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 have 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.
So Americans kept doing most of the Constitutional Monarchy’s fighting and most of the dying in Japan. Next to the battles there before World War II ended, even next to the fighting in Europe, the stubborn positional war going on now was small potatoes. But it was like an infected sore that wouldn’t stop oozing casualties. News of young American men killed and young American men maimed wouldn’t go away. Spring passed into summer. Places christened Geisha Gulch and the Valley of the Shadow of Death showed up in the newspapers. They weren’t the kind of names that won popularity contests.