Joe Steele (41 page)

What the makeshift weapons did say was that the Japs aimed to fight to the last man. Their soldiers had done that everywhere Mike had seen. He remembered the women on Saipan throwing their children off the cliffs and then jumping after them. Here in the Home Islands, it would be even worse.

And it was. Some of the people with those muskets weren't old men who hadn't gone overseas. Some were young women and girls. You had to shoot them, or they would shoot you. Mike hadn't puked since Tarawa, but killing a musketeer in a kimono damn near did it for him.

A guy in his section, a burly fellow who went by Spider from a tattoo on his left forearm, didn't kill one of those lady musketeers. He just wounded her. When he went up to see if he could save her and take her prisoner, she waited till he got close, then blew herself up with a grenade, and him with her.

From then on, the guys in Mike's section shot first and didn't ask questions even afterwards. That had to violate the laws of war. He didn't worry about it. The Japs weren't playing by the rules, either. If they armed civilians and sent girls into battle, they had to take their chances.

American Sherman tanks clanked forward. Mike was happy to trot
along behind one for a while. It was like having a shield that also blew things up and killed things for you. The Japs had only a handful of tanks, and the ones they did have were no match for Shermans. Mike had heard that Shermans were death traps against German panzers, but they were almost unstoppable on this side of the world.

Almost. Something exploded under the one Mike was following. Fire and smoke burst from the hatches. A couple of crewmen got out. The rest . . . didn't. Mike peered under the Sherman's flaming carcass. An arm hung out of a hole in the ground. A Jap had been in there with an antitank mine or an artillery shell. He'd killed himself when he set it off, but he'd killed the tank, too.

“Fuck,” Mike muttered. He lit a cigarette, wishing he had whiskey in his canteen. How were you supposed to fight people like this? Most military planning assumed that the other guy wanted to live as much as you did. The Japs tore up that rule and danced on it.

Fighting barely slowed down when night fell. The Japs kept coming, wave after wave of them. Mike snatched a little sleep like an animal, curled up in a hollow. Nothing this side of getting wounded would have woken him.

Firepower let the Americans push forward. The only planes in the sky had stars on their wings and fuselages. The Japs fought for Kagoshima street by street, house by house, just the same.

Eating C-rations behind a wrecked building, Mike said, “This must be what Trotskygrad was like.”

One of his men nodded wearily. By then, the section was down to seven guys: less than a squad's strength. The tired soldier said, “That reminds me, Sarge. I heard the Russians are finally fighting the Japs with us.”

“About time,” Mike said between bites of canned ham and eggs. The ration wasn't bad if you heated it. You could eat it straight from the can, the way he was, but you'd like it less. He went on, “I sure as hell wish they'd come fight the ones we got here.”

“There you go,” the soldier said.

Something blew up near them. “Here we go,” Mike said, and made sure he had a full magazine on his grease gun.

Charlie had put a
National Geographic
map of the Home Islands on the wall in his office. Blue pins measled Kyushu. Nothing at all was left of Nagasaki, near the westernmost part of the island. B-29s full of incendiaries had annihilated the old port city even more thoroughly than they'd leveled Tokyo. Kagoshima? Fukuoka? Miyazaki? Likewise names for places that were no longer there.

Also no longer there were too many thousands of American soldiers. As far as Charlie knew, Mike was still okay, but he didn't know how far he knew. Japanese casualties, military and civilian? Nobody had any idea, not to the nearest hundred thousand.

Farther north, red pins measled Hokkaido the same way. The Russians had swept through the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, which they'd lost in the Russo-Japanese War. They'd swept across the Kuril Islands. They'd roared into what had been Japanese Manchukuo and Chosen, and what were now nominally part of China (though still under Trotsky's thumb) and the People's Democratic Republic of Korea under a native Red called Kim Il-sung, which was every bit as independent as Father Tiso's Slovakia had been under the Nazis.

And the Red Army had invaded Hokkaido, the northernmost Home Island. The Russians had had just as much fun there as the Americans had
in Kyushu. The Japs fought as if there were no tomorrow. For them, there mostly wasn't.

But they wouldn't quit. They had no idea how to quit. The Emperor and his generals ruled only Honshu and Shikoku. They still bellowed defiance at the rest of the world. The rest of the world responded with incendiaries and high explosives. The Japs shot back when they could. They sent raiding parties to harass the Allies occupying Kyushu and Hokkaido.

So Coronet was on—was, in fact, only a couple of weeks away, from what Charlie'd heard. With it would come a Russian invasion of northern Honshu. The whole campaign would be an enormous, bloody mess. Everybody knew it. But how else could you knock out an enemy who wouldn't quit on his own?

As Charlie didn't know for sure that Mike was all right, he also didn't know whether his brother's punishment brigade was part of the invasion force for Operation Coronet. He feared it was, though. You served in a punishment brigade for the duration: yours or the war's. Usually, it was yours. Mike still had a chance of coming back, though.

Charlie was studying the map and trying to stay hopeful when Lazar Kagan came in and said, “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot,” Charlie said. Whatever Kagan asked him, it would help take his mind off the bad reflections the map of the Home Islands stirred in him.

“What do you know about uranium?” Kagan said.

Charlie stared. As a matter of fact, Charlie gaped. “I don't know what the hell I thought you'd ask me, but I could've guessed for a million years before I came up with that one,” he said. “Why?”

“I'll tell you why in a minute. Tell me what you know first.” Kagan sounded serious. Charlie couldn't remember the last time Kagan hadn't sounded serious. He had none of Mikoian's occasional impishness. To give him his due, he also wasn't so nasty as Vince Scriabin.

“O-kay.” Charlie flogged his brains. He got tiny little bits from highschool chemistry he'd done his best to forget over the intervening quarter-century and more, and a few others from science stories before the war. “It's an element. Is it ninety-one or ninety-two? Ninety-two, I think. And
it's—what's the word? Radioactive, that's it. Like radium, only it doesn't glow in the dark, does it? And—” He stopped with a shrug. “And that's about it. How'd I do, Mr. Baker?”

“Heh,” Kagan said. Phil Baker had hosted
Take It or Leave It
, the radio quiz show with questions that kept doubling in value till they got to sixty-four dollars, since before the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. After a moment, though, Kagan grudged a nod. “You did pretty well. Better than Vince and me, better than Hoover, about as well as Stas.”

Mikoian's brother knew science, being an engineer. Maybe some had rubbed off on Joe Steele's aide. “Now you've got to tell me why you asked me,” Charlie said.

Lazar Kagan nodded again. “All right, I will. But it goes no further. Not even your wife, you hear? I'm serious about this. So is Hoover. So is the boss. If you don't think you can do that, forget I ever asked you.”

“I know when to keep my mouth shut. I'll keep it shut now.” Charlie would have liked to tease Kagan, but that didn't look like a good idea, not if he wanted to find out what was what.

Even as things were, Lazar Kagan hesitated. He must have seen he'd gone too far to stop, though. “You're right—uranium's radioactive. But that's not all. It turns out you can
split
the right kind of uranium atom. When you do, you release energy—a lot more than you can get from dynamite or TNT. I mean, a lot more, enough so one bomb could blow up a whole city. The Germans were working on this during the war, we've found out. They didn't get too far, thank God, but they were trying.”

One bomb, one city? Charlie's mind spun dizzily. It sounded like one of those stories you read in the pulps with the robots and the little green men on the cover. But Kagan sounded as serious as he ever did, which was saying something. “The Germans were working on this, you say?” Charlie asked. Kagan nodded yet again. Charlie found the next question with no trouble at all: “How come we weren't, too? If we weren't.”

“We weren't.” Kagan spoke the words like a judge passing sentence. “As to why we weren't . . . It is possible that there have been wreckers inside the scientific community.”

Charlie didn't burst out laughing. He remembered that Mikoian had
said his brother had said the same thing. He hadn't believed it then, and he didn't believe it now. But he didn't want to cut his own throat, either.

And it was just as well that he kept his mouth shut and his features still, for Lazar Kagan went on, “Einstein is coming down from Princeton to discuss this with the boss. Since you know a little something, maybe you should sit in on the meeting—it's tomorrow at ten. I'll talk to the boss. Unless I tell you otherwise, you're in.”

Once more, Charlie didn't laugh in Kagan's face. A little something was what he knew about uranium, all right! Accent on
little
. Before he went home that night, he stopped at the public library, yanked the
Britannica
off the shelf, and read what it had to say about uranium and radioactivity. He took no notes; if the Jeebies found them, he figured they'd shoot him before they questioned him. The encyclopedia said nothing about splitting any kind of uranium atoms. Well, that made sense—it wasn't exactly common knowledge.

As ordered, he didn't tell Esther anything about uranium or Einstein. She noticed he had something on his mind, even if she didn't know what. “You okay?” she asked him. “You're kind of not quite with it tonight.”

“Work stuff,” he answered, as lightly as he could. “I can't talk about it yet.”

“Oh.” She left it there—she respected that. She wasn't the kind of person who tried to pry business out of him, for which he was duly grateful.

When he took his seat in the conference room the next morning, three places down from Joe Steele, he wondered how much he remembered of what he'd read. And he wondered how much what wasn't in the encyclopedia made what he did remember obsolete.

Also sitting in with the President were his three California cronies, J. Edgar Hoover, and a scholarly-looking Navy captain named Rickover. A White House staffer led Einstein in a few minutes after ten. “Mr. President,” the physicist said in good but accented English.

“Professor Einstein,” Joe Steele replied. “Sit down, please. Do you want coffee or anything like that?” His voice was under tight control. His face showed nothing at all.

“Thank you so much, but no,” Einstein said as he slid into a chair across the table from the President.

“All right, then,” Joe Steele said. “I have learned that the Germans were trying to make a bomb, a very powerful bomb, from uranium. They don't seem to have tried too hard, but some of my military men who reviewed their work”—he nodded toward Captain Rickover—“tell me this might be possible.”

Einstein nodded sadly. Sadness seemed to live naturally on his face. “Yes. This is possible, I am sorry to say. I have understood that it is possible since I learned of the Hahn-Meitner experiments at the end of 1938 or the beginning of 1939.” Charlie'd never heard of the Hahn-Meitner experiments. They weren't in the
Britannica
. Plainly, Rickover had; he leaned toward the President and whispered something.

Joe Steele waved his words aside. He turned the full force of his will on Einstein. “You knew of this for so long, but you said nothing about it?” The question was all the more fearsome for being so soft.

“Yes, sir.” If it put Einstein in fear, he didn't let on.

“Why?” Joe Steele asked, more softly yet.

“Because I was afraid you would build this bomb, sir. Because I was afraid you would use it.” Einstein didn't say
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
. The words tolled inside Charlie's head all the same.
Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting
.

And the writing was on the wall for Albert Einstein, too. Just for a moment, Joe Steele's calm mask slipped and showed the raw, red rage underneath. Charlie flinched away from the President, as he would have flinched away from a furnace door that suddenly opened and blasted heat in his face.

“You deprived the United States of a weapon that might have won the war sooner?” Joe Steele hissed.

“I tried to stop, or at least to delay, the birth of a weapon that may destroy the world,” Einstein said calmly.

Joe Steele swung toward J. Edgar Hoover. “Tend to him. He's not just a wrecker. He's the king of wreckers.”

Hoover nodded. “I'll take care of it.” He bounced to his feet and hustled out of the room. Einstein watched him go with what looked like mild
interest. As the President did, the physicist smoked a pipe. He took it out and started charging it with tobacco.

He never got the chance to finish. Hoover came back with four burly Jeebies. Had they been waiting outside for a moment like this? They must have. They hauled Einstein out of the chair and hustled him away. The pipe fell on the floor. One of the GBI men picked it up and stuck it in his pocket on his way out.

As if such things happened at the White House every day, Joe Steele asked Captain Rickover, “With what you know now, can you go on and finish the job?”

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Rickover said. “There will be engineering issues to overcome, but it should be doable.”

“How long? Six months? A year? You'll have whatever resources you need.”

“I fear it may take longer than that, sir. We'll be doing things no one has ever done before, you know. The Germans barely even opened the door. We have to go through it.”

“You will not waste time.” Joe Steele sounded like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai hurling
Thou shalt not
s at the children of Israel. “The Reds will know about this, too. So will the English, for that matter.”

“If you think you can find someone better to run the project, sir, put him in charge instead of me,” Rickover said. “If you don't, I'll do the best I can.”

“That will do. I hope that will do,” Joe Steele said.

“Whatever resources I need, you said?” Rickover asked him.

“That's right.” The President gestured impatiently. “What about it?”

“Some of the people who could help me a lot on this project are serving terms in labor encampments on one charge or another,” Rickover said. “If I can get them released—”

“You can use them,” Joe Steele said. “They'll be released if they do what I need fast enough. In the meantime, we'll set up your project as a special labor encampment. If they do any more wrecking, we'll dispose of them. Be plain about that when you recruit them, understand me?”

“Yes, sir. I will do that, sir,” Rickover said.

“All right, then. Go ahead.”

Charlie took his courage in both hands and asked, “Sir, what will you do with Einstein? He's too famous just to bump off.”

“We took him in when he had to run from Hitler. This is how he thanks us? By keeping quiet about something so important?” Joe Steele shook his head. “I said it before—he is the king of wreckers. He will get what he deserves. Any of the others we took in who also kept still about this, they will get it, too.” His eyes warned that, if Charlie said one more word, he would get some, too.

He even had a point . . . of sorts. But Einstein might have said more had he thought more of the man to whom he would be saying it. As one of that man's aides, Charlie was in no position to point out such things. He kept quiet.
Poor Einstein,
he thought.

*   *   *

M
ike squatted in a cratered field, stripping and cleaning his grease gun. Not far away lay the highway that ran from Kyoto to Tokyo. American forces were supposed to have cut the road already. They had cut it, in fact. A Jap counterattack had opened it again, at least for a little while.

Several men from Mike's company stood guard while he cared for his weapon. He was still a sergeant, but he headed a company anyhow. Nobody who'd been a scalp in an encampment would ever make officer's rank, even if he commanded a regiment. Captain Magnusson had commanded a regiment till he picked up another leg wound. He was on the shelf again, but he was supposed to get better.

Here on Honshu, they actually had fought girls carrying spears. Jugs would have laughed if he hadn't stopped a machine-gun round with his nose outside of Nagasaki. Mike hadn't thought it was funny. He didn't want to kill those high-school kids. They sure as hell wanted to kill him, though. Sometimes you didn't get many choices, not if you wanted to go on breathing.