them personally?' Captain Rhodes persisted.
'Uh, yes, sir.'
'Congratulations. That is the right answer, Lieutenant. Do you realize you and whoever you dragged with you would have ended up dead if you did manage to break into Charleston?'
'Uh, yes, sir,' Lavochkin said again, still more softly than usual.
'Then remember that, goddammit,' Rhodes barked.
'Yes, sir,' the young lieutenant said one more time. And no doubt he would…for a while. How long? Not long enough, I bet, Chester Martin thought.
P ortable wireless sets would have been a lot better if they lived up to their name. Luggable was more like it, as far as Leonard O'Doull was concerned. The damn things were too damn big and too damn heavy, and so were the batteries that powered them. Those batteries didn't last long enough, either.
Still, having a wireless set was better than not having one, especially since U.S. Wireless Atlanta went on the air. USWA had the power to punch through all the jamming the Confederates put out, and it brought the word-or the U.S. version of the word-into the heartland of the CSA: over near Birmingham, for instance.
It also gave U.S. personnel something to listen to besides Confederate Connie. Her sultry voice kept reminding O'Doull he'd been away from home too damn long. He knew she told lies every time she opened her mouth. Like hundreds of thousands of other guys, he kept listening to her anyway. She sounded like bottled sex.
When he said something like that one evening, Eddie nodded. Then the corpsman said, 'She's probably sixty and fat and ugly.'
'Yeah, she probably is-life works that way too goddamn often,' O'Doull agreed. 'But she sure sounds hot.'
'She doesn't do that much for me,' Sergeant Goodson Lord said.
O'Doull reached for his wrist. 'Do you have a pulse, man?' Sergeant Lord jerked his arm away. Not for the first time, O'Doull wondered whether the senior medic was a fairy. How could you like women and not like Confederate Connie?
Eddie looked at his wristwatch. 'Seven o'clock,' he said. 'Time for the news.' He switched the wireless from Confederate Connie's music to USWA.
He couldn't have timed it better if he tried for a week. 'Hello,' said a deep voice with a distinctive U.S. accent. 'I'm Eric Sevareid, and I'm here to tell you the real truth.' All the men in the aid station grinned. How many times over how many years had they heard Jake Featherston open up a can of worms with that bullshit?
'Hope the Confederates listen up,' Goodson Lord said. 'They'd better.' He might be a queer, but if he was, he was a patriotic queer. Long as he doesn't grab my ass, I can live with that, O'Doull thought, and felt proud of his own tolerance.
'Today, President La Follette again called for the surrender of the Confederate States,' Sevareid said on the wireless. 'In his words, 'Only by quitting the war now can the CSA hope to escape destruction of a sort the world has never seen before. Newport News and Charleston are just the beginning. We will put an end to this evil regime one way or another. Which way that will be is the only thing left for existing Confederate officials to decide.''
'That's telling 'em!' Eddie said. He was as mild and inoffensive a little guy as ever came down the pike, but he hated the CSA. He wouldn't have had to see so much misery if not for Jake Featherston.
'Featherston's reply was, 'We aren't going to lay down for the United States, and they can't make us do it,'' Sevareid continued. 'He is believed to have broadcast that reply from somewhere in North Carolina. Richmond, of course, is in U.S. hands. Featherston narrowly escaped the Newport News bomb, and U.S. forces are now pushing toward Hampton Roads. Before long, he will be a president without a country.' The broadcaster's voice showed unmistakable satisfaction.
'In the European half of the war, German drives against Russia continue,' Sevareid said. 'The Tsar's army shows signs of disintegration, but Petrograd Wireless-now broadcasting from Moscow after the destruction of Petrograd-denies reports that the Tsar is seeking an armistice from Germany.'
'If Russia bails out, England and France are done,' Lord opined.
'France is about done anyway,' Eddie said. 'Bye-bye, gay Paree.' He waved.
Half a lifetime spent in the Republic of Quebec speaking French almost all the time made O'Doull look at France differently from most Americans. It was the sun around which Quebec revolved whether they were on the same side or not. And when the heart of the sun was torn out…
'Despite the loss of Paris, France also denies any plan to leave the conflict,' Eric Sevareid said. 'The new King of France, Louis XIX, vows revenge against Germany. And Winston Churchill was quoted by the BBC as saying, 'We can match the Hun bomb for bomb. Let him do his worst, and we shall do our best. With God's help, it will be good enough.''
'With him and Featherston, the bad guys have all the good talkers,' Sergeant Lord said. 'Doesn't seem fair.'
'Churchill's a better speaker than Featherston any day,' O'Doull said. 'He's not such a bastard, either.'
'That's what you say, Doc,' Eddie put in. 'Ask the Kaiser, and I bet he'd tell you different.'
Since he was bound to be right-what did the Kaiser care about the CSA? — O'Doull didn't argue with him. He gave his attention to the wireless: 'Japan has sent Russia an ultimatum over several Siberian provinces. If the Tsar's forces do not evacuate them, the Japanese threaten to take them by force.'
'Wait a minute!' Lord said. 'The Japs and the Russians are on the same side.'
'They're on the same side against us,' Leonard O'Doull said. 'Otherwise? Forget it. The Japs already screwed England in Malaya. They've got Australia sweating bullets. They're the ones who've done the best for themselves in this war. If they'd driven us out of the Sandwich Islands, nobody could ever touch 'em.'
'Won't be easy, even the way things are,' Eddie said.
'They haven't used any of these new superbombs yet,' O'Doull said. 'I wonder how close they are to building one.'
'Well, if they weren't working on 'em before, they sure as hell are now,' Goodson Lord said. That was another obvious truth.
Back before the Pacific War, people in the USA would have wondered whether the Japanese were smart enough to do something like that. Not any more. The Pacific War was a push, or as close as made no difference, but Japan bombed Los Angeles while the United States never laid a glove on the home islands. This time around, the United States hadn't tried breaking through the Japs' island barricade, either. All the fighting had been on U.S. soil and in U.S. waters. The United States was too busy fighting for their life against the Confederacy to give Japan more than a fraction of their attention.
It had been quiet up at the front. Suddenly, it wasn't any more. Machine guns and automatic weapons started banging away. 'It's getting dark outside!' Lord exclaimed. 'What the hell do they think they're shooting at?'
'They don't care,' O'Doull answered. 'Somebody imagined he saw something, and as soon as one guy starts shooting they all open up.'
'We better get up there,' Eddie told his fellow corpsmen. They scurried out of the aid station. Before long, they'd likely be back with wounded men.
Eric Sevareid went on talking about the world and the USA. He had a good wireless voice, a voice that made you think he was your friend even though you'd never met him and never would. You wanted to believe what he said. You wanted to believe what Jake Featherston said, too, even after you knew what a liar he was. If he didn't believe it himself, he put on one hell of an act.
'Will the corpsmen be able to find us in the dark?' Goodson Lord asked.
'Don't know,' O'Doull answered. 'But I'll tell you something-I'm not gonna put on a light. If our own side doesn't shoot us because of it, the enemy would.'
Not even fifteen minutes later, he heard the too-familiar shout of 'Doc! Hey, Doc!' from somewhere off to the left.
'Hey, Eddie!' he yelled back. A battery of 105s was thundering behind the U.S. lines. Pretty soon, C.S. artillery would open up, too, or they'd start shooting off screaming meemies, and then hell really would be out to lunch.
In the meantime…'We got a sucking chest, Doc!' Eddie said.
O'Doull swore. That was a bad wound, one that would kill the soldier who had it unless everything went
