Harry Turtledove - The Man with the Iron Heart

“Hey, it’s happening in Europe. A bunch of the people on those planes are bound to be foreigners. So it’s nothing anybody in the United States needs to worry about, is it?” Frank said.

“Of course not.” But Lou reached for the bourbon after all.

Vladimir Bokov had all kinds of reasons not to want to go to the Prague airport. He’d had plenty of work on his plate back in Berlin-important work, too, not just stuff to make time go by. Dealing with Czechoslovakian officials was still tricky. Too many of them thought they could restore the bourgeois republic they’d had before the war. They didn’t see that, with Soviet troops occupying their country, it had to accommodate itself to the USSR. And dealing with the Nazi terrorists who’d hijacked this Li-2 and ordered it flown here might be even trickier.

None of which had anything to do with anything. When Bokov and Colonel Shteinberg got orders to drop everything, to go to Prague, and to recapture the passenger plane without making concessions, they went. What other choice did they have? None, and Bokov knew it.

Which didn’t keep him from complaining. “Why us?” he groused, peering at the Li-2 through captured German binoculars (better than any the Soviet Union made).

“Why us, Volodya?” Moisei Shteinberg’s chuckle said he was amused to find such naivete in a fellow NKVD officer. “You mean you don’t know?”

“If I did, would I be pissing and moaning like this?” Bokov answered irritably.

“I’ll tell you why, then.” And Shteinberg proceeded to do just that: “Lieutenant General Vlasov, that’s why. We did well giving Birnbaum to the Americans after he didn’t want us to. So now he gives us this mess. If we don’t make a hash of it, we solve his problem for him. And if we do, he’s even with us, and he writes something good and foul on our fitness report.”

“Well, fuck me!” Bokov said, and not another word. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to admit he should have seen that for himself. And he should have. As soon as Shteinberg pointed it out to him, he knew it was true. In Yuri Vlasov’s shoes, Bokov would have done the same thing.

All the troops ringing the Li-2 belonged to the Red Army. The Czechoslovakians had grumbled about that, which did them no good whatever. The plane was Russian. That gave the Soviet commandant in Prague all the excuse he needed to use his own men. If some pimp of a Czech colonel who’d probably get purged once the other shoe here dropped didn’t like it, too goddamn bad.

The radio crackled to life. “Do you read me, Prague airport?” one of the Nazi hijackers asked.

“We hear you, yes,” Bokov answered in German.

“You’d better get cracking on our demands, then,” the fanatic said. “Time’s running short. If we don’t know for sure that you’re freeing prisoners and moving soldiers out of the Vaterland, it’s too bad for the people on this plane.”

“We are doing what you told us to do,” Bokov lied. Not even the Americans were stupid enough to yield to the hijackers’ demands. If you did that even once, you set yourself up for endless trouble down the line.

“We’d better see some sign of it, or we start shooting,” the German warned.

“There’s no hope for you if you do,” Bokov said. That was true, but there’d been no hope for the fanatics once they commandeered the airplane.

“Maybe not, but there’s no hope for your important people, either,” the Nazi said. The passengers were important: officers, engineers, agricultural officials, a prominent violinist. No one but important people flew, not in Soviet airspace. But that also had nothing to do with anything.

A Red Army lieutenant handed Colonel Shteinberg a note. He read it and nodded to Bokov. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Bokov told the fanatic. “We’ll do what you want, and we’ll get you the evidence you need. Out.” He made sure he’d switched off before asking Shteinberg, “Everything’s ready?” The Jew nodded again. Bokov switched frequencies on the radio and said one word in Russian: “Now!”

Three 105mm shells slammed into the Li-2’s cockpit. They blew off most of the plane’s nose. A truck with a scaling ladder-taken from a Prague fire engine-sped down the runway. The ladder went up. Red Army men with submachine guns swarmed into what was left of the cockpit.

Another truck raced over to the Li-2’s right-side doorway. This one needed a shorter ladder. The first soldier up it sprayed the lock with bullets from his PPSh. Then he threw the door open and sprang into the plane. The rest of his squad followed.

It was all over in less time than it took to tell. The Russians threw two hijackers’ bodies out of the Li-2’s shattered nose. One more corpse came out through the side door. They were bound to be dead already, but men on the ground filled them full of lead anyway, just to stay safe.

Then live soldiers and passengers started coming out. Another lieutenant hurried back to the tower to report to Shteinberg and Bokov. “Your plan worked very well,” he said, saluting the NKVD men. “The sons of bitches only had time to shoot three men, and one of them isn’t badly hurt. Oh, and shell fragments killed the pilot and wounded the copilot and one passenger.”

“Too bad, but it’s the cost of doing business,” Bokov said.

Colonel Shteinberg nodded. “Cheaper than dealing with hijackers any day.”

A moment later, the Li-2 caught fire. Blasting the cockpit had pretty much wrecked it anyway. The Red Army soldiers and the surviving people who’d been aboard pulled away in a hurry. Vladimir Bokov impassively watched the fat column of black smoke rise into the sky. The plane was part of the cost of doing business, too.

And as for Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov… Go fuck yourself, Yuri Pavlovich, Bokov thought happily. The senior NKVD man had given Bokov and Shteinberg this assignment hoping they would botch it: Shteinberg was bound to be right about that. But they hadn’t. They’d done as well with it as anyone could reasonably hope to do. They’d given no concessions, the hijackers were dead, and most of the passengers were alive. If Vlasov didn’t like it… Drop dead, cuntface. Bokov grinned. Maybe he’d said it out loud, because Moisei Shteinberg smiled, too. Or maybe the Jew was just thinking along with him. After what they’d managed here together, that wouldn’t surprise him at all.

Seeing what his hijackings had wrought, Jochen Peiper was more happy than not. One thing was clear: taking over a Russian plane didn’t yield enough to make it worthwhile. The Russians, as he already had painful reason to understand, proved at least as remorseless and relentless as his own people. To them, the hijacked aircraft and the people aboard it were expendable. As long as they got rid of the hijackers, they didn’t care about anything else.

“All right,” Peiper muttered. “We won’t mess with them again. Not like that, anyhow.”

But the plane that landed in Madrid, and the one that came down in Lisbon…Both of those were successes, no two ways about it. The German fighting men aboard had killed a few fat, rich fools. They’d got wonderful publicity. Every airline that flew anywhere in Western Europe was frantically revamping security procedures. That would cost piles of dollars or pounds or francs or whatever currency they used. It would also cost them endless wasted time and uncountable passenger goodwill.

The team in Madrid had even managed to torch their Constellation as they walked out. They were in jail now, as were the hijackers who’d gone to Lisbon. The USA, and UK, and France were all screaming for their heads. Jochen Peiper didn’t think they’d get them. The Reich still had friends in high places in Spain and Portugal, even if those friends had to work quietly and discreetly these days. His best guess was that the hijacking teams would stay locked up till the foo-faraw died down, and then, without any fuss, someone would open the door, shove them out through it, and do his goddamnedest to pretend the whole thing never happened.