Black Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  The sirens sounded the All Clear, we clambered out, stiff and cold, Woody was still coatless, but Alde had him wrapped in her blanket, Weeks looked only mildly put out about it. Jazz babies, what can you say? Theater people. None of my business.

  The ground crew had lit lines of old tires to mark the runway for landing, pursuits droned in randomly, most landed well, one or two hit hard, but no disasters. Far to the east a flare lit the darkening sky. It had that orange-red color of a burning zepp. They dope the cotton canvas skin with aluminum powder in cellulose acetate. Once it lights, it burns fast and hot. The hydrogen lift gas burns faster, but it has a colorless flame. One zepp down. Bastard. I pointed the flare out to my people, none of them cheered, but Woody saluted with a middle finger. Then Alde dragged him off, not quite kicking and screaming.

  Fuck Woody. Obviously one of those weedy little guys that strong women love to mother. For all the good that ever does them. That type is so independent they are just like cats. You can pet them feed them, do anything in the world for them, but you can never keep them. But go for it, Alde. I decided I was better off with Babs. At least she cared enough to get mad at me when one of my old women showed up. Send a telegram, tell her the coast was clear, come on. Good enough. I counted my blessings, slapped Frankie on the butt in a comradely fashion, and went to bed, all by my grown-up self.

  >>>>>>>

  The Germans were well past Karaganda, by dawn, and coming fast. As soon as it was full light, streams of planes, pursuits and dive bombers, landed at the airfield, refueled, and headed west as fast as possible. The troop trains rumbled through non-stop and at least one long fuel train was shunted to a siding to refuel the flyboys. It was getting shit-serious around here.

  Weeks mounted his rocket clusters on our train, ten of them, and told me that more were on the way from Hong Kong. A flight of five Gunships, Trimotors with cannon, landed, refueled, and were sent on to the front, highest priority. I grabbed some caffeine, headed for the Radio Car. The US radio stations had admitted the invasion of Vermont was happening, pretty hard to ignore troop movements that big. Especially when they had to go right up Rt. 5. People were being advised to “seek alternative routes,” which was a joke to anybody who grew up there. Good luck to anybody who had to cross the Connecticut River.

  No telling what was happening tactically, but the strategic plan was easy to figure. Go straight down the river, past the mountains, then split off left and right to destroy the road network, once you got to the coast and Rt. 1, New England would be cut off from the rest of the states. Then strike west for Albany, while coming down from Montreal. They didn’t have to win, they just had to fuck things up so bad that Patton could not recover the initiative.

  If they kept New York Harbor blocked off with U-Boats and mines, kept the Panama Canal closed, and the Mississippi in chaos, they were home free. In the long run, I suspected, they didn’t really care about Central Asia. They might have needed its oil and coal at one time, but with Arabia under their control, they could just use all the Stans for a buffer zone, a place to lose unreliable troops, winnow out the cannon fodder, while the elite troops, Brits and ethnic Germans, conquered the Atlantic and the Middle East. And there was nobody to stop them. Not me for sure.

  Lupo had a thick sheaf of transcripts, the Juárezistas were still holding around Vera Cruz, and were causing enough trouble in Juarez and Tijuana to provoke cross-border thrusts into the deserts of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California. You would think Patton might have learned his lesson in 1916, chasing Pancho Villa, but apparently not. Some people are so full of themselves, they never think anybody would dare fuck with them, even when it is a matter of desperate survival from the party of the second part. That made me remember a scurrilous quote, that right after he scraped through West Point on his second try, dear Georgie made a beeline for the seat of power in the U.S. Army, Fort Myer, near Washington DC, making no bones about his goal of “getting a bootlick on people of note.” The same spirit had led him to impose himself on Pershing’s Expedition to Mexico, where he demanded a spot in any capacity; “Because nobody else wants this as bad as I do.” Kiss up and kick down. That one tactic that son of a bitch was a master of.

  While I was reading, a bulletin came in that our leader had suffered yet another head injury falling off one of his beloved polo ponies. Nothing could keep him from his he-man activities, not even a couple of wars in his back yard. Prayers were being offered for his speedy recovery. Not by anybody in this hemisphere, but what the hell? It would have made me angry, but this whole mess just made me Homerically sad. This whole interminable Endless War had been a fuckup from the word go. A family squabble between an inbred collection of idiots and morons, who had an endless supply of cannon fodder to throw at each other’s illusions of invincibility.

  Pershing could have won the war in France, he wanted to keep AEF troops under his sole command, deploy them in an effective, open order battle plan, but the British and French High Commands had fought him every step of the way, rumor had it that MacArthur and Patton had undercut his authority at every opportunity. MacArthur had been killed in a Zeppelin attack on Paris that got lucky and hit a ritzy restaurant where he had been dining, Patton had moved into the power vacuum, kissed ass, and wound up with the plum job. It hadn’t mattered that his great tank attack in ’20 had been a soggy disaster, he kept telling everybody he was a hero, and his open bar for the press got him enough laudatory coverage to make the illusion into the reality. If I had not spent a month or so dragging the charred remnants of doughs out of burned tanks, I might have believed in the myth too. But charred bodies wedged into tight little crevices of armor plate leave indelible imprints in the memory. When I say “dig out” I mean just that.

  All back story and bullshit at this point, serving only to piss me off even more. For all the good that did. I might as well turn Buddhist and cultivate calm. Just as soon as the war is over. I sent a telegram to Barbara, “COME IF YOU WANT TO STOP I WOULD LIKE THAT STOP I CARE FOR YOU STOP MILES ENDS.” Romantic, no? I amaze myself sometimes.

  Being brave. I managed to shave for the first time since my cheek was ripped open, there were still a few stiches in there I had to shave around, I had any number of interesting scars, but I still had a face. Not too much uglier than usual. One more bowl of soup, one more look at the transcripts, and I walked over to the Field Hospital to have those stiches out. I hadn’t even thought of them for days, but as soon as I was conscious of them, they had to come out. You would think I was trying to pretty up. Fat chance of that shit ever happening.

  I could see a lot of activity on my walk, a steady flow of planes coming and going, trains constantly rolling through, more munitions than soldiers now, but lots of both. When I got back, the Mail Car had a package for me from the Bulletin. It turned out to be a couple of books on Amateur Radio, and a dozen ragged copies of “The Electrical Experimenter” and “Science and Invention” magazines. I flipped through them, all full of diagrams I could not understand, and similar bull-docky. Something called schematics. They did appear to publish some odd genre of pulp fiction called scientifiction, which would have fascinated me a few years ago. Now, I had other things on my mind. Good enough. I found a PFC doing nothing and had him run the books over to Aneko at HQ. Done. I requested a receipt, just to fuck with her a little.

  Our Portuguese interpreter from Port Arthur showed up a little later, a salty type, noncommittal blue uniform, duffle over his shoulder. Bobby Olvera. He looked like a smart ass. A type I recognize easily enough. It was easy to tell that Bobby-O was a chatty type, always had to get the last word, but seemed solid enough. He also had Spanish, French, and some Russian, he said, had been on lumber ships all up and down the West Coast for years. I fed him to Peaches, and tried to find some way to keep myself out of trouble until dinner time.

  >>>>>>>>

  The battle for Newport, Vermont could not last long, not with real forces involved. A look at what maps I had showed that there was fu
ck-all to stop them until White River Junction, eighty miles south. I knew that Rt. 5 stayed on the west side of the river for the most part, I could not remember if there were bridges, and these maps did not show that fine a detail. I had been up there a few times, and there was not a whole lot of anything up there but cows and maple groves. Nothing to stop armor, for sure. And if it was all snow-covered, frozen solid, then tanks would roll over everything in their way. Mud will stop them, but mud in Vermont this time of year was not bloody likely. If the rivers froze solid, they would be tank highways. A little too early for that, but the war was young.

  White River Junction was where Rt. 4 crossed 5, so that would be the cut-off point for the thrusts to Albany and Boston. Looked like big trouble for the “Military Genius of the Age,” especially if he had had his bell rung good and solid. He was such a jealous fuck, that you could bet that all his most competent generals were over here, chasing Fritz across the steppes. Or being chased, more like it. My head hurt.

  I was so restless thinking these thoughts, that I had to go walk around, went to the Radio Car, I wasn’t pulling regular shifts anymore, but I needed to do something. It was buzzing, daytime back in the states, and all sorts of shit was hitting all sorts of fans.

  Bobby-O was already earning his money. The Portuguese and the Brazilians had declared neutrality, and therefore were not censoring their radio stations, perhaps the only free stations on the planet. The Portuguese Empire, Ultramar Português, was in decline, perhaps, but was still widespread; Goa on the west coast of India, Macau near Hong Kong, East Timor in the Netherlands East Indies, and two colonies in Africa, Angola and Mozambique. Who knew? All those places had radio shortwave stations, and all were broadcasting what they believed was the truth. Truth is in the ear of the believer; I think that’s how that goes.

  One point of immediate interest; a lot of American doughboys had made their way by hook or crook to Portugal after the slaughter of the troop convoys just after the Peace Treaty, they had been joined by thousands of American civilians from all over Europe, fleeing to neutral countries. They were still there, and they seemed to have their own stations. I guess some of the refugees were pretty well off, but anyway, they had access to the Air, and were using it to vent their opinions of the war situations. They were only on part of the time, but Bobby-O promised to monitor them closely.

  Anyway, the Portuguese had lots of stuff on the Japs having to quash rebellions in their new territories. That “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” bullshit was fading away, if it had ever meant anything in the first place, and Japanese boots were on the ground in Java, Malaysia, the jungles of Burma, Ceylon, and of course, in the mountains of northern India. The Muslims up there were having none of another foreign occupation, Bengal seemed to be the home of the worst unrest, but the lands below the Khyber Pass were getting out of hand too. It was a safe bet that Anglo-Germans were fanning the flames. We were starting to get similar reports from the new Persian State Radio, they had an English Service now. They didn’t say much, but reading between the lines, it was not hard to see that Afghanistan was aiming to be the Graveyard of Yet Another Empire. Well, shit, they had plenty of practice at that job. I think Alexander the Great was the first one to try that game, and it didn’t work for him either.

  The Afghans seemed to think they had been done dirty, lead astray by the Germans, and led into a trap in front of the city we were sitting in now, Jiu-quan, the end-point of the Great Wall. Seeing how I had helped spring that trap and helped clean up the mess, I had to admit they had a point. And fuck them, they couldn’t take a joke. That’s the state motto of Connecticut, you know.

  >>>>>>>

  I read until I was nodding at my desk, stumbled of to beddie-bye, and was woken up by another bombing raid, bright and early. The Railroad Engineering troops had spent the night improvising bunkers out of ties and ballast, so we were a little better off than yesterday. Bless them. The shelters would not survive a direct hit, but they would keep the steel rain off our necks. That meant we were almost comfortable while we were cowering for our lives. Then back to business as usual. We had found out in the AEF, that in time, the unimaginable could become trivialized into the boring. Your brain has a capacity to accept the unacceptable. Unless it goes insane. No need for that; we were orders of magnitude better off than we had been in France. For one thing, it wasn’t raining. We were not ass-deep in mud. We had beds and warm food, and even luxuries, like dry socks and cigarettes and booze. Count your blessings. When the duckboards at the bottom of the trenches are three deep, and the mud is still over your boots, then life is fucked. Until then, have a nice cuppa, listen to the goddamn radio, and count your blessings.

  When I got back to my desk, there was a yellow envelope. I ripped it open, it said, “YES STOP ME TOO STOP BABS ENDS” I’m not the only deathless romantic in the world, am I?

  >>>>>>>>

  Of course, the next couple days dragged on, Babs had not bothered to say, probably did not know, when she was due in Jiu-quan, the troop and munitions trains had the right of way, and I did not think she rated air transport. Meanwhile, back in the war, the enemy had bypassed Karamay, and were hooking around to Urum-qi. They had no way around that bottleneck, it was break through, or try to sneak through a mountain pass someplace to the north. They knew that, we knew that, and they knew we knew that. Hodges and Bradley were no dopes. The Reds and the Nationalists knew that they could make no deals with the Germans, who were even more brutal than the Japanese, if it came right down to the nut-cutting. All the German allies, the Stans, the Russians, the remnant Cossacks, were all hereditary enemies of the Chinese, so that was not going to fly either. You get to these points in wars where all the cards are on the table, the game just has to be played out with what is showing.

  Maggie and Stan did another flight, just out and back, Oblenski was out of hospital, more battered than seriously injured. We drafted him into the Radio Car, he had Polish and a little German, there were a few Polish stations that pretended to be sort of free, but no revelations there. No revelations anywhere. Or was I just getting tense?

  I did brave the cold wind, and take a turn around a couple of platforms, just to be doing something. There were crews installing quite a few Rocket Cluster drums along the tracks, more than I would have thought, and some black doughs building things that looked like barbeque pits, masonry stoves with chimneys over toward the Wall. I walked over and asked them what they were doing, and got a dusty answer, that I was not cleared for that information. “I’m Colonel Kapusta, I’m the head of Recon here. It’s my job to know what’s going on around here.”

  That just got me a long cold look, and a nearly polite request to take the matter up with General Remus, if I really wanted to know. Just what I needed, more frustration.

  I did sort of want to tie on a good drunk, but that was not a good plan either. What was a good plan? Play cards with Peaches and Frankie and somebody? Get them good and drunk? That was working on a plan. But they were not in evidence, their door was closed, even though it was not even dinner time. Fuck it. Zane Grey.

  >>>>>>>

  The next day was more of the same, no air raid, but the wind was setting in hard from the northeast, it might have been too strong for the zepps to fight on the way back home. They have a lot of endurance, can cross oceans, but their top speed is only about sixty-five miles per hour, so they can easily be grounded by a storm. Our ground crews and the railroad troops improved the shining hours by making real bunkers, hiring coolies to fill thousands of sandbags, and getting ready for more attacks. Troops here were getting thin on the ground, everything possible had been moved to the front in Urum-chi, the hammer was about to come down any minute now. Nerve-wracking. I hate waiting, and now I was waiting for two things, one good and one bad. I found myself snapping at people, and pacing up and down the cars, as if I was looking for trouble to get into. Just like a boss. I would call myself an asshole, force myself to sit down, be up a few minutes later, pacing again.
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br />   That Woody guy and Alde were wrapped up pretty tight, she had promoted a flivver, and the two of them were putting about in the cold trying to locate musical instruments of any kind. Come to find out that the Missionary Schools almost always had pianos, and Chinese Army units had bands, back at the turn of the century, before all that shit hit all those fans, and some of them had western instruments, tubas and trumpets and such.

  There were a few Russian guitars, although they had seven strings for some reason, and accordions were not hard to find. I just cheered them on, found them another passenger car with a coal heating stove, and let them do what they wanted. One of those, “It can’t hurt, might help” deals. Which only left another twenty hours in the day to make a pain in the ass out of myself.

  Eventually I wore myself down, had one large drink, and passed the hell out, in the hope of a glorious resurrection. Or at least some word from Babs.

  >>>>>>>

  In the night, I rolled over enough to realize the wind had died down. I reached down, made sure my boots were handy, then had second thoughts, got up and slipped on long johns and a couple pairs of socks. Been to these movies before. They never end well. The bad guys win every once in a while. Whether they win or not, you do need to keep your pants on.

  The sirens went off just at dawn, and the bombs started detonating a very short time later. We were digging for the bunkers by then. Big bombs this time, and they were walking in from the east, backwards from the usual. I knew that zepps could carry sixteen hundred kilograms of bombs, not quite two tons, and it sounded like they were carrying one or two bombs apiece. Fuck-blisters. At least you wouldn’t get hurt if one of those things hit your bunker. Could save on burial expenses too. Such happy thoughts.