“But don’t you think it’s something that needs doing?” Heydrich persisted. “It might not be something we could manage to scrape together at the last minute, with everything going to the devil around us. If we’d taken Moscow the first autumn and hanged Stalin in front of the Kremlin, what would the Soviet partisan movement be worth now?”
Himmler plucked at his red lower lip again. He let it spring back into place with a soft, liquid plop. After another pause, he said, “If we were to go forward with these preparations, it would be an SS undertaking.”
“Aber naturlich, Herr Reichsfuhrer!” Heydrich exclaimed. “This is the SS’s proper business. The Wehrmacht fights ordinary battles in ordinary ways. We need to be able to do that, too, but we also need to be able to do whatever else the State may require of us.”
“Jaaaa.” Himmler let the word stretch. Seen through the pince-nez, his stare didn’t seem too dangerous-if you didn’t know him. Unfortunately, Heydrich did. The Reichsfuhrer-SS said, “Since you propose this project, do you expect to head it?”
“Yes, sir,” Heydrich answered without the least hesitation. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time-since things, ah, first went wrong last fall at Stalingrad and in North Africa. Even if worse comes to worst, it would give us the chance to do the enemy a great deal of harm. In the end, it might save the Reich despite what would ordinarily be reckoned a defeat.”
“Do you think so?” Himmler looked and sounded unconvinced.
But Heydrich nodded. “I do. Especially in the west, the enemy is basically soft. How much stomach will he have for occupying a country where his soldiers aren’t safe outside their barracks-or inside them, either, if we can smuggle in a bomb with a time fuse?”
“Hmm,” Himmler murmured. He plucked once more. Plop-the lip snapped back. Heydrich thought the mannerism disgusting, but couldn’t very well say so. Pluck. Plop. Finally, the Reichsfuhrer said, “Well, you’ve given me a good deal to think about. I can hardly deny that. We’ll see what comes of it.”
“The longer we wait, the more trouble we’ll have doing it properly,” Heydrich warned.
“I understand that,” Himmler said testily. “I have to make sure I can get it moving without…undue difficulties, though.”
“As you say, sir!” Heydrich was all obedience, all subordination. Why not? Himmler played the cards close to his chest, but Heydrich was pretty sure he’d won.
AFTER
I
Lichtenau was a little town-not much more than a village-a few miles south and west of Nuremberg. Charlie Pytlak walked down what was left of the main street, a BAR cradled in his arms. He had the safety off and a round chambered. He knew the Nazis had surrendered the day before, but some damnfool diehards might not have got the word-or might not care. The only thing worse than getting it during the war was getting it afterwards.
He admired the shattered shops and houses and what had probably been a church. The bright spring sun cast his shadow ahead of him. “Wow,” he said with profound unoriginality, “we liberated the living shit out of this place, didn’t we?”
“Bet your ass, Sarge,” said Dom Lombardo. He’d liberated a German submachine gun-a machine pistol, the krauts called it. He kicked a broken brick out of the way. “Got any butts on you?”
“Sure thing.” Pytlak gave him a Chesterfield, then stuck another one in his own mouth. He flicked a flame from his Zippo to light both cigarettes; his unshaven cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He blew it out in a long stream. “Dunno why they make me feel good, but they do.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Lombardo agreed. “Couldn’t hardly fight a war without cigarettes and coffee.”
“I sure wouldn’t want to try,” Pytlak said. “I-”
He broke off. Half a dozen German soldiers came around a corner. A couple of them wore helmets instead of Jerry field caps-a sign they’d likely fought to the end. One of the bastards in ragged, tattered field-gray still carried a rifle. Maybe he just hadn’t thought to drop it. Or maybe…
“Hold it right there, assholes!” Pytlak barked. His automatic rifle and Dom’s Schmeisser swung to cover the enemy soldiers.
The Germans froze. Most of them raised their hands. The guy with the Mauser slowly and carefully set it down in the rubble-strewn street. He straightened and reached for the sky, too. May 1945 was way too late to die.
One of the krauts jerked his chin toward the Chesterfields Charlie and Dom were smoking. He wasn’t dumb enough to lower a hand to point. “Zigarette, bitte?” he asked plaintively. His buddies nodded, their eyes lighting up. The past couple of years, they must have been smoking hay and horseshit, except for what they could take from POWs.
“I can’t give ’em any, Sarge,” Lombardo said. “I had to bum this one offa you.”
“Fuck. I don’t wanna waste my smokes on these shitheads. A week ago, they’d’ve tried to waste me.” Pytlak looked the Germans over. They were pretty pathetic. A couple of them couldn’t have been more than seventeen; a couple of the others were nearer fifty than forty. The last two…The last two had been through the mill and then some. One of them wore an Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. But they were whipped, too. You could see it in their eyes.
Charlie flicked the BAR’s safety on. He leaned the weapon against a wall and dug in his pocket for more cigarettes. As he started toward the Germans, Dom said, “I’ll cover you.”
“You goddamn well better, Ace.”
But there was no trouble. The German soldiers seemed pathetically grateful as Pytlak passed around the Zippo. And well they might have. The way things were in the ruins of the Reich these days, he could have got blown for half a dozen Chesterfields. He really was wasting them on these guys.
He scooped up the rifle the one guy had carried. Its safety was off, too. He took care of that. Then he tapped the other kraut’s Iron Cross. “Where?” he asked. The guy just looked at him. “Uh, wo?” Like most GIs, he’d picked up a few words of German.
“Ah.” The Jerry got it. “Kharkov.” He pointed east. “Russland.”
“Right,” Charlie said tightly. If you listened to the Germans, all of them had done all their fighting on the Eastern Front. Trouble with that was, Uncle Joe’s boys fought back a hell of a lot harder than the Nazis figured they would. As the war wound down, all the Germans wanted to do was get away from the Red Army so they could hand themselves over to Americans or Englishmen.
Well, these guys had made it. Charlie carried the rifle back to Dom and handed it to him. “Here. You can handle this and your grease gun. I’ve gotta lug the BAR around.”
“Thanks a bunch,” Dom said, slinging the Mauser. But Charlie knew he was right. The Schmeisser didn’t weigh even half as much as a Browning Automatic Rifle. And he was a sergeant, and Dom nothing but a PFC. What point to rank if you couldn’t use it?
They marched the Germans out of Lichtenau. There was a camp of sorts a couple of miles outside of town: a big barbed-wire cage in a field, now rapidly filling up with Jerries. If the surrendered soldiers had to sleep out in the open and eat U.S. Army rations for a while-well, too goddamn bad.
A truck’s carcass lay by the side of the road. It wasn’t a big, snorting GMC model from the States, but some shitty little German machine. It must have been machine-gunned from the air and then burned like a son of a bitch. Later, a tank or a bulldozer shoved it to one side so it wouldn’t block traffic.
A German in civvies was fiddling around in the wreckage. “Wonder what he’s up to,” Charlie said.
“Scrap metal-waddaya wanna bet?” Dom returned. “Fucking scavengers are gonna be everywhere for months. Years, probably.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Charlie laughed. “We turned this whole stinking country into scrap metal and garbage. Just what the assholes deserved, too.”