The Man with the Iron Heart (7 page)

“No,” Bokov agreed. Germany, however prostrate it was, remained a separate country. “Too bad.”

“Isn’t it?” Shteinberg said. “So we have to depend on scaring the devil out of the Fritzes we don’t send to camps.”

“That will work against most people. Will it work against the diehards?” Bokov asked.

“I doubt it.” Colonel Shteinberg sounded so indifferent, Bokov looked at him in surprise. The other NKVD man condescended to explain: “Sooner or later, we’ll scare one of the ordinary ones enough to make him sing. He’ll think,
If I sell out, they won’t take my daughter
or
They won’t shoot me
or whatever bothers him the most. And once we get our hooks into the diehards’ network, it’ll start coming to pieces. They always do.”

“Ah.” Bokov thought about it. “Yes, sir, you’re probably right.”

“You’d better believe I am,” Shteinberg said. “We’ll make every miserable German in our occupation zone sure hell’s not half a kilometer away from his front door. Some of them will decide they’d rather kiss our behinds than keep on getting it in the neck ’cause they’re making like tough guys.”

He talked like a tough guy himself—actually, like a
zek,
a man who’d been through the camps. Maybe he’d been a guard at one of them. Or maybe he had a term in his past. Plenty of people who went into the gulags in ’37 or ’38 came out again after the Hitlerites invaded. Some of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, too, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t go right back into a camp if they sneezed at the wrong time. Even men like Tupolev, the great aircraft designer, had the camps hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles.

The Red Army men made sure the cars were shut good and tight. Each one boasted impressive locks and bars that hadn’t been on them while they were part of the German railway system—unless the Germans used them to haul people to
their
concentration camps. Similarly, metal gratings and barbed wire across passenger-car windows made sure nobody would leave that way.

Smoke poured from the locomotive’s stack. The train pulled out of the station, heading east. Vladimir Bokov wondered if any of the Germans on board had the slightest idea how far east they were likely to go. Well, if the sons of bitches didn’t, they’d find out pretty damn quick.

Colonel Shteinberg watched the train go with no expression at all on his face. “A good job, eh?” Bokov said.

Shteinberg looked at him as coldly as he’d eyed the train. “They could put every German ever born on trains like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough to pay them back for what they did,” he said. His voice was also cool and quiet, but Bokov realized there were people who liked Fritzes even less than he did.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG WAS EATING BREAKFAST AT THE BARRACKS IN
N
UREMBERG
when somebody came in waving the
Stars and Stripes.
“Look at this!” the guy shouted. “Look what we done to the goddamn Japs!”

“Hold the stupid thing still, willya?” somebody else said, more irritably than Lou would have—maybe this fellow hadn’t had his coffee yet. “Give us a chance to see what it says.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The guy with the paper did hold it still—and upside down. After assorted hoots from the soldiers shoveling food into their faces, he turned it right side up.

Upside down or right side up, the headline screamed about an atom bomb. “What the hell is that?” a major asked.

“They dropped one on this, uh, Hiroshima place, and the town is gone. Right off the map,” said the man with the
Stars and Stripes.

“Well, they firebombed the living shit out of Tokyo not long ago, too, and they pretty much burned it off the map. So what’s such a big deal about this?” The major seemed determined not to be impressed—or maybe he didn’t fully grasp what was going on.

Either way, the guy with the paper spelled it out for him: “Yes, sir, but that was hundreds of planes and gazillions of incendiaries—Christ only knows how many. This Hiroshima place, this was one plane and one bomb. One.”

“What? One bomb? A whole city? My ass! That’s impossible!” the major said. If not for the enormous headline, Lou would have felt the same way.”

“Here’s what the President said.” The man with the
Stars and Stripes
opened it and read from a story: “‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.’”

The guy beside Lou stubbed out his cigarette and crossed himself. Lou knew just how he felt.

“‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold,’” read the fellow with the paper. “‘And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

“‘It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.’”

“Son of a bitch,” the skeptical major whispered. That summed up what Lou was feeling, too.

“‘Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it.’” The guy who had the
Stars and Stripes
didn’t read especially well. Or maybe he was as flummoxed as everybody else. He went on, “‘By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1’s and V-2’s late and in limited quantities and that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.’”

“Oh, son of a bitch.” From Lou, it came out as more prayer than curse. Imagining the Nazis with a bomb that could take out a city at one shot scared him worse than anything he’d seen in the war, which was saying a lot.

“‘The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.’” The soldier folded the
Stars and Stripes
shut again.

“Wow,” said somebody at another table. “I wouldn’t believe a story like that if it was in
Superman,
and here it is in
Stars and Stripes.
”

All through the mess hall, heads solemnly bobbed up and down. Lou understood what the other American meant, but he didn’t nod. He had to fight not to wince, in fact. British and French officers were amazed—and politely dismayed—at how many of their allies from across the Atlantic read comic books. Right this second, Lou understood how they felt.

The major who hadn’t wanted to believe in atom bombs said, “We ought to bring some of those mothers over here. If the Jerries want to keep blowing themselves up, we can drop one on Munich and one on Frankfurt and one on this fucking place, too. That’d teach ’em not to screw around with us, by God!”

He got even more nods than the guy who’d talked about
Superman.
“Uh, sir,” Lou said, “how do we make sure our own people are out of places like this before we blast ’em? Sounds like one of these things takes out about a mile’s worth a ground, maybe more, when it goes off.”

“Hell, we’d do it. That kind of stuff is just details.” The major was in artillery, which meant he’d never needed to worry about “that kind of stuff.” Everything always looked easy to somebody who didn’t have to do it.

“How many short rounds did your batteries fire?” somebody asked, not quite quietly enough.

“Who said that, goddammit?” The major turned the color of molten bronze. He jumped to his feet. “Who said that? Whoever it is can step outside, if he isn’t too yellow.”

“Oh, sit down, Major. Button your lip while you’re at it,” a gray-haired chicken colonel said. “I got a Purple Heart and a week in the hospital from a short round. That kind of thing happens more often than anybody wishes it did.”

Instead of sitting, the major stormed out of the mess hall. Somebody snickered as he got to the door. That only made his back stiffer and his ears redder.

Lou drained his coffee before he stood up. He couldn’t imagine the Japs staying in the war much longer, not after a right to the chin like this. Maybe the Nazis had bailed out at just the right time. If the USA had had an atom bomb while the fighting was still going on, it sure would have dropped one on Munich or Berlin.

Now…This wasn’t a war any more, not officially. What it was was a running sore. Would we blow a city off the map because guerrillas bombed a barracks? Lou shook his head. It’d be like burning down a house with a flamethrower to kill a wasp.

But if you didn’t kill the wasp, it would keep buzzing around. And it would keep stinging. So how were you supposed to get rid of it? There was a good question. So far, nobody’d found anything resembling a good answer.

W
HEN
H
ANS
K
LEIN FIRST HEARD REPORTS ABOUT THE
A
MERICAN
atom bomb, he said two things. The first was
“Quatsch”
—rubbish. The second was
“Unmöglich”
—impossible.

That also pretty much summed up Reinhard Heydrich’s reaction. He’d had much better connections than Klein’s. He knew German physicists had tried to make a uranium bomb. He also knew they hadn’t come close to succeeding. If German scientists couldn’t do it, odds were nobody else could, either.

Odds were only odds, though. Sometimes snake eyes would come up four times in a row with honest dice. Not often, but sometimes. So maybe the Americans really had come up with something new. Maybe.

Three days after they claimed to have destroyed Hiroshima, they claimed to have destroyed Nagasaki. And, less than a week after that, the Japanese Empire surrendered unconditionally. Well, not quite: the Japanese wanted to retain the Emperor. But close enough. Heydrich was astonished, to say nothing of appalled. He’d counted on the little yellow men to bloody the Americans who landed on their beaches to take their islands away from them. That would help make the occupiers sick of holding Germany down.

Would have made. Now the German resistance would have to go it alone. Reluctantly, Klein said, “I guess the American pigdogs really do have these fancy bombs.”

“I’d say so,” Heydrich agreed.

“Can we get
our
hands on one, sir?” the
Oberscharführer
asked. “That’d teach the enemy a thing or three.”

“I don’t think we can sneak one from America to here,” Heydrich said. Klein gave back a glum nod. Heydrich continued, “If we can find out where our own scientists were working and how far they got…”

“Don’t you know?” Klein seemed astonished that Heydrich wouldn’t.

But Heydrich had to shake his head. “No. I never found out much about the project—it was highly secret. And, of course, it came to nothing, so I thought it wasn’t important. It seems I was wrong.”

Hans Klein had been through a lot with Heydrich. It took a lot, then, to surprise him. But his eyebrows leaped toward his hairline now. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I don’t think I ever heard you say that before.”

“No, eh?” Heydrich smiled a thin smile: the only kind apt to fit on his long, lean face. “Well, maybe it’s because I don’t make mistakes very often. And maybe it’s because, when I do make one, I don’t talk about it afterwards—and neither does anybody else.”

“Er—yes, sir,” Klein said hastily. Anyone in the
Reich
who talked about Heydrich’s mistakes—with the sole exception of Heinrich Himmler—would have counted himself lucky if he only ended up in a camp.

“Now…” Heydrich pulled his attention back to the business at hand. “What can we do about this? Dammit, I really don’t know much about uranium or radioactivity. Can we get our hands on someone who does?”

“Beats me, sir,” Klein said. “If you don’t know much about this business, well, me, I know less than nothing. But I do wonder about something.”

“What’s that?” Heydrich snapped. Facing the blue glare of his attention was like standing up against a pair of lit Bunsen burners.

Gulping, Klein said, “If we piss the Americans off enough, will they use one of these hellish things on us? One bomb, one city gone.” He shuddered.

“Donnerwetter,”
Heydrich said softly. “The whole country is hostage to them.” His fingers drummed on the desktop. “This place is safe against any ordinary bombs, even the big British ones. But what would happen if one of those things blew up right on top of us?”

“Beats me,” Klein said. “How would we go about finding out?” He glanced up uneasily at the ceiling—and at the many, many meters of rock above the ceiling. He’d never worried about ordinary bombs, either. But how could you help worrying about these atom bombs, especially when you didn’t know exactly what they could do?

Dryly, Heydrich answered, “Well, I don’t want to make the experiment. Maybe we’d live even if they did it—we’re a devil of a long way underground. But if they dropped one of those things on us, that would mean they knew where we were. And the only way they could do that would be to squeeze it out of somebody who already knows.”

“What will we do when they start capturing our people?” Klein asked. “They will, you know, if they haven’t by now. Things go wrong.”

Heydrich’s fingers drummed some more. He didn’t worry about the laborers who’d expanded this redoubt—they’d all gone straight to camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. “Things go wrong.
Ja.
If they didn’t, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would’ve worked Churchill to death in a coal mine.” He barked laughter. “The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we’d be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But…things went wrong.”