The Man with the Iron Heart Read Online Free Page A

But he was not the master of his fate or the captain of his soul. The master of his fate was back in Nuremberg, waiting to hear what he had to say about this. He sighed. What
could
he say that wasn’t obvious?
    Benton’s eyes slid to what was left of the two GIs’ bodies. Those would either get buried in a military cemetery here or go back to the States in sealed coffins, probably with sandbags to keep them company and make them weigh what they should. Lou hoped the Graves Registration people would plant them here. The less these guys’ relatives knew about what had happened to them, the better.
    He walked over to the jeep that had brought him out from Nuremberg. Benton had his own jeep. A bored-looking private sat in Lou’s machine, checking out a magazine full of girls in pinup poses. Reluctantly, the driver set down the literature. “Take you back now, sir?” he asked. Violation of the surrender terms? A honking big crater and two mangled bodies? He probably didn’t care much about anything, but he cared more about the leg art than this business.
    And maybe he had the right attitude, too.
    “Yeah, let’s go,” Lou said.
    The driver started the engine. Jeeps were almost as reliable as Zippos. They fired up first time every time. Not much traffic on the road. What there was was nearly all U.S. military: olive-drab vehicles marked with a white star, usually inside a white circle.
    Lou didn’t get his ass in an uproar about trucks and jeeps and halftracks that ran. He didn’t worry about the Germans he saw, either, even though a lot of them still wore
Feldgrau
and some hadn’t handed in their weapons yet. But he flinched whenever he rolled by crumpled metal wreckage—and there was plenty of it. If those Nazi
schmucks
had booby-trapped one dead truck, who could say they hadn’t done it to more than one?
    Nuremberg looked as if God had jumped on it with both feet and then spent a while kicking it, like a kid throwing a tantrum. The town where the Nazis threw their big wingdings, the town where Leni What’s-her-name filmed
Triumph of the Will,
was the biggest rubble field in the world.
    Or maybe not. Lou hadn’t seen Berlin yet. The Russians played for keeps. And well they might. Hitler’s team had come that close—
that
close—to doing unto them instead, and they had to know it. It never occurred to most Americans that they might have lost the war. The Atlantic and Pacific didn’t shield the USSR from nasty neighbors. Fighting their way west across their own smashed and shattered country, Red Army men could see what a narrow escape they’d had.
    Lou suddenly snickered, which made the driver look at him as if he’d started picking his nose. He didn’t care. Suppose that truck had been sabotaged by organized diehards who weren’t ready to quit. Maybe they thought Americans were too soft to give them what they deserved. Maybe they were even right.
    But he would have bet dollars to doughnuts that the surviving Nazis had too much sense to piss off the Russians. He laughed again, louder this time. If the krauts didn’t have that kind of sense, the Reds would be happy—fucking delighted—to pound it into them.
             

    M ARSHAL I VAN S TEPANOVICH K ONIEV WAS ABOUT AS UNHAPPY AS A jubilant man could be. His First Ukrainian Front had done everything an army group could do to smash the last German defenses in the east. It had broken into Berlin, and paid its share in blood to take Hitler’s capital away from him and throw the Third
Reich
into the coffin it deserved.
    So far, so good. But Stalin’s orders gave the most important targets in Berlin to Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Front. “
Yob tvoyu mat’,
Georgi Konstantinovich,” Koniev muttered.
    No matter what he said about Zhukov’s mother, Koniev hadn’t really expected anything else. Hoped, yes; expected, no. Zhukov was Stalin’s fair-haired boy, and that was that. Stalin trusted Zhukov not to try to overthrow him: the kind of