Harry Turtledove: Fallout

“Good job,” the copilot said. “Now they won’t be able to go after his family.”

“Right,” Gribkov said tightly. The world would never know just why Leonid Tsederbaum had killed himself. Boris wished he didn’t know. Better not to start thinking about things like that. You only got into trouble when you did. He had to keep flying. He wondered how he’d manage.

–

First Lieutenant Cade Curtis wondered where the devil he was. Oh, he knew in a general sense: he was in Korea, and in the southern part of it. He even knew in some detail-he was south of the town of Chongju, which lay southeast of Seoul. The Americans (if you wanted to get fancy about it, the United Nations forces, but most of them were Americans) and the Republic of Korea had been attacking “in the direction of Chongju” for quite a while now. They hadn’t got there yet, and didn’t seem likely to any time soon.

When Curtis got to Korea in the fall of 1950 as a newly minted shavetail straight out of ROTC, it was the most important fight in the world. He’d been part-a tiny part, but part nonetheless-of General MacArthur’s triumphant drive to the Yalu River. That drive was going to take care of North Korea and Kim Il-sung once and for all.

It was going to, but it didn’t. Winter and the Red Chinese made sure of that. The UN forces-there were Englishmen and Turks along with the Americans-had reached the Chosin Reservoir, near the Yalu. Then the mercury dove somewhere south of twenty below, and Mao’s band of merry men drove south across the Yalu.

MacArthur hadn’t figured they would. It was one of the nastiest surprises in the history of surprises, especially if you happened to be on the receiving end, as Cade was. He’d got lucky. He’d slipped through the Red Chinese net, one of a handful who did. The Reds destroyed three or four divisions trying to retreat to safety at the port of Hungnam.

Because they did, Truman dropped A-bombs on several Manchurian cities to fubar their logistics. Because he dropped them on Red China, Stalin dropped them on the USA’s European allies. Because Stalin did that…the Free World and the Communists had been climbing the ladder of devastation one rung at a time ever since.

Those Manchurian cities, and several in the Soviet Far East, glowed in the dark now. So did ports on the American West Coast from Seattle all the way down to Los Angeles. Both sides had trouble getting men and weapons into Korea these days. Both sides had trouble caring, too-the big fight now was in Europe.

But the war here, the little war that had touched off the bigger one, ground on with whatever was at hand and whatever Truman and Mao and Stalin could spare. The outside world forgot it? You hurt just as much if you got maimed in a fight nobody back home gave a damn about, and you were just as dead if you got killed in that kind of fight.

Cade walked along the trench, here somewhere south of Chongju. Dust scuffed up under his boots. When he noticed, he could smell his own stink, and the stink of his fellow dogfaces. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. If the wind blew down from the north, he could smell the different but no more pleasant stinks of the Red Chinese and North Koreans. And the stench of death was always in the air. It was sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but it never went away.

To get it out of his nose, he lit a Camel. He hadn’t smoked at all before he got here. Of course, he’d been just nineteen. He sure smoked now. Like so many other soldiers, he hardly knew what to do without a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

He ground the match out under his bootheel. The smoke did let him forget about the other charming aromas for a little while. And it made him more alert and relaxed him at the same time-for a little while. Pretty soon, he’d fire up another one to get the same effect all over again.

In the meantime, he cautiously stuck his head up out of the trench to make sure the Reds weren’t up to anything. He looked around for a couple of seconds, then ducked down again. A few seconds after that, a rifle bullet cracked past, not far enough above where he’d just been. If he’d shown himself for much longer, that sniper might have put a round through the bridge of his nose.

“Anything cookin’ out there, Lieutenant?” asked Sergeant Lou Klein. He was old enough to be Cade’s father. An Army lifer, he’d fought in North Africa and Italy the last time around. He could have run the company at least as well as Cade did. They both knew it. Since the days of Hammurabi, one of the many things veteran sergeants were for was riding herd on eager young officers.

After this long in Korea, Cade might still have been young, but he was eager no more. He shook his head. “All seemed pretty quiet.”

“Good.” Klein hedged that by adding, “Unless they’re cooking up something sneaky, anyway.”

“They don’t seem to try cute stuff a whole lot,” Cade said. “When they fight, they just get in there and slug.”

“That’s on account of most of ’em carry pieces like yours.” Klein pointed at Cade’s PPSh submachine gun, a Russian weapon he liked much better than the M-1 carbine American officers were supposed to carry. The sergeant went on, “Hard to get fancy when you can’t hit anything out past a coupla hundred yards.”

“Yeah, but when they get in close-” Cade didn’t go on, or need to. An awful lot of combat took place at ranges where the PPSh and its older cousin the PPD were world-beaters. They sprayed a lot of bullets at anything that looked dangerous, they hardly ever jammed, and they were easy to strip and clean. What more could you want?

“Hey, they ain’t tryin’ to kill me right this minute. I won’t worry about it till they do,” Klein said.

That attitude was wonderful-if you could manage it. Cade had always been a worrier. He fretted over what would happen next, what might happen next, what could possibly happen next. The sergeant didn’t. Whatever happened, he tried to deal with it as it came up. He was still here, still breathing, still fighting. His way worked as well for him as Cade’s for him, and he probably had lower blood pressure.

But he wouldn’t be promoted to officer’s rank if he lived to be ninety. Cade didn’t have much chance of making general if he stayed in the Army. Few without a West Point class ring scaled that mountain. But major, light colonel, maybe even bird colonel wouldn’t be unreachable. Men at those ranks needed to care about possibilities, not just take things as they came.

Off in the distance, an American machine gun spat a burst at the Communist lines. The Red Chinese didn’t have so many machine guns. They had plenty of rifles, though, and plenty of men to shoot them. They shot back. Firing picked up on both sides.

Klein swore under his breath. “Somebody’s been eating his spinach, so he thinks he’s fucking Popeye,” he said. “If it’s quiet where you’re at, why do you want to go poke it with a stick?”

“Beats me.” Cade was far more willing to let lying dogs sleep than he had been when he got here.

Not everybody was. The hothead disease afflicted guys on both sides. They figured Uncle Sam or Chairman Mao had gone to the trouble of issuing them a rifle or a PPSh and the ammo to go with it, so the least they could do was start shooting as soon as they got the chance-or imagined they did.

Somebody on the American side of the rusty barbed wire started screaming and wouldn’t stop. The noise was horrible, terrible, dreadful, whatever was worse than those. It was the noise a dog makes after a car smashes it, when it’s dead but hasn’t finished dying yet. Sometimes a kind human will cut a dog’s throat when it’s hurt like that, or bash in its head with a brick.