Harry Turtledove - The Man with the Iron Heart

People laughed and cheered and pounded him on the back. Why not? He was still slapping money down on the bar. Somebody else asked him, “Did you know it was Heydrich when you opened up on those Jerries?”

“Shit, no,” Bernie answered. “All I knew was, they were Germans and they weren’t supposed to be there. I figured I better get ’em while they were still all bunched up, like, so I did.”

“Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” The other GI sounded jealous. And he had a quarter of a million reasons to sound that way. No, a quarter of a million and one, because Bernie had a ticket home, too. Well, the way things were going, everybody’d be heading back from Germany soon. Bernie didn’t know if he liked that. But he liked going home himself just fine.

Engines roaring, the big triple-tailed Constellation rolled down the runway outside of Amsterdam. The TWA airliner took off smooth as you please. It would stop at Paris to let passengers off and take on new ones, and to top up its fuel tanks. Then it would cross the Atlantic-eight or ten times as fast as the fastest ocean liner-and land at New York City.

Over the intercom, the pilot explained all that in English and French and Dutch. Before the war, he surely would have used German, too. He didn’t think he needed to now. Konrad could follow English, and Dutch after a fashion, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of what the pilot thought the flight would be doing, Konrad and his friends had other plans.

Konrad and Max carried Dutch passports-or excellent forgeries of Dutch passports, anyhow. A couple of rows farther back, Arnold and Hermann flew on Belgian passports-or equally excellent forgeries. Along with the false documents, all four men had also brought cut-down Schmeissers onto the plane. But the submachine guns weren’t on display, not yet.

A steward came down the aisle with a tray of drinks. It was almost empty by the time it got to Konrad and Max. Plenty of people needed help forgetting they were three or four kilometers up in the air. Max took a cocktail. Konrad didn’t.

They landed at Orly Airport. Like the rest of the people going on to New York, Konrad and Max and Arnold and Hermann sat tight while other stylish men and women got off and on. If you couldn’t afford stylish clothes, odds were you couldn’t afford a plane ticket, either.

After the layover, the L-049 took off again. The pilot came on the intercom to brag in his three languages about the meals TWA would be serving. Then he explained how to fold the seats down into reasonable approximations of beds. No matter how much faster than a ship it was, the airliner would still take a long time to get to New York City.

It would take far longer than the pilot expected, but he didn’t know that yet. Time he found out.

“Ready?” Konrad asked quietly. Max nodded. Konrad twisted and looked back over his shoulder. He caught Arnold’s eye, and Hermann’s. They nodded, too. All four Germans took their Schmeissers out of their travel cases. No one had searched them before they boarded. Except for a few panicky editorial writers, no one had seen the need, even after the German Freedom Front flew that captured C-47 into the Russians’ Berlin courthouse.

A stewardess-quite a pretty girl, really-was drawing near when Konrad and Max, Arnold and Hermann, all stood up at the same time. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding more curious than alarmed.

Then she saw the Schmeissers. Her eyes-green as jade-opened so wide, Konrad could see white all around the irises, as he might have with a spooked horse on the Eastern Front. Crash! The tray of drinks hit the floor.

“Don’t do anything dumb,” Konrad said-he was lead man in this operation not least because he knew English. “Take us to the cockpit.”

“What-What will you do?” The girl’s voice quavered, which was hardly a surprise.

“Nobody will get hurt if people do what we say,” Konrad answered, which committed him to nothing. He gestured sharply with the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Now go on! Move!”

When the cockpit door opened, the pilot grinned at the stewardess. “Hey, beautiful! What’s going on?” Then he saw the four men with submachine guns behind her. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

“I will shoot you if you do not do everything I tell you,” Konrad said. “The plane will crash. Everyone will die. If you do what I tell you, I think everyone can live. Is it a bargain?”

“Who the hell are you?” the pilot demanded.

That was a fair question. He meant Are you a pack of crazy people? If he decided Konrad and his friends were, he wouldn’t see any point to dealing with them. He might think crashing the plane now would be the best thing he could do, so they wouldn’t try to make him fly it into a building or something. Since Konrad didn’t want to die, he spoke quickly: “We belong to the German Freedom Front. We were soldiers in the war. We still fight to liberate the Fatherland.”

Pilot and copilot looked at each other. Neither seemed to like the answer very much. “What do you want us to do?” the pilot asked after a considerable pause.

“Fly this airplane to Madrid. Land there,” Konrad replied. “We will-how do you say it? — use the airplane and the passengers as poker chips to move our cause forward. We will not shoot unless you try to overpower us. Everyone in that case will be very unhappy.”

“When we go off course, the radar will see it,” the pilot said. “They’ll call us up and ask us what’s wrong. What are we supposed to tell ’em?”

“Tell them the truth. Tell them you have men from the German Freedom Front on your airplane. Tell them these men require you to fly to Spain,” Konrad answered.

The pilot eyed him. “You son of a bitch! You want everybody to know!”

“Aber naturlich,” Konrad said. “The world must learn we are still fighting for a free Germany, and we are serious in what we do.” As he had with the stewardess, he let a twitch of the Schmeisser’s muzzle make his point for him. “Now-to Madrid.”

“Right. To fucking Madrid,” the pilot muttered. The L-049 swung from west to south.

Not five minutes later, a voice on the radio said, “TWA flight 57, this is Paris Control. Why have you changed course? Over.”

The pilot grabbed the microphone. “Paris Control, this is TWA57. We have four men from the German Freedom Front aboard. They are all armed, and they have directed us to fly to Madrid. To keep our passengers and crew safe, we are obeying. Over.” He clicked off the mike and looked back over his shoulder at Konrad. “There. Happy now?”

“You did what was needed. That is good,” Konrad answered. The pilot’s eyebrows said he didn’t think so.

“Jesus Christ!” Paris Control burst out. “Say that again, TWA57.” At Konrad’s nod, the pilot did. “Jesus!” Paris Control repeated. Then he asked, “Have the assholes hurt anybody?”

“Negative. They say they won’t if we play along with ’em. You might watch what you call ’em, since they’re in the cockpit with us.”

“Er-roger that,” Paris Control said. A different voice came over the air: “Shall we scramble fighters?”

“Negative! Say again, negative!” the pilot replied. “Not unless you aim to shoot us down. What else can fighters do?”

A long silence followed. At last, Paris Control said, “You may proceed. We will inform Spanish air officials of the situation.”

“Thank you,” the pilot said. He looked disgusted. Paris Control had sounded disgusted. Some of the Anglo-Americans had wanted to clean out Franco’s Spain after the Wehrmacht surrendered. They hadn’t done it, though, even if Spain sheltered more than a few German refugees and other Europeans who’d supported the Reich ’s crusade against Bolshevism. Maybe they remembered that Franco hadn’t let the Fuhrer come in and run the English out of Gibraltar. All by itself, that had gone a long way toward costing Germany the war.