Joe Steele (46 page)

A flight of F-80s screamed overhead, racing north. A few minutes later, more of the jets roared by. “Wonder what's going on,” Dick Shirakawa said.

“Beats me,” Mike answered. “Goddamn, but those jets are noisy! Just hearing 'em makes me want to ditch the jeep and dive into a foxhole. If you didn't know what they were, just the racket might scare you into giving up.”

They were still south of Tokyo when they got stuck behind a column of tanks, Shermans and a few of the newer, heavier Pershings, all on the way north. There was just enough southbound traffic to make Mike hesitate about pulling into the other lane and trying to pass the column. Bends
in the road showed it was long. He fumed instead, crawling along at fifteen miles an hour.

An MP at a crossroads waved the jeep over to the shoulder. “Show me your papers, you two!” he barked. He kept not quite pointing his M-1 at Dick Shirakawa. Seeing a Japanese man in an American uniform made him jumpy, even if most of the Constitutional Guard wore them. He examined both sets of leave documents with microscopic care, Dick's even more than Mike's.

Finally, Mike got fed up and said, “What's the story, anyway?”

The MP stared at him. “You haven't heard?”

“I haven't heard jack shit, man. If I had, would I be asking you?”

“You guys are fucking lucky you weren't back at the border—that's all I've got to tell you. The North Japanese are attacking South Japan. They've got tanks and big guns and I don't know what all else. No warning, no nothin'. One minute, everything was quiet. The next one, all hell broke loose.”

Mike and Dick looked at each other in consternation. “We've got to get back up there,” Mike said. “Our buddies are there. So are the Jap troops we were training.”

“Good luck—that's all I've got to tell you.” The MP liked the phrase. “Here's what you do. Go on in to Tokyo. Get your orders there. Draw some weapons there, too. You sure as hell ain't safe without 'em.”

Being unarmed hadn't worried Mike till then. Riding in a jeep, he'd felt safe enough. Not if there was a new war on, though. He nodded tightly. “We'll do that, then.”

American authorities in sad, ruined Tokyo seemed as discombobulated as if they'd taken a right from the Brown Bomber square in the kisser. They hadn't expected an attack from North Japan. Mike didn't know why not. Captain Armstrong had been sending in worried reports for weeks. So had other commanders near the demilitarized zone. Had anybody here believed them, or even read them? It sure didn't look that way.

Getting weapons was easy. The armory issued Mike and Dick grease guns and as many magazines as they could carry. Getting orders . . . Dick
got his right away: to sit tight in Tokyo. The captain who told him to do that sounded apologetic but firm. “Corporal, I understand what you are. I understand what you've done for your country,” he said. “But I don't want our own guys getting a look at you and filling you full of holes because they think you're a North Japanese soldier in an American uniform.”

“You think our men are really that dumb, sir?” Dick Shirakawa asked.

“You tell me,” the harried captain replied. Dick thought it over. He didn't need long. He stayed in Tokyo.

Mike scrambled into a halftrack that was part of a patched-together regimental combat team. Hardly anybody in the machine knew anybody else. That worried him. One of the reasons men fought well was to protect their buddies. Another was to keep from seeming yellow to those same buddies. How well would these guys do if they didn't care about the men with them and those men didn't give a damn about them?

For a while, it just seemed like a training ride. Then, off to the north, the rumble of artillery began to make itself known above the different rumble of the halftrack's engine. Smoke stained the horizon. War and fire went together like pretzels and beer.

They stopped for the night before they found the action, or it found them. Some of them didn't know the first thing about digging a foxhole or setting up a perimeter. They were draftees who'd been doing garrison duty, not soldiers with combat experience. Mike took charge of them. He had a first sergeant's stripes and a manner that said he knew what he was doing.

In the morning, they went forward again. It started to be stop-and-go traffic. Refugees clogged the roads: Jap civilians who didn't want to live under North Japan's Rising Sun with the gold Hammer and Sickle inside. Mike didn't blame them, but they sure didn't make getting up there to defend South Japan any easier.

Then Mike saw other Japs getting away from the North Japanese invasion. Some wore American uniform, some that of the old, dead Imperial Army. A lot of them had thrown away their rifles so they could retreat faster. The Constitutional Guard, or big chunks of it, didn't seem eager to
guard the shiny new constitution. A few of those soldiers were wounded, but only a few. The rest were just bugging out.

Mike started worrying in earnest.

*   *   *

A
s far as the White House was concerned, the Japanese War couldn't have come at a worse time. The Republicans had just nominated Harold Stassen. Hardly anyone outside of Minnesota had ever heard of him. The way it had looked, he would have been a token candidate, and Steele and Garner would have rolled to a fifth term.

Now? Now Joe Steele had to work again. He was almost seventy. Some of the old energy was gone. Charlie could see that. The President seemed not just insulted but amazed that Trotsky's followers in North Japan dared try to upset the applecart.

At his orders, the Americans in South Japan tried to bomb them back to the Stone Age. B-29s thundered over North Japan, the way they'd thundered over the whole country when Hirohito still ran it. But the Imperial Japanese air defenses had been flattened before the Superfortresses rolled in.

It wasn't so easy now. North Japan flew Gurevich-9 fighter jets. The Gu-9s weren't as good as American F-80s. They were Russian versions of the German Me-262, probably built with the help of captured Nazi engineers and technicians. Even if they couldn't match the American jets, though, they were far more than B-29s had been designed to face. Daylight air raids over North Japan lasted only a few days. Had they gone on any longer, there would have been precious few B-29s left to make more.

And . . . Charlie went up to the oval study to ask Joe Steele a question: “Sir, is it true a lot of those Gu-9s have Russian pilots?”

“It's true,” Joe Steele answered. “But there's no point to saying anything about it.” He knocked dottle from his pipe into a favorite ashtray: a brass catcher's mitt.

“Why not?” Charlie exclaimed. Propaganda points danced in his head.

Joe Steele looked at him the way he looked at Pat when his son asked a
child's question. “Well, Sullivan, do you suppose the Japs are flying all those F-80s and B-29s?”

Charlie deflated. “Oh,” he said. Then he brightened. “But North Japan invaded South Japan. We're helping the South Japanese defend themselves. Trotsky's pilots are helping the aggressors.”

“If you can do something with it, go ahead.” The President still sounded like a man humoring a little boy. He scratched his mustache. “What we really have to do is stop the bastards before they take Tokyo. That wouldn't look good at all. Can't let it happen.” He nodded in a way that said there would be some dead generals if it did happen.

Seeing that Joe Steele didn't have anything else to tell him, Charlie got out of there. He fiddled around with the news that the Russians were flying planes for North Japan. Fiddle around was as much as he did. He couldn't manage to bring it out in a way that didn't show the Americans were doing more than just flying planes for South Japan. If not for American boots on the ground, the whole fragile Constitutional Monarchy of Japan might get swept away.

And one pair of those boots belonged to Mike. Charlie hoped his brother was okay. Hope was all he could do; he hadn't heard from Mike since the fighting broke out.

Idly, or not so idly, he wondered what kind of dope J. Edgar Hoover had on Harold Stassen. Whatever it was, it would poison the well during the campaign. Joe Steele might be slowing down, but he hadn't stopped. He wasn't about to lose an election, not if he could help it. And, as Charlie had reason to know, he damn well could.

*   *   *

U
tsunomiya was one more medium-sized Japanese town, about as important, or as unimportant, in the scheme of things here as Omaha was in the States. It was also one of those places that might find its way into the history books by getting drenched in blood.

If the North Japanese broke through at Utsunomiya, Mike had no idea what would stop them this side of Tokyo. He was only a first sergeant, of course. He had a bug's-eye view of the battlefield, not a bird's-eye view.
But, by the way the brass kept piling American troops and the steadier units of the Constitutional Guard into the fight, they felt the same way.

He and his section were dug in on the northern outskirts of Utsunomiya. If they had to fall back, they had orders to fight inside the town, too. Mike hoped they wouldn't have to. Where they were now marked the deepest penetration into South Japan the North Japanese had made.

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.”

*   *   *

J
oe 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.”