Except when they did.
“The United States is grateful for your husband’s courage, ma’am,” the Air Force major said.
“Oh, fuck the United States!” Marian didn’t remember ever using that word before. She used it now. Had she known a stronger one, she would have used that, too.
24
Major Jeff Walpole got up on the firing step to look across the barbed wire at the Red Chinese positions. He got down again in a hurry. A good thing he did, too: a bullet aimed at him cracked past a couple of seconds later. It might have missed. Did you want to find out, though?
The battalion CO had a big grin on his face. Cade Curtis couldn’t see why. The Chinks were too goddamn close and too goddamn aggressive. But Walpole said, “Those bastards have worries of their own.”
“How’s that, sir?” Cade was glad every day the Red Chinese didn’t try to storm the American lines. He wasn’t even slightly sure they wouldn’t break through.
“They’ll be the ones with supply problems for a while,” Major Walpole said. “Didn’t you hear Armed Forces Radio this morning?”
“No, sir,” Cade said. “They were throwing mortars at us this morning.”
“That’s always fun.” Walpole had the ribbon for his own Bronze Star with a V. Cade didn’t know if he’d won it in this war or the last, but he’d be a man who knew something about mortars. He went on, “Anyway, we bombed a couple of the cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk.”
Cade knew Khabarovsk lay north of Vladivostok, or what remained of Vladivostok. He wasn’t so sure about the other place, or about how to pronounce it. Instead of trying, he found a different kind of question: “When you say bombed, do you mean bombed? Like with atoms?”
“With atoms, yeah,” Major Walpole agreed. “So they won’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again in a few days, the way they would if they were fixing up ordinary bomb damage.”
“Yes, sir,” Cade said, but he wondered if Walpole was an optimist. Mao’s men had driven new tracks through the ruins of Harbin way faster than American military intelligence guessed they could. He didn’t care about laborers, only about the labor they did. Was Stalin likely to prove more merciful? When had he ever?
Staff Sergeant Klein ambled up the trench. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Nodding to Walpole, he said, “Sir, I hear you tell the lieutenant we dropped some more A-bombs?”
“That’s right, Sergeant. Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” Walpole could say it.
“Yeah, I know where those are at. That’ll slow the trains down some,” Klein said. If he knew where Blagoveshchensk was, he was one up on Cade. After a meditative puff, he went on, “Any idea where the Russians’ll clobber us for payback?”
“I haven’t heard anything,” Major Walpole answered. “It would be nice if we could keep them from hitting us anywhere.”
“Yes, sir. It sure would.” By the way Klein said that, he didn’t believe it would happen no matter how nice it was. He pulled out his cigarettes. “You guys want a smoke? Look at me-I’m turning into a tobacco shop for officers.”
“I’ll take one. Thanks,” Walpole said.
“Thank you, Sergeant. Me, too,” Cade added. A private had given him the matches he used to light up. They advertised a bar on Hotel Street in Honolulu where you could probably buy the hostesses along with the drinks they served.
The smoke still burned as it went down the pipe and into his lungs. It didn’t make him think he’d lose his last can of C-rats any more, though. And he did get the little jolt of relaxed alertness that made people start using cigarettes to begin with.
“See what you did?” he said to Lou Klein. “You turned me into a junkie.”
Major Walpole laughed. “You mean you weren’t before? I didn’t think there was anybody over here who didn’t smoke like a steel-mill chimney. Christ, even the North Koreans puff away every chance they get, and those sorry bastards don’t have food half the time, let alone tobacco.”
“I’ve never seen ’em short of small-arms ammo, though,” Cade said.
“Uh-huh. The cartridges get through. I think they make their own in Pyongyang, too,” Walpole said.
“Cartridges aren’t hard. Anybody with some brass bar stock and a lathe can crank ’em out,” Klein said. “The Red Chinese ain’t makin’ tanks, but they sure as hell turn out copies of Russian submachine guns and the rounds to shoot from ’em.”
Cade looked down at his own PPSh. “By the maker’s stamps, this one’s from Russia,” he said. “But I’ve seen those Chinese copies, too. They work just as well as Stalin’s specials.”
“Pretty soon, they will make their own tanks,” Walpole said. “Then they’ll make their own planes, and Katie bar the door after that.”
“Unless we bomb the fuckers back to the Stone Age before they get that far,” Klein said.
“If we’re going to hang on to our half of Korea, we may need to,” Walpole said. “We can screw the Russians’ logistics, same way they did with us. But we can’t screw up Mao’s logistics, or not very much. Red China’s right across the goddamn river, for Chrissake. We can make ’em work harder to haul the shit over here, but it’s not like we can stop ’em.”
Cade had had that same unhappy thought. “Mao’s got I don’t know how many hundred million people,” he said. “However many we kill, how much difference will it make?”
“Gotta get ourselves more bombs. Bigger bombs. Sooner or later, we’ll make the Chinks sit up and take notice.” Lou Klein sounded like a man with all the angles figured.
He made a hell of a staff sergeant. He could have run the company better than Cade. They both knew it. So, no doubt, did Major Walpole. If Walpole and all the battalion officers suddenly bought a plot, Klein could probably handle that many men, too.
But, because he could do his part of the military job so well, he thought he could do even more. He reminded Cade of the poets and craftsmen in Socrates’ Apology. They too knew their own business inside and out-, but thought they also knew everything else because they did.
And a fat lot of good explaining all that had done the ancient Greek. Socrates had paid the price then. The whole world was paying it now.
No sooner had that cheerful notion crossed Cade’s mind than the Red Chinese started lobbing some more mortar bombs at the American trenches. Mortar rounds-and the nasty little tubes that fired them-were even easier to make than ordinary firearms and ammo. The tolerances were looser, and the tubes didn’t have to be very strong. Homemade artillery, perfect for a country full of blacksmiths like Mao’s so-called People’s Republic of China.
Curtis threw himself flat. Lou Klein was diving for the mud as soon as he was. Jerry Walpole, who didn’t get to the front as much as the two men of lower rank, stayed on his pins half a second longer. It cost him. When he went down, it was with a howl of pain. He clutched at his left thigh. Red started soaking his trouser leg and oozing out between his fingers.
“Corpsman!” Sergeant Klein yelled. “The major’s down! We need a corpsman, God damn it to fucking hell!”
Cade lay closer to Major Walpole. The first thing he did was grab the morphine syrette out of the pouch on Walpole’s belt and stick him with it. The next thing was to pull his own bayonet from the sheath on his belt and use it to cut away the wounded man’s pants so he could see the wound.
It was a nasty, ragged gash. It was bleeding, but not gushing blood. Cade guessed the fragment hadn’t torn the femoral artery-that could kill you in a couple of minutes. He wished for pins to close the cut. Since wishing didn’t produce them, he did the next best thing: he dusted the wound with sulfa, slapped on a bandage, and taped it down as tight as he could.