Joe Steele (48 page)

About half past ten, Mike was getting ready to roll himself in his blanket. He'd learned to sleep anywhere at any time in the labor encampment. That came in handy for a soldier, too.

Before he dropped off, though, bombers droned overhead, flying from south to north. They really were going to hit Sendai, then. They hadn't
used the B-29s all that much lately, even at night. North Japanese fighters and flak made the big planes suffer.

The ones tonight were flying so high, he could hardly hear their engines. Considering how much noise B-29s made in the air, that was really saying something. The North Japanese in Sendai knew they were coming, though. Their antiaircraft guns sent a fireworks display of tracers into the sky. Mike hoped the crews would come through safe.

He twisted in his hole. Like a dog or a cat, he looked for the most comfortable way in which to sleep. He'd just found it and closed his eyes when a new sun blazed in the north.

Even in the hole, even with his eyes closed, the hideous glare tore at his sight. He clapped his hands to his face. That wouldn't have helped, either, if the light hadn't faded quickly. As it faded, a thunderous roar, like that of every artillery piece in the world going off at once, left him half deaf. Wind whistled past him for a moment, though the night had been calm till then.

He scrambled to his feet. Now he could bear to look to the north. He gaped at what he saw. Lit from within, a cloud of gas and dust and God knew what rose high into the sky, higher and wider every moment. It had a terrible and terrifying beauty unlike anything he'd ever dreamt of.

Even though it was so far away, he felt heat against his face, as he would have from the real sun. What had happened to Sendai, right under . . . whatever that was? What had happened to the North Japanese troops crowding Sendai? Whatever had happened to them, he was sure he didn't need to worry about them any more.

*   *   *

J
oe Steele's voice came out of the radio: “Yesterday, August 6, 1949—a day which will live in history—the United States of America harnessed the power that lights the stars to bring peace between the two warring nations that now share the Home Islands of Japan.”

Charlie beamed. He beamed so much that Esther smiled, too, and asked, “That's your opening, isn't it?”

“You bet it is,” Charlie said. The news was big enough that what Joe Steele had to say about it was bound to wind up in Bartlett's. The President
would get the credit, but Charlie would know where the words came from even if nobody else but his wife did.

“A B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Sendai last night,” Joe Steele went on. “It was a legitimate military target because of its factories and because North Japanese troops were massing there for a fresh attack against American forces at Yamashita, ten miles to the south. This one bomb had the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of high explosive. It was two thousand times as strong as the biggest bomb that fell on Germany during World War II.

“We used this terrible weapon with reluctance. But it has become clear that the North Japanese and their Russian backers cannot be made to recognize the legitimacy of the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan by anything but extraordinary measures. And so we have now turned to those measures. To the leaders of North Japan and to all who prop them up, I give a warning they would do well to heed. Enough is enough.”

“That sounds like we have more of those atomic bombs piled up somewhere ready to go,” Esther said.

“It sure does,” Charlie said. “But you can't prove anything by me. I didn't know we had the one till it went off.” He had known Rickover and his pet physicists and engineers were working on it, but not that they'd succeeded. The eggheads Rickover had pulled out of the regular labor encampments and into his special one probably wouldn't have to break any more rocks or pave any more roads.

“Here's hoping this means your brother gets out of the war in one piece,” Esther said.

“That would be good. That would be wonderful, in fact,” Charlie said. “As far as I know, Mike hasn't been on this side of the Pacific since he shipped out in—God!—1943.”

Esther looked and listened to make sure Sarah and Pat couldn't hear what she had to say. Charlie not only recognized the gesture, he used it himself. Satisfied, she said, “He probably doesn't want to get any closer to Joe Steele than he can help.”

“No, he probably doesn't.” Charlie sighed and started to take a Chesterfield out of the pack. Then he decided he didn't have the urge that badly;
he could wait a little longer. After another sigh, he went on, “Not everything Joe Steele's done has been bad. We're the richest, strongest country in the world now. We sure weren't when he took over. We were out on our feet like a fighter who walked into a left hook.”

His wife checked again. Only after that did she say, “Well, you're right. I can't argue. But we used to be the freest country in the world. I don't think we are now. Do you? Is what we got worth what we've lost?”

“I can't begin to tell you,” Charlie said. “When the kids' kids are all grown up, ask them. Maybe they'll have an answer.”

“What's that thing in the New Testament?” Esther snapped her fingers in frustration, trying to remember. “Something about, What does it profit—?” She shook her head; she couldn't finish the quote.

But Charlie could: “‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'”

“That's the one! It's a darn good question, isn't it? Even if it's goyish, I mean.” She sent him a crooked grin of the kind he was more used to feeling on his own face than to seeing on hers.

“It is a good question,” he said. “But that's not how I look at things. For me, it's more like ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.'”

“This Caesar's done a lot of rendering, hasn't he?” Esther said. “Mike would think so.”

“Yeah, I guess he would,” Charlie agreed. “But so would all those North Japanese troops at Sendai. They got rendered down in spades.”

Esther made yet another check to be sure the children couldn't hear. She dropped her voice all the same: “What happens when he dies, this term or next term or the one after that? What do we do then? Do we turn back the clock and try to pretend he never happened? Or do we go on the way . . . the way he's shown us?”

Charlie whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Babe, I have no idea.” The only person who'd ever mentioned to him the possibility of Joe Steele dying was John Nance Garner, and the Vice President hadn't believed it would happen—certainly not soon enough to do him any good.

Scriabin, Mikoian, Kagan, Hoover, Wyszynski, Marshall . . . They all
had to know the boss was mortal. And they had to know that acting as if they knew would send them crashing down in ruin.

A couple of days went by. The first Americans got into Sendai, breathing through masks and wearing lead-lined clothes. Pictures were horrific. The one that particularly made Charlie shudder was of a man's shadow, printed on the sidewalk by the flash of the bomb. The shadow was the only thing left of the man who'd cast it. He'd gone up in smoke a split second later.

While the Americans were bombing Japan during World War II, a handful of damaged B-29s that couldn't get back flew on to Russia instead. The Reds interned the crews: for most of the war, they hadn't been fighting the Japs. They also kept the planes. They kept them and they copied them, the same way they copied DC-3s. Russian Tu-4s looked and performed almost the same as their American models. The North Japanese flew a few bombing raids with them early in the Japanese War: or, more likely, Russian crews handled the flying for them. Those raids didn't do that much, and pretty soon they stopped.

On the night of August 9, a lone B-29 flew high over Nagano, a medium-sized city in South Japan. No one paid any special attention to it. There was a war on. Warplanes came by every now and then. Only this one wasn't a B-29. It was a Tu-4. A bomb fell free. The plane made a tight turn and got out of there as if all the demons of hell were after it.

And they were. Not quite a minute later, Nagano was incinerated the way Sendai had been three days earlier. Radio Moscow's shortwave English-language broadcast explained the whys and wherefores: “The capitalist jackals of South Japan demanded American aid in their unjust struggle against the peace-loving Japanese People's Republic. Recently, that aid became destructive to an unprecedented and barbarous degree. In response, the peace-loving Japanese People's Republic called on its fraternal socialist ally for assistance against imperialist aggression. That assistance has been proffered.

“President Steele, the arch-aggressor of the postwar world, declared that enough was enough. As the leader of the Red vanguard of world revolution, Leon Trotsky agrees. Enough
is
enough. These devastating bombs
can fall upon the territory of countries other than the two Japans. The world struggle may prove painful, but we shall not shrink from it.”

When photos from Nagano began coming out, they looked just as dreadful as the ones from Sendai. The only difference was, some of the ones from Nagano had mountains in the background, while some of those from Sendai showed the Pacific. The dead, the melted, the scorched, and, soon, the people dying of radiation sickness in both cities looked pretty much the same.

“What are we going to do?” Charlie asked Stas Mikoian. “How many bombs do we have? How many has Trotsky got? Do we want to start playing last-man-standing with him?”

“That's about what it would come down to, all right, only I don't know if anybody'd be left standing. I don't know just how many bombs we have, either,” Mikoian said. Charlie took that with a grain of salt, not that he could do anything about it short of calling Mikoian a liar. The Armenian went on, “And I have no idea how many Trotsky has. I didn't know he had one till he dropped it.”

“What does the boss think? I haven't had the nerve to ask him.”

Mikoian scowled. “He wants to kill Einstein all over again, that's what. I've got a hard time blaming him, too. If we'd started on the bomb in '41 instead of '45, we would have kept the whip hand on the Russians for years.”

Maybe that was what Einstein was afraid of,
Charlie thought. If Joe Steele had the atomic bomb and Leon Trotsky didn't, wouldn't he have held it over Trotsky's head like a club, or else bashed him with it? Sure he would have. But saying as much to Mikoian wouldn't be Phi Beta Kappa. Charlie hadn't been Phi Beta Kappa himself, but he could see that.

He found one more question: “What'll we do about the Japanese War now?”

“Wind it up as quick as we can. What else are we supposed to do?” Mikoian said. “If we keep going like this, pretty soon there won't be any Japanese left alive to fight over.”

“Makes sense to me,” Charlie said. That had looked obvious to him
since the news came out of Nagano. He was damn glad it looked that way to Joe Steele and his other henchmen, too.

*   *   *

M
ike climbed into the back of an olive-drab Army truck with nothing but relief. “And so we bid farewell to lovely, romantic North Japan, to its quaint natives, and to its curious and exotic customs,” he said. Even after so many years as a wrecker and a dogface, he still liked slinging words. It was a hell of a lot more fun than, say, slinging hash.

He thought so, anyhow. The other soldiers boarding the truck with him jeered and hooted. “Cut the bullshit, Sarge,” one of them said. “Only good thing about the fuckin' natives is, they didn't manage to shoot me.”

“I can't even say that,” Mike replied.

“Oh,” the soldier added, “and we didn't get blown up by the atomic whoozis.”

“That wasn't the North Japanese. That was us,” Mike said.

“Well, what if the flyboys had missed? Then it woulda come down on our heads and blown us to the moon instead of the Japs. Coulda happened, I bet. Them bomber pilots, they can fuck up a wet dream.”

“Yeah.” Mike couldn't even tell him he was full of it. Maybe he wasn't. It wasn't as if Mike hadn't had to dive into a hole a time or three himself to escape his own side's ordnance. But that big a screwup wouldn't have been easy, and it hadn't happened.

Another soldier said, “Us and the Japs, we sure wasted a lot of time and blood and sweat to call it a tie and all go back to where we started from.”

“Status quo ante bellum,”
Mike said. He wasn't sure whether that came from being a reporter or straight out of Catholic school. Either way, he'd had it a long time.

It just confused the soldier from his section. “What the hell does that mean, Sarge?” the man asked.

“The same thing as what you said, only in Latin.”

“Latin? La-de-da!” the guy said. Mike gave him the finger. Everybody laughed. If Mike hadn't shown he was as tough as anybody half his age, his men might have decided he was a fairy. He'd seen that soldiers often prided
themselves on how ignorant they were, and distrusted anybody who knew anything that didn't have to do with killing. The only worse group for that he could think of were Jeebies.

The driver slid over from behind the wheel to look back through the little window in the partition that separated his compartment from the bigger one behind it. Seeing the truck was full, he said, “Okay, we're gonna get outa here.” The men in the back gave him a hand. Mike joined in along with the rest.

Down the coast road from Yamashita they went. Looking backward—the only way he could look out—Mike was reminded of the truck ride he'd taken from the railway siding to the labor encampment in the Rockies. The fields on either side of that highway hadn't been pocked with shell craters, though. And, once that truck got up into the mountains, the air had been crisp, and smelled like pines. Now it was hot and muggy and held the faint but unmistakable whiff of death.