Not This August (21 page)

The trucks were ready and waiting. Somebody shouted something at Gribble; he said, “
Da
,” saluted, and hurried on. He was wearing a homemade imitation of the MVD green uniform. The green would never pass by daylight, nor would the linoleum imitations of leather belt and puttees, but it was not necessary for them to pass by daylight.

Gribble was looking for the field kitchen and found it. The cooks, overcoats on top of their whites, were serving one for the road to the troops; hunks of solid black bread and dippers of tea from great boilers. Against the blazing background of the school building the men filed past, one hand out for the bread, canteen cup out for the tea. There were five boilers left when Gribble found the tent; he didn’t know how many had already been emptied. As he watched, the cooks came to the bottom of one boiler; they yanked it back into the tent and shoved another into place at the serving counter. As he watched, the rear fly of the tent was pulled, folded, and hurled aboard the mess truck; the tent was disintegrating from the rear under the practiced attack of the cooks. Gribble drifted among them, among the three boilers of tea in reserve, despite their warning shouts. When they were all struggling with a big side fly, he impartially sweetened the boilers of tea with white powder from his pockets.

He had morbidly asked about it and learned that the stuff was arsenious trioxide, procured from the remelt shop of Corning Glass.

He wandered off foggily. There was a spark in the fog which wanted him to run screaming to the cooks and tell them he had poisoned the good tea, that they must stop serving it to the soldiers—he saw them drain the boiler at the counter, hurl it back, and drag forward the next.

He knew by then that he was a monster. Who but a monster could do what he had done, slaying five thousand devoted scientists and engineers by the simple closing of a door? Now causing the horrible death of how many young soldiers he did not know?

He screamed and began to run away from himself, hurtling into tents, trucks, soldiers. Somebody seized him by the front of his coat and slapped his face sharply; he broke loose and ran again. Then there was a brief interlude under a flashlight during which sharp questions rang in his ears and he could answer them only by weeping.

It ended with a tremendous padded blow on the back of his neck, which was all he felt of the lieutenant’s pistol bullet destroying his brain. He never knew hundreds of soldiers squirming themselves settled in the trucks were at that very moment complaining about food as soldiers always do; they said their tea was too sweet.

At eleven-thirty Justin was establishing the first roadblock in the path of the MVD motor convoy, five miles east on the highway from Chiunga Center. Heading a commando of five untrained men and boys whom he didn’t know, he steered his truck athwart the two-laned concrete strip and ordered them out. The six of them grunted and strained in the icy night air rocking the truck on its springs, trying to tip it over. It swayed farther and farther with each shove; on the twentieth it almost heeled but then crashed back solidly on its four wheels while the six men stood panting and beaten.

“Lights,” said a sixteen-year-old boy named Sheppard. The aura of headlights was just becoming visible over a rise to the east. They scrambled for the roadside and into the brush about ten yards.

“Remember what I told you,” Justin whispered. “Don’t look at their headlights at all. Officers first. When they come after us, fall back and snipe the main body of the convoy.”

“Yeah,” the Sheppard boy whispered, fascinated.

The aura of light became beams and then blazing pairs of eyes. “
Don’t look
,” said Justin.

The lights snapped out fast when they picked up the truck. The advance guard—it was six jeeps—knew a roadblock wasn’t a roadblock unless it was defended. By starlight and a little moon the commando saw MVD men scrambling out and flattening on the road. One soldier talked loudly into a radio before getting out. Justin discovered that he couldn’t tell insignia.

“Forget what I said about officers,” he said. “Fire and fall back, then west.”

He aimed into a clump of three men who were belly down on the road, peering off the roadside and whispering. At least one had to be an officer or noncom giving orders. He fired six shots from his carbine; at the range he couldn’t miss. All three men floundered and yelled.

Around him blazed the rifles of his men, firing at what he didn’t know.

A command in Russian from the road and the MVD men uncertainly began to fire in their general direction; somebody had seen muzzle flash from one of the old guns. The bullets whistled above them (people fire high in the dark) except for one that stopped with a meaty chunk in young Sheppard’s head. Justin scooped up the boy’s varmint rifle and box of ammunition. “Fall back,” he said.

They clustered tight behind him, trampling and talking until he cursed them. He headed right, guiding on glimpses of the white road in starlight seen through ragged trees until there were the brighter lights of the convoy to guide them. They had stopped on radio word from the point, but had not yet blacked out. Justin fell farther back into the woods, saw the black hump of a little rise, and crawled up it on his belly.

“Don’t fire,” he whispered. “Something’s going on.”

One truck was emptying; that would be a platoon sent forward to reinforce the point and get the truck off the road. In the headlights half the platoon seemed to be drunk; they were lurching and holding their stomachs. Justin could barely make out features when they swayed across a headlight’s beam. They were in agony, and Justin knew what it meant. Gribble had made it with his white arsenic. Good-by, Gribble, insurance executive, security officer, hatchet man, poisoner, child of self-torment…

Some men were hanging from the other trucks, vomiting.

“Fire off your rounds,” Justin said. “Officers and noncoms. Then we get out of here and back to the roadblock.” They spread out along the rise and began to squeeze off careful shots. Justin fired four times at a shouting, waving captain and missed all four times. Grinding his teeth, he hurled his carbine aside and blazed away wildly with young Sheppard’s .22; just before the convoy lights went out he dropped his man.

They had lost their night vision watching the convoy; they stumbled and crashed their way east along the roadside until it slowly returned. They heard shots behind them and then machine-gun fire. It was probably another commando sniping the convoy from its left flank and getting worse than it gave.

They hugged the roadside, passing other roadblock trucks, some successfully toppled, on their way back to the weighing-station commando post. (“Christmas Eve” was the watchword.)

Justin went in and told Hollerith: “We lost one man and wasted a lot of ammunition but our truck stopped them temporarily five miles out of town. Gribble got through with his sugar; my guess is one man in four affected.”

“Good,” Hollerith said. “Have some tea.”

Justin gulped a tin cup of scalding tea from the top of the kerosene heater. “What about the satellite?” he asked.

Hollerith said tightly: “One man said he believes he saw it take off at eleven forty-five but he wasn’t certain. I was busy at the time.”

One of the trained men came in, wild-eyed and bleeding from a crudely wrapped wound of his left hand. “Hi, Rawson,” he said. General Hollerith looked annoyed. “We got there second,” the man said. “Some other gang was banging away and they blacked out. They fired at us a lot and a machine gun killed both my brothers. With the same burst.”

“What did you see?” Hollerith urged gently.

The man rambled: “They looked sick, lots of them. They unloaded a lot of their men and their medics with the bands and a lot of blankets. Left ’em right there in the road and the trucks moved on up with their lights out and soldiers out beating the bushes on each side of the road.”

“That’s fine,” Hollerith said quietly. “About five miles an hour in low gear?”

“That’d be about right,” the man said. “Did I tell you they killed James and Henry? My brothers.”

Hollerith said: “Have some tea, Hanson. Take it outside with you.” He nodded to Justin, who put a mug of tea in the man’s unwounded hand and gently steered him from the little house. Hanson sat down and began to cough. Justin walked away when the coughs turned into sobs.

There were headlights coming down Oak Hill Road off the highway. The car made the turn and headed for the command post, stopping a hundred feet away. Justin didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure it was Betsy. She was soot-stained and bedraggled and silent; she carried a bulging shopping bag. He took her in to Hollerith. She laid down the shopping bag carefully and began to unpack it on the general’s table. She said: “Winkler had a sudden rush of courage. He met me at the post office garage with this stuff. Extra thermit he turned out and some nitro in flat bottles.”

“How’s the Center?” snapped Hollerith.

“Still burning, I guess,” she said listlessly. “What about the satellite?”

Hollerith said in a low, venomous voice: “To hell with the satellite. How am I supposed to know about the satellite? Maybe it’s crashed in Nebraska or the Atlantic by now. Maybe it never got up. Maybe it’s on its way into the sun. I’m no mind reader, Miss Cardew, so kindly shut up about the satellite.”

Stan Potocki came in and looked apologetic. “Gus got killed,” he said. “One of their patrols tossed grenades when they heard us. Blown in half—but I guess you want a report. The convoy is proceeding east on the highway under blackout with flank patrols. They are stopping from time to time to move our roadblocks. They are averaging maybe three miles an hour, I figure, because their walking patrols aren’t having any trouble keeping up. I don’t know whether our sniping’s having any real effect on them except to kill a few of their people. They’re going to get through, General.”

“Thanks, Potocki,” Hollerith said. “We’ve got some stuff here for you to lay in their path. It’s nitroglycerine; handle with care. Mass all these together; maybe we can crater the road. Put it where one of our roadblock trucks’ll run over it when they move it. And send in anybody outside who wants a job.”

Two exhausted men came in; one saluted shame-facedly. Hollerith gave him the thermit bombs. “Take these to the top of the old Lehigh cut. They’re incendiaries; you just light them. Got matches? Here, take mine. You ought to get some fine results from dropping them into open personnel trucks.”

The man grinned, took the shopping bag, and left. “Young Joe Firstman. They killed his father a few days ago,” he told Justin in an aside. To the other man he said: “Take those dinner plates out of that cabinet there. Yes, that’s what I said! I want you to lay ’em face down in the road between Truck Six and Truck Seven.”

“Aw,” the man said incredulously.

“Listen,” Hollerith said patiently. “I mean what I say. It’ll cost them ten minutes and thirty men if our shooting is any good. They’ll see them, they’ll know they’re plates, and still won’t dare roll over them until their bomb-disposal men have come up and removed them. Is that clear?”

“I guess so,” the man said doubtfully, and took the plates and went out.

“Five to one he goofs off,” said Hollerith, looking after him dismally.

Mr. Sparhawk entered and came to a heel-clicking, palm-out British salute before Hollerith. “Sir,” he said, “I have the honor to report that the satellite vessel was launched at 11:45 hours. Dr. Dace said that all appeared to be well on radar track. He instructed me to take a recon car and report.”

“Thank you,” Hollerith said. “Now everybody be quiet and let me think. Very shortly the Reds will decide they won’t be made to eat soup with a knife. They’ll pull in their flank guards, turn on their lights, and go barreling through, taking their losses and consoling themselves with thoughts of coming back and killing us bandit terrorists an inch at a time. I think they’ll reach the decision at about oh-oh-one-five. Justin, sound the recall, check the wind, and give ’em gas.”

Justin went outside, Betsy trailing after, and cranked a siren on a truck loaded with long cylinders from the satellite cavern. “Betsy,” he said, “this stuff is chlorine. I’m going to drive east to the cut about three miles from here. If the wind is right, I open the valves for the Red convoy to run into a cloud of the stuff. Will you tail me in your car so I can hop in and get back here? By then the command post will be dismantled and we’ll all be heading for high ground.”

“All right,” she said.

On Christmas morning at 12:30 A.M. General Hollerith, Justin, Betsy, Mr. Croley, and Mr. Sparhawk were in Sparhawk’s recon car on the ridge road with a view of the chlorine-filled cut below.

“I was right,” Hollerith said abstractedly. “Here they come.”

With headlights on the convoy was rolling eastward at fair speed. Into the chlorine.

It was easy to imagine the hellish confusion below. Headlight beams angled crazily as drivers found themselves retching over their wheels; in the trucks dazed soldiers must have been scratching wildly under useful blankets, mess gear, and overcoats for long-forgotten gas masks. Some trucks butted into the walls of the cut. But slowly, slowly, the convoy reformed and limped on.

Hollerith was swearing under his breath. At last he said: “We didn’t smash them locally.” The radio in the recon car squawked in Chinese. “What’s happened elsewhere we don’t know yet. Compared to what I privately expected, it’s been a howling success. If it could be followed up—but of course it can’t be followed up. It was a one-punch affair. If the Reds had broken and scattered, it would have been…” He sighed. “But they’re going to make it through to Rochester or Syracuse or wherever they’re headed, and they’ll regroup and…” He sighed again.

The radio switched from Chinese to Russian. The general’s head snapped sharply toward the speaker and he said at last: “That was it. English next.”

The radio said: “M.S. One to Earth. To the peoples of Russia and China. This is Military Satellite One of the United States Armed Forces broadcasting. We hereby deliver the following ultimatum: Your occupation troops in North America must surrender within twenty-four hours. Repatriation of North American prisoners of war must begin within twenty-four hours. Unless these demands are met, the cities of Moscow and Peiping will be destroyed. If the demands are still not met within a further twenty-four hours, the cities of Leningrad and Hong Kong will be destroyed. If our demands are not met, we shall continue destroying Russian and Chinese cities at twenty-four-hour intervals until our stock of hydrogen weapons is exhausted. We shall then drop cobalt bombs on Russia and China which will wipe out all life in those areas. Peoples of Russia and China, make your voices heard while you can. It is your rulers alone who condemn you to certain death if they refuse our ultimatum.”