Part of Lou wanted to sleep for a week. The rest wondered whether he’d ever sleep again with so much adrenaline zinging through him. Shaking his head, he stood up and started trying to think like an officer once more. “Do what you can for the wounded,” he told the men who’d gone through the fight with him. “We should have medics here real soon now-docs, too, I hope.”
“Some of these guys are bleeding bad, sir,” a GI said out of the night. “They don’t get plasma or something pretty damn quick, they ain’t gonna make it.”
“Yeah,” Lou said unhappily. He didn’t know what else to say, because he couldn’t do one single thing about it.
Then he heard footsteps coming down from above. “Don’t shoot, nobody!” someone called in accents surely American. “I gotta talk to the guy in charge of diggin’ out this mine.”
“That’s me,” Lou called. “What’s up?”
The Yank thumped closer. Or was he an English-speaking German with an explosive vest, intent on vengeance? Dr. Freud would call that paranoia, Lou thought. But you’re not paranoid when they’re really after you, he retorted to himself. And then all that silly fluff blew out of his head, because the guy said, “We’ve got Heydrich’s body up there. Somebody’s one rich motherfucker.”
“Heydrich?” Lou said dazedly. “For sure? No shit?”
“Looks just like him-we’ve all seen enough posters to know. His face ain’t hardly tore up at all,” the GI answered. “Papers on the body say he’s some horseshit noncom, but you know what that kinda crap’s gonna be worth. And there’s another German noncom still breathin’ who says it’s him.”
“Heydrich,” Lou said again. He could hardly believe it, even if it was exactly what he’d been trying to accomplish. “Take me to him. This I gotta see.”
He stumped uphill after the soldier. He stumbled in the darkness a couple of times, but he didn’t fall. Before long, he was breathing hard. A desk job with the CIC didn’t keep him in great shape. But he would have walked up the side of Mt. Everest on his hands to see Reinhard Heydrich dead.
No more shooting on this slope. Up ahead, a couple of flashlight beams marked the place where the GI was taking him. He saw American soldiers and guys in Feldgrau milling around. All the Germans kept hands above head.
“Here comes the captain,” his escort called so nobody would get jumpy. “He wants to see the body.”
Lots of German corpses in uniform lay in a compact knot, with others out around the fringes. “Looks like a bunch of ’em got taken by surprise,” Lou remarked.
“Yes, sir,” the soldier agreed. “They came out right behind one of our guys. He chucked a grenade into ’em, and then he started shooting ’em up.”
“Good for him,” Lou said. The air stank of blood and shit and smokeless powder. One of the GIs shone a flashlight at him. He waved. The beam swerved away: he was judged all right. He raised his voice a little: “Show me Heydrich.”
“Over here, sir,” another man called. He had a flashlight, too, and pointed it at a pale, still face on the ground. “This bastard.”
Lou bent down. The dead man’s pale, narrow eyes were still open, but he wasn’t seeing anything. The face was long and thin. So was the nose, which had a slight kink in it. “Son of a gun,” Lou whispered. “I think it really is him.” He undid the corpse’s tunic. Whoever this guy was, he’d taken grenade fragments and bullets in the chest and belly. “Shine it under his arm,” Lou told the GI with the light. “I want to check his blood group.”
He had to wipe away blood before he could make out the tattoo. It was an A-just what he wanted to see. “Well?” the soldier asked.
“Yeah.” Lou felt as if he’d swallowed a big slug of straight bourbon. “It matches.” He paused, remembering. “The guy who brought me up here said you’d captured another Jerry in noncom’s clothes who could ID him.”
“That’s right, sir.” The other American turned away for a moment. “Hey, Manny! Bring that cocksucker over here. The captain wants him.”
“Sure,” said somebody-presumably Manny. He spoke a couple of words of rudimentary German: “Du! Komm!”
Unlike Heydrich, the man who came over to Lou blinked when the GI shone a flashlight in his eyes. He looked like a guy who’d been a noncom for a long time-put a different uniform on him and he would have made a perfect American tech sergeant. “Who are you?” Lou asked. He pointed to the dead man. “How do you know this is Heydrich?”
“I am Oberscharfuhrer Johannes Klein,” the noncom answered. “I was the Reichsprotektor’s driver, and then his aide when we went underground.”
“Wow,” Lou said. Klein’s name was on his list, too-on all kinds of CIC lists. Nobody seemed to know what he looked like. Well, here he was, in the flesh. Quite a bit of flesh, too. Whatever the diehards had been doing underground, they hadn’t been starving. Lou dragged his attention back to the business at hand. “So what happened here? What went wrong for you?”
“He made a mistake,” Klein answered matter-of-factly. He sounded like an American noncom giving an officer the back of his hand, too. “He thought the diversionary attack would pull your men off this side of the mountain. He turned out to be wrong. We had just come out when….” He spread his hands. One of them had blood on it, but it wasn’t his.
Another German came over. He stared down at Heydrich’s body for a long time. “So he is truly dead,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lou.
“What difference does it make to you? Who are you, anyway?” Lou asked him auf Deutsch.
“I am Karl Wirtz,” the man answered in fluent British English.
For a second, the name didn’t mean anything to Lou. Then it did. “The physicist!” he exclaimed. Wirtz nodded. Lou tried to ask something that wasn’t too dumb. The best he could come up with was, “Where are your, uh, colleagues?”
“Poor Professor Diebner lies over there. Sadly, he is dead,” Wirtz said. “The others…I do not know what has happened to the others.” He nodded toward Klein. “But I believe the Oberscharfuhrer may.”
“How about it?” Lou said. Johannes Klein only shrugged. Wirtz’s grimace told what he thought of that. Lou thought the same thing. “So-you disposed of them, did you?”
Klein shrugged again. “At the Reichsprotektor’s order. They could never have kept up during the escape.” His shoulders went up and down one more time. “Fat lot of good it turned out to do.”
Do you always kill people on your own side? Lou didn’t ask it, however much he wanted to. He was too sure Klein would look at him and say something like Of course I do, if my superior tells me to. He’d already been down that road with too many other Germans. So he stuck to what might be immediately usefuclass="underline" “Where were you going to go after you came out of your tunnel?”
“We were to split up and head for safe houses in the next valley,” Klein said. “The only one I know of is the one I was to go to. And then-” He stopped.
“Then what? Come on-talk,” Lou said. He didn’t believe Klein knew about only one safe house, either. If he was Heydrich’s aide, wouldn’t he have found out about plenty of them?
“Well, you will have heard this by now, I’m sure.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to be talking himself into talking, so to speak. After a moment, he went on, “Sooner or later, Jochen Peiper’s people would pick us up and take us to his headquarters.”
“Ah?” Lou’s ears quivered and came to attention. “And where’s that?”
“I have no idea. I never tried to find out. I suppose the Reichsprotektor must have known, but I don’t think anyone else down below”-Klein stamped his foot on the mountainside-“had any idea. What we weren’t told, we couldn’t give away if we got caught.”
“Huh,” Lou said. “We’ll see about that.” The kraut gave a much more elaborate denial here than he had about the safe houses. Maybe that meant he was bullshitting. On the other hand, maybe it meant he was telling the exact truth. Some remorseless squeezing of everybody left alive who’d come up out of the ground would tell the tale. Lou tried another question: “What do you know about Peiper?”