The Man with the Iron Heart

XXI

One of the first tricks Heydrich’s fanatics had tried was still among the nastier ones they used. As a matter of fact, the Germans had trotted this one out even before the surrender, so maybe some bright Wehrmacht Feldwebel dreamt it up. Stretch a wire across a road at just above windshield height on a jeep and you’d get anybody who was inside by the neck.

Scuttlebutt said the diehards had decapitated a few GIs with that little stunt. Lou Weissberg didn’t believe it, and he was in a better position to know than most American soldiers. He supposed it might be possible, if the wire was stretched good and tight and the jeep was really hauling ass. But the next confirmed report he saw would be the first.

Which didn’t mean a wire stretched across a road couldn’t put an unlucky or careless dogface in the hospital. In miserable winter weather like this, snow alternating with freezing rain, you’d never see a wire till you were way too close to stop.

That was why the jeep Lou rode in, like most in the American zone, had a wire cutter mounted on the hood. (Most jeeps in the British, French, and Soviet zones also mounted wire cutters these days.) The contraption, made from a couple of welded steel bars, would part any wire like Moses parting the Red Sea.

These days, casualties from murder wires were few and far between. Lou wondered why the fanatics kept running the risk of stretching them across highways. He supposed it was because they’d got used to doing it when it still accomplished something. It wasn’t as if they were the only military force ever to get bogged down in routine.

He remarked on that to his current driver, a swarthy fellow who went by Rocky and had five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. Rocky swore and spat as the jeep rattled along between Nuremberg and Munich. “Fuck, Lieutenant, nice to think something these assholes try don’t work so hot,” he said.

“Well…yeah.” Lou hadn’t thought of it like that. He wished Rocky hadn’t, either. The driver had a grease gun on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry. Lou carried a.30-caliber M2 carbine, which gave him about as much firepower as a submachine gun. But he also manned the jeep’s pintle-mounted.50-caliber Browning. That baby could reach out over a mile, and kill anything it reached. A damn nice weapon to have.

All the same, he and Rocky both kind of hunkered down whenever they passed a wrecked German or American vehicle by the side of the road. They did that at least every few hundred yards-sometimes a lot more often, where fighter-bombers had rocketed or just shot up a column on the move.

You never knew whether some bastard lurked in or behind a burnt-out hulk. If he popped up and let fly with an antitank rocket, your fancy.50-caliber machine gun might not do you one goddamn bit of good. You’d have a Panzerfaust up the ass, and he’d duck back down before you could even get a shot off at him.

“Almost 1947,” Rocky said after they rolled past a seventy-ton King Tiger tank that some colossal explosion had flipped over onto its side. Lou tried to imagine what it took to do that to one of the fearsomely lethal-and fearsomely immense-panzers. He had trouble coming up with anything plausible.

Answering Rocky seemed easier. “I won’t be sorry to see the end of 1946-I’ll tell you that,” he said.

But then the driver said, “Back when those Nazi cocksuckers signed the surrender, did you figure you’d still be here now?”

“Maybe to get rid of war criminals,” Lou said uncomfortably. “I didn’t think the fighting’d still be going. Who could have?”

“Yeah. Who?” Rocky gunned the jeep to hustle past a dead Panzer IV. Those babies weren’t nearly so dangerous as King Tigers-they made a pretty fair match for, say, a Sherman. The krauts had had a lot more of them than King Tigers, but nowhere near enough. A rocket had blown the turret clean off of this one. When the IV proved really and truly dead, Rocky went on, “Me, I won’t be sorry if Congress ships us all home. Only way we’ll ever get there, looks like to me.”

“You want to fight another war in fifteen, twenty years?” Lou demanded.

“Shit, Captain, I’ll worry about that then-or I’ll let my nephew worry about it. He’s like six or seven now,” Rocky answered. “What I know for sure is, I don’t want to fight this motherfucking war any more. I’ve paid my dues and then some. Fifteen, twenty years till we go again? I think that sounds pretty goddamn good.”

Lou stared at him, as he might have stared at a blue giraffe in a zoo. Were people really shortsighted enough to think like that? Of course they were. Why else was the incoming Eightieth Congress full of folks who wanted to pretend that the United States could walk away from Europe without anything bad happening afterwards? But they weren’t pretending. They really believed it. That was even scarier.

They drove through some trees. Lou didn’t know whether to swing the heavy machine gun to the left or the right. He feared it wouldn’t do much good either way, because he couldn’t see very far in either direction. Well, with luck any lurking German fanatics also couldn’t see very far.

Only trouble with that was, he couldn’t know ahead of time where the fanatics lurked. They already had a pretty good notion where the road was. They could have their rocket launchers or machine guns all sighted in….

Spang! The wire cutter mounted on the jeep’s hood did its job. “Greatest thing since-” Rocky started.

He never got sliced bread out. The world blew up before he could.

That was how it seemed to Lou, anyhow. One second, he was grinning along with Rocky. This $1.29 wire-cutting wonder damn well was the greatest thing since sliced bread. American ingenuity and know-how beat the evil fanatics again. It was an ending straight out of a Hollywood serial.

Except it wasn’t. The next second, Lou flew through the air with the greatest of ease. He fetched up against a tree trunk on the far side of the road with an “Oy!” followed a moment later by a louder, more heartfelt “Shit!” That stab when he inhaled had to mean at least one fractured rib. If he hadn’t been a good boy and worn his helmet the way orders said he was supposed to, he likely would have had a fractured skull to go with it. He wasn’t a hundred percent positive he didn’t anyway. He was sure as hell seeing double as he struggled to sit up.

And, at that, he’d been lucky. Getting blown clear of the jeep was the best thing that could have happened to him. Well, actually, not getting into the jeep at all would have been luckier, but it was way too late to worry about that now. Way too late to worry about the blasted jeep, too. It had slewed sideways and caught fire. Whatever blasted it to hell and gone must have killed Rocky. He wouldn’t have been pretty even without the flames. He seemed to be in several chunks….

Muzzily, Lou tried to figure out what the devil had happened. They’d taken care of that damn wire, and then…. “Shit,” Lou said again, on a different note this time. Cutting the wire must have touched off whatever explosive charge the fanatics had hooked up to it.

Explosive charge and fragments: it wouldn’t have done that to Rocky-and to the jeep-without plenty of fragments. A buried 155mm shell, maybe? The blast seemed about right for something like that. If Lou had been Catholic, he would have made the sign of the cross. He realized how lucky he was not to be ground round himself. Lucky, yeah-and Rocky caught some of the fragments that would have torn him up instead.

The only good thing you could say about Rocky was that he never knew what hit him. One second, he was being happy about the wire cutters. The next? Blam! No, he couldn’t have suffered much, not when he ended up looking like…that.

Lou hauled himself to his feet. That made the rib or ribs stab him again. It also informed him that one of his ankles could have been working better.

He scowled at the wire cutters, which he now saw through a curtain of flames and smoke-and through a deeper curtain of apprehension. If you took them off jeeps, the fanatics’ wires would start causing casualties again. But if you left them on, how many wires would turn out to be hooked up to big old artillery shells? You’d find out pretty damn quick. Boy, would you ever, the hard way.

Something warm dripped from Lou’s nose. Blood, he discovered when he wiped it on his sleeve. No surprise there. Blast could have broken both eardrums as easily as not. It could have torn up his lungs, too, if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling. If could have done all kinds of things it hadn’t-quite-done.

All it did was earn him a Purple Heart. Just what I fucking need, he thought, doing his best not to breathe deeply.

After a moment, he realized the improvised bomb had done something else. It had turned Rocky, who wanted to get the hell out of Germany, into a statistic that argued for doing just that. He would be the whatever and sixth GI killed in Germany since what the papers were calling the so-called surrender. And Lou had just made the statistics himself. He would be the whatever and twenty-ninth American soldier wounded since V-E Day.

“Hot damn,” he muttered, and then “Shit” one more time.

Vladimir Bokov remembered last year’s new year’s eve much too well. Influenza and benzedrine made a lousy combination. They went even worse with wood-alcohol poisoning. Damn the Heydrichites anyway! They’d taken out far too many first-rate Soviet officers with that stunt. Some of the men who replaced those casualties couldn’t tie their own boots without reading the manual first. Others didn’t have the brains to read the manual.

“Things could be worse,” Colonel Shteinberg said when Bokov complained out loud.

“How’s that, sir?” Bokov asked.

“Well, the Heydrichites could be holding their own victory banquet right now,” the senior NKVD officer replied.

“You’re right,” Bokov admitted. “It isn’t that bad. But it isn’t good, either. For instance, Comrade Colonel-how many times have you been in a jeep that cut a garroting wire stretched across the road?”

“A few. More than a few, in fact. That was a clever gadget our technicians came up with,” Shteinberg said. “Why?”

Vladimir Bokov happened to know an American noncom had invented the wire cutters that sat on the hoods of most jeeps in Germany these days. He also knew Shteinberg wouldn’t listen if he said anything like that out loud. It was beside the point, anyway. “Be careful if you cut another wire, that’s all,” was what he did say.

“Oh? How come?” Moisei Shteinberg asked.

“Because Heydrich’s bandits have started hooking those wires to 105mm and 155mm shells buried by the side of the road,” Bokov answered. “The wire gets stretched, the wire gets broken, and bam!”

Colonel Shteinberg understood what that meant, all right. “Gevalt!” he exclaimed. Captain Bokov blinked. His superior spouted Yiddish about as often as he spouted mat. Shteinberg had to be truly provoked to come out with either. By the way he hastily lit a cigarette, he wanted to pretend he hadn’t done it here. He blew out smoke and sighed. “One more way for the Heydrichites to get in our hair.”

“I’m afraid so,” Bokov said. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t, if you know what I mean. We’ve already had some casualties on account of this. So have the Americans, I gather.”

“Nice to know the Fascist hyenas aren’t saving all their cute tricks for us alone,” Shteinberg said. “I suppose this report’s on my desk, too. It just hasn’t surfaced yet.”

“Believe me, Comrade Colonel, I understand that.” Bokov spoke with great sincerity. Even though he swam easily through the sea of Soviet bureaucracy, he said, “What else does more than paperwork to keep us from accomplishing anything really important?”

Shteinberg sent a meditative plume of smoke up toward the ceiling. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to send you to a camp for saying such a thing. Maybe you’re right and I ought to send you to a camp for saying such a thing.”

Captain Bokov laughed. He didn’t think Shteinberg was serious. On the other hand, the only way you knew for sure when someone was serious about a crack like that was when the burly Chekists knocked on your door in the wee small hours. Bokov had made it through the frightful nights of 1937 and 1938. He hoped times like those would never come again.

“Besides,” Shteinberg continued, as if what he’d just said meant nothing at all (exactly what Bokov hoped it meant), “unless something goes wrong somewhere else, I’m not getting into a jeep tonight, not for anything. I’m not going to drink tonight, either, not unless I have some German taste the booze first.”

“Makes sense,” Bokov said, remembering last year’s madness once more and wishing he could forget it. Perhaps rashly, he asked, “So what will you do, then?”

“Me? I’m playing chess with Marshal Stalin, what else?” Shteinberg said.

Bokov shut up. Whatever his superior would be doing, it had None of your damned business written all over it. Bokov didn’t know what he’d be doing as 1946 turned into 1947, either. Like Shteinberg, and for all the same reasons, he was leery of drinking on New Year’s Eve. True, the Heydrichites probably wouldn’t try the same stunt two New Year’s Eves in a row. But they might decide the Soviets would figure they wouldn’t try the same stunt twice running, and try it anyhow to see what happened. Why take chances?

Red Army soldiers-and, no doubt, their French and Anglo-American counterparts-started shooting rifles and pistols in the air about half past eleven. That gave Bokov one more reason for thinking staying quietly indoors was a good idea. If you went outside without a helmet, a falling bullet could punch your ticket for you just fine.

And how many murders were getting committed under cover of that small-arms fire? By Heydrichites? By ordinary robbers? By husbands sick of wives and wives sick of husbands? Most of them wouldn’t be the NKVD’s worry, for which Bokov thanked…No, not God, he decided. I thank my good luck.

Front-line soldiers had no trouble sleeping through worse gunfire than this. So they insisted, especially after they took aboard a good cargo of vodka. Vladimir Bokov hadn’t seen the kind of action that would have inured him to such a racket. He kept waking up whenever a new set of drunks squeezed off yet another annoying volley.

Bokov also kept going back to sleep. No noncom came to shake him out of bed with word of some horrid atrocity from the Fascist bandits. That might not mean a lot of progress, but it meant some. And it meant a halfway decent night’s sleep, if not a great one. You took what you could get. If it wasn’t too great, you thanked whatever you thanked that it wasn’t too bad.

Bokov finally gave up and got out of bed about half past six. It was still dark; the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet. Berlin was only three or four degrees of latitude south of Moscow. It had long summer days and long winter nights. Bokov rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. His beard wasn’t especially heavy, but he’d have to shave this morning.

A jeep started up outside. Bokov went to the window to see what was going on. It might have been raiders taking off after planting a bomb. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It was Colonel Shteinberg taking off with an extraordinarily pretty brunette. Sunrise might be more than an hour and a half away, but Bokov had no trouble seeing that. The Soviet barracks blazed with light, to help hold the Heydrichites at bay.

“Well, well,” Bokov said softly, and then again: “Well, well.” Plenty of Soviet officers were screwing German women: that general he’d visited in Dresden sprang to mind. It wasn’t encouraged (though raping German women had been, at least unofficially, as the Red Army stormed into the Reich), but the Soviets didn’t try to declare it off-limits the way the U.S. Army did. The women were there. They were in no position to say no. Of course men would screw them.

Moisei Shteinberg, though…For one thing, he was NKVD, which meant he had more to keep quiet about than most Red Army men. For another, he was a Jew. Was he avenging himself every time he stuck it in there? Or was he just a man who got horny like any other man, even if he’d had his cock clipped?

“Interesting,” Bokov murmured. And it might give him a hold on Shteinberg. It also might not, but finding out could be interesting, too.

A new face up there on the rostrum. Sam Rayburn was just another Congressman again. Well, not just another Congressman-Rayburn remained House Minority Leader. But after you’d been Speaker, House Minority Leader wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss, as John Nance Garner had famously said (and been famously misquoted) about another Washington office.

Jerry Duncan grinned like a fool. Well, pride could do that to a man. Instead of Rayburn’s combative, bald, round-faced visage (which made him sound like Churchill, whom he resembled not at all), there was the aristocratic New England countenance of Joseph W. Martin. Joe had represented his Massachusetts district since just after the Indians got chased out of it. He finally had his reward. The GOP finally had its reward. Joe Martin was Speaker of the House.

It was a cold day outside, cold enough to snow. Some of the Democrats staring up toward Joe Martin were bound to be thinking, A cold day in hell. Well, maybe Satan was juggling snowballs, because the Republicans had their majority back.

What Jerry was thinking was that traffic would go to hell. Coming from central Indiana, he took snow for granted. Washington didn’t. The town didn’t get it often enough. People didn’t know how to drive in it. The street authority, or whatever they called it here, didn’t know how to keep the main highways cleared. It would be a mess till it melted.

Joe Martin raised the gavel and brought it down again. “The Eightieth Congress is now in session,” he declared. There. It was official. The Speaker went on, “We have a lot of things to try to set right. The American people expect it of us. No-they demand it of us.”

Along with most of the other Republicans, Jerry nodded. He had all he could do not to clap his hands. The Democrats, by contrast, all looked as if they’d been issued lemons and ordered to suck on them. From Pearl Harbor through V-J Day, Congress had shown a bipartisan spirit unusual in its raucous history. That wouldn’t go on any more.

It’s Truman’s fault, not ours, Jerry thought with the smug righteousness a majority could bring. If he didn’t want to keep on occupying Germany when any idiot can see that’s a losing proposition, we could get along with him just fine. But let’s see him occupy Germany if we don’t give him any money to do it.

The Speaker of the House said the same thing, only more politely: “It’s time to take a long, hard look at our foreign policy. It’s also time to get our fiscal house in order. I think we’ll see that the two of those go hand in hand.”

More solemn nods from the Republicans-and from the Democrats who didn’t think they’d make it to the Eighty-first Congress if Truman went on pouring men and money down the German rathole. More scowls from the President’s loyalists-and from the Republicans who feared Hitler’s ghost or Stalin’s reality more than they feared the endless bloody bog through which Truman insisted on wading.

Behind Jerry, somebody called, “And we’ll bring our boys home from overseas!” The voice wasn’t one Jerry recognized, but that didn’t prove anything, not on this Friday, January 3, 1947. Too many new voices, too many new faces. He’d get to know the new kids on the block pretty soon, but he hadn’t yet.

All the rage on both sides that had sizzled just below the surface exploded. Congressmen shouted. Congressmen swore. Some Congressmen clapped their hands. Others shook their fists. Things must have felt like this just before the country tore itself to pieces when Lincoln was elected.

“Order! Order! There will be order!” Joe Martin shouted, plying his gavel with might and main. But there was no order. Bang! Bang! He tried again: “The Sergeant at Arms will enforce order!”

The Sergeant at Arms looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. Jerry Duncan wasn’t so sure the poor, unhappy functionary was wrong. One man couldn’t enforce order on 435 (well, 434, because Joe Martin up on the rostrum wasn’t being disorderly) unless they wanted it enforced. And, right this minute, they didn’t. All they wanted to do was yell at one another.

“We haven’t got the money to pay for even half the things we really need!” another new Republican Congressman bawled. He had a bigger, rougher voice than the fellow who’d first ignited the uproar, and he used it like a top sergeant roaring his men forward through an artillery bombardment: “We’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for us to send to Germany to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement!”

Jerry’d only thought things were bad before. A skunk at a picnic, a photographer at a no-tell hotel, couldn’t have raised a tenth the ruckus that furious shout did. Not so many Republicans clapped this time. The Democrats, though…

“Shame!” some of them cried. “Shame!” And they were the polite ones. What the others yelled would have made a dock worker blush. What it did to the handful of Congresswomen…Well, they all seemed to be shouting their heads off, too.

“Order! Order!” Speaker Martin said again, this time in something not far from desperation. He used his gavel so fiercely, Jerry Duncan was surprised the handle didn’t break off in his hand. And he got…something not far from order, anyhow. Maybe everyone was shocked at how fast things had gone down the drain. Jerry knew he was.

“Censure!” Sam Rayburn shouted, shaking his fist at the new Congressman who’d said what he really thought. “I demand a vote of censure! That gentleman”-he spat the word-“is a disgrace to the House!”

“Now, Mr. Rayburn,” Joe Martin said, “if we censure everyone who loses his temper and says something unfortunate-”

“Unfortunate! I don’t know whether he should be more embarrassed for spouting claptrap or we for listening to it,” Rayburn thundered. “I move that we censure…whatever the devil the stupid puppy’s name is.”

“Second!” That cry rang out from all over the Democratic side of the aisle.

By the look on Joe Martin’s face, he was wondering why he’d wanted to be Speaker in the first place. He called for the vote. The motion failed, 196 to 173. Quite a few Congressmen sat on their hands. Jerry voted against the motion, though he didn’t think the new Representative had done himself or his side of the argument any good. At least half a dozen Republicans voted in favor of censuring him.

And that was the first day, the day that was supposed to be ceremonial and nothing but ceremonial. The Eightieth Congress got livelier from there.

They issued Lou Weissberg a corset and a stick when they let him out of the military hospital. They’d already given him his Purple Heart. He could have done without it, but the brass gave it to him anyway.

When he came back on duty, Major Frank greeted him with, “Well, well. Look what the cat drug in.”

“Your mother…sir,” Lou answered sweetly. “I found out how to fly without an airplane. If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d’ve rather walked.” You could do worse than steal your jokes from Abraham Lincoln. You could, and Lou figured he probably would.

“Good to have you back any which way, and more or less in one piece,” Howard Frank told him.

“Goddamn good to be back,” Lou said. “One piece-with a few cracks and chips and shit like that. They’d put me on the discount table at Woolworth’s, you betcha.”

“Well, the problem hasn’t gone away while you were on the bench, that’s for sure,” Frank said. “Matter of fact, you found one of the ways it’s getting worse. Care to guess how many 155mm shells, and 105s, and 88s, are lying around Germany waiting to get turned into bombs?”

“Too fucking many-that’s all I can tell you,” Lou replied. “Government didn’t issue me a slide rule, or maybe I’d do better.”

“‘Too fucking many’ is good enough. Bad enough, I mean,” Major Frank said. “One of the fanatics’ bright boys must’ve had a brainstorm, ’cause they’re starting to play all kinds of cute games with shells lately. Those goddamn trip wires-”

“I found out about those, all right. I found out more than I ever wanted to know,” Lou said.

“Yeah, I bet you did. But that’s not the only thing they’re doing.” If Lou was back, Major Frank would bring him up to date come hell or high water. That kind of persistence made Frank annoying, but it also made him a good officer. He went on, “They’ve got some of them wired so a guy watching half a mile off can blow ’em up when he sees they’ll do him the most good-hurt us worst, I should say.”

“Figured that out, thanks,” Lou said dryly.

“Did you?” Frank gave him a wry grin. “The guy with the detonator’s long gone, natch, by the time we trace the wire back to where he was hiding, but the wire does let us do some tracing. So the assholes have one more stunt. Some of these shells, they’ve got ’em hooked up so they can touch ’em off by radio.”

“Fuck!” Lou spoke with great sincerity.

“You said a mouthful,” Howard Frank agreed. “Try tracing a radio wave. I know, I know-we can do some of that. We can do more than the Jerries ever thought we could. But a signal that lasts this long?” He snapped his fingers, then mournfully shook his head. “Fanatic’s gone, transmitter’s gone-it’s a major-league snafu, is what it is.”

“Sure sounds like one,” Lou said. “Does it matter to a kraut if Heydrich pins a Knight’s Cross on him instead of Hitler?”

“You don’t get a Knight’s Cross pinned on. You wear it around your neck,” Frank said.

He was right, too. Lou had interrogated several German supermen who’d won the award-it was more or less the equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross. All the same, Lou made a face now. “They shoulda sent you to law school,” he said.

“Nah. I got good at picking nits the times I was lousy,” Captain Frank said. Lou winced; he’d had lice more than once himself. If you spent much time in the field, chances were you would. Frank added, “Thank God for DDT, is all I’ve got to tell you. That shit really works.”

“Yeah!” Lou nodded enthusiastically. He’d seen the same thing himself. From what retreads said, nothing they’d tried in the First World War stopped the cooties. But DDT did the trick, sure as hell. It knocked mosquitoes over the head, too. And it didn’t poison people. How could you not like something that slick?

“Well, anyway, like I said, it’s goddamn good to have you back,” Frank told him. “I did want to get you up to speed as fast as I could-and I wanted to let you know you aren’t the only guy the fanatics did for with their new trick.”

“Misery loves company,” Lou said. The funny thing was, it was true. If something happened to a bunch of other guys, too, you didn’t feel quite so bad when it happened to you. Not that Lou had felt good when that 155 or whatever it was went up, but….

“Well, you’ve got it,” Frank said. “Word is they’re working over the Russians the same way, too.”

“I bet Ivan loves that to death.” Lou knew what the Red Army and the NKVD did when they were unhappy. He would have said they’d learned their lessons from the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, but they’d needed no instruction. Hostages, firing squads, mass deportations, concentration camps…The Russians knew at least as much about such things as the Germans.

Before he could say anything more, he heard something outside. A shout-and a shout in English, at that. He hadn’t heard any gunshots or explosions beforehand, but how much did that prove? Any time people-for the shout had definitely come from more than one throat-in occupied Germany started yelling in English, something had hit the fan somewhere.

“Son of a bitch!” Major Frank’s mouth thinned to a pale, furious line. He must have understood the shout, where Lou hadn’t. “Those stupid bastards! Boy, are they gonna catch it!”

“Huh?” Lou said brilliantly.

Howard Frank didn’t answer. He didn’t need to, because the shout rang out again, louder and closer this time. Lou made it out with no trouble at all.

“We want to go home!” The roar was ragged but unmistakable. A moment later, here it came once more, louder still: “We want to go home!”

“Oh, good God!” Lou said. If that wasn’t mutiny…

Major Frank jumped to his feet and hurried to the window in his office. Lou followed more sedately. With corset and cane, he couldn’t hurry, but he wished he could now.

And here they came, around the corner toward the command center. There might have been fifty or sixty of them. Most were privates, but Lou saw several corporals and at least one sergeant. “We want to go home!” they bawled again.

Quite a few of them carried picket signs, as if they were on strike against, say, an auto-parts factory. And damned if some of the signs didn’t say UNFAIR! Others said WHY ARE WE HERE? and demanded HOW COME WE’RE DYING AFTER THE SURRENDER?

“We want to go home!” the unhappy soldiers yelled one more time.

They’d attracted MPs the way a magnet attracted iron filings. But, once attracted, the snowdrops stood around trying to figure out what to do next. They had billy clubs on their belts. Some carried grease guns, others Tommy guns. But the soldiers they confronted weren’t rioting. They were demonstrating. Both went against orders, but you couldn’t beat demonstrators or shoot them…could you? Lou imagined the headlines if the MPs tried. By the unhappy look on the military policemen’s faces, they were imagining the headlines, too.

“We want to go home!” Some of the GIs probably had struck at auto-parts plants or the like. The line they formed in front of the command center seemed highly practiced. They chanted in rough unison. The picket signs bobbed up and down. “We want to go home!”

“What are they gonna do?” Lou asked hoarsely, meaning not the demonstrating soldiers but the MPs and the top brass.

Major Frank understood him perfectly. “I don’t know,” he answered. “They’ve gotta do something. If they don’t, the nuts are running the loony bin.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. That was one way to put it, all right. Another way was that, if the brass and the MPs didn’t do something, and do it pretty goddamn quick, the U.S. Army in Germany wouldn’t be an army any more. It would be a mob.

The door to the command center opened. An officer came out and said something to the GIs marching in front of the place. They stopped chanting long enough to listen to whatever he came out with. When he stopped, they hesitated, but not for long.

“We want to go home!”

It rocked him back on his heels. Maybe he’d thought he would get them arguing among themselves, or something. No such luck. They were more united and more determined than he’d figured. It wasn’t the first time the powers that be had underestimated the rank and file.

When the officer spoke again, the soldiers quieted long enough to hear him out. Then they gave forth with their much louder counterblast.

“We want to go home!”

Okay. You asked for it. The officer didn’t say that, but Lou read it in every line of his body. He gestured to the MPs. They waded in with their billy clubs; just about all of them, by then, had slung their submachine guns. Some of the demonstrating soldiers tried to resist. They used the handles on their picket signs to hit back at the military police.

But, while the ordinary soldiers had shown pretty good discipline for protesters, they couldn’t match the well-trained military policemen. The MPs grabbed and handcuffed as many GIs as they could, clobbering them whenever they thought they needed to. Some of the soldiers who threw away their picket signs ran and escaped. The others were quickly overcome.

“How long in the stockade d’you think they’ll earn?” Lou asked as the demonstration came to pieces before his eyes.

“Depends on what they charge ’em with,” Major Frank said. “If it’s making a mutiny, that’s not the stockade. That’s Leavenworth-if they’re lucky.”

“Urk,” Lou said. “You can draw the death penalty for making a mutiny, can’t you?”

“Don’t ask me. I’ve got nothing to do with the judge advocate’s office, and I’m damn glad I don’t.” Having denied everything, Frank pontificated anyway: “But I think you can, at least during wartime.”

“Is this wartime?” Lou asked. “I mean, yeah, the Nazis surrendered and all, but what’s the shooting about if it’s not?”

“Those guys can figure that out, too.” Having pontificated, Frank started denying again. “Only thing I know is, we’ve got a mess on our hands.”

“Yeah, like we didn’t before. I wish,” Lou said.

“Okay. We’ve got a bigger mess on our hands now,” Major Frank said. “There. You happier?”

“No. I’d be happier if Heydrich was dead. I’d be a hell of a lot happier if I was going home,” Lou said. “Only difference between me and those dumb assholes is, I know better than to lay my neck on the block.”

“If we kill Heydrich, maybe we do get to go home,” Frank said.

“If Congress kills the budget, maybe we get to go home any which way,” Lou said. Howard Frank frowned but didn’t try to contradict him. Lou wished he would have.