“No,” Bokov agreed. Germany, however prostrate it was, remained a separate country. “Too bad.”
“Isn’t it?” Shteinberg said. “So we have to depend on scaring the devil out of the Fritzes we don’t send to camps.”
“That will work against most people. Will it work against the diehards?” Bokov asked.
“I doubt it.” Colonel Shteinberg sounded so indifferent, Bokov looked at him in surprise. The other NKVD man condescended to explain: “Sooner or later, we’ll scare one of the ordinary ones enough to make him sing. He’ll think, If I sell out, they won’t take my daughter or They won’t shoot me or whatever bothers him the most. And once we get our hooks into the diehards’ network, it’ll start coming to pieces. They always do.”
“Ah.” Bokov thought about it. “Yes, sir, you’re probably right.”
“You’d better believe I am,” Shteinberg said. “We’ll make every miserable German in our occupation zone sure hell’s not half a kilometer away from his front door. Some of them will decide they’d rather kiss our behinds than keep on getting it in the neck ’cause they’re making like tough guys.”
He talked like a tough guy himself-actually, like a zek, a man who’d been through the camps. Maybe he’d been a guard at one of them. Or maybe he had a term in his past. Plenty of people who went into the gulags in ’37 or ’38 came out again after the Hitlerites invaded. Some of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union, too, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t go right back into a camp if they sneezed at the wrong time. Even men like Tupolev, the great aircraft designer, had the camps hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles.
The Red Army men made sure the cars were shut good and tight. Each one boasted impressive locks and bars that hadn’t been on them while they were part of the German railway system-unless the Germans used them to haul people to their concentration camps. Similarly, metal gratings and barbed wire across passenger-car windows made sure nobody would leave that way.
Smoke poured from the locomotive’s stack. The train pulled out of the station, heading east. Vladimir Bokov wondered if any of the Germans on board had the slightest idea how far east they were likely to go. Well, if the sons of bitches didn’t, they’d find out pretty damn quick.
Colonel Shteinberg watched the train go with no expression at all on his face. “A good job, eh?” Bokov said.
Shteinberg looked at him as coldly as he’d eyed the train. “They could put every German ever born on trains like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough to pay them back for what they did,” he said. His voice was also cool and quiet, but Bokov realized there were people who liked Fritzes even less than he did.
Lou Weissberg was eating breakfast at the barracks in Nuremberg when somebody came in waving the Stars and Stripes. “Look at this!” the guy shouted. “Look what we done to the goddamn Japs!”
“Hold the stupid thing still, willya?” somebody else said, more irritably than Lou would have-maybe this fellow hadn’t had his coffee yet. “Give us a chance to see what it says.”
“Oh. Sorry.” The guy with the paper did hold it still-and upside down. After assorted hoots from the soldiers shoveling food into their faces, he turned it right side up.
Upside down or right side up, the headline screamed about an atom bomb. “What the hell is that?” a major asked.
“They dropped one on this, uh, Hiroshima place, and the town is gone. Right off the map,” said the man with the Stars and Stripes.
“Well, they firebombed the living shit out of Tokyo not long ago, too, and they pretty much burned it off the map. So what’s such a big deal about this?” The major seemed determined not to be impressed-or maybe he didn’t fully grasp what was going on.
Either way, the guy with the paper spelled it out for him: “Yes, sir, but that was hundreds of planes and gazillions of incendiaries-Christ only knows how many. This Hiroshima place, this was one plane and one bomb. One.”
“What? One bomb? A whole city? My ass! That’s impossible!” the major said. If not for the enormous headline, Lou would have felt the same way.”
“Here’s what the President said.” The man with the Stars and Stripes opened it and read from a story: “‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.’”
The guy beside Lou stubbed out his cigarette and crossed himself. Lou knew just how he felt.
“‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold,’” read the fellow with the paper. “‘And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.
“‘It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.’”
“Son of a bitch,” the skeptical major whispered. That summed up what Lou was feeling, too.
“‘Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it.’” The guy who had the Stars and Stripes didn’t read especially well. Or maybe he was as flummoxed as everybody else. He went on, “‘By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1’s and V-2’s late and in limited quantities and that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.’”
“Oh, son of a bitch.” From Lou, it came out as more prayer than curse. Imagining the Nazis with a bomb that could take out a city at one shot scared him worse than anything he’d seen in the war, which was saying a lot.
“‘The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.’” The soldier folded the Stars and Stripes shut again.
“Wow,” said somebody at another table. “I wouldn’t believe a story like that if it was in Superman, and here it is in Stars and Stripes.”
All through the mess hall, heads solemnly bobbed up and down. Lou understood what the other American meant, but he didn’t nod. He had to fight not to wince, in fact. British and French officers were amazed-and politely dismayed-at how many of their allies from across the Atlantic read comic books. Right this second, Lou understood how they felt.
The major who hadn’t wanted to believe in atom bombs said, “We ought to bring some of those mothers over here. If the Jerries want to keep blowing themselves up, we can drop one on Munich and one on Frankfurt and one on this fucking place, too. That’d teach ’em not to screw around with us, by God!”
He got even more nods than the guy who’d talked about Superman. “Uh, sir,” Lou said, “how do we make sure our own people are out of places like this before we blast ’em? Sounds like one of these things takes out about a mile’s worth a ground, maybe more, when it goes off.”
“Hell, we’d do it. That kind of stuff is just details.” The major was in artillery, which meant he’d never needed to worry about “that kind of stuff.” Everything always looked easy to somebody who didn’t have to do it.