Heydrich didn’t want to believe him, but decided he had no choice. If Wirtz was lying, one of the other physicists-Diebner, most likely-would give him away. And then Heydrich would shoot him. He had to understand that. “Well, if you can’t make a bomb, what can you do with ten grams of radium?” Heydrich demanded. “You must be able to do something useful, or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”
“Let me think.” Wirtz did just that for close to a minute. Then he said, “Well, you know radium is poisonous even in very small doses.”
“How small? A tenth of a gram? A hundredth?” Heydrich asked. A poison that strong could make assassinations easier.
Karl Wirtz actually smiled. “Much less than that, Herr Reichsprotektor. Anything more than a tenth of a microgram is considered toxic.” He helpfully translated the scientific measurement: “Anything more than a ten-millionth of a gram.”
“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Heydrich whispered. He did sums in his head, and then, when he didn’t believe the answer, did them again on paper. “Ten grams of radium could poison a hundred million people?” That stuff could kill off everybody still alive in Germany, with almost enough left over to do in France, too.
“Theoretically. If everything were perfectly efficient,” Wirtz said. “You couldn’t come anywhere close to that for real.”
“But we could still do a lot of damage with it.” Heydrich waited impatiently for the physicist’s response.
Wirtz slowly nodded. “Yes, you could. I have no doubt of that. I am not sure of the best way to go about it, though.”
“Well, that’s why you and your friends are here.” Heydrich’s grin was as wide and inviting as he knew how to make it.
Spring was in the air. Vladimir Bokov was almost back to his old self again. Everything should have been easy. After all, hadn’t the Fascist beasts suffered the most devastating military defeat in the history of the world? If they hadn’t, what was the tremendous victory parade through Red Square all about? Where had all those Nazi standards and flags that proud Soviet soldiers dragged in the dust come from?
The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t want to admit they were beaten. The Russian zone in what was left of the shattered Reich, what had been eastern Germany and was now western Poland, what had been East Prussia and was now split between Poland and the USSR, western Czechoslovakia, the Soviet zone in Austria…Rebellion bubbled everywhere.
Bokov would have suspected the Western Allies of fomenting the trouble-the Soviet Union’s greatest fear had always been that the USA and Britain would end up in bed with Hitler, not Stalin-if he hadn’t known they had troubles of their own. They might even have had worse troubles than the USSR did, because they put them down less firmly.
Poland and Czechoslovakia were kicking out their Germans. The Soviets were doing the same thing in their chunk of East Prussia. What had been Konigsberg-a town the Nazis fought for like grim death-was now called Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s longtime henchmen. Reliable Russians poured in to replace the Germans, who were anything but.
Once Poland and Czechoslovakia were German-free, the uprisings there would fizzle out. That delighted Bokov less than it might have. You couldn’t expel all the Germans from the Soviet zones in Germany and Austria…could you? Not even Stalin, who never thought small, seemed ready for that.
And so the NKVD had to make do with lesser measures hereabouts. Mass executions avenged slain Soviet personnel. Mass deportations got rid of socially unreliable elements-and, often enough, of people grabbed at random to fill a quota. The survivors needed to understand they’d better not help or shelter Fascist bandits.
All that might have scared some of the remaining Germans into staying away from the bandits. Others, though, it only cemented to what should have been the dead Nazi cause.
Which was why Bokov bucketed along in a convoy of half a dozen jeeps, on his way south to Chemnitz. One jeep took the lead. Four more followed close together. The last one did rear-guard duty. The hope was that the formation would defeat bandits lurking by the side of the Autobahn with Panzerschreck or Panzerfaust-or, for that matter, with nothing fancier than a machine gun.
Bokov certainly hoped the stratagem worked. His neck, after all, was among those on the line here. This ploy was new. The bandits would take a little while to get used to it. After that…He knew his countrymen better than he wished he did. They would go on repeating it exactly-and the Germans would get used to it, and would find some way to beat it. Then the Red Army would take too long to figure out what to do differently.
Chemnitz wasn’t quite so devastated as Dresden had been. But Anglo-American bombers had visited the Saxon city, too. The old town hall and a red tower that had once been part of the city wall stood out from the sea of rubble.
In the old town hall worked the burgomeister, a cadaverous fellow named Max Muller. “Good to meet you, Comrade Captain!” he said, shaking Bokov’s hand. He belonged to the Social Unity Party of Germany, of course-the Russians wouldn’t have given him even the semblance of power if he hadn’t. And he might well have spent the Hitler years in Russian exile with Ulbricht if he so readily recognized Bokov’s rank badges.
“You’ve had a string of assassinations here,” Bokov said. Red Army soldiers had established a barbed-wire perimeter around the town hall. They wanted to keep Muller alive if they could. He was the fourth burgomeister Chemnitz had known since the surrender.
“We have,” he agreed now. Sweat glinted on his pale forehead, though the day was far from warm. He had to be wondering what the Heydrichites were plotting now-and who could blame him? “Neither our own resources nor those of the fraternal Soviet forces in the area have quelled them.”
He certainly sounded like a good Marxist-Leninist. All the same, Bokov’s voice was dry as he asked, “And what makes you think one more officer will be able to set things right like this?” He snapped his fingers.
“Oh, but, Comrade Captain, you’re not just one officer! You’re the NKVD!” Muller exclaimed.
“Well, not all of it,” Bokov said, more dryly still. He was glad this Fritz respected and feared the Soviet security apparatus. But he meant what he’d said before: there was only one of him.
“You have the rest behind you,” Muller declared in ringing tones.
The other NKVD men were probably goddamn glad they were nowhere near Chemnitz. The place stank of death. So did a lot of Germany, but this was worse.
A labor gang of Germans-old men in overalls, younger men in Wehrmacht rags, and women in everything under the sun-dumped rubble into wheelbarrows and carted it away. How many wheelbarrows full of broken bricks and shattered masonry did Chemnitz hold? How many did all the Soviet zone hold? How many did all of Germany hold? How many years would it take to clear them, and how big a mountain would they make added together?
A tall one, Bokov hoped. Then he wondered how big a mountain the rubble in the USSR would make. Leningrad and Stalingrad weren’t much besides rubble these days. Plenty of cities, some of them big ones, had changed hands four times, not just twice. As the Nazis fell back, they’d destroyed everything they could to keep the Red Army from using it against them.
How long would the Soviet Union take to get over the mauling the Fascist hyenas had given it? Vladimir Bokov scowled, not liking the answer that formed in his mind. Germany had caught hell, no doubt about it. But, even though the Red Army finally drove the invaders off with their tails between their legs, it was plain the USSR had caught whatever was worse than hell.