Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’ve heard that, yes.” Cade knew he sounded troubled. He was troubled. The North Koreans were a bunch of Reds, sure. They cheerfully shot anybody whose ideology they didn’t like. But their leaders had mostly resisted the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria.

  The South Korean leaders had mostly worked with the Japs. Collaborated with the Japs, the North Koreans said. In Europe, plenty of people in places like France and Holland and Czechoslovakia who’d collaborated with the Japs’ Nazi allies wound up on the gallows or in front of a firing squad. Here, the collaborators were American allies now—and they also cheerfully shot anybody whose views they didn’t like.

  It made you wonder. It really did.

  “I wonder if we ought to break them up, put one of their squads with one of ours,” Cade said. “That way, we won’t have a hole in the line with all of them together.”

  “We’d be less weak in any one place, but more over a longer stretch.” Sturgis shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other, you ask me. Other thing is, betcha the Chinks already know we’ve got gooks here. They’ll poke us just to see how bad things are—you wait.”

  “Uh-huh.” That had already occurred to Cade. Koreans were gooks to him, too. Again, he did his damnedest to look on the bright side: “We’ve still got our artillery and air.”

  “Hot damn.” No, Howard Sturgis wasn’t a bright-side guy.

  “They might perform better if they had more of that stuff themselves,” Cade said.

  “And rain makes applesauce,” Sturgis retorted. “Sir, one reason they don’t got it now is, they ran so fast they left it behind for the Commies to grab. If they didn’t cough up ten divisions’ worth o’ shit in the retreat to Pusan, you can call me a nigger.”

  Cade had heard such stories, too. He hoped they were stretched—but he didn’t know they were. Sighing, he said, “I’ll go see if their company CO speaks English.”

  “Yeah, that’d be nice. What’ll you do if he can’t?”

  “Try Latin,” Cade said. Sturgis goggled, but he meant it. A surprising number of Koreans were Catholic, as was he. Bits and pieces of Latin had saved his bacon on the journey south from the Chosin Reservoir. Maybe they would again.

  He turned out not to need to find out. The Korean captain knew enough English to get by. “We fight,” he said. “We tough. We tigers.”

  “Good,” Cade said. “You want to mix your men with ours? We can support each other better that way.” He could have ordered the ROK officer to do that. They were both captains, but he headed the regiment. But he was willing—for now—to save the other man’s face and leave it up to him.

  And the Korean—his name was Pak Ho-san—shook his head and said, “Oh, no, no, no.”

  Koreans put the family name first; if Cade decided to get friendly, he’d call the other captain Ho-san. He wasn’t feeling friendly. He was nervous. “You sure?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes.” Pak eyed him. He was close to Cade’s six-one: big for an Oriental. “You no think we do. You think we gooks.” He said the word as if he were upchucking. As Americans universally used it, so Koreans universally hated it. “You see. By God, we fight!” He didn’t say So fuck you, asshole, but it was in his bearing.

  “Okay.” Cade still had his doubts about whether it was, but he didn’t see how he could show them.

  Damned if the Red Chinese didn’t start lobbing mortars at the South Koreans within an hour. They yelled across no-man’s-land. They didn’t love Koreans, either. The people of the peninsula might not be niggers to them, but they sure as hell were poor yellow trash.

  A few of the ROK guys took wounds. None of them HA’d, though. One of the wounded was that lieutenant who’d slugged the private. Cade wasn’t sorry to see him carried moaning to the rear. Sometimes subtraction was addition in disguise.

  He quietly told his men to can the use of gook while the Koreans were in the line. If the locals recognized any one word of English, that was too likely to be it. And he warned them to stay on their toes after the sun went down. If the Red Chinese decided to test the South Koreans, they’d do it when American air power had a harder time making them pay.

  And they did. One American picket got off a burst with his grease gun before a wail said he was done. But, alerted, the dogfaces in the main line launched flares and started shooting for all they were worth. Machine guns, submachine guns, semiautomatic rifles…

  Caught under that merciless white light, quite a few of the Red Chinese raiders who’d scragged the sentry quickly fell. The others fired back. A tracer snapped past Cade’s head. A few of the enemy soldiers got into the trenches, but only a few. Then it was knives and entrenching tools and rifle butts: apes whacking away at one another with tree branches, as primitive and basic as combat got.

  The Red Chinese didn’t need long to realize it wouldn’t be their night. They melted away toward their own positions, taking as many of their wounded as they could. A few men still whimpered and cried out north of the trenches. Machine guns swept the ground to make them shut up.

  “I be damned,” Howard Sturgis said as the gunfire slowed to spatters. “The, uh, ROK guys really did hang in there. Who woulda thunk it?”

  “They did great,” Cade agreed. “I should go tell Captain Pak they really are a bunch of tigers.” They weren’t, exactly, but they hadn’t bugged out and they’d pulled their weight. It would do. He started up the trench.

  Pak Ho-san met him halfway. The Korean officer carried something that wasn’t a weapon in his right hand. “Here, Captain Curtis,” he said, holding it up. “I have for you. We fight, hey?”

  “You fight, you bet.” Cade flicked his lighter to see what Pak was giving him. The Korean held a Red Chinese soldier’s head by the hair. “Jesus!” Cade said. “I don’t want that! Get rid of it!”

  “I kill him my ownself, with bayonet.” Captain Pak sounded sulky, as if he hadn’t expected Curtis to be so soft. But, shrugging at the inscrutability of the Occidental, he threw the head back toward the enemy line. The thump it made hitting the mud sounded dreadfully final.

  —

  Istvan Szolovits crouched in a shell hole, using his left hand to jam his helmet down onto his head as hard as he could. The Americans were throwing artillery at his unit with positively Soviet abandon. Mortars, 105s, 155s, rockets…Everything but the kitchen sink seemed to be coming down on the Hungarians’ heads. If some clever Yankee worked out how to fit a charge in the basin and a rocket motor instead of a drainpipe, they’d probably start firing sinks, too.

  Fragments whined and snarled and screamed hatefully, not far enough overhead. Blast slammed Istvan around. The nearer near misses made him have trouble breathing. A shell didn’t have to land on you to do you in. Close enough could be good enough.

  In between the shell bursts, he heard people screaming. Some were wounded, more just frightened out of their minds. Half deafened and more than half stunned, he needed a little while to realize that one of those terrified voices belonged to him. He’d been through some hell since the Hungarian People’s Army went into combat, but never anything like this. The atom bomb had scared him, too, but it didn’t go on and on the way this bombardment did.

  His father and a couple of uncles had fought for Franz Joseph during the First World War. They would have understood what he was going through. But they probably would have enjoyed better protection than he did.

  He’d already dug a foxhole in the shell hole. He didn’t have a proper dugout, though. You needed time in one place to dig those into the walls of your trenches and shore them up with whatever timber you could find.

  “Watch out, you whistleass peckerheads!” No one but Sergeant Gergely would bellow a profane warning through the thunder of the shells. “When the Americans let up, that’s when you better be ready, on account of that’s when they’ll come.”

  He made good sense. The enemy was trying to kill as many Magyars as they could (and even the occasional Jew who found himself in the same unifo
rm), and to paralyze the ones they didn’t kill. Then their advance would be a walkover.

  But the Americans didn’t let up, and didn’t let up, and didn’t let up some more. They sifted this field like a baker sifting cake flour. They didn’t want any big lumps left in it before they stuck it in the oven.

  At last, after a couple of hours that seemed like a couple of thousand years, the barrage moved past the Hungarians’ position. That would make retreating hard for them and keep anybody else on their side from moving forward to give them a hand. Istvan stuck up his head to see what kind of prophet the sergeant made.

  He wasn’t surprised when Gergely could have matched himself against Elijah or Jeremiah. However big a bastard Gergely was, he knew his onions. Here came the Yankees. Their tanks were bedizened with white stars. Foot soldiers in olive drab loped along between them.

  A Magyar popped out of his hole like a marmot—only marmots didn’t carry rocket-propelled grenades. One of them took out a tank. All the ammo inside the Pershing went off at once. The turret flew through the air and squashed an infantryman ten meters away. Like a beetle under a boot, he died before he knew what hit him.

  There were worse ways to go. Too many of them seemed to loom large across Istvan’s future. The surviving American tanks pounded that Magyar with cannons and machine guns. The guy who’d fired would likely wind up too dead to try it again.

  Rifle bullets cracked past Istvan. By the sound, some of them came from beside his hole, not in front of it. If he didn’t fall back, he’d get cut off and surrounded and…Killed, he thought bleakly. Of course, he might also get killed trying to fall back. But the odds looked worse if he stayed where he was.

  He scrambled out of the hole he’d worked so hard to improve and dashed eastward. He wasn’t the only Hungarian doing the same thing. As his eyes darted this way and that, one of his countrymen let his rifle fall, threw his arms wide, and crumpled bonelessly to the shell-pocked turf.

  A bullet kicked up dirt at Istvan’s feet. “Rukhi verkh, Russki!” somebody yelled.

  Istvan knew that meant Hands up, Russian! He’d heard Germans and Magyars shout it during the grim street fighting in Budapest at the end of the last war. But he needed an almost fatal second to realize that soldier was yelling it at him.

  I’m no Russian! he thought with absurd indignation as he dropped his Mosin-Nagant and raised his hands. His captor was a pink-cheeked kid in an American uniform. He kept his own M-1 on Istvan. “You speak English?” he demanded, so he was a Yank and not a German.

  Regretfully, Istvan shook his head. He’d never had the chance to learn it. “Ich spreche Deutsch,” he said. That was the one language they might share.

  They didn’t. For all the American could tell, he was using Russian. The kid gestured with his rifle—go back that way. Keeping his hands high, Istvan went back that way.

  He’d often thought about giving himself up to the Americans. It wasn’t as if this were his war, or Hungary’s. But surrendering turned out not to be so simple. And he’d seen that the few minutes after you did surrender told the story of whether you’d live or die. If the guy who captured you was in a hurry or just feeling mean, he’d plug you and go on about his business instead of getting you back to where you might stay safe. To the soldiers who took them, prisoners were a damn nuisance.

  Istvan tried not to tense as he walked west. If the American shot him in the back, he hoped it would all end in a hurry.

  But the American didn’t. Another Yank came up to him. They went back and forth in the language Istvan couldn’t follow. He did hear the word Russian several times, though.

  “Nicht russisch,” he said, using one hand to point at himself. “Ich bin ungarisch.”

  More English. The soldier who was talking with his captor also pointed at him and said, “You’re Hungarian?”

  That was close enough to ungarisch for Istvan to get it. He nodded. “Ja!”

  The Yanks held another palaver. The newcomer used his machine pistol to point down a muddy track. The man who’d captured Istvan trotted off to fight some more.

  Along the track Istvan went. At last, under some trees the artillery had drastically abridged, he found half a dozen other Hungarians sitting and smoking. A couple of them were wounded, but the Americans had bandaged them and given them food and water. One of the Yanks guarding them spoke in German: “Use this language only. I need to be able to understand what you say.”

  “Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Istvan said as he sagged to the ground with his fellow POWs. All his bones seemed to turn to water. He was going to live! You didn’t usually shoot a bunch of prisoners behind the lines. If you were going to dispose of them, you did it right away.

  “Hey!” one of the Magyars said in his own tongue. “How’s it going?”

  “Auf Deutsch, Scheissekopf!” the American barked. The other captive repeated the question in German. He had a country accent in Magyar, one that said he came from the southwest.

  “Es geht ganz gut,” Istvan said. “Ich lebe noch.” It’s fine—I’m still alive. What could be better than that?

  Food could. The American guard tossed him a ration can. He opened it with his bayonet, which no one had bothered taking yet. Then he shoveled stew into his mouth with his fingers. It tasted richer, greasier, than Hungarian or Soviet supplies. He licked the can clean. He’d got lucky. He was out of the war.

  —

  Ivans with machine pistols had holed up inside a grocery store in Lippstadt. Gustav Hozzel cautiously peered round the corner at the strongpoint.

  “They picked a hell of a place to dig in,” Rolf grumbled from behind him. “They plug up the way forward but good. And with all the food in there, they can hang on for days.”

  “Could be,” Gustav said. Like most Germans who’d fought in the east, he’d seen how Russians could keep fighting longer than anybody sensible would figure, and do it on next to no supplies.

  Max Bachman shook his head. “Lippstadt’s been under Russian control for a while now. What makes you guys think that store isn’t bare as a stripper’s chest?”

  “Huh,” Gustav said thoughtfully. “You’ve got something there.”

  “Yeah. Maybe sulfa drugs will cure it, though,” Rolf put in.

  “Funny. See? I’m laughing.” But Max spoke without heat.

  “I know what I’d like to use to pry those Ivans out of there. A Flammenwerfer’d do the job neat as you please,” Rolf said.

  “Go ahead. You first.” Like most Frontschweine, Gustav hated flamethrowers, his own side’s hardly less than the Russians’. Yes, they could drive people out of places that would hold for a long time against other weapons. But he’d never seen or heard of anybody who carried one being taken prisoner.

  “I’ll do it,” Rolf said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Gustav lit a cigarette so his face wouldn’t give away what he was thinking. He hadn’t known that his comrade in arms had used a Flammenwerfer during the last go-round, but he would have been lying had he said the news amazed him. Rolf liked hurting things and killing things a little too much for even the guys on his side to be easy around him.

  “Unless you feel like fressing a tonne of beans and lighting your farts, we haven’t got a flamethrower,” Max pointed out, which made even the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler veteran laugh. Practical as usual, Max went on, “What can we do with what we have got?”

  “Why don’t we just shout for them to come out and give up?” Gustav said.

  “Go ahead. You first,” Rolf told him.

  Which meant the Waffen-SS puke would think he was yellow unless he went ahead and did it. “Up yours, Rolf,” Gustav muttered. Louder, he went on, “Let’s see if I can find a white cloth bigger than my snotrag.” The shop they crouched in front of proved to be a coffeehouse. Gustav yanked a cloth off a table. Before he showed himself, he told Rolf, “I get killed trying this, I’ll fucking haunt you.”

  Rolf nodded. “You can join the club.” He was tough to rattle
.

  Shaking the tablecloth around the corner before he went himself, Gustav gave the Red Army men a chance to see it. Still waving it, he stepped out where they could see him, too. “You Ivans!” he shouted—some of them were bound to know scraps of German. “Come out! Surrender! We won’t hurt you if you do—soldiers’ honor!”

  You never could tell with Russians when things got strange. When they were proceeding according to plan, they’d keep going no matter what, as hard to divert or slow as a wrecking ball. But when they had to think for themselves or deal with the unexpected, you had no idea ahead of time what they’d do.

  Nothing happened here for three or four minutes. The Ivans might have been holding their own little soviet inside the grocery. They didn’t shoot him for the sport of it, the way they easily might have. He took that as a good sign. Standing there in the street waving his stupid tablecloth, he didn’t know how else to take it.

  And then, when he was getting antsy enough to want to dive back into cover, damned if the Russians didn’t come out, one after another, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They came, and they came, and they came some more. It reminded him of swarms of clowns piling out of a little trick car in the circus. He’d figured four or five of them, tops, were defending the grocery. Dizzily, he counted seventeen men in Red Army khaki.

  The Ivan in front came up to him. “No hurt us?” he said in broken German. “Soldiers’ honor?”

  “Soldiers’ honor,” Gustav promised, and raised his right hand with the first two fingers crooked as if swearing an oath in court. Then he pointed back around the corner. “You—all of you—come with me.”

  They came. Rolf stared at them, goggle-eyed. Max looked pretty well sandbagged, too. “Fuck me up the asshole,” Rolf said. “I didn’t think you’d bring back a whole division.”

  “Neither did I,” Gustav said, “but here they are.” He caught Max Bachman’s eye. “How about the two of us take ’em back? I promised they’d get treated all right.”

  “Hey!” Rolf said. “What about me?”

  “I promised they’d get treated all right,” Gustav repeated. “You stay here and keep an eye on things. Or get some other guys and clean the weapons out of that grocery if you want.”