The Man with the Iron Heart Read Free Page B

assholes deserved, too.”
    “I ain’t arguing,” Dom said.
    The POW camp looked to be getting more organized by the minute. Charlie had to sign a paper saying he’d brought in six krauts. The corporal who manned a typewriter actually gave him a receipt for them. “The fuck’m I supposed to do with this?” Pytlak asked. “I feel like I just got into the slave-trading business.”
    “Hang on to it,” the typist said. “We need to ask you anything about these guys, now we can.”
    “Hot damn,” Charlie said, and then, “Jesus! I gotta figure out how many points I have. Sooner I get out of the Army, happier I’ll be.”
    You earned discharge points for time in the service, for time overseas, for medals, for campaign stars on theater ribbons, and for kids under eighteen back home. Eighty-five would bring you home. Till now, Pytlak hadn’t worried about them much. But the war was over. That still took getting used to; damned if it didn’t.
And damned if I wanna hang around on occupation duty, either,
he thought.
    “Don’t get hot and bothered, man,” the typist advised him. “They’re gonna ship all our asses to the Pacific so we can punch Hirohito’s ticket for him, too.”
    Charlie’s reply was detailed and profane. Dom also chimed in with some relevant opinions. The corporal just grinned. He’d got under their skins, so he won the round. The really evil thing was, on top of that he was liable to be right.
    Finally, in disgust, Pytlak said, “I’m gone. Next to this crap, Lichtenau looks goddamn good. You with me, Dom?”
    “Oh, hell, yes,” Lombardo said.
    They were both shaking their heads as they trudged back toward the town. “Fight the fuckin’ Japs,” Charlie muttered. “That’s just what I fuckin’ need. Time they ship my butt home, I’ll have a long white beard.”
    Dom was more than ready to help him bitch. Dom was always ready to help a guy bitch. He’d been pretty handy with that Schmeisser when they really needed it, too. Before long, it’d be nothing but a souvenir—that or more scrap metal, one. Charlie had heard they weren’t letting GIs ship weapons home. One more chickenshit regulation, almost as bad as getting a receipt for POWs.
    He and Dom came up to the corpse of the German truck. The scrounger who’d been messing around there was gone. “Who’s that asshole gonna sell his scrap to?” Charlie said. “Us—you wait and see. We’re dumb enough to pay good money to put these mothers back on their feet now that we stomped ’em.”
    “Yeah, that’s like us, all right,” Dom agreed. “We—”
    The truck blew up. Next thing Charlie knew, he was sprawled on the ground a surprisingly long way from the road. Dom—no, a piece of Dom—lay not far away. Charlie tried to reach out. His arm didn’t want to work. When he looked down at what was left of himself, he understood why. It didn’t hurt. Then, all at once, it did.
    His shriek bubbled through the blood filling his mouth. Mercifully, blackness enfolded him.
             

    L IEUTENANT L OU W EISSBERG LOOKED AT THE CRATER BY THE SIDE OF the road. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Looks like a five hundred-pound bomb went off here.”
    That won him the first respectful glance he’d got from the ordnance sergeant already on the scene. “Damn near, sir,” Toby Benton agreed, his slow Texas or Oklahoma drawl halfway to being a different language from Lou’s clotted New Jersey. “Reckon some Jerries snuck one of their two hundred and fifty-kilo jobs into the truck an’ then touched the mother off. Blew two of our guys to hell and gone.” He pointed over to the corpses.
    They’d left the GIs where they lay, so Weissberg could look them over and use his brilliance to pull a Sherlock Holmes and tell everybody what was what. To ordinary soldiers, the Counter-Intelligence Corps did stuff like that. Lou belonged to the CIC. He wished like hell he could do stuff like that. Unfortunately, unlike ordinary