When photos from Nagano began coming out, they looked just as dreadful as the ones from Sendai. The only difference was, some of the ones from Nagano had mountains in the background, while some of those from Sendai showed the Pacific. The dead, the melted, the scorched, and, soon, the people dying of radiation sickness in both cities looked pretty much the same.
“What are we going to do?” Charlie asked Stas Mikoian. “How many bombs do we have? How many has Trotsky got? Do we want to start playing last-man-standing with him?”
“That’s about what it would come down to, all right, only I don’t know if anybody’d be left standing. I don’t know just how many bombs we have, either,” Mikoian said. Charlie took that with a grain of salt, not that he could do anything about it short of calling Mikoian a liar. The Armenian went on, “And I have no idea how many Trotsky has. I didn’t know he had one till he dropped it.”
“What does the boss think? I haven’t had the nerve to ask him.”
Mikoian scowled. “He wants to kill Einstein all over again, that’s what. I’ve got a hard time blaming him, too. If we’d started on the bomb in ’41 instead of ’45, we would have kept the whip hand on the Russians for years.”
Maybe that was what Einstein was afraid of, Charlie thought. If Joe Steele had the atomic bomb and Leon Trotsky didn’t, wouldn’t he have held it over Trotsky’s head like a club, or else bashed him with it? Sure he would have. But saying as much to Mikoian wouldn’t be Phi Beta Kappa. Charlie hadn’t been Phi Beta Kappa himself, but he could see that.
He found one more question: “What’ll we do about the Japanese War now?”
“Wind it up as quick as we can. What else are we supposed to do?” Mikoian said. “If we keep going like this, pretty soon there won’t be any Japanese left alive to fight over.”
“Makes sense to me,” Charlie said. That had looked obvious to him since the news came out of Nagano. He was damn glad it looked that way to Joe Steele and his other henchmen, too.
* * *
Mike climbed into the back of an olive-drab Army truck with nothing but relief. “And so we bid farewell to lovely, romantic North Japan, to its quaint natives, and to its curious and exotic customs,” he said. Even after so many years as a wrecker and a dogface, he still liked slinging words. It was a hell of a lot more fun than, say, slinging hash.
He thought so, anyhow. The other soldiers boarding the truck with him jeered and hooted. “Cut the bullshit, Sarge,” one of them said. “Only good thing about the fuckin’ natives is, they didn’t manage to shoot me.”
“I can’t even say that,” Mike replied.
“Oh,” the soldier added, “and we didn’t get blown up by the atomic whoozis.”
“That wasn’t the North Japanese. That was us,” Mike said.
“Well, what if the flyboys had missed? Then it woulda come down on our heads and blown us to the moon instead of the Japs. Coulda happened, I bet. Them bomber pilots, they can fuck up a wet dream.”
“Yeah.” Mike couldn’t even tell him he was full of it. Maybe he wasn’t. It wasn’t as if Mike hadn’t had to dive into a hole a time or three himself to escape his own side’s ordnance. But that big a screwup wouldn’t have been easy, and it hadn’t happened.
Another soldier said, “Us and the Japs, we sure wasted a lot of time and blood and sweat to call it a tie and all go back to where we started from.”
“Status quo ante bellum,” Mike said. He wasn’t sure whether that came from being a reporter or straight out of Catholic school. Either way, he’d had it a long time.
It just confused the soldier from his section. “What the hell does that mean, Sarge?” the man asked.
“The same thing as what you said, only in Latin.”
“Latin? La-de-da!” the guy said. Mike gave him the finger. Everybody laughed. If Mike hadn’t shown he was as tough as anybody half his age, his men might have decided he was a fairy. He’d seen that soldiers often prided themselves on how ignorant they were, and distrusted anybody who knew anything that didn’t have to do with killing. The only worse group for that he could think of were Jeebies.
The driver slid over from behind the wheel to look back through the little window in the partition that separated his compartment from the bigger one behind it. Seeing the truck was full, he said, “Okay, we’re gonna get outa here.” The men in the back gave him a hand. Mike joined in along with the rest.
Down the coast road from Yamashita they went. Looking backward-the only way he could look out-Mike was reminded of the truck ride he’d taken from the railway siding to the labor encampment in the Rockies. The fields on either side of that highway hadn’t been pocked with shell craters, though. And, once that truck got up into the mountains, the air had been crisp, and smelled like pines. Now it was hot and muggy and held the faint but unmistakable whiff of death.
Before too long, they left North Japan and went back into South Japan. The two countries that were unhappily learning to divide the Home Islands between them had already set up border checkpoints on the road. The two flags flew on poles of exactly the same height. Even though nobody on either side of the frontier bothered the truck convoy, Mike was glad to get out of the country that put the hammer and sickle inside the meatball and into the one that left the old Japanese flag alone.
Not far south of the border, an enormous American processing center had sprouted, rather like a ring of toadstools after a rain. One advantage of being a sergeant was that Mike stood in a shorter line before the rear-echelon clowns who decided what to do with him.
He showed a personnel sergeant his dog tags. “And where were you stationed before the fighting broke out?” the man asked.
“On the demilitarized zone. Right outside of Wakamatsu, about fifteen miles east of the mountains.”
“Really?” The personnel sergeant lifted an eyebrow. “You were. . lucky, weren’t you?” That was a polite way of saying How come you’re still alive? Did you run like Red Grange?
“Mac, you don’t know the half of it,” Mike answered. “I was coming back from leave on Shikoku when things went kablooie. My buddy and me, we’d just about made it to Tokyo when we got the news.” He wondered how Dick Shirakawa was doing. With his looks, Dick had a built-in excuse, one even the Army recognized, for staying behind the lines.
“I see,” the personnel sergeant said. Mike wondered how he’d managed to steer clear of the fighting. The guy wore a clean uniform. He hadn’t missed any meals. He might as well have been in an insurance office back in Bridgeport. Now he asked, “Would it suit you if I send you to that area again?”
“I guess so,” Mike answered. “I liked being there before. Christ only knows what it looks like these days, though, or how many of the people I knew last year are still there.” Are still alive, he thought, but he didn’t say it.
“We’ll do that, then. Wakamatsu, you said?” The personnel sergeant seemed glad to solve a problem so fast. Mike wasn’t so sure he was glad to be going back. But now he had orders, so all he had to do was follow them.
The processing center had its own motor pool. A buck private wouldn’t have been able to promote a jeep, but a veteran first sergeant with a chestful of ribbons (Mike made sure he put them on before he went over) had no trouble at all. They also might have given him a bad time had they known he’d served in a punishment brigade, but he hadn’t worn the P on his sleeve for a while now.
Country around the demilitarized zone hadn’t been smashed up so badly as the rest of Japan during the Second World War. The Japanese War made up for that, and then some. All the damage here was fresher than it was farther south. And the North Japanese had kidnapped lots of people and taken them over the border. Others, they simply shot. Not many of his old friends greeted Mike when he made it back. The only thing that made him sure he’d come to the right place was his road map.