Joe Steele Read online

  “Why not?” Charlie exclaimed. Propaganda points danced in his head.

  Joe Steele looked at him the way he looked at Pat when his son asked a child’s question. “Well, Sullivan, do you suppose the Japs are flying all those F-80s and B-29s?”

  Charlie deflated. “Oh,” he said. Then he brightened. “But North Japan invaded South Japan. We’re helping the South Japanese defend themselves. Trotsky’s pilots are helping the aggressors.”

  “If you can do something with it, go ahead.” The President still sounded like a man humoring a little boy. He scratched his mustache. “What we really have to do is stop the bastards before they take Tokyo. That wouldn’t look good at all. Can’t let it happen.” He nodded in a way that said there would be some dead generals if it did happen.

  Seeing that Joe Steele didn’t have anything else to tell him, Charlie got out of there. He fiddled around with the news that the Russians were flying planes for North Japan. Fiddle around was as much as he did. He couldn’t manage to bring it out in a way that didn’t show the Americans were doing more than just flying planes for South Japan. If not for American boots on the ground, the whole fragile Constitutional Monarchy of Japan might get swept away.

  And one pair of those boots belonged to Mike. Charlie hoped his brother was okay. Hope was all he could do; he hadn’t heard from Mike since the fighting broke out.

  Idly, or not so idly, he wondered what kind of dope J. Edgar Hoover had on Harold Stassen. Whatever it was, it would poison the well during the campaign. Joe Steele might be slowing down, but he hadn’t stopped. He wasn’t about to lose an election, not if he could help it. And, as Charlie had reason to know, he damn well could.

  * * *

  Utsunomiya was one more medium-sized Japanese town, about as important, or as unimportant, in the scheme of things here as Omaha was in the States. It was also one of those places that might find its way into the history books by getting drenched in blood.

  If the North Japanese broke through at Utsunomiya, Mike had no idea what would stop them this side of Tokyo. He was only a first sergeant, of course. He had a bug’s-eye view of the battlefield, not a bird’s-eye view. But, by the way the brass kept piling American troops and the steadier units of the Constitutional Guard into the fight, they felt the same way.

  He and his section were dug in on the northern outskirts of Utsunomiya. If they had to fall back, they had orders to fight inside the town, too. Mike hoped they wouldn’t have to. Where they were now marked the deepest penetration into South Japan the North Japanese had made.

  Enemy bodies swelled in the sun in the fields north of town. That sickly-sweet stench was horribly familiar to Mike. It didn’t just fill your nostrils. It soaked into cotton and wool, too; you brought it with you when you left the battlefield.

  A killed T-34/85, a hole in its side armor, sat not far from his foxhole. He eyed the steel corpse with a healthy respect. One T-34/85 could make two or three Shermans say uncle. The Russian tank was faster than its American foe, it had better armor, and its gun was more powerful. The Sherman did have better fire control—a Sherman’s gunner was more likely to hit what he aimed at. But if the round didn’t get through, what good was a hit? This particular T-34/85 hadn’t been lucky.

  Or maybe a Pershing had got it. Pershings were definitely the big kids on the block, but there weren’t enough of them to go around. Mike hoped like anything more were on the way.

  Cautiously, he stuck his head up out of the foxhole. The North Japanese had pulled back a couple of miles, probably to gather themselves for one more push. He could see them moving around in the distance, but not what they were up to. He wished American artillery would hit them harder.

  Then flames rippled from trucks parked over there. Lances of fire stabbed up into the sky. “Hit the dirt!” Mike yelled to his men. “Katyushas!”

  He’d heard that the Red Army’s rocket salvos scared the Nazis worse than anything else. He believed it. They sure as hell terrified him. He huddled in his hole as the rockets screamed down. They burst with deafening roars. Blast made breathing hard. Fragments of hot, sharp steel screamed through the air. Katyushas could devastate a whole regiment if they caught it out in the open.

  But the Americans weren’t out in the open. And the rocket barrage seemed to wake up the U.S. gunners. As the North Japanese tanks and foot soldiers surged forward, 105s and 155s started dropping shells among them. Purely by luck, one scored a direct hit on a T-34/85. It went up in a blaze of glory as all its ammo blew at once.

  A Sherman clanked up and sat behind the dead Russian tank near Mike. Using the T-34/85 as a shield, it pumped high-explosive rounds at the enemy infantry. It couldn’t kill enemy tanks till they got closer, and sensibly didn’t try.

  Mike held his fire. A grease gun was a murder mill inside a couple of hundred yards. Past that range, it was pretty much useless.

  Corsairs and Hellcats roared in low, pounding the North Japanese troops with their machine guns and dropping napalm on their heads. The prop-driven Navy planes were obsolete for air-to-air combat, but they still made dandy ground-attack machines.

  The North Japanese came on anyhow. They had a few old Russian fighters, but not so many planes as the Americans did. No one could say their foot soldiers weren’t brave. Mike wished he could say that. He wouldn’t have been so nervous.

  Before long, he was banging away with his submachine gun. He greased one Jap who was about to throw a grenade his way. That was as close as the enemy got. Try as the North Japanese would, they couldn’t bang their way past the defenders and into Utsunomiya.

  Sullenly, they pulled back again as the sun went down in blood to the west. Mike discovered he had a gash on one arm. He had no idea when he’d got it. It didn’t start to hurt till he realized it was there. He dusted it with sulfa powder and slapped on a wound bandage. If an officer noticed before he healed up, he might get another oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart. If not, he didn’t care enough to make any kind of fuss.

  He lit a cigarette. The smoke made him feel better for a little while. “Fuck,” he said wearily. “I think we held ’em.”

  * * *

  Joe Steele’s voice came out of the radio: “It looks like we have stabilized the front in Japan. Now we have to clear the invaders from the Constitutional Monarchy and drive them back across the border they violated. I am sorry to say this may not be quick, easy, or cheap. But we will do it. We have to do it. The peace of the whole world demands that we contain Red expansion wherever Trotsky’s minions try it. Like Nazism, world revolution is an idea whose time has come—and gone.”

  He went on to talk about rooting out Red spies and traitors at home, and about the way the economy was booming. Charlie listened with reluctant but real admiration. “There’s life in the old boy yet,” he said.

  “It seems that way.” Esther never went out on a limb to show what she thought of Joe Steele, but Charlie had no doubts on that score. She eyed him. “How much of the speech is yours?”

  “Bits and pieces,” he answered honestly. “Half a dozen people feed him words and ideas. He stirs them all together, takes what he likes, and adds his own stuff. The bit about containing the Reds—I came up with the word. It’s something he wants to do. Maybe we can make it work in Japan and in Europe.”

  “How about in China?” Esther asked.

  “How about that?” Charlie said, deadpan. Mao kept gaining ground; Chiang kept giving it. “Mao won’t win before the election, anyway. It’s only two weeks away. That will give us a while to figure out what to do about China going Red.”

  “If Joe Steele wins,” his wife said.

  “Oh, he’ll win.” Charlie sounded sure because he was sure. He agreed with both John Nance Garner and Stas Mikoian: Joe Steele would be President of the United States as long as he wanted to be.

  Esther eyed him again. “How much do the election results they annou
nce have to do with the real ones?”

  She’d never asked him that before, not in all the years he’d been at the White House. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to know. Charlie didn’t know himself, not exactly. Approximately? Well, yes, he knew that much. And, because he knew, he replied, “Tell you what, hon. If you pretend you didn’t say that, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it.”

  Sometimes something that wasn’t an answer turned out to be an answer after all. Esther sighed. This time, she was the one who got up, walked into the kitchen, and came back with a drink in her hand. Charlie could have used that as an excuse for one of his own. He would have not too long before. Now, he was finding he felt better when he drank less. They’d run him out of the Hibernian Hall if he ever told them so, but it was true just the same.

  He stayed at the White House for election night. Esther could have gone over to listen to the returns come in, but keeping an eye on Sarah and Pat gave her the perfect excuse to stay home. Since she had it, she used it.

  Maine went for Stassen. New Hampshire and Vermont joined it. So did Maryland and Delaware. Lazar Kagan swore when losing Maryland became certain. Charlie did get himself a drink then. Somebody from the state out of which the District of Columbia was carved would catch hell for not stuffing the ballot boxes better.

  But the big states, the states with the piles of electoral votes, stayed in Joe Steele’s camp. New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois a little later on—they all backed the fifth term. The South stayed Solid behind the President. That was what the radio announcers said, anyhow. If the actual results were different from the announced totals, nobody was going to prove it.

  Some of the states with lots of labor encampments and lots of resettled wreckers swung Harold Stassen’s way. They might have been sending a message, but it wasn’t loud enough. They didn’t have many electoral votes.

  More people lived on the West Coast. All three states there remained in Joe Steele’s pocket. He didn’t win so overwhelmingly as he had in 1936, 1940, or 1944, but Stassen’s challenge wasn’t serious.

  About fifteen minutes after his lead in California grew too big to overcome, the President and Betty Steele came downstairs. Charlie joined in the applause. People would have noticed if he hadn’t. Joe Steele waved to his aides and henchmen. “Well, we did it again,” he said, and got another hand. “We’ll keep on setting the country to rights, and we’ll make sure the world doesn’t go too crazy, too.”

  He was telling stories with Andy Wyszynski and the young assistant attorney general when Charlie came over to congratulate him. “Thanks, Sullivan,” Joe Steele said. “You know what I wish we’d done when we went to Japan?”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “I wish we’d shot down Trotsky’s plane. The Reds might’ve had themselves another civil war, trying to sort out who’d follow him.” The President shook his head in annoyance. “Too late now, dammit. I’ll never get such a good chance again.”

  “Sorry, sir.” As soon as he could, Charlie hurried to the bar. He had a drink or three. Even if he didn’t need them all the time any more, sometimes he did.

  XXIV

  Mike hunkered down behind a rock in the snow. A bullet spanged off the front of the rock. He shivered both from fear and from the cold. If Japanese summers reminded him of the ones in New York City, winters here came straight from Montana. It could get good and cold. It didn’t always, but it could—and it had.

  He was farther north than he had been this past summer, too. The fighting was north of what had been the border between North Japan and South Japan, but only by a few miles. He’d heard that Russian pilots flew North Japanese fighters. He wasn’t even sure it was true. He hadn’t seen any of the Russian occupiers fighting on the ground.

  The North Japanese sure had a lot of fancy new Russian equipment, though. Trotsky was doing the same thing as he had in the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler and Mussolini with him. He was letting some other people try out his latest and greatest toys to see how they worked.

  One of those new toys was a rifle of a kind Mike had never seen before. It spat bullets like a submachine gun, but you could still hit things with it out to a quarter of a mile. Some guys who’d fought in Europe said the Germans had used a piece like it right at the end of the war. For Mike and for most of the American troops on this side of the world, though, the AK-47 came as a nasty surprise.

  Motion off to the left made Mike’s head whip that way. Were the North Japanese trying to outflank his men? But it wasn’t a Red Jap. It was a brownish gray monkey, its fur dusted with snow. It carried some kind of root in one startlingly human hand.

  “Get the hell outa here, monkey!” Mike called softly. He gestured with his grease gun. Damned if the monkey didn’t lope away. The words or the movement seemed to make sense to it. Most of the critters that lived in Japan didn’t look too different from ones you’d see in the States. Not everything was just the same, but most came close.

  And then there were the monkeys. None of those in New York City, not outside of the zoos. The males were as big as two-year-olds, and had much sharper teeth. They were half tame; the Japs didn’t bother them. And, just like their human cousins, they would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. He’d even seen them eat cigarette butts. If he’d done that, he would have heaved up everything he’d eaten for the past week. It didn’t seem to bother the monkeys one bit.

  He wondered how many of them had got killed in the American and Russian invasions. It wasn’t as if—he hoped it wasn’t as if—soldiers killed them on purpose. But monkeys, just like soldiers, could wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Mike hoped he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . again. He did have that fifth oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart now. What he didn’t have any more was the bottom of his left earlobe. The wound had bled like hell. He didn’t much care. Four inches to the right and that round would have caught him between his nose and his mouth.

  A kid in a white winter suit with a radio on his back crawled up to Mike and said, “Sarge, they’re gonna start shelling the Japs in half an hour. When they let up, they say we’re supposed to go in and clean ’em out.”

  “They do, huh? Happy fucking day,” Mike said. The brass always figured artillery would do more than it really could. But no help for it, not when he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t got the order. Sighing, he went on, “Tell ’em we’ll give it our best shot.”

  The barrage came in on schedule. He peered around his rock and watched dirt and snow fly as the 105s thudded down one after another. You thought nothing above bug size could live when you watched something like that. But you’d be wrong. Human beings proved tough to kill, time after time.

  Like me, for instance, Mike thought. He hoped he’d be tough to kill one more time. They hadn’t got him yet. Nobody said they couldn’t, though.

  As soon as the barrage stopped, he bounced to his feet. “C’mon, guys!” he yelled. “We’ll hit ’em while they’re groggy!” He wanted to close with the North Japanese troops as fast as he could, so his grease gun would stand a better chance against those new automatic rifles.

  Bullets snapped past him no more than a few seconds after he started running forward. Not all the enemy soldiers were groggy, dammit. He fired a burst of his own to make them duck.

  They didn’t have much barbed wire up—only a few strands. Younger men who ran faster had cut it by the time he reached it. A North Japanese wearing a Russian helmet popped out of his hole like a prairie dog to see what was going on. Mike shot him in the face. He fell down again with a bubbling wail.

  Clearing trenches was a nasty business. They’d learned that in the American Civil War, and in World War I, and one more time in World War II. The Shuri Line on Okinawa had taught Mike more than he’d ever wanted to learn. But here he was, still at the same old trade. A grease gun was a good thing to have along. An entrenching tool was another. He’d ha
ve to clean his off when he got the chance.

  The North Japanese had no more quit in them than their brothers and cousins had had in places from Wake Island to the borders of India. They wouldn’t surrender, and they didn’t want to retreat. So they died. Trotsky would have been proud of them, or perhaps just amused. A few Americans fell, too, for some frozen acres that would never mean much to anybody.

  * * *

  Charlie had the Geographic map of Japan back on his office wall at the White House. He’d drawn in what had been the demilitarized zone between Trotsky’s North Japan and Joe Steele’s South Japan. These days, the pins showing where the recent fighting was went into territory north of that borderline.

  But he wasn’t sure where all the pins should go. Some of the places that had seen bitter fighting carried handles like Sukiyaki Valley or Mamasan Ridge or Hill 592. They must have owned other names, too, names that might have shown up on his map. Whatever those names were, though, they hadn’t made it across the Pacific.

  In Japan, Joe Steele’s plan was to train and arm the Constitutional Guard till it could go up against the North Japanese forces on something like equal terms. Trotsky’s Japs meant it. The ones fighting and dying for Akihito as constitutional monarch didn’t. They weren’t eager to go forward, or to fight if they did happen to advance.

  One reason for the trouble was that the Constitutional Guard was full of Red infiltrators. Trotsky’s backers must have started that the minute Hirohito bought a plot, or maybe even before. They spread distrust of officers and of Americans and a reluctance to obey orders far and wide.

  That was something Joe Steele knew how to handle—or he thought he did. The trouble was, treason trials and harsh punishments for anyone who even looked unhappy did nothing to improve the Constitutional Guard’s morale.