Joe Steele (40 page)

“Half an hour after the mailroom clerk put the card on my desk, Scriabin walked in,” Charlie said. “He asked me, ‘How do you like having a hero for a brother?'”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said it was nice there was one in the family, anyhow. He kind of blinked and went away. Now I've got to call my mom and dad. I don't know how many cards they let those guys send.”

It turned out that the elder Sullivans had also heard from Mike. Their card announced that he was alive and well and doing fine. It was the kind
of card you sent to your parents, as the one Charlie had got was the kind you sent to your brother.

“Did you tell Stella?” Charlie asked his mother, figuring she'd miss no chance to rub it in with her ex-daughter-in-law.

But Bridget Sullivan said, “No. Hadn't you heard? She's engaged to one of those draft-dodging sheenies she works for.”

“Mom . . .” Charlie said. No, his mother and father had never warmed to Jews, no more than they had to.

“Esther is all right,” his mother said. “But the ones Stella works for, that's just what they are.”

“Whatever you say.” Charlie got off the phone as soon as he could. He relayed a censored version of his mother's message to Esther.

By the way his wife lifted an eyebrow, she could read between the lines. “Stella didn't tell me, but I suppose she wouldn't, all things considered. I hope she ends up happy, that's all. She never would have dumped Mike if the Jeebies hadn't taken him.”

“I guess not.” Charlie didn't want to think anything good about the gal who'd left his brother. Esther was probably right, but that had nothing to do with the price of beer, not to him.

“Let's hope they knock Japan for a loop before Mike has to go in,” Esther said.

“Amen!” Charlie said. “The Japs, they're like a boxer on the ropes taking a pounding. The B-29s are flattening their cities one at a time. God only knows why they won't give up and say enough is enough. Joe Steele doesn't get it—I'll tell you that.”

Esther's mouth narrowed into a thin, unhappy line. “I don't know how you can stand to work at the White House,” she said. “I can't understand why it doesn't drive you nuts.”

He shrugged helplessly. “When I started there, all my other choices looked worse. And you know what? They still do. If I walk away, just tell 'em I quit, you think I won't go into a labor encampment inside of fifteen minutes? I sure don't think I won't. You want to raise two kids on what you'd make without me?”

“I don't want to do anything without you,” Esther answered. “But I don't want your job to wear you down the way this one does, either.”

Charlie shrugged again. “I like to think I do some good once in a while. Stas and me, we're the ones who can slow Joe Steele down sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. Scriabin and Kagan and J. Edgar Hoover, all they ever do is cheer him on. If they get a new speechwriter, you can bet your boots he'd be another rah-rah guy. That'd leave Mikoian even further out on a limb than he is already.”

“How does he manage to hang on if he doesn't see eye-to-eye with most of the people in the White House?” Esther asked.

“Funny—I asked him pretty much the same thing once,” Charlie said. “He looked at me, and he smiled the oddest smile you've ever seen in your life. ‘How?' he said. ‘I'll tell you how. Because if I go somewhere without my umbrella and it's raining when I come out, I can dance my way home between the raindrops. That's how.'”

“Nice work if you can get it—if you can do it, I guess I should say. If he can, good for him,” his wife said. “But when
you
go out in the rain, you come home dripping wet like a normal person. And I wish you didn't have to.”

“Well, so do I,” Charlie said. “Now wish for the moon while you're at it.”

*   *   *

M
ike's pack weighed him down as he trudged along the wharf to the waiting troopship. He'd landed on Okinawa in April. Here it was six months later, and he was finally getting off the miserable island. That was the good news. The bad news was that the punishment brigade, rebuilt yet again, was going somewhere that promised to be even worse.

Operation Olympic, the brass was calling it. Kyushu. The southernmost Home Island. If Tojo's boys wouldn't say uncle, the United States would go in there and take their own country away from them. It would cost a lot of American lives. As one of the Americans whose life it was likely to cost, Mike knew that much too well. But the number of Japs who were going to get killed beggared the imagination.

And if Operation Olympic didn't convince the Emperor and Company the lesson Joe Steele wanted them to learn, Operation Coronet was waiting around the corner. That would seize Honshu, the main island. From what Mike had heard, something like a million men would go in if they needed that one. How many dead would come out was anybody's guess.

Mike had a section of his own now—a couple of dozen men to ride herd on. They'd all come into the brigade after he had. Captain Magnusson was still here. Or rather, he was here again. He'd taken a bullet in the leg, but by now he'd had time to recover and risk getting one in a really vital spot.

As the soldiers settled themselves on the crowded bunks, one of them asked, “Hey, Sarge, is it true what Tokyo Rose says?”

“Jugs, if Tokyo Rose says it, bet your ass it ain't true,” Mike answered. “Which pile of bullshit are you wondering about in particular, though?”

Jugs was properly Hiram Perkins, a Southerner who'd wound up in a labor encampment because—he said—somebody with connections had taken a shine to his wife. It was possible; people went into the encampments for all kinds of reasons. Mike wouldn't have cared to guess if it was true. The way Perkins' ears stuck out gave him his nickname. He said, “The one where she says the Japs'll spear us if they don't shoot us.”

“You've got a grease gun, don't you?” Mike said.

“No, Sarge. Got me an M-1.”

“Okay. Either way, you can shoot anybody who comes after you with a spear before he sticks you, right?”

“I reckon so, yeah.”

“Well, all right, then. You won't get speared unless somebody catches you asleep in a foxhole or something.”

Jugs worked that through. Mike could practically see the gears turning inside his head. They didn't turn very fast; Jugs wasn't the brightest ornament on the Christmas tree. He finally said, “That makes sense. Thanks, Sarge. I purely don't like me no pig-stickers.”

“Other thing is,” Mike said, “if the Japs do come at us with spears, it's because they don't have enough rifles to go around. So let's hope they do. The easier they are to kill, the better I like it.”

He wondered how many kamikaze planes the enemy had left. They'd been troublesome around Okinawa. Mike figured the Japs would throw everything they could at a force invading the Home Islands.

Later, he also wondered if he'd jinxed things. Less than half an hour after kamikazes crossed his mind, the troopship's antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Down in the bowels of the ship where the enlisted men waited out the passage from Okinawa to Kyushu, they swore or prayed, depending on which they thought would do more good.

In the bunk across from Mike, another Catholic worked a rosary. Mike still more or less believed, but not that way. God was going to do what He was going to do. Why would He listen to some stupid human who wanted Him to do something else instead?

No flaming plane with a bomb under its belly slammed into the troopship. Either the gunners shot it down, or it missed and smashed into the sea, or the pilot was aiming at some other ship. The Japs were terribly, scarily, in earnest. The way their soldiers fought showed that. But kamikazes? Didn't you have to be more than a little nuts to climb into a cockpit and take off, knowing ahead of time that you weren't coming back? The things some people would do for their country!

Mike started to laugh. What
he'd
done for his country was volunteer for a punishment brigade. And his country had rewarded him how? By sending him to hell five different times. It hadn't managed to kill him off yet, so here he was, going in for a sixth try at suicide. What was he but a slow-motion kamikaze pilot?

The guy who was telling his beads paused between one Our Father and the next. “What's so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Mike said. “Believe me, nothing.”

“Too bad. I could use a yock,” the other soldier said, and went back to the rosary.

When they scrambled down nets from the troopship to the landing craft, that green to the north rising up out of the sea was the Japanese mainland. The punishment brigade was going in on the west side of Kagoshima Bay, a little south of the middle-sized city of Kagoshima. Orders were to
push toward the city once they got off the beach. Those orders assumed they
would
get off the beach. That had to mean the fellow who wrote them was a damned optimist.

To be fair, the USA was doing everything it knew how to do to keep its men alive, even the ones in punishment brigades. Warships shelled the coast, sending clouds of dust and smoke into the air. Fighter-bombers raked the landing zone with machine guns, rockets, and firebombs made from jellied gasoline. From farther overhead, heavier bombers flying out of Okinawa and Saipan and other islands bloodily taken from the Japs dropped high explosives on the enemy.

Mike had been through the preliminaries too many times before to think they'd murder all the Japs waiting to murder him. No matter how much hellfire you rained on the bastards, you killed only a fraction of them. The rest would require more personal attention.

Even now, the Japs were trying to fight back. Shells kicked up waterspouts among the wallowing landing craft. Just by the luck of the draw, a few of those would be direct hits, and God help the poor fools in those boats.

The landing craft mounted .50-caliber machine guns as token antiaircraft protection. Suddenly, all of them seemed to start going off at once. Tracers stitched across the sky.

Some kamikazes went after the bigger warships and freighters. Some pilots decided they'd be doing their duty for the Emperor if they took out a landing craft's worth of Americans. They weren't so far wrong, either—if they could do it. A lot of them got shot down trying, or else missed their intended targets and went into the drink.

One flew terrifyingly low over Mike's landing craft, so low he got a split-second glimpse of the young pilot's face. Then the kamikaze was gone. Whatever he did, Mike never found out about it.

A swabby manning the .50 that had been banging away at the Jap flyer sang out: “Beach just ahead! Good luck, you sorry assholes!”

Mike would be happy to take all the good luck he could get. The Japs knew the Americans were coming. Kagoshima Bay was the closest part of
the Home Islands to Okinawa. You didn't have to be a military genius to see what that meant. All you had to do was look at a map.

So they'd put mines in the beachside water. A couple of landing craft hit them and went up with a boom. But the one Mike was riding made it onto the sand of Kyushu. Down went the landing gate.

“Come on, you fuckers!” Mike shouted to the men he would lead for as long as he could. He dashed out. They followed. His boots scuffed across the Japanese beach.

People were shooting at him again. That seemed to happen every goddamn time he visited a new island. The only polite thing to do was to shoot back.

A Corsair roared in at just above treetop height, almost as low as the kamikaze had passed over the landing craft. It machine-gunned and napalmed the ground in back of the beach. Mike whooped when the fireball from the napalm sent black, greasy smoke into the sky. He whooped again when he realized a lot less Jap fire was coming in. That Navy plane had done some good.

“Keep moving!” he called. “The farther off the beach we get, the better off we are.” He didn't know that was true, but he hoped like hell it was.

Enemy fire picked up again. The Japs were doing everything they could to drive the invaders into the ocean. As if to underline that, a soldier stepped on a land mine. What happened next reminded Mike of an explosion in a butcher's shop. He had nightmares often enough as things were. That memory would only make them worse.

Pretty soon, his boots were thumping, not scuffing. Whenever he saw anything moving ahead, he squeezed off a burst. He assumed anyone alive here would try to kill him with even a quarter of a chance.

You weren't supposed to shoot civilians. Then again, they weren't supposed to shoot at you, either. A gray-haired man in farmer's clothes fired a rifle at him. The range wasn't long, but the fellow missed. A big puff of white smoke poured from his weapon. Mike greased him before he could duck back into his hole. Then he ran up to make sure the guy was dead.

He was, or he would be in a few minutes. Half his head was blown off.
Mike stared at the piece he was carrying more than he did at the horrible wound. It looked like something a farmer might make for himself. The Jap had a powder horn with black powder in it. He had percussion caps. His bullets were half-inch lengths cut from an iron bar. When Mike looked down the barrel, he saw it wasn't even rifled. It looked to have been made from ordinary metal pipe. The whole setup belonged to 1861, not to 1945.

But by the end of the day he'd seen three or four more of those smoothbore muskets, all in the hands of civilians. Jap soldiers here carried Arisakas, the same as they did everywhere else he'd been. Those weren't as good as M-1s, but they were reasonable military weapons. The muskets . . . You could make stacks of them in a hurry and pass them out to anybody who wanted to use them.

They wouldn't do much good. They weren't a whole lot more dangerous than the spears Jugs had heard Tokyo Rose talking about. When you fired one, the smoke that burst from the muzzle yelled
Here I am!
to the world. With a smoothbore, you'd hit a man out past fifty yards only by luck.