It was the rhythm that was important. A good team would have its rivets caught and in place before the riveter himself took his swing. A really good riveter didn't need the check-man to tell him whether the rivet was sound; he could feel it by the vibration in the hammer when it struck metal. Once the yard had used pneumatic hammers to drive the rivets home but that equipment had long gone. Taken to Germany for the shipyards there and then turned to radioactive slag by the Yanks with their atom bombs. So it was back to manual hammering. McMullen felt the good strikes all morning so when the siren went for tea-break, he wasn't surprised to see the line of white ticks behind him. Not a red cross in sight.
It was 15 minutes for a cup of tea, then back to the quayside. By the time the noon siren went, they had reached the end of the first long line and started the short side. Looked like the structure they were building would fit crosswise on the ship somehow. Didn't matter of course, what did was that there wasn't a red chalk mark in sight.
Thirty minutes for lunch. Tea and a wad. Or what had been a wad once, before the war. Then it had been a thick sandwich, two slabs of bread stuffed with fresh-fried bacon or ham. Came out the wage of course but few had complained about it. Well, no more than any good workmen complained about anything the bosses did.
But now the wads were thin and sparse things. Off the ration, that was the one good thing about them. But the bread was skimpy and where it had once been dripping with melted fat and butter, now the margarine was scraped thin and the sandwich was filled with strange things. Whale meat was one, some sort of nutty paste was another. No bacon in sight. Hardly food to fill a working man's stomach. Even a good union man like McMullen couldn't bring himself to blame the bosses, they were doing the best they could. The thin tea and meager wads, that was the Yank's fault. Dropping their atom bombs on everybody.
30 minutes on the dot. The men had been exchanging ribald jokes, traditional ones between the Unions, between the men who worked on the gantries and them as worked on the ground, between the veterans and the 'prentices. Then the siren went again and the joking stopped, drowned out by the roar and crash of the hammers, the pounding of the engines and the rattling of the cranes.
Five o clock, 11 hours on the job. Ten hours work. McMullen got his ticket from the check-man, taking pride in its totals. All white approvals, not a red cross all day. He went to the tally-office and handed it in. There was a stranger there, a big man with a reddened skin who looked at the ticket and nodded.
“This your gang McMullen?” The accent was thick and heavy, sounding as if the man had a bad cold. Sounded Dutch or German. Its shipyards had made Tyneside a surprisingly cosmopolitan city and McMullen pegged the accent immediately. South African. McMullen nodded and the man reached into a bag in the tally-office and gave each member of the gang a small envelope. McMullens fingers accurately gauged the contents. A two-bob bit.
“Gift from South Africa, bonus for a good job. Every gang has a day without rejects, gets the same. Every day without rejects gets you a bonus. Our Republic thanks you McMullen.”
McMullen left the factory gates fingering the coin. He didn't see the South African watch him leave, then note his name down in a small book. He was too busy rejoicing in his unexpected fortune. A bonus paid daily? Generous one too. By the time he got home, McMullen had already decided to give the first one to his wife, and make sure she spent it on herself. The smell of sausages cooking and the sight of mashed potato just confirmed that decision. A day's real work and a solid British supper. It had been a good day.
Chulachomkho Military Academy, Bangkok, Thailand
The officer cadets were sitting in ranks in the lecture theater. They'd spent the last couple of days being run from one place to another, learning the layout of the college, where they had to go and when they had to be there. Learning their place in the world which, as everybody took pains to remind them, was at the bottom of everything else.
Today, though, was a little different. Today they were, in a small way, in charge of their own destinies. Today they would be determining the course of their military careers. On the desk in front of them was a pad of forms several pages thick. It had to be filled out, completely and accurately. Right at the end, on the last page was a block where the cadets had to enter their choice for their selected army careers. Their Military Occupational Specialty or MOS.
“Cadets. Today you will be selecting the particular direction your army career will be taking. You will fill out the forms in front of you and enter the code for the military specialty which you want to follow. You will then be assigned to the studies appropriate to that MOS. Each of you has one of these.” The instructor picked up a book, almost three centimeters thick. “This contains all the MOS codes. Find the one that applies to your desired career and enter it on the last page. If you can't find the code or you have another problem, enter MOS 11B. It's a general course and we'll sort you out later.”
The attendants started to hand out the thick books while the cadets filled in the forms. The experienced cadets, the ones who had relatives already in the service had been tipped off and had been told their desired MOS code earlier. The far-sighted had also found their desired code out in advance. The cynical put down a code at random, any code other then 11B (as a result one delighted cadet found himself in Public Relations, two more became rural development specialists and one took up a short but very exciting career in explosive ordnance disposal).
As the attendants started to collect the books and forms, far too early for anybody else to look through the reference book properly, most of the Cadets put themselves down for MOS 11 B.
A few hours later, in the Commandant's office, the staff were going through the forms with satisfaction. It had worked again. The Commandant looked at the Instructor with a slightly pained air. “A general course Tawat?”
“Well Sir, some of them may end up as Generals.” A ripple of laughter spread across the room.
“Tell me Tawat. doesn't your conscience ever trouble you about this?”
The instructor looked thoughtful for a second. “No sir. Anyway, out of 100 cadets we have 84 volunteers for the infantry. It never fails to inspire me Sir how the Cadets always choose to serve in the infantry. Selfless of them.”
A ripple of laughter spread around the office again. However, the instructor was suddenly afflicted by a strange, troubling sensation of disaster. His ghost-guardian was warning him of something, he thought. He was making a mistake. Superstitiously, he quietly felt the Buddha amulet around his neck and was eased by the act of touching the image. Nothing could be that wrong, could it? Of course not.
As a matter of fact he was wrong. Everything was very wrong indeed. The years of bad karma earned by tricking poor innocent cadets into signing up for the infantry had suddenly come home to haunt him. His ghost-guardian had tried to warn him but failed.
The eternal balance of good and evil, of honesty and guilt, of rewards and punishment was just about to be evened out. In doing so, the Army's carefully-planned introduction of women officers to take over secretarial and office work in the military headquarters and administrative departments had run hard onto the shoals of unexpected hazards. For, unnoticed in the pile of forms that represented all those who had signed up for Military Occupational Specialty 11B (Leg Infantry) were those submitted by all four female Cadets.
Headquarters. Second Karelian Front, Riga, “The Baltic Gallery”
He didn't know which frightened him most. The sheer mass of forces that were being assembled or the fact that the Russians hadn't cared how much he saw of them. They'd just met his Kubelwagen at the agreed spot and he'd got into the jeep to be brought here. In doing so, the Russians had driven him right through their lines. And what lines they had been, a horde of tanks, T-44s, some with 85mtn guns, some with the new 100mms. Older T-34-85s. The SU-100 tank destroyers with their cross-hull rangefinders. Armored personnel carriers for the infantry, some with the stains on the paint where the American markings had been scrubbed off and replaced by Russian.