Harry Turtledove: The Man with the Iron Heart

One of the soldiers opened the barred door. The stink that wafted out said the barn didn’t have much in the way of plumbing. Most likely, it didn’t have anything. “Give the swine the works,” the trooper said.

“I aim to, Corporal,” Bokov said. Then he switched to German and shouted, “Prisoners, attention!” He’d learned the language before the war started. Only luck, he supposed, that that hadn’t made someone suspect him.

How the Germans scrambled to form neat lines! They all wore uniform, and ranged in age from maybe fourteen to sixty-five. Bokov found himself nodding. Whoever’d taken out Marshal Koniev had used a military weapon, and used it like someone who knew how. So the occupying troops would have hauled in as many men in field-gray as they could catch.

Bokov could see which Germans had already been interrogated. They were the ones who stood there with fresh bruises and scrapes, the ones who had trouble standing up at all. He pointed to a fellow who still wore a senior sergeant’s single pip on each shoulder strap. “You. Feldwebel. Come with me.”

Gulping, the man came. He hadn’t been thumped yet. Plainly, he thought he was about to be. And he was right. But the Red Army men would have shot him on the spot had he even peeped.

“Tie him to a tree,” Bokov told the troopers. “Do a good job of it.” They did. From somewhere, one of them produced wire instead of rope. The Feldwebel wouldn’t be going anywhere, no matter what. Bokov took out a pen knife. He started cleaning his nails with it. The German watched the point with fearful fascination. Casually, Bokov asked him, “What do you know about Marshal Koniev’s murder?”

“Only that he’s dead, sir,” the noncom said quickly. Too quickly? Well, Bokov had all the time in the world to find out.

He slapped the German across the face, forehand and backhand. “That’s just a taste of what you’ll get if I decide you’re lying. Now-let’s try it again. What do you know about this murder?”

“Nothing. On my mother’s honor, sir, I-” Another pair of slaps interrupted the Feldwebel. Blood and snot ran from his nose. Bokov eyed him with distaste. He didn’t particularly enjoy this, but it was part of the work. If he got something useful from this poor bastard, his bosses would remember. Unfortunately, they’d also remember if he didn’t.

With some help from the troopers, he did what he needed to do. The Feldwebel didn’t enjoy it, but he wasn’t supposed to. Bokov soon became sure he wasn’t the fellow who’d fired the Panzerfaust. That didn’t mean he was a born innocent. At a certain point in the proceedings, he shrieked, “Jesus Christ! Why are you doing this to me? Why don’t you torture the Werewolves? They’re the ones who really know something!”

“Werewolves?” Vladimir Bokov paused to light another mild American cigarette. He blew smoke in the prisoner’s eyes. “Tell me more….”

Reinhard Heydrich hardly noticed the distant put-put from the generator any more. He hardly noticed the faint smell of the exhaust, either. He hoped he-or somebody-would notice if that smell got stronger. The ventilation system down here was supposed to be as good as anybody knew how to make it, but carbon monoxide could still get you if your luck turned sour.

His mouth twisted. This past month, Germany’s luck had turned sour. The Fuhrer, dead by his own hand! Himmler dead, too, also by his own hand! The whole country prostrate, surrendered, occupied from east and west. Almost all the important officials of State and Party in the Western Allies’ hand; or, worse, in the Russians’.

I’m on my own, Heydrich thought. It’s up to me. If they think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost. If we think we’ve quit, then we’ve really lost.

Thinking of the Western Allies’ hands, and of the Russians’, made him glance down at his own. The light from the bare bulb was harsh. Even so, he was amazed how pale he’d got, this past year underground. He’d always been a man who rejoiced in the outdoors. He’d always been a man who tanned as if someone had rubbed his skin with walnut dye, too.

When he proposed this scheme to Himmler, when he proposed himself to head it, he hadn’t grasped everything it entailed. If you were going to fight a secret war, a guerrilla war, against enemy occupiers, you had to disappear yourself. And so…he had.

“I’ll come out in the sun again when Germany comes out in the sun again,” he murmured.

“What was that, Herr Reichsprotektor ?” Hans Klein asked. His onetime driver was with him still. After the assassination attempt in Prague, Heydrich knew he could count on the veteran noncom. Klein had loudly and profanely turned down promotion to officer’s rank. The mere idea affronted him.

“Nothing.” Heydrich said it again, to make himself believe it: “Nothing.” But it wasn’t. He shouldn’t have let Klein see what was going on inside his head, even for a heartbeat.

The Oberscharfuhrer had too much sense to push it. Instead, he asked, “Anything interesting in the news bulletins?”

Of course they monitored as many broadcasts as they could. Their own signals were few and far between, to keep from leaving tracks for the hunters. Since the Reich collapsed, they had to do the best they could with enemy propaganda and the military traffic they could pick up and decipher. Heydrich fiddled with some papers. “They’ve found paintings and some other art that Goring salted away.”

That made Klein chuckle. “The Fat One wasn’t in it for the money, but he sure was in it for what he could grab.”

“Ja.” Heydrich admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. “But when I said he salted stuff away, I meant it. They took this art out of an abandoned salt mine.”

“Oh. Scheisse. ” Hans Klein might not have much book learning, but he was nobody’s fool. “Does that mean they’ll start poking around other mines?”

“I hope not,” Heydrich answered. “We have ways to keep them from finding the entrance.” He sounded confident. He had to, to keep Klein’s spirits up. But he knew things could go wrong. Anyone who’d survived in Germany knew that. And, of course, one traitor was worth any number of unlucky chances. He had endless escape routes, and didn’t want to use any of them.

“What else is in the news?” Klein inquired. Maybe he didn’t want to think about everything that could go tits-up, either.

“The Americans say they’ve almost finished conquering Okinawa.” Heydrich had needed to pull out an atlas to find out just where Okinawa lay. He had one to pull out; when Germans set out to do something, they damned well did it properly.

His former driver only sniffed. “They’ve been saying that for a while now. The little yellow men are making them pay.”

“They are,” Heydrich agreed. “And these suicide planes…If you can use an airplane to sink a warship, that’s a good bargain.”

“Not one I’d want to make myself,” Klein said.

“It all depends,” Heydrich said in musing tones. “It truly does. A man who expects to die is hard to defend against. The Russians taught us that, and the Japanese lesson is a different verse of the same song. We have men dedicated enough to serve that way, don’t you think?”

“You mean it.” Klein considered the question as a senior sergeant might. “Well, sir, I expect we could, as long as they saw they were taking a bunch of those other bastards with ’em.”

“Our enemies need to understand we are in earnest,” Heydrich said. “One thing to win a war. Quite another to win the peace afterwards. They think they can turn Germany into whatever they please. The Anglo-Americans go on about democracy-as if we want another Weimar Republic! And the Russians…”