Joe Steele Read online

  “Some of the people who could help me a lot on this project are serving terms in labor encampments on one charge or another,” Rickover said. “If I can get them released—”

  “You can use them,” Joe Steele said. “They’ll be released if they do what I need fast enough. In the meantime, we’ll set up your project as a special labor encampment. If they do any more wrecking, we’ll dispose of them. Be plain about that when you recruit them, understand me?”

  “Yes, sir. I will do that, sir,” Rickover said.

  “All right, then. Go ahead.”

  Charlie took his courage in both hands and asked, “Sir, what will you do with Einstein? He’s too famous just to bump off.”

  “We took him in when he had to run from Hitler. This is how he thanks us? By keeping quiet about something so important?” Joe Steele shook his head. “I said it before—he is the king of wreckers. He will get what he deserves. Any of the others we took in who also kept still about this, they will get it, too.” His eyes warned that, if Charlie said one more word, he would get some, too.

  He even had a point . . . of sorts. But Einstein might have said more had he thought more of the man to whom he would be saying it. As one of that man’s aides, Charlie was in no position to point out such things. He kept quiet. Poor Einstein, he thought.

  * * *

  Mike squatted in a cratered field, stripping and cleaning his grease gun. Not far away lay the highway that ran from Kyoto to Tokyo. American forces were supposed to have cut the road already. They had cut it, in fact. A Jap counterattack had opened it again, at least for a little while.

  Several men from Mike’s company stood guard while he cared for his weapon. He was still a sergeant, but he headed a company anyhow. Nobody who’d been a scalp in an encampment would ever make officer’s rank, even if he commanded a regiment. Captain Magnusson had commanded a regiment till he picked up another leg wound. He was on the shelf again, but he was supposed to get better.

  Here on Honshu, they actually had fought girls carrying spears. Jugs would have laughed if he hadn’t stopped a machine-gun round with his nose outside of Nagasaki. Mike hadn’t thought it was funny. He didn’t want to kill those high-school kids. They sure as hell wanted to kill him, though. Sometimes you didn’t get many choices, not if you wanted to go on breathing.

  He clicked the magazine back into place and chambered a round. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

  One of his men, a nervous little greaser named Gomez, pointed west along the highway. “Maybe we better hold up a second, Sarge,” he said. “Looks like something’s comin’ towards us.”

  “Well, shit,” Mike said mildly. “When you’re right, you’re right. I don’t wanna fuck with Jap tanks.”

  The Japs didn’t have many. They never had. The ones they did have weren’t as tough as American Shermans. That didn’t mean they were anything foot soldiers wanted to face, though. Mike could have yelled for one of the company’s bazooka teams. But stalking the tanks wouldn’t be easy—there wasn’t much cover close by the road. He lit a cigarette instead. He’d done plenty of fighting for his country. He knew he’d do more, but not right this minute.

  There were four tanks: two, then a gap, then two more. And in the gap . . . “Well, will you look at that?” Mike said. “I wonder who the big shot is.” In the gap, plainly being escorted by all that armor, came a plain black car. A Japanese flag fluttered on a small staff—it could have been a radio aerial—sticking up from the right front fender.

  “Some general, I betcha,” Nacho Gomez said.

  He didn’t suggest going after the important Jap. The men with Mike hadn’t seen as much as he had. But they’d all seen plenty, even if the landing west of Tokyo was their first and not their third or their sixth. They were still ready to fight. Nobody was eager any more. Sooner or later—probably sooner—those tanks would run into American armor. That would take care of that.

  As a matter of fact, that got taken care of even sooner than Mike expected. Half a dozen Hellcats screamed down out of the sky. Flame rippled under their wings as they fired air-to-ground rockets at the tanks and the car. Their heavy machine guns hammered away, too.

  Tanks were hideously vulnerable to strikes on the engine decking and on top of the turret. Their armor was thinnest there, not that Japanese tanks carried real thick armor anywhere. Tank designers didn’t worry—or hadn’t yet worried—about their creations’ being attacked from the air.

  Three of the tanks burned like torches. So did the passenger car. The fourth tank didn’t seem badly damaged. It stopped just the same. The whole crew—all five men—jumped out and ran to the blazing car. They paid no attention to anything else in the world.

  “Come on, boys,” Mike said. “Let’s see what they’ve got ants in their pants about.”

  Disposing of the tank crew was the easiest thing he’d done since hitting the beach at Tarawa two and a half years before. A brass band, complete with high-kicking majorettes, could have come up to the Japs and they never would have noticed. The Americans shot four of them before the last one finally spun around, pistol in hand. He managed to fire once, wildly, before he went down, too.

  Mike finished him with a shot to the head at point-blank range. Then he said, “What did they think was more important than watching their backs?”

  The Japs had managed to drag one man out of the car. The pants on his good Western suit were still smoldering, but it didn’t matter. Two heavy machine-gun bullets from a Hellcat had caught him square in the middle of the chest. Shock alone might have killed him. If it hadn’t, those .50-caliber rounds, big as a man’s thumb, had torn up his heart and lungs but good—he was dead as shoe leather.

  He’d been in his mid-forties, on the skinny side, with buck teeth and a mustache. Ice walked up Mike’s back as he recognized him. The only Japanese face that might have been more familiar to an American was Tojo’s, and Tojo had died in battle leading troops against the Coronet landings.

  “Holy shit,” Nacho said softly, so Mike wasn’t imagining what he thought he was seeing.

  “Fuck me up the asshole if this isn’t Hirohito. We—the planes, I mean—just sent the goddamn Emperor to his goddamn ancestors.” Mike kept staring at the scrawny little corpse.

  So did the rest of the Americans. “If the Japs don’t quit now, with him dead, they ain’t never gonna,” Nacho Gomez said.

  That they wouldn’t quit even now struck Mike as much too likely. But they might. Clobber somebody hard enough and often enough and the message had to get through sooner or later . . . didn’t it? He could hope so, anyway.

  “If they quit . . .” He had to try twice before he could get it out: “If they do quit, the fuckin’ war’s over.” His stunned wits started to work again. “Nacho!”

  “Yes, Sergeant?” Nacho couldn’t have sounded so crisp since escaping from basic training.

  “Haul ass back there and bring up somebody with a radio or a field telephone. We gotta let the brass know pronto,” Mike said. Nacho nodded and started to dash away. Mike held up a hand to stop him. “Hang on, man! Bring up all the reinforcements you can grab, too. If the Japs find out what happened to Hirohito, sure as hell they’re gonna want his carcass back, and we’ll have a big fucking fight to worry about.”

  “I’m on it, Sergeant.” The greaser took off toward the rear at a dead run. Mike envied his speed. Well, the kid was less than half his age and probably hadn’t been in an encampment all that long before he decided a punishment brigade made a better bet.

  He might even have been right. Who would have imagined that even half an hour earlier?

  Mike pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging a foxhole. Any time you were going to stay in one place longer than a few minutes, any time you thought you’d have a fight on your hands, a hole in the ground was your best buddy. Even a shallow scrape with some dirt in front
of it helped. The more time you had, the deeper you dug. It was that simple.

  The rest of the Americans followed his lead. It was just as well they did, too, because Japanese soldiers did start coming up to see what had happened to their tanks—and to the car those tanks were escorting. The Americans’ rifle and grease-gun fire kept them at a distance till . . .

  The cavalry came to their rescue. It wasn’t quite like a Western serial, but close enough. Some of the soldiers who hurried up with Nacho Gomez did ride in jeeps and halftracks. Those tough little vehicles came as close to the days of the Old West as anything in modern warfare.

  A lieutenant colonel who didn’t have a P on his sleeve crawled up to look the corpse over for himself. He might not serve in a punishment brigade, but the way he moved said he’d been around the block a time or three. He nodded to Mike, whose foxhole lay closest to Hirohito. “That’s him, all right,” he said. “I was posted to our embassy here in the late Thirties. I saw him several times at parades and such, once or twice up close. No doubt about it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mike said. “People know what he looks like.”

  “They sure do.” The officer didn’t treat him like a nigger because he did wear a P, which was nice. The man gestured someone else forward: a photographer, who started immortalizing the fact that the Emperor of Japan was mortal.

  “Sir, what do you think the Japs will do now?” Mike asked.

  “Damned if I know,” the light colonel answered. “I hope they give up, but who knows? What have they got left to fight for?” He pointed north. “It isn’t just us, either. It’s the Russians, too. We smashed the Germans between us till there was nothing left. If we have to, we’ll treat the Japs the same way.”

  “Here’s hoping we don’t have to.” Mike had had enough war for any hundred men.

  “Yeah, here’s hoping,” the officer said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  * * *

  “My God!” Charlie stared out the window of the President’s airliner in awe and disbelief. “Will you look at that?”

  Lazar Kagan sat beside him. “Lean back a little so I can,” Kagan said. Charlie did. Kagan looked, then shook his head. “Not much left of the place, is there?”

  “Hardly anything,” Charlie said. They were flying low over what was left of southern Honshu. Till Hirohito bought a plot, the Japanese had fought with everything they had, from tanks and fighter planes down to teeth and fingernails. They’d killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and probably a similar number of Red Army men. Whether you called that surpassing bravery or surpassing insanity depended on how you looked at things. Japanese casualties ran way up into the millions, and that was just talking about deaths. Then you added in the maimed, the crippled, the blinded . . . Not much was left of what had been a great country, even if you didn’t like it.

  Only after Hirohito was dead, and was known to the Japs to be dead, did they despair at last. American officers had sensibly kept ordinary American soldiers from mistreating the corpse. They’d put it on ice, in fact, to keep it as fresh as they could. And, when the Japs asked for it, they gave it back under flag of truce so it could be cremated.

  That polite gesture also helped spur the surrender. Farther north, Trotsky’s men hadn’t done anything so accommodating. But even the Japs could see they had no chance to resist the Russians once they’d yielded to the United States. The brigadier general who’d signed that surrender document slit his belly immediately afterwards to atone for his shame, but the surrender remained in force.

  The airliner was descending toward the small, no-account town of Wakamatsu. No-account or not, it was the biggest place on the Agano River, which marked most of the border between American-occupied Japan to the south and Russian-occupied Japan to the north. Joe Steele had come halfway around the world and Leon Trotsky was coming a quarter of the way around the world to talk about what they wanted to do with Asia.

  Trotsky was already making his ideas all too clear. He had his Red boss in Korea, which his troops had taken from the Japs. Manchukuo went back to being Manchuria and to belonging to China, but the Red Army handed it—and all the Japanese weapons captured there, and no doubt some Russian weapons as well—to Chinese Red Mao Tse-tung, not to Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S.-backed President of China. Mao and Chiang had been squabbling long before the Japs swarmed into China. Now that the Japs were gone, they could pick up where they’d left off.

  And the Russian half of Japan had been tagged the Japanese People’s Republic. Trotsky’d found some Japanese Reds the Kempeitai hadn’t hunted down and murdered. They were puppets for Field Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, who gave the orders—well, after he got them from Trotsky.

  American-held Japan—the southern half of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku—currently wore the clumsy handle of the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan. Hirohito’s son, Akihito, was not quite thirteen. He was the constitutional monarch, though the constitution hadn’t been finished yet. As the Japanese Reds took their marching orders from Marshal Tolbukhin, Akihito’s main job was to do whatever General Eisenhower told him to do.

  Clunks and bumps announced that the landing gear was lowering. The plane landed smoothly enough. The runway was brand new, made by U.S. Army engineers. Wakamatsu had been bombed—Charlie didn’t think any towns in Japan hadn’t been bombed—but the surrender came before it saw an infantry battle. Some of the buildings were still standing, then.

  Humid late-summer air came in when the airliner’s door opened. Charlie wrinkled his nose; that air held the stench of death. He’d smelled it even more strongly down on Kyushu, where the plane had stopped to refuel. It was older there, but the fighting had been worse.

  Trotsky’s plane landed an hour after Joe Steele’s. Watching it come in, Charlie thought it was a DC-3. But it wasn’t: it was a Russian model no doubt based on the Douglas workhorse, but one that sported a dorsal machine-gun turret.

  Joe Steele greeted Trotsky on the runway. This was between the two of them. Clement Attlee, the new British Prime Minister, had no horse in this race. And Russia and the USA were the countries that counted in this brave new postwar world.

  Photographers Red and capitalist snapped away as the two leaders shook hands. “The war is over. At last, the war is over,” Joe Steele said. “I thank you and the Red Army for your brave aid in the victory against Japan.”

  “We were glad to help our ally,” Trotsky replied through his translator. We were glad to help ourselves, Charlie realized that meant. But the Red leader hadn’t finished yet: “And I thank you and the U.S. Army for your brave aid in the victory against the Hitlerites.”

  Joe Steele started to say something else, then stopped when he realized he’d been given the glove. He sent Trotsky a glare that should have paralyzed him. Trotsky smirked back. Joe Steele couldn’t order him to a labor encampment. He had labor encampments of his own. He had more of them and he’d had them longer than the President.

  “Let’s do what we can to make sure that neither one of us has to fight again for many years to come,” Joe Steele said after a pause for thought.

  “That would be good,” Trotsky agreed.

  “Even revolution needs a vacation, eh?” The President tried a jab of his own.

  “Revolution never sleeps anywhere.” Trotsky might have been quoting Holy Writ. As far as he was concerned, he was.

  Joe Steele, by contrast, liked quoting past Presidents. He did it again now: “Yes, Jefferson said ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ We’ve rid the world of savage tyrants these past few years.”

  “So we have.” Trotsky nodded—and smirked once more. “We’ve rid it of a good many patriots, too.”

  Dinner that evening was at the Army base by the runway. The food was American style. The toasts were drunk Russian fashion: stand up, say your say, and knock it
back. This time, unlike in Basra, Charlie was ready. “To peace between North Japan and South Japan!” he said when his turn came, giving the half-nations their newspaper names instead of the clumsy official titles.

  Russians and Americans drank to that. No doubt the Japs would have, too, had any been invited. But this was a gathering of the victors, not the vanquished.

  Trotsky seemed more easygoing than he had while discussing European affairs. When Joe Steele proposed a three-mile-wide demilitarized zone between the parts of Japan the great powers held, Trotsky waggled his hand as if to say it wasn’t worth arguing about. “You took the Balkans seriously,” Joe Steele teased.

  “Oh, yes.” Trotsky turned grave again. “The fight against Hitler was a struggle for survival. Another such fight in Europe would be, too.” He eyed the President before finishing, “But this over here? This was only a war.”

  The longer Charlie thought about that, the more sense it made. A professor or a striped-pants diplomat would have said Japan didn’t affect Russia’s vital national interests the way Germany did. Trotsky got the message across saying what he said. He got his own cold-bloodedness across, too.

  Joe Steele never mentioned uranium. Charlie didn’t know how Rickover was doing with the project that had cost Albert Einstein—and, from small stories in the paper, several other prominent nuclear physicists, one here, one there, one now, one then—a discreetly untimely demise. Charlie couldn’t very well grab the President by the lapel and ask, Say, how’s that uranium bomb coming? If Joe Steele wanted him to know, he’d know. If Joe Steele didn’t, he’d find out with everybody else, or he’d never find out at all.

  Of course, Leon Trotsky never mentioned uranium, either. Was that because he’d never heard of it? Or was it because he also had scientists and engineers slaving away? There was a fascinating riddle, especially after Charlie had tossed down enough toasts to get toasted.

  He didn’t ruin himself the way he had in the Iraqi city. Despite aspirins and Vitamin B12, though, he still felt it the next morning. He slouched toward coffee (mandatory) and breakfast (optional). As he left the Quonset hut he’d shared with Kagan, a trim young first lieutenant said, “Excuse me, Mr. Sullivan, sir, but there’s a noncom who’d like to speak to you.”