The Grapple

Armstrong’s eyes flicked now this way, now that. Since Lieutenant Streczyk got wounded, he’d commanded a platoon. One of these days, a new junior officer might take charge of it. Armstrong wasn’t holding his breath. The war in Utah got what the war against the CSA didn’t need. Since the war against the CSA needed everything, the war in Utah got…hind tit.

Corporal Yossel Reisen walked through the wreckage, too. Like Armstrong, the Jew from New York City held his Springfield at the ready. Reisen took a drag at the cigarette that hung from the corner of his mouth. “Well, here we are. We’ve liberated Temple Square,” he said.

“Yeah.” Armstrong looked around. He didn’t see a piece of rock bigger than about two by two. The United States had expended a lot of bombs and shells on this place. “We’ve liberated the living shit out of it, haven’t we?”

Here and there, Mormon civilians who’d lived through the fighting were starting to come out of their holes. They said they were civilians, anyway. Orders were to treat them as civilians unless they showed signs of being dangerous. Armstrong didn’t know why the U.S. government was trying to win the locals’ hearts and minds. That had been a losing game for more than sixty years now. But he didn’t shoot at people he would have tried to kill not long before.

That didn’t mean he wanted the Mormons coming anywhere near him. One of the ways they could show signs of being dangerous was by blowing themselves up, along with whatever U.S. soldiers happened to be within range of the blast. Mormons had invented people bombs, and still used them to deadly effect.

And they weren’t the only ones who did. Plainly, they’d hit upon an idea whose time had come. Blacks in the CSA used people bombs to strike at the Freedom Party. Half a dozen Balkans groups were using them against Austria-Hungary. Armenians blew themselves up to hit back at the Ottoman Turks. In Russia, the Reds had lost a long, brutal civil war to the Tsar. Now their remnants had a new weapon, too.

Other soldiers in green-gray kept chivvying the emerging Mormons away from them. Most of the civilians were women. That cut no ice with Armstrong Grimes. The first person he’d seen using a people bomb was a woman. And plenty of Mormon women picked up rifles and grenades and fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons.

“You ever…pay a Mormon gal back?” he asked Yossel Reisen.

Reisen was watching the women, too. He shook his head. “Not like that. You?”

“No,” Armstrong said. Not many Mormon women let themselves be captured. They had reasons for fighting to the death, too. The revenge U.S. soldiers took was basic in the extreme. Gang-raping captured Mormon women was against orders, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Off to the north, artillery boomed. U.S. airplanes buzzed overhead, some spotting for the guns, others dropping bombs on Mormon positions. The Confederates would have hacked the lumbering, obsolescent bombers out of the sky with ease. Against enemies who didn’t have fighters and didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns, they were good enough.

“Blow all the bastards to hell and gone.” Armstrong picked up a chip of granite that might have come from the Temple. “Then we can get on with the real war.” He flung the stone chip away. It bounced off a bigger rock and disappeared in the rubble.

Yossel’s expression changed. He bent and picked up a bit of stone, too. Tossing it up and down, he murmured, “I wonder what Jerusalem is like these days.”

“Huh?” Armstrong knew what Jerusalem was like: a sleepy Ottoman town full of Arabs and Jews where nothing much had happened for centuries.

But his buddy said, “We had our Temple destroyed twice, too.”

He didn’t usually make a big deal out of being a Jew, any more than he made a big deal out of being a Congresswoman’s nephew-and not just any Congresswoman, but one who’d also been First Lady. “You guys are real Americans,” Armstrong said. “Hell, you’re a gentile here-just ask a Mormon.”

“I know. I think it’s a scream,” Yossel Reisen said. “Yeah, we’re real Americans-or we try to be, anyhow. But we sure didn’t make real Romans a couple of thousand years ago. That’s why the Second Temple got it.”

“I guess.” Except for what little Armstrong remembered from a high-school history class and from Julius Caesar in English Lit, ancient Rome was a closed book to him.

“We think the Mormons are nuts, and we treat ’em that way, and what happens?” Yossel said. “Bang! They rise up. We treat Jews all right, and they’re happy and quiet. The Romans thought my ancestors were nuts, and they treated ’em that way, and what happened? Bang! The Jews rose up.”

“Bunch of bullshit, if you want to know what I think,” Armstrong said. “We were nice to the Mormons right before the war, and what did we get for it? They kicked us anyway, soon as we got busy with Featherston’s fuckers.” He might not know ancient history, but he remembered the end of the occupation of Utah. Fat lot of good ending it did anybody.

“Yeah, there is that,” Yossel allowed. “Maybe you just can’t make some people happy.”

“Better believe you can’t,” Armstrong said. “These bastards have spent the last God knows how long proving it, too.” He was some small part of what the U.S. government had done to Utah, but that never entered his mind. Neither side, by then, worried much about who’d started what and why. They both knew they had a long history of hating, mistrusting, and striking at each other. Past that, they didn’t much care.

Yossel Reisen pointed to another corporal trudging through the wreckage of Temple Square. He nudged Armstrong. “You recognize that guy?”

Armstrong eyed the two-striper. He looked like anybody else: not too young, not too old, not too big, not too small. But he didn’t look like anybody Armstrong knew, or even knew of. Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Now that Temple Square had finally fallen, it drew its share of gawkers.

But maybe it did mean something. The USA had trouble fighting the Mormons just because they looked so ordinary. They had no trouble getting U.S. uniforms, either. Down in the CSA, the Freedom Party knew who was a Negro and who wasn’t. Here…Armstrong unslung his Springfield. “Let’s go check him out.”

The corporal wasn’t doing anything to draw notice; he ambled around with his hands in his pockets. Once he bent down and picked up a bit of rock and stowed it away. To Mormons, pieces of the Temple were sacred relics. But to U.S. soldiers who’d gone through hell to get here, they made good souvenirs. Carrying one didn’t say a thing about what you were.

“Hey!” Armstrong said, quietly slipping off the Springfield’s safety.

“You want something, Sarge?” The corporal sounded like anybody else, too. Mormons did.

“Yeah. Let’s see your papers.”

“Sure.” The noncom started to take something out of his pocket.

“Hold it right there!” Yossel Reisen snapped. Armstrong didn’t like the way the stranger’s hand bunched, either. He sure looked as if he was grabbing something bigger than a set of identity documents. “Take both hands out, nice and slow,” Yossel told him. “If they aren’t empty when you do, you’re dead. Got it?”

“Who are you clowns?” the corporal demanded. “You Mormons trying to hijack me? You won’t get away with it!”

If he was trying to put the shoe on the other foot, he had balls. Armstrong gestured with his Springfield. “Do like my buddy says.” His own balls tried to crawl up into his belly. If this guy was a Mormon and what he had in there was a detonator…But his hands came out empty.

Yossel reached into that pocket and pulled out a pistol: not an Army.45, but a smaller revolver, a civilian piece. Armstrong’s suspicions flared. Then Yossel found the other corporal’s papers. He looked from the photo to the man and back again. He shook his head.