Joe Steele (47 page)

“How about in China?” Esther asked.

“How about that?” Charlie said, deadpan. Mao kept gaining ground; Chiang kept giving it. “Mao won't win before the election, anyway. It's only two weeks away. That will give us a while to figure out what to do about China going Red.”

“If Joe Steele wins,” his wife said.

“Oh, he'll win.” Charlie sounded sure because he was sure. He agreed with both John Nance Garner and Stas Mikoian: Joe Steele would be President of the United States as long as he wanted to be.

Esther eyed him again. “How much
do
the election results they announce have to do with the real ones?”

She'd never asked him that before, not in all the years he'd been at the White House. Maybe she hadn't wanted to know. Charlie didn't know himself, not exactly. Approximately? Well, yes, he knew that much. And, because he knew, he replied, “Tell you what, hon. If you pretend you didn't say that, I'll pretend I didn't hear it.”

Sometimes something that wasn't an answer turned out to be an answer after all. Esther sighed. This time, she was the one who got up, walked
into the kitchen, and came back with a drink in her hand. Charlie could have used that as an excuse for one of his own. He would have not too long before. Now, he was finding he felt better when he drank less. They'd run him out of the Hibernian Hall if he ever told them so, but it was true just the same.

He stayed at the White House for election night. Esther could have gone over to listen to the returns come in, but keeping an eye on Sarah and Pat gave her the perfect excuse to stay home. Since she had it, she used it.

Maine went for Stassen. New Hampshire and Vermont joined it. So did Maryland and Delaware. Lazar Kagan swore when losing Maryland became certain. Charlie did get himself a drink then. Somebody from the state out of which the District of Columbia was carved would catch hell for not stuffing the ballot boxes better.

But the big states, the states with the piles of electoral votes, stayed in Joe Steele's camp. New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois a little later on—they all backed the fifth term. The South stayed Solid behind the President. That was what the radio announcers said, anyhow. If the actual results were different from the announced totals, nobody was going to prove it.

Some of the states with lots of labor encampments and lots of resettled wreckers swung Harold Stassen's way. They might have been sending a message, but it wasn't loud enough. They didn't have many electoral votes.

More people lived on the West Coast. All three states there remained in Joe Steele's pocket. He didn't win so overwhelmingly as he had in 1936, 1940, or 1944, but Stassen's challenge wasn't serious.

About fifteen minutes after his lead in California grew too big to overcome, the President and Betty Steele came downstairs. Charlie joined in the applause. People would have noticed if he hadn't. Joe Steele waved to his aides and henchmen. “Well, we did it again,” he said, and got another hand. “We'll keep on setting the country to rights, and we'll make sure the world doesn't go too crazy, too.”

He was telling stories with Andy Wyszynski and the young assistant attorney general when Charlie came over to congratulate him. “Thanks, Sullivan,” Joe Steele said. “You know what I wish we'd done when we went to Japan?”

“What's that, sir?”

“I wish we'd shot down Trotsky's plane. The Reds might've had themselves another civil war, trying to sort out who'd follow him.” The President shook his head in annoyance. “Too late now, dammit. I'll never get such a good chance again.”

“Sorry, sir.” As soon as he could, Charlie hurried to the bar. He had a drink or three. Even if he didn't need them all the time any more, sometimes he did.

Mike hunkered down behind a rock in the snow. A bullet spanged off the front of the rock. He shivered both from fear and from the cold. If Japanese summers reminded him of the ones in New York City, winters here came straight from Montana. It could get good and cold. It didn't always, but it could—and it had.

He was farther north than he had been this past summer, too. The fighting was north of what had been the border between North Japan and South Japan, but only by a few miles. He'd heard that Russian pilots flew North Japanese fighters. He wasn't even sure it was true. He hadn't seen any of the Russian occupiers fighting on the ground.

The North Japanese sure had a lot of fancy new Russian equipment, though. Trotsky was doing the same thing as he had in the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler and Mussolini with him. He was letting some other people try out his latest and greatest toys to see how they worked.

One of those new toys was a rifle of a kind Mike had never seen before. It spat bullets like a submachine gun, but you could still hit things with it out to a quarter of a mile. Some guys who'd fought in Europe said the Germans had used a piece like it right at the end of the war. For Mike and for most of the American troops on this side of the world, though, the AK-47 came as a nasty surprise.

Motion off to the left made Mike's head whip that way. Were the North
Japanese trying to outflank his men? But it wasn't a Red Jap. It was a brownish gray monkey, its fur dusted with snow. It carried some kind of root in one startlingly human hand.

“Get the hell outa here, monkey!” Mike called softly. He gestured with his grease gun. Damned if the monkey didn't lope away. The words or the movement seemed to make sense to it. Most of the critters that lived in Japan didn't look too different from ones you'd see in the States. Not everything was just the same, but most came close.

And then there were the monkeys. None of those in New York City, not outside of the zoos. The males were as big as two-year-olds, and had much sharper teeth. They were half tame; the Japs didn't bother them. And, just like their human cousins, they would steal anything that wasn't nailed down. He'd even seen them eat cigarette butts. If he'd done that, he would have heaved up everything he'd eaten for the past week. It didn't seem to bother the monkeys one bit.

He wondered how many of them had got killed in the American and Russian invasions. It wasn't as if—he hoped it wasn't as if—soldiers killed them on purpose. But monkeys, just like soldiers, could wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mike hoped he wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . again. He did have that fifth oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart now. What he didn't have any more was the bottom of his left earlobe. The wound had bled like hell. He didn't much care. Four inches to the right and that round would have caught him between his nose and his mouth.

A kid in a white winter suit with a radio on his back crawled up to Mike and said, “Sarge, they're gonna start shelling the Japs in half an hour. When they let up, they say we're supposed to go in and clean 'em out.”

“They do, huh? Happy fucking day,” Mike said. The brass always figured artillery would do more than it really could. But no help for it, not when he couldn't pretend he hadn't got the order. Sighing, he went on, “Tell 'em we'll give it our best shot.”

The barrage came in on schedule. He peered around his rock and watched dirt and snow fly as the 105s thudded down one after another. You thought nothing above bug size could live when you watched something
like that. But you'd be wrong. Human beings proved tough to kill, time after time.

Like me, for instance,
Mike thought. He hoped he'd be tough to kill one more time. They hadn't got him yet. Nobody said they couldn't, though.

As soon as the barrage stopped, he bounced to his feet. “C'mon, guys!” he yelled. “We'll hit 'em while they're groggy!” He wanted to close with the North Japanese troops as fast as he could, so his grease gun would stand a better chance against those new automatic rifles.

Bullets snapped past him no more than a few seconds after he started running forward. Not all the enemy soldiers were groggy, dammit. He fired a burst of his own to make them duck.

They didn't have much barbed wire up—only a few strands. Younger men who ran faster had cut it by the time he reached it. A North Japanese wearing a Russian helmet popped out of his hole like a prairie dog to see what was going on. Mike shot him in the face. He fell down again with a bubbling wail.

Clearing trenches was a nasty business. They'd learned that in the American Civil War, and in World War I, and one more time in World War II. The Shuri Line on Okinawa had taught Mike more than he'd ever wanted to learn. But here he was, still at the same old trade. A grease gun was a good thing to have along. An entrenching tool was another. He'd have to clean his off when he got the chance.

The North Japanese had no more quit in them than their brothers and cousins had had in places from Wake Island to the borders of India. They wouldn't surrender, and they didn't want to retreat. So they died. Trotsky would have been proud of them, or perhaps just amused. A few Americans fell, too, for some frozen acres that would never mean much to anybody.

*   *   *

C
harlie had the
Geographic
map of Japan back on his office wall at the White House. He'd drawn in what had been the demilitarized zone between Trotsky's North Japan and Joe Steele's South Japan. These days, the pins showing where the recent fighting was went into territory north of that borderline.

But he wasn't sure where all the pins should go. Some of the places that had seen bitter fighting carried handles like Sukiyaki Valley or Mamasan Ridge or Hill 592. They must have owned other names, too, names that might have shown up on his map. Whatever those names were, though, they hadn't made it across the Pacific.

In Japan, Joe Steele's plan was to train and arm the Constitutional Guard till it could go up against the North Japanese forces on something like equal terms. Trotsky's Japs meant it. The ones fighting and dying for Akihito as constitutional monarch didn't. They weren't eager to go forward, or to fight if they did happen to advance.

One reason for the trouble was that the Constitutional Guard was full of Red infiltrators. Trotsky's backers must have started that the minute Hirohito bought a plot, or maybe even before. They spread distrust of officers and of Americans and a reluctance to obey orders far and wide.

That was something Joe Steele knew how to handle—or he thought he did. The trouble was, treason trials and harsh punishments for anyone who even looked unhappy did nothing to improve the Constitutional Guard's morale.

So Americans kept doing most of the Constitutional Monarchy's fighting and most of the dying in Japan. Next to the battles there before World War II ended, even next to the fighting in Europe, the stubborn positional war going on now was small potatoes. But it was like an infected sore that wouldn't stop oozing casualties. News of young American men killed and young American men maimed wouldn't go away. Spring passed into summer. Places christened Geisha Gulch and the Valley of the Shadow of Death showed up in the newspapers. They weren't the kind of names that won popularity contests.

Charlie went to Stas Mikoian, who was the most reasonable of Joe Steele's longtime cronies. “You know, if the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he's got to do something more about the Japanese War,” he said.

Mikoian smiled at him. “If the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he'll get reelected in 1952, and you can take that to the bank.”

“He'll have to cook the books harder than usual to make sure nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said.

“Nothing will go wrong.” Stas Mikoian kept smiling. Was it an I-know-something-you-don't-know smile? Charlie didn't especially think so at the time. At the time, all he thought was that Mikoian should have paid more attention to him. Afterwards, though, he wondered.

And the Japanese War and its misfortunes weren't limited to the far side of the Pacific. A few days after Charlie talked with Mikoian, he saw a little story in the
Washington Post
some AP stringer in New Mexico had filed.
An ammunition dump exploded in the desert about a hundred miles south of Albuquerque
, it read.
The blast, which took place in the predawn hours, lit up the bleak countryside and could be heard for miles. The cause is still under investigation. No casualties were reported.

Casualties or not, somebody's head will roll,
Charlie thought.
Sounds like it was a big boom. Good thing it was off in the middle of nowhere. That's where they need to keep ammunition dumps.
He read the story again. That
bleak
argued the reporter wasn't from New Mexico. He smiled to himself, there in the office. If his life hadn't got tangled up with Joe Steele's, he might have written the paragraph in the paper himself.

He wondered if he would be happier now had he kept on writing for the Associated Press. It wouldn't have been hard to arrange. If he'd taken a leak a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later in that Chicago greasy spoon in 1932, so he didn't hear Vince Scriabin talking to, well, somebody . . . Those few minutes, the chance filling of his bladder, made all the difference in the world to his life, and to Mike's, too.

You could drive yourself clean around the bend if you started wondering about stuff like that. What if Joe Steele's folks had stayed in the old country instead of coming to America? What would he have become over there? A priest? A Red? Nothing very much? That was the way to bet. The United States was the land of opportunity, the place where a man could rise from nothing to—to five terms in the White House.

People always liked to believe they were the masters of their souls and the captains of their fate. But just because you liked to believe it didn't make it true. It seemed at least as likely that people bounced at random off the paddles of God's pinball machine, and that they could as easily have bounced some other way.

In a similar vein, hadn't Einstein said God didn't play dice with the universe? Something like that, anyhow. But Einstein himself had crapped out before his appointed time, so how much had he known?

No. That wasn't a problem of physics or quantum mechanics or whatever you wanted to call it. That was Albert Einstein misreading Joe Steele. Einstein had been mighty good with a slide rule. With people? Not so hot. With Joe Steele, you got only one mistake. Einstein made a big one, and paid a big price.

What went through Charlie's mind was
I'm still here
. Einstein had done more while he was around. Charlie knew that. But Einstein was a genius, and Charlie didn't fill the bill there. He knew that, too. Genius or not, he was still around to do the things he could do, while Einstein wasn't. That also counted. As far as Charlie could see, it counted for more than anything else.

*   *   *

M
ike sat in the ruins of Yamashita, on the east coast of North Japan, as the sun went down. Red propaganda posters still decorated the walls and fences that the fighting hadn't knocked down. Workers and peasants marched side by side into a sunny future. Happy tractors—they were smiling cartoons—plowed fields. He couldn't read the script, but the pictures spoke for themselves.

He spooned beef stew out of a C-ration can. It wasn't one of his favorites, but it beat hell out of going hungry. Down in South Japan, they were trying to make the Japs use the Roman alphabet all the time. The idea was to link them to the wider world. Whether they wanted to be linked that way . . . Eisenhower didn't bother to ask. He just followed Joe Steele's orders.

Trotsky was supposed to be the one who tore everything up by the roots. But the Russians hadn't tried to change the way people in North Japan wrote. What did it say when Joe Steele was more radical than Mr. World Revolution?

A soldier came over to Mike and asked, “Hey, Sarge, are we gonna move up toward Sendai tonight?”

Sendai was the next real city, about ten miles north of Yamashita. It
held about a quarter of a million people. It was also the place where the North Japanese were digging in for a serious stand. All the same, Mike shook his head. “Doesn't look that way, Ralph. Our orders are to sit tight right where we are.”

“How come?” Ralph said. “If we hit 'em when they're off-balance, like, maybe we can punch through 'em an' get this goddamn stupid useless fucking war over with.”

Mike chuckled. “Tell me again how you feel about it. I wasn't quite sure the first time.” He held up a hand. “Seriously, though, all I do is work here. You want to get the orders changed, go back to Division HQ. That's where they came from.”

“Oh, yeah. They're gonna listen to a PFC.” Ralph patted his single stripe. “But I still say we're missin' a good chance.”

“I think so, too, but I can't do anything about it, either. Maybe we'll bomb 'em tonight or something.” Mike paused to slap at a mosquito. There weren't nearly so many of them now in August as there had been during spring, but Japan seemed to be without them only when it was snowing.

Ralph slapped, too. “What we ought do is bomb
this
place with that new shit, that DDT,” he said. “Beats the bejesus out of Flit and like that. I mean, it really kills the little sonsabitches.”

“Yeah.” Mike wasn't lousy. He didn't have fleas. He got sprayed every week or two, and the pests couldn't live on him. “It's the McCoy, all right.”

He walked around his section's perimeters, making sure the sentries were where they needed to be and stayed on their toes. The main North Japanese force was up at Sendai, sure. But those bastards liked to sneak men in civilian clothes, sometimes even women, back into areas they'd lost and have them toss grenades at the Americans and try to disappear in the confusion afterwards. Whenever you fought Japs, you needed to stay ready all the time or you'd be sorry.