The MP stared at him. “You haven’t heard?”
“I haven’t heard jack shit, man. If I had, would I be asking you?”
“You guys are fucking lucky you weren’t back at the border-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. The North Japanese are attacking South Japan. They’ve got tanks and big guns and I don’t know what all else. No warning, no nothin’. One minute, everything was quiet. The next one, all hell broke loose.”
Mike and Dick looked at each other in consternation. “We’ve got to get back up there,” Mike said. “Our buddies are there. So are the Jap troops we were training.”
“Good luck-that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” The MP liked the phrase. “Here’s what you do. Go on in to Tokyo. Get your orders there. Draw some weapons there, too. You sure as hell ain’t safe without ’em.”
Being unarmed hadn’t worried Mike till then. Riding in a jeep, he’d felt safe enough. Not if there was a new war on, though. He nodded tightly. “We’ll do that, then.”
American authorities in sad, ruined Tokyo seemed as discombobulated as if they’d taken a right from the Brown Bomber square in the kisser. They hadn’t expected an attack from North Japan. Mike didn’t know why not. Captain Armstrong had been sending in worried reports for weeks. So had other commanders near the demilitarized zone. Had anybody here believed them, or even read them? It sure didn’t look that way.
Getting weapons was easy. The armory issued Mike and Dick grease guns and as many magazines as they could carry. Getting orders. . Dick got his right away: to sit tight in Tokyo. The captain who told him to do that sounded apologetic but firm. “Corporal, I understand what you are. I understand what you’ve done for your country,” he said. “But I don’t want our own guys getting a look at you and filling you full of holes because they think you’re a North Japanese soldier in an American uniform.”
“You think our men are really that dumb, sir?” Dick Shirakawa asked.
“You tell me,” the harried captain replied. Dick thought it over. He didn’t need long. He stayed in Tokyo.
Mike scrambled into a halftrack that was part of a patched-together regimental combat team. Hardly anybody in the machine knew anybody else. That worried him. One of the reasons men fought well was to protect their buddies. Another was to keep from seeming yellow to those same buddies. How well would these guys do if they didn’t care about the men with them and those men didn’t give a damn about them?
For a while, it just seemed like a training ride. Then, off to the north, the rumble of artillery began to make itself known above the different rumble of the halftrack’s engine. Smoke stained the horizon. War and fire went together like pretzels and beer.
They stopped for the night before they found the action, or it found them. Some of them didn’t know the first thing about digging a foxhole or setting up a perimeter. They were draftees who’d been doing garrison duty, not soldiers with combat experience. Mike took charge of them. He had a first sergeant’s stripes and a manner that said he knew what he was doing.
In the morning, they went forward again. It started to be stop-and-go traffic. Refugees clogged the roads: Jap civilians who didn’t want to live under North Japan’s Rising Sun with the gold Hammer and Sickle inside. Mike didn’t blame them, but they sure didn’t make getting up there to defend South Japan any easier.
Then Mike saw other Japs getting away from the North Japanese invasion. Some wore American uniform, some that of the old, dead Imperial Army. A lot of them had thrown away their rifles so they could retreat faster. The Constitutional Guard, or big chunks of it, didn’t seem eager to guard the shiny new constitution. A few of those soldiers were wounded, but only a few. The rest were just bugging out.
Mike started worrying in earnest.
* * *
As far as the White House was concerned, the Japanese War couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Republicans had just nominated Harold Stassen. Hardly anyone outside of Minnesota had ever heard of him. The way it had looked, he would have been a token candidate, and Steele and Garner would have rolled to a fifth term.
Now? Now Joe Steele had to work again. He was almost seventy. Some of the old energy was gone. Charlie could see that. The President seemed not just insulted but amazed that Trotsky’s followers in North Japan dared try to upset the applecart.
At his orders, the Americans in South Japan tried to bomb them back to the Stone Age. B-29s thundered over North Japan, the way they’d thundered over the whole country when Hirohito still ran it. But the Imperial Japanese air defenses had been flattened before the Superfortresses rolled in.
It wasn’t so easy now. North Japan flew Gurevich-9 fighter jets. The Gu-9s weren’t as good as American F-80s. They were Russian versions of the German Me-262, probably built with the help of captured Nazi engineers and technicians. Even if they couldn’t match the American jets, though, they were far more than B-29s had been designed to face. Daylight air raids over North Japan lasted only a few days. Had they gone on any longer, there would have been precious few B-29s left to make more.
And. . Charlie went up to the oval study to ask Joe Steele a question: “Sir, is it true a lot of those Gu-9s have Russian pilots?”
“It’s true,” Joe Steele answered. “But there’s no point to saying anything about it.” He knocked dottle from his pipe into a favorite ashtray: a brass catcher’s mitt.
“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.