“Some general, I betcha,” Nacho Gomez said.
He didn’t suggest going after the important Jap. The men with Mike hadn’t seen as much as he had. But they’d all seen plenty, even if the landing west of Tokyo was their first and not their third or their sixth. They were still ready to fight. Nobody was eager any more. Sooner or later-probably sooner-those tanks would run into American armor. That would take care of that.
As a matter of fact, that got taken care of even sooner than Mike expected. Half a dozen Hellcats screamed down out of the sky. Flame rippled under their wings as they fired air-to-ground rockets at the tanks and the car. Their heavy machine guns hammered away, too.
Tanks were hideously vulnerable to strikes on the engine decking and on top of the turret. Their armor was thinnest there, not that Japanese tanks carried real thick armor anywhere. Tank designers didn’t worry-or hadn’t yet worried-about their creations’ being attacked from the air.
Three of the tanks burned like torches. So did the passenger car. The fourth tank didn’t seem badly damaged. It stopped just the same. The whole crew-all five men-jumped out and ran to the blazing car. They paid no attention to anything else in the world.
“Come on, boys,” Mike said. “Let’s see what they’ve got ants in their pants about.”
Disposing of the tank crew was the easiest thing he’d done since hitting the beach at Tarawa two and a half years before. A brass band, complete with high-kicking majorettes, could have come up to the Japs and they never would have noticed. The Americans shot four of them before the last one finally spun around, pistol in hand. He managed to fire once, wildly, before he went down, too.
Mike finished him with a shot to the head at point-blank range. Then he said, “What did they think was more important than watching their backs?”
The Japs had managed to drag one man out of the car. The pants on his good Western suit were still smoldering, but it didn’t matter. Two heavy machine-gun bullets from a Hellcat had caught him square in the middle of the chest. Shock alone might have killed him. If it hadn’t, those.50-caliber rounds, big as a man’s thumb, had torn up his heart and lungs but good-he was dead as shoe leather.
He’d been in his mid-forties, on the skinny side, with buck teeth and a mustache. Ice walked up Mike’s back as he recognized him. The only Japanese face that might have been more familiar to an American was Tojo’s, and Tojo had died in battle leading troops against the Coronet landings.
“Holy shit,” Nacho said softly, so Mike wasn’t imagining what he thought he was seeing.
“Fuck me up the asshole if this isn’t Hirohito. We-the planes, I mean-just sent the goddamn Emperor to his goddamn ancestors.” Mike kept staring at the scrawny little corpse.
So did the rest of the Americans. “If the Japs don’t quit now, with him dead, they ain’t never gonna,” Nacho Gomez said.
That they wouldn’t quit even now struck Mike as much too likely. But they might. Clobber somebody hard enough and often enough and the message had to get through sooner or later. . didn’t it? He could hope so, anyway.
“If they quit. .” He had to try twice before he could get it out: “If they do quit, the fuckin’ war’s over.” His stunned wits started to work again. “Nacho!”
“Yes, Sergeant?” Nacho couldn’t have sounded so crisp since escaping from basic training.
“Haul ass back there and bring up somebody with a radio or a field telephone. We gotta let the brass know pronto,” Mike said. Nacho nodded and started to dash away. Mike held up a hand to stop him. “Hang on, man! Bring up all the reinforcements you can grab, too. If the Japs find out what happened to Hirohito, sure as hell they’re gonna want his carcass back, and we’ll have a big fucking fight to worry about.”
“I’m on it, Sergeant.” The greaser took off toward the rear at a dead run. Mike envied his speed. Well, the kid was less than half his age and probably hadn’t been in an encampment all that long before he decided a punishment brigade made a better bet.
He might even have been right. Who would have imagined that even half an hour earlier?
Mike pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging a foxhole. Any time you were going to stay in one place longer than a few minutes, any time you thought you’d have a fight on your hands, a hole in the ground was your best buddy. Even a shallow scrape with some dirt in front of it helped. The more time you had, the deeper you dug. It was that simple.
The rest of the Americans followed his lead. It was just as well they did, too, because Japanese soldiers did start coming up to see what had happened to their tanks-and to the car those tanks were escorting. The Americans’ rifle and grease-gun fire kept them at a distance till. .
The cavalry came to their rescue. It wasn’t quite like a Western serial, but close enough. Some of the soldiers who hurried up with Nacho Gomez did ride in jeeps and halftracks. Those tough little vehicles came as close to the days of the Old West as anything in modern warfare.
A lieutenant colonel who didn’t have a P on his sleeve crawled up to look the corpse over for himself. He might not serve in a punishment brigade, but the way he moved said he’d been around the block a time or three. He nodded to Mike, whose foxhole lay closest to Hirohito. “That’s him, all right,” he said. “I was posted to our embassy here in the late Thirties. I saw him several times at parades and such, once or twice up close. No doubt about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Mike said. “People know what he looks like.”
“They sure do.” The officer didn’t treat him like a nigger because he did wear a P, which was nice. The man gestured someone else forward: a photographer, who started immortalizing the fact that the Emperor of Japan was mortal.
“Sir, what do you think the Japs will do now?” Mike asked.
“Damned if I know,” the light colonel answered. “I hope they give up, but who knows? What have they got left to fight for?” He pointed north. “It isn’t just us, either. It’s the Russians, too. We smashed the Germans between us till there was nothing left. If we have to, we’ll treat the Japs the same way.”
“Here’s hoping we don’t have to.” Mike had had enough war for any hundred men.
“Yeah, here’s hoping,” the officer said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see.”
* * *
“My God!” Charlie stared out the window of the President’s airliner in awe and disbelief. “Will you look at that?”
Lazar Kagan sat beside him. “Lean back a little so I can,” Kagan said. Charlie did. Kagan looked, then shook his head. “Not much left of the place, is there?”
“Hardly anything,” Charlie said. They were flying low over what was left of southern Honshu. Till Hirohito bought a plot, the Japanese had fought with everything they had, from tanks and fighter planes down to teeth and fingernails. They’d killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and probably a similar number of Red Army men. Whether you called that surpassing bravery or surpassing insanity depended on how you looked at things. Japanese casualties ran way up into the millions, and that was just talking about deaths. Then you added in the maimed, the crippled, the blinded. . Not much was left of what had been a great country, even if you didn’t like it.
Only after Hirohito was dead, and was known to the Japs to be dead, did they despair at last. American officers had sensibly kept ordinary American soldiers from mistreating the corpse. They’d put it on ice, in fact, to keep it as fresh as they could. And, when the Japs asked for it, they gave it back under flag of truce so it could be cremated.
That polite gesture also helped spur the surrender. Farther north, Trotsky’s men hadn’t done anything so accommodating. But even the Japs could see they had no chance to resist the Russians once they’d yielded to the United States. The brigadier general who’d signed that surrender document slit his belly immediately afterwards to atone for his shame, but the surrender remained in force.