The airliner was descending toward the small, no-account town of Wakamatsu. No-account or not, it was the biggest place on the Agano River, which marked most of the border between American-occupied Japan to the south and Russian-occupied Japan to the north. Joe Steele had come halfway around the world and Leon Trotsky was coming a quarter of the way around the world to talk about what they wanted to do with Asia.
Trotsky was already making his ideas all too clear. He had his Red boss in Korea, which his troops had taken from the Japs. Manchukuo went back to being Manchuria and to belonging to China, but the Red Army handed it-and all the Japanese weapons captured there, and no doubt some Russian weapons as well-to Chinese Red Mao Tse-tung, not to Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S.-backed President of China. Mao and Chiang had been squabbling long before the Japs swarmed into China. Now that the Japs were gone, they could pick up where they’d left off.
And the Russian half of Japan had been tagged the Japanese People’s Republic. Trotsky’d found some Japanese Reds the Kempeitai hadn’t hunted down and murdered. They were puppets for Field Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, who gave the orders-well, after he got them from Trotsky.
American-held Japan-the southern half of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku-currently wore the clumsy handle of the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan. Hirohito’s son, Akihito, was not quite thirteen. He was the constitutional monarch, though the constitution hadn’t been finished yet. As the Japanese Reds took their marching orders from Marshal Tolbukhin, Akihito’s main job was to do whatever General Eisenhower told him to do.
Clunks and bumps announced that the landing gear was lowering. The plane landed smoothly enough. The runway was brand new, made by U.S. Army engineers. Wakamatsu had been bombed-Charlie didn’t think any towns in Japan hadn’t been bombed-but the surrender came before it saw an infantry battle. Some of the buildings were still standing, then.
Humid late-summer air came in when the airliner’s door opened. Charlie wrinkled his nose; that air held the stench of death. He’d smelled it even more strongly down on Kyushu, where the plane had stopped to refuel. It was older there, but the fighting had been worse.
Trotsky’s plane landed an hour after Joe Steele’s. Watching it come in, Charlie thought it was a DC-3. But it wasn’t: it was a Russian model no doubt based on the Douglas workhorse, but one that sported a dorsal machine-gun turret.
Joe Steele greeted Trotsky on the runway. This was between the two of them. Clement Attlee, the new British Prime Minister, had no horse in this race. And Russia and the USA were the countries that counted in this brave new postwar world.
Photographers Red and capitalist snapped away as the two leaders shook hands. “The war is over. At last, the war is over,” Joe Steele said. “I thank you and the Red Army for your brave aid in the victory against Japan.”
“We were glad to help our ally,” Trotsky replied through his translator. We were glad to help ourselves, Charlie realized that meant. But the Red leader hadn’t finished yet: “And I thank you and the U.S. Army for your brave aid in the victory against the Hitlerites.”
Joe Steele started to say something else, then stopped when he realized he’d been given the glove. He sent Trotsky a glare that should have paralyzed him. Trotsky smirked back. Joe Steele couldn’t order him to a labor encampment. He had labor encampments of his own. He had more of them and he’d had them longer than the President.
“Let’s do what we can to make sure that neither one of us has to fight again for many years to come,” Joe Steele said after a pause for thought.
“That would be good,” Trotsky agreed.
“Even revolution needs a vacation, eh?” The President tried a jab of his own.
“Revolution never sleeps anywhere.” Trotsky might have been quoting Holy Writ. As far as he was concerned, he was.
Joe Steele, by contrast, liked quoting past Presidents. He did it again now: “Yes, Jefferson said ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ We’ve rid the world of savage tyrants these past few years.”
“So we have.” Trotsky nodded-and smirked once more. “We’ve rid it of a good many patriots, too.”
Dinner that evening was at the Army base by the runway. The food was American style. The toasts were drunk Russian fashion: stand up, say your say, and knock it back. This time, unlike in Basra, Charlie was ready. “To peace between North Japan and South Japan!” he said when his turn came, giving the half-nations their newspaper names instead of the clumsy official titles.
Russians and Americans drank to that. No doubt the Japs would have, too, had any been invited. But this was a gathering of the victors, not the vanquished.
Trotsky seemed more easygoing than he had while discussing European affairs. When Joe Steele proposed a three-mile-wide demilitarized zone between the parts of Japan the great powers held, Trotsky waggled his hand as if to say it wasn’t worth arguing about. “You took the Balkans seriously,” Joe Steele teased.
“Oh, yes.” Trotsky turned grave again. “The fight against Hitler was a struggle for survival. Another such fight in Europe would be, too.” He eyed the President before finishing, “But this over here? This was only a war.”
The longer Charlie thought about that, the more sense it made. A professor or a striped-pants diplomat would have said Japan didn’t affect Russia’s vital national interests the way Germany did. Trotsky got the message across saying what he said. He got his own cold-bloodedness across, too.
Joe Steele never mentioned uranium. Charlie didn’t know how Rickover was doing with the project that had cost Albert Einstein-and, from small stories in the paper, several other prominent nuclear physicists, one here, one there, one now, one then-a discreetly untimely demise. Charlie couldn’t very well grab the President by the lapel and ask, Say, how’s that uranium bomb coming? If Joe Steele wanted him to know, he’d know. If Joe Steele didn’t, he’d find out with everybody else, or he’d never find out at all.
Of course, Leon Trotsky never mentioned uranium, either. Was that because he’d never heard of it? Or was it because he also had scientists and engineers slaving away? There was a fascinating riddle, especially after Charlie had tossed down enough toasts to get toasted.
He didn’t ruin himself the way he had in the Iraqi city. Despite aspirins and Vitamin B12, though, he still felt it the next morning. He slouched toward coffee (mandatory) and breakfast (optional). As he left the Quonset hut he’d shared with Kagan, a trim young first lieutenant said, “Excuse me, Mr. Sullivan, sir, but there’s a noncom who’d like to speak to you.”
“There is?” Charlie said in surprise.
There was. A lean, tough-looking sergeant who looked as if he’d been in the Army for a million years came up. Only when he cocked his head to one side did Charlie realize who he was. “Hey, kiddo! How the hell are ya?” Mike said.
Hangover forgotten, Charlie threw himself into his brother’s arms. “Mike!” he blubbered through tears while the lieutenant gawped. “What in God’s name are you doing here, Mike?”
“Well, the Japs couldn’t kill me, not that they didn’t try a time or two. . dozen,” Mike answered. “But why I’m here in Hey-Sue-Whack-Your-Mama or whatever they call this rotten joint, I’m here on account of Joe Steele’s gonna pin a medal on me for knowing that dead Jap was Hirohito. Is that funny, or what?”
“That,” said Charlie with deep sincerity, “is fucking ridiculous. Come on and have some breakfast with me. I bet we get better grub than you do.”
“I haven’t groused since I left the encampment,” Mike said. “Long as there’s enough, I take an even strain.”
But he went into the fancy mess hall with Charlie. He filled a tray, demolished what he’d taken, and went back for seconds. He disposed of those, too. While he was doing it, Joe Steele paused on his own way to the chow line.