The Man with the Iron Heart

XXII

“Well, boys, here I am again,” Harry Truman said. One eyebrow quirked up toward where his hairline had been once upon a time. “You’ve got to have more fun talking with me than you do with Joe Martin. My God! That man makes oatmeal look like it’s made out of chili peppers.”

Along with the rest of the press corps, Tom Schmidt chuckled. Truman knew what he was talking about, all right. Joe Martin wasn’t the most exciting man God ever made. All the same…“How does it feel to be working with a Republican House and Senate?” somebody called.

“I’m going to do something a good Democrat probably shouldn’t: I’m going to quote Abraham Lincoln,” President Truman replied. “He said he was like the boy who’d got a licking-he was too big to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

More chuckles. FDR would never have told a cornpone story like that-Tom was sure of it. But FDR was a year and a half gone: more than that now. Truman was on his own. By all appearances, he was in over his head, too. He was the only one who didn’t seem to think so.

“What will you do if Congress passes a bill cutting off funds for U.S. soldiers in Germany?” another reporter asked.

“Veto it,” Truman said calmly. “And they know I will.”

“What if they override?” the man pressed.

“They haven’t got the votes,” the President said. “Even with a few Democrats who can’t see their nose in front of their face, they haven’t got ’em. So let them try.” He sounded like a tough little terrier. Roosevelt would have stuck out his chin, but Roosevelt had more of a chin to stick out than round-faced Truman. Roosevelt never had to deal with a Republican Congress, either. Maybe he’d picked the right time to die, or he probably would have.

“What about the soldiers’ strikes in Germany, sir?” Tom asked when Truman nodded at him.

“What about ’em?” the President said. “Some of our boys drank some bad schnapps, if you want to know what I think.”

“A little more than that going on, isn’t there?” Tom said. “Marches, picket signs, petitions? Sounds like more than drunken foolishness to me.”

“Oh, it’s foolishness, all right.” Truman’s eyes flashed behind his spectacles. He wasn’t FDR-not even close-but in his own way he was also nobody you wanted to mess with. He’d make you sorry if you tried. Eyes still snapping, he went on, “You know what would’ve happened if American boys tried that kind of nonsense in 1918?”

“Tell us,” Tom urged, along with two other reporters.

“I will tell you, by God. They would’ve got drumhead courts-martial, they would’ve got blindfolds and cigarettes-miserable French Gitanes, that tasted like horse manure-and pow! That would’ve been that. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Can we quote you, Mr. President?” someone asked. Tom swore under his breath; he’d intended to quote Truman any which way.

But the President nodded again. “Go right ahead. The Army’s not a factory. You don’t have the right to strike against the United States of America. Anybody who thinks he does doesn’t think very well. He’s going to be sorry pretty darn quick. That’s just the way things are, and that’s how they’ll stay.”

“So do you think we ought to shoot these strikers?” Tom asked. “Do you think the Communists got to them, or maybe the Nazis?”

“I don’t know who got to them. I don’t know if anybody did,” Truman said. “All that will come out in the courts-martial. I’m sure the military judges will do what the evidence suggests.”

“What will you do if some of the soldiers get sentenced to death?” Somebody else beat Tom to the question, which pissed him off. “Will you let the sentence be carried out, or will you commute it?”

“I’m not going to judge anyone in advance,” Truman answered. “I don’t have all the evidence in front of me now. I’ll see what the courts-martial decide and how they decide it. Then I’ll do some deciding of my own.”

A reasonable response-to Tom, no friend of the administration, too reasonable to be of much use. Well, he could turn the story however he needed it to go. Another reporter asked a question about the civil war in China. Truman said he hoped Chiang Kai-shek’s forces would do better. That wasn’t useful, either. Who didn’t hope Chiang’s soldiers would do better? Getting them to do better was the problem.

Then the questions turned to domestic policy, and Tom almost stopped listening. As far as the Tribune was concerned, he was there to hold Truman’s feet to the fire about Germany. Westbrook Pegler had been tearing the Democrats a new one on domestic issues for years.

At last, Truman said, “That’s all for today, boys.”

“Bye-bye, donkey,” one of the reporters said as they trooped out of the press room. “The elephant’s gonna be living here as soon as the voters send Harry T. back to Missouri.”

“Dewey? Taft? Stassen? Who do you figure?” Tom asked.

“Whoever makes the most noise about bringing the boys back,” the other reporter answered. “Right now, I’d put my two bucks on Taft, but it’s early days yet. They aren’t even around the first turn.”

“Yeah.” Tom nodded. Then he grinned. “I think I’ve got the lead for my next column.” He wrote it down so he wouldn’t lose it.

If you had to be anywhere in January, Los Angeles was a pretty good place to be. The sun beamed down from a bright blue sky. It was over seventy. Lawns were still green. Flowers bloomed. Every now and then, Diana McGraw saw a butterfly. Birds chirped as if it were spring. Diana even spotted a hummingbird at some of the flowers in front of Union Station.

“My God!” she said to the man who’d organized this protest rally. “Why does anybody live anywhere else?”

“Beats me,” Sam Yorty answered. The California Assemblyman was a Democrat. Not only that, he’d served in the Army Air Force during the war. That made him a doubly terrific catch for Mothers Against the Madness in Germany. He went on, “I was born in the Midwest myself, but the only way they’ll get me out of California again is feet first.”

“What if they send you to Washington?” Diana asked. “Would you go there?”

“If the voters send me to Washington, I’d have to go,” Yorty said. “You’ve got to listen to them.” He might not just listen-he might do some talking of his own. And if he did, they might well listen to him. He was pushing forty, with a handsome face, a fine head of curly hair, and a wry, almost impish sense of humor. “Truman isn’t listening,” he added, “and look what’s happening to him.”

“Not just to him. To the country,” Diana said.

“Sure. I know.” Assemblyman Yorty nodded. “More and more people know. More and more people want to do something about it. We were going to hold this rally in the Angelus Temple, but-”

“In the what?” Diana broke in. Then the name rang a bell, and not one she cared for. “Isn’t that where Aimee Semple McPherson-?”

Sam Yorty nodded again. “She started it, but she’s gone, remember-she died during the war. Anyway, the place only holds 5,300 people. That’s not enough. So we’ve moved things to Gilmore Field.”

“Where’s that?” Diana asked. Unlike the Angelus Temple, she’d never heard of it.

“In Hollywood. It’s a ballpark-the Stars play there. Pacific Coast League,” Yorty said. Diana nodded. The Indianapolis Indians of the American Association were the Hoosier heroes. Yorty went on, “Anyway, we can put 13,000 people in there. That ought to do the job.”

“I hope so,” Diana said. “I never dreamt when I started out that so many people would get behind me.”

“I’m only sorry you had to start out,” Yorty said. He remembered about Pat, then. Not everybody did, even though Diana talked about her son almost every time she spoke.

Gilmore Field was on Beverly Boulevard. It wasn’t that far up and over from her downtown hotel. The rally organizers got Diana earlier than she thought they needed to. When she saw the traffic, she understood. This was a big city, even if it all looked like suburbs.

Picketers marched outside Gilmore Field’s grandstand. Cops kept them from going any farther, and from mixing it up with the people filing into the ballpark. “Heil Hitler!” the picketers yelled at Diana, and “Heil Heydrich!” and “Communist!” and all the other endearments she’d heard from one coast to the other by now.

The cheers she got when she went out onto the field warmed her. So did the weather, which was still perfect. From what the locals said, you couldn’t count on that in January, even in Los Angeles. But God or the weatherman or somebody was smiling on the rally.

Before Diana got to talk, Sam Yorty burned some time introducing celebrities who agreed with her. She’d never imagined she would meet an actor like Ronald Reagan, but there he was, waving up at the people in the stands and blistering Truman in three well-spoken minutes. Several other performers did the same.

“And now,” Yorty said at last, “the lady who started this ball rolling! Let’s hear it for Mrs.-Diana-McGraw!”

Diana got another hand, louder this time. If those picketers were still out there, this one was loud enough to make them grind their teeth. “Thank you very much,” she said into the microphone between second base and the pitcher’s mound. “I think I’ve already been upstaged, but that’s okay. We’re all on the same side here today, right?”

“That’s right!” The cry rolled down on her from all around the single-decked grandstand. She felt as if she’d hit a pennant-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth on the last day of the season.

“My son Pat would be proud of you,” she said. “He went to Europe to fight to keep us free. He helped win the war-or he thought he did. But after everybody said it was over, he got killed. And for what? For nothing! That’s all these poor kids who get murdered every day in Germany are dying for. For nothing! Because Harry Truman’s too pigheaded to bring them home, that’s why. There’s no other reason at all!”

Was this what a ballplayer heard when he did something special and won a big game? If it was, it was worth playing for all by itself. Any money the player raked in after that seemed only a bonus.

“Germany can’t hurt the United States any more. We knocked it flat. Even if we hadn’t, we’ve got France and England and the ocean in between,” Diana went on. “And we’ve got the atom bomb, and the Germans all know it. If they even think about making trouble, we can knock them even flatter. Anybody with his eyes open can see that, right? Too bad the President of the United States keeps his shut!”

More cheers. Diana knew they were as much for what she was saying-for what needed saying-as for her ideas. She hardly cared. They were as warming as the bright California sun. It was snowing back home. Did it ever snow here?

“Congress is heading our way. Maybe that will push Truman in the right direction. Maybe. But how many more American boys will get blown up on occupation duty that doesn’t need doing before the President sees the light? Too many! Even one more would be too many!”

“That’s right!” If anything, the roar from the packed seats was even louder than it had been before. Diana finished her speech. She waved and flashed a two-finger V for Victory as she stepped away from the mike.

Sam Yorty wrapped things up: “Remember to give, folks, if you haven’t given already. Changing people’s minds costs money. I wish it didn’t, but it does. Please be generous. Show you support our cause.”

They did, with everything from nickels to twenty-and even fifty-dollar bills. Quite a few silver dollars ended up in the donation buckets. The government hadn’t minted them since 1933, but they still circulated out West. Diana had seen that on other trips across the Rockies. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a big silver cartwheel in her hand back in Anderson. Probably not since before the war.

“I think we did a heck of a job,” Yorty said. When Diana saw what they’d taken in, she wouldn’t have dreamt of arguing with him.

“The motherfuckers were ordered to surrender all their munitions, dammit!” The Red Army lieutenant colonel was almost comically outraged.

Vladimir Bokov looked down his nose at him-not easy, not when the Red Army was several centimeters taller, but he managed. “And you’re all of a sudden surprised because the Fascists didn’t, Comrade? They’ve had mortars and antitank rockets all along. When they figured out something new to do with artillery shells, of course it figured they’d start pulling those out of their dicks, too.”

“Well, why don’t you miserable bluecaps stop them, then?” the lieutenant colonel shouted. “What the hell good are you if you can’t do something like that?”

“What was your name again, Comrade?” Bokov asked softly.

A question like that from an NKVD man should have turned the Red Army officer to gelatin. It didn’t, which made him either very brave or very stupid. “Kuznetsov. Boris Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov,” he growled. “If you have to blame me, go ahead. Even a camp’s a better bet than going down some of these German roads.”

Maybe that proved he didn’t know much about camps. On the other hand, the way things were these days, maybe it didn’t. That possibility worried Bokov. He said, “We’re not the only ones with the problem. The Americans have it, too. By the way they squawk, they have it worse.”

“Americans always squawk. It’s what they’re good for-that and jeeps and trucks and Spam.” Kuznetsov’s bulging belly said he’d probably put away a lot of Spam. Since Bokov liked it, too, he couldn’t mock the Red Army man. Kuznetsov went on, “This is just a fucking mess. They blow us up, and there’s nobody around to avenge ourselves on. What kind of chickenshit way to fight is that?”

“A damned nasty one,” Bokov answered. Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov blinked. Bokov continued, “What do you want us to do? We shoot people by the thousands. We’ve shipped so many to Siberia, pretty soon everybody north of the Arctic Circle will speak German. We’ve captured the Devil’s grandmother’s worth of Nazi artillery.”

“This Nazi officer we captured used to intercept our signals. He said that whenever we started talking about the Devil’s relatives, it was a sure sign things were really fucked up,” Kuznetsov said. “Looks like he was right.”

“Huh,” was all Bokov said. So even the Germans knew that!

Before he had to come up with anything more, an explosion rocked the already-battered building in which he worked. All the windows rattled. One of them fell in with a tinkle of shattering glass. Only luck it hadn’t speared him and Kuznetsov with flying shards. Frigid February air streamed in through the sudden new opening.

“Bozhemoi!” Kuznetsov burst out, and then loosed a stream of mat that proved zeks in the gulag didn’t know everything there was to know about cussing. He finished, “That was too cocksucking close.”

“No shit.” Bokov jumped to his feet. “I’m going to see what happened-and if I can help.”

“Well, you talk like a soldier, even if you’ve got that blue band around your cap,” Kuznetsov said. Instead of wanting to deck him as he should have, Vladimir Bokov felt obscurely pleased. The two men dashed out of Bokov’s third-story office together.

They couldn’t get down the stairs as fast as they would have wanted, because other NKVD and Red Army men clogged them. Some would be useful when they got to the bomb site. Others would just stand around rubbernecking. Bokov had seen that before.

The crater was in a small square a couple of blocks away. A market of sorts had sprung up there. Berliners traded whatever happened to have come through the war in one piece for food and firewood. Sometimes women who didn’t have anything else traded themselves. More than anything else, that was what drew Red Army men to the place. And the Red Army men had drawn the…

Truck. It was a truck. Part of the chassis was still recognizable even after blast and fire. The stink of cordite or some high explosive much like it filled the cold air-that and burned rubber and burnt flesh.

Bokov did some swearing of his own. His obscenity wasn’t so inspired as Boris Kuznetsov’s, but it would have to do. The motionless bodies and pieces of bodies he didn’t have to worry about. They were beyond worry now. The Red Army men and locals down and moaning were a different story-if anything, a sadder story, because they were still suffering. What had happened seemed all too obvious. Now Bokov had to do what little he could in its wake.

Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov spoke in a voice like iron: “This kind of shit has happened too fucking often. We’ve got to get a handle on it. We’ve got to, goddammit. If we don’t, those Nazi cunts will run us out of Germany yet.”

That kind of defeatist talk could get him sent to a camp, too. But, looking at the crater the bomb had blown in the pavement, at the bodies, at the freshly shattered apartment blocks around the edges of the square-a couple of them on fire-Bokov had trouble feeling anything but defeatist himself.

“They haven’t tried one so close to us for a while.” Moisei Shteinberg might have appeared out of nowhere. He sounded altogether dispassionate as he surveyed the scene. “I’m surprised they did. They don’t seem to have got enough for their bomb.”

“You’re a cold-blooded prick of a zhid, aren’t you?” Kuznetsov said.

“I try to think with my head, not with my belly,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “Chances are it’s lucky for you that I do, too.”

Bokov stooped to bandage a Red Army sergeant with gashes in one arm and the other leg. Here it was, going on two years since Berlin fell, and he still routinely carried wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. What did that say? For sure, nothing good.

“Spasibo, Comrade Captain.” The sergeant managed something between a grimace and a wry grin. “Fuck me if I ever come here looking to get my cock sucked again.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bokov said. “Did you notice the truck before the bomb went off?”

“Nah.” The young underofficer shook his head. “I was just looking for a woman who wasn’t old enough to be my mother.”

Ambulances and fire engines screamed into the square, tires screeching, sirens wailing. The men on one of the fire trucks swore horribly when they discovered the bomb had broken a water main. They got a pathetic pissy dribble from their hose, nothing more. The ambulance drivers and their helpers started loading the injured-Red Army men first-into their vehicles.

With help from Bokov, the wounded sergeant hopped toward the closest one. His mangled leg wouldn’t bear his weight. Bokov hoped he would keep it. The sergeant managed one more word of thanks as he flopped into the back of the ambulance.

The bomb hidden in a jeep at the edge of the square blew up then.

Next thing Bokov knew, he was on his hands and knees. His trousers tore. The cement scraped his legs. Dirt and pebbles and bits of broken glass dug into his palms. He felt as if someone had banged his ears with garbage-can lids, or maybe with hatch covers from a Stalin tank.

And the ambulance had shielded him from the worst of the blast. It hadn’t flipped over onto him, either, which was a major piece of good fortune. It would have squashed him like a cockroach if it had.

As if from very far away, he heard people screaming. Shaking his head like someone who’d been sucker-punched, he lurched upright. He needed two tries, but he made it.

Colonel Shteinberg had a cut on his forehead and seemed to be missing the bottom of one ear. Blood dripped onto his tunic-ear and scalp wounds were always gory, even when they weren’t serious. Whatever had clipped his ear might have taken off the top of his head had it flown a few centimeters to one side.

No sooner did that thought cross Bokov’s mind than he got a look at Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov, or what was left of him: not much, not from the eyes up. The Red Army man’s blood pooled on the pavement. Bokov gulped. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen blood, or spilled it, before. But how much a man held always surprised you. Kuznetsov’s steamed in the cold.

Shteinberg shouted something at Bokov. Cupping a hand behind his ear, Bokov shouted back: “What?”

The Jew cupped a hand behind his ear, too. That was how he discovered he was missing part of it. He looked absurdly astonished. Limping over to Bokov-one of his knees didn’t seem to work right-he bawled in the ear the junior officer had cupped: “Nazi swine planned it this way!”

When Bokov heard that, he knew he was hearing truth. It was just the kind of things the Germans would do. It had their complicated cleverness all over it. Use one blast to create chaos. Wait a bit. Let rescuers and firemen gather. Then take them out with a second bomb.

German tanks were far more complicated than Soviet T-34s. They were easier to drive. They had better fire-control systems. But they broke down more often, too. In tanks, in submachine guns, in strategic plans, the Soviet option was usually the simple one, the one that reliably did what was needed. Complicated gadgets and plans had so many more ways to go wrong. When they went right, though, they could go spectacularly right.

This one had.

Something else occurred to Bokov. “More cars here. Is a third bomb waiting?”

He had to say it three times before Moisei Shteinberg understood. The NKVD colonel clapped a hand to his forehead-and found out he was cut there, too. “We have to make them pay,” he said.

Boris Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov would have agreed. But Kuznetsov was dead. So were-how many other Russians? How many Germans? The Heydrichite hyenas didn’t care about that. They only cared out hurting the occupiers. They were much too good at it, too.

The budget was usually about as exciting as…well, the budget. You voted for it or you voted against it. You tried to fish something out of the pork barrel for your district-or your state, if you were a Senator. Jerry Duncan had played the game, and played it well, ever since he came to Congress. Not even he could claim he’d got excited about it.

This session of Congress, things were different. The GOP held the majority. It ran the Ways and Means Committee. The budget started there. And the Republicans were bound and determined that the War Department’s appropriation would start without one thin dime for the occupation of Germany.

Oh, how the Democrats screamed! (Actually, some of them didn’t-more than a few Southerners, and some others, were sick of the occupation, too. And some northeastern Republicans wanted to leave the troops in place. But the fight came closer to Republicans versus Democrats than anything else.) The Republicans were less than sympathetic. Jerry watched the fur fly. “You people made this mess,” the Ways and Means Committee chairman said. “Now you’re blaming us for trying to get the country out of it.”

“You’re getting the country into a worse mess, and you’re too blind to see it,” the ranking Democrat retorted. “Do you want to fight the Nazis again in twenty years? Do you want to fight the Russians sooner than that?”

“We don’t want to fight anybody any more, and we don’t have to,” the chairman said. “That includes wasting thousands of lives and billions of dollars on an unwar that the administration has proved incapable of ending. And we don’t have to fight anybody, either, not in a big way. In the atom bomb, we have Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick. If we’ve got to use it again, we will, that’s all.”

“What happens when somebody uses it on us?” the ranking Democrat demanded.

Jerry Duncan’s hand shot up. “Mr. Duncan,” the chairman said.

“Last year, General Groves testified before the Senate that Russia had next to no uranium and was at least twenty years away from making one of these bombs,” Jerry said. He’d had people beat him over the head with Leslie Groves. Now he got to quote the general himself. That was a lot more enjoyable.

“And what about the Germans?” the Democrat inquired. “Will they sit quietly like good boys and girls, the way they did from 1939 to 1945?” He got a laugh. The chairman’s gavel stifled it. “Will they sit quietly, the way they’re still doing now?”

“Who said the surrender in 1945-almost two years ago now! — was the end of the war in Europe? Wasn’t that Mr. Truman?” Jerry said. “How right was he? How right has he been about anything?”

“That isn’t what you were talking about. You were talking-I should say, not talking-about the chances the Nazis would get the atom bomb if we ran away from Germany,” the Democrat said. “They already used one, remember, or close enough, on Frankfurt. Even cleaning up the mess there will take years.”

“It wasn’t an atom bomb. It used radium, not uranium. The only explosive was TNT.” For somebody who’d never heard of uranium before August 6, 1945, for somebody who’d practiced law before going into politics, Jerry’d learned a hell of a lot since. Well, so had plenty of other people, but he’d learned more than most. “You can’t call it an atom bomb, not if you want to tell the truth.” By the way he said it, he didn’t think his Congressional opponent gave a damn.

Said opponent only shrugged. “Okay, fine. Say it wasn’t an atom bomb. What if they drop one just like it on midtown Manhattan?”

Best thing that could happen to the place went through Jerry’s head. But that was small-town Indiana talking. The press would crucify him if he said it out loud. So he didn’t. He did say, “How would they get it over here? There’s an ocean in the way. We’ve got fighter planes. We’ve got radar to watch for bombers.”

“Okay, fine,” the Democrat repeated, and shrugged again. “Suppose one of these radium-not-atom bombs goes off inside a freighter in New York harbor?”

Jerry’s ears got hot. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“The Secretary of the Navy sure doesn’t think so.”

“Then he’s jumping at shadows,” Jerry said. “If the Germans tried a stunt like that, we’d blast their country off the face of the earth. You know it. I know it. They know it, too. So why are you talking silly talk, unless you’re just trying to scare the American people?”

“Mr. Chairman!” The Democrat raised his voice in appeal.

In Congresses gone by, that would have been plenty to get Jerry’s ears pinned back. Here in the Eightieth Congress, the chairman came from the GOP, too. “Sounds like a reasonable question to me,” he said.

Debate-no, argument-went on. But both sides knew what would happen long before it did. The appropriations bill with no money in it for the U.S. occupation of Germany would come out of the Ways and Means Committee. It would pass the House. If the Democrats in the Senate wanted to filibuster, they could. Then they’d get blamed for holding up the people’s business. Sooner or later, a bill pretty much like the one the Republicans wanted would hit the President’s desk.

And Harry Truman would veto it. He’d already promised that. And then the fun would really start.

No noise from overhead. No explosions echoing down the long, lovingly concealed mineshafts. Reinhard Heydrich breathed a little easier. No repair crews rushing to check the latest damage, or to repair the ventilation system after the confounded Americans screwed it up.

Had the Amis known which shafts were blind holes, which ones led to mines that were nothing but mines, and which ones led to pay-dirt…But they didn’t, and they were unlikely to find out. The Jews and other camp scum who’d expanded this old mine probably hadn’t had any idea why they were digging here. Just to stay on the safe side, afterwards they’d been exterminated anyhow-all of them, as far as Heydrich knew. And their SS guards had gone to the Eastern Front once this little stint was over. Not many of them were likely to survive, either.

Business as usual, then, at the same old stand. Well, almost as usual. The German Freedom Front had to do without a whole mine’s worth of munitions and small arms. Two valleys over, the miserable Americans had collapsed the whole thing when they touched off their damned charges up near the surface. That should never have happened-whoever’d designed that storage system had screwed up in a big way. Which didn’t mean Heydrich could do anything about it now.

The struggle went on regardless. Most ways, it went pretty well. The fellow who’d come up with the bright idea of using exploding trucks and cars in sequence to do more damage would win himself a Knight’s Cross. That scheme was a beauty-it could hardly work any better. Heydrich had no authentic Knight’s Crosses to hand out, but he could improvise. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done it before. An Iron Cross Second Class with the proper ribbon-which he did have-would do the job just fine. Everyone would know it stood for a real Ritterkreuz. Besides, a medal truly wasn’t iron and ribbon-it was a reminder of what the holder had done to earn it.

Heydrich touched the Knight’s Cross that hung at his own throat. Even if he weren’t wearing it, he would know he had it, and why. That was the only thing that mattered. He went through the latest pile of newspapers and magazines from the outside world that Hans had left on his desk. The French were still vowing to rebuild the Eiffel Tower: de Gaulle had made another speech before their Chamber of Deputies.

Another story in the International Herald-Tribune told how the English, apparently without any political speeches, were already rebuilding Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. Reinhard Heydrich nodded to himself. If he hadn’t come upon a fundamental difference between the two races there, he didn’t know when he ever would. The English monuments had been bombed later. He had no doubt they would rise again first.

But then, on an inside page, he found a story that interested him even more. The American Congress (a vaguely obscene name for a parliament, he’d always thought) was still wrangling about whether to pay for keeping U.S. soldiers in Germany. Signs were that Congress didn’t want to, but the President still did.

Heydrich knew what he would do in Harry Truman’s place. The leaders of Congress who didn’t want to go along with him would get a visit from…what did the Amis call their Gestapo? From the FBI, that was it. Then they would see things Truman’s way. If they didn’t, their funerals would no doubt be well attended.

If Truman had plans along those lines, the Herald-Tribune didn’t talk about them. It wouldn’t, of course. But Heydrich didn’t believe Truman would do the obvious, necessary thing. Americans were fools. They were rich fools, fools with enormous factories, but fools all the same. The factories let them smash the Wehrmacht. Still, they had no stomach for what came after even a victorious war….

Or did they? A German magazine had a glowing article about the police force the Amis were organizing in their zone. Heydrich already knew about that, naturally. But getting the American slant-for what else was the magazine but an American propaganda rag? — was interesting. Very interesting, in fact.

Before the collapse, the writer had worked for the Volkischer Beobachter; Heydrich recognized his name. Well, he’d landed on his feet. He claimed that this new police corps would protect order and guard against extremism, whether from the left or the right. He also claimed the Amis were building it up to be strong enough and reliable enough to do its duty under any conceivable political circumstances.

“Any?” Heydrich murmured. That was a large claim, to say the least. And Heydrich also knew enough to translate it from journalese into plain German. The writer obviously hoped most of his readers didn’t. If the Americans decided to hop on their planes and boats and go back across the Atlantic where they belonged, the new police corps would stay behind as their surrogates.

During the war, Germany had set up plenty of police outfits like that. The French Milice fought the French resistance harder than any German outfits in France ever did. Latvian and Lithuanian policemen cheerfully delivered Jews to the Germans for disposal. General Nedic’s militia in Serbia harried the Titoists.

All of those police forces fell apart when the German military might supporting them waned. Did the Amis think the same thing wouldn’t happen to their sheep dogs after they went home? If they did, they really were fools.

And did they think their fancy new police corps wasn’t riddled with traitors? Heydrich shook his head. With true German patriots, he thought. It depended on how you looked at things, though. Some of Nedic’s men had warned Tito’s followers what their outfit was up to. Some members of the Milice played a double game with the resistance.

Some members of the Americans’ German police were in touch with the forces that aimed to restore the Reich to greatness, too. Heydrich usually knew what the would-be oppressors had in mind before they tried it. None of their moves had hurt him yet. He had to be careful-the Americans weren’t too naive to plant false information-but so far he’d outsmarted them.

How many men from the Milice had de Gaulle’s French forces shot or imprisoned? What had the Titoists done to Nedic’s militia? How had the Russians treated Germany’s Latvian and Lithuanian collaborators? Heydrich slowly smiled. None of that would be a patch on the revenge he aimed to take on the German police who cozied up to the Americans.

“Revenge on the USA, too,” he said, as if reminding himself. Von Braun and the other slide-rule soldiers at Peenemunde had made rockets that could hit London from the Continent. They’d planned much bigger beasts: rockets that could hit America from Europe. Only the collapse kept the scientists from building them.

A lot of those scientists were twiddling their slide rules for the United States these days. Others were working for the Russians. But some remained in Germany. And the Reich still had plenty of scientists and engineers who could learn rocketry if they needed to.

Which they would. A rocket that could reach New York City with an atom bomb in its nose would teach the Americans they couldn’t tell Germany what to do any more. And rockets like that could also reach far into Russia-farther than the Wehrmacht ever got. As soon as Germany built them, Stalin would have to think twice before he started any new trouble.

Heydrich could hardly wait.