The Military Megapack

by Harry Harrison

  He scrambled up and fled. Wolver followed him toward the collapsed bridge. The freighter’s deck force and all of the engineer’s force who were off-watch, were clustered here. They had been standing by boat falls, ready to abandon the ship. They stared incredulously, even yet, out to where the sub had vanished.

  Wolver stood with them. The skipper appeared presently. To the mate he said that she was leaking, but the well showed nothing alarming. The pumps were taking care of it.

  An hour passed. Then a lean gray shape materialized like a greyhound, and came alongside. Captain Banning’s voice sounded anxiously. The derbied skipper of the Willamette thrust his head over the port bridge rail and jerked the rim of his derby a bit to starboard, over a cold blue eye. Very briefly he told his tale.

  “A navy man?” Banning shouted. “Why—a seaman named Dean, who fell overboard? Where is he?”

  “Here, sir,” Wolver answered drearily. “I reckon there ain’t a chance of stayin’ aboard, sir?”

  “No, you’ll have to come back. But—well, I’ll lower a boat for you.”

  Not on the bridge did Captain Banning interview him. It was in the privacy of the cabin, with only the exec by to hear. And at Wolver’s account, interlarded with his burning desire to return to the armed guard, Captain Banning stiffened.

  “Cohoxon?” he snapped. “You were on the Cohoxon? Are you, by any chance, the pointer who sank that sub? Why—why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You never ask me, sir.”

  “Well, I think you can help me win a bet with the executive officer. If you can—and you can tell me the truth without any worries concerning results—I’ll promise you a transfer back to the armed guard. Now, did you, or did you not, actually fall overboard?”

  Wolver stared at his feet, then looked up. “How was you a-bettin’, sir?” he asked.

  “That you jumped! For I never saw a man more set on any duty than you seemed to be set on that detail.”

  “Well, sir, I just don’t know whether you won that bet, or not. I never fell overboard—exactly. Nor yet I never jumped. I was right skeered of the propellers, so I dived! An’ swum like ever’thing. It looked like a chance to git back to wolvin’, sir, sea-wolvin’.”

  “I win, and you win!” said Captain Banning, with a faint note of helplessness. “Wolving is certainly your line!”

  WHEN A YANK GETS FIGHTING MAD, by Lieut. Jay D. Blaufox

  I.

  Doctor Mikhail Tchekov, American military surgeon attached to the Russian Army and stationed in Amavir in the Caucasus, waited in front of the camp where the Soviets kept their German prisoners on the outside of the town.

  As he stood before the gates of the barbed wire entanglements waiting to be admitted, he remembered to keep well back from the gate. One touch of the wire before the electric switches were pulled which charged them, and he—or anyone—would need a doctor. That is, if he survived the terrific electric shock.

  A guard strode to the gate. He swung it wide and saluted.

  “Thank you, Pavrovitch,” said Mickey nodding at the Russian. “I hear we have a new batch of prisoners today.”

  “Da,” replied the guard Pavrovitch. “General Timoshenko has added another five hundred to his collection of Nazi dogs for his great kennel.”

  Mickey laughed. He entered the enclosure.

  The gang at the hospital called him Mickey. Mickey Checkoff and even the nurses dared call him that—though they did it quietly, respectfully, and even affectionately, for everyone in the hospital situated on the left bank of the Kuban River liked the tall, handsome, dark-eyed American. They liked his jokes, his broad smile, and the noise he made with his tongue—a sort of clucking noise—twice. When he said anything that tickled his hearer, a broad wink always accompanied it from one of his laughing eyes.

  “Do I have to examine the whole five hundred, Pavrovitch?” he asked smilingly.

  “Only fifty, doctor,” replied Pavrovitch. “The others have been examined.”

  Mickey strode on to a low, rambling pinewood building, at one end of the camp.

  He walked past dozens of small groups of half-starved, weary Nazis in ragged grey-green uniforms. He saw the toes of many of them sticking through rotten, worn-out boots. Their coats and britches were torn, badly patched, or pinned together.

  As he passed one man separated from the rest, the German stopped him.

  “Herr doktor.”

  Mickey stopped.

  “Oh! Hello Heinsel,” he greeted in perfect German.

  Heinsel was a small man, of the type which might have been obese if he had been well fed enough.

  “Wie gehts?” asked Mickey.

  “Sehr gut!” smiled Heinsel. The man never complained; at least, not to the American. It was odd seeing an American uniform among the German and Russians in camp.

  * * * *

  Mickey and Heinsel were old friends. They had known each other when Mickey was taking a postgraduate course in medicine at the Breslau University. Heinsel gave up surgery when he lost an arm in the attack on Moscow.

  “I just wanted to let you know that one of your new prisoners is Von Starheim,” Heinsel warned him. “You’ll meet him in the examining hut.”

  Mickey’s face was not a poker face. He showed his surprise plainly. Then he smiled.

  “Really,” he grinned. “We meet even here.”

  “Hitler may yearn to rule the world,” Heinsel added. “But one thing is certain; if he wins, he won’t be able to make it any larger—or any smaller.”

  “So my old sword-swinging Von Starheim is a guest of ours,” mused Mickey.

  “I shall always remember how you used to beat him to a pulp with your fists in the good old American fashion while he would insist on using broadswords in your duels,” recalled Heinsel as if it were something pleasant to remember.

  “So will he, I’ll bet,” smiled Mickey. “He swore to kill me for it someday. Said I was responsible for disgracing him at the University; making a laughing stock of him for refusing to fight in the prescribed German fashion; making him resign from the College of Medicine, he said.” Mickey looked away from Heinsel as he reminisced. He turned back to the smaller, bespectacled man. “Do you think he meant what he said,” he grinned. “Do you really think he’ll try to kill me?”

  Heinsel was not smiling. His undernourished face was serious. “I’d be careful if I were you, Mickey,” he urged. “I’ve seen Von Starheim in action. He is capable of anything.”

  Mickey smiled at the German.

  “Thank you for the tip, Heinsel,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll be careful.”

  As Mickey entered the low building, a Russian orderly who could speak German cried: “All right you men, line up for examination.”

  The Nazi prisoners complied.

  “I’ll take the officers first,” ordered Mickey.

  “Officers fall in up front,” shouted the orderly again.

  Mickey placed his kitbag in one of the pine compartments on the long examining table of bare pine. He removed his blouse and hung it up on a hook and put on the long, white coat that it replaced.

  The first ten men Mickey examined were officers; the eleventh was Von Starheim.

  “Well,” said Mickey by way of greeting. “Fancy meeting you here, Von Starheim.”

  The German’s eyes glowed with the hate that was born in a University classroom in Germany, and the kind of hate Mickey knew would be carried into eternity.

  “I won’t stay here very long, Tchekov,” replied the man bitterly. “I don’t like the place; and I don’t like the people.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to us,” encouraged Mickey. “We’re not like the Nazis at all. We treat our prisoners with kindness and medicine. Not with bullets and bayonets.”

  “I’ll stake my life that I’m not in this prison camp twenty-four hours,” boasted the German.

  “Come now,” said Mickey. “You should be a good guest if you want your host to treat you with affability. I
f you have any information that would be helpful to him, as long as you accept his hospitality and his food, you should reciprocate in kind.”

  * * * *

  Mickey looked at Von Starheim. He could see fires of intense passion burning in the man’s soul; the passion to kill. Mickey became serious as he applied the stethoscope to the Nazi’s broad chest. Why couldn’t Americans be like that? This man represented the most hateful thing on earth; the domination of races and peoples so far superior to the Nazi stupidmen that it was a pleasure to kill for the ambition. Yet great nations went down in the mad onrush of Heinie brutality only because they were not trained as the Nazis were; to destroy everything opposing them in their insane path; to kill everything that lived whether it was a simple flower, or an innocent child that chanced to be under its stiff, unrelenting, goose-stepping, hobnailed boots.

  Mickey examined Von Starheim from head to feet.

  “Your luck seems to be with you, Von Starheim,” he said. “You’re in pretty good shape.”

  “I intend to continue to be,” replied the man, his chest expanding with arrogant Nazi pride.

  “You look a lot better fed than most of the officers I’ve just examined,” remarked the American.

  “And why not?” asked Von Starheim. “I am a Staff officer.”

  “Well,” Mickey observed, “you always did take good care of that body of yours. Even at Breslau.”

  Von Starheim’s face darkened.

  “I haven’t forgotten Breslau,” said Von Starheim bitterly. “I swore to kill you then for disgracing me at the University, and now that we are at war, my job will be a lot easier.”

  “You disgraced yourself, my friend,” reminded Mickey. “Your arrogance got you into trouble not only with me, but with the faculty as well. If you were asked to resign, the fault lay with you, not with me.”

  “I would not have suffered the ridicule from the other students if you had fought honorably,” replied Von Starheim.

  “Fighting honorably, as you put it,” said Mickey, “is not in the Nazi category. It is also a matter of geography. In my country we fight with our fists; not with broadswords. If I were a German—which, thank God, I am not—I might have fought you that way—and killed you.”

  The Nazi stiffened.

  “You would never have killed me,” he snapped.

  Mickey looked down and smiled.

  “You forget my strength,” he grinned.

  Von Starheim had not forgotten. He remembered the terrific pummeling from Mickey’s big fists. He remembered the unconcealed amusement on the faces of the other medical students when he appeared with his eyes blackened; a gaping hole in the middle of an otherwise perfect row of teeth where Mickey had knocked a tooth or two off its foundation. But the American had taken the German’s taunts at the University, his bragging arrogance of his Aryan superiority over the American Indian as he had called him, until even a patient Yankee must defend his good name. So Mickey slapped Von Starheim’s face.

  * * * *

  Von Starheim’s seconds called on the American. He had the choice of weapons. He chose to use his fists. Von Starheim had no alternative. He had to fight with his fists. The count reached almost a thousand—or it could have—before he could mutter: “Where am I?” Even his seconds laughed at that. And so did the whole medical studentry. It made the proud Von Starheim forget his medical career; but not the students who laughed; nor Mickey Tchekov. When the Nazi Party came into power, six of the students died in concentration camps for their laughter. Von Starheim became a respected member of the Nazi party, gained power, and began seeking typical Nazi revenge. He had one more to go; that was Doctor Mikhail Tchekov, the American “Indian.”

  But there was nothing Indian about Mickey, except his fine body; his enduring strength. Though these were not inherited from any Indian ancestry but from a father and mother of Kuban Cossack descendancy. Mickey’s father was a Caucasian who, with his wife, had migrated to New York City where, in the lower East Side, Mickey was born to them.

  Mickey’s father prospered and his son enjoyed all the fruits of a free American education even to the scholarship which sent him to Breslau University for postgraduate medical work.

  When the war broke out, Mickey enlisted in the United States Army and because he spoke Russian and German fluently, was sent to Iran with the first American contingent to await further orders.

  The Soviet Union declined the use of American soldiers to protect Russian soil, but they did accept many American medical officers when the German 1942 summer offensive started and medical men were at a premium in the Soviet.

  With a number of other Americans who could speak Russian and German, Mickey was shipped up the Caspian Sea to Mackhack in the Caucasus. There he entrained on the Transcaucasian Railway and later disentrained at Amavir where one of the largest of the Caucasian Hospital units was based. It was there many of Russia’s captured Germans were imprisoned in a camp on the outskirts of the town.

  No. Von Starheim had not forgotten Mickey’s strength. Nor the disgrace that strength had caused.

  “How can I forget your strength,” the Nazi replied, “when it caused me the loss of my career? Do you think I shall ever forget that?”

  “Probably not,” agreed Mickey. “You’re not the type. You lost your career not through any beating I might have given you, but through your foolish Nazi pride.” He looked down at Von Starheim significantly. “I’d advise you to forget that around here.”

  “I won’t have time to forget it here,” smirked the Nazi. “I won’t be here long enough. My army is driving South. They’ve smashed Krasnodar. They are not far from the Maikop oil fields. Once in Maikop, this place will crumble like an egg crate.” The man could not help licking his chops at the prospect. “Then, my friend, you will not be too far away for me to get satisfaction.”

  * * * *

  The news was bad from the direction of Maikop. The German Army was pushing down on it and driving the dauntless Russians back deeper into the Caucasus. Amavir was less than seventy-five miles from Maikop to the southwest of it.

  Back at the hospital, Mickey sat with his superior officer.

  “I’m not an alarmist, sir,” he said, “but in the face of the information we are getting from Maikop—and that from our bragging Nazi friend, it would seem to me that evacuating our wounded up the Kuban River to Batalpashinsk where they will be a lot safer—at least for a while—is the pressing thing to do.”

  “That will be difficult, Captain Tchekov,” replied the Chief Surgeon. “You must remember that the Kuban flows down from the Elbrus Mountain. To embark for Batalpashinsk will be driving against the strong current. Our boats are small and too few.”

  “I think we still have time to get more boats, sir,” replied Mickey. “I know where there are at least a dozen of them; motorized.”

  The telephone jangled on the Chief Surgeon’s desk. He answered it. Mickey watched him. The man’s face grew serious, as he listened to the squeaking voice which came through to the American. The conversation was short and snappy. When the Hospital Commandant turned to Mickey, his eyes were aglow with an anxious light.

  “You were right, Captain,” he said. “Orders have just come in. We must evacuate at once. Do you think you can get those boats?”

  Less than one hour later, with the help of a dozen Russian guards, Mickey had the motorboats tied to the hospital dock. The whole place had suddenly come alive. Stretcher bearers, nurses, doctors, assistants, orderlies and hospital attendants were bringing out the wounded and laying them on the ground to wait their turn to be put aboard the boats.

  Von Starheim had not lied. Maikop had fallen to the Germans. Gunfire, light and heavy, could be heard not more than twenty miles away. The vanguard of the retreating Russians appeared less than five miles to the West across the Kuban Steppes. Motorboats of all sizes lined the docks and part of the shoreline. Soon one of the motors roared over the noise of distant gunfire and the boat moved out with the wounded
and nurses packed as tightly as they dared.

  Mickey Tchekov, his kitbag in hand, rushed from one stretcher to another, and helped the wounded men where he was needed. One by one the boats were filled. But the job was a slow one. The gunfire drew closer to the little town at the river’s edge; and the hospital that nestled at the base of the foothills of the Caucasus Range.

  As Mickey looked toward the South, he saw Mount Elbrus towering toward the sky, over eighteen thousand feet above them. Not much higher than the mountain, he caught a glimpse of smaller objects. Their noses were pointed in his direction. Suddenly the noses dipped. The objects started a mad dive earthward. The sound of Jumo engines ripped the atmosphere over the hills. Mickey shouted:

  “Hurry! Hurry! Stuka dive bombers are tearing at the hospital!”

  It was true. Those Nazi messengers of death were aiming their beaks for the Amavir Hospital roof and as they roared down in screaming fury, they unloosed their cargo of burning destruction upon the red cross that marked the roof of the building using it as a guide to place their bombs.

  * * * *

  One by one they roared over. One by one they sent their black missiles of oblivion into the unprotected building. Blast after blast rocked the earth about it; geysers of white cots, hospital equipment, men and women, were blown through the roof to fall back to earth, lifeless, useless, twisted things. Fire rose through the roof and the flames licked at the side walls. Men were still bringing the wounded out in spite of the roaring inferno that soon made it impossible to return for more. Most of the wounded men and women were brought out. In the face of devastating fire from the Nazi machine guns, the boats were being loaded rapidly now, and moved up the river with their cargo of pain as rapidly as they could get away.

  The five miles that separated the motorized Russian columns that were marching and riding in the direction of Amavir were soon obliterated and the light gun carriers blasted into action. They poured their anti-aircraft shells at the roaring, diving Huns and caught two of them in their engines driving them into the earth where they burned as they had caused the hospital to burn.