Yawning Tommies stood sentry outside the physicists’ quarters. The British weren’t altogether idiots. But the sentries didn’t expect trouble.
“Hands up!” an English-speaking German called to them. “If you surrender, you will not be harmed.”
A burst from a Sten gun answered him. Unlike the tin Tommy gun that had almost murdered Heydrich in Prague, this one worked fine. But so did the Germans’ assault rifles and Schmeissers and grenades. The sentries went down one after another. Lights came on all over Alswede as people woke to the firefight and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
Heydrich’s raiders charged into the haberdashery. “Schnell!” he called to them. “We have to be gone before the Tommies come in force.” He didn’t know how long they had. Fifteen minutes, he judged, would be uncommon luck.
Long before fifteen minutes were up, the raiders came out again, herding along men middle-aged and elderly in their nightclothes. “We’ve grabbed nine of them!” a captain yelled to Heydrich. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where’s the last one?” As long as they were in Alswede, Heydrich wanted to make a clean sweep.
But the captain answered, “He’s kaput-caught a bullet in the head, poor bastard.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ground.
“All right.” As long as the loose end was cleared up, Heydrich wouldn’t fuss. He’d known going in that they took that chance if the British resisted. They were lucky-more than one of the slide-rule boys might have stopped something. Heydrich raised his voice: “Withdraw! Plan One!”
Some of the raiders left Alswede heading north. They made a hellacious racket, whooping and shouting and firing their weapons into lighted windows. Everyone in town could tell exactly where they were-and could tell the British exactly where they’d gone.
Along with the captured physicists-who were now starting to shiver in the late-night chill-Heydrich and the rest of his men quietly retreated to the south. Far fewer locals would pay them any attention. Far fewer would be able to tell the Tommies where they’d headed. And, with luck, the British would be slow to figure out they were the important group. How important could they be if they didn’t fire off everything they were carrying?
One of the scientists-a middle-aged fellow with rumpled, greasy hair and thick glasses-asked, “Why did you shoot poor Heisenberg?”
“Shut up, Professor Diebner, or we’ll shoot you, too.” Heydrich was pleased with himself for recognizing who’d spoken. “Heisenberg was an accident.” An unfortunate accident, too, he thought. Heisenberg was-had been-a high-horsepower physicist. Coldly, Heydrich went on, “We will shoot you on purpose, though, if you slow us down or give us away.”
“Give you away? I don’t even know who you are,” Diebner said.
“A man who believes in a free, strong Germany,” Heydrich answered. “A man who doesn’t believe the war is over yet, or lost.”
Behind the spectacle lenses, Diebner’s eyes were enormous. Maybe the lenses magnified them; Heydrich wasn’t sure. He didn’t care much one way or the other. “But-” Diebner began, and then clamped his mouth shut. That made sense; he was in no position to argue.
He and the others had probably spilled their guts while the enemy held them in England. Heydrich didn’t even reckon it treason. Obviously, the Anglo-Americans were ahead of Germany in nuclear physics. He would have grabbed American scientists if he could. But his countrymen were the best he could get his hands on. Maybe they’d be able to come up with…something, anyhow.
Out of Alswede. Into the woods. The raiders divided into smaller groups, splitting the physicists among them. Gunfire broke off to the north. Heydrich smiled wolfishly. His distraction was working just the way he’d hoped it would.
“Be damned, sir,” Hans Klein said. “I think we pulled it off.”
“I said we would,” Heydrich answered. Klein kept his mouth shut. Officers and leaders said all kinds of things. Sometimes they delivered. Sometimes…Sometimes your Vaterland ended up occupied by unfriendly foreigners. But Heydrich had delivered. And maybe Germany wouldn’t stay occupied too much longer.
XIII
Cold rain pissed down out of a gray, curdled sky. Bernie Cobb manned a checkpoint outside of Erlangen and steamed. The rain blew into his face and dripped down the back of his neck, which did nothing to improve his mood. He looked this way and that-he tried to look every which way at once. Visibility wasn’t much more than a hundred feet, so looking didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good. The only consolation was, a Nazi sniper couldn’t see any farther than he could.
“What did they stick us out here for?” Mack Leff asked for about the tenth time.
Leff wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d got here after V-E Day, so Bernie didn’t trust him as far as he would have trusted somebody who’d been through the mill. “Beats me,” Bernie said. “Something’s screwed up somewhere, though-that’s for goddamn sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put so many of us out on patrol at once.”
“Yeah,” Mack agreed mournfully. His left hand moved inside the pocket of his field jacket. Bernie knew what that meant: he was feeling a pack of cigarettes in there and wondering if he could keep one lit in this downpour. He must have decided he couldn’t, because he didn’t try to light up.
Bernie had already made the same glum calculation and come up with the same answer. He wasn’t twitchy from missing a smoke yet, but he sure wanted one. “The orders we got are all bullshit, too,” he went on-he could always piss and moan, even if he couldn’t light up. “Check everybody’s papers. Hold anybody suspicious for interrogation. Suspicious how?”
“You come out in this weather at all, you ought to have your head examined,” Mack Leff opined.
“Got that right.” Bernie wondered if he could peel the paper off a cigarette and chew the tobacco inside. He’d always thought a chaw was disgusting (to say nothing of hillbilly), but out in the open in weather like this…. “Rained this hard when we got over the Rhine last year. Then, at least, we could lay up in a house or a barn or somethin’ and stay out of it sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.” Leff nodded. “Musta been good when you knew who the enemy was, when you didn’t have to worry about everybody from the grocer to the old lady with a cat. You didn’t have to watch your back so hard then.”
“Fuck,” Bernie muttered. Mack actually thought he’d had it easy when the real war was on. How was that for a kick in the nuts? The really weird thing was, the new guy might have a point. You kinda had to look at things sideways to see it, but when you did….
He became aware of a new noise punching through the endless hiss of rain off paving and fields. “Heads up, Mack,” he said. “Car’s comin’.”
The jeep they’d ridden out here made a decent obstacle after they’d pulled it across the road. If you wanted to go around it, you’d probably get stuck in the mud and you’d probably get shot, too. Bernie had the safety off on his M-1. If Mack Leff didn’t, he was too dumb to deserve to live.
Only worry was whether whoever was in the oncoming car could spot the jeep in time to stop. They did, which impressed Bernie-that Kubelwagen had seen plenty of better years. Hitler’s equivalent of a jeep could do most of the stuff a real one could, only not so well.
Two men sat in the Kubelwagen. If they weren’t vets, Bernie’d never seen any. “Cover me,” he told Leff as he came out from behind the jeep. He raised his voice and used some of his terrible German: “Papieren, bitte!” Then, hopefully, he added, “You guys speak English?”
Both krauts shook their heads. Bernie sighed; he might’ve known they wouldn’t. It was that kind of day. They passed him the papers. The guy behind the wheel was Ludwig Mommsen, the documents said. The other fellow, whose long, thin nose kind of leaned to one side and who needed a shave like nobody’s business, was Erich Wisser.