“How many short rounds did your batteries fire?” somebody asked, not quite quietly enough.
“Who said that, goddammit?” The major turned the color of molten bronze. He jumped to his feet. “Who said that? Whoever it is can step outside, if he isn’t too yellow.”
“Oh, sit down, Major. Button your lip while you’re at it,” a gray-haired chicken colonel said. “I got a Purple Heart and a week in the hospital from a short round. That kind of thing happens more often than anybody wishes it did.”
Instead of sitting, the major stormed out of the mess hall. Somebody snickered as he got to the door. That only made his back stiffer and his ears redder.
Lou drained his coffee before he stood up. He couldn’t imagine the Japs staying in the war much longer, not after a right to the chin like this. Maybe the Nazis had bailed out at just the right time. If the USA had had an atom bomb while the fighting was still going on, it sure would have dropped one on Munich or Berlin.
Now…This wasn’t a war any more, not officially. What it was was a running sore. Would we blow a city off the map because guerrillas bombed a barracks? Lou shook his head. It’d be like burning down a house with a flamethrower to kill a wasp.
But if you didn’t kill the wasp, it would keep buzzing around. And it would keep stinging. So how were you supposed to get rid of it? There was a good question. So far, nobody’d found anything resembling a good answer.
When Hans Klein first heard reports about the American atom bomb, he said two things. The first was “Quatsch”-rubbish. The second was “Unmoglich”-impossible.
That also pretty much summed up Reinhard Heydrich’s reaction. He’d had much better connections than Klein’s. He knew German physicists had tried to make a uranium bomb. He also knew they hadn’t come close to succeeding. If German scientists couldn’t do it, odds were nobody else could, either.
Odds were only odds, though. Sometimes snake eyes would come up four times in a row with honest dice. Not often, but sometimes. So maybe the Americans really had come up with something new. Maybe.
Three days after they claimed to have destroyed Hiroshima, they claimed to have destroyed Nagasaki. And, less than a week after that, the Japanese Empire surrendered unconditionally. Well, not quite: the Japanese wanted to retain the Emperor. But close enough. Heydrich was astonished, to say nothing of appalled. He’d counted on the little yellow men to bloody the Americans who landed on their beaches to take their islands away from them. That would help make the occupiers sick of holding Germany down.
Would have made. Now the German resistance would have to go it alone. Reluctantly, Klein said, “I guess the American pigdogs really do have these fancy bombs.”
“I’d say so,” Heydrich agreed.
“Can we get our hands on one, sir?” the Oberscharfuhrer asked. “That’d teach the enemy a thing or three.”
“I don’t think we can sneak one from America to here,” Heydrich said. Klein gave back a glum nod. Heydrich continued, “If we can find out where our own scientists were working and how far they got…”
“Don’t you know?” Klein seemed astonished that Heydrich wouldn’t.
But Heydrich had to shake his head. “No. I never found out much about the project-it was highly secret. And, of course, it came to nothing, so I thought it wasn’t important. It seems I was wrong.”
Hans Klein had been through a lot with Heydrich. It took a lot, then, to surprise him. But his eyebrows leaped toward his hairline now. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but I don’t think I ever heard you say that before.”
“No, eh?” Heydrich smiled a thin smile: the only kind apt to fit on his long, lean face. “Well, maybe it’s because I don’t make mistakes very often. And maybe it’s because, when I do make one, I don’t talk about it afterwards-and neither does anybody else.”
“Er-yes, sir,” Klein said hastily. Anyone in the Reich who talked about Heydrich’s mistakes-with the sole exception of Heinrich Himmler-would have counted himself lucky if he only ended up in a camp.
“Now…” Heydrich pulled his attention back to the business at hand. “What can we do about this? Dammit, I really don’t know much about uranium or radioactivity. Can we get our hands on someone who does?”
“Beats me, sir,” Klein said. “If you don’t know much about this business, well, me, I know less than nothing. But I do wonder about something.”
“What’s that?” Heydrich snapped. Facing the blue glare of his attention was like standing up against a pair of lit Bunsen burners.
Gulping, Klein said, “If we piss the Americans off enough, will they use one of these hellish things on us? One bomb, one city gone.” He shuddered.
“Donnerwetter,” Heydrich said softly. “The whole country is hostage to them.” His fingers drummed on the desktop. “This place is safe against any ordinary bombs, even the big British ones. But what would happen if one of those things blew up right on top of us?”
“Beats me,” Klein said. “How would we go about finding out?” He glanced up uneasily at the ceiling-and at the many, many meters of rock above the ceiling. He’d never worried about ordinary bombs, either. But how could you help worrying about these atom bombs, especially when you didn’t know exactly what they could do?
Dryly, Heydrich answered, “Well, I don’t want to make the experiment. Maybe we’d live even if they did it-we’re a devil of a long way underground. But if they dropped one of those things on us, that would mean they knew where we were. And the only way they could do that would be to squeeze it out of somebody who already knows.”
“What will we do when they start capturing our people?” Klein asked. “They will, you know, if they haven’t by now. Things go wrong.”
Heydrich’s fingers drummed some more. He didn’t worry about the laborers who’d expanded this redoubt-they’d all gone straight to camps after they did their work. But captured fighters were indeed another story. He sighed. “Things go wrong. Ja. If they didn’t, Stalin would be lurking somewhere in the Pripet Marshes, trying to keep his partisans fighting against us. We would’ve worked Churchill to death in a coal mine.” He barked laughter. “The British did some of that for us, when they threw the bastard out of office last month. And we’d be getting ready to fight the Amis on their side of the Atlantic. But…things went wrong.”
“Yes, sir.” After a moment, Klein ventured, “Uh, sir-you didn’t answer my question.”
“Oh. Prisoners.” Heydrich had to remind himself what his aide was talking about. “I don’t know what we can do, Klein, except make sure our people all have cyanide pills.”
“Some won’t have the chance to use them. Some won’t have the nerve,” Klein said.
Not many men had the nerve to tell Reinhard Heydrich the unvarnished truth. Heydrich kept Klein around not least because Klein was one of those men. They were useful to have. Hitler would have done better had he seen that.
Heydrich recognized the truth when he heard it now: one more thing Hitler’d had trouble with. “I don’t know what we’ll do,” Heydrich said slowly. “We’ll play it by ear, I suppose. I don’t know whether the enemy will treat our men as prisoners of war or as francs-tireurs, or-”
“The Russians won’t treat us like POWs,” Klein broke in. “They’ll jump on us like they’re squashing grapes to make wine.”
“Ja.” Heydrich scowled. Keeping the resistance going in the Soviet zone was harder than it was in the parts of Germany the Western democracies held. The Russians played by the rules only when it suited them. Otherwise, the NKVD was at least as ruthless as the Gestapo had been.
“And so?” Klein was persistent. This must have been on his mind for a while now.
“We’ve done what we can,” Heydrich said. “We work in cells. The cell leaders don’t know where their orders come from-only that they’d better follow them. Losing men won’t make the system unravel. Even if our government surrendered, it’s still a war. What else can I tell you?”