Two Fronts (41 page)

“Who?” Pete wouldn’t have known who Hercule Poirot was even with his name said the right way. Sherlock Holmes he could have handled. Anyone more obscure? He would have dropped the ball. Hell, he
had
dropped it. He went on, “I knew the fucking song. Jeez, who doesn’t? But I never figured it was about a real place.”

“Well, it is.” Now Bob Cullum spoke with exaggerated patience.

“Well, ain’t that nice?” Unconsciously, Pete used the line and the intonation of a performer in a Vitaphone Variety—an early stab at a talkie, well before
The Jazz Singer
—he’d watched when he was a kid. Japanese interrogators could have shoved burning bamboo slivers under his fingernails without getting him to remember the skit with the top part of his mind.

Floatplanes launched from the cruisers’ catapults were the flotilla’s long-range scouts. You had to hope they would spot Japanese ships before the Japs spotted them. And you had to hope that, if they did, they’d be able to relay a warning before some slanty-eyed son of a bitch in the cockpit of a Zero hacked them out of the sky.

Neither of those hopes struck Pete as especially good. American scouts had already missed Japanese naval units more than once in the Pacific. And one of those sedate floatplanes wouldn’t last long against a Zero, much less against a swarm of Zeros. It’d last … about as long as the
Suwannee
would, say, in a gun duel with a Jap battlewagon.

Not that the
Ranger
would last one whole hell of a lot longer. But the
Ranger
could make twenty-nine knots. She might manage to flee from such an unfortunate encounter. The
Suwannee
and the
Chenango
couldn’t even do that. A battleship would devour them at its leisure.

Something overhead that wasn’t a Wildcat or a floatplane drew Pete’s nervous glance. Then he relaxed … fractionally. “Gooney bird,” he explained to Bob Cullum, who’d sent him a quizzical stare.

“Ah.” The other leatherneck nodded. “Yeah, they’re all over this stretch of the Pacific, aren’t they?”

“Damn right they are,” Pete said. “They’re just about big enough to shoot down, too.”

“Bad luck!” Cullum said. “No luck’s worse’n that! Fuck, I’d sooner bust ten mirrors than shoot an albatross.”

“Okay, okay. All right, already. Keep your hair on, man. I was just kidding around.” Pete knew about how hurting an albatross was worse than breaking a mirror while walking under a ladder as a black cat sauntered across your path. Anybody who’d ever put to sea in the tropical Pacific did, even if—like Pete—he’d never heard of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
.

But Bob Cullum took the superstition to extremes. No matter how much Pete apologized, the other Marine muttered about curses and misfortunes for days. By the time he finally shut up, Pete was tempted to head for Midway with a machine gun and a flamethrower, to wipe the breeding colony of gooney birds off the face of the earth.

Only one thing stopped him: the Japs held the island. He wondered if they felt the same way about albatrosses as white men did. If not, they might be settling the great big birds’ hash for him. He could hope, anyhow.

“Sir!” Sergeant Hideki Fujita stood at rigid—to say nothing of corpselike—attention. His salute was so perfect, even so extravagant, that the pickiest, the most worst-tempered, drillmaster could have found nothing wrong with it. “Reporting as ordered, sir!”

“At ease, Sergeant,” Captain Ikejiri said. Fujita eased his stiff brace a little, but still felt anything but easy. What noncom would, when summoned out of the blue by an officer? The first thing that went through Fujita’s mind was
What have I done now?
Sensing as much, Ikejiri went on, “You’re not in trouble.”

“Sir!” Fujita repeated, and went back to attention. When they were really after you, didn’t they try to lull you into a false sense of security?

“At
ease
, Sergeant,” the captain said again, more sharply this time. “How would you like to get away from Burma—about as far away from Burma as you can go and stay in the Japanese Empire?”

“Sir?” It was the same word for the third time in a row, but now Fujita meant it as a question.

“I’m asking you. I’m not telling you. You can say no. You won’t get in trouble if you do say no, and no one will think less of you if you do,”

Captain Ikejiri said. “But you’ve been eager to see action, and here—or rather, there—is a chance for you to see more than you would if you stayed in Myitkyina.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Fujita said cautiously.

“I know you don’t. That’s why I called you in: to explain what your choices are.” Ikejiri let his patience show. “You will know there was some talk of using our special techniques against the Englishmen in India.”

He was a good officer, a conscientious officer. Even here, with nobody listening but Fujita, who was already in the know, he didn’t talk openly about bacteriological warfare. He took security seriously, so seriously that he censored himself, perhaps without even noticing he was doing it.

“Oh, yes, sir!” Fujita nodded. He would have loved to give England a taste of Japan’s medicine.

“Good. Then you will also know that it was decided not to proceed with this. The concern was that we were too likely to be found out, and that that would not be advantageous for the Empire,” Ikejiri said.

“I had heard that,
hai
.” Fujita nodded once more. Like most ordinary soldiers, he was all for giving the white men the plague or smallpox or cholera or whatever else Japan had in its bag of tricks now, and for worrying about consequences later. Eagerly, he asked, “Do we have permission to operate against England now, sir?”

“Against England? No,” Captain Ikejiri said, and Fujita’s chin went down onto his chest in disappointment. But the officer went on, “We do have permission to begin special warfare against the Americans in Hawaii. If they can’t use those islands, they will have to try to fight the war from the coast of their continent. Obviously, that would be difficult and expensive for them, and most desirable for us.”

“Yes, sir. I can see how it would be,” Fujita replied, picturing a map. An extra three or four thousand kilometers of sea voyage each way? Oh, the Americans would love that!

“The special unit will be set up on the island called Midway,” Captain Ikejiri said. “The Navy has long-range bombers that can reach the Hawaiian islands from Midway. I am being transferred to the new facility. I would like to have some men along I know I can rely on. So, Sergeant—will you come to this Midway place with me?”

“Yes, sir!” Hideki Fujita didn’t hesitate. He knew nothing about Midway Island except that it wasn’t Burma. What else did he need to know?

Nothing in Burma, nothing that had anything to do with Burma, happened right away. That would have annoyed Fujita more had it also surprised him more. He’d spent a long time in the Army now. He’d come to see how very little that had to do with soldiering happened right away—the main exception being the arrival of an unwelcome bullet or shell.

No, transfer requests had to snake up the chain of command. Approvals—assuming there were approvals—had to wind their way back down. Transportation orders needed to be cut. Planes had to get off the ground.

In due course, the unit threw a farewell party for Captain Ikejiri and the noncoms and private soldiers who would accompany him to Midway. It got kind of drunk out. In one skit, the men who were staying behind mimed his party falling off the edge of the world. They howled laughter. Fujita found himself less amused. Captain Ikejiri clutched the hilt of his officer’s sword hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

“Take it easy, sir,” Fujita whispered to him. “If you start taking heads, people will talk about you.”

Ikejiri smiled thinly. “I know that, Sergeant. I really do. But I thank you for reminding me just the same. The temptation is there, believe me.” With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, he moved his right hand away from the curved sword.

He and the men who accompanied him and their caged animals and infected fleas and bacteriological cultures crowded an Army transport plane that looked a lot like an American DC-3 (the resemblance was not a coincidence; Japan had been building the design under license since before the war). From Myitkyina, they flew to Bangkok—Siam was a Japanese ally.

They got stuck there for a couple of days. No one seemed to have heard they were coming, which meant no one wanted to allocate the transport fuel so it could go on. If Captain Ikejiri had been annoyed at the going-away party, he was furious now. When he stormed off the plane, Fujita wondered if Siamese—or Japanese—heads would roll.

But the telegram proved mightier than the sword. Once Ikejiri used his connections, what must have been a peremptory wire came back to Bangkok. Local officials fell all over themselves refueling the transport and getting it out of there. They might have feared that some of the unit’s diseased fleas would get loose and touch off epidemics in their town. Watching Captain Ikejiri’s smile of grim satisfaction as gasoline gurgled into the plane’s tanks, Fujita suspected they might have had excellent reason for such fears.

The airstrip at Hanoi was heavily guarded. Japan had taken over French Indochina. The French had had troubles of their own with the Annamese and other native peoples. The locals didn’t want to be occupied by Japan, either, even if the Japanese were Asians rather than white men. Whether they wanted that or not, they didn’t have enough guns to stop it. But they did have enough to make nuisances of themselves: thus the barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the airstrip.

At least the Japanese in Hanoi didn’t seem astonished that the transport had come down out of the sky. They gassed it up, did a little work on one engine, and sent it on its way. The natives didn’t shoot at it as it gained altitude. If they knew what it carried, they wouldn’t want that cargo raining down on their countryside. They weren’t supposed to have any way of knowing, but how much did that prove?

From Hanoi, the transport droned across the South China Sea to Manila. Manila, seen from the air, was a surprisingly big city. It had taken a lot of damage when the Rising Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes, not much of which had been repaired. The jungle-covered islands of the Philippines gave way to more ocean as the transport flew on to Guam. By the time the wheels hit the landing strip, Fujita hoped he would never set foot in another airplane as long as he lived.

But he couldn’t even escape the one he was on. And he still had a long way to go before he finally made it to Midway. He’d had no idea the Pacific was so vast. He’d also had no idea Midway was so small, so flat, and, except for its position, so utterly insignificant.

The really scary thing was that it was another two thousand kilometers from Midway to the Hawaiian islands, and four thousand from those islands to the U.S. mainland. Whatever else you said about this war, it had scale. He’d just come a quarter of the way around the world to position himself to strike a blow against the Americans. He’d have to do plenty more traveling before he could actually attack them.

HERB DRUCE POURED
himself a bourbon on the rocks. He handed Peggy another one. They clinked glasses. “ ‘Here’s to Three Men well out of a Boat!’ ” Herb quoted.

Peggy drank. The bourbon flamed down her throat. “That old thing,” she said with a chuckle. She didn’t know how many times she’d read
Three Men in a Boat
. Whatever the number was, it was large. Victorian foolishness on the Thames made a perfect antidote to the harried modern world.

When she said so, her husband nodded. But then he said, “Jerome K. Jerome lasted long enough to watch that foolishness die—literally. He drove an ambulance in France during the last war.”

“Did he?” Peggy exclaimed. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s the truth,” Herb said. “You could look it up, if you felt like looking it up. Or you could just believe me if you wanted to live dangerously.”

“I’ll try that,” Peggy said. “If I need more exercise later, I’ll take a shot at jumping to conclusions.”

“There you go.” Herb nodded. “Plenty of people get plenty of practice at that one, though, so the competition’s pretty stiff.” Ice cubes clattered as he knocked back his drink. He stared down into the glass; he might have been wondering how it had emptied so fast. When he continued, it was on a slightly different note: “If I’d been in the right place at the right time, I could’ve met him when I was Over There.”

“That would’ve been something,” Peggy said.

“Sure would. Would’ve mattered more to me than anything I did do, even if I didn’t see it that way twenty-five years ago.” Herb started fixing himself a fresh drink. “Want another one, too?”

“You bet.” Peggy drained her own glass, then handed it to him for the refill. After they clinked again, she asked, “So which Boat are you well out of?”

Her husband coughed in faint embarrassment. “Remember that business in Tennessee?”

“The one you couldn’t talk about ’cause J. Edgar Hoover would shoot you through the window with a Tommy gun if you even started to open your mouth?”