Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  “It’s really not a problem, Mr. President.”

  Kolhammer wasn’t sure what to say next. He’d expected to have another hour or two to compose something appropriate. He’d also been thrown by the presence of Eisenhower, and had to fight an impulse to address him as Mr. President. He really hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with a young John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or George Bush anytime soon.

  Before he could blunder into a morass of fatuous small talk, Roosevelt surprised him by saying, “Please accept my condolences for your losses at Midway, Admiral. I know they weren’t as serious as ours, but we don’t measure out our grief in teaspoons for the purposes of comparison. I’m sure you don’t, either.”

  “No sir, we do not. And thank you. We lost some fine men and women. As did you . . . or, uhm . . .”

  He was about to clarify that inaccuracy, but Roosevelt waved it away.

  “We know what you mean, Admiral. Since you’re here, you’d best meet everyone now. General Eisenhower, could you do the introductions? I’m afraid I’m not as familiar with everybody, particularly the scientists, beside Professor Einstein.”

  Eisenhower looked stumped for an instant.

  Roosevelt grinned wickedly. “You’re not president yet, young man. You still have to work for a living.”

  A small but genuine wash of laughter ran through the room.

  They must know about Ike, Kolhammer realized. Word travels fast.

  Eisenhower had put together the short list of scientists, with the help of Professor Einstein. But he suspected the president had asked him to do the introductions because Roosevelt and one of the scientists, Professor Millikan, loathed each other. Eisenhower had joked to King they needed the rifle squad inside the building to keep the two men apart.

  Millikan, the director of the California Polytechnic Institute’s physics lab, merely grunted at Kolhammer. He appeared actively hostile to most of the other fliers. Eisenhower knew him to be a bit of a nut on racial issues, so perhaps that had something do with it. By way of contrast, Theodore von Karman, the top man at Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and Leo Szilard from Columbia University, had to be dragged away from the fliers. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, and a relatively young man called Robert Dicke from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology restricted themselves to nods and perfunctory smiles.

  “And this is Professor Albert Einstein,” said Eisenhower. “He’s probably done more than anyone here to help us adjust to your arrival.”

  All the time travelers reacted as Einstein shuffled forward to shake hands with Kolhammer. They treated him like some kind of big-league ballplayer or radio star, suddenly crowding around to take his hand or just touch him on the arm or the shoulder. It was odd. One of the fliers produced a thin black briefcase and handed it to Kolhammer.

  “We thought you might appreciate this, Professor,” said the admiral. “It’s a computer. It’ll help you in your work.”

  The physicist thanked him and carefully unzipped the bag. Eisenhower had been told about their electrical books, the flexipads as they called them. This would have fit the description, except that it seemed to be too large. Perhaps it was a more powerful flexipad?

  “It’s called a data slate,” said Kolhammer as Einstein turned it over in his hands. “The sort of calculations that’d take months to do by hand, you can do in a split second on this baby.”

  Eisenhower suppressed a smirk. He could see the other scientists eyeing it covetously.

  “Does it play movies and music?” asked Einstein. “I’ve heard that it does.”

  “Do you mind?” Kolhammer asked, taking the slate back and looking inquiringly at both Einstein and Roosevelt. Neither objected.

  The admiral brushed a corner of the slate’s glass screen and it lit up, throwing out considerably more light than the single gas lamp in the room. Eisenhower could see that most of the illuminated page appeared to be a blank blue rectangle. Half a dozen or so small objects, about the size of a postage stamps, were clustered down the right-hand side of the—what would you call it, the screen? The page?

  Kolhammer brushed one with the tip of his finger and it suddenly whooshed outward to fill the entire space with a moving picture of people in evening dress. Violinists, he realized as the first sweet notes of a Paganini concerto stole into the room. A murmur arose from the scientists and even from some of the military officers. The recording sounded as real as if they were in the front row of a concert hall.

  Kolhammer handed the slate back back to Einstein, who was clearly entranced. He nodded and grinned and stroked the glowing glass plate like a blind man, attempting to “see” through his fingertips. He turned and bent over so that Roosevelt could see the display more clearly. The president took the machine gingerly, handling it like a precious crystal vase.

  “It’s pretty tough, sir,” said Kolhammer. “Military-grade construction. You could kick it across the room and it’d be fine.”

  Einstein straightened up. He was smiling as though very pleased.

  “It is good, ja? Not everything in your world is about war making and destructive potential?”

  Eisenhower thought he detected something in Kolhammer’s response—a fleeting moment of indecision, as though he wasn’t quite sure of how to respond. In the end, the man shrugged and smiled with a mixture of warmth and possibly of regret.

  “No,” said Kolhammer. “Not everything.”

  21

  THE EASTERN FRONT, MAY 1942

  Eternity was so cold they had piled up the dead to shield themselves.

  The wind cut deeply into Brasch’s bones on the short run from the trench to the forward observation post, until he wondered if he might ever stop shivering; although shiver was too mild a word for the spasms that shook him to his core. He shuddered so violently, and with such little hope the convulsions would ever cease, that he began to wonder if he might die from exhaustion.

  There was no source of warmth in the filthy dugout. The three men he found there were wrapped in so many layers of clothing scavenged from fallen comrades and Russian prisoners that they no longer resembled men. They looked like swollen, fuzzy ticks. Brasch tried to speak to them, but his voice stuttered so much he gave up. He had only platitudes to offer anyway. When the next wave came it would sweep them from the face of the earth.

  From eternity, as he now thought of it.

  Certainly this wretched country stretched out endlessly. Russia was a Hell of frozen, never-ending space and enemies without number. Thousands of them lay in the darkness just beyond this hole.

  They had stacked up a dozen or more of the most pliable bodies in the vain hope that they would offer protection against the howling wind that roared across the plain and knifed through every layer of rotting, fetid cloth. One of the Russian corpses with which they had constructed their windbreak had frozen with an arm protruding. Somebody had hacked it off with a spade, and the sharp bone stump dug into Brasch’s neck, forcing him to shift into a more exposed position.

  He couldn’t see the faces of the men who huddled there with him and didn’t know their names. This wasn’t his unit. He’d been separated from the engineers for three weeks. They were twelve hundred kilometers away, but it hardly mattered. He now fought with a battalion of Panzergrenadiers and didn’t think he would ever see his comrades again. He had come forward to encourage these men in their vigilance, but was reduced instead to curling in a small ball and trying not to moan.

  Brasch knew that far in the rear, across an impenetrable sea of snap-frozen mud, lay mountains of provisions and arctic-weather gear that would never reach them. He knew because he had helped build the great depots himself and seen them fill up with thousands of hooded lamb’s-wool jackets and mountains of thick blankets, with exquisitely warm insulated boots and soft cat-skin gloves. He knew there were half a million sturdy kerosene heaters still packed away in boxes—just one of which might have made habitable this dismal sinkhole in which they suffered.

  Instead the
y were forced to piss on their cracked and blistered hands, the only way they had of even briefly warming and cauterizing fissures and scabs filled with infected, frozen puss. Their wounds made it almost impossible to hold a Mauser, let alone fire one.

  One of the men in the hole—Brasch thought somebody had called him Franz—began to sob. Nobody moved to comfort him. Every breath produced a rattling sound from deep within his chest, and sometimes an explosive burst of coughing that sprayed them with mucus.

  The boy’s wailing and coughing increased. “Mutti, Mutti . . . ,” he cried incessantly.

  Brasch painfully levered himself up to peer over the rim of hardened bodies.

  “Look alive, my friends,” he croaked. “Ivan will be joining us for breakfast soon. Check your communications lines.”

  A white-haired sergeant picked up the handset and raised it near his ear. The Feldwebel did not press the instrument there, though, lest it stick to his flesh in the cold.

  “Lines are fine,” he grunted.

  The dawn was near enough now that Brasch could see steam pluming from his mouth. The dense forest of arms and legs once more resolved itself into an open field littered with innumerable corpses. The shell holes were now visible, too. Thousands of them, curiously delicate if viewed with some detachment, against the vast canvas of the snow-covered steppe. Somebody had once pointed out to him how much they resembled flowers—the dark brown centers of scorched earth, a sallow tinge around the mouth of the oldest holes, red blooms of bloody snow marking the newest. Having been alerted to such a perverse notion, he was never able to shake it.

  Brasch was gathering his strength, trying to shake off the lassitude that threatened to overwhelm him, when the vague horizon that blurred between white ground and gray sky was unexpectedly thrown into sharp definition. A solid black line appeared, extending as far as he could see. His balls had just started to climb into his body when the Soviet war cry reached him.

  Ooooouuuuurrraaaahhhhh . . .

  Brasch wrenched the phone from the claws of the white-haired sergeant and began cranking the handle to generate a charge. When a small, impossibly distant voice answered, he screamed into the mouthpiece, demanding artillery support. The connection was poor, and the line crackled and hissed with static so that he began to suspect they could not even hear him on the other end. That faraway, tinny, nearly nonhuman voice repeated the same senseless mantra, again and again.

  “Wo sind sie? Wo sind sie? Was ist los? Wo sind sie?”

  Brasch called out his identity and demanded an artillery barrage.

  “Wo sind sie? Wo sind sie?”

  The boy screamed for his mother, reminding Brasch for one insane moment of his own son Manfred, just turned four years old. The soldier’s grief and rage sounded just like Manny when, as a toddler, he ran into the sharp corner of a table, splitting open his head.

  “MUTTI! MUTTI! NEIN NEIN NEIN!”

  The sergeant and the last man, a displaced driver from a transport company, wrestled frantically with the Spandau, attempting to thread a new belt of cartridges with stiff, shaking hands. The black line on the horizon grew thicker as more and more Communists poured over the gentle rise.

  “God, there are millions of them,” cried the Feldwebel, his voice cracking with terror. “We must go, Major, we have to run now, before they get here.”

  Ooooouuuuurrraaaahhhhh . . .

  “We need artillery,” Brasch shouted stubbornly as he leaned over to place a firm hand on the shoulder of the truck driver, who was quite obviously seconds from fleeing the post. The man’s trembling hands still fumbled with the ammunition belt. He bounced up and down at the knees, and his head snapped back and forth between the awful spectacle of the approaching human wave and the beckoning safety of the tree line, some three hundred yards behind them. A low keening sound, like an animal that it knows it is being led to slaughter, emanated from deep within him.

  “Fire!” ordered Brasch, pointing at the Soviets, who rushed on like a surging black tide. The machine-gun crew began to fire, the harsh industrial hammering coming in short bursts that did nothing to halt the advancing horde. They must have killed a hundred men in less than ten seconds, but Brasch would swear another hundred thousand simply trampled down the corpses.

  “Where is the artillery?” he roared into the phone.

  “Was ist los? Wo sind sie?”

  Ooooouuuuurrraaaahhhhh . . .

  “M-m-m-m-mutti . . .”

  A single shot rang out, sounding flat and insignificant beneath the rising din of the Soviet charge and the snarl of the heavy machine gun. It was so close that Brasch jumped, not realizing for an instant that a warm shower of gore had just sprayed him. Then the boy soldier was dead, his body twitching spastically as the nervous system fired its last mad messages. One side of his head was missing, blown off by the pistol he had placed within his mouth and triggered when his mother had been unable to chase away the monsters rushing at him, as she had once shooed off the gremlins that hid beneath his bed.

  OOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUURRRAAAAAAAHHHHH . . .

  The Spandau lashed at the black tide. The boy stopped twitching. Brasch spoke calmly into the phone again, like a man inquiring at the butcher shop after his weekly bratwurst order.

  “Where is my artillery?”

  “Was ist los?”

  He replaced the receiver.

  The flood of berserkers began to slow, impeded by a foot of fresh snow, the thickness of their clothes, stiff muscles, and the littered corpses of their countrymen—but the advance remained unstoppable. Half the eternal steppe seemed filled with them, and still they poured over the horizon.

  Brasch was so far beyond terror that he placidly took out his Luger, stood up in the dugout, placed one boot on the rock-hard cadaver of a Russian corporal, and commenced firing, slowly and meticulously, even though the Soviets were still well beyond the effective range of any sidearm. He wished he had a cigarette to smoke. The white-haired sergeant begged him piteously for permission to retreat, but Brasch ignored him. What’s the point, he asked himself. You can die here, or a few yards from here.

  The thunder of the charge hid the first rumble of the German guns so that Brasch didn’t realize an artillery barrage was on its way until the first shells shrieked overhead, to explode in the center of the Russian mass half a second later. Enormous fountains of fire and ice and hateful Russian soil erupted just behind the leading edge of the attack, silhouetting the front ranks against a curtain of flames. They rushed on regardless, as smaller detonations started to thin out their ranks.

  “Mortars,” said Brasch with a detached air.

  The machine-gunners weren’t listening. They screamed at the Soviets, pouring a constant stream of fire into the maelstrom.

  “You’ll melt the barrel,” said Brasch, whose wits were returning. He hopped down from his exposed perch and holstered his pistol. A frightful din, the thunder of a world riven in two, shook the frozen mud beneath their feet, as the big guns walked their barrage back through the densely packed Russians. He could no longer see any of the attackers inside the wild conflagration. He wondered how many had just died. Fifty thousand? A quarter of a million?

  Then it was time to leave. The attack had been broken, but a few hundred crazed survivors might yet emerge from the killing field and overrun their little outpost.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the old sergeant, turning his back to the carnage.

  But some new horror paralyzed the man. His jaw hung slack and his eyes bulged. The truck driver simply howled and ran like a dog, stumbling over the corpse of the dead boy.

  Twisting slowly back toward the open steppe, so slowly that it seemed as if he were forever turning, Brasch stared into the abyss. A million Russians appeared from within the boiling shroud of black smoke and blasts of flashing light.

  OOOOOOOOOOoooouuuuurrraAAAaaahhhhh . . .

  “Manfred,” whispered Brasch as the barbarian horde came upon them.

  A single man, a Siberian o
r a Mongol by his features, accelerated from the foremost rank, heading straight for their dugout. He launched himself into the air, clearing the windbreak of dead Communists, slamming into Brasch, his hands closing around the engineer’s neck, his teeth finding purchase in the unshaven bristles of his throat.

  KRI SUTANTO, HASHIRAJIMA ANCHORAGE, 0438 HOURS, 6 JUNE 1942

  “Herr Major, Herr Major, wake up sir, wake up. You are disturbing the others.”

  The Siberian’s rough, choking grasp became a lighter, more considerate touch, shaking his shoulders, dragging him up out of the nightmare that had haunted him for weeks.

  “Willie?” Brasch was disoriented. His heart still raced, almost as it had that day outside Belgorod. “Willie, is that you?”

  “No, sir. It is I, Herr Steckel. From the embassy.”

  Brasch came upright and instantly a sharp, nearly blinding pain bit into his scalp. He cursed.

  “Careful sir, there’s not much headroom in here.”

  Brasch rubbed his head and blinked the crust of sleep from his eyes. The first thing he noticed, as always, was the warmth. He’d never expected to be warm again. Then he became conscious of his freedom of movement. He wore only a light vest and undershorts. Finally, he remembered. He was no longer at the Eastern Front. He was in the Far East, on the ship of wonders. A rush of half-formed thoughts and feelings blew through his sleep-disordered mind. Dominating them all, however, was a profound blankness and disbelief in the simple fact that he was still alive. He had numbered himself among the dead for so long, he felt ill at ease to be among the living once more.

  “I am sorry, Herr Steckel. Please excuse me,” he rasped. “My throat is dry. Some water, if you have it.”

  Steckel passed across a glass of chilled water. They had been through this ritual every night since the engineer’s arrival. At first the diplomat had been awed and humbled just to draw breath in the same room as the legend of Belgorod. But two weeks of tending to this shattered husk of a man had obviously drained him of any such respect.