Down thumped the steel unloading door. “Get out!” yelled the sailors who crewed the ungainly beast. They wanted to get out of there themselves, and who could blame them?
Mike yelled like a fiend when he charged onto the beach. It wasn’t to scare the Japs. It was to unscare him a little bit. He saw jungle ahead, more than he’d seen on Tarawa. That just meant the little yellow men here had more hiding places. They’d know how to use them, too.
Next to him, a guy from his squad folded up like an accordion and added his screams to the din all around. That could have been me, Mike thought. A bullet tugged at his trouser leg like a little kid’s hand. It pierced the cotton, but not his flesh. If that was anything but dumb luck, he couldn’t see what.
A couple of Americans with a machine gun sprayed bullets into the bushes ahead. You didn’t want to run in front of them, or they’d shoot you, too. Mike swerved to the left.
A Jap with a rifle popped up out of nowhere right in front of him. They stared at each other in horror for a split second, then fired at the same time. They couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards apart, but they both missed. Shooting when your heart was pounding two hundred beats a minute and your mouth was dry with fear was no easy test. The Jap frantically worked the bolt on his Arisaka. Mike just pulled the trigger again. The semiautomatic M-1 fired. The Jap clutched his chest. He managed to get off another shot, but it went wild. He fell back into whatever hole he’d popped out of.
Of course, if Mike’s first shot had been the last one in the magazine, it would have popped out with a neat little clink—and the Jap would have plugged him instead. One more time, the luck of the draw.
He crawled up to where he could see the opening in the ground the Jap had come from. He threw in three grenades, in case the son of a bitch had company in there.
Fighter planes raked Saipan with heavy-caliber machine guns and rockets. Bombers dropped more high explosives on the Japs’ heads. The fleet offshore kept pounding away with everything up to fourteen-inch guns. And the American soldiers had tanks and flamethrowers along with their other toys.
Tojo’s boys had no air support. No warships gave them a hand. But Japan had owned Saipan since the end of the First World War. The Japs had dug in but good, and camouflaged all their bunkers and dugouts and strongpoints. Anybody who wanted them dead had to come kill them, and they commonly took a deal of killing.
Still, once the Americans got off the beach and into the jungle, it was only a matter of time, and of how big the U.S. butcher’s bill would be. American officers used the punishment brigade instead of Marines where things were hottest. That was what punishment brigades were for.
Mike acquired a flesh wound on his leg, another on his arm, and an abiding hatred for all American officers except the ones in his outfit. His hatred for the Japs, oddly, shrank each day as he killed them and they tried to kill him. They were in the same miserable boat he was. They had to stand and fight. He had to go to them and fight. If you didn’t go to them, you either got shot on the spot by MPs who trailed the punishment brigade or you earned a drumhead court-martial and the services of a firing squad. If you went forward, you might make it. Mike went forward.
He lived. So did Luther Magnusson, despite a shrapnel gash along the side of his jaw. But the brigade, despite being built up again after Tarawa, melted away like a snowball in Death Valley.
Puffing greedily on a cigarette from a C-ration pack, Magnusson said, “I think the Germans are better professional soldiers than these guys. The krauts, they have the doctrine down like you wouldn’t believe. Everybody does, generals down to privates. They know what to do, and they know how.”
“These guys, all they do is mean it,” Mike said. The wound on his arm didn’t hurt, but it itched like a bastard. He scratched the bandage. You weren’t supposed to do that, but everybody did.
“Yeah. That’s about the size of it,” Magnusson agreed.
Just how much the Japs meant it, they saw a few days later. Japanese soldiers with nowhere left to go charged the Americans behind a great red flag. Anyone who could walk, wounded or not, armed or not, went to his death hoping to take some of the enemy with him. And, since Japan had held Saipan for so long, there were civilians on the island, too. Thousands of them leaped to their deaths from cliffs on the eastern coast rather than yielding to the Americans.
“What can you do with people like that?” Mike asked when it was finally over.
“Damned if I know.” After watching women throw children off a cliff and then jump into the Pacific after them, Captain Magnusson had the air of a man shaken to the core. Mike understood that; he felt the same way himself. It was like getting stuck inside a nightmare where you couldn’t wake up and get away. As a matter of fact, combat in general was a lot like that. Luther Magnusson shook his head and spat. Quietly, he repeated, “Damned if I know.”
* * *
Paris fell. Charlie heard there were practically orgies in the streets when the Allies entered the long-occupied French capital. The stories varied, depending mostly on the imagination of who was telling them. The Germans in France skedaddled toward the Reich.
In Italy, the Allies ground forward. The Germans there were stubborn. They’d hold a line as long as they could, then fall back a few miles and hold another one. The rugged terrain worked for the defenders.
And the Russians! Trotsky’s men drove the Nazis back over the frontier they’d had before the Eastern Front exploded. Finland bailed out of the war. Romania switched sides with treacherously excellent timing. Bulgaria bowed out, too. Sure as the devil, Trotsky was going to gobble up most of the Balkans. Red Army tanks rolled all the way to the Vistula, to the suburbs of Warsaw.
Hitler still had a few cards up his sleeve. When Slovakia rebelled, he squashed it before the Russians could help. And he stopped Hungary from asking for an armistice by kidnapping the admiral who’d run the landlocked country and putting in a passel of Hungarian Fascist fanatics horrible enough to satisfy even him.
But the writing was on the wall. Most of the world could see it, even if Hitler couldn’t or wouldn’t. The Allies were going to win the war. The Axis was going to lose. It would happen sooner, not later.
In the United States, anybody who wanted work had it, and was probably making more money than he (or she—especially she) ever had in his (or her) life. Quite a few people who might not have wanted work were working hard anyway, in one or another of Joe Steele’s labor encampments. By now, those had been around long enough, most of the country took them for granted. Why not? Most folks knew somebody or knew of somebody who’d got himself (or, again, herself) jugged.
Tom Dewey rolled and sometimes flew across the country as if his pants, or possibly his hair, were on fire. He promised to do better with the war and less with the labor encampments than Joe Steele was doing.
He couldn’t say much else. But it would have been hard to do better with the war than Joe Steele was already doing in the fall of 1944. Anyone who paid any attention at all to the headlines or listened to the news on the radio could see that. And the labor encampments were old news. People took them in stride, the way they took bad weather in stride. You tried not to say anything stupid where some squealer could overhear it and pass it on to the Jeebies. And you got on with your life.
Charlie found Thelma Feldman’s address in a New York City phone book. He put a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope with a sheet of paper folded around it so no one would know what it was. One Sunday, he told Esther he had to go in to the White House. Instead, he went to Union Station and took a train up to Baltimore. When he got there, he left the train station so he could drop the envelope in a streetcorner mailbox. Then he turned around and went back to Washington.
He didn’t want the editor’s wife to know from whom the money came. He also didn’t want anybody from the White House or the GBI to know he’d sent it. That kind of thing wasn’t illegal
, which didn’t mean it couldn’t land you in the soup.
Esther wouldn’t have minded. If she’d known what he was doing, she would have kissed him or maybe even dragged him off to the bedroom to show what she thought of it. But not even the Jeebies could pull what she didn’t know out of her.
Sometimes Charlie remembered the days when he didn’t need to worry about things like that. He also remembered millions of people out of work, and his own fears of winding up in a bread line. So parts of life were better now, even if other parts were worse. Life was like that. If you got something, you mostly had to give up something else.
Joe Steele wasn’t going to give up the White House, not to the likes of Tom Dewey. Charlie was convinced the President would win an honest election, maybe not so easily as he had against Alf Landon, but without any trouble. With the apparatus he had in place, chances were he wouldn’t lose even if he told people to vote for the other guy.
He seemed to feel the same way. He asked for only a few campaign speeches from Charlie. His theme, naturally, was winning the war and staying prosperous after peace came. None of that was exciting, but Charlie could see it was what he needed to say.
With time on his hands—and with his conscience none too clear in spite of sending Thelma Feldman that C-note—he visited the watering hole around the corner from the White House more often than he had been in the habit of doing.
Every so often, he would run into John Nance Garner there. Garner was a drinker’s drinker. He rarely seemed out-and-out drunk, but he rarely seemed sober, either. By all the signs, he started as soon as he got up and kept on till he went to bed. Not too much at once, but never very long without, either.
“Congratulations, sir,” Charlie told him one afternoon. “You’re the longest-serving Vice President in American history.”
John Nance Garner glared at him. “Ah, fuck you, Sullivan. It don’t mean shit, and you know it as well as I do.”
Since Charlie did know, all he could say was, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Hell you didn’t. It don’t mean shit,” Garner repeated with mournful emphasis. “Only way it means shit is if I’m still around when Joe Steele kicks the bucket. And you know what else? That ain’t gonna happen, on account of I’m more than ten years older’n he is, an’ on account of I bet he’s got a deal with the Devil, ’cause he just don’t get no older.”
That wasn’t true. Joe Steele was grayer and more wrinkled than he had been in 1932. But he hadn’t aged as much as Garner since then. He also hadn’t drunk as much. Charlie said, “I hope you both last a long time.” Garner had to be more pickled than he looked to talk at all about Joe Steele dying. You couldn’t pick a less safe subject.
He must be sure I won’t rat on him, no matter how plastered he is, Charlie thought. That was a compliment, and not such a small one. It made Charlie feel better for the rest of the day.
When the election came, Joe Steele trounced Dewey. “I wish the President well,” Dewey said in his concession speech, “because wishing the President well means wishing the United States well, and I love the United States, as I know Joe Steele does.” Listening in the White House, Charlie glanced over at the President. Joe Steele didn’t even smile.
XX
It was over. Half of it was over, anyhow. Along with everybody else in Washington, Charlie had gone nuts with joy over reports from German radio that Adolf Hitler had died fighting against the Russians in the blazing ruins of Berlin. Shortly afterwards, Radio Moscow claimed he’d done no such thing—he’d blown out his own brains in his fortified bunker when it finally dawned on him that the Nazis wouldn’t win their war and the Reich wouldn’t last a thousand years.
A few days later, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. A reporter wound up in trouble for breaking the story before it became official. As an ex-reporter with a brother who’d got in trouble for what he’d reported, Charlie sympathized. He still thought the guy was a prime jerk, though.
Slippery to the last, the Germans tried to give up to the Americans and English but not to the Russians. On Joe Steele’s orders, Omar Bradley told them they could do it the way the Allies wanted or they could go back to fighting everybody. They did it the way the Allies wanted. They even staged a second ceremony in Berlin for the Red Army’s benefit. Marshal Koniev signed the surrender there for Leon Trotsky. The guns in Europe fell silent after almost six years.
Joe Steele went on the radio. “This is victory, victory in Europe, V-E Day,” the President said. “And victory is sweet, no doubt of that. It is all the sweeter because it came against such a cruel and heartless foe.”
Charlie grinned when he heard that. He’d suggested it. The reports on what the Nazis had done in their prison camps and their death camps still seemed impossible to believe. How could a famously civilized country go mad like that? But photos of skeletal corpses piled like cordwood had to be real. No one could be sick enough to imagine such things. No one except Hitler’s thugs, anyhow. And they hadn’t just imagined them. They’d made them real.
“And it is all the sweeter because it comes after so much pain and heartache,” Joe Steele went on. “And so we deserve to celebrate—for a little while. Only for a little while, though. Because our job is not done. Japan still fights against the forces of freedom and democracy.”
He could say that with a straight face, because Russia and Japan remained neutral to each other. Trotsky had promised Joe Steele and Churchill he would enter the war against the Japs. Of course he would—he wanted to grab as many goodies from the chaos convulsing Asia as he could. But he hadn’t done it yet.
“Unless the Japanese follow the German lead and yield to our forces without conditions, we will treat their islands as we have treated Germany.” Joe Steele sounded as if he looked forward to it. “We will rain fire and destruction from the skies upon them. We will make a desert, and it will be peace. If the Emperor of Japan and his servants do not think we are determined enough to follow through, they are making the last and worst in a long string of disastrous mistakes. The fire-bombing of Tokyo month before last was only a small taste of what they have to look forward to.”
Charlie whistled softly. Beside him in the front room of their apartment, Esther nodded. Hundreds of B-29s had dropped tons of incendiaries on Tokyo in March. They’d burned—cremated was a better word—more than ten square miles in the heart of the Japs’ capital. Tens of thousands died. Outside of Japan, nobody could be sure how many tens of thousands. Charlie didn’t know if anyone inside Japan could be sure, either.
“So celebrate, Americans, but carry on. I know we will fight as well and as bravely in the Pacific as we did in Europe. I know that victory will be ours there as well,” Joe Steele said. “And I know our country will be a better place once peace returns. Thank you, and God bless America.”
“Like he said, one down, one to go,” Charlie said.
“The big one down, as far as I’m concerned. Hitler wanted the whole world, and he came too close to getting it,” Esther said. “I had cousins and aunts and uncles in Hungary. I don’t know how many of them are still alive. I don’t know if any of them are.”
“Mike’s still in the Pacific somewhere,” Charlie said quietly. “If the Japs don’t quit, we’ll need an invasion that’ll make the one in France look like a day in a rowboat on the Lake in Central Park.”
“There is that,” she said. “I hope he’s all right, too. But that’s all we can do, hope, same as with my kin. The Japs are never going to beat the United States, though, never in a million years. Hitler . . . If he’d flattened Trotsky fast, the way he tried, he might have got England, too. Then it would have been our turn. Oh, maybe not right away, but he wouldn’t have waited real long.”
That all sounded disturbingly likely to Charlie. Likely or not, though, it wouldn’t happen now. Because Hitler couldn’t do what he’d wanted to do, other things would happen instead. Charlie said
, “Instead of Hitler, Joe Steele’s watching Trotsky and the Reds.”
“And Trotsky’s worth watching.” Esther sounded sad. “Nothing big will happen between us and the Russians till we KO Japan. We need each other till then. After that, watch out.”
“Looks the same way to me.” Charlie smiled a crooked smile. “And now that we’ve tied up all the world’s problems in pink string and put a bow on them, what do you say we make some lunch?”
“Sounds good,” Esther said. “We’ve still got some fried chicken from the other night in the icebox.”
“Yum! But what will you eat?” Charlie said. Laughing, she poked him.
* * *
Mike gnawed on a D-ration bar. They were what the Army gave you to eat when you didn’t have anything else. They were slabs of chocolate made to keep pretty much forever. They tasted something like a Hershey bar and something like a birthday candle. The wax or tallow or whatever it was made them chew like no chocolate bar you’d eat if you didn’t have to.
Rain poured down. Mike’s foxhole had six inches of water in it. It had started raining on Okinawa several days earlier, just after soldiers and Marines had beaten back a Jap counterattack from the Shuri Line. By all the signs, it could keep right on pouring for the next week, too. The downpour didn’t make the war move any faster.
He’d heard about men who drowned in foxholes like this. His other choice was to stand up. If he did, the Japanese soldiers still in the Shuri Line would shoot him. They’d given up most of Okinawa without a big fight, but they were hanging on ferociously here in the mountainous south. The Americans had to dig them out one foxhole, one strongpoint, one tunnel at a time—and to pay the price for doing it.
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