Cade squelched down the trench. His own uniform was muddy, too. So were most of his men’s. He didn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it. There was a war on, dammit.
“Hey!” he said sharply. “Yeah, you, Captain Pak! Knock that off!” His voice went louder and deeper than he usually made it. It was, though he didn’t quite realize it, the voice of an angry, fully mature man, the kind of man other men didn’t care to trifle with.
Pak Ho-san didn’t quite realize that yet, either. “What you say?” he asked, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He went on poking the ROK private.
“I said, knock that off. Leave that man alone. He hasn’t done anything worth screaming at him like that or slugging him. So leave him alone.”
“He my man,” Pak said. “He not your man. None of your fucking business.”
“He’s a man,” Cade said. “That makes him my business. Cut out your crap, you hear me? Or you’ll be sorry.”
Plainly, no American officer had ever talked to Pak Ho-san like that before. He didn’t laugh in Cade’s face, but he might as well have. “Oh?” he jeered. “Who make me?”
Cade carried his PPSh. He carried it everywhere, all the time, except when he was sleeping or eating or taking a crap. Then it lay right beside him. He swung it so it bore on Pak Ho-san’s belly button. “I’ll make you,” he said. “It’d be a pleasure.”
Arguing with a submachine gun took more in the way of intestinal fortitude than arguing with a kid captain. Pak opened his mouth. Then he closed it and stormed away. He got mud on his own trousers. Would he gig himself for it? Cade didn’t think so.
The ROK private stared at him. It wasn’t gratitude. It was more like terror. What would happen to him as soon as his protector went away? Nothing pretty, that was for sure. Cade realized he’d just adopted a puppy. He gestured toward his own men with the PPSh. A smile broke out on the Korean’s face like sunshine through clouds. He hustled to join the grimy dogfaces.
Cade dug into a can of chili and beans. He grinned at Howard Sturgis. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.”
“You’re gonna catch it,” Sturgis predicted dolefully.
“If I do, somebody else can run this madhouse.” Cade was still grinning. He felt great. “Maybe it’ll be you.”
“They won’t give a lieutenant a battalion,” Sturgis said.
“I had one for a little while with only one bar.” The great feeling went away. “Those guys are dead now. I would be, too, only I was on a pass when the Russians dropped that bomb.”
He got summoned to Division HQ, back in Kaeryong, that very afternoon. The summons included a jeep ride, so he could get in trouble faster. “What did you do, sir?” the driver asked. “They usually let you guys walk.”
“I believed in democracy and the rights of the little man,” Cade replied.
“Hoo-boy!” The driver clapped a hand to his forehead. “No wonder you’re in deep!”
“No wonder at all,” Cade said.
When he told the clerk-typist in the headquarters prefab who he was, he found himself escorted forthwith into the august presence of Brigadier General Randolph Hackworth, who was commanding the division. Hackworth sported a cigar, a chestful of medals from the last war, and a steely glare, which he fixed on Cade. “Captain, what the hell do you mean by interfering in the way our ally conducts his military business?” he rasped.
By then, Cade didn’t care what happened to him any more. “Sir, what the hell does our ally mean by treating his soldiers like peasants out of the War of the Roses?”
The Havana jerked in Hackworth’s mouth. “You are insubordinate, young man.”
“No, sir,” Cade said. “If Captain Pak Ho-san were an American, you’d court-martial him so fast it’d make his head swim…sir.”
“You are an American,” Hackworth said. “I can do that to you.”
“Go ahead, sir. After what I’ve seen, it’s no wonder Kim Il-sung’s men fight harder than the Koreans on our side. The guys who give them orders weren’t taking orders from the Japs ten years ago.” Cade silently thanked Howard Sturgis for that bit of intelligence.
“How does Leavenworth sound, Captain?” Hackworth asked.
“Sir, after better than a year here, it sounds like a vacation,” Cade said. “But I wouldn’t go, not once my Congressman got my letter.”
The brigadier general went so dusky a red, Cade wondered if he had heart trouble. “You don’t have the proper attitude,” he said.
“I guess I don’t, sir. If we aren’t fighting for the idea that every man is just as good as every other man whether he’s rich and connected or not, why don’t we just jump into our boats and let the Reds have this stinking place?” As it did with Pak Ho-san, his voice took on its mature timbre. Even Cade had no idea how intimidating he sounded.
Hackworth stared at him. “Get the hell out of here,” he said at last.
“Am I under arrest, sir?”
“No. Just get out. I’ll fix things with the ROK mucky-mucks. Beat it!” Out Cade went. He didn’t know if he’d won, but he didn’t think he’d lost.
–
Konstantin Morozov stared at his “new” tank. He stared at the sergeant in the tank park who’d led him to the machine. “You’re tying my dick in knots,” he said.
“Comrade Sergeant, it’s a runner,” the tank-park sergeant answered. “Half the machines I’ve got here are just like it. Somebody’s going to take it. Your turn happened to come up.”
Behind Konstantin, Juris Eigims and Vazgen Sarkisyan looked as appalled as he felt. So did Demyan Belitsky, the driver they’d added to their crew, and Ilya Goledod, the bow gunner. Seeing the dismay in their eyes stiffened his spine.
“Give it to the Devil’s nephew. It’s bound to be older than he is,” he said. “I know fucking well it’s older than you are.”
Even though the tank-park sergeant was a fresh-faced kid, the T-34/85 wasn’t older than he was. They hadn’t started making them till the end of 1943. He wasn’t wrong that he had a lot of them in the tank park, either. None of that had anything to do with anything.
“I don’t care if that piece of shit is a runner or not,” Morozov continued furiously. “It’s a coffin, is what it is. Put it up against a Pershing or a Centurion and we’re all chopped to sausage meat and burned to charcoal ten seconds later.”
“We use what we have, Comrade Sergeant.” The guy at the tank park tried to stay reasonable. He could afford to. His balls weren’t on the line. He went on, “The Americans are using Shermans, I’ve heard. The English are using Cromwells and Churchills. Any tank is better than no tank.”
“Even the Nazis killed these things last time. I ought to know-I was in a couple of them. My men and I didn’t recover from radiation sickness to go back to duty in a horse and buggy!”
“I’ll bring the lieutenant over here if you want,” the tank-park sergeant said.
As soon as Konstantin heard that, he knew he and his crew were stuck with the T-34/85. When an officer poked his beak into something like this, what would he do? Back the guy he worked with, of course. And he would order the crew into the obsolescent tank instead of just giving it to them.
“Fuck you. Fuck your mother. Fuck both your ugly old grannies, one in the mouth and one up the ass. Fuck your father up the ass,” Konstantin said wearily. “You’re sending us out there to get us killed.”
The tank-park sergeant only shrugged. “You aren’t the only ones in machines like this one. I told you that before.” How many other tank commanders who got an ancient rustbucket had cussed him up one side and down the other? How many of them were still alive?