The Man with the Iron Heart (59 page)

He thought about passing the word to be careful about it. Only one thing stopped him—the likelihood the other GIs would tell him to fuck off. They knew everything there was to know about soldiering. Or if they didn’t, they didn’t want to hear about it. Chances were it wouldn’t matter. If the Germans were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be coming out.

Then again, even critters knew better than to dig a burrow with only one opening. Didn’t Jerry? He could be an arrogant bastard. Maybe he’d figured nobody would ever find his perfect hidey-hole. Or maybe…Maybe the American troops who’d combed this territory had missed some escape hatches. That might not be so good.

Here and there, soldiers on the mountainside were smoking. Bernie could see the glowing coal at the end of a cigarette for a surprising distance. And when somebody lit a match or flicked a Zippo, the yellow flare drew the eye like a magnet. Most of the other guys didn’t believe anything bad could happen. Bernie’d been through the mill. He was a confirmed pessimist.

He shivered and wished for an overcoat again. The blonde, the booze, and the bed might be more fun, but the coat was more practical.

His watch—GI issue—had glowing hands. Those wouldn’t give him away—you couldn’t see them from farther than about six inches. He held the watch up to his face. 0230. “Shit,” he muttered. Another hour and a half before somebody came to relieve him.

He undid his fly and relieved himself. That, sadly, didn’t get him out of being stuck here. He tramped along. Once he tripped over a rock he never saw. He flailed frantically, and almost dropped his grease gun. Only his Army boots saved him from a twisted ankle.

Any kraut in the neighborhood could have plugged him. So could any soldier allegedly on his side. He’d made enough noise to let them all know right where he was. If any of them had been as jittery as he was…But nobody fired at him. All the Americans assumed he was only a clumsy GI. Which he was, but they shouldn’t have thought that way.

And then, on the slopes across the valley from him, the balloon really did go up. Mortars and machine guns and rifles all opened up at the same time. The incoming fire was aimed at the tiny area the spotlights lit up. Almost in slow motion, a driver tumbled off his seat atop a bulldozer. He started to clutch at himself as he fell, but never finished the motion—he must have been hit as bad as anyone could be. When he hit the ground, he didn’t move.

“Fuck!” Bernie said. The krauts were way the hell up the mountains over there—he could see where their muzzle flashes were coming from. His submachine gun was as useless as a bow and arrow. It didn’t have a fraction of the range he needed. All he could do up here was watch the fur fly.

The Germans were out and fighting in at least company strength. Bernie did some more swearing. They hadn’t come out in those numbers since the surrender. And where the devil did they come out from?
From up out of the ground, dumbshit:
he answered his own question. Sure as hell, the American patrols that came through here hadn’t found anywhere near all the hidden doorways Jerry’d dug for himself.

Somebody at the opening to the mineshaft had his head on straight. No more than thirty seconds after the Americans there started taking fire, the spotlights went out, plunging the whole valley into blackness. The mortars and MG42s would still have the range, but they couldn’t see what they were shooting at any more. That had to make a big difference.

“Let’s go help ’em!” a guy not far from Bernie yelled. He knew which way to run, anyhow. Bernie was all set to go stumbling down the side of the mountain, too.

But somebody else farther away said, “No! Sit tight!” with an officer’s snap to his voice. The man went on, “If they popped up over there, they can pop up here, too. That attack may be a diversion. Hold your ground and see what happens next—that’s an order.”

Maybe it was a smart order. Maybe it was stupid, or even cowardly. No way to know till things played out.

The Americans had more than just bulldozers and steam shovels down closer to the valley floor. Armored cars started shooting at the German mortar and machine-gun positions. A 37mm gun wasn’t much, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. And how could the krauts hurt the armored cars unless they dropped a mortar bomb right on top of one?

“C’mon, guys!” Bernie said, as if his team were trying to rally in the late innings.

Then he found out what the krauts could do. A streak of rocket fire lit up the night and slammed into one of those armored cars.
Panzerschreck
or
Panzerfaust
? Bernie couldn’t tell from up here. It hardly mattered, anyhow. Both weapons were designed to pierce the frontal armor on a main battle tank. No wonder the armored car went up in a fireball.

“Jesus! Where’d that asshole come from?” Bernie said. How many secret holes did the Germans have? He had the bad feeling his side was liable to find out.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG BARELY NOTICED WHEN THE FIRST COUPLE OF MORTAR
bombs came in. The earth-movers made so much noise, the only thing that told him what was up was a graceful fountain of earth rising into the air—and a sharp steel fragment whining past his ear and clanking off a truck’s fender.

A split second later, machine-gun bullets cracked by him. When they hit metal, they sounded like pebbles banging on a tin roof. When they hit flesh…A man tumbled from a bulldozer, thumped down onto the ground, and never moved again. The bullet that got him in the head might have been a baseball bat smacking into a clay jug full of water. Lou knew he would remember that sound the rest of his days, however much he tried to forget it.

“Holy shit! They’re shooting at us!” someone yelled.

“Get down!” somebody else added.

That struck Lou as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flattened out on the ground and wriggled toward the closest vehicle. If he could put it between him and the deadly spray of bullets…it might not matter much, since the truck wasn’t armored.

Halfway there, though, he had a rush of brains to the head. “Douse the lights!” he sang out, as loud as he could. For a wonder, somebody who could do something about it heard him. Blackness thudded down.

That didn’t stop the machine-gun bullets from snarling by or the mortar bombs from hissing in and going
bam!,
the way he’d hoped it would. But then, what he knew about real combat would have fit in a K-ration can, if not on the head of a pin. That was, or had been, the advantage of CIC work. It was real soldiering: you tried to find out what the bad guys were up to, and to stop them from doing it. You mostly didn’t go out there to shoot and get shot yourself. Except now Lou did.

He hadn’t shit himself. He was moderately proud of that. Lying there with bullets and pieces of jagged metal flying every which way all around him, he didn’t have much else to be proud of.

“Hey, Birnbaum! You there?” he shouted—in English, because he knew damn well his own side would figure Yiddish was German, and would try to liquidate him if he used it.

“Here,” the DP answered. The word was as near identical as made no difference in all three languages.

“Good,” Lou said: another cognate, though in the Yiddish dialect he and Shmuel Birnbaum shared, it came out more like
geet.
Birnbaum must have been through more combat than he had himself—a lot more, odds were. The DP knew what to do to try to stay alive. His reply hadn’t come from more than three inches off the ground.

When the American armored cars started shooting back at the Germans on the mountainside, Lou let out a war whoop Sitting Bull would have been proud of. Shell bursts stalked the machine guns’ malignant muzzle flashes. He whooped again when two MG42s fell silent in quick succession.

Then an armored car blew up. By the light of the fireball—and by the flame trail from the antitank rocket that had killed it—Lou spotted a kraut trying to slide back into the night. He opened up with his carbine. He couldn’t do anything to the Germans farther away. This son of a bitch…Lou wasn’t the only guy spraying lead at him. The Jerry went down. Whether he was hit or trying to avoid fire, Lou couldn’t have said. He also had no idea whether he’d personally shot the German. He knew he never would.

Somebody running forward tripped over Lou and fell headlong. “Shit!” Lou said, at the same time as the other guy was going, “Motherfuck!” The heartfelt profanity convinced each of them the other was a Yank, so neither opened up.

The light from the blazing car let the other guy recognize Lou. “Well, you got it right, Captain,” he said—he was the driver who’d thought this whole exercise was a waste of time. “Goddamn krauts were down there.”

“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said dryly, which startled a laugh out of the driver.

Another German let fly with
Panzerfaust
or
Panzerschreck.
This one missed the armored car it was aimed at. It blew up when it hit something else a hundred yards beyond. Shrieks said it hurt people, too. But the armored car kept blasting away at the enemy on the mountainside, which counted for more.

“How long till the cavalry gets here?” the driver asked.

That made Lou think of Sitting Bull again. It also made him cuss some more. The first thing he should have done—well, maybe the second, after killing the lights—was to tell the radioman to scream for help. Dammit, he
wasn’t
a front-line officer. He didn’t think that way. He could hope the radioman had done it on his own. For that matter, he could hope the radioman had stayed alive to do it. But he should have made sure of it himself.

Combat was an unforgiving place. How many lives would one small mistake cost? And the more immediately crowding question:
will one of them be mine?

R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH SPOKE INTO A MICROPHONE:
“G
ERMAN
F
REEDOM
Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four.” He pushed the mike away. “All right. They know it’s an emergency. If we get away, we get away. If we don’t…” He made himself shrug. “Peiper’s a solid man. He’ll carry on.”

“Hell with him,” Hans Klein said. “I don’t plan on dying now, any more than I did when those Czech bastards tried to bump you off.”

“Good.” Heydrich didn’t plan on dying, either. That might have nothing to do with the price of beer, worse luck.

Faintly echoing down the corridors and shafts from very far away, gunfire said the diversionary force was punishing the Americans. In the short run, that would make them stop excavating. In the very slightly longer run, it would show them they needed to tear everything in this valley to pieces, the mountainsides included.

The move, then, was to take advantage of the short run and not to stick around for the very slightly longer run. Now, to bring it off. Heydrich pulled a panel off the wall. Behind the panel was a red button. Heydrich pushed it. “Let’s go,” he said, a certain amount of urgency in his voice.

“Right you are, sir.” Klein grabbed a different microphone, one hooked up to the PA system.
“Achtung!”
His voice echoed through the mine. “Get your lanterns and torches. Lights going out—now!”

Logically, they didn’t have to do that. As long as the last few hundred meters of the escape passage were dark, nothing else made any difference. But sometimes logic had nothing to do with anything. If you were leaving forever a place that had served you well for a long time, it was dead to you after that. And, being dead, it should be seen to die.

The generators sighed into silence. The lights went out. For a split second, the blackness was the deepest Heydrich had ever known. Then good old reliable Klein flicked on his torch. The beam speared through the inky air. When God said “Let there be light!” He must have seen a contrast as absolute as this. Reinhard Heydrich never had, not till now.

He turned on his own torch. That was better. Somebody not too far away let out a horrible yell. Probably a poor claustrophobic bastard who thought the darkness was swallowing him whole. If he didn’t cut that out quick, they’d have to knock him over the head and leave him here. One way or another, he shut up. Heydrich was glad he didn’t have to find out how.

When he went out into the corridor, more torch beams flashed up and down it. He wondered if all the men gathering there recognized him. He’d left his usual uniform and
Ritterkreuz
behind. His outfit said he was a
Sturmmann
—a lance-corporal. So did his papers.

But his voice…Everyone down here knew his voice. “We will use Tunnel Three,” he said crisply. “As some of you will know, the diversion on the far side of the valley is going well. The undisciplined Americans will surely rush every man they have into the fight against such a large, obvious enemy grouping. And that will clear the escape area for us. Any questions?”

No one said a word. Kurt Diebner stared owlishly through his thick glasses. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, though no one could have made a less convincing soldier. Wirtz played another lance-corporal, and seemed slightly better suited to the role. They’d been told the other physicists were evacuated earlier. Maybe they believed that, maybe not. What they believed counted for little now.

“Some of you don’t have greatcoats,” Klein said. “Go get ’em. It’ll be cold on the mountainside.” Diebner was one of the men who needed a coat. Heydrich might have known he would be. A real SS noncom went with him as he got it, to make sure he didn’t try to disappear.

“When we get over the mountains, there will be people to take us in,” Heydrich promised. “We’ll split up, we’ll stay hidden, and before too long we’ll be with our friends again. Once we are, we’ll give the Amis the horse-laugh. For now—let’s move!”

They moved. The only ones who seemed uncertain of the way were the physicists. The others had been down here longer than Wirtz and Diebner. And, unlike the slide-rule boys, the SS personnel were encouraged to explore their underground world. They might have needed to try an escape far more desperate than this one. Heydrich thought he could have done it in absolute darkness, without even a match to light the way. If you knew where to run your hand, shallow direction markers on the walls would guide you along. He was glad he didn’t have to try it, though.