The Man with the Iron Heart (64 page)

A stewardess—quite a pretty girl, really—was drawing near when Konrad and Max, Arnold and Hermann, all stood up at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding more curious than alarmed.

Then she saw the Schmeissers. Her eyes—green as jade—opened so wide, Konrad could see white all around the irises, as he might have with a spooked horse on the Eastern Front.
Crash!
The tray of drinks hit the floor.

“Don’t do anything dumb,” Konrad said—he was lead man in this operation not least because he knew English. “Take us to the cockpit.”

“What—What will you do?” The girl’s voice quavered, which was hardly a surprise.

“Nobody will get hurt if people do what we say,” Konrad answered, which committed him to nothing. He gestured sharply with the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Now go on! Move!”

When the cockpit door opened, the pilot grinned at the stewardess. “Hey, beautiful! What’s going on?” Then he saw the four men with submachine guns behind her. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

“I will shoot you if you do not do everything I tell you,” Konrad said. “The plane will crash. Everyone will die. If you do what I tell you, I think everyone can live. Is it a bargain?”

“Who the hell are you?” the pilot demanded.

That was a fair question. He meant
Are you a pack of crazy people?
If he decided Konrad and his friends were, he wouldn’t see any point to dealing with them. He might think crashing the plane now would be the best thing he could do, so they wouldn’t try to make him fly it into a building or something. Since Konrad didn’t want to die, he spoke quickly: “We belong to the German Freedom Front. We were soldiers in the war. We still fight to liberate the Fatherland.”

Pilot and copilot looked at each other. Neither seemed to like the answer very much. “What do you want us to do?” the pilot asked after a considerable pause.

“Fly this airplane to Madrid. Land there,” Konrad replied. “We will—how do you say it?—use the airplane and the passengers as poker chips to move our cause forward. We will not shoot unless you try to overpower us. Everyone in that case will be very unhappy.”

“When we go off course, the radar will see it,” the pilot said. “They’ll call us up and ask us what’s wrong. What are we supposed to tell ’em?”

“Tell them the truth. Tell them you have men from the German Freedom Front on your airplane. Tell them these men require you to fly to Spain,” Konrad answered.

The pilot eyed him. “You son of a bitch! You want everybody to know!”

“Aber natürlich,”
Konrad said. “The world must learn we are still fighting for a free Germany, and we are serious in what we do.” As he had with the stewardess, he let a twitch of the Schmeisser’s muzzle make his point for him. “Now—to Madrid.”

“Right. To fucking Madrid,” the pilot muttered. The L-049 swung from west to south.

Not five minutes later, a voice on the radio said, “TWA flight 57, this is Paris Control. Why have you changed course? Over.”

The pilot grabbed the microphone. “Paris Control, this is TWA57. We have four men from the German Freedom Front aboard. They are all armed, and they have directed us to fly to Madrid. To keep our passengers and crew safe, we are obeying. Over.” He clicked off the mike and looked back over his shoulder at Konrad. “There. Happy now?”

“You did what was needed. That is good,” Konrad answered. The pilot’s eyebrows said he didn’t think so.

“Jesus Christ!” Paris Control burst out. “Say that again, TWA57.” At Konrad’s nod, the pilot did. “Jesus!” Paris Control repeated. Then he asked, “Have the assholes hurt anybody?”

“Negative. They say they won’t if we play along with ’em. You might watch what you call ’em, since they’re in the cockpit with us.”

“Er—roger that,” Paris Control said. A different voice came over the air: “Shall we scramble fighters?”

“Negative! Say again, negative!” the pilot replied. “Not unless you aim to shoot us down. What else can fighters do?”

A long silence followed. At last, Paris Control said, “You may proceed. We will inform Spanish air officials of the situation.”

“Thank you,” the pilot said. He looked disgusted. Paris Control had sounded disgusted. Some of the Anglo-Americans had wanted to clean out Franco’s Spain after the
Wehrmacht
surrendered. They hadn’t done it, though, even if Spain sheltered more than a few German refugees and other Europeans who’d supported the
Reich
’s crusade against Bolshevism. Maybe they remembered that Franco hadn’t let the
Führer
come in and run the English out of Gibraltar. All by itself, that had gone a long way toward costing Germany the war.

“Can we tell the passengers what’s going on?” the copilot asked. “They’re bound to be wondering by now.”

“Go ahead,” Konrad said, and then, in German, to his comrades, “If anybody back there makes trouble, kill him.”

Word went out over the airliner’s intercom. The copilot warned people not to do anything silly, and nobody did. The Constellation flew on, almost at right angles to its planned course.

After a while, Konrad saw the peaks of the Pyrenees ahead. The L-049 flew high above them. The land on the other side was Spain.

He and his fellow hijackers grinned at one another. Everything was going according to plan. The Spanish ground-control man who came on the radio hardly spoke English. He and the pilot went back and forth in French. Konrad didn’t know any, but Max and Hermann did. They nodded to show nothing was wrong.

Spanish planes came up to look the airliner over. “Son of a bitch!” the pilot exclaimed. “Thought I’d never seen another goddamn Messerschmitt again!”

To Konrad, the German design carried happier associations. “We sold many of them to Spain,” he said. “The Spaniards must use them yet.”

“I guess.” The pilot still sounded shaken.

He wasn’t too shaken to land smoothly, though. Tanks rolled toward the Constellation. They were also German—outdated Panzer IIIs—which did nothing to reassure Konrad. “Tell them to go away, or the passengers will answer for it,” he said sharply. The American relayed the message. The tanks pulled back.

“People are hungry. May I serve a meal?” the stewardess asked.

“
Ja.
Go ahead. Hermann, keep an eye on things,” Konrad said. Hermann smiled and nodded. Plainly, he was happy to keep an eye on the cute stewardess. That wasn’t what Konrad had meant, but…. The lead hijacker turned back to the pilot. “You can talk to the control tower, yes?”

“Yes,” the man said. “They finally found a guy who really knows some English, too.”

“Good. Very good. Get in touch with him.” When the pilot had, Konrad took a folded sheet of paper out of his inside jacket pocket. “Send to the tower the just demands of the German Freedom Front. Tell the tower to send these demands on to the troops unlawfully and improperly occupying Germany. Have you got it?”

“Take it easy. Let me give ’em that much before I start forgetting,” the pilot said. Konrad waved agreement. The pilot spoke into the microphone. Then he looked back to the hijacker to find out what came next.

Konrad was only too happy to oblige him. “First, all demands must be met within seventy-two hours. After that, we cannot answer for the safety of the passengers.”

“You’ll start shooting people, you mean,” the pilot observed bleakly.

“Ja,”
Konrad said. “If we do not do this, no one pays attention to us. Send the warning.” After the pilot had, Konrad resumed: “We demand the immediate liberation of all prisoners captured while resisting the unlawful occupation. We demand also an end to the unlawful ban against National Socialist participation in German political life. And we demand—”

“Maybe you should start shooting now,” the pilot said. “They won’t give you any of that stuff.”

Konrad hefted his Schmeisser. “You had better hope they do.”

Had Lou Weissberg tried for a year, he would have had trouble coming up with a photo he less wanted to see on the front page of the
International Herald-Tribune.
There was the big four-engined airliner parked at the edge of a runway in Madrid. There was the doorway, open. There was a faint view of a Nazi bastard with a submachine gun standing in the doorway. And there on the tarmac below the doorway lay a crumpled corpse in a spreading pool of blood.

“Motherfuckers even picked a Jew to murder first,” Lou snarled in helpless, frustrated fury—the story beside the photo said the dead man’s name was David Levinsky. “Probably the only Jew on the plane, but they found him, all right.”

“Sure they did,” Howard Frank agreed. “After everything you’ve seen since you got here, how come you’re surprised now?”

Lou sighed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe ’cause they’re still exactly the same assholes they were before, even though Heydrich’s dead. Why did Clay bother giving me a medal and all that cash if killing the bastard didn’t change anything?”

“He must have hoped it would, too,” Major Frank said. “And if you don’t want the money, I’ll take it off your hands. I bet I can figure out something to do with it.”

“You know what you can do with it—sideways,” Lou said. Chuckling, Frank lit up, too. Lou went on, “And the goddamn Spaniards just stand around watching with their thumbs up their asses.”

“Portuguese, too,” Major Frank said. A DC-4 had been hijacked to Lisbon. The Nazis aboard that plane hadn’t started shooting hostages yet.

“Yeah, the Portuguese, too. We shoulda gone into both countries after V-E Day. Then the krauts wouldn’t have anywhere to hide—I don’t think you can fly nonstop from Europe to Buenos Aires,” Lou said. “But you know the real pisser?”

Howard Frank suddenly seemed fascinated by the glowing coal on his cigarette. At last, without much wanting to, he said,
“Nu?”

“The real pisser is, we’re still loading GIs onto troopships and taking them home,” Lou said. “That hasn’t slowed down one goddamn bit. I mean, why should it? We knocked the crap out of the Nazis, so they aren’t dangerous any more. Sure makes sense to me! Must make sense to you, too, right?”

“Riiight.” Frank stretched out the word like a train whistle fading in the distance. “Go close the door to my office, willya?”

“Huh? How come?” Lou said. Major Frank just looked at him. “Okay, okay. All right, already.” Lou walked over and shut it.

By the time he got back, Frank had produced an almost-full pint of bourbon from nowhere—more likely, from a desk drawer. He took a knock and handed Lou the bottle. “Here. Get the taste out of your mouth.”

“Thanks!” Lou was glad to drink. It wouldn’t help the poor SOBs in Madrid or Lisbon, but it made him feel better. “Ahh! You’re a
mensh.
”

“Well, I try.” Major Frank tilted the pint back again, not so far this time. “Russians have the same worry we do—just before you came in with the paper, I heard on the radio that there’s a hijacked plane in Prague.”

“Fuck!” Lou said. That made him want more bourbon himself, so he took some. “Fanatics have a new toy, don’t they?”

Howard Frank nodded. “Looks that way.”

“But what can they accomplish?” Lou asked. “No matter how many hostages they kill, we won’t do what they say. That’d be asking for even more trouble, if such a thing is possible. And they’ve gotta know the Russians’ll tell ’em to piss up a rope.”

“Sure.” Frank nodded again. “The kind of publicity they’re getting, though—you can’t buy headlines like that. And if they’re pulling this crap on regular airline flights, they’ll make us start patting people down and going through everybody’s luggage and stuff like that. It’ll cost millions of dollars and flush even more millions of man-hours down the shitter.”

“Lord, will it ever!” Lou exclaimed, picturing the mess in his mind. “Millions and millions of dollars.”

“Uh-huh.” Major Frank eyed the bourbon longingly. This time, though, he didn’t pick it up. “And I guess that’s why nobody’s stormed the planes in Madrid and Lisbon. If a bunch of hostages get shot, who do we blame? Franco and Salazar, right? That’s how they’re bound to see it, anyway.”

Lou grunted. He also wanted another snort, and also hung back. “Makes sense. I almost wish it didn’t, but it does. But if the fucking SS men are shooting hostages anyway…”

“Hey, it’s happening in Europe. A bunch of the people on those planes are bound to be foreigners. So it’s nothing anybody in the United States needs to worry about, is it?” Frank said.

“Of course not.” But Lou reached for the bourbon after all.

V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV HAD ALL KINDS OF REASONS NOT TO WANT TO GO TO
the Prague airport. He’d had plenty of work on his plate back in Berlin—important work, too, not just stuff to make time go by. Dealing with Czechoslovakian officials was still tricky. Too many of them thought they could restore the bourgeois republic they’d had before the war. They didn’t see that, with Soviet troops occupying their country, it had to accommodate itself to the USSR. And dealing with the Nazi terrorists who’d hijacked this Li-2 and ordered it flown here might be even trickier.

None of which had anything to do with anything. When Bokov and Colonel Shteinberg got orders to drop everything, to go to Prague, and to recapture the passenger plane without making concessions, they went. What other choice did they have? None, and Bokov knew it.

Which didn’t keep him from complaining. “Why us?” he groused, peering at the Li-2 through captured German binoculars (better than any the Soviet Union made).

“Why us, Volodya?” Moisei Shteinberg’s chuckle said he was amused to find such naïveté in a fellow NKVD officer. “You mean you don’t know?”

“If I did, would I be pissing and moaning like this?” Bokov answered irritably.

“I’ll tell you why, then.” And Shteinberg proceeded to do just that: “Lieutenant General Vlasov, that’s why. We did well giving Birnbaum to the Americans after he didn’t want us to. So now he gives us this mess. If we don’t make a hash of it, we solve his problem for him. And if we do, he’s even with us, and he writes something good and foul on our fitness report.”

“Well, fuck me!” Bokov said, and not another word. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to admit he should have seen that for himself. And he should have. As soon as Shteinberg pointed it out to him, he knew it was true. In Yuri Vlasov’s shoes, Bokov would have done the same thing.

All the troops ringing the Li-2 belonged to the Red Army. The Czechoslovakians had grumbled about that, which did them no good whatever. The plane was Russian. That gave the Soviet commandant in Prague all the excuse he needed to use his own men. If some pimp of a Czech colonel who’d probably get purged once the other shoe here dropped didn’t like it, too goddamn bad.

The radio crackled to life. “Do you read me, Prague airport?” one of the Nazi hijackers asked.

“We hear you, yes,” Bokov answered in German.

“You’d better get cracking on our demands, then,” the fanatic said. “Time’s running short. If we don’t know for sure that you’re freeing prisoners and moving soldiers out of the
Vaterland,
it’s too bad for the people on this plane.”

“We are doing what you told us to do,” Bokov lied. Not even the Americans were stupid enough to yield to the hijackers’ demands. If you did that even once, you set yourself up for endless trouble down the line.

“We’d better see some sign of it, or we start shooting,” the German warned.

“There’s no hope for you if you do,” Bokov said. That was true, but there’d been no hope for the fanatics once they commandeered the airplane.

“Maybe not, but there’s no hope for your important people, either,” the Nazi said. The passengers
were
important: officers, engineers, agricultural officials, a prominent violinist. No one but important people flew, not in Soviet airspace. But that also had nothing to do with anything.

A Red Army lieutenant handed Colonel Shteinberg a note. He read it and nodded to Bokov. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Bokov told the fanatic. “We’ll do what you want, and we’ll get you the evidence you need. Out.” He made sure he’d switched off before asking Shteinberg, “Everything’s ready?” The Jew nodded again. Bokov switched frequencies on the radio and said one word in Russian:
“Now!”

Three 105mm shells slammed into the Li-2’s cockpit. They blew off most of the plane’s nose. A truck with a scaling ladder—taken from a Prague fire engine—sped down the runway. The ladder went up. Red Army men with submachine guns swarmed into what was left of the cockpit.

Another truck raced over to the Li-2’s right-side doorway. This one needed a shorter ladder. The first soldier up it sprayed the lock with bullets from his PPSh. Then he threw the door open and sprang into the plane. The rest of his squad followed.

It was all over in less time than it took to tell. The Russians threw two hijackers’ bodies out of the Li-2’s shattered nose. One more corpse came out through the side door. They were bound to be dead already, but men on the ground filled them full of lead anyway, just to stay safe.

Then live soldiers and passengers started coming out. Another lieutenant hurried back to the tower to report to Shteinberg and Bokov. “Your plan worked very well,” he said, saluting the NKVD men. “The sons of bitches only had time to shoot three men, and one of them isn’t badly hurt. Oh, and shell fragments killed the pilot and wounded the copilot and one passenger.”

“Too bad, but it’s the cost of doing business,” Bokov said.

Colonel Shteinberg nodded. “Cheaper than dealing with hijackers any day.”

A moment later, the Li-2 caught fire. Blasting the cockpit had pretty much wrecked it anyway. The Red Army soldiers and the surviving people who’d been aboard pulled away in a hurry. Vladimir Bokov impassively watched the fat column of black smoke rise into the sky. The plane was part of the cost of doing business, too.

And as for Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov…
Go fuck yourself, Yuri Pavlovich,
Bokov thought happily. The senior NKVD man had given Bokov and Shteinberg this assignment hoping they would botch it: Shteinberg was bound to be right about that. But they hadn’t. They’d done as well with it as anyone could reasonably hope to do. They’d given no concessions, the hijackers were dead, and most of the passengers were alive. If Vlasov didn’t like it…
Drop dead, cuntface.
Bokov grinned. Maybe he’d said it out loud, because Moisei Shteinberg smiled, too. Or maybe the Jew was just thinking along with him. After what they’d managed here together, that wouldn’t surprise him at all.

S
EEING WHAT HIS HIJACKINGS HAD WROUGHT
, J
OCHEN
P
EIPER WAS
more happy than not. One thing was clear: taking over a Russian plane didn’t yield enough to make it worthwhile. The Russians, as he already had painful reason to understand, proved at least as remorseless and relentless as his own people. To them, the hijacked aircraft and the people aboard it were expendable. As long as they got rid of the hijackers, they didn’t care about anything else.

“All right,” Peiper muttered. “We won’t mess with them again. Not like that, anyhow.”

But the plane that landed in Madrid, and the one that came down in Lisbon…Both of those were successes, no two ways about it. The German fighting men aboard had killed a few fat, rich fools. They’d got wonderful publicity. Every airline that flew anywhere in Western Europe was frantically revamping security procedures. That would cost piles of dollars or pounds or francs or whatever currency they used. It would also cost them endless wasted time and uncountable passenger goodwill.

The team in Madrid had even managed to torch their Constellation as they walked out. They were in jail now, as were the hijackers who’d gone to Lisbon. The USA, and UK, and France were all screaming for their heads. Jochen Peiper didn’t think they’d get them. The
Reich
still had friends in high places in Spain and Portugal, even if those friends had to work quietly and discreetly these days. His best guess was that the hijacking teams would stay locked up till the foo-faraw died down, and then, without any fuss, someone would open the door, shove them out through it, and do his goddamnedest to pretend the whole thing never happened.

That suited Peiper fine. He didn’t think he would have any trouble recruiting people for more hijackings.

And the rest of the German Freedom Front’s business seemed to be going well enough. Most important, the Amis hadn’t brought bulldozers and steam shovels into this valley to dig out Peiper’s headquarters. Nobody the enemy had caught when they dug out Heydrich must have known where this place was. Peiper had hoped that would prove true, but he’d known too well there was no guarantee. Either Heydrich had paid proper attention to security, or luck meant no one who knew what he shouldn’t had survived. Peiper didn’t—couldn’t—know which, but either would do.

Roadside bombs, sabotaged vehicles and railroad lines, poisoned liquor, brave men in explosive vests who could take out a platoon of Amis or Tommies or Ivans if they pressed the button at the right time…All that was the small change of partisan warfare—unless you had to try to stop it. Peiper’s side had had to do that in Russia and Poland…and Yugoslavia, and Greece, and France, and the Low Countries, and Norway. Unfortunately, the
Reich
hadn’t made a popular overlord.