Harry Turtledove - The Man with the Iron Heart

That suited Peiper fine. He didn’t think he would have any trouble recruiting people for more hijackings.

And the rest of the German Freedom Front’s business seemed to be going well enough. Most important, the Amis hadn’t brought bulldozers and steam shovels into this valley to dig out Peiper’s headquarters. Nobody the enemy had caught when they dug out Heydrich must have known where this place was. Peiper had hoped that would prove true, but he’d known too well there was no guarantee. Either Heydrich had paid proper attention to security, or luck meant no one who knew what he shouldn’t had survived. Peiper didn’t-couldn’t-know which, but either would do.

Roadside bombs, sabotaged vehicles and railroad lines, poisoned liquor, brave men in explosive vests who could take out a platoon of Amis or Tommies or Ivans if they pressed the button at the right time…All that was the small change of partisan warfare-unless you had to try to stop it. Peiper’s side had had to do that in Russia and Poland…and Yugoslavia, and Greece, and France, and the Low Countries, and Norway. Unfortunately, the Reich hadn’t made a popular overlord.

Now the Germans got to jump up and down on the other pan in the scale. If the Anglo-Americans and the Russians (oh, yes-and the French, too) didn’t like it, let them have the joy of figuring out what to do about it. The Americans had already decided they didn’t know. The English weren’t likely to be far behind. And then…

Then what? Peiper wondered. But he knew. Then we take over, that’s what. The Anglo-Americans would leave behind political parties and policemen to try to keep the National Socialists from reclaiming the power that was rightly theirs. Peiper chuckled. How long would that last? Not bloody long!

In the German-occupied East, how many Russian policemen had also served the Red Army or the NKVD? Way too goddamn many-Jochen Peiper knew that for sure. And how many German policemen in the occupied Reich also served the German Freedom Front? Quite a few-Peiper also knew that for sure.

“The fight goes on,” he murmured, and nodded to himself. “Whoever has the most patience-he wins.” He nodded again. The Americans and the English had already seen more trouble than they’d ever wanted. Before too long, the French would, too. Without the Anglo-Americans to prop them up, they weren’t much. The Russians…Jochen Peiper grimaced. The Russians were a different story. Against the Russians, you had to look a lifetime down the line if you were going to accomplish anything. But a free and independent and National Socialist Deutsches Reich in western Germany would do for a start. Peiper thought they could win that much pretty soon.

Anybody could go to New York city to interview troops coming home. Since Tom Schmidt couldn’t go to Germany, he didn’t want to go to New York. Yes, lots of people-and lots of reporters-did, but wasn’t that the point? What were your chances of finding an interesting story if you did the same thing as everybody else? Pretty goddamn slim, that’s what.

And so Tom went to Baltimore instead. It was a major port, nobody else except people from there gave two whoops in hell about it, and it was only a little more than an hour by train from Washington. How could you not like the combination?

It was chilly and rainy there, as it had been when he set out from Union Station. Winter wasn’t on the calendar yet, but it sure was in the air. He stood under an umbrella a few paces beyond the tent that called itself a deprocessing center and waited for demobilized soldiers to come by. Out at the end of the pier squatted the Peter Gray, as unlovely a rustbucket as shipfitters had ever slapped together. Tom wondered who the Liberty ship was named for. Not the one-armed outfielder on the 1945 Browns, surely? But what other even slightly famous Pete Gray had there been?

MPs discouraged him from getting to the returning soldiers before they went through the deprocessing center. That irked him. “I happen to know other people have been able to talk to them beforehand,” he fumed.

All he got back from the sergeant in charge of the MPs was a shrug and a dismissive, “Sorry, sir.” The three-striper didn’t sound one bit sorry. Tacking insult on to injury, he added, “You understand-we’ve got our orders.”

So did the guards at Dachau and Belsen. Tom almost said it. He would have if he’d figured it would do him any good. But the boss MP’s dull eyes and blunt features argued that he would have made a pretty good concentration-camp guard himself. That being so, hearing himself compared to one would have pissed him off all the more. He had no real reason to run Tom in, which might not stop him from inventing one. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was keep your mouth shut.

Here came a soldier proudly wearing a shiny new Ruptured Duck on his lapel. “Talk to you a minute?” Tom asked. “Tom Schmidt, from the Chicago Tribune. ” Taking notes, he realized, would be a bitch. It was like driving the hills of San Francisco, where you needed one foot on the gas, one on the brake, and one on the clutch. Here he needed one hand for the umbrella, one for the pencil, and one for the notebook.

As things turned out, he didn’t need pencil or notebook this time. The GI shook his head and kept walking. “Sorry, Mac. All I wanna do is haul ass for the train station, get aboard, and head for home.”

“Where is home?” Tom was nothing if not persistent. It did him no good this time. The soldier or ex-soldier or whatever he was shook his head again. He splashed every time his Army boots came down on the concrete. That had to be better than slopping through mud, though. Slowly, as if in a Hollywood dissolve, the curtain of rain made him disappear.

Here came another tired-looking GI. Tom took another shot at it: “Tom Schmidt, Chicago Tribune. Can I talk to you for a little bit?”

The GI-one stripe on his sleeve made him a PFC-paused. “Okay. Why not? You gonna put me in the paper?”

Tom nodded. “That’s the idea. What’s your name?”

“Atkins. Gil Atkins.”

“Where you from, Gil?” If Tom held both the notebook and the umbrella in his left hand, he could take notes…after a fashion.

“Sioux City, Iowa.”

“How about that?” Tom said: one of the rare phrases you could use with almost anything. He’d been to Sioux City. It was a place where nobody died of excess excitement. “What did you do there?”

“Short-order cook.”

“Were you a cook in the Army, too?”

“Not fuckin’ likely. I lugged a BAR.”

“Did you get to Germany before V-E Day or after?”

“After, not that it made much difference. Krauts may have said they gave up, but that didn’t mean shit, and everybody knew it. I’m just glad I made it home in one piece.” The kid’s face clouded over. “Bunch of my buddies didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. Gil Atkins only shrugged; maybe he recognized purely polite sympathy when he heard it. Tom tried again: “So you’re glad to come home from Germany, then?”

“Oh, hell, yes!” Nothing wrong with Atkins’ sincerity.

“What’s the best thing about being back in the States?”

“Lord! Where do I start?” Quite seriously, the returning PFC ticked off points on his fingers: “Let’s see. When I get on the train, I won’t have to worry that the fanatics have planted a block of TNT on the tracks. When I get into a jeep-sorry, I mean a car-I won’t have to watch the bushes by the side of the road to make sure no cocksucker with a rocket or a machine gun can blow it up. When I walk down the street, I won’t have to worry somebody’ll chuck a grenade under my feet and run away. I won’t have to wonder if the guy coming past me has dynamite and nails on under his coat. I won’t have to think the pretty gal pushing the baby carriage has maybe got a big old mine in there instead of a baby. I won’t have to be scared somebody’s gonna bomb the place where I’m sleeping. If I buy myself a shot, I won’t have to wonder whether some asshole poisoned it. I won’t…Shit, buddy, I could go on a lot longer, but you’ve got the message, doncha?”