Konrad was only too happy to oblige him. “First, all demands must be met within seventy-two hours. After that, we cannot answer for the safety of the passengers.”
“You’ll start shooting people, you mean,” the pilot observed bleakly.
“Ja,” Konrad said. “If we do not do this, no one pays attention to us. Send the warning.” After the pilot had, Konrad resumed: “We demand the immediate liberation of all prisoners captured while resisting the unlawful occupation. We demand also an end to the unlawful ban against National Socialist participation in German political life. And we demand-”
“Maybe you should start shooting now,” the pilot said. “They won’t give you any of that stuff.”
Konrad hefted his Schmeisser. “You had better hope they do.”
XXXII
Had Lou Weissberg tried for a year, he would have had trouble coming up with a photo he less wanted to see on the front page of the International Herald-Tribune. There was the big four-engined airliner parked at the edge of a runway in Madrid. There was the doorway, open. There was a faint view of a Nazi bastard with a submachine gun standing in the doorway. And there on the tarmac below the doorway lay a crumpled corpse in a spreading pool of blood.
“Motherfuckers even picked a Jew to murder first,” Lou snarled in helpless, frustrated fury-the story beside the photo said the dead man’s name was David Levinsky. “Probably the only Jew on the plane, but they found him, all right.”
“Sure they did,” Howard Frank agreed. “After everything you’ve seen since you got here, how come you’re surprised now?”
Lou sighed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe ’cause they’re still exactly the same assholes they were before, even though Heydrich’s dead. Why did Clay bother giving me a medal and all that cash if killing the bastard didn’t change anything?”
“He must have hoped it would, too,” Major Frank said. “And if you don’t want the money, I’ll take it off your hands. I bet I can figure out something to do with it.”
“You know what you can do with it-sideways,” Lou said. Chuckling, Frank lit up, too. Lou went on, “And the goddamn Spaniards just stand around watching with their thumbs up their asses.”
“Portuguese, too,” Major Frank said. A DC-4 had been hijacked to Lisbon. The Nazis aboard that plane hadn’t started shooting hostages yet.
“Yeah, the Portuguese, too. We shoulda gone into both countries after V-E Day. Then the krauts wouldn’t have anywhere to hide-I don’t think you can fly nonstop from Europe to Buenos Aires,” Lou said. “But you know the real pisser?”
Howard Frank suddenly seemed fascinated by the glowing coal on his cigarette. At last, without much wanting to, he said, “Nu?”
“The real pisser is, we’re still loading GIs onto troopships and taking them home,” Lou said. “That hasn’t slowed down one goddamn bit. I mean, why should it? We knocked the crap out of the Nazis, so they aren’t dangerous any more. Sure makes sense to me! Must make sense to you, too, right?”
“Riiight.” Frank stretched out the word like a train whistle fading in the distance. “Go close the door to my office, willya?”
“Huh? How come?” Lou said. Major Frank just looked at him. “Okay, okay. All right, already.” Lou walked over and shut it.
By the time he got back, Frank had produced an almost-full pint of bourbon from nowhere-more likely, from a desk drawer. He took a knock and handed Lou the bottle. “Here. Get the taste out of your mouth.”
“Thanks!” Lou was glad to drink. It wouldn’t help the poor SOBs in Madrid or Lisbon, but it made him feel better. “Ahh! You’re a mensh.”
“Well, I try.” Major Frank tilted the pint back again, not so far this time. “Russians have the same worry we do-just before you came in with the paper, I heard on the radio that there’s a hijacked plane in Prague.”
“Fuck!” Lou said. That made him want more bourbon himself, so he took some. “Fanatics have a new toy, don’t they?”
Howard Frank nodded. “Looks that way.”
“But what can they accomplish?” Lou asked. “No matter how many hostages they kill, we won’t do what they say. That’d be asking for even more trouble, if such a thing is possible. And they’ve gotta know the Russians’ll tell ’em to piss up a rope.”
“Sure.” Frank nodded again. “The kind of publicity they’re getting, though-you can’t buy headlines like that. And if they’re pulling this crap on regular airline flights, they’ll make us start patting people down and going through everybody’s luggage and stuff like that. It’ll cost millions of dollars and flush even more millions of man-hours down the shitter.”
“Lord, will it ever!” Lou exclaimed, picturing the mess in his mind. “Millions and millions of dollars.”
“Uh-huh.” Major Frank eyed the bourbon longingly. This time, though, he didn’t pick it up. “And I guess that’s why nobody’s stormed the planes in Madrid and Lisbon. If a bunch of hostages get shot, who do we blame? Franco and Salazar, right? That’s how they’re bound to see it, anyway.”
Lou grunted. He also wanted another snort, and also hung back. “Makes sense. I almost wish it didn’t, but it does. But if the fucking SS men are shooting hostages anyway…”
“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.”