“Suppose he was carrying Heydrich?” Lou snapped.
“Then we fucked up,” the GI said, shrugging. “But what’re the odds?”
“Okay. Okay. But when the prize is this big, we gotta tie up all the loose ends,” Lou said. “If all he’s got’re cigarettes, I don’t give a shit. But all the krauts hate Hitler-now. Ask ’em five years ago and you woulda got a different answer. So which way did this goddamn boat go?”
“Thataway,” the soldier said, as if he’d watched too many Westerns. He jerked a thumb toward the southeast.
“Then we’ll go after him,” Lou declared. He had a radio in the jeep, and turned back towards it. “I’ll call in reinforcements.”
“Call in a bunch-sir,” the dogface told him. “You go much farther and things start getting tricky-like.” Again, his pals’ heads went up and down.
Lou shrugged, too, in a different way. “Fine. So things get tricky. I will call in a bunch.” And he did.
Then he had to wait for the reinforcements to get there. When they did, his heart sank. They were new draftees-you could always tell. They didn’t want to be there, and barely bothered to hide it. They squelched into the swamp like guys ordered to take out the Siegfried Line with slingshots.
“Just remember the price on Heydrich’s head, guys,” Lou called to them. “A million bucks, tax-free. You’re set for life if you nail him.” Anything to get the reluctant soldiers moving. If he thought they would have believed him, he would have promised them a week of blowjobs from Rita Hayworth.
They did move a little faster, but only a little. One of them said, “Yeah, like this fuckin’ kraut’s really in there. Now tell me another one.” Like any other soldier with an ounce of sense, the American GI was a professional cynic. These fellows didn’t know much about soldiering yet, but they’d sure figured that out.
Sometimes there was no help for a situation. Sometimes there was. Lou knew one that front-line officers had often used before the surrender. “Well, follow me, goddammit!” he snapped, and plunged past the draftees into the swamp himself. They muttered and shook their heads, but they did follow.
That accomplished less than he wished it would have. He rapidly discovered why the troopers who knew Fritzi had set up their checkpoint where they did. Past that, the stream split up into half a dozen narrow channels that crossed and recrossed, braided and rebraided, like a woman’s pigtail woven by a nut. Some of what lay between the channels was mud, some was bushes, some was rank second-growth trees. All of it was next to impossible to get through.
“Have a heart, Lieutenant,” one of the draftees panted after a while. “If that what’s-his-name asshole came this way, he’ll never make it out again.” Several of the other new fish nodded.
“My ass,” Lou said sweetly. “You wouldn’t be dogging it if the Jerries were plastering this place with 105s-I guarandamntee you that.”
Behind him, the GIs muttered. Nobody directly answered him, though. He knew what that meant. It meant just what he’d thought: these guys were fresh off the boat from the States. They’d never been under fire, and they had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Something fair-sized and brown splashed into the water and swam away. Lou came that close to opening up on it before he realized it was an animal…one that walked on four legs. Most of the GIs came out with variations on “What the fuck was that?” But one of them said, “Hey, Clifton, that a muskrat or a nutria?”
“Muskrat, I betcha. Nutria’s even bigger.” Clifton sounded froggier than most of the Frenchmen Lou’d met. Five got you ten he was born within spitting distance of the Louisiana bayou. After a moment, he went on, “Damfino what either one of ’em’s doin’ here. They’s American critters.”
“Waddaya wanna bet the krauts brung ’em over to raise for fur and they got loose, way nutrias did when we shipped ’em up from South America?” his buddy answered. “My uncle raise nutrias for a while. Then he go bust and sponge offa Pa.”
Lou didn’t give a muskrat’s ass about escaped rodents or the soldier’s sponging uncle. “Spread out,” he told his none too merry men. “God damn it to hell, we are gonna comb this swamp and see what’s in here.”
He hadn’t gone another fifty yards before he realized it was hopeless. A regiment could have gone through here and missed an elephant standing quietly in the shade of the trees. No elephants, or none he saw-the Jerries wouldn’t have brought them in for fur. But with the best will in the world the platoon he led couldn’t have searched the whole swamp in under a year.
And these clowns didn’t have the best will in the world, or anything close to it. They pissed and moaned. They dragged their feet. Reward or not, they couldn’t have cared less about catching Reinhard Heydrich, because they didn’t think he was within miles. As for Fritzi and his rowboat full of illicit tobacco…The only thing that mattered to them was that they were getting muddy and their poor little tootsies were soaked.
More than once, Lou had heard krauts-especially krauts who didn’t know he spoke German-wonder out loud how the hell the USA won the war. He’d never been tempted to wonder the same thing himself…till now.
A gray heron almost as tall as a man made him nervous-all the more so because its plumage was only a little lighter than Feldgrau. But no Landser ever born came equipped with that cold yellow stare or that bayonet beak. The heron’s head darted down. A carp wriggled briefly, then disappeared.
The sun sank toward the western horizon. Clifton said, “No offense, Lieutenant, but we ain’t gonna find him.”
“Yeah,” Lou said, and then several things quite a bit warmer than that. Maybe the GIs posted on the far side of the swamp would scoop Heydrich up when he came out. Lou had to hope so. He wasn’t going to be the hero himself. The Reichsprotektor shouldn’t have got away-but it looked like he had.
XIV
A teletype chattered. Tom Schmidt pulled the flimsy paper off the machine. The dateline was Munich. The headline said, HEYDRICH MOCKS PURSUERS AFTER ESCAPE. The story was…just what you’d expect after a headline like that. The boss of the German national resistance was back in hiding again, and thumbing his nose at the blundering Americans who’d let him slip through their fingers.
“Well, Jesus Christ!” Schmidt said in disgust. “We really can’t do anything right over there, can we?”
“What now?” asked another reporter in the Tribune’s Washington bureau. He was interested enough not to light his cigarette till he got an answer.
Schmidt gave it to him, finishing, “What d’you think of that, Wally?”
Wally did light up before replying, “I think it stinks, that’s what. What am I supposed to think? First the krauts grabbed a bunch of guys with slide rules, then when their own big cheese put his neck on the chopping block we couldn’t bring the goddamn hatchet down. Somebody’s head ought to roll if Heydrich’s didn’t.”
“Sounds right to me,” Tom said. “You know what else?”
“I’m all ears,” Wally said. He wasn’t so far wrong, either; he really did have a pair of jug handles sticking out from the sides of his head.
“I’ll tell you what.” Tom always had liked the sound of his own voice. “This part of the war is harder on us than whipping the Wehrmacht was, that’s what.”
“How d’you figure?” Wally asked.
“’Cause when we were fighting the Wehrmacht we knew who was who and what was what,” Tom said. “Now we’re in the same mess the Nazis got into when they had to fight all the Russian partisans. You can’t tell if the guy selling cucumbers likes you or wants to blow you to kingdom come. And does that pretty girl walking down the street have a bomb in her handbag? How are you supposed to win a fight like that if the other side doesn’t want to let up?”