“Okay, sir.” Howard Sturgis’ tone said it really wasn’t. He was in his thirties. He’d been a sergeant when the fighting here started, and won a battlefield commission for gallantry. He attacked first and worried about it later.
He did when you let him, anyhow. Cade wasn’t about to. “Hey, look, eventually the States’ll do a proper job of reinforcing us,” he said. “Till then, we’ve just got to hang on so they’ll have something to reinforce.”
“Sir, they’re way the hell over there. The ports on the West Coast are fucked up. The Panama Canal’s fucked up. Now Pusan’s fucked up, too, and that was the best harbor we had over here.” Sturgis pointed north with heavy patience. “But all the Chinks in the world, they’re right across the goddamn Yalu.”
“I know about that, thanks,” Cade said dryly. “I was up at the Chosin Reservoir.”
For the first time, he got Sturgis’ undivided attention. The older man stared at him. “But they killed just about all o’ those guys,” he said.
“I know about that, too.” Curtis pointed at his own chest. “Just about all, but not quite. So if they give us too much trouble down here, who knows what happens? Maybe Peiping goes up in smoke, or Shanghai, or some other big cities.”
“Wouldn’t break my heart,” Sturgis said.
“Only thing that worries me is, will anybody have anything left to rebuild with by the time this war is over?” Cade said. “In the meantime, we’re gonna sit tight, let the enemy come to us, and slaughter him when he does. I can’t think of any better way to keep our casualties down, so we’ll do it like that.”
“Got it,” Howard Sturgis said reluctantly. “Uh, sir.”
“Good.”
“Sir?” Sturgis said. When Cade nodded, the veteran went on, “Sir, no shit, you made it back down from the reservoir?”
“Yeah,” Cade said, in lieu of Screw you if you think I’m lying. He added, “I never would’ve if I didn’t get help from the Korean Christians. They live up to the name better than a bunch of folks back home, and you can sing that in church.”
“Huh.” Sturgis sounded thoughtfuclass="underline" not a usual sound from him. “Guess they love Mao even better’n they love old Kim, then.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Cade agreed.
He might have said something more, but all the American machine guns started going off at once. Airplane engines roared in at treetop height. Cade flung himself into a dugout. The Red Chinese couldn’t call in Corsairs from carriers, but they had Shturmoviks. Those carried rockets and bombs and guns, too. The machine gunners on the ground were wasting ammo. The Russian attack planes laughed at that kind of fire. Only an F-80 or F-86 could make them say uncle, and not a whole lot of those were left over here.
Nothing came down too close to Cade, for which he thanked heaven. Of course, heaven had just decided to visit hell on some other sorry bastards instead, so how grateful should he have been, exactly? He shook his head. When you started asking yourself questions like that, where did you stop? Anywhere?
–
Konstantin Morozov climbed out of the bathtub. He took it slow and easy; he had about as much strength and endurance as a sand castle. He clucked sadly as he looked down at his naked body. He was a man. Ever since his beard came in, he’d been hairy like a man, with a mat on his chest, tufts at his armpits and crotch, and some pretty fair fuzz on his arms and legs.
Women liked men that way, dammit. It let them know they weren’t lying down with another girl.
But, as far as Konstantin could tell, he had no more sprouting from his hide than a plucked chicken. It had all fallen out. And not just on his body. He hadn’t had to shave since he came to the military hospital. He had no hair on his dome. He had no hair in his nose or ears, and no eyebrows or eyelashes, either.
“Will it ever grow back?” he’d asked a doc when he’d been a lot sicker than he was now, when he thought the tide was rolling in on that poor sand castle.
She’d only shrugged. “If you live, we think it will. Eventually.” How long eventually was, she hadn’t said. Maybe she didn’t know, either.
He was still alive. He was pretty sure now he’d stay that way for a while, and he was even beginning to believe he might want to. All of his crewmen were still alive, too, though for Vladislav Kalyakin it was a close call. The driver wouldn’t stop bleeding out his asshole, so they had to go in there and do…something. Konstantin was hazy on the details, but it seemed to have helped.
Even if it had, though, Kalyakin wouldn’t be fit to fight again for a long time, if he ever was. Morozov, Eigims, and Sarkisyan were in better shape than that. Konstantin had puked blood only once, and not a whole lot of it. Food was starting to taste good to him again.
The Balt and Armenian were about where he was. They’d had their brush with the scythe-carrying skeleton in the black robe, but Old Man Death wasn’t quite hungry enough to gnaw on them.
Yet. Konstantin knew too well it was always yet. He’d survived a near miss from an atom bomb? Okay, fine. As soon as he was healthy enough, the Red Army would throw him into another tank and try to expend him some other way. A mine, a bazooka rocket, a shell from an English tank he didn’t spot soon enough…Any one of those would do to kill a man, even if they didn’t murder by carload lots like the big son of a bitch full of atoms.
He made it back to his cot without getting too exhausted. Lying on the lumpy mattress couldn’t have been much more boring. Even Konstantin had to admit it beat the hell out of lying at the bottom of a hole two meters deep with dirt shoveled in on top of him.
A doctor came by to check on him: an East German man who spoke Russian with the precision of a bright schoolboy. “You are feeling well?” he asked.
“Not too bad, Doc,” Morozov answered. Then he opened his mouth so the man in the white coat could stick a thermometer under his tongue.
“Oh, this is excellent!” the Fritz said when he looked at Konstantin’s temperature. “You have no fever now for two days in a row. This shows your immunity to infection is recovering.”
“Good.” Konstantin supposed it was good. It sounded good, anyway. He asked, “How much can you do for radiation sickness, anyway?”
“Less than we would like, I am sorry to say,” the fraternal socialist ally replied. (What had he done in the last war? Patched up guys for the Wehrmacht? Morozov wouldn’t have been surprised-he was plenty old enough.) After a moment, he continued, “We treat the symptoms as they develop, to the best of our ability. We give supportive care-we keep patients comfortable and well-nourished, to help them recover from the dose of radiation they have received. But we cannot do anything about the radiation itself. If it is too much…” He let his voice trail off.
Konstantin held out his right hand, fingers in a fist, thumb pointing down. The German doctor nodded. Konstantin asked, “How close did my crew and me come to getting too much?”
“No one had a Geiger counter in your tank, so I cannot measure that exactly,” the doctor replied. “I have seen people who were sicker than you men recover. I have not seen people who were much sicker than you recover.”
“I get you.” That marched pretty well with the way Konstantin had felt right after they brought him here. Then he asked, “How many other people with radiation sickness have you seen?”
“More than you think, perhaps. Remember, the Americans have used these horrible bombs against the German Democratic Republic. So my colleagues and I have had practice with our fellow citizens.”
“Ah.” Morozov left it there. As a matter of fact, he’d forgotten the Yankees had dropped A-bombs on this part of Germany. Like most Russians who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, he had trouble working up much sympathy for Fritzes.
The doctor produced a lancet and a microscope slide. The slide had a label with Morozov’s name and service number written on it. Well, actually the label said MOROZOW, not МОРОЗОВ, but that was what the Latin alphabet and German language did to it.