Hold Back the Night

by Pat Frank

  Ekland, who had been listening, said, “Gee-sus!”

  “You mean the whole Division?” said Mackenzie. It didn’t sound believable. Only a few days before, the war had been over, and won, and now they were talking about evacuating the Division.

  “The whole Corps, I should think,” said Major Toomey. “Maybe the whole Army, the whole works.”

  Mackenzie drew in one long breath, and let it out with a whistle, but he made no comment. He could understand, because of the gap between Ten Corps and Eighth Army, that Corps might have to pull back into a perimeter around Hamhung, the industrial city, and Hungnam, its port. Certainly Corps could hold a beachhead perimeter, with all its artillery, and Navy big guns and the carriers, and all the air. What had happened? Were the Russians coming in, or what?

  The communications jeep had now drawn abreast of them. Mackenzie sent Vermillion back down the line with orders about the major’s jeep. Kato slipped into the back seat. Mackenzie saluted Toomey, as line officers often do when they encounter Staff, and said, “Glad to have met you, major.”

  Major Toomey smiled, returned the salute, and said, “I was gladder to meet you, and your sergeant here. Any time you’re in San José—”

  “Right. I’ll drop around for a drink.”

  “Name’s in the phone book. Toomey.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “Be seeing you, Mackenzie.”

  The column moved again. John Ekland, at the wheel of the jeep, had not ever been so cold—so cold, and frightened, and miserable. What in hell had happened to the United States? What in hell was happening when a bunch of gooks and Chinks could lick the United States?

  If everybody bugged out on Korea, it didn’t take a general or a genius to predict the final result. The United States had most of its infantry, and all its Marines, fighting these gooks in Korea, and if that Army fled and evacuated, and came back home with its tail between its legs, then the whole world would know that the United States couldn’t hold Berlin or Vienna, or the line of the Elbe, or the Dardanelles, or the oil fields of the Middle East. It couldn’t hold Japan, or maybe even England. They’d all be back inside their own borders, like squawking turkeys in a pen, waiting while the butcher sharpened his knife. “Like Thanksgiving Day turkeys,” Ekland said aloud.

  “Too bad about the turkeys,” said Mackenzie.

  “Yes, sir. Too bad about the turkeys.”

  And when the butcher was ready, when he was completely ready, he’d drop it on them. He’d certainly drop one—perhaps three or five—on Chicago. Maybe he’d aim for the Merchandise Mart, which was an excellent central location, or maybe he’d aim for the University, and its atomic research labs, where Molly worked. Ekland spit through the spokes of the wheel, as if to get a bad taste out of his mouth.

  “What’s the matter, sergeant?” asked Mackenzie. “Feel bad?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It’s tough when you have to kill somebody close up. Even a gook.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Makes you feel like a murderer. I know. You have to rationalize it. You have to get over it. It was either you, or them.”

  “I know, sir. It’s either us, or them.” If they had to pull out of Korea it was going to be us. Ekland was sure of that. He evaluated the future in the terms of his own experience. That’s the way everybody thought of World War No. 3. It was natural. It was the only way it could be.

  When a banker thought of atomic bombs on Manhattan, or in the river between the bridges and over the tunnels, he considered the dead and the maimed and the fire storms and millions of people clawing their way into the countryside, sure. But because of his indoctrination, and his profession, naturally he thought most of the financial chaos. He considered the billions in paper securities that would be irretrievably lost. Today a safety deposit box. Tomorrow an oven. He was shaken by the thoughts of accounts destroyed, and loans and mortgages never to be traced or repaid, and important clients missing in a cloud of atomic dust, and the gutting of Wall Street and the elimination of the Stock Exchange.

  A doctor considered it differently. He thought of the helpless in the hospitals, burning, and no way to get them out. He thought of the splendid equipment, purchased by public contribution or painstakingly squeezed from state funds, wrecked and lost. He thought of oceans of plasma, and rivers of whole blood, and carloads of antibiotics and miles of bandages. He thought of the skin grafts they’d need, and couldn’t get. You can’t buy skin like rolls of wallpaper, but that’s the way it would be needed.

  A real estate man had to be real hep, come an atomic bomb. And he ought to prepare for it, in advance. He ought to sell in the cities, and buy the countryside, but with care. For instance, Seattle was finished. They could hit Seattle like snapping your fingers. Places like Miami and New Orleans were safe, unless, of course, they delivered their bombs via snorkel subs and guided missiles. Then Miami and New Orleans were finished too. One sure rule was Back to the Land. The ideal investment was a modern producing farm within commuting distance of a metropolitan area, and with its own water supply and generator. If the generator could be run by water power, and the house used solar heat, then the setup was perfect. For an ideal place like that, you could get three thousand an acre, and probably twenty-seven five for the house, if it had two baths and was liveable.

  John Ekland considered it in terms of radio, and communications. When the butcher came, everybody who had relatives in New York, and Chicago, and L.A., and Washington would instantly pick up the telephone and call long distance to find out if they were safe. The telephone system would be screwed up beyond belief. He also suspected that the military lines, and Army and Navy radio, would be so overloaded by local commanders, and self-centered National Guard generals, that they would be useless for days.

  And radio! Ekland would not like to be at the NBC control switches on A-Day, even if Chicago wasn’t hit, which it certainly would be. If Orson Welles could scare the wits out of the country by talking about Men from Mars, what would happen when atomic bombs from Russia actually landed? First thing, of course, was that all the network stations would immediately be off the air. The listeners wouldn’t hear any explosion. All they’d hear would be a click, and then nothing. Nothing at all. They’d think the power was off, and in the metropolitan centers it probably would be. But in other, smaller places they’d start turning the dial, and they’d pick up some local station, and listen to the usual hillbilly music and three commercials each quarter hour, and while they might wonder what had happened to the networks, it would all be normal—for a small space of time. Then a disk jockey would say:

  “We interrupt this program—”

  Ekland looked ahead, and saw a crossroads. Tanks were moving on the main road. They looked solid, good.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you an AP news flash from Tarrytown, New York, by way of Poughkeepsie. There has been a tremendous explosion in the New York area. The Tarrytown chief-of-police believes it may have been an atomic bomb. We will have more details later.”

  Then the local station would go on, playing Flatfoot Boogie, or whatever, and the disk jockey would bespeak the qualities of Surf, The Boston Store, and Hadacol. Then, in his smooth, emasculated voice, “It seems that the news is true. There has been attack on a number of cities on both coasts. I have just called the mayor. He assures me there is no cause for alarm.”

  And then? Then the next amphibious landing of the Marines would be in Alaska, if Americans had the guts to shake off the shock of a hundred Pearl Harbors, and rise from the ashes of their cities. John Ekland could not see his own life clearly in this foreboding, for when he put on uniform again, he had renounced the privilege of making his own decisions. He’d be a sergeant, somewhere. That was all he knew for sure.

  When they came to the main road, an MP raised his hand and stopped Dog Company. “I’ll let you in here as soon as this mob of tanks passes through,” he told the captain.

  “Okay,” the captain sa
id. The MP would not break into a battalion of tanks to let an infantry company into line, even if Mackenzie told him they had an important combat mission. There wasn’t any use arguing with an MP. An MP was the law.

  There was something eerie, something wrong, about the way this tank battalion moved, and for a time Mackenzie could not put his finger on it. Then he knew. You might call this movement a breakout, or an attack in another direction, but fundamentally it was a retreat. Whenever you abandon ground to the enemy, it is retreat, however words coat and oil it, and there is a special sound to American troops in retreat. It is their wordlessness, their silence. All the sounds Mackenzie could hear were mechanical. All he could hear was the grinding of the tank treads on the ice and frozen ground, and the rumble of engines. It was as if the men were hypnotized, and the tanks retreated of themselves.

  There was no shouting. There were no commands. There were no wisecracks, or jokes, passed from tank to tank. The tank commanders stood in the ports of their turrets, their faces as impassive and gray as their armor. In their football-type helmets, each looked like a halfback who has just been taken out of the game, with his team three touchdowns behind. As the tanks passed Mackenzie, none of the commanders waved, and few of them even looked.

  “Bow-wow!” shouted Vermillion. “Dog-faces!”

  Mackenzie saw four tired men, two of them weaponless, jouncing on the back of one of the tanks. He recognized them as GI’s, probably from the Seventh Division, hitchhiking to the sea. Mackenzie turned on Vermillion. “Shut up!” he said.

  The last Pershing passed, and the MP blew his whistle, exactly like a traffic cop back home, and waved Dog Company into the procession.

  The column moved at seven, sometimes four or five miles an hour, and Mackenzie fretted, but there was nothing he could do about it. That was the trouble with the American Army. It was conceived and designed in gasoline-land, lavishly painted with four- and eight-lane superhighways, where every hamlet was connected with its neighbor by a faultless strip of concrete or macadam, where if one road was blocked you could always use three alternate routes, and there were gasoline pumps always around the next bend. The men who designed the mobile equipment of the Army could not wholly shake their environment and tradition, even when they suspected the Army might have to fight in countries where hard-surfaced, all-weather roads were few. Like Jugoslavia. Like Iran. Like China. Like Korea. Maybe like Russia. There were only a few places in the world where the mechanized United States Army could fight with maximum efficiency. One of them was Germany, which it had proved. Another was the United States. What was needed in Korea were mules. Mackenzie had heard of the Army mule, but he had never seen one. He wondered what had happened to the mule.

  Ahead Mackenzie saw the arms of the tank commanders fly up, one by one, in the signal for halt, and the column halted. “What’s cooking?” he yelled ahead.

  The tanker lifted both hands, palms up. “Don’t know. They’ll pass the word.”

  At this point Dog Company rested on the crest of a hill, and the line of tanks wormed downward before Mackenzie, so he could see the progress of the word, as the face of each tanker flashed back, and up. Finally the tank ahead got the word, and the tank commander turned to Mackenzie and shouted, “Road block. Chinks. Pass the word.”

  Mackenzie passed the word to the jeep behind, where a kid named Nick Tinker was swinging the fifty-seven recoilless around, like a small boy with a Roy Rogers pistol. He heard Ostergaard, the big, placid Swede driving this jeep behind, pass the word.

  Mackenzie considered this wait ridiculous. It was absolutely stupid and ridiculous that a powerful formation of tanks should be stopped by a road block. There was firing ahead, about two miles, he guessed from the sound. He could hear a tank’s high-velocity gun laying it in, and the dull thud of mortars which were probably Chinese mortars, and the dueling of machine guns. From the sound he judged that not more than two tanks were in action. This was a shame, but this wasn’t tank country. On the right the tanks were barred by the cliff, and on the left they dared not venture across country, for fear they would crush through the ice formed over the paddy fields, and mire in the slush below. The tanks could not deploy, as tanks should, and race across country to take the enemy on the flank and rear. The tanks were chained to the road.

  What was needed here was infantry. Mackenzie estimated the road. The Pershings and the Pattons stood astride of it so that not even a jeep could pass on either side. They had to move over. They had to get close to the rock. If they did that, he could bring his jeeps into action, his jeeps and his foot soldiers. “Vermillion,” he ordered his runner, “you go on back and tell everybody but the drivers of the six-by-sixes, and the weapons carriers, that I want ’em. Right now! Tell ’em to hit the ground and move up. I want every bazooka man. Every one. And I want the jeeps.”

  Vermillion tumbled out, and Mackenzie yelled back at Ostergaard, “All jeeps follow me. Pass the word.”

  Then he turned on the tank commander in front of him. “Move that big bastard over!”

  The tank commander stared back, surprised and uncertain.

  “You heard me! Move it over!”

  The tank commander said something into his mouthpiece, and the tank grated to the side of the road.

  That was the way Mackenzie got Dog Company to the point of the Battalion. It was slow. It was tedious. It required much cursing, and excursions into the ditches. But eventually he came to a place where two tanks were firing. There was still another tank ahead of these two, but it was burning, and had slewed athwart the road. At regular intervals enemy mortar shells arrived, bursting around the burning tank. The road was efficiently interdicted, and part of Division was cut off.

  Ekland stopped the jeep at what he considered a safe distance behind the two engaged tanks. Mackenzie said, “Think the ice on those paddy fields will hold our jeeps, sergeant?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Sure. I’m not sure the ice wouldn’t hold the tanks.”

  “I guess their Battalion commander knows more about that. Those things weigh almost fifty tons. They go through the ice and they’re finished. Tell you what we’re going to do, sergeant. We’re going to make a sweep. We’re going to flank ’em. We’re going to use the jeeps like cavalry.”

  “Very light cavalry,” said Ekland.

  “Very light indeed,” said the captain. “But anything’s better than sticking here. Pretty soon the Chinese will get wise. They’ll find out we’re stopped cold here, and they’ll bring up some heavy guns, and we’ll never get out. You and I are going to stay right here, sergeant. This will be the CP. The platoons have got walkie-talkies. We’ll operate by walkie-talkie. You be my talker.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ekland said. He brought the walkie-talkie from its case, and called in the platoons.

  “Tell ’em I want a bazook on every jeep,” said Mackenzie. “Tell ’em the jeeps are going to move off the road at an angle. The jeeps are going to do a left oblique, if they remember what that is. And when they’re all deployed they’re going to do a right oblique, and charge. The riflemen will follow the jeeps, and the machine-gun and mortar platoon is going to cover, if it sees anything to shoot at.”

  Ekland told them.

  Mackenzie rummaged for his field glasses, and found them, and stood up on the seat, and swept the terrain a mile distant. Close to where the shells from the Pershings were bursting he saw what he believed to be the top of the turret of an enemy tank. A tank, naturally, would be the core of a road block. It was probably immobile, dug in. Behind the tank he saw no evidence of the enemy, but they were there. Mortar shells spoke their presence. “They’ve got a tank up there,” he said. “You tell the platoons they’re each to have two bazookas on that tank.”

  Ekland told them.

  Mackenzie looked back over his shoulder and he motioned to Ostergaard to come up, and when Ostergaard came up he said, “I’ve got a special job for you with that mounted fifty-seven. I don’t think that fifty-seven is a damn bit of good
against all that turret armor. But when I give the word, you light out of here, but you stay behind the other jeeps, and open fire on that tank up there.” He gave Ostergaard his glasses, and pointed, until Ostergaard too saw the turret.

  “I see it, sir,” Ostergaard said. “But what am I going to do with it?”

  “You won’t do anything with it,” said the captain. “All you’ll do is distract their fire, so the bazookas can slip in with a Sunday punch. Who’s your gunner?”

  “Well, that kid, Tinker, is our gunner, since we lost our gunner back to Ko-Bong.”

  “Can he shoot?”

  “I guess so, sir. He says so. He brags he’s an expert.”

  “Okay, let him shoot. Now look, Ostergaard, any time you think they’ve zeroed in on you, you move.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll move, sir.”

  Ostergaard went back to his own jeep. Mackenzie said, “Okay, sergeant, tell them to get going.”

  Ekland spoke into his walkie-talkie, using the code name for Dog Company. “This is Lightning Four. This is Lightning Four Forward. Take off!”

  Mackenzie watched as his jeeps swerved out on the frozen plain, with the brown stubble of last season’s rice crop poking through the ice. There were only eleven jeeps, in the beginning, and they hadn’t made their turn towards the Chinese block when there were only ten, because a shell from the Chinese tank found one. “This isn’t in the book,” Mackenzie said. “This may be all wrong.”

  “This isn’t a book war,” said Ekland. “Right, sergeant, but that won’t help if I lose my company.” Mackenzie noticed that a red beard had been sprouting on Ekland’s chin since Ko-Bong, and that this beard was now stiff, like toothbrush bristles.

  “You can call it a calculated risk,” said Ekland.

  “Captains don’t take calculated risks,” said Mackenzie. “Captains just make mistakes.” A general could take a calculated risk. If it was successful, he wouldn’t call it a risk, later. It would be a well-planned operation. If he failed, it was a calculated risk.