The Man with the Iron Heart Read online

  Lou also had a strong opinion about what people like that could do to themselves. It violated several commandments and other Biblical prohibitions, to say nothing of the laws of anatomy, physiology, and probably physics. He expressed it anyhow. His superior laughed. “Sideways,” Lou added.

  “Well, it’s not like I don’t feel the same way,” Howard Frank said. “But I’m just a poor goddamn dogface on the other side of the ocean, too, far as they’re concerned.”

  “Uh-huh.” Letters from Lou’s family-and, even more, letters he’d tried and failed to write to them-had painfully proved to him that he wasn’t a civilian any more. He wondered if he ever could be again. He had his doubts.

  “But I think they’re just what you called ’em,” Frank said. “I’m not gonna worry about ’em-not unless they make so much noise, they don’t let us do what we’ve gotta do over here.”

  “Sounds good to me, too, sir,” Lou said. The last Pershing-finally, an American tank that could match up with a Panther, only it got to the battlefield a couple of months before Panthers went out of business-rumbled away. Exhaust fumes choked the air.

  “I just hope everything goes good on the other end, too,” Captain Frank said.

  “Boy, me, too,” Lou said. “Next stop…” He dropped to a whisper. He wasn’t supposed to say where, even if the only guy who could possibly hear already knew anyway. Bringing out the place had a thrill of the forbidden: “Frankfurt.”

  The truck was a deuce-and-a-half painted olive drab. Well, what the hell else would it be in Germany these days? The English used them. So did the French. So did the Russians. And the Jerries had used all the big American brutes they could capture. These babies beat the crap out of the Opels and the other hunks of tin the krauts had manufactured for themselves.

  “Papers?” said the guard at the entrance to the American compound in Frankfurt.

  Without a word, the driver passed them to him. The guard looked them over. They were in order. They looked in order, anyhow. It wasn’t the same thing, but the guard didn’t think of that.

  “I’ve got to inspect your cargo,” he said. The driver only nodded. The guard eyed him. “Watsamatter? Cat got your tongue, buddy?” The driver mimed tipping back a stein, or maybe a bottle. He held his head in both hands and rolled his eyes. The guard laughed. “Okay, okay. I’ve tied one on a few times, or maybe a few times too many. But I still gotta look at your stuff.”

  With a hesitant nod, the driver waved him on. The man was as pallid as if he’d got plastered the night before-that was for sure. The guard went around to the back of the truck. He scrambled up onto the rear bumper so he could look over the gate at what the canvas-covered truck body held.

  Then he jumped down in a hurry. His own face felt as if it were on fire. He knew it had to be beet-red. Carton after cardboard carton, all with KOTEX printed on them in big, embarrassing scarlet letters. Soldiers’ wives, officers’ grown and mostly grown daughters…Sure, they’d need stuff like that, but a nineteen-year-old draftee didn’t want to get reminded of it.

  “Well, go on, goddammit.” He tried to make his voice rough and deep, but it broke in the middle of the curse. Mortified anew, he waved the deuce-and-a-half forward.

  It should have headed straight for the PX, which was for all practical purposes a supermarket. Instead, it made for the community center, right in the middle of the American compound in Frankfurt.

  “Hey,” the GI said to his companion, who hadn’t bothered coming out of the guard shack. “What does he think he’s doing?”

  “What is he doing?” The other guard emerged to look. He was a year older, which only meant his whiskers rasped more when he rubbed his chin. “Sure doesn’t know where he’s going, does he?”

  “No, and he oughta, unless…” A sudden, horrid suspicion filled the kid who’d waved the truck through. He raised his grease gun, and his voice. “Hey, you! Halt, or else I’ll-!”

  Too late. If there are two more mournful words in the English language, what could they possibly be? The truck was out of voice range, and almost out of grease-gun range. It hadn’t been full of Kotex after all. It blew sky-high.

  I’m in deep shit, the guard thought as he went ass over teakettle. That was pretty goddamn mournful, too, but it needed more than two words. Then he slammed into what was left of a wall across the street from the compound. A rib broke. It stabbed him from the inside out. “Motherfuck!” he gasped, and got stabbed again. That wasn’t mournful; it was half automatic, half furious.

  At that, he was one of the lucky ones. When the German fanatic pressed the button on the steering wheel or wherever the hell it was, he’d got 300 yards-maybe even a quarter mile-into the compound: almost to the community center. He blasted himself to kingdom come, of course. He blew up twenty-nine U.S. soldiers, and seventy-three women, and nineteen children under the age of ten. The papers were very particular about that, for some reason. Children under the age of ten, they all said. The exploding truck wounded more than twice as many as it killed.

  So the papers proclaimed right after the fanatic killed himself to strike at the USA. The luckless guard lay on a cot in a crowded room in a crowded Army hospital. His chest was bandaged so tight, he could hardly breathe. He had nothing to do-nothing he could do-but read the papers and listen to the radio that sat on a wall shelf in one corner of the room.

  A broken rib. That wasn’t so much. After a while, you’d get better. Except the guard didn’t. He lost his appetite-easy enough to do with Army chow, but still…. When he scratched his head, his hair started coming out. He didn’t feel good at all, not even a little bit.

  A frowning nurse gave him a blood test. Not too much later, a frowning doctor came in and asked him, “How long have you been anemic, son?”

  “Huh? What? Me?” The guard didn’t even know what the word meant. “How come I’m going bald?”

  The doctor didn’t answer, which pissed him off. It would have made him even madder if he’d felt better. He threw up that night, and the vomit had blood in it.

  A tech sergeant walked into the ward much too early the next morning. He carried a metal box with…things attached to it. The guard, still nauseous, wasn’t inclined to curiosity just then. One of the…things was a set of earphones. The tech sergeant steered the other one over the guard. Something clicked in the earphones; even the sick guard could hear it. The sergeant looked down at a gauge on top of the metal box. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered, and got out of there in a hurry.

  They carried the guard out of the ward later that day. The medics who moved him wore gas masks and thick gloves. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “I ain’t Typhoid Mary. I ain’t got smallpox or nothin’. I know I ain’t-I been vaccinated. All I got’s a coupla cracked ribs, right?”

  “Well, no.” Coming through the gas mask, the medic’s voice sounded otherworldly.

  “What is it, then? How come I feel so crappy?” the guard asked.

  “After we A-bombed the Japs, the docs called it radiation sickness,” the medic replied.

  “Son of a bitch!” The guard would have got more excited, but he did feel crappy. “That thing the fuckin’ kraut touched off-that was an atom bomb? How come I ain’t dead?”

  The medic hesitated. Maybe you will be-something like that had to be going through his mind. The guard would have been more upset had he been less wrung out, too. At last, the medic said, “Well, it wasn’t a real atom bomb. What blew up was just TNT, that kinda shit. If it was a real atom bomb, Frankfurt wouldn’t be there any more-one gone goose. But the fuckin’ krauts put some kinda radioactive crap in with the explosive, and the blast spread it all over the place. You musta been pretty close to where it went off.”

  “Yeah, I sure was. That’s how I got the ribs,” the guard agreed. “What happens now? Am I gonna die?” He wished he cared more.

  “See how much of that crap you took in. See if you get better or not.” The medics who were lugging the guard stopped at a door with ISOLATIO
N painted above it in big letters that looked new. A nurse held the door open for them. She was a blonde with a nice shape-Betty Grable legs-but a gas mask kept the guard from telling whether she was cute or not. He also wished he cared more about that. If he didn’t give a damn about what a girl looked like, he had to be much too close to buying a plot.

  Several other guys already lay in the isolation ward. A couple of them seemed pretty chipper. Others looked even worse than the guard felt. The medics got him up onto a bed. He lay there like a lump, wondering what happened next or if anything happened next. He had a hard time caring one way or the other.

  Robert Patterson didn’t look happy about coming before Congress. Jerry Duncan didn’t give a good goddamn about how the Secretary of War looked. “Let me get this straight, Mr. Secretary,” Jerry said. “We had this enormous enclave in Frankfurt for American officers and their dependents, constructed at taxpayer expense for several million dollars. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Congressman.” Patterson looked even less happy. Jerry hadn’t been sure he could.

  “Okay,” Jerry said. It wasn’t-not even close-but sometimes you had to soften ’em up before you bored in for the kill. “We had this enclave. Now we can’t use it any more, because this damned German fanatic blew himself up right in the middle and left it radioactive. We were going to try the German war criminals there, but now we can’t do that, either. Is all that right?”

  “Yes, Congressman. Unfortunately, it is.” There had to be some bottom to the Secretary of War’s gloom, but he hadn’t found it yet.

  “How did the German drive his truck into the middle of our enclave?” Jerry inquired, acid in his voice. “Was the guard asleep at the switch?”

  “It appears the guard was deceived, sir, if that’s what you mean,” Patterson answered stolidly.

  “What would have happened if the guard wasn’t asleep at the switch?” Jerry liked his own phrase better. It made the guard and the Secretary of War look bad. “Wouldn’t the whole enclave have been saved?”

  “Well, sir, I think the most likely thing is that the fanatic behind the wheel would have touched off the vehicle at the first sign of trouble,” Patterson replied. “There was a lot of explosive in that truck. It still would have blown up a large area, and it would have spread the, uh, radioactive material far and wide any which way.”

  Damn, Jerry thought. That seemed likely to him, too, even if he wished it didn’t. He tried a different jab: “How did Heydrich’s fanatics get their hands on radioactive material in the first place? How did they know what to do with it?”

  Patterson licked his lips. “They kidnapped physicists out of the British zone. The radioactive material came from the French zone.”

  “So none of this is the War Department’s fault? Is that what you’re saying?” Jerry asked. “The bomb blew up in the American zone, didn’t it? It contaminated the American zone, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Secretary of War said.

  “And this, uh, radioactive material the fanatics got from the French zone-how did they know it was there?” Jerry pressed.

  “I presume one of the German physicists told them,” the Secretary of War said.

  “Now, we knew the stuff was there? But we didn’t try to get it because we didn’t want to alert the French to its presence? Isn’t that right?” Jerry said.

  Patterson sipped from the glass of ice water in front of him before answering, “Yes, Congressman, I believe it is.”

  In his shoes, Jerry would have been sweating, too, and would have wanted to cool down. “We held our cards too close to our chest, wouldn’t you say?” Jerry asked.

  “It did turn out that way, yes, sir. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” Patterson said.

  “How many people got blown up by the bomb, Mr. Secretary? How many will die of radiation sickness or cancer because of it? Couldn’t we have used some twenty-twenty foresight?” Jerry demanded.

  Bang! The committee chairman used his gavel. “There will be no badgering of witnesses,” he declared. “You need not respond to that, Mr. Patterson.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Chairman,” Jerry said. But, when he thought about the stories the papers would run, he wasn’t sorry one bit.

  Some Soviet printer in Berlin had run off countless copies of the latest ukase from Moscow. The fellow must have, if one appeared on the desk of an officer as junior as Vladimir Bokov. With the order in hand, he went down the hall to see what his superior thought of it.

  Colonel Shteinberg was reading the pronunciamento when Bokov came in. “Hello, Volodya,” he said. “You’ve seen this?” He held up the sheet of cheap pulp paper.

  “Da, Comrade Colonel.” Bokov displayed his own copy. “What do you make of it?”

  “It will be a little inconvenient, maybe, but of course we’ll do it, because the order comes straight from Marshal Stalin,” Shteinberg said.

  “Of course,” Bokov agreed, straight-faced. Anyone who didn’t follow an order from Stalin would regret it the rest of his life, which might not be long but would be unpleasant. “We will have to help organize postage and reparations to make sure everything is examined by Geiger counter before it proceeds to the motherland.” He paused, then asked, “Comrade Colonel, how many of these Geiger counters are there in the Soviet zone, and what are they for?”

  “They measure radioactivity. I found that out with a phone call to a doctor who did a course in physics before the war,” Shteinberg replied. “At the moment, I believe we have seven in the Soviet zone. But more are coming from the USSR.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Bokov said with what he thought of as commendable optimism. Every motherland-bound letter, parcel, truck, soldier, dismounted factory? Seven of these Geiger counters? Yes, they needed more-thousands more!

  All the same, he thought he understood why Stalin gave the order. Radioactivity could kill, and kill invisibly. The bandits’ bomb in Frankfurt must have put the Little Father’s wind up. If the Heydrichites still had any of their radioactive material-whatever it was-left, they could strike a blow at the very heart of the Soviet Union. Of course Stalin would do everything he could to block it.

  Another question formed in Bokov’s mind. “What do we do if we find something that’s, uh, radioactive?” He had only the vaguest notion of what the word meant.

  “Ah. They must not have issued you the supplement.” Moisei Shteinberg brandished another sheet of paper. “In that case, we are to find out who delivered it, and where, and where he got it. This may give us some leads on who gave it to him.”

  “Yes. It may.” Bokov didn’t believe that, but he had to sound like someone who did. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had practice.

  “And so we have our orders, and so we will carry them out,” Shteinberg declared. “At my suggestion, the Red Army’s postmasters have directed that all mail to the motherland be routed through Berlin. Six of the seven Geiger counters are here, in this city. All rail traffic between the Soviet zone and the USSR will be centralized here, allowing us to inspect soldiers and functionaries.”

  “Very good, Comrade Colonel. What about Germans assigned to camps?” Bokov asked.

  “Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about them,” Shteinberg said with a certain savage satisfaction. “They won’t be going any place where they can endanger people who matter.”

  Bokov nodded. “Makes sense to me. We won’t have to take any of these counters away from important work, then.”

  “We’ll be stretched thin enough as is,” Shteinberg agreed.

  “Can we borrow Geiger counters from the Anglo-Americans?” Bokov wondered. “They’re imperialist powers, I know, but they’re still our allies against the Fascist jackals.”

  Shteinberg pondered, then clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Not a good idea, Comrade Captain. We will not show England or the United States that we are weak in any way.” When he put it like that, Bokov couldn’t possibly argue. Even trying would have been dangerous, so he didn’t.
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br />   XVII

  Ravens were nasty birds. Lou Weissberg hadn’t seen many-truth to tell, he couldn’t remember seeing any-back in New Jersey. He hadn’t even seen that many crows. But he’d found out more than he ever wanted to know about ravens in the months before the German surrender. They pecked out corpses’ eyes and worried at wounds to make them bigger and get at the exposed flesh. Sometimes they didn’t wait till what they were pecking at was a corpse.

  Here they were again, on the road between Nuremberg and Munich. The day before, a squad’s worth of fanatics had tangled with about an equal number of GIs. More often than not, the krauts’ assault rifles and Schmeissers would have given them a firepower edge over American troops. Not this time-three of the dogfaces were BAR men. The Brownings chewed up the fanatics and left them…ravens’ meat.

  Vultures prowled the grass along with the ravens. European vultures were hawkier than their American equivalents. They looked as if they wouldn’t mind going out and killing something when the carrion ran short. Well, they didn’t need to do any extra work today. The GIs with the BARs had taken care of that for them.

  The Americans had lost one dead and three wounded. The Germans were mostly dead. They’d given themselves a nasty surprise, sure as hell. But the GIs had captured a couple who were only wounded-he didn’t get to interrogate fanatics all that often.

  Plenty of U.S. soldiers surrounded the tent that housed the wounded Aryan supermen. Most of the time, the Jerries would have gone to a hospital in Munich or Nuremberg. Not today, Josephine. So soon after the radioactive attack on Frankfurt, the brass wasn’t sure Heydrich’s goons wouldn’t try another one. A tent in the middle of nowhere didn’t make a promising target for that kind of thing.

  Jumpy troopers made Lou show his ID three different times and frisked him twice before he got inside the tent. In the Far East, he’d heard, Army discipline was going right down the crapper. The Japs actually believed they were licked. American troops might not want to be in Europe, but they didn’t get slack and dick around here. Nothing concentrated the mind like the possibility you might get your head blown off.