Last Orders: The War That Came Early (23 page)

“Heh! You mean the way we did?” Demange said. “I was over there when that happened, remember. And I’m goddamn lucky I’m back here now.”

Off in the distance, German 105s woke up. Demange listened to the shells scream through the air. If that scream built and built till it sounded as if it were coming down right on top of you … then the chances were much too good that it was. That was when you wanted a deep bunker, like the German one Demange remembered. A direct hit from a 105 wouldn’t bother that bunker one bit. You’d need something like a 240 to make it sit up and take notice, and those babies didn’t grow on trees.

Mirouze was listening intently, too. His face cleared no more than a split second after Demange’s. “They’ll go wide of us.”

“That’s right,” Demange said. “Some other sorry
salauds
will suffer, but not us. And you know what? The Germans shot me in the last war. If they don’t get me this time, I won’t mind. Let the next hero take his turn instead. Fine with me, by God!”

“If everybody thought like you, we couldn’t have a war,” Mirouze said.

“Everybody
does
think like me. You fucking
want
to get your family jewels blown off?” Demange said. “But when they tell you, ‘We
will
kill you if you don’t go, and the
Boches
may miss if you do,’ what happens then? You damn well go, that’s what.”

Back behind them, French artillery started roaring. Demange carefully noted the flight of those shells, too. It was counterbattery fire, going after the Germans’ guns. He relaxed, as much as he ever let himself relax. If his own side had started raking the enemy’s forward trenches, the
Boches
might have felt obliged to return the favor. Some courtesies, Demange could do without.

Lieutenant Mirouze asked a new question: “What do you think of the antitank rocket the Americans have made, the
bazooka
?” He pronounced the name slowly and carefully, stressing how strange and foreign it was.

Demange thought the handle sounded idiotic, too, but that wasn’t what the kid was talking about. “I’ve only seen a couple of them,” he answered. “I’ve heard it can get through the armor on most German
tanks—the Tiger still gives it trouble. If it can, I’m all for it. I’m for anything that gives the infantry a chance against
chars
. But what do you want to bet the Fritzes will start making their own as soon as they can get their hands on one? Then our tanks will start cooking, too.”

“It could be.” By Mirouze’s expression, he hadn’t thought of that. Also by his expression, he didn’t much like the possibility now that Demange had pointed it out. What a shame! Whether he liked it or not wouldn’t slow the Germans down a bit. Demange had no doubts there.

After a while, the shelling petered out. Only the rain and the chill and the machine guns to worry about then. Wasn’t life grand? It was so grand, Demange took the water bottle off his hip and swigged from it. He had cognac in there, not water. It didn’t do much about machine guns, but it sure made the rain and chill seem less annoying.

He offered Mirouze the aluminum bottle. “Thanks,” the younger officer said, surprise in his voice: Demange wasn’t usually so friendly. Mirouze started to cough when he found the bottle didn’t hold water or even
pinard
. But he didn’t choke and he didn’t spew the stuff out his nose like someone who didn’t know how to drink. He respectfully handed the bottle back. “Thanks is right.”

“Any time. All part of the service.” Demange stuck the bottle back into the cloth canteen cover.

“That’ll put hair on my chest,” Mirouze said. “Probably make me grow hair all over like King Kong.”

“Just don’t start pounding your chest and climbing the tallest building you can find. It wouldn’t be beauty killed the beast—it’d be the fucking Fritzes and their damn buzz saws.” As if to underscore Demange’s words, an MG-42 sprayed more death at the French lines.

“I guess I won’t.” Mirouze sighed. “I’d make a crappy gorilla anyhow, wouldn’t I?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Demange said. The junior lieutenant was skinny and sallow, with a long, mournful face, not quite enough chin, and a sad little mustache that looked as if someone had put burnt cork on his upper lip and he’d washed off some of it but not enough.

“You know what else is funny?” Mirouze said. “Those biplane
fighters that got the ape were as good as anybody’s ten years ago. They wouldn’t last ten minutes now. Well, they would against King Kong, but not against real airplanes.”

“You’re right.” Demange sounded surprised, mostly because he was. That a punk like Lieutenant Mirouze could come up with something worth hearing, something Demange hadn’t thought of himself, had to come as a surprise. “What we had ten years ago was junk next to what we’ve got now.”

“And who knows what we’ll have in ten years more?” Mirouze said.

“Whatever it is, it’ll probably kill you before you even get born.” In his own twisted way, Demange had faith in mankind.

Every time Hideki Fujita woke up in the morning after a U.S. bombing raid, he thanked all the
kami
that he didn’t wake up dead. He’d seen bombing raids from the Russians, but those were only an annoyance next to the pounding Midway was taking.

The island, bigger than any this side of the main Hawaiian group, took up several square kilometers. The only thing that let the Japanese garrison remain a going concern was that that was simply too much ground for a string of bombers to knock flat even with the worst will in the world.

Had they dropped incendiaries … Fujita imagined the devastation that kind of bombing could cause in Japan’s lightly built cities, with so many walls of wood or paper. Yes, those would all go up in flames, and no one could guess how many people with them.

But the Americans were at the end of their reach here on Midway. The Home Islands lay thousands of kilometers to the west. No Yankee bombers could reach them. No Yankee bombers would ever reach them. Fujita was sure of it.

He walked over to the edge of the lagoon as soon as it began to get light. Bombs had fallen in the water there. The bursts killed the little silvery fish that took refuge in the shallows from bigger, meaner fish out in the Pacific. Some of them had washed ashore. They hadn’t started to go bad.

A bayonet was rarely useful these days as a weapon of war. You
fought the enemy at longer range than you could thrust with your bayoneted rifle. But a knife on your belt was still a handy thing to have. It was good for all kinds of things. Gutting little fish lying on the sand, for instance.

Another soldier was using his bayonet for the same purpose. A petty officer had a shorter knife that also did the job. He caught Fujita’s eyes. “Well, the Americans went and got our breakfast ready for us, anyhow,” he said, and ate the fish he’d just cleaned.

“Hai.”
Fujita nodded. “I didn’t have sashimi for breakfast very often before I came here, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” He ate a fish, too. “A lot better than no breakfast at all.” He knew more about that than he’d ever wanted to find out. Anyone who’d been in combat for a while discovered more than he’d ever wanted to learn about missing meals.

The other soldier tossed some guts into the water. He crouched down and scooped out a fish that came up to the bait. Inside of two minutes, that one was inside him. “You won’t get any fresher than that unless you eat dancing shrimp.”

“I haven’t done that since before I went into the Army.” Fujita let out a sigh full of longing. What could be more delicious than a live shrimp peeled from its shell and still wriggling?

A gull swooped down, grabbed a dead fish, and swallowed it while flying away. The gooney birds here didn’t care about people. The gulls knew enough to be wary of them. Some of the Japanese had eaten seagulls. The only reason they didn’t do it more often was that gulls tasted bad.

One of the reasons they tasted bad was that they didn’t care what they ate themselves. They were as bad as ravens. They would eat dead soldiers if you didn’t get the bodies under the sand. Did that make you a cannibal if you ate them? Fujita hadn’t, so he didn’t worry about it.

He had other things to worry about. He went to work with pick and shovel so the G4Ms could try to pay the Americans back for their visit. Japan kept flying a few bombers in by way of Wake Island. The Americans had more, though, and could bring in planes and men and munitions more easily than Fujita’s side. Their bases were closer to their homeland than this distant outpost of Empire was.

Rice. A little
shoyu
for flavor. Canned squid (the Americans had blown up a lot of food, but for some reason there was still plenty of canned squid). All things considered, sashimi from fish bombed in the lagoon was a step up from anything the cooks could do with what they had.

At the garrison’s pitiful supper, everyone held the same thought uppermost in his mind. Would the Yankees come over again tonight? The only way to find out was to try to sleep and see if you made it through till morning without needing to dash for a hole in the sand. When U.S. air raids started, the soldiers and sailors used to give the antiaircraft gunners grief about not shooting down more American planes. Now the men saw the gunners did the best they could. The bombers flew high. The gunners had no searchlights to show them their targets. They had to fire at the engines’ drone and hope for the best.

Fujita rolled himself in his blanket. After a day of hard labor on the runway—still nowhere near ready to take planes—he was ready to sleep hard for as long as anybody would let him. The Americans let him till a little past midnight. Then explosions woke him. He thought some of those booms would have woken the dead.

If he didn’t want to be one of those dead, he needed to take what little cover he could find. He grabbed his belt and his rifle—ingrained military habit—and ran for a shallow, sandy trench. Bombs kept whistling down out of the sky. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if one of them whistled down right here. But what else could he think about when the ground shook and the only light was the lurid flash of explosions?

Almost the only light. A couple of guns kept blasting away at the planes overhead. Their muzzle flashes and the ice-blue streaks from the tracers they fired also gave Fujita’s eyes something to work with.

If you put enough shells in the air, sooner or later you were bound to hit something. So the gunners claimed. Other troops stationed on Midway loudly and profanely doubted it. But the gunners turned out to know what they were talking about after all.

Through the whistles and explosions and the rapid-fire booming of the guns, Fujita heard his countrymen cheering in their holes. He
looked up into the night. Kilometers high in the sky, an American bomber was on fire. Flames spread up the wing to the fuselage. The plane plummeted toward the sea. When it crashed into the Pacific, wreckage and gasoline floated on the water, burning.

Rifles started going off. Fujita looked up again. Lit as if by flash bulbs, parachutes were floating down on Midway. He chambered a round in his own Arisaka and blazed away whenever he could see one. American flyers deserved whatever happened to them, especially if they didn’t have the nerve to kill themselves instead of being taken prisoner.

One of the parachutes was coming down almost right on top of him. He fixed his bayonet. He might get some combat use out of it after all. When the flyer landed, Fujita scrambled from the trench and dashed toward him. He wasn’t the only one, but he was the closest.

He could see and smell blood on the American, but the white man wasn’t dead. He reached for something on his belt—a pistol, probably. Fujita fired from no more than a couple of meters away. The flyer groaned. Fujita gave him the bayonet, again and again. The Yankee screamed till his voice faded into a choking gurgle.

“Enough,” another Japanese said. “You killed him, all right.”

“I wish I could kill them all.” Fujita stabbed the bayonet into the sand to get off as much of the American’s blood as he could. If any other men from the burning bomber came down on Midway, he knew they would meet the same reception this fellow had.

As the rest of the enemy planes growled away, Fujita plundered the corpse. He took the pistol and a couple of magazines of cartridges. He also took the Yankee’s emergency rations. They might not be good, but they’d be different, anyhow. He tossed the man’s billfold aside—American money wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t care if he slept the rest of the night or not. He’d hit back at the foe right here on Midway!

One of the things Hans-Ulrich Rudel hated about the way the war had gone was that you couldn’t ask questions any more. Well, you could, but you had to be careful about who heard them. Otherwise, you might get a visit from Major Keller, who would wonder whether your spirit was sufficiently National Socialist.

Or Keller might just decide you were hopeless. In that case, he wouldn’t call on you. The SD or the
Gestapo
would. And if they took you away, who knew where you’d wind up or what would happen to you there?

No one knew, though almost everyone could make a good guess. That was another question you couldn’t ask. It was bound to bring Major Keller or worse down on you if you did.