Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

  “Fuck me.” Mike lit a cigarette. He’d imagined a lot of different troubles, but that wasn’t any of them. “You know what they sound like? They sound like a broad who’s only happy when her husband knocks her around, ’cause that’s how she knows he loves her. He cares enough to smack her one.”

  Shirakawa nodded. “That’s about the size of it. What are we supposed to do? Our own brass would court-martial us—hell, they’d crucify us—if we treated these guys the way their sergeants did.”

  “I’ll talk with Captain Armstrong about it, see what he thinks,” Mike said. “In the meantime, tell ’em it’s not our custom to beat the crap out of people who didn’t really earn it. Tell ’em that doesn’t make us soft, any more than surrendering or taking prisoners does. Remind ’em we won the war and they damn well didn’t, so our ways of doing things work, too.”

  “I’ll try.” Shirakawa harangued the company in Japanese. Mike got maybe one word in ten; he never could have done it by himself. The Constitutional Guardsmen listened attentively. They bowed to the corporal and then, more deeply, to Mike. After that, they marched a little better, but not a lot better.

  When Mike talked with Calvin Armstrong, the young officer nodded. “I’ve heard other reports like that,” he said, frowning. “I don’t know what to do about them. If we treat the Japs the way their old army did, aren’t we as bad as they were?”

  “If we don’t treat ’em that way, will the new army—”

  “The Constitutional Guard.”

  “The Constitutional Guard. Right. Sorry. Will the goddamn Constitutional Guard be worth the paper it’s printed on? Is the idea to be nice to them or to get them so they’re able to fight?”

  “I can’t order you to rough them up. My own superiors would land on me like a ton of bricks,” Armstrong said unhappily.

  “Yes, sir. I understand that,” Mike said. “But I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The sorry bastards in the North Japanese Army, they don’t ever worry that the Russians telling ’em what to do are too fucking soft.”

  Armstrong laughed what might have been the least mirthful laugh Mike had ever heard. “Boy, you’ve got that right,” he said. “The Red Army’s just about as dog-eat-dog as the Japs were.”

  “They may be even worse,” Mike said. “Their officers have those NKVD bastards looking over their shoulder all the time.”

  “Uh-huh.” Armstrong nodded. “Wouldn’t it be fun if the Jeebies kept an eye on our guys like that?”

  “I never really thought about it, sir,” Mike answered. He liked Calvin Armstrong. He respected him. But he didn’t trust him enough to say anything bad about the GBI where the younger man could hear him. He didn’t want to wind up in a labor encampment again if Armstrong reported him. No, the Jeebies didn’t put political officers in U.S. Army units, or they hadn’t yet, anyhow. That didn’t mean they had no influence in the Army. Oh, no. It didn’t mean that at all.

  * * *

  Esther had got a call from the elementary school where Sarah and Pat went. She had to go in early and bring Pat home. He’d landed in trouble on the playground at lunchtime. Esther told Charlie the story over the phone, but he wanted to hear it from the criminal himself. Not every kindergarten kid could pull off a stunt like that.

  “What happened, sport?” Charlie asked when he came back from the White House.

  “Nothin’ much.” His son seemed not at all put out by landing in hot water.

  “No? I heard you had kind of a fight.”

  “Yeah, kind of.” Pat shrugged. No, it didn’t bother him.

  “How come?”

  Another shrug. “I had on this same shirt”—it was crimson cotton, just the thing for Washington’s warm spring—“and Melvin, he asked me, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a Red?’”

  “And so?”

  “And so I bopped him in the ol’ beezer,” Pat said, not without pride. “Everybody knows Red is a dirty name. But he got a bloody nose, and he started crying all over the place. I guess that’s why they sent me home.”

  “‘Everybody knows Red is a dirty name,’” Esther echoed.

  “When the five- and six-year-olds throw it at each other, you know it’s sunk in pretty deep, all right.” Charlie turned back to Pat. “From now on, don’t hit anybody unless he hits you first, okay?”

  “Okay,” Pat said with no great enthusiasm.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” Pat said, more reluctantly yet. But Charlie and Esther had taught him that promises were important, and that if you made one you had to keep it. With any luck at all, this one would keep Pat from becoming the scourge of the schoolyard—or from getting his block knocked off if he goofed.

  Not long after dinner, the phone rang. Thinking it might be someone from the White House, Charlie grabbed it. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Sullivan?” a woman’s voice asked. When Charlie admitted he was himself, she went on, “I am Miss Hannegan, the principal at your children’s school. I’m calling about what unfortunately happened this afternoon.”

  “Oh, sure,” Charlie said. “We gave Pat a good talking-to. I don’t think you’ll have any more of that kind of trouble out of him.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Miss Hannegan didn’t just sound glad. She sounded massively relieved. “I wanted to be positive you weren’t angry at Miss Tarleton for bringing Patrick to my office, and to remind you that of course”—she bore down hard on that—“Melvin Vangilder had no idea what you do, or he never would have said what he said to your son.”

  “Uh-huh. If you hadn’t called, I never would have thought of that,” Charlie said. Miss Hannegan seemed more relieved than ever. He said his good-byes as quickly as he could and hung up.

  Then he fixed himself a drink. Esther gave him a look, but he did it anyway. The principal had called to make sure he wasn’t an ogre. She assumed that someone who worked at the White House had but to say the word and Miss Tarleton (who taught Pat’s kindergarten class) would disappear into a labor encampment. So would Melvin Vangilder’s mother and father. So would Melvin himself, and never mind that he might or might not have had his sixth birthday. She might not have been wrong, either.

  “But doggone it, I’m not an ogre,” Charlie muttered when he’d finished the drink—which didn’t take long.

  “What?” his wife asked.

  “Never mind.” The real trouble was, he understood why Miss Hannegan had been so worried. If he were an ogre, she couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted to Miss Tarleton and to the Vangilders. All she could do was beg him. If he didn’t feel like listening, what would he do? He’d pick up the phone and call J. Edgar Hoover. The Jeebies would take it from there.

  He’d never used his influence that way. It hadn’t occurred to him, which he supposed meant that his own parents had raised him the right way. He wondered whether Lazar Kagan, say, had got even with somebody who beat him up on a school playground back around the turn of the century. He couldn’t very well ask the next time he bumped into Kagan in the White House. And, all things considered, he was bound to be better off not knowing.

  * * *

  When American soldiers in Japan got some leave, they often went to Shikoku. Yes, the natives there resented their presence more than Japs in other parts of South Japan did. But the cities and towns of Shikoku had just had the hell bombed out of them. They hadn’t had the hell bombed out of them and then been fought over house by house. It made a difference.

  Along with Dick Shirakawa, Mike took the ferry from Wakayama on Honshu to Tokushima on Shikoku. The ferry was a wallowing landing craft, the kind he’d ridden towards unfriendly beaches too many times. The only part of Wakayama that had much life, even now, was the harbor, and Americans were in charge there.

  Tokushima . . . wasn’t like that. It was the friendliest beach Mike h
ad ever landed on. It was, in fact, a quickly run-up, low-rent version of Honolulu. The whole town, or at least the waterfront district, was designed to give servicemen a good time while separating them from their cash.

  You could go to the USO and have a wholesome good time for next to nothing. Or you could do other things. You could gamble. You could drink. You could dance with taxi dancers who might or might not be available for other services, too. You could go to any number of strip joints—Japanese women, even if most of them were none too busty, had fewer inhibitions about nakedness than their American sisters did. Or you could go to a brothel. The quality of what you got there varied according to how much you felt like spending, as it did anywhere else.

  MPs and shore patrolmen did their best to keep the U.S. servicemen from adding brawling to their fun and games. They also stayed alert for Jap diehards who still wanted to kill Americans even two years after the surrender. Japs not in the Constitutional Guard or the police forces weren’t supposed to have firearms. Mike knew what a forlorn hope that was. Before the American invasion, the authorities had armed as many people in the Home Islands as they could. You could get your hands on anything from one of those sad black-powder muskets to an Arisaka rifle or a Nambu light machine gun with no trouble at all.

  You could also get your hands on what American soldiers still called knee mortars. You couldn’t really fire them off your knee, but you could lob the little bombs they threw for most of a mile. Every so often, Japs in the suburbs would shoot at the bright lights of the waterfront. They were only a nuisance—unless you happened to be standing where a bomb went off. The Americans seldom caught anybody. Knee mortars were too easy to ditch.

  Nobody fired anything at Tokushima while Mike and Dick were in town. The days were hot and muggy: a lot like New York City in the summertime. Nights were warm and muggy. A lot of the eateries by the harbor featured hamburgers and hot dogs, or steaks if you had more money.

  But you could find Japanese food, too. Mike was the only round-eye in the place he and Dick went into. He’d got halfway decent with hashi, which made the serving girl giggle in surprise. When Americans did come in here, they usually asked for a fork, not chopsticks. Between pieces of sushi, Mike said, “Before I crossed the Pacific, I never would’ve touched raw octopus or raw fish or sea urchin. I guess I know better now.”

  “We mostly ate American food in L.A.,” Dick said. “Except for the rice—my mom always made sticky rice. But oh, yeah—this is good, too.”

  Mike held up his empty glass. “Biru, domo.” He went back to English: “Beer washes it down great.”

  “You got that right,” Shirakawa said.

  They also tended to other pleasures, and went back to Wakayama four days later, lighter in the wallet but sated and otherwise amused. Mike signed for a jeep in the motor pool there, and he and Dick started north again, back toward the Agano River and the increasingly nervous demilitarized zone. Almost all of the traffic was American jeeps and trucks. That was a good thing. The Japs had driven on the left, British-style, before the occupation. Sometimes—especially when they’d had a snootful—they forgot the rules had changed. Head-on collisions with American-driven vehicles happened all too often.

  A flight of F-80s screamed overhead, racing north. A few minutes later, more of the jets roared by. “Wonder what’s going on,” Dick Shirakawa said.

  “Beats me,” Mike answered. “Goddamn, but those jets are noisy! Just hearing ’em makes me want to ditch the jeep and dive into a foxhole. If you didn’t know what they were, just the racket might scare you into giving up.”

  They were still south of Tokyo when they got stuck behind a column of tanks, Shermans and a few of the newer, heavier Pershings, all on the way north. There was just enough southbound traffic to make Mike hesitate about pulling into the other lane and trying to pass the column. Bends in the road showed it was long. He fumed instead, crawling along at fifteen miles an hour.

  An MP at a crossroads waved the jeep over to the shoulder. “Show me your papers, you two!” he barked. He kept not quite pointing his M-1 at Dick Shirakawa. Seeing a Japanese man in an American uniform made him jumpy, even if most of the Constitutional Guard wore them. He examined both sets of leave documents with microscopic care, Dick’s even more than Mike’s.

  Finally, Mike got fed up and said, “What’s the story, anyway?”

  The MP stared at him. “You haven’t heard?”

  “I haven’t heard jack shit, man. If I had, would I be asking you?”

  “You guys are fucking lucky you weren’t back at the border—that’s all I’ve got to tell you. The North Japanese are attacking South Japan. They’ve got tanks and big guns and I don’t know what all else. No warning, no nothin’. One minute, everything was quiet. The next one, all hell broke loose.”

  Mike and Dick looked at each other in consternation. “We’ve got to get back up there,” Mike said. “Our buddies are there. So are the Jap troops we were training.”

  “Good luck—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” The MP liked the phrase. “Here’s what you do. Go on in to Tokyo. Get your orders there. Draw some weapons there, too. You sure as hell ain’t safe without ’em.”

  Being unarmed hadn’t worried Mike till then. Riding in a jeep, he’d felt safe enough. Not if there was a new war on, though. He nodded tightly. “We’ll do that, then.”

  American authorities in sad, ruined Tokyo seemed as discombobulated as if they’d taken a right from the Brown Bomber square in the kisser. They hadn’t expected an attack from North Japan. Mike didn’t know why not. Captain Armstrong had been sending in worried reports for weeks. So had other commanders near the demilitarized zone. Had anybody here believed them, or even read them? It sure didn’t look that way.

  Getting weapons was easy. The armory issued Mike and Dick grease guns and as many magazines as they could carry. Getting orders . . . Dick got his right away: to sit tight in Tokyo. The captain who told him to do that sounded apologetic but firm. “Corporal, I understand what you are. I understand what you’ve done for your country,” he said. “But I don’t want our own guys getting a look at you and filling you full of holes because they think you’re a North Japanese soldier in an American uniform.”

  “You think our men are really that dumb, sir?” Dick Shirakawa asked.

  “You tell me,” the harried captain replied. Dick thought it over. He didn’t need long. He stayed in Tokyo.

  Mike scrambled into a halftrack that was part of a patched-together regimental combat team. Hardly anybody in the machine knew anybody else. That worried him. One of the reasons men fought well was to protect their buddies. Another was to keep from seeming yellow to those same buddies. How well would these guys do if they didn’t care about the men with them and those men didn’t give a damn about them?

  For a while, it just seemed like a training ride. Then, off to the north, the rumble of artillery began to make itself known above the different rumble of the halftrack’s engine. Smoke stained the horizon. War and fire went together like pretzels and beer.

  They stopped for the night before they found the action, or it found them. Some of them didn’t know the first thing about digging a foxhole or setting up a perimeter. They were draftees who’d been doing garrison duty, not soldiers with combat experience. Mike took charge of them. He had a first sergeant’s stripes and a manner that said he knew what he was doing.

  In the morning, they went forward again. It started to be stop-and-go traffic. Refugees clogged the roads: Jap civilians who didn’t want to live under North Japan’s Rising Sun with the gold Hammer and Sickle inside. Mike didn’t blame them, but they sure didn’t make getting up there to defend South Japan any easier.

  Then Mike saw other Japs getting away from the North Japanese invasion. Some wore American uniform, some that of the old, dead Imperial Army. A lot of them had thrown away their rifles so they could retreat faster. Th
e Constitutional Guard, or big chunks of it, didn’t seem eager to guard the shiny new constitution. A few of those soldiers were wounded, but only a few. The rest were just bugging out.

  Mike started worrying in earnest.

  * * *

  As far as the White House was concerned, the Japanese War couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Republicans had just nominated Harold Stassen. Hardly anyone outside of Minnesota had ever heard of him. The way it had looked, he would have been a token candidate, and Steele and Garner would have rolled to a fifth term.

  Now? Now Joe Steele had to work again. He was almost seventy. Some of the old energy was gone. Charlie could see that. The President seemed not just insulted but amazed that Trotsky’s followers in North Japan dared try to upset the applecart.

  At his orders, the Americans in South Japan tried to bomb them back to the Stone Age. B-29s thundered over North Japan, the way they’d thundered over the whole country when Hirohito still ran it. But the Imperial Japanese air defenses had been flattened before the Superfortresses rolled in.

  It wasn’t so easy now. North Japan flew Gurevich-9 fighter jets. The Gu-9s weren’t as good as American F-80s. They were Russian versions of the German Me-262, probably built with the help of captured Nazi engineers and technicians. Even if they couldn’t match the American jets, though, they were far more than B-29s had been designed to face. Daylight air raids over North Japan lasted only a few days. Had they gone on any longer, there would have been precious few B-29s left to make more.

  And . . . Charlie went up to the oval study to ask Joe Steele a question: “Sir, is it true a lot of those Gu-9s have Russian pilots?”

  “It’s true,” Joe Steele answered. “But there’s no point to saying anything about it.” He knocked dottle from his pipe into a favorite ashtray: a brass catcher’s mitt.