The Fracas Factor (14 page)

Joe came to the salute before a grim-faced Stonewall Cogswell, who looked as though he hadn’t had a moment’s sleep since Joe had seen him last. His face was gray with exhaustion.

“Why in the hell aren’t you with your men, Lieutenant?” he said. “You were scheduled to be back here at first dawn. Your lads are to go in on the first wave. We’re trying to soften up Bitter Dave before the assault.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said. “We heard a rumor in Kingston and were trying to trace it down.”

“What do you mean a rumor?” Cogswell snapped. “You sound to me as though you’re drenched and are trying to use an alibi.”

Joe then realized that he and Jim had forgotten to take the Sober-ups. His face was probably flushed and his voice uneven. He said, desperately, “Sir, we heard that Bitter Dave was bringing in large numbers of mitrailleuse.”

“What in the name of the ever jumping Zen is, or are, mitrailleuse? You’re not making much sense, Mauser.”

Joe said desperately, “If my French is correct, sir, the word means grapeshooter, or, more accurately, grape-shot shooter. In short, a small caliber machinegun. What we heard is that they were highly portable. That one man could carry and operate one, preferably, but not necessarily, with another to carry extra pans. They evidently operate from a pan, rather than a belt. Makes them more portable, of course. It takes a whole crew to man even a Maxim and …”

“I know the workings of the Maxim, Lieutenant,” Cogswell said coldly. “Now rejoin your lads.” He added ominously, “And you and Lieutenant Hawkins can forget what I said yesterday afternoon about a recommendation for promotion. You are both late in returning from your leave and obviously drenched.”

Joe saluted and said, “Yes, sir.” He did an about-face and left the tent.

Outside, his emotions were mixed, even after he had mounted his horse and taken off for the front. The withdrawing of the promised promotion was a blow, but at least the rumor of the machinegun was scotched by Cogswell. General Stonewall Cogswell was the best man in the world of the Category Military. If he said that they were not going to face the mitrailleuse in the storming of Langenscheidt’s trenches, he was probably right.

The Lockheed-Cessna infantry forces were largely drawn up in a wood below the crest where the Boeing-Douglas troops had dug in so deeply. They had scooped out their own temporary foxholes and were waiting philosophically while Cogswell’s field artillery blasted the trenches above. They were in no hurry whatsoever for the barrage to end. Every shell fired was another guarantee that when they advanced, the situation wouldn’t pickle for them. It looked as though the fracas was all but over, and that they’d survive and earn their bonus. Nevertheless, their faces were pale and wan. One never becomes a veteran of such experience by going into a frontal assault without being both wan and pale.

Joe located Jim Hawkins and dropped down beside him, seeking cover from whatever reply the Boeing-Douglas outfit might be making to Cogswell’s barrage. Bitter Dave’s artillery had been largely knocked out. He said, “False alarm. Old Stonewall says it’s an impossibility. What’s the word?”

Jim sighed in relief and said, “That’s good news. Major Hallidat came by a few minutes ago. The minute the barrage ends, you and your lads go in first. We back you up, in a second wave. Sergeant Hix is over there near the fence. I told him that you’d be along shortly.”

Joe crawled back again to Jim’s foxhole. He said, “Maybe by tomorrow this whole thing will be over. We could go back and look up those two mopsies.”

“You dreamer,” Jim laughed at him. “By this time, they’ve already lined up a couple of other funkers.”

The shelling ended suddenly, the guns falling silent simultaneously.

“This is it,” Joe said, coming to his feet. He held up an arm and shouted, “Okay, lads, let’s go. This is a milk run. It’s all over. We can get our bonuses!”

“Ha!” Jim growled, too low to be heard by the Rank Privates. “It’s never all over. Zen! My head. Good luck, Joe. If you cop one in this advance, I’ll never forgive you. I need a drinking chum-pal tonight to help me take a hair of the dog that bit me.”

“It’s a milk run,” Joe repeated. “Like we said last night, the general never orders a head on assault until the enemy’s already practically helpless.”

He drug his.44 Smith & Wesson from its holster and waved it above his head, in an attempt to be dramatic. He pointed his left hand at the entrenchments on the hill above and was the first to scramble into the open field. He yelled, “Up and at ’em, lads! Take ’em prisoners if at all possible. You might be in the dill yourselves some day and prefer to be taken prisoner, rather than copping one. And those lads up there are in the dill!”

There was a concrete pillbox only a few yards to the side, and he could make out the light-reflecting lenses as the cameramen ground away.

“Bastards,” he muttered bitterly, even as he went into a slow run, his lads rising up behind him to left and right, and going into the slow, crouching trot he had assumed. They were armed with the Spanish-American War 45-70 caliber Springfield, low on velocity but carrying an ultra-heavy slug. The enemy, he knew, bore Krags.

They went up the shell-pocked hill with hardly a casualty. It was in the bag. The barbed wire that the Boeing-Douglas people had hurriedly strung was all but leveled by the barrage. They were within fifty feet of the ravaged enemy trenches when the shattering blast hit them.

Joe Mauser had never run into such a heavy fire.

Even as he fell, he saw his lads go down, to right and left, like mowed wheat.

He rolled desperately into a shallow shell hole, seeking cover. He had taken two hits, one in his side, one in his right leg. Panting, he checked them. Evidently, both were of small caliber. If they had been Maxim, not to speak of Gatling gun slugs, he would have had it. He fumbled for his first aid kit.

So the infallible Stonewall Cogswell wasn’t as infallible as all that, he thought bitterly. Whether or not the International Disarmament Commission voted against them later, enforcing the Universal Disarmament Pact, Bitter Dave Langenscheidts’s lads had their mitrailleuse and a hell of a lot of them.

He didn’t dare raise his head to check out what had come of his lads. For a moment, the deadly fire dropped off. Probably, the marksmen had emptied their pans of ammo, he decided, and were reloading. And it was then that Jim Hawkins, bent double to make as small a target as possible, appeared at the edge of the shell hole.

“Joe!” he yelped. “Are you all right? As soon as I saw you fall, I came a-running.”

“Get down!” Joe yelled.

But it was then that the blast of automatic fire hit Jim Hawkins, cutting him nearly in two.

At that point Joe Mauser awoke from his nightmare. There were blisters of sweat on his forehead and running rivulets of perspiration all over his body. He lay there in his bed for long minutes, panting.

Joe remembered how the rest of the fracas had been a madhouse. Stonewall Cogswell had taken a devastating blow, but had not been eliminated. In that frontal assault he had lost practically all of his infantry field officers Joe had been field-promoted to acting battalion commander, then to acting regimental commander, and finally to acting brigadier. For three days he held the rank of acting commander of brigade.

It had finally ended when Jack Altshuler’s heavy cavalry’ hit Bitter Dave Langenscheidt from the rear, decisively overrunning him. Joe, when it was over, was bounced from High-Lower to Low-Middle at the same time as he acquired Rank First Lieutenant. His victory, however, was cotton in his mouth. Jim Hawkins had copped his last one on the way to Joe’s rescue, a rescue that wasn’t necessary.

He stumbled out of his bed and made his way to the bathroom. It had been the last time that Joe Mauser had ever done any drinking immediately before or during a fracas. If Jim hadn’t been drenched, old pro that he was, he would never have run into that sheet of fire while coming to Joe’s aid. He might have crawled on his belly, from shell hole to shell hole, but he would never have come running erect.

Joe showered in cold water, used a depilatory on his beard, then returned to the bedroom and dressed. He was still shaken. His dreams and particularly his nightmares were more than ordinarily vivid and believable. He wished that Nadine was available to give him a lift, but she had taken a trip to the West Coast, somewhat similar to the one that had taken him to Mexico City, to contact a group out there.

He went on into the living room and through it to the small dining room with its auto-chef table. He dialed black coffee and returned with it to the living room where he found Max Mainz with a handful of leaflets and pamphlets and a pleased grin on his face.

Joe said, “Morning, Max. Did you go to the Nathan Hale Society rally?”

“Sure,” Max said. He handed over the Society literature. “It wasn’t as big as all that. Maybe two or three hundred cloddies. And most of them probably wouldn’ta come if it hadn’t been for free beer and trank.”

Joe sat on the couch and looked at the material Max had brought. He said, “How would the crowd break down caste-wise?”

“Almost all of them were Lowers,” Max told him. “And Low-Lowers at that.”

Joe looked up. “No Middles? No Uppers?”

“I dint see more than maybe half a dozen Middles and they dint look like they come to cheer. Just maybe kind of curious. One kinda heckled the first speaker and a couple of the guards beat him up. There was a special place for the Uppers to sit and they had champagne and all. There was maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, but I don’t know if they was members or just possible recruits. All the speakers looked like Uppers.”

Joe went back to the pamphlets. They were expensively printed and! well done. The cover of the first one read; My Country Right or Wrong, and there was a depiction of Nathan Hale, his arms tied behind him, a handkerchief tied over his eyes, about to be shot as the spy he had been.

Joe muttered, “I thought it was Stephen Decatur who said that, not Nathan Hale.”

He read the first few paragraphs. They seemed to have been written for the eyes of a twelve-year-old and not a very bright one at that.

Max sat down and said, “I joined up.”

Joe looked at him, startled. “You what?”

“I joined up. I’m going to be a Minuteman. You get to wear a special blue shirt and you carry a billy club around and beat up anybody who gives the Society a hard time.”

Joe glared at him. “You damned cloddy.”

“Well, Zen, Major, you told me to learn as much about them as I could. So now I’m right in with them. I’ll get the inside dope. Besides, they’re not so bad. Patriotic, like. There’s just one thing that worries me.”

“What’s that?” Now that he thought about it, having a plant in the ranks of the Nathan Hale Society might not be a bad idea.

Max said, scowling, “Well, when I signed up it was with Baron Balt Haer. And he said that they’d check out my Category Security dossier. If it checked out okay, then I’d be a full member.”

“Holy Jumping Zen, Max. If they find out that you’re associated with me, you’ll wind up dead. Nobody’s supposed to have access to your Security dossier except proper government officials.”

“Yeah,” Max said, “By the looks of it, the Society and Category Security are, like, buddy-buddy. One of the big Security officials was the first speaker last night. I betcha he’s a member of the Society.”

Joe mulled it over. He said, “There’s a half dozen things in your dossier that would connect you to me. You were my batman in two fracases. You were my observer the first time I used a glider. You went with me to Budapest on that mission to contact the Sov-world underground. And right now you’re paying part of the rent on this apartment.”

“Yeah,” Max said miserably. “Baron Haer’s already got my signature and my identification number.”

Joe hurried over to the table and to the tellyphone there. He dialed the special unlisted number Frank Hodgson had given him and drew a blank. Seemingly, the bureaucrat was neither in his office nor his home.

Joe dialed Philip Holland on his unlisted, organizational phone, and this time the other’s face faded in.

Joe Mauser said quickly, “Emergency. Max joined up with Balt’s outfit last night, and Balt dropped the information that they’d check out his Security dossier.

Is there any possible manner in which to remove any information connecting Max to me?”

“Will do, soonest,” Holland snapped. “Get him out of your apartment and into another one. Not a fancy one. He’s only a Middle-Lower. Maybe this isn’t too bad an idea, Joe, having a man planted in with those funkers.”

Philip Holland’s face faded.

Joe spun back to Max Mainz. “Get your things packed, Max. We don’t know whether or not we can get to that dossier before Baron Haer checks it. He already suspects me as being anti-government, and if he finds out any connection between us, your name’s mud.”

“You’re the boss, Joe.” Max looked around the room. “Gee, I really liked living in this place. It’s going to be tough, going back to Lower quarters.”

Chapter Thirteen

Max Mainz was taken aback by the magnitude of the Headquarters of the Nathan Hale Society when he approached it Saturday night. Several days had passed since some contact of Joe’s had erased from Max’s Security dossier the pertinent information linking him to Joe Mauser. He and Joe had kept their fingers crossed in the meantime, but nothing had developed that would indicate that the Society had checked on Max before Joe’s friend had taken action.

He assumed that he would soon know, one way or the other. He was entering the lion’s den. He wasn’t too unhappy. According to Joe Mauser, some big mucky-muck in Joe’s organization, whoever it was—Max didn’t know the name of anybody else who belonged, except Nadine Haer—had promised to pay Max well if he came up with any useable information.

He entered the main doorway, passing two king-size Minutemen who were standing there, billy clubs in sheaths at their sides.

Max approached the nearest, a stupid looking oaf, and almost certainly a Low-Lower. His cheap clothing indicated that.