The ship took on fuel, food, and fresh water. Then it sailed on, west and south. Every passing minute took the men closer to the time and the place where Uncle Sam-or was it Uncle Joe? — would start using them up. Most of them didn’t seem to care. The poker games started up as soon as the men got back aboard. The dice started rolling, too.
Mike didn’t gamble much. He lay in his bunk, plowing through paperbacks. He hadn’t had much chance to read in the labor encampment. He was trying to make up for lost time. These cheap little books were great for that.
It got hotter and stickier every day. When they crossed the Equator, the sailors summoned the soldiers topside and drenched them with fire hoses. King Neptune and his court magically transformed the polliwogs to sturdy shellbacks.
They disembarked at Guadalcanal. The scars in the jungle were already healing, but the place still looked like hell. They went into an encampment that made the one outside of Lubbock seem like a Ritz-Carlton by comparison.
There’d been mice in the barracks in Montana. Some of the guys there, with nothing else to give their affection to, had made pets out of them. No mice scurrying over these bunks. There were cockroaches instead: cockroaches almost as big as mice. You couldn’t tame them. All you could do was squash them, and they made a mess when you did.
Ordinary soldiers, Mike quickly discovered, weren’t allowed to mingle with men from punishment brigades. No fraternization-that was what the Army called it. That was why they had the P on their sleeves. They were soldiers, and then again they weren’t.
Time dragged on. The brass still didn’t seem to have decided how best to dispose of them. Some men cooked up a nasty brew from fruit and sugar and whatever else they could promote that would ferment. A fellow from South Carolina who swore he’d been a moonshiner rigged a still. What came out of it was even fouler than the undistilled product. Mike sampled both, so he had standards of comparison.
Captain Magnusson hunted him up when he was still feeling the aftereffects. “One thing about this year,” the company CO said. He’d been putting away rotgut, too; his breath stank of it.
“What’s that, sir?” Mike was discovering that heat and humidity didn’t improve a hangover. He wished Magnusson would go away.
But the captain had tabbed him as somebody he could talk to. “We go into action before it’s over, that’s what,” he said. “And we see how many of us get to say hello to 1944, let alone 1945.”
“You always know how to cheer me up, don’t you, sir?”
As if he hadn’t spoken, Luther Magnusson went on. “And you know what else? I’m still looking forward to it.” Almost in spite of himself, Mike nodded. He was, too.
* * *
Charlie looked out of the hotel at Basra. The smells coming in through the window would have told him he wasn’t in America any more even if he couldn’t have seen any of the Iraqi city. No town in the United States had smelled like this since the turn of the century, maybe longer. Neither the locals nor the British, who’d grabbed hold of Iraq after the First World War (and who’d hung on to it despite a pro-Nazi uprising) seemed to have bothered with putting in flush toilets or sewer lines. The canals near the river only added to the stink.
Right by the Shatt al-Arab Hotel was a little England, at least to the eye. Rich people, limeys and their wog flunkies, lived in those rose-gardened houses. Farther away, most of the buildings he could see were made of mud brick, with flat roofs. He could have found the like in Albuquerque or Santa Fe; he’d done a good bit of knocking around the country in his AP days. But nowhere in the USA would he have seen domed mosques with minarets spearing up toward the sky. Just looking at them made him think of the Arabian Nights, or of Douglas Fairbanks buckling a swash in a silent movie.
Basra wasn’t silent. The mosques weren’t even close to silent. They had PA systems to amplify the muezzins’ wailing calls to prayer. The first time Charlie heard one, he knew he wasn’t in Kansas any more.
The hotel, like its surrounding district, was a little bit of England dropped into the Middle East. The elevator-the lift, they called it-creaked. The beer was warm. The dining room served roast beef and Yorkshire pudding although, even in October here, Basra was hotter than London ever got.
Charlie didn’t know how many Tommies were protecting the hotel from any mischief the natives or even the now-distant Germans could brew up. He did know the number wasn’t small. And the security was needed. Charlie wouldn’t have come a quarter of the way around the world if Joe Steele hadn’t come. The President had his own guards under J. Edgar Hoover, who was also along.
Joe Steele wasn’t just playing tourist. He hadn’t come to ride in one of the almost-gondolas that plied the canals. He’d come here to meet with Winston Churchill, and with Leon Trotsky. They needed to plan how the rest of the war would go, and to talk about what the world might look like once it didn’t hold crazy Nazis and fanatical samurai.
Churchill had greeted Joe Steele when he and his followers flew in from Cairo. Trotsky was due at the airport any minute now. He’d said he didn’t want to be greeted. He would meet the leaders of the Western democracies when he got to the hotel.
How many people around the world would have wanted to be in the room to witness the first confrontation between Trotsky and Joe Steele? Millions. Millions and millions, for sure. I get to be one of the lucky ones who do it, Charlie thought. The reporter he had been quivered in anticipation.
Someone knocked on the door. Charlie opened it. There in the wildly carpeted hallway stood J. Edgar Hoover. “I just received word that Trotsky has arrived safely. The President and the Prime Minister will greet him in the Grand Ballroom on the first floor.” He made a face. “What the limeys call the first floor. It’d be the second floor to us.”
“Gotcha. Thanks,” Charlie said. To an Englishman, the American first floor was the ground floor. Two countries separated by the same language. Charlie couldn’t remember who’d said that. Whoever it was, he’d known what he was talking about.
He walked down the stairs to the Grand Ballroom. He didn’t trust that lift. He wouldn’t have trusted it if they’d called it an elevator. The ballroom was a garish horror. It was a bad English imitation of Arab decor that was bad to begin with. Low couches, footstools, silk brocade, cloth-of-gold. . Put it all together and it spelled tasteless. The British crystal candelabra with light bulbs in place of candles only added to the surreal gaucheness.
Churchill and his entourage sat on the right side of the chamber as you came in. Joe Steele and his were over to the left. Charlie headed that way. In the center would be Trotsky and his followers. Only a few hard-faced Red security men stood there now. They eyed the decadent capitalist imperialists to either side of them with an odd and-Charlie was to learn-very Russian mix of fear and contempt.
Lazar Kagan nodded to Charlie as he came over. So did General Marshall. Scriabin ignored him. Mikoian and Joe Steele were whispering back and forth. The President chuckled at something Mikoian said.
J. Edgar Hoover strode in. He’d only grown heavier and jowlier in the years since Charlie first met him when he seized the Supreme Court Four. He took his place with the rest of the Americans. “Any minute now,” he said.
A British military band outside the hotel struck up “The Internationale.” That had to be one of the more bizarre moments of Charlie’s life. It also had to mean the boss Red was here.
When the lift worked, you could hear it all over the building. Charlie listened to it now. Into the Grand Ballroom strode Trotsky, accompanied by a couple of generals, by Foreign Commissar Litvinov, by a skinny little man who had to be his translator, and by some more tough-looking Russian security men with submachine guns. The three leaders’ guardsmen could have themselves quite a little war if things went south.