Last Orders: The War That Came Early (14 page)

Tonight, the pilot flew south of the usual course. American carriers sometimes lurked partway up the chain of islets that led from Midway to the main Hawaiian islands. Their fighters would come up at night, hunting for bombers. Every once in a while, they’d catch one. But what they couldn’t find, they couldn’t catch.

Fujita shivered. Now that he was at altitude, he was glad for the gear in which he’d sweltered on the ground. Even in these subtropical latitudes, it was frigid up here at six or seven thousand meters. He wished he had more clothes, thicker clothes, to put on.

The pilot’s and copilot’s voices came faintly back to him through the speaking tube. They had nothing to say to him yet; they chatted with each other about how the plane was doing. As far as he could tell, it was doing fine. Listening to them gave him something to do while
he sat there shivering in the dark. He hoped they had their navigating in good order.

They must have been about halfway to Oahu when the two men in the cockpit suddenly exclaimed together. The moon had shown them a string of bombers flying north and west. As they were going to hit Honolulu, so the Americans were taking a fresh whack at Midway.

“Zakennayo!”
Fujita muttered. If the Yankees cratered the runways again, landing would be an adventure. He couldn’t do anything about that but worry. Worry he did.

He also hoped the American pilots hadn’t noticed the G4Ms, the way the Japanese pilots had seen their planes. If this raid was like the others, the Americans would have far more bombers in the sky
to
notice.

If the Americans had seen them, they would radio the news back to Honolulu. Then the night sky would light up with even more fireworks than usual when the Japanese flyers came overhead. Fujita hoped the moon was down by the time they arrived. They’d be harder to see then. It would be close. Moonset should be somewhere near midnight, which was also about when they were supposed to reach Oahu.

Nothing to do but wait and brood. Every so often, Fujita would check the luminous dial on his watch. He kept thinking forty-five minutes or an hour had gone by since the last time he’d looked at its radium-painted hands. He kept finding out it was only ten or fifteen minutes.

At last, when he was sure he’d spent a week in the air and the plane would either fly on forever or run out of gas and crash into the Pacific, the pilot’s voice came metallically through the speaking tube: “Be ready, Bombardier! We are nearing the target.”

“Hai!”
Fujita couldn’t help adding, “Good to hear it, sir.”

No response to that. A few minutes later, though, the pilot said, “Open the bomb-bay doors.”

“Hai!”
Fujita repeated. He cranked them open. The moon wasn’t quite down. He could see ocean far below, and then dark land. Freezing wind tore at him. The American blackout got better every time he flew over Honolulu. If he wasn’t wrong, they were coming up from the
south. Raiding from that unexpected direction might keep the Americans from realizing they were there till they’d dropped their bombs and headed back toward Midway.

Or, of course, it might not. In fact, the thought had hardly passed through Fujita’s mind before lights winked on, all those thousands of meters down below. Some of those were the muzzle flashes of antiaircraft guns. Others were searchlight beams stabbing up to pin the Japanese planes on their bilious blue beams so the gunners could see what they were shooting at.

The G4M started jinking violently, going faster and slower, higher and lower, left and right to confuse the gunners. Gulping, Fujita feared his stomach was a few jinks behind the plane. Then he gulped again, for a different reason. Not far enough away, the antiaircraft shells began to burst. Fire and smoke lay at the heart of each explosion. Fragments flew much farther. And the blast from the bursts threw the bomber around, too.

“Bombs away!” the pilot shouted. “Let them fall!”

“Bombs away!” Fujita echoed. He yanked hard on the levers that released the pottery bomb casings full of fever and death. At least one of the G4Ms flying with his had ordinary explosives aboard. He saw the bombs burst down there as he closed the bomb-bay doors to make the plane more aerodynamic. The faster they got out of there, the better their chance of making it back to Midway.

By the way the pilot gunned the bomber’s motors, he didn’t want to hang around here, either. All the Japanese in the Midway garrison said the flat little island was a hellhole. Fujita had said so himself. When the other choice was getting shot down, though, the hellhole seemed heavenly by comparison.

Near misses shook the G4M for another long couple of minutes. One fragment tore a hole in the plane’s thin aluminum skin a meter behind Fujita. Had it hit him, it would have gutted him like a salmon. The wind screamed through the hole. No fluid leaked out of it, though, and no torn cables writhed in that wind. The bomber kept flying.

Fujita stayed nervous till the cockpit crew’s chatter told him the plane had got past Kauai on the way back to Midway. That meant American fighters were unlikely to come after them. They would
probably make it back … and find out what the U.S. bombers had done to their base.

Or they would unless they met the returning American bombers head-on. The Yankee planes bristled with machine guns. The G4M might be able to outrun them, but it would never win an air-to-air gunfight.

The sun was just rising when the bomber jounced to a stop on the runway. The pilot came in slow, just above stalling speed, and braked so hard Fujita could smell burning rubber from the tires. He stopped as short as he could, so the plane had the smallest chance of going into a crater and flipping over. Fujita scrambled out onto the tarmac. He was at sea level again, and sweating hard again, too. He didn’t care. He’d made it one more time.

Benjamin Halévy stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He offered Vaclav Jezek the pack. Vaclav took one. “Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Up yours, Sergeant,” Halévy replied. They grinned at each other.

Before the war, Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews. But the Jewish conscripts in the Czechoslovakian army had hung in and fought the Nazis along with the Czechs, while Poles and Ruthenians and especially Slovaks either just gave up or went over to the enemy. Jews had even better reasons than Czechs for hating Hitler and his minions, and that wasn’t easy.

Halévy wasn’t, or wasn’t exactly, a Czech Jew. His parents had gone from Prague to Paris after the last war. He’d been a French sergeant and, because he spoke both French and Czech, a liaison between his own armed forces and those of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile. When France made its temporary truce with Hitler, he’d accompanied the Czech soldiers into exile in Republican Spain. He couldn’t stomach fighting on the German side.

He was a lieutenant here for the same reason Jezek was a sergeant. The Spaniards had an inferiority complex about their own fighting skills. They automatically promoted foreigners one grade. A lot of Vaclav’s pay still came in promises, but they were bigger promises than they would have been otherwise.

After blowing out smoke, Vaclav asked, “Do Sanjurjo’s bastards promote the Germans and Italians on their side, too?”

“I know they do with the Germans,” Halévy said. “I’m not so sure they bother with Mussolini’s boys. I mean, would
you
promote an Italian?”

“Not unless I wanted him to cook noodles for me,” Vaclav answered, and they both laughed. The German
Legion Kondor
had good men, picked men, in it. There were more Italians in Spain, but they were mostly conscripts who didn’t want to be here, and fought like it.

Vaclav’s canteen was full of harsh red wine. He swigged from it. He had a better chance of steering clear of the trots with wine than with water. And the trots were something nobody in the trenches needed, much less someone who spent a lot of his time quietly waiting in no-man’s-land. Hard to wait quietly when you had to yank down your trousers and squat.

He hadn’t gone out this morning. He couldn’t have said why. He hadn’t felt lucky when he woke up before sunrise—that was as close as he could come. No one in the little Czech force gave him any trouble about it. They’d all served together for a long, long time. They knew he wasn’t malingering. He’d done plenty to Sanjurjo’s Nationalists, and chances were he would again. Only not today.

Not today. Tomorrow.
Mañana
. That was one of the Spanish words Vaclav did know. You couldn’t be in Spain long without learning it. When he said it, he commonly meant
tomorrow
. A Spaniard who said it might mean
tomorrow
, too. Or he might mean
in a few days—I don’t quite know when
. Or he might mean
go away and quit bothering me
. It all depended on how he said it.

Czechs had spent a lot of centuries living next door to Germans. Attitudes rubbed off, even if no one intended that they should. When a Czech said
in an hour
, that was what he meant. When he said
tomorrow
, he meant that, too. Discovering how abstract and theoretical time could be in Spain came as a painful surprise.

It cost lives, too. If an artillery barrage came in two hours late—and such things happened all the time here—foot soldiers who should have attacked a softened-up position advanced against one with the defenders ready and waiting. They usually paid the price for it, too.

In the Czech army, as in the
Wehrmacht
, an artillery officer whose guns didn’t fire when they were supposed to would get it in the neck. He’d wind up a corporal, one posted where the fighting was hottest. Among the Spaniards, Republicans and Nationalists alike, people just shrugged. Such things were sad, absolutely, but what could you do?

Maybe the weather had something to do with it. Jezek drank more wine. “Christ, it’s hot!” he said. You never saw weather like this in Central Europe. This would kill you if you gave it half a chance. Here in Spain, sunstroke wasn’t just a word.

“It is,” Halévy agreed. He’d turned brown as an Arab, brown as old leather, under the harsh Spanish sun. Like most Czechs, Vaclav was much fairer than the Jew. He’d burned and peeled, burned and peeled, over and over again, till he finally started to tan. He knew he wouldn’t tan like Halévy if he stayed here another fifty years.

Before he could say anything else, the Nationalists’ artillery woke up. That didn’t happen every day any more—nowhere close. Marshal Sanjurjo got most of his tubes from Germany and Italy. Since France backed away from her deal with Hitler, the marshal hadn’t been able to get many any more. The ones he had were old and worn. They’d lost a lot of accuracy. Spanish-made shells (on both sides of the line) were much too likely to be duds.

Artillery could still kill you, though. Jezek grabbed his antitank rifle and folded himself up into a ball in the bottom of the trench. Any pillbug that happened to see him would have been impressed. But his bet was that any pillbugs down here were folding themselves into balls, too.

He opened his eyes for a second. Beside him, Benjamin Halévy was also doing his best to occupy as little space as he could. Not all the Nationalists’ shells were duds, dammit. Some of them burst with thunderous roars near the Czechs’ trench line. Dirt fountained up into the air. Clods fell down and thumped Vaclav. He flinched every time one did, afraid it would be a speeding, whining fragment and not a harmless lump of earth.

While he lay there, his hands were busy under him. He stuck a five-round box into the slot on his elephant gun and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He’d left the monster rifle unloaded. He
hadn’t thought he would need to do any shooting from the trench. But if Sanjurjo’s men were shelling like this, what was it but the prelude to an infantry attack?

Halévy had to be thinking the same thing. As soon as the artillery barrage eased off, he bounced to his feet, yelling, “Up! Up, dammit! They’ll be coming after us any second now!”

Vaclav scrambled onto the firing step. Grunting, he heaved up the heavy antitank rifle and rested the bipod on the dirt of the parapet. Sure as hell, soldiers in German-looking helmets and pale yellowish khaki were swarming out of the Nationalists’ trenches and foxholes like angry ants.

He didn’t worry about picking off officers now. He pulled the trigger as soon as he got one of Sanjurjo’s men in his crosshairs. When you hit some poor bastard dead center with a round intended to pierce two or three centimeters of hardened steel, you almost tore him in half. The luckless Spaniard’s midsection exploded into red mist. He didn’t crumple; he toppled.

The thumb-sized cartridge case clinked off the top of Vaclav’s boot after he worked the bolt again. He killed another Nationalist a few seconds later. This one did a graceful pirouette into a shell hole. He wouldn’t come out again, either, not with most of his head blown off.

Ordinary rifles were banging away from the Czech line, too, along with a couple of machine guns. When Republican artillery woke up and started giving no-man’s-land a once-over, the Nationalists decided they wouldn’t be breaking through to Madrid today after all. Some hunkered down in whatever cover they could find while others scurried back to their start line. Even Fascist Spaniards were recklessly brave, but war was a Darwinian business. The longer it went on, the more pragmatists survived.

Somebody not far away was wailing for his mother in Czech. Vaclav and Halévy shared pained looks. That sounded bad, and the poor guy wouldn’t be the only Czech hurt or killed, either. The government-in-exile’s army had been a regiment when it got to Spain. It was a lot smaller than that now, and kept shrinking all the time.