American Front gw-1 Read online

  Normally dour, he smiled from ear to ear as he went back inside.

  Captain Wilcox stabbed a finger out at Reginald Bartlett. "How'd you like to lay some barbed wire tonight?" he said.

  "Sir, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather lay one of those pretty little Red Cross nurses back at the aid station," Bartlett answered, deadpan.

  The Confederate soldiers who heard him laughed and snorted and cheered. One or two of them sent up Rebel yells to show they agreed with the sentiment expressed. Captain Wilcox grinned. By now, he'd got used to the idea that expecting Bartlett to take anything, war included, seriously was asking too much.

  "Only trouble is, Reggie, they wouldn't want to lay you," he said. "Your uniform is filthy, your face is grubby, you've got lice in your hair and nits in every seam of your clothes, and you smell like a polecat would if he didn't take a bath for about a year. Barbed wire, now, barbed wire doesn't care about any of that."

  "That's all true, sir," Bartlett agreed, "but barbed wire can't foxtrot, either. Honestly, sir-"

  It was a losing fight, and he knew it. It wasn't really even a fight at all, just a way to grumble about orders that was different from the profane complaints most men gave. When evening came, he would crawl out of the trench with a roll of barbed wire on his back, and he knew that, too. So did Captain Wilcox, who waved at him and went along the line to pick some more volunteers.

  Down in the trenches, you were fairly safe unless you did something stupid like showing yourself to the damnyankees on the other side of the wire, or unless a shell landed right by you, or unless the U.S. soldiers decided to make another probe toward the Roanoke River and happened to pick your stretch of the line to raid.

  Once you came out of the earthworks that protected you, though.. once you came out of them, machine guns weren't nuisances any more. They were menaces only too likely to make your family get a "The government of the Confederate States of America deeply regrets to inform you…" telegram. Rifle bullets ran around loose up there, too.

  And you were liable to run into damnyankees out between the lines doing the same sorts of things you were. Sometimes you'd work and they'd work and you'd pretend not to notice one another. And sometimes you'd go after them or they'd go after you with guns and bayonets and the short-handled shovels you used to dig holes in the ground. And then the rifles in both trench lines would open up, and the machine guns would start to hammer, and then oh Lord! how you wished you were back of the lines in bed with a nurse-or even down safe in your trench-instead of where you really were.

  Captain Wilcox had called Reggie's face grubby. Before he climbed up out of the trench, he rubbed mud on himself till he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The blacker you were, the harder it was for the Yankees to spot you.

  "We ought to send niggers up to do this for us," he said. "They're already black."

  "I hear tell they've tried that in Kentucky," Captain Wilcox said. "Didn't work. The Yankees shot at them like they were us, and they didn't have any guns to shoot back with. The ones who lived, you couldn't make 'em go up again."

  "Too bad," Reggie said. "Better them than me. Better them than me for just about any job I don't want to do, matter of fact." But when the captain said go, you went. Bartlett nodded to his companions. "Let's get rolling."

  The other half-dozen men nodded. He'd been fighting along the Roanoke longer than any of them, so they took his word as Gospel, even if he had no more rank than they did. He was that mystical, magical thing, a veteran. A lot of the men who'd come to the fight with him were dead now. That he wasn't was partly luck and partly being able to remember what he'd learned in his first few fights well enough not to repeat any of the stupid parts.

  "Stay low and go slow," he said now. "The less racket we make spreading the wire, the less chance the damnyankees have of starting to shoot at us."

  Some kind and thoughtful soul had made a stairway out of sandbags to help the heavily burdened wire men get out of the trench. Bartlett was grateful and angry at the same time: if he hadn't been able to get up onto the battered ground between the lines, he wouldn't have had to crawl forward toward the wire-and toward the enemy.

  It was a dark and cloudy night. For once, Reggie wouldn't have minded rain or even snow: nothing better to keep the U.S. forces from knowing he and his chums were out there. But if a storm hid in those clouds, it refused to come out.

  He set down his hands with great care every time he moved forward. Behind him, somebody let out a soft, disgusted oath, probably because he'd crawled over a soft, disgusting corpse or piece of corpse. The line had swung back and forth several times; a lot of the dead from both sides had gone without proper burial. And even those who had been thrown into hasty graves or holes in the ground might well have been disinterred by the endless, senseless plowing of the artillery. The smell was that of a meat market that had been out of ice for a month in the middle of a hot summer.

  Up above his head, something went fwoomp! "Freeze!" he hissed frantically as the parachute flare spread harsh white light over the field. If you didn't move, sometimes they wouldn't spot you even when you were out there in plain sight. Some of the men in his company spoke of walking right past deer that had bounded away once they'd gone by.

  Bartlett was no deer, but he knew he could be in some hunter's sights right now. His nose itched. His hand itched. His scalp and the hair under his arms always itched. He directed a few unkind thoughts to the cooties he carried around with him. But he didn't scratch. He didn't move. He did his best not to blink.

  Some Yankee with a rifle started shooting, somewhere too close for com fort. Bartlett froze even colder. But whatever the U.S. soldier thought he saw, it wasn't the Confederate wiring party. Hissing and sputtering, the parachute flare sank ever so slowly, going from white toward red as it did. At last it died, plunging the debatable ground into darkness once more.

  "Come on," Bartlett whispered. "Come on, but come quiet."

  Like most things, that was easier said than done. When at last they got to the wire barrier they were to strengthen, the men couldn't just unroll the wire and scoot for home. To make it a proper obstruction, they had to mount it on poles and shove the poles in the ground. In some places, the ground was damp. Things were easy there. In some places, though, the ground was frozen. You had a choice then: either stab the supports into the dirt, knowing they wouldn't stay well, or hammer at them with a shovel or whatever you had, knowing the noise was liable to draw fire. Bartlett opted for quiet. "Hell," he muttered to himself, "it ain't like there's not enough wire out here already."

  Somebody, though, somebody had to get intrepid. Tap, tap tap. In the middle of a quiet night, the noise might as well have been a shell going off. Along with everybody else in the wiring party, Bartlett made frantic shushing noises. The damnyankees would start tapping, too, the two-inch tap an experienced machine gunner used on the barrel of his weapon to traverse it through its deadly arc of fire.

  And sure enough, the U.S. soldiers did open up, first rifles, then machine guns. When a bullet clipped the barbed wire, it sparked blue. There were a lot of blue sparks, as if lightning bugs had suddenly come to roost between the lines of the two armies.

  "Out of here!" Bartlett said urgently. He'd just about finished unreeling his wire; he unhooked the roll from his back and, suddenly lighter, hurried back toward the Confederate front line. Never had a muddy, stinking hole in the ground seemed so welcome, so wonderful.

  Bullets zipping all around him, he dove into a shell hole. There was a puddle at the bottom of it. A horrible stink rose when he roiled the water. Something- or more likely someone-had died in this hole, too long ago.

  A series of two-inch taps sent the Yankees' stream of machine-gun bullets past him. He thought he could make it to the trench before the stream came back. Leaping up out of the shell hole, he ran for all he was worth. Somebody else, panting like a dog, sprinted stride for stride with him.

  Slap! His comrade, whoever he was, we
nt down: even with the machine gun busy elsewhere, plenty of rifle bullets were still in the air. Swearing, Bartlett grabbed the other man, slung him over his back in place of the roll of wire, and stumbled on.

  He almost went into the trench headfirst. Soldiers caught him, steadied him. "Who have I got here?" he asked, easing the man on his back to the ground.

  Somebody struck a match. "It's Jordan," he said, and then, a moment later, quite unnecessarily, "He's dead."

  "Good job you picked him up even so," Captain Wilcox said out of the darkness. "You can't know, not for sure. How did the wiring go?"

  Bartlett took a minute or so to stop gasping for breath and to let his heart slow as terror began to recede. "Routine, sir," he answered then. "Just routine."

  "Routine," Sam Carsten said. "Just routine."

  Hiram Kidde laughed out loud. "Ain't one damn thing about it that's routine," the gunner's mate said. "Wearin' summer whites in February, sweatin' in summer whites in February, bein' in the Sandwich Islands at all…" His grin was broad and delighted. "Still can't believe we caught the limeys with their drawers down."

  "Might as well believe it," Carsten answered. "It's true." He waved to show what he meant. The two off-duty sailors strolled along the grounds on the eastern side of the entranceway to Pearl Harbor. When the British ruled the Sandwich Islands, they'd built a parade ground there, so their Marines could get in the drill they needed. The parade ground was somewhat the worse for wear after the American invasion of the islands, but Marines still paraded on it: U.S. Marines in uniforms of forest green, several shades darker than Army men wore.

  "Eyes-right!" the Marine drill sergeant shouted, marching along with his men. "Sing out-let me hear it, you birds!"

  "One, two, three, four," the men sounded off. "Miss Maggie's why we'll win the war!"

  Not even a Marine drill sergeant, as fearsome a creature as any ever born, could make the young men ignore the spectacular woman who came out to the parade grounds several days a week to watch them march-and to be watched. The sergeant, a man of sense, didn't even try. He stared at Maggie Stevenson, too. And so did Sam Carsten and "Cap'n" Kidde.

  Maggie Stevenson had been in business for herself when the Union Jack flew over Honolulu, and the recent change of ownership hadn't fazed her a bit. Indeed, because there were more American sailors, soldiers, and Marines here now than there had been Englishmen before, her business was better than ever.

  "There's one limey I'd like to catch with her drawers down," Carsten said reverently.

  "Limey?" Kidde said. "I hear tell she's from Nebraska."

  "'Cap'n,' with Maggie it's not what you hear, it's what you see."

  Kidde nodded reverently. There was a lot of Maggie to see. She was within an inch of Carsten's height, and was probably even fairer, but on her it looked good. She shielded her face from the sun with a broad-brimmed straw hat. Like a lot of women in Honolulu, she wore a holoku, a baggy, native-style dress that covered her from neck to ankles. Hers, though, wasn't cotton or linen. It was green silk, somewhere between translucent and transparent. When she stood between men and the sun, as she made a point of doing, you could see there was a hell of a lot of woman under there.

  After thorough and judicious study, Hiram Kidde said, "Sam, I don't think she's wearin' drawers." He shook his head. "And you can get right there, too, just for the asking." He sighed. "Amazing."

  "Not quite just for the asking," Carsten said. "For the paying. If she's not the richest gal in these islands, it ain't for lack of effort."

  "Effort?" Kidde laughed. "There's coal-heavers down in the black gang don't work as hard as she does, I hear tell. You know about the setup dear Maggie's got?"

  "Tell me," Carsten said. "Beats hell out of thinking about cleaning out a five-inch gun, that's for damn sure." He winked. "'Course, you only got a five-inch gun, Miss Maggie ain't gonna want anything to do with you."

  Kidde had been inhaling to say something, which meant he choked when he started to laugh. Sam Carsten pounded him on the back. "You got to watch that," he wheezed when he could talk again.

  "I was watching that," Sam said, watching Maggie Stevenson, who was watching the Marines watch her.

  "Shut up," Kidde said. "What the hell was I talkin' about? Oh, yeah- her place. They say she's got this big room with four, maybe five, Pullman-sized compartments in there, nothin' in any of 'em 'cept a red couch and a horny guy on it, and she just goes from couch to couch to couch, long as she can walk."

  "No wonder she's rich," Carsten said, with the genuine respect a professional in one field gives a professional in another.

  "Yup," Kidde agreed. "And she's got 'em lined up for every damn compartment, too, even if she does charge thirty bucks a throw." His hard, blunt face grew dreamy for a moment. "She must be a piece of ass and a half."

  "Yeah, reckon so," Carsten said. "But most of a month's pay- hell, more than a month's pay if you're just an ordinary seaman- for five minutes, ten tops? That's a lot to spend just to get your ashes hauled."

  "She's got a lot-" the gunner's mate started.

  "Of satisfied customers," Sam said, beating him to the punch line. "Yeah." They both laughed. Carsten scratched the angle of his jaw. "I dunno. You can take yourself to just an ordinary everyday crib and lay one o' them Jap girls or a Filipino for a couple-three bucks. Maggie can't be that much better… can she?" But he was still watching the undisputed queen of Honolulu 's ladies of the evening.

  "You can get drunk on that olikau popskull the natives cook up here, too," Hiram Kidde observed. "If gettin' drunk is the only reason you're drinkin', fine. But every now and then, don't you hanker after some real sip-pin' whiskey?"

  Carsten scratched his jaw without answering. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. He needed a shave. He had a razor back on the Dakota, but you could give a dime to one of the Chinese barbers in the little shops all around Pearl Harbor, and he'd shave you closer and smoother than you could do it for yourself. He got shaved a lot these days. His meals and his hammock were taken care of, so he didn't have a hell of a lot to spend his money on.

  The drill sergeant led the marching Marines back toward the British barracks they were occupying. They were too well disciplined to go with really laggard step, but their footwork showed less mechanical precision than usual. A few sailors weren't enough of an audience for Maggie Stevenson to keep herself on display. She retreated to her carriage. The driver, a little, dark Oriental sweating in top hat and cutaway, flicked the reins. Two perfectly matched black horses bore her away. Carsten and Kidde both watched till the carriage was out of sight.

  Sam went and bathed, then headed to one of the barbershops and paid a couple of cents extra for a splash of bay rum. The British had set up an electric trolley between Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, though the motormen who took your nickel were uniformly Japs. Carsten wasn't the only military man who got out at the Kapalama stop, east of downtown. Some of the men in white or green acted as if they knew exactly where they were going. He followed them.

  The half-timbered house might have been transplanted from London, though it wouldn't have had palm trees around it there. From what "Cap'n" Kidde had said, Carsten had expected to see a line around the block. He didn't. Then the Oriental driver waved him and the rest of the newcomers around to the back. The line was there. Discreet, he thought.

  In the Navy, you got used to lines. What was waiting at the end of this one was better than any of the other things for which he'd lined up. He shot the breeze with some of the other guys there. A couple of them seemed too embarrassed about being where they were to say much. Most, though, like him, took it for granted.

  When he got up to the back door, another slanteye in formal wear took his money. The fellow wore a pistol, concealed not quite well enough in a shoulder holster. Carsten didn't blame him, not a bit. If Maggie Stevenson's place didn't keep as much cash around as your average bank, he'd eat his hat.

  Still another Oriental, also armed, stood at the doorway to the
big room Kidde had talked about. "You go Number Three," he said, pointing. Sure enough, the little compartments had brass numbers on the doors, as if they were hotel rooms. Carsten went into Number 3. Inside were a mirror on one wall, a red couch, a pitcher and basin and a cake of soap on a stool, and some hooks on which to hang his clothes.

  Sam used the hooks, then lay back on the couch to wait. The noises coming from one of the other cubicles were highly entertaining. Maggie Stevenson worked her way through the other three-there were four in all, not five-and then opened a door on the far side of his compartment. She came in wearing nothing but a smile and a light sheen of sweat. Carsten stared and stared. "Hell of a woman," he muttered; what you could see through even the most diaphanous holoku barely gave you a clue.

  "Hello, sailor," she said, her voice English, sure enough. She lathered up the soap and washed Sam's privates. "All part of the service," she said, smiling. Then she bent down and kissed him there, right on the tip, as if it were the end of his nose. "Now-what would you like?"

  "You get on top," he said. "I want to see you, too."

  "All right." And she did. Those perfect, pink-tipped breasts hung like ripe fruit, inches from his face. He squeezed them and kissed them and licked them. His hands clenched her meaty backside tight.

  He wanted to make it last as long as he could. But he hadn't had any in a while, and Maggie made her money by having lots of customers on any one day, so she tried hard to hurry him along. She knew just what she was doing, too. Try as he would to hold back, he bucked and jerked and came, hard enough to leave him dizzy for a moment.

  "Hope I see you again, sailor," Maggie said. She leaned over him for a second, just far enough that her nipples brushed against the hair and skin of his chest. Then she got off him and off the couch and headed for the next little cubicle.