That was an order, though he might not phrase it as one. Sturgis had been in the Army too long to mistake it for anything else. “Okay, sir. I’ll watch it,” he replied. His face told what he thought of the order, but that had nothing to do with anything. This wouldn’t be the first order he’d disliked that he had to follow, or the last.
“Thanks, Howie.” Cade tried to soften things as much as he could.
“Sure.” Mischief glinted in Sturgis’ eyes. “How’s about I just call ’em kikes? That’s one they probably won’t know.”
Cade started to ream him out. Luckily, he saw the glint before he said anything. He made do with a dry chuckle and one word: “Cute.”
“Phooey on you, sir,” Sturgis said. “You’re taking my fun away.”
“Besides,” Cade said, “you don’t want to get Jimmy ticked at you, right?”
“Well, no, there is that,” Howard Sturgis allowed. Jimmy was the ROK private Cade had rescued from Captain Pak Ho-san. Now that he’d been rescued, he was doing his best to turn into a GI. His real name was Chun Won-ung. Americans thought learning Korean was a waste of time. Chun became Jim and Jim became Jimmy, a handle they could wrap their tongues around. Sturgis said, “Only thing is, he’s liable to start calling the ROK chumps gooks himself.”
He was, too. The more he stuck with the Americans, the more scorn he had for the folk he’d come from. But before Cade could reply, a voice blared perfect English from the Red Chinese loudspeakers: “Happy Valentine’s Day, Yankees!” A POW with a gun at his head? An American Red who’d fled his country one jump ahead of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men? Whoever he was, he went on, “Want to see your squeeze back home? Don’t want to go back in a box, or missing an arm or a leg, or blind? Come on over to the people’s side, the side of the workers’ revolution! We’ll treat you right! We’ll feed you and we’ll send you home as soon as this stupid capitalist war is over. Don’t fight your class allies!”
“I wish those noisy bastards’d stick to leaflets,” Howard Sturgis said.
“How come?” Cade asked.
“On account of I can’t wipe my ass with noise from a loudspeaker.”
“Well, okay.” Cade laughed. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it.
Getting yelled at by the enemy was better than getting shot at, but it wore thin in a hurry. The Red Chinese kept playing the same message over and over, always at top volume. They probably had a bored corporal standing by the phonograph and smoking a cigarette while he waited for the record to get to the end. Then he’d grab the tone arm, put the needle back at the beginning, and send the lies out one more time.
When one side’s snipers scored a couple of hits, the other side would deploy more sharpshooters with scope-sighted rifles to pay them back. When one side’s machine gunners kept raking the other’s forward positions, their foes’ machine guns soon made life miserable for their front-line troops. Mortars begat more mortars; artillery, more artillery.
And a propaganda bombardment quickly brought on a propaganda counterbombardment. The loudspeakers behind the American lines started bellowing at the Red Chinese in their own language. Cade had always thought a Chinese conversation sounded like cats in a sack right after you’d kicked the sack. Listening to it hideously amplified did nothing to improve it.
There, he found Howard Sturgis in complete agreement with him. “Jesus H. Christ!” Sturgis said, wincing. “That shit’d drive anybody Asiatic. Makes me want to grab a Tommy gun like yours and shoot up those goddamn speakers.”
Cade held out the PPSh. “Here. Be my guest, man. No court-martial would convict you. Hell, they’d probably promote you.”
“Don’t tempt me, sir.” Sturgis made pushing-away motions. “Y’know, even if they did convict me, I could probably get out of it on a Section Eight.”
“A psych discharge? I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cade shook his head. “No, I take it back-I would. You have to be crazy to be in Korea, right? Everybody says so, and when everybody says something it’s gotta be true. So if they gave Section Eights to everyone who deserved it, nobody’d be left to fight the war.”
“Shit. You’re right. We’re fucked coming and going.” Sturgis lit a fresh cigarette. Loudspeakers roared Chinese at loudspeakers roaring English. Cade began to wish for a Section Eight himself.
20
Istvan Szolovits pulled off his uniform. The barracks in the POW compound had a stove in it, but it wasn’t what anybody would have called warm. As if to prove he’d lost his mind, he pulled on red socks, white shorts, and a short-sleeved green shirt with the number 3 on the front and back.
As he was tying on his football boots-they had longer cleats than army boots, although that might not matter much if the pitch was frozen-Miklos told him, “Go get ’em, Jewboy!”
“You’re fucking crazy, you know that?” Istvan said.
“Like hell I am,” said the Magyar ornamented with the Arrow Cross and the Turul. “You may be a fucking clipcock, but you’re a clipcock on the Hungarian team. And if you give those Czech dipshits a quarter of what you gave me, they’ll run from you the way they ran in World War I.”
If Istvan gave anybody on the football pitch a quarter of what he’d given Miklos, the man in black would eject him from the match and probably ban him from playing in any more. Miklos had to know it, too. But center-back wasn’t a position for ballet dancers. As much as you could be in a game, you were in the trenches there.
Since the war, Hungarian football had been some of the best in the world. The national team might well be favored at the upcoming World Cup…if the team members stayed alive, and if there was enough of a world left to hold a World Cup when 1954 came around.
This match wouldn’t be like that. Istvan hadn’t been sure he could make the team when he tried out. He really hadn’t been sure because the coach, a captain named Viktor Czurka, had Colonel Medgyessy’s attitude toward Jews. But the captain cared more about football than he did about Istvan’s missing foreskin. Seeing Istvan could do the job better than the man he had in there, he said, “We’ll see how you play Saturday.”
Istvan had practiced as much as he could with the other backs. A good back line was a unit. Like an army, they advanced and retreated together. If they didn’t, the other side would get in behind them and then the keeper would be screaming at them as he went to the back of the net to pick up the ball that had just tallied a goal.
“Let’s go get ’em,” said the captain. He was the team’s number 9, the striker. Geza was small and quick and dangerous, like an adder. Off the pitch, he was a lance-corporal, a nobody. On it, he ran the show.
Footballers and ordinary POWs headed for the pitch. The Czechoslovakians-red shirts, blue shorts, white socks-and their supporters came out of their barracks at the same time. The Poles and East Germans didn’t have a dog in this fight, but they were eager to watch and bet.
“Arschlochen!” Miklos yelled at the Czechoslovakians.
“Schweinehunde!” a Czech or Slovak shouted back. Yes, it might still have been the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The only way Magyars and Czechoslovakians could insult one another and make sure they got the message across was to use German. Chances were the Poles could manage in it, too.
The referee was a French sergeant. He must have come from Alsace, because he spoke German himself, with an accent that made Istvan have a devil of a time following him. Well, he had an accent himself when he spoke German. The guys from Prague and Bratislava had a different one. The way they all talked would have appalled someone from Cologne or Leipzig.
An aluminum-bronze ten-franc coin spun in the chilly air. Geza won the toss. He chose to play against the breeze in the first half. The Czechoslovakians would kick off to start the game, then.