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 announce 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.”