Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

Tarawa. Saipan. Angaur. Iwo Jima. Now Okinawa. Gnawing away on the hard, waxy chocolate, Mike thought, I am a fugitive from the law of averages. He had a Purple Heart with two oak-leaf clusters. He couldn’t imagine going through the fights he’d been through without getting hurt. The miracle was, he’d come through them without getting maimed for life or killed. Damn few of the guys he’d trained with outside of Lubbock were still in there fighting. They’d been used, and they’d been used up.

  Miracles did happen, of course. They didn’t always happen to the good guys, either. Hitler had been a runner during the last war. He’d taken messages from the officers to the front-line trenches and back again, the kind of thing you had to do before there were radios and field telephones in every company. The usual life expectancy for a runner was measured in weeks. Hitler had done it all through the war. He’d got gassed once, not too badly, but that was it.

  And much good it did him in the end. He was sure as hell dead now, and the Nazis had thrown in the sponge. Mike had heard that just before the last Jap counterattack. He’d been dully pleased, and that was about it. The enemy in front of him was not in a surrendering mood.

  Eventually, the rain would stop. Eventually, the fighting would pick up again. Eventually, in spite of everything the Japs here on Okinawa could do, they’d be exterminated. The Americans had too many men, too many guns, too many tanks, too many planes, too many bombs.

  Suppose I’m still alive and in one piece when that happens, Mike thought. What comes next?

  Motion seen from the corner of his eye distracted him. He swung his grease gun towards it. He’d picked up the submachine gun on Iwo. For the kind of close-quarters fighting the punishment brigade did, it was better than an M-1. If you sprayed a lot of lead around, some of it would hit something. That was what you wanted. (He’d also picked up his third stripe on Iwo, not that he cared.)

  But this wasn’t a Jap. “Jesus fucking Christ, Captain!” Mike burst out. “Get down in here! I almost drilled you!”

  Luther Magnusson slid into the hole with him. He was all over mud. The Japs couldn’t have seen him. But moving around above ground this close to the Shuri Line was dangerous. Machine guns and mortars meant they didn’t have to see you to kill you. They could manage just fine by accident, or by that goddamn law of averages.

  “Good,” Magnusson said. “I was looking for you.”

  “Oh, yeah? How come?” A lot of the time, you didn’t want an officer looking for you. But Magnusson was all right, even if he did still drink like a fish every chance he got. By now, they’d been through a hell of a lot, and a lot of hell, together. So many familiar faces gone. Magnusson was lucky, too, if you wanted to call this luck.

  “Got something for you.” The captain pulled a brand-new twenty-pack of Chesterfields, the kind you bought in the States, out of his breast pocket. The cellophane around the paper kept them dry and perfect. “Here you go.”

  “You didn’t have to do that!” Mike yipped, which was an understatement. Magnusson had risked his life to deliver these cigarettes.

  “No big deal,” he said. Considering life as they lived it, he might not have been so far wrong.

  “Well, smoke some with me, anyway.” Mike draped a dripping shelter half over their heads so the downpour wouldn’t drown their cigarettes. Magnusson’s Zippo—painted olive drab to keep the sun from shining off the case and giving away his position—worked first time, every time. They puffed through a couple of fresh, fragrant, flavorful Chesterfields apiece. Then Mike said, “Those were terrific! Where’d you get ’em?”

  Magnusson jerked his thumb back toward the north. “Took ’em from a colonel—no P, natch. He didn’t need ’em any more. I figured they might as well not go to waste.”

  Yeah, real colonels got all kinds of goodies men in punishment brigades never saw. Fat lot of good that had done this one. He’d been brave to come up to the front with his men. Now he wasn’t brave. Now he was just dead.

  After one more cigarette, Mike asked, “How many of the old guys you think’ll be left after we invade Japan?”

  Magnusson looked at him. Along with being dirty, his face was also stubbly. So was Mike’s. The closer you got to the front, the less time you had to worry about stupid things like how you looked. “You sure that’s the question you wanna ask?” the captain said at last.

  “Uh-huh.” Mike nodded. “It’s what I was thinking about when you went and dropped in at my mansion here.” Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived in a mansion for real just about his whole life. And what had that won him? An end even nastier than most soldiers got, which was really saying something.

  “Mansion, huh?” Mike squeezed a short chuckle out of Luther Magnusson. After a beat, the company CO went on, “Well, a few of us may still be hanging around. Or else none of us. Me, I’d bet on none, but I could lose. War’s a crazy business.”

  “Man, you got that right,” Mike said. “Okay, thanks. Pretty much the way I read the odds, too, but I wanted to see what somebody else thought. Other side of the coin is, we may all be gone before Okinawa’s over with.”

  Magnusson leaned toward him under the shelter half and kissed him on the cheek. Mike was so caught off guard, he didn’t even slug him. “I couldn’t resist,” the captain told him. “You say the sweetest things.”

  Mike told him what his mother could do with the sweetest things. To manage all of it, she would have needed more native talent, as it were, and more stamina than God issued to your garden-variety human being. “In spades,” Mike added. “You can get off this fucking island with a Section Eight.”

  “Nah.” More seriously than Mike had expected, Magnusson shook his head. “It’s as near impossible as makes no difference for anybody from a penal brigade to get a psych discharge. The way the head-shrinkers look at it is, if you weren’t crazy already, you never woulda signed up for an outfit like this to begin with.”

  “Oh.” Mike chewed on that, but not for long. He nodded. “Well, shit, it’s not like they’re wrong.” From behind them, American 105s threw death at the Shuri Line. A short round might take out this foxhole instead. Mike didn’t waste time worrying about it. He couldn’t do anything about it, so what was the point? The rain drummed down. He wondered if he could dig a little channel so it wouldn’t get too deep in the hole. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. That, he might actually manage.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks after the Army announced the fall of Okinawa, Charlie got a card from Mike, addressed to him at the White House. It was a dirty card, not because it had a naked girl on it but because somebody’s muddy bootprint did its best to obscure the message.

  Charlie had to hold the card right in front of his nose to read it. It was short and to the point. Call Ripley! it said. Still here—believe it or not. Underneath that was a scrawled signature and NY24601. Charlie laughed. In spite of himself, the card sounded like his brother. So did sending it where he had.

  “That’s good news!” Esther exclaimed when he showed it to her. “Nice somebody’s getting some.” She and her folks weren’t having much luck finding out if any of their Hungarian relatives survived. Magyar officials cared little for Jews. Their Red Army occupiers and overlords cared even less for letters from the United States.

  “Half an hour after the mailroom clerk put the card on my desk, Scriabin walked in,” Charlie said. “He asked me, ‘How do you like having a hero for a brother?’”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said it was nice there was one in the family, anyhow. He kind of blinked and went away. Now I’ve got to call my mom and dad. I don’t know how many cards they let those guys send.”

  It turned out that the elder Sullivans had also heard from Mike. Their card announced that he was alive and well and doing fine. It was the kind of card you sent to your parents, as the one Charlie had got was the kind you sent to your brother.

  �
�Did you tell Stella?” Charlie asked his mother, figuring she’d miss no chance to rub it in with her ex-daughter-in-law.

  But Bridget Sullivan said, “No. Hadn’t you heard? She’s engaged to one of those draft-dodging sheenies she works for.”

  “Mom . . .” Charlie said. No, his mother and father had never warmed to Jews, no more than they had to.

  “Esther is all right,” his mother said. “But the ones Stella works for, that’s just what they are.”

  “Whatever you say.” Charlie got off the phone as soon as he could. He relayed a censored version of his mother’s message to Esther.

  By the way his wife lifted an eyebrow, she could read between the lines. “Stella didn’t tell me, but I suppose she wouldn’t, all things considered. I hope she ends up happy, that’s all. She never would have dumped Mike if the Jeebies hadn’t taken him.”

  “I guess not.” Charlie didn’t want to think anything good about the gal who’d left his brother. Esther was probably right, but that had nothing to do with the price of beer, not to him.

  “Let’s hope they knock Japan for a loop before Mike has to go in,” Esther said.

  “Amen!” Charlie said. “The Japs, they’re like a boxer on the ropes taking a pounding. The B-29s are flattening their cities one at a time. God only knows why they won’t give up and say enough is enough. Joe Steele doesn’t get it—I’ll tell you that.”

  Esther’s mouth narrowed into a thin, unhappy line. “I don’t know how you can stand to work at the White House,” she said. “I can’t understand why it doesn’t drive you nuts.”

  He shrugged helplessly. “When I started there, all my other choices looked worse. And you know what? They still do. If I walk away, just tell ’em I quit, you think I won’t go into a labor encampment inside of fifteen minutes? I sure don’t think I won’t. You want to raise two kids on what you’d make without me?”

  “I don’t want to do anything without you,” Esther answered. “But I don’t want your job to wear you down the way this one does, either.”

  Charlie shrugged again. “I like to think I do some good once in a while. Stas and me, we’re the ones who can slow Joe Steele down sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. Scriabin and Kagan and J. Edgar Hoover, all they ever do is cheer him on. If they get a new speechwriter, you can bet your boots he’d be another rah-rah guy. That’d leave Mikoian even further out on a limb than he is already.”

  “How does he manage to hang on if he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with most of the people in the White House?” Esther asked.

  “Funny—I asked him pretty much the same thing once,” Charlie said. “He looked at me, and he smiled the oddest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. ‘How?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you how. Because if I go somewhere without my umbrella and it’s raining when I come out, I can dance my way home between the raindrops. That’s how.’”

  “Nice work if you can get it—if you can do it, I guess I should say. If he can, good for him,” his wife said. “But when you go out in the rain, you come home dripping wet like a normal person. And I wish you didn’t have to.”

  “Well, so do I,” Charlie said. “Now wish for the moon while you’re at it.”

  * * *

  Mike’s pack weighed him down as he trudged along the wharf to the waiting troopship. He’d landed on Okinawa in April. Here it was six months later, and he was finally getting off the miserable island. That was the good news. The bad news was that the punishment brigade, rebuilt yet again, was going somewhere that promised to be even worse.

  Operation Olympic, the brass was calling it. Kyushu. The southernmost Home Island. If Tojo’s boys wouldn’t say uncle, the United States would go in there and take their own country away from them. It would cost a lot of American lives. As one of the Americans whose life it was likely to cost, Mike knew that much too well. But the number of Japs who were going to get killed beggared the imagination.

  And if Operation Olympic didn’t convince the Emperor and Company the lesson Joe Steele wanted them to learn, Operation Coronet was waiting around the corner. That would seize Honshu, the main island. From what Mike had heard, something like a million men would go in if they needed that one. How many dead would come out was anybody’s guess.

  Mike had a section of his own now—a couple of dozen men to ride herd on. They’d all come into the brigade after he had. Captain Magnusson was still here. Or rather, he was here again. He’d taken a bullet in the leg, but by now he’d had time to recover and risk getting one in a really vital spot.

  As the soldiers settled themselves on the crowded bunks, one of them asked, “Hey, Sarge, is it true what Tokyo Rose says?”

  “Jugs, if Tokyo Rose says it, bet your ass it ain’t true,” Mike answered. “Which pile of bullshit are you wondering about in particular, though?”

  Jugs was properly Hiram Perkins, a Southerner who’d wound up in a labor encampment because—he said—somebody with connections had taken a shine to his wife. It was possible; people went into the encampments for all kinds of reasons. Mike wouldn’t have cared to guess if it was true. The way Perkins’ ears stuck out gave him his nickname. He said, “The one where she says the Japs’ll spear us if they don’t shoot us.”

  “You’ve got a grease gun, don’t you?” Mike said.

  “No, Sarge. Got me an M-1.”

  “Okay. Either way, you can shoot anybody who comes after you with a spear before he sticks you, right?”

  “I reckon so, yeah.”

  “Well, all right, then. You won’t get speared unless somebody catches you asleep in a foxhole or something.”

  Jugs worked that through. Mike could practically see the gears turning inside his head. They didn’t turn very fast; Jugs wasn’t the brightest ornament on the Christmas tree. He finally said, “That makes sense. Thanks, Sarge. I purely don’t like me no pig-stickers.”

  “Other thing is,” Mike said, “if the Japs do come at us with spears, it’s because they don’t have enough rifles to go around. So let’s hope they do. The easier they are to kill, the better I like it.”

  He wondered how many kamikaze planes the enemy had left. They’d been troublesome around Okinawa. Mike figured the Japs would throw everything they could at a force invading the Home Islands.

  Later, he also wondered if he’d jinxed things. Less than half an hour after kamikazes crossed his mind, the troopship’s antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Down in the bowels of the ship where the enlisted men waited out the passage from Okinawa to Kyushu, they swore or prayed, depending on which they thought would do more good.

  In the bunk across from Mike, another Catholic worked a rosary. Mike still more or less believed, but not that way. God was going to do what He was going to do. Why would He listen to some stupid human who wanted Him to do something else instead?

  No flaming plane with a bomb under its belly slammed into the troopship. Either the gunners shot it down, or it missed and smashed into the sea, or the pilot was aiming at some other ship. The Japs were terribly, scarily, in earnest. The way their soldiers fought showed that. But kamikazes? Didn’t you have to be more than a little nuts to climb into a cockpit and take off, knowing ahead of time that you weren’t coming back? The things some people would do for their country!

  Mike started to laugh. What he’d done for his country was volunteer for a punishment brigade. And his country had rewarded him how? By sending him to hell five different times. It hadn’t managed to kill him off yet, so here he was, going in for a sixth try at suicide. What was he but a slow-motion kamikaze pilot?

  The guy who was telling his beads paused between one Our Father and the next. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Mike said. “Believe me, nothing.”

  “Too bad. I could use a yock,” the other soldier said, and went back to the rosary.

  When they scrambled down nets from the troopship
to the landing craft, that green to the north rising up out of the sea was the Japanese mainland. The punishment brigade was going in on the west side of Kagoshima Bay, a little south of the middle-sized city of Kagoshima. Orders were to push toward the city once they got off the beach. Those orders assumed they would get off the beach. That had to mean the fellow who wrote them was a damned optimist.

  To be fair, the USA was doing everything it knew how to do to keep its men alive, even the ones in punishment brigades. Warships shelled the coast, sending clouds of dust and smoke into the air. Fighter-bombers raked the landing zone with machine guns, rockets, and firebombs made from jellied gasoline. From farther overhead, heavier bombers flying out of Okinawa and Saipan and other islands bloodily taken from the Japs dropped high explosives on the enemy.

  Mike had been through the preliminaries too many times before to think they’d murder all the Japs waiting to murder him. No matter how much hellfire you rained on the bastards, you killed only a fraction of them. The rest would require more personal attention.

  Even now, the Japs were trying to fight back. Shells kicked up waterspouts among the wallowing landing craft. Just by the luck of the draw, a few of those would be direct hits, and God help the poor fools in those boats.

  The landing craft mounted .50-caliber machine guns as token antiaircraft protection. Suddenly, all of them seemed to start going off at once. Tracers stitched across the sky.

  Some kamikazes went after the bigger warships and freighters. Some pilots decided they’d be doing their duty for the Emperor if they took out a landing craft’s worth of Americans. They weren’t so far wrong, either—if they could do it. A lot of them got shot down trying, or else missed their intended targets and went into the drink.

  One flew terrifyingly low over Mike’s landing craft, so low he got a split-second glimpse of the young pilot’s face. Then the kamikaze was gone. Whatever he did, Mike never found out about it.

  A swabby manning the .50 that had been banging away at the Jap flyer sang out: “Beach just ahead! Good luck, you sorry assholes!”