Two Fronts (25 page)

“Oh, hell, yes. Nothing but first class for us.” Vaclav sent him a sly look. “Good thing we’ll have some Jews to kick around.”

“Jews are the original people without a country,” Halévy said seriously. “Hard to be a number-one country without ’em. I mean, look at Germany. How much fun could the Nazis have if they just went and persecuted Gypsies and queers and Czechs and no-account folks like that?”

“Oh, I expect they’d manage.” Vaclav sounded as dry as his cosmopolitan comrade usually did.

Halévy grunted. “Mm, you’ve got something there. The Nazis are a cancer on humanity. They’ll eat up whatever they’re next to. Unless surgery works, they’ll eat up the whole world.”

Cancer. Surgery. Vaclav had heard a lot of nasty talk about the Nazis, but none that made more sense to him. “You’ve got a way with words, you know that?” he said, genuine admiration in his voice.

“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t think you cared,” Halévy lisped, and blew him a kiss. The Jew was as grimy and bestubbled and smelly as any other soldier who’d stayed in the front line too goddamn long. When he swished that way, he caught Vaclav by surprise and reduced him to helpless laughter.

“You
son
of a bitch!” the Czech wheezed when he could talk at all.

“Well, at least you smiled when you said it,” Halévy replied. The other Czechs were gaping at them as if they were both nuts.
I guess we are
, Vaclav thought, not without pride.

Hideki Fujita rolled off the comfort woman, stood by the side of the bed, and pulled up his trousers. The rules at military brothels didn’t let him take them off, or even his boots. All that dressing and undressing wasted time. The comfort women wouldn’t have been able to service so many horny soldiers.

As he fastened his belt, he said, “
Arigato
.”

The comfort woman just stared at him. She stared through him, really: her eyes were a million kilometers away. She was Burmese—a couple of shades darker than a Japanese would have been, with less angular features. She looked as different to him as an Italian would have to an Englishman. That he looked as different to her as an Englishman would have to an Italian never crossed his mind.

Somebody banged on the door to the humid little room. “Hurry up in there!” the man outside yelled in Japanese.

Out went Fujita. As he’d hoped, the man standing in the hallway was only a corporal. “What was that?” he growled.

“Please excuse my bad manners, Sergeant
-san
.” The lower-ranking noncom quailed, as he had to. Fujita could have mashed him like a yam without getting into trouble. Superiors could always do what they wanted to inferiors—that was how the Japanese system worked.

Sated, though, Fujita didn’t feel like fighting now. He walked down the hall to the stairs. Behind him, the Burmese girl’s door slammed shut. The corporal would get his sloppy seconds, just as he’d got someone else’s a few minutes before. When you thought of things like that, wasn’t it something close to a miracle that the whole Japanese Army hadn’t come down with one venereal disease or another—or with one venereal disease
and
another?

Locals and Japanese soldiers led oxen up and down Myitkyina’s streets. Some of the oxen had sacks of grain strapped to their backs. Some pulled two-wheeled carts or four-wheeled wagons. None of them moved very fast. Trucks were few and far between in Burma. Nothing seemed urgent here, the way it had on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia, in Siberia, and in Unit 731 south of Harbin.

One of the fighting fronts was off in the west, by the border between Burma and India. The other was up north, in southern China. Myitkyina was a long way from either of them. If not for the bacteriological-warfare unit outside of town, this would have been a complete backwater.

Once upon a time, when he was younger and more eager, the way things went here would have bothered Fujita. No, it would have done worse than that—it would have driven him crazy. Not any more. Rushing toward an attack—what did that really mean? It meant rushing toward a chance to get killed: nothing else. Living was better, if they gave you even half a chance. You could do better than laying these resigned Burmese women, but you could also do an awful lot worse.

Not far from the brothel was the hotel the English Army had used for a headquarters till the Japanese chased out the white men and took over the place for themselves. It was the best Myitkyina boasted, which wasn’t saying much. A third-rate colonial copy of a third-rate English provincial hotel … Fujita didn’t know the details. All he knew was, the place was a dump.

But it was a dump with a bar, so he walked in anyhow. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the battered lobby. They stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The bar was all dark wood and brass. The kind of place it was modeled on might have felt cozy and inviting back in England. Here in Burma, the bar seemed out of place, to say nothing of bewildered.

They had beer. Fujita had never been in a bar anywhere that didn’t have beer. They had sake—a bad local imitation of what the Japanese made. And, no doubt because they’d started life as a bad copy of an English hotel, they had what they called whiskey. That was a worse local imitation of what the English made. It smelled and tasted like kerosene, and felt like burning kerosene on the way down. Once, Fujita had asked the native behind the bar what it was distilled from. The man had seemed fluent enough in Japanese, but he suddenly lost his ability to understand the language.

This was a different bartender now. “Beer,” Fujita said, and set some occupation money on the bar. The native scooped up the bill and made it disappear. He filled a mug and handed it to the sergeant.

It wasn’t good beer, either. It was thin and sour. But beer was harder to screw up than sake or whiskey, even if the bar did serve it at room temperature. The barmen swore up and down that the English wanted it that way and complained if it was cold. Fujita had never known a barman who wouldn’t lie, but he couldn’t see why the Burmese would come up with such unlikely nonsense. Maybe they meant it—you never could tell. He hadn’t figured Englishmen were so stupid, though.

He carried the mug over to an empty table (he didn’t lack for choices) and sat down in one of the massive wooden chairs that were another holdover from England. In Japan, a chair like that would have marked a
daimyo
, a great lord. Ordinary people sat on mats or made do with stools. The English had different ideas about what was comfortable. Maybe they had more wood, too. They must have, if this paneled barroom gave any clues.

After he drank the first beer, he had another, and then a couple of more to weight down the earlier ones. By then, his head was buzzing nicely. It might not have been the best beer in the history of brewing, but it packed a punch, all right. He shambled over to the barman again. “Where do I piss?” he asked.

The Burmese jerked a thumb at a door he hadn’t noticed amidst all the fancy woodwork. As soon as he opened the door, the smell told him the water didn’t run any more. He got rid of his beer and escaped as fast as he could.

“Another, Sergeant
-san
?” the bartender asked.

“No, thanks.” Fujita walked out. He thought about going back to the brothel, but he wasn’t sure he could manage another round. Having a girl look through him was one thing. Having a girl sneer if he couldn’t keep it up was something else again, something much worse. Even if she had too much sense to show she was sneering, she would anyhow. He knew that.

Which left … what? He didn’t want to go back to his unit so soon. What was leave for but getting away from the people whose ugly faces you saw every day? Well, down the block stood the movie house. He could sit in the dark there and not think about anything. If the film turned out to be a stinker, he could fall asleep. Nobody’d care.

The movie house took only Japanese money. He paid his fifty sen and went inside. As in the hotel lobby, ceiling fans spun without accomplishing much. A newsreel showed Japanese tanks roaring forward in China, Japanese bombers dropping their loads on Hawaii, and a POW camp in the Philippines full of skinny, dirty Americans bearded like animals. He wondered whether they’d get shipped to Unit 731, or whether the Japanese Army would set up a germ-warfare center near the camp.

Then the feature came on. It was set in China, and featured espionage, intrigue, and a gorgeous heroine. The people playing Chinese probably were: they spoke very bad Japanese. The hero foiled their plot to bomb a general’s residence and got the girl. It was as good a way to kill a couple of hours as any Fujita could have found.

He paused at a newsstand next to the movie house. A Japanese magazine showed a greenish-skinned Roosevelt on the cover. The American President’s teeth were sharp and pointed like a vampire’s. He looked like something that would sleep in a coffin and come out at night to suck blood, all right. Creatures like that weren’t native to Japanese legend, but Fujita was one of the many, many people who’d shivered through
Dracula
when it came to the Home Islands.

He bought a girlie magazine instead. You could always think about pretty girls and what you wanted to do with them. Vampires were a sometime thing.

And then he did head out into the countryside again. His unit, no matter how much he might want to get away from it, was as close to home as he had.
Too bad
, he thought.
It’s true, but too bad all the same
.

AIR-RAID SIRENS HOWLED
, both on the
Ranger
and ashore. Pete McGill tumbled out of his bunk and dashed for his antiaircraft gun. “Battle stations!” the PA system howled unnecessarily. “All men to battle stations!”

Searchlights were already stabbing up into the warm tropical night. Here and there, they picked out the silver sausages of barrage balloons that had sprouted above Pearl Harbor and Honolulu to make life difficult for Japanese bombers. They didn’t stab any of the bombers themselves. The Japs flew high above the barrage balloons and sensibly painted their planes’ bellies matte black.

Guns ashore and aboard the ships at Pearl were already going off. Tracers added to the Fourth of July atmosphere the powerful searchlights created. Pete had no idea whether the guns were radar-guided or just putting lots of shells in the air in hopes of hitting something.

Something was up there, all right. Through the guns’ thunder, Pete caught the drone of the bombers’ unsynchronized engines. To him, Bettys sounded like flying washing machines. Their motors didn’t have the rich, masculine growl that American planes’ did.

They also caught fire at any little hit. Americans often called them Zippos—they lit the first time, every time. They’d got slaughtered when they came over Oahu by daylight. Hitting them at night was a whole different story, though. They did have their virtues. They were fast for bombers. And they had a hell of a long range: the flip side of the lack of protection that made them such lightweights. These bastards had flown all the way from Midway.

Here and there, bomb bursts outshouted the antiaircraft guns. Pete’s gun started shooting at—well, something. He passed shells one after another. Sweat soaked him.

Off in the distance, a Betty cometed down into the Pacific, trailing smoke and flame. Somebody’d got lucky, anyhow. As the English, the French, and the Germans had found out before them, the Americans were discovering that stifling nighttime air raids was anything but easy. By the engine noises up in the sky, some night fighters had got airborne. They also needed to be lucky to find the enemy, though.

They needed to be lucky not to get shot down by the flak the guns on the ground and on the ships were throwing up, too. Anybody down below who saw or imagined he saw anything up above would do his goddamnedest to knock it down. If it happened to be on the same side as he was, well, that was its hard luck.

What saved most of the night fighters was the same thing that saved most of the Bettys: when you were shooting four miles straight up into the darkness, chances were you’d miss. Even as he grabbed another heavy brass shell, Pete understood that.

Shrapnel pattered down. He put on a helmet—one of the new pots that were replacing the English-style steel derbies U.S. soldiers and Marines had used since the last war. If you got hit in the head by sharp fragments of steel and brass coming down from four miles up, you’d be sorry, but not for long.

The all-clear sounded after twenty minutes or so. Some of the gunners were so keyed up, they kept firing for a while even after they had no more targets. Not the ones on the
Ranger
, though—this was a ship with discipline.

“Raid’s over,” Sergeant Cullum said, and lit a Camel. After a deep drag, he went on, “Now we can all hit the sack again, right?”

Most of the answers he got were inventively profane. Leathernecks who’d been jerked out of bunks and hammocks and straight into combat were running on nerve ends. Their hearts would be pounding too hard to let them sleep as quickly as they’d wakened.

Or maybe not. Pete was ready to give it a try. He’d been in the Corps long enough to understand that you grabbed Z’s whenever you could, because you were bound to get screwed out of a lot of them.