The Man with the Iron Heart

XXIX

There was a graveyard up on the mountainside. The Americans in the valley paid it no attention. Why should they? By the tumbled headstones and leaning crosses over the graves, it had been there a long, long time. No one shot at the Amis from the position. No one down on the valley floor seemed to remember it was around.

All of which suited Reinhard Heydrich fine. One of those leaning crosses was a dummy. It concealed a periscope, from which an observer surveyed the scene below. Heydrich admired the conceit. He’d filched it from a Russian field fortification the Waffen-SS somehow smoked out. This was an improved version. The observer had a field telephone. He wasn’t actually in a grave, but in a passage that led down to the main mine. If he saw trouble coming, he could get away. Explosives in the passage would make sure nobody followed him.

“They keep bringing in more troops and more digging equipment, Herr Reichsprotektor,” he said now, his voice tinny in Heydrich’s ear. “It sure looks like they know something. What are we going to do?”

Heydrich didn’t want to believe the Amis could know where his hideout lay. They’d come through here before, done some superficial damage, and gone on their way. They’d treated this valley no differently from two dozen others in the Alps.

They were treating it differently now, dammit. How? Heydrich wondered. Why? Had they found one of the drops where his people communicated with the outside world? He couldn’t believe it. The drops were well sited, and everybody who knew about them had the discipline to use them discreetly.

A traitor? Heydrich was sure that would have been Hans Klein’s guess. And it wasn’t unlikely, worse luck. Somebody who decided a million dollars would set him up for life could cause a lot of trouble. But everyone who was supposed to be underground here was accounted for. Some men in Jochen Peiper’s underground center knew where this one was. They would have betrayed both of them, though. And there was no sign Peiper’s center was in trouble. One of the outside connections, then? Even if the worst happened here, Heydrich hoped the pigdog wouldn’t live to enjoy his foul loot.

Or-a new thought-could one of the laborers who’d dug most of this place out of the living rock have survived in spite of everything? Could he have figured out what he’d been working on? Could he have gone to the Amis with the story? Would they have believed somebody like that?

Heydrich shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered. The extermination camps were most efficient. He knew that. He damn well should have. Hadn’t he set the Einsatzgruppen in motion against the Jews of Eastern Europe? Hadn’t he organized the Wannsee Conference, which got all the antisemitic forces in the Reich moving on parallel tracks against the Jewish enemy? So, no, surviving laborers were anything but likely.

But the observer in the graveyard heard him, which he hadn’t intended. “It’s not impossible, Herr Reichsprotektor. I only wish it were. But they’re really here,” the man said. “What will we do? What can we do?”

That was a better question than Heydrich wished it were. He and his men had escape routes. They would have sufficed to let the Germans give most bands of attackers the slip. But the American net was cast wider than Heydrich had ever dreamt it could be.

Decision crystallized in the Reichsprotektor’s mind. “For now, we sit tight,” he answered. “They may have a good notion we’re here, but they can’t be sure. Finding us won’t be easy. Neither will digging us out.”

“I sure hope you’re right, sir,” the observer said, and rang off.

Heydrich hoped he was right, too. The generators would run out of fuel before too long-or maybe he’d have to turn them off to keep their noise from betraying itself to listening devices. The mines had good natural ventilation, but even so…. Heydrich tried to imagine running the war for the liberation of the Reich by candle-and lantern light.

Napoleon had fought his wars that way. So had Clausewitz, and even Moltke. None of them, though, had tried to do it from hundreds of meters underground. The sun rose every day for them. It never rose for Heydrich. When the candles and lanterns ran low…

“Klein!” he called.

“Yes, sir?” The Oberscharfuhrer wasn’t far away. Heydrich hadn’t thought he would be.

The decision that had crystallized broke up and re-formed. “Looks to me like we’ll have to try to break out,” the Reichsprotektor said. “We have…some people who won’t be able to fight or to keep up. You know who I’m talking about?” He waited for Klein to nod, then went on, “Good. I want you to see that’s taken care of, all right?”

Hans Klein nodded again. “I’ll make sure of it. Too bad, nicht wahr? Such a waste, after we went to all the trouble to grab them.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Heydrich sighed. He wanted an atom bomb as fast as he could get one after the Reich was free again. Germany needed that weapon. “Why don’t you leave Wirtz and Diebner for now? We can always tend to them later if we have to. The others…It is too bad, but they’d better disappear.”

“Right you are, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein sketched a salute and hurried away.

Reinhard Heydrich sighed once more. He didn’t know how or why things had gone wrong in the valley, but they had. Not everything worked out the way you wished it would. He patted his tunic. He had a cyanide capsule in his breast pocket, and others in other places about his person. Everybody down here did. Even if the Amis caught him, they wouldn’t question him or make sport of him or try him. He just had to bite down. If Himmler had done it, Heydrich was sure he could, too.

“There, Captain.” Shmuel Birnbaum pointed to what had been a mineshaft till an explosive charge closed up the front of it. “That one heads straight down. You could do like the people in the Jules Verne story and go straight to the center of the earth.”

“I read that book when I was a kid,” Lou Weissberg said. He’d read it in English, of course. Birnbaum would have seen it in Russian, or maybe Yiddish, or possibly even German. And it was really written in French. Ideas bounced across the world like rubber balls.

The main idea in Lou’s head now was seeing Heydrich dead. Maybe, if you chopped off the German Freedom Front’s head, the body would flop like a chicken that met the hatchet and then fall over and die. Maybe. Alevai. Lou muttered to himself. Please, God. Don’t You owe us a little something, anyway? It wasn’t exactly a prayer-more a bitter question. When the Nazis efficiently went about the business of murdering Jews by the million, God showed He’d got out of the habit of listening to prayers.

If God wouldn’t take care of things (or if God wasn’t there to take care of things, which Lou found much too likely), mere mortals would have to do their goddamnedest. Lou waved to the crews of the waiting bulldozers and steam shovels. “Come and get ’em!” he yelled, as if he were calling them to dinner.

They rumbled forward on their tracks, filling the pure mountain air with the stink of diesel exhaust. Dozer blades and the steam shovels’ buckets dug into the mountainside. Earth and stones went into piles off to either side of the closed shaft. This place wouldn’t be nearly so scenic after the excavators got through. Maybe that bothered the Germans who lived here. Lou was no tourist. He hadn’t come for the view.

Along with the dirt and boulders, the earth-moving equipment also dislodged timbers that had helped support the sides and roof of the shaft. Over the blat! of his engine, a dozer jockey shouted, “Damn things look like they’ve been here since B.C. You sure we’re in the right place, Captain?”

Lou wasn’t sure of anything. The people working under him needed to know that like they needed a hole in the head, though. He didn’t even look back at Shmuel Birnbaum as he nodded. “This is all camouflage,” he declared. “C’mon-you know the Germans do shit like that.”

“Hope you’re right, sir,” the dozer driver said, and plunged forward again.

So do I, Lou thought. If this didn’t work out the way he hoped it would, if he didn’t come up with a big burrow full of Nazis if not with the Reichsprotektor’s head on a platter, the Army would be only too happy to separate him from the service and boot his butt back to New Jersey. Chances were it would throw Howard Frank out, too. They would get exactly what eighty percent of the soldiers in Germany craved most: a ride home. It was, naturally, the last thing either of them wanted. If that wasn’t the Army way of doing things, Lou couldn’t imagine what would be.

The earth-movers were tearing the living crap out of the opening to the mineshaft. Lou wondered if they would just peel back the whole mountainside to get at whatever it concealed. Wouldn’t they fill the valley floor below with rocks and dirt if they did?

But the guys who ran the growling, farting, grinding machinery were more purposeful than that. They stayed on the old mine’s trail. Before long, the dozer blades and the steam shovels’ steel jaws clanged off some serious boulders. Here and there, they had to back out so demolition crews could make big ones into, well, littler ones, anyhow.

That dozer driver said, “Big old honking landslide, I bet. This woulda closed the place down better than our charge of dynamite.”

“Just keep going, goddammit.” Lou had the courage of his convictions. Of course, Hitler had also had the courage of his. Now, am I right, or nothing but a stubborn jackass? Is it the good turtle soup, or merely the mock? Lou wondered. One way or the other, I’ll find out.

Bulldozers and steam shovels kept banging through rocks. The drivers shouted to one another. Lou couldn’t always make out what they said. That was bound to be just as well. When one of them jerked a thumb in his direction and then spun an index finger in a circle next to his temple, Lou couldn’t stay in much doubt about what the GI meant.

Neither could Shmuel Birnbaum. “They think you’re crazy,” the DP said. “So they think I’m crazy, too.”

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em all,” Lou answered. “Long as they do what I tell ’em to, who gives a rat’s ass what they think?” Birnbaum gave him a look. Lou had no trouble translating it-something like You’re the champion of democracy? And, in a weird way, Lou was. But democracy and Army life mixed like water and sodium-they caught fire when they touched. What did democracy give rise to in the Army? We want to go home! and damn all else. The system might stink, but it worked.

The sun sank lower and lower, toward the pass in the west. Shadows stretched. A chilly breeze started moaning. Then one of the dozer drivers urgently waved to the rest. That had to mean Hang on! His cry of amazement pierced the diesel roar: “Fuck me up the asshole!” He pointed to something Lou couldn’t make out.

After scuttling like a pair of ragged claws to position himself better, Lou did see what had astonished him: a black hole driven straight into the side of the mountain. Sure as shit, the mine went on after the supposed cave-in. Which meant…well, they’d have to see what it meant. One thing it meant was that Shmuel Birnbaum wasn’t crazy-or not on account of that, anyway.

Lou was about to send men into that hole when explosive charges went off somewhere deep inside. The black opening fell in on itself. A great cloud of dust and more than a few rocks-some up to fist-sized and beyond-flew out. They clattered off the olive-drab machinery. One smashed a steam shovel’s windshield. Another caught a bulldozer driver in the shoulder. His howl said it sure didn’t do him any good.

But what those mine blasts said…Lou put it into plain, everyday English: “We’ve got the motherfuckers!”

Night. Black night. Black as the inside of an elephant. Cold, too. Bernie Cobb wished he had an overcoat, not just his thin, crappy Eisenhower jacket. He laughed at himself. Why don’t you wish for a hotel room and a bottle of bourbon and a naked blonde with legs up to there? If you were gonna wish, you should wish.

It might be dark, but it wasn’t quiet. Way down the mountainside from where he crouched in the gloom, Army engineers tore away at the blocked mineshaft. Something was sure as hell going on down there. Bernie still thought that was funny as hell. He’d been there when the demolitions guy closed that hole in the first place. If it turned out to be important now, the krauts had done a fuck of a job of disguising it. Well, they were good at that stuff. He’d seen as much since the minute he got to Europe.

Generators grunted down there, powering spotlights that bathed the work scene in harsh white light. Bernie looked every which way but that one. When he watched what was going on down there, his eyes lost their dark adaptation. He wondered how many of the guys scattered over the mountainside with him would think of that. Odds were most of ’em were rubbernecking for all they were worth.

He thought about passing the word to be careful about it. Only one thing stopped him-the likelihood the other GIs would tell him to fuck off. They knew everything there was to know about soldiering. Or if they didn’t, they didn’t want to hear about it. Chances were it wouldn’t matter. If the Germans were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be coming out.

Then again, even critters knew better than to dig a burrow with only one opening. Didn’t Jerry? He could be an arrogant bastard. Maybe he’d figured nobody would ever find his perfect hidey-hole. Or maybe…Maybe the American troops who’d combed this territory had missed some escape hatches. That might not be so good.

Here and there, soldiers on the mountainside were smoking. Bernie could see the glowing coal at the end of a cigarette for a surprising distance. And when somebody lit a match or flicked a Zippo, the yellow flare drew the eye like a magnet. Most of the other guys didn’t believe anything bad could happen. Bernie’d been through the mill. He was a confirmed pessimist.

He shivered and wished for an overcoat again. The blonde, the booze, and the bed might be more fun, but the coat was more practical.

His watch-GI issue-had glowing hands. Those wouldn’t give him away-you couldn’t see them from farther than about six inches. He held the watch up to his face. 0230. “Shit,” he muttered. Another hour and a half before somebody came to relieve him.

He undid his fly and relieved himself. That, sadly, didn’t get him out of being stuck here. He tramped along. Once he tripped over a rock he never saw. He flailed frantically, and almost dropped his grease gun. Only his Army boots saved him from a twisted ankle.

Any kraut in the neighborhood could have plugged him. So could any soldier allegedly on his side. He’d made enough noise to let them all know right where he was. If any of them had been as jittery as he was…But nobody fired at him. All the Americans assumed he was only a clumsy GI. Which he was, but they shouldn’t have thought that way.

And then, on the slopes across the valley from him, the balloon really did go up. Mortars and machine guns and rifles all opened up at the same time. The incoming fire was aimed at the tiny area the spotlights lit up. Almost in slow motion, a driver tumbled off his seat atop a bulldozer. He started to clutch at himself as he fell, but never finished the motion-he must have been hit as bad as anyone could be. When he hit the ground, he didn’t move.

“Fuck!” Bernie said. The krauts were way the hell up the mountains over there-he could see where their muzzle flashes were coming from. His submachine gun was as useless as a bow and arrow. It didn’t have a fraction of the range he needed. All he could do up here was watch the fur fly.

The Germans were out and fighting in at least company strength. Bernie did some more swearing. They hadn’t come out in those numbers since the surrender. And where the devil did they come out from? From up out of the ground, dumbshit: he answered his own question. Sure as hell, the American patrols that came through here hadn’t found anywhere near all the hidden doorways Jerry’d dug for himself.

Somebody at the opening to the mineshaft had his head on straight. No more than thirty seconds after the Americans there started taking fire, the spotlights went out, plunging the whole valley into blackness. The mortars and MG42s would still have the range, but they couldn’t see what they were shooting at any more. That had to make a big difference.

“Let’s go help ’em!” a guy not far from Bernie yelled. He knew which way to run, anyhow. Bernie was all set to go stumbling down the side of the mountain, too.

But somebody else farther away said, “No! Sit tight!” with an officer’s snap to his voice. The man went on, “If they popped up over there, they can pop up here, too. That attack may be a diversion. Hold your ground and see what happens next-that’s an order.”

Maybe it was a smart order. Maybe it was stupid, or even cowardly. No way to know till things played out.

The Americans had more than just bulldozers and steam shovels down closer to the valley floor. Armored cars started shooting at the German mortar and machine-gun positions. A 37mm gun wasn’t much, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. And how could the krauts hurt the armored cars unless they dropped a mortar bomb right on top of one?

“C’mon, guys!” Bernie said, as if his team were trying to rally in the late innings.

Then he found out what the krauts could do. A streak of rocket fire lit up the night and slammed into one of those armored cars. Panzerschreck or Panzerfaust? Bernie couldn’t tell from up here. It hardly mattered, anyhow. Both weapons were designed to pierce the frontal armor on a main battle tank. No wonder the armored car went up in a fireball.

“Jesus! Where’d that asshole come from?” Bernie said. How many secret holes did the Germans have? He had the bad feeling his side was liable to find out.

Lou Weissberg barely noticed when the first couple of mortar bombs came in. The earth-movers made so much noise, the only thing that told him what was up was a graceful fountain of earth rising into the air-and a sharp steel fragment whining past his ear and clanking off a truck’s fender.

A split second later, machine-gun bullets cracked by him. When they hit metal, they sounded like pebbles banging on a tin roof. When they hit flesh…A man tumbled from a bulldozer, thumped down onto the ground, and never moved again. The bullet that got him in the head might have been a baseball bat smacking into a clay jug full of water. Lou knew he would remember that sound the rest of his days, however much he tried to forget it.

“Holy shit! They’re shooting at us!” someone yelled.

“Get down!” somebody else added.

That struck Lou as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flattened out on the ground and wriggled toward the closest vehicle. If he could put it between him and the deadly spray of bullets…it might not matter much, since the truck wasn’t armored.

Halfway there, though, he had a rush of brains to the head. “Douse the lights!” he sang out, as loud as he could. For a wonder, somebody who could do something about it heard him. Blackness thudded down.

That didn’t stop the machine-gun bullets from snarling by or the mortar bombs from hissing in and going bam! the way he’d hoped it would. But then, what he knew about real combat would have fit in a K-ration can, if not on the head of a pin. That was, or had been, the advantage of CIC work. It was real soldiering: you tried to find out what the bad guys were up to, and to stop them from doing it. You mostly didn’t go out there to shoot and get shot yourself. Except now Lou did.

He hadn’t shit himself. He was moderately proud of that. Lying there with bullets and pieces of jagged metal flying every which way all around him, he didn’t have much else to be proud of.

“Hey, Birnbaum! You there?” he shouted-in English, because he knew damn well his own side would figure Yiddish was German, and would try to liquidate him if he used it.

“Here,” the DP answered. The word was as near identical as made no difference in all three languages.

“Good,” Lou said: another cognate, though in the Yiddish dialect he and Shmuel Birnbaum shared, it came out more like geet. Birnbaum must have been through more combat than he had himself-a lot more, odds were. The DP knew what to do to try to stay alive. His reply hadn’t come from more than three inches off the ground.

When the American armored cars started shooting back at the Germans on the mountainside, Lou let out a war whoop Sitting Bull would have been proud of. Shell bursts stalked the machine guns’ malignant muzzle flashes. He whooped again when two MG42s fell silent in quick succession.

Then an armored car blew up. By the light of the fireball-and by the flame trail from the antitank rocket that had killed it-Lou spotted a kraut trying to slide back into the night. He opened up with his carbine. He couldn’t do anything to the Germans farther away. This son of a bitch…Lou wasn’t the only guy spraying lead at him. The Jerry went down. Whether he was hit or trying to avoid fire, Lou couldn’t have said. He also had no idea whether he’d personally shot the German. He knew he never would.

Somebody running forward tripped over Lou and fell headlong. “Shit!” Lou said, at the same time as the other guy was going, “Motherfuck!” The heartfelt profanity convinced each of them the other was a Yank, so neither opened up.

The light from the blazing car let the other guy recognize Lou. “Well, you got it right, Captain,” he said-he was the driver who’d thought this whole exercise was a waste of time. “Goddamn krauts were down there.”

“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said dryly, which startled a laugh out of the driver.

Another German let fly with Panzerfaust or Panzerschreck. This one missed the armored car it was aimed at. It blew up when it hit something else a hundred yards beyond. Shrieks said it hurt people, too. But the armored car kept blasting away at the enemy on the mountainside, which counted for more.

“How long till the cavalry gets here?” the driver asked.

That made Lou think of Sitting Bull again. It also made him cuss some more. The first thing he should have done-well, maybe the second, after killing the lights-was to tell the radioman to scream for help. Dammit, he wasn’t a front-line officer. He didn’t think that way. He could hope the radioman had done it on his own. For that matter, he could hope the radioman had stayed alive to do it. But he should have made sure of it himself.

Combat was an unforgiving place. How many lives would one small mistake cost? And the more immediately crowding question: will one of them be mine?

Reinhard Heydrich spoke into a microphone: “German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four. German Freedom Front Radio. Code Four.” He pushed the mike away. “All right. They know it’s an emergency. If we get away, we get away. If we don’t…” He made himself shrug. “Peiper’s a solid man. He’ll carry on.”

“Hell with him,” Hans Klein said. “I don’t plan on dying now, any more than I did when those Czech bastards tried to bump you off.”

“Good.” Heydrich didn’t plan on dying, either. That might have nothing to do with the price of beer, worse luck.

Faintly echoing down the corridors and shafts from very far away, gunfire said the diversionary force was punishing the Americans. In the short run, that would make them stop excavating. In the very slightly longer run, it would show them they needed to tear everything in this valley to pieces, the mountainsides included.

The move, then, was to take advantage of the short run and not to stick around for the very slightly longer run. Now, to bring it off. Heydrich pulled a panel off the wall. Behind the panel was a red button. Heydrich pushed it. “Let’s go,” he said, a certain amount of urgency in his voice.

“Right you are, sir.” Klein grabbed a different microphone, one hooked up to the PA system. “Achtung!” His voice echoed through the mine. “Get your lanterns and torches. Lights going out-now!”

Logically, they didn’t have to do that. As long as the last few hundred meters of the escape passage were dark, nothing else made any difference. But sometimes logic had nothing to do with anything. If you were leaving forever a place that had served you well for a long time, it was dead to you after that. And, being dead, it should be seen to die.

The generators sighed into silence. The lights went out. For a split second, the blackness was the deepest Heydrich had ever known. Then good old reliable Klein flicked on his torch. The beam speared through the inky air. When God said “Let there be light!” He must have seen a contrast as absolute as this. Reinhard Heydrich never had, not till now.

He turned on his own torch. That was better. Somebody not too far away let out a horrible yell. Probably a poor claustrophobic bastard who thought the darkness was swallowing him whole. If he didn’t cut that out quick, they’d have to knock him over the head and leave him here. One way or another, he shut up. Heydrich was glad he didn’t have to find out how.

When he went out into the corridor, more torch beams flashed up and down it. He wondered if all the men gathering there recognized him. He’d left his usual uniform and Ritterkreuz behind. His outfit said he was a Sturmmann-a lance-corporal. So did his papers.

But his voice…Everyone down here knew his voice. “We will use Tunnel Three,” he said crisply. “As some of you will know, the diversion on the far side of the valley is going well. The undisciplined Americans will surely rush every man they have into the fight against such a large, obvious enemy grouping. And that will clear the escape area for us. Any questions?”

No one said a word. Kurt Diebner stared owlishly through his thick glasses. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, though no one could have made a less convincing soldier. Wirtz played another lance-corporal, and seemed slightly better suited to the role. They’d been told the other physicists were evacuated earlier. Maybe they believed that, maybe not. What they believed counted for little now.

“Some of you don’t have greatcoats,” Klein said. “Go get ’em. It’ll be cold on the mountainside.” Diebner was one of the men who needed a coat. Heydrich might have known he would be. A real SS noncom went with him as he got it, to make sure he didn’t try to disappear.

“When we get over the mountains, there will be people to take us in,” Heydrich promised. “We’ll split up, we’ll stay hidden, and before too long we’ll be with our friends again. Once we are, we’ll give the Amis the horse-laugh. For now-let’s move!”

They moved. The only ones who seemed uncertain of the way were the physicists. The others had been down here longer than Wirtz and Diebner. And, unlike the slide-rule boys, the SS personnel were encouraged to explore their underground world. They might have needed to try an escape far more desperate than this one. Heydrich thought he could have done it in absolute darkness, without even a match to light the way. If you knew where to run your hand, shallow direction markers on the walls would guide you along. He was glad he didn’t have to try it, though.

Like the other escape tunnels, Three was carved out of the living rock. It wasn’t prettied up the way the main body of the command center was. It didn’t resemble barracks and offices. Heydrich’s boots thunked off stone as he hurried along. He led from the front. He might be dressed as a Sturmmann, but he didn’t act like one.

Heydrich grunted in satisfaction when his torch showed the stairs ahead. They led to the camouflaged mountainside doorway that would let him slide out of this trap as he’d slid out of the one the Amis set when he rescued the German physicists.

He climbed the stairs. There it was: the underside of the stainless-steel escape hatch. It would have dirt and grass on top of it. It also had a periscope beside it. If someone needed to come out here by daylight, he could make sure it was safe. Heydrich pushed up the periscope now, too, but he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. Either the diversionary party’s attack had knocked out the Americans’ lights or the Amis had had the sense to turn them off themselves.

Well, it wouldn’t matter. “Kill your torches,” he said. When the others had, he undogged the escape hatch and pushed up. It was heavy. He felt and heard roots and shoots tearing as he shoved. Then the hatchway swung open. Cold, grass-scented outside air poured into the tunnel.

“Come on!” he said. “North and west once we’re out!”

“How will we know which way that is?” Diebner asked plaintively.

“I can steer by the stars, if there are stars. And if there aren’t, I have a compass.” Heydrich didn’t bother hiding his scorn. “Now up! Move it!” He might have been a drill sergeant at physical training-except a drill sergeant wouldn’t murder a man who couldn’t keep up, while Heydrich intended to.

One by one, the Germans emerged. Heydrich looked around. No moon, but some stars. Once his eyes got used to nearly full dark again, he’d be fine.

Bernie Cobb sat on a boulder, watching the firefight down below. He wished like hell he were on his way down there to give the guys on his side a hand. He could slip off in the darkness, and that officer would never be the wiser…. How many other GIs had already done just that? More than a few, unless he missed his guess.

For the moment, discipline held Bernie here. For the moment. When they asked him why he hadn’t helped out, what would he say? I was only following orders, maybe? That didn’t cut it. Bernie knew it didn’t. They’d already hanged plenty of death-camp guards who tried singing that song.

“Shit,” he muttered, and then “Fuck,” and then “Motherfucking son of a bitch.” None of which helped. He stood up and took a couple of steps down the mountainside, drawn by the racket of automatic weapons and bursting shells.

Then he heard a much smaller noise behind him. There weren’t supposed to be any noises back there. It might have been another American soldier heading down toward the fight. It might have been, yeah, but it didn’t quite sound like that. Next thing Bernie knew, he was flat behind that boulder, the grease gun cradled in his hands, his index finger on the trigger. He didn’t know what was going on up there, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

The noise went on. It got louder. It sounded like somebody or something trying to push up through the grass from below. Unless it was the world’s biggest fucking gopher (did they even have gophers over here?), that should have been impossible outside of a horror movie. It should have been, unless….

Abruptly, the noise cut off. What followed was a perfectly human grunt of satisfaction, and what sounded like footsteps on stone or concrete. Then the footsteps were on dirt instead. And then somebody spoke in a low voice-but, unmistakably, in German.

Even as Bernie grabbed for a grenade, more people came up out of, well, whatever the hell that place was. An escape tunnel, he supposed. He waited. He’d only get one chance at this. He had to do it right the first time. How many of those assholes were there, anyway? Was it the whole fucking Reichstag? No-the other house was over on the far slope of the valley, making life miserable for the Americans down below.

At last, after what seemed like twenty minutes longer than forever, he didn’t hear any more footfalls on stone. The krauts milled around on the grassy mountainside, muttering in soft voices. Sorting out what to do before they do it, Bernie thought. Yeah, they’re Germans, all right.

Any second now, though, they’d go do it instead of talking about it. If he was gonna get ’em, best to do it while they were still bunched up. As quietly as he could, he pulled the grenade’s pin. Then he rose up onto his knees and flung it into their midst. He heard a thump, a startled exclamation, a blam! and all the screams he could’ve hoped for.

He fired a short burst from his grease gun. More screams! “Jerries!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Whole buncha fuckin’ Jerries!” He squeezed off another burst and bellyflopped down behind the boulder again.

Just in time, too. Quite a few of the Germans had to be hurt. They all had to be discombobulated. All the same, some of them were pros. Bullets from one of their nasty assault rifles spanged off the boulder in front of Bernie and snarled by overhead. He slid to the left and returned fire again, more to give the krauts something new to worry about than in the serious expectation of hitting them.

If too many GIs had ignored the officer’s orders, he was screwed. The Germans would flank him out and slaughter him like a fat hog on barbecue day. Sure as shit, here came urgent running footsteps, around toward the right side of the boulder. Hardly even looking, Bernie twisted and fired. His magazine ran dry, but not before he won himself a screech and a moan from the Jerries.

And then fire started coming in on the krauts from both sides. M-1s and grease guns could put a lot of lead in the air. “Thank you, Jesus!” Bernie murmured-he did still have friends in the neighborhood, after all. With those friends raking the Germans, they had too much on their plate to care about finishing him off.

He stuck another magazine on his submachine gun and banged away at them again. It wasn’t aimed fire, but it didn’t have to be. If you spat out enough bullets, some of them were bound to bite. And even the ones that didn’t scared the crap out of people they just missed.

“Surrender!” somebody shouted in English, following it with “Hande hoch!”

Damned if that wasn’t the officer who’d told everybody to sit tight. He’d turned out to be 112 percent right-probably right enough to win himself a medal.

Bernie wasn’t sure any Germans were left to surrender. But someone called, “Waffenstillstand! Bitte, Waffenstillstand!” They wanted a truce. They even said please. No matter what they wanted or how polite they were, Bernie didn’t stand up.