The Man with the Iron Heart Read Online Free Page B

trust a dictator didn’t give lightly—or, sometimes, at all. Having given it, Stalin could afford to be extravagant in giving Zhukov anything else he fancied.
    That Zhukov was a damned good general had nothing to do with anything, not so far as Koniev was concerned. Without false modesty, the commander of the First Ukrainian Front knew he was a damned good general himself. So did Zhukov. And so did Stalin.
    All the same, Stalin had only one favorite. Koniev knew he wasn’t it. Zhukov was. So Zhukov’s men got the Chancellery and the
Führer
’s bunker. It seemed unfair. It certainly did to Koniev, whose men broke into Berlin ahead of the other marshal’s.
    “Nichevo,”
Koniev said. And it
couldn’t
be helped, not unless he felt like quarreling with Stalin. He might be—he was—irked, but he wasn’t suicidal.
    Scrawny Germans, many still in threadbare uniforms, trudged gloomily through Berlin’s wreckage-strewn streets. They got out of the way in a hurry when Red Army men came by. If they didn’t, they’d pay for it. The stench of death hung in the air. Corpses still lay in the gutters, and sometimes in the middle of the street. Quite a few of them had got there after the surrender. No surviving Germans wanted to give the conquerors an excuse to add more.
    Off in the distance, a woman shrieked. A Russian a few meters from Marshal Koniev chuckled. “One more cunt getting what she deserves,” he said. His buddies laughed out loud.
    Koniev didn’t. The Red Army had avenged Nazi atrocities inside the USSR ever since it crossed the
Reich
’s borders. Berlin was no exception. Who’d wanted to say the Russian and Asiatic soldiers couldn’t have their fun after the war’s last battle? They owed the Germans plenty. But discipline was supposed to be returning. That scream—and others like it Koniev had heard in the ten days since the surrender—argued it still wasn’t all the way back.
    Which went a long way towards explaining why almost all the Germans Koniev could see were men. German women feared Red Army soldiers would drag them off and gang-rape them if they showed themselves. They might have been right, too. They’d be safe enough in a few weeks. Not yet.
    A driver came up to Koniev and saluted. “Comrade Marshal, your car is ready,” the man said.
    “Good,” Koniev said. “Very good. I won’t be sorry to get out of this place for a while. It stinks.”
    “Sure does.” The driver didn’t seem to care. “If you’ll come with me, sir…”
    The car was a captured
Kubelwagen
—the German equivalent of a U.S. jeep—with red stars painted all over it to keep trigger-happy Russians from shooting it up. The driver carried a PPSh41 submachine gun to fight off not only stupid friends but stubborn enemies. Little dying spatters of resistance went on. Massive reprisals killed plenty of Germans, and would eventually snuff out the resistance, too—Koniev was confident of that.
    Even a couple of kilometers outside of Berlin, the air improved. And then, abruptly, it got worse again: the
Kubelwagen
rattled past the bloated carcasses of a dozen cows in a cratered meadow. Koniev scowled at the stink, and also at the waste. “Our men should have butchered those animals,” he said.
    “Sorry, Comrade Marshal.” The driver sounded afraid Koniev would think it was his fault. He added, “I never saw the beasts till this minute.”
    “All right, Corporal.” While the fighting was still going on, Koniev might have looked to blame…somebody, anyhow. With the war over, he could afford to be more easygoing.
    Artillery had chewed up the woods outside of Berlin, too. Some trees still stood straight. Others leaned at every angle under the sun. They’d been down long enough that their leaves were going from green to brown. Some of them would have fallen on the road from Berlin to Zossen—the former
Wehrmacht
headquarters, now taken over by the Red Army. Koniev wondered whether Red Army engineers or German POWs had