red Army men to the place. And the Red Army men had drawn the…

Truck. It was a truck. Part of the chassis was still recognizable even after blast and fire. The stink of cordite or some high explosive much like it filled the cold air—that and burned rubber and burnt flesh.

Bokov did some swearing of his own. His obscenity wasn’t so inspired as Boris Kuznetsov’s, but it would have to do. The motionless bodies and pieces of bodies he didn’t have to worry about. They were beyond worry now. The Red Army men and locals down and moaning were a different story—if anything, a sadder story, because they were still suffering. What had happened seemed all too obvious. Now Bokov had to do what little he could in its wake.

Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov spoke in a voice like iron: “This kind of shit has happened too fucking often. We’ve got to get a handle on it. We’ve got to, goddammit. If we don’t, those Nazi cunts will run us out of Germany yet.”

That kind of defeatist talk could get him sent to a camp, too. But, looking at the crater the bomb had blown in the pavement, at the bodies, at the freshly shattered apartment blocks around the edges of the square—a couple of them on fire—Bokov had trouble feeling anything but defeatist himself.

“They haven’t tried one so close to us for a while.” Moisei Shteinberg might have appeared out of nowhere. He sounded altogether dispassionate as he surveyed the scene. “I’m surprised they did. They don’t seem to have got enough for their bomb.”

“You’re a cold-blooded prick of a
zhid,
aren’t you?” Kuznetsov said.

“I try to think with my head, not with my belly,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “Chances are it’s lucky for you that I do, too.”

Bokov stooped to bandage a Red Army sergeant with gashes in one arm and the other leg. Here it was, going on two years since Berlin fell, and he still routinely carried wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. What did that say? For sure, nothing good.

“
Spasibo,
Comrade Captain.” The sergeant managed something between a grimace and a wry grin. “Fuck me if I ever come here looking to get my cock sucked again.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bokov said. “Did you notice the truck before the bomb went off?”

“Nah.” The young underofficer shook his head. “I was just looking for a woman who wasn’t old enough to be my mother.”

Ambulances and fire engines screamed into the square, tires screeching, sirens wailing. The men on one of the fire trucks swore horribly when they discovered the bomb had broken a water main. They got a pathetic pissy dribble from their hose, nothing more. The ambulance drivers and their helpers started loading the injured—Red Army men first—into their vehicles.

With help from Bokov, the wounded sergeant hopped toward the closest one. His mangled leg wouldn’t bear his weight. Bokov hoped he would keep it. The sergeant managed one more word of thanks as he flopped into the back of the ambulance.

The bomb hidden in a jeep at the edge of the square blew up then.

Next thing Bokov knew, he was on his hands and knees. His trousers tore. The cement scraped his legs. Dirt and pebbles and bits of broken glass dug into his palms. He felt as if someone had banged his ears with garbage-can lids, or maybe with hatch covers from a Stalin tank.

And the ambulance had shielded him from the worst of the blast. It hadn’t flipped over onto him, either, 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.

T
HE 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?”

Best thing that could happen to the place
went through Jerry’s head. But that was small-town Indiana talking. The press would crucify him if he said it out loud. So he didn’t. He did say, “How would they get it over here? There’s an ocean in the way. We’ve got fighter planes. We’ve got radar to watch for bombers.”

“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.

N
O NOISE FROM OVERHEAD.
N
O 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.