The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  A commendation letter sat in Armstrong’s file for capturing the corporal who turned out not to be a corporal. They’d promoted Yossel Reisen to sergeant for his part in that. Armstrong didn’t flabble about not getting bumped up to staff sergeant. For one thing, he cared more about coming out in one piece than he did about rank. And, for another, getting promoted up to sergeant was pretty easy. Adding a rocker to your stripes wasn’t.

  His whole regiment was out of line for R and R, or what passed for R and R in Utah: real beds, food that didn’t come out of cans, hot showers, and a perimeter far enough out to make it hard for the Mormons to snipe at you or drop mortar bombs on your head. No women, but there was an NCOs’ club where Armstrong could buy beer. Rank did have its privileges. He enjoyed them while he could.

  Now he couldn’t any more. In a clean uniform, he trudged back up toward the fighting. The dirty, ragged, unshaven men coming south for R and R of their own eyed him and his comrades with the scorn veterans gave to anybody who looked new and raw. “Does your mama know you’re here?” one of them jeered-the oldest gibe in the world.

  “Ah, fuck you,” answered one of the privates in Armstrong’s platoon. It wasn’t even a challenge-more an assertion that the man who’d spoken wasn’t worth challenging.

  The vet coming back understood that tone. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You didn’t look like you’d been through it before.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you anyway,” the private said. This time, he did smile when he said it.

  “Come on, keep moving,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”

  “Funny,” Yossel said.

  “Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “I’m gonna grow a long blue beard and join the Engels Brothers.” That made his buddy shut up. Armstrong could see the wheels going round in Yossel’s head. He would be thinking that Armstrong had to know the Engels Brothers dyed their beards all the colors of the rainbow…didn’t he? He would also be wondering how Armstrong intended to grow a blue beard. Since Armstrong was wondering the same thing himself, he let it go there.

  As soon as they got into the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the sniping started. Armstrong swore as he hit the dirt. This was supposed to be territory the USA controlled. Civilians here were supposed to be disarmed. With Utah under martial law, the penalty for keeping firearms was death. So was the penalty for harboring Mormon fighters. No one seemed to worry about that.

  After a few minutes and a burst of machine-gun fire, the sniping stopped. The soldiers got to their feet again and tramped on. “Nice to be back at the same old stand, isn’t it?” Armstrong said.

  “Lovely.” Yossel Reisen modified the word with a participle that brought a sour smile to Armstrong’s face.

  The Mormons still held the military compound northeast of downtown Salt Lake City that the United States, with the tact that made the central government so beloved in Utah, called Fort Custer. Before becoming a national hero in the Second Mexican War, George Armstrong Custer hanged John Taylor-Brigham Young’s successor-and several other prominent Mormons on the grounds of that fort. Afterwards, Custer said his biggest regret was not hanging Abe Lincoln, too.

  U.S. artillery and aircraft pounded the Mormon garrison up there. The Mormons replied with mortars and screaming meemies and whatever else they could get their hands on.

  A lieutenant led the platoon Armstrong and his men were replacing. The officer showed no particular surprise at briefing a noncom. “A sergeant’s got the other platoon in this company, too,” he said. “Just dumb luck I haven’t stopped anything myself.” A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked beat to hell. But for the gold bars on his shoulders, he might have been a noncom, too.

  Because he’d been through the mill, Armstrong gave him more respect than he would have otherwise. “Hope you stay safe, sir,” he said. “They got anything special up ahead of us I ought to know about? Places where they like to put mortars? Sniper spots? Infiltration routes?”

  “Ha! You’re no virgin, sure as hell,” the lieutenant said.

  “Bet your ass,” Armstrong told him, and then, “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “‘Bet your ass’ will do fine.” The lieutenant laughed. “Don’t slip and say it back of the line, that’s all, or it’ll be your ass.” He pointed out the trouble spots on the other side of the line, and the places where U.S. soldiers had to keep their heads down if they didn’t want to turn into sniper bait. And he added, “Brigham’s bastards have some kind of headquarters about half a mile ahead of us. That’s what I figure, anyhow. More foot traffic up there”-he pointed-carefully-to show where-“than anything else is likely to account for.”

  “You put snipers on ’em?” Armstrong asked.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” the lieutenant said. “They’re sneaky as snakes about it now, but the traffic won’t go away.”

  “Maybe some mortars’ll shift ’em,” Armstrong said. “Maybe they’ll go away and be somebody else’s headache. Hell, that’d do.” The lieutenant laughed again, for all the world as if he were kidding.

  After the other platoon pulled back, Armstrong put his own snipers into some likely looking spots. He told them to pick off the first few Mormons they spotted. One of the snipers said, “I got it, Sarge. You don’t want those shitheels figuring we’re a bunch of damn greenhorns.”

  “Right the first time, Urban,” Armstrong answered. “As soon as they know we know what the hell we’re doing, they’ll find somebody easier to pick on. Hell, I would.”

  One of the Mormons took a shot at him as he left that nest. The bullet cracked past his head. He flattened out and crawled for a while after that. Yes, the guys on the other side were seeing what they were up against.

  They tried a trench raid that night. Having acquired a nastily suspicious mind in the course of almost two years of fighting, Armstrong was waiting for it. He sited a couple of machine guns to cover the route he thought the enemy most likely to take, and he guessed right. The Mormons retreated as fast as they could-from the cries that rose, some of them were wounded. His platoon didn’t lose a man.

  They left him and his men severely alone for the next two days. That suited him fine, even if it did make him wonder what they were up to. He assumed they were up to something. They usually were.

  On the third morning, a Mormon approached under flag of truce. Armstrong shouted for his men to stop shooting. One thing the Mormons didn’t do was violate a cease-fire. They were scrupulous about that kind of thing. They always played fair, even if they played hard.

  Armstrong stared at the Mormon. “You!” he said.

  “You!” the Mormon-a major-echoed. They’d met before. Armstrong had made him strip to his drawers to prove he wasn’t a people bomb. The Mormons did their best to pay him back by turning him into a casualty. They didn’t quite manage, but not for lack of effort. The officer went on, “You’d better let me through this time.”

  “Oh, yeah?” That automatically made Armstrong suspicious. “How come?”

  “Because-” The Mormon choked on his answer and had to try again: “Because I’m coming to try to work out a surrender, that’s why.” He looked like a man who badly, desperately, wanted to scream, God damn it! He didn’t, though. In all too many ways, the Mormons were made of stern stuff.

  “Oh, yeah?” In spite of himself, Armstrong didn’t sound so hostile this time. The Mormon major’s fury and frustration embittered his face as well as his voice.

  “Yeah.” Again, the Mormon’s fastidiousness seemed to handicap him. “If we don’t, you people will murder all of us, the same as the Confederates are murdering their colored people.”

  “Why should you piss and moan about Featherston’s fuckers?” Armstrong said. “You’re in bed with ’em, for Christ’s sake!”

  He got a look full of hatred from the Mormon major. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” the Mormon quoted. “You ever hear that one? You people send guns to the Negroes. The Confederates give us a hand when t
hey can. It evens out.”

  “Oh, boy. It evens out,” Armstrong said in a hollow voice. “How do we know you guys won’t keep using people bombs even after you say you’ve given up?”

  “Because we’ll be hostages, that’s how.” The Mormon major looked and sounded like death warmed over. “How many of us will you murder every time anything like that happens? You’ll set the number high-and you know it.”

  “Like you won’t deserve it,” Armstrong said.

  “I don’t have to dicker with you, and I thank God for that,” the Mormon said. “Will you please pass me through to your officers? They’re the ones who can say whether they’ll let any of us live.”

  Armstrong thought about making him strip again. He didn’t do it this time. He wanted nothing more than getting out of Utah in one piece. A truce or a surrender or whatever you called it made that more likely. He did say, “Come forward so I can pat you down. You still may be a people bomb.”

  “Do whatever you think you need to,” the Mormon said. By itself, that went a long way toward convincing Armstrong he wasn’t loaded with explosives. The man came up to him, lowered the white flag, and raised his hands. Armstrong frisked him and found the nothing he expected.

  “Yeah, you’re clean,” Armstrong said when he was satisfied. “Come on with me. I’ll take you back.”

  “You’re not gloating as much as I thought you would,” the Mormon major remarked.

  “Sorry,” Armstrong said. “I just want to get this over with so we can go on with the real war, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, sure,” the enemy officer said bitterly. “We’re just the sideshow, along with the trained ponies and the flea circus and the freaks.”

  “You said it, pal-I didn’t,” Armstrong replied. The Mormon gave him another dirty look. He ignored it.

  He passed the Mormon major on to behind-the-line troops, then went back to his platoon. “You think anything will come of it?” Yossel asked him.

  “Beats me,” Armstrong said. “Even if it does, are we ever gonna let up on these snakes again? Every time we try it, they give us one right in the nuts.”

  “Be nice to get the hell out of Utah,” Yossel said wistfully.

  “Yeah, and if they let us leave, you know where they’ll ship our asses next?” Armstrong waited for Yossel to shake his head, then went on, “Up to fucking Canada, that’s where. We’re good at putting down rebellions, so they’ll give us another one.” Yossel, a look of horror on his face, flipped him the bird. Armstrong gave it right back. He knew how the War Department’s mind worked-if you called that working.

  Flora Blackford and Robert Taft glared at each other in the small conference room. The Congresswoman from New York and the Senator from Ohio were friends on a personal level. Though she was a Socialist and he a conservative Democrat, their views on prosecuting the war hadn’t been very different. They hadn’t been, but they were now.

  “We have Jake Featherston to deal with,” Flora said. “He’s more important. We can worry about the Mormons later.”

  “We’ve got them on the ropes now. We ought to finish them off,” Taft said. “Then we won’t have to worry about them later.”

  “How do you aim to finish them?” Flora inquired. “If you don’t make peace when they ask for it, don’t you have to kill them all?”

  Taft gestured toward the front of Congressional Hall. Along with Confederate bombs from the air, it was also scarred by Mormon auto bombs and people bombs. “Aren’t they doing their best to kill us all, or as many of us as they can?” he said.

  “But they can’t, and we can,” she said. “They’re only trouble to us. We can destroy them. Isn’t that reason enough not to?”

  “How many bites do they get?” Robert Taft returned. “Whenever we get in trouble with the Confederate States, the Mormons try to take advantage of it. They did it in the Second Mexican War. They did it in the Great War. If they just stayed quiet in Utah this time around and enjoyed being citizens again, nobody would have bothered them at all.”

  “‘Enjoyed being citizens again,’” Flora echoed. “Do you think they might resent us a little for occupying them for twenty years?”

  “Maybe,” Taft answered calmly. “Do you think we might resent them a little bit for making us conquer the whole state of Utah house by house in the Great War? How many casualties did they cause? How many divisions did they tie down? And now they’re doing it again. Do you think they can just walk away and say, ‘All right, we’ve had enough,’ and get off easy? Your nephew’s there, isn’t he? What does he say about that?”

  “Yossel says he’d sooner fight the Confederates. That’s the war that really counts,” Flora answered. He also said he worried about getting sent to Canada instead. She understood that. If a division showed it could put down one rebellion, wouldn’t the War Department figure it was good at the job and ship it off to help put down another one?

  “Even if the Mormons do surrender, or claim they’re surrendering, how many troops will we have to leave behind in Utah to disarm them all and make sure they don’t start fighting again as soon as our backs are turned?” Robert Taft asked. “Just licking them isn’t the only problem. We have to remind them that they’re licked, and that they’ll catch it even worse if they give us any more trouble. Even now, they’re probably stashing guns and explosives as fast as they can.”

  They probably were, too. She couldn’t tell him he was wrong. But she said, “If we say, ‘No, you can’t surrender,’ what will they do? Fight till they’re all dead. Send people bombs all over the country, and auto bombs, and poison gas if they can arrange that. They’ll play Samson in the temple, except they won’t be playing.”

  Now Taft gave her an unhappy look, because that also seemed only too probable. “You’re saying we don’t win even if we win, and they don’t lose even if they lose.”

  “Oh, they lose, all right,” Flora said. “But so do we.”

  “Maybe we ought to kill them all in that case,” Taft said.

  Now Flora violently shook her head. “No, Robert. I’m going to quote the New Testament at you, even if I am Jewish: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?’ You’ve seen the photos of those Confederate camp guards grinning while they hold their rifles and stand there on trenches full of dead Negroes. Do you want pictures like that with our soldiers in them?”

  She waited. If Taft said yes, their cautious friendship was just one more war casualty. But he shook his head, too. “No. Those photographs sicken me-almost as much for what massacres like that do to the guards as for what they do to the poor colored people. I don’t want to murder the Mormons like that. But if they die in battle I won’t shed many tears.”

  “The question is, can we make real U.S. citizens out of the Mormons?” Flora said.

  “We’ve been trying since before the War of Secession, and we haven’t had much luck,” Taft said.

  Almost two thousand years earlier, hadn’t Roman senators and imperial officials in Palestine asked the same kind of questions about the Jews there? They didn’t come up with any good answers. Discrimination and maltreatment sparked one Jewish revolt after another. The revolts sparked mass slaughter, plus more discrimination and maltreatment. Finally, the Romans ended up throwing most of the surviving Jews out of Palestine altogether.

  Flora’s head came up. “I wonder if that would work here,” she murmured.

  “If what would work here?” Robert Taft asked.

  “Expelling the Mormons from Utah after they surrender,” Flora answered.

  “Where would you put them if you did that?”

  “Some place where they wouldn’t make so much trouble.” Flora explained what she’d been thinking about her own people’s past.

  “Are they tied to Salt Lake City the way the Jews were to Jerusalem in days gone by?” Taft asked. “I have to tell you, I don’t know the answer to that. Does anyone? Somebody would probably be able to tell us. But where would yo
u put them? In Houston, now that we have some of it back? Wouldn’t they join the Confederates against us? Would you send them up to Canada? Wouldn’t they just stir up the Canucks? Aren’t the Canucks stirred up enough already? Newfoundland? Wouldn’t they start waving across the Atlantic to the British?”

  Those were all good questions. Disagree with him or not, you judged Robert Taft a fool at your peril. Flora said, “Maybe we could ship them to the Sandwich Islands. It looks like we’ll be able to hold on to those now.”

  “Wouldn’t the Mormons yell for the Japanese?” Taft snorted laughter. “And wouldn’t they deserve each other?”

  “Maybe we could keep them off the island with Honolulu and Pearl Harbor on it,” Flora said. “The others don’t matter so much to the military. What I’m thinking is that, if we get them out of Utah, we can search what they take with them. They wouldn’t have years and years’ worth of guns and ammunition and explosives squirreled away and hidden so well we couldn’t find them.”

  “They wouldn’t when they left, no,” Taft agreed. “How long would they need to start getting hold of them, though?”

  “Twenty minutes-maybe half an hour if we take them all the way out to the Sandwich Islands,” Flora said. “I know that, Robert. But we have to do something with those people, and I don’t want to kill them all. I don’t want to leave them in place, either. That’s just asking for the whole thing to start all over again in another generation.”

  “It won’t if we keep an eye on them.” Robert Taft sighed and ran a hand over the bald crown of his head. He was a much slimmer man than his father, but William Howard Taft had kept his hair till his dying day. With another sigh, the Senator from Ohio went on, “I don’t suppose it’s in the range of human nature to hold somebody down for much longer than a generation, is it? We couldn’t even do it to the Confederates after the Great War.”