Last Orders: The War That Came Early (29 page)

When the air-raid sirens began to howl in the middle of the morning, Hideki Fujita laughed and swore at the same time. The officers had their heads up their back passages. Who would take a drill seriously when it came at a time when American bombers were most of the way back to Oahu?

Only it turned out not to be a drill. The antiaircraft guns pounded away. Bombs began bursting on Oahu and in the ocean around it. The Yankees had lousy aim. When enough came down, though, how much did it matter?

All Fujita could do was huddle in a trench and hope none of those badly aimed bombs came down on top of him. None of them had yet, or he wouldn’t be here huddling. He dared hope he’d stay lucky one more time.

One of the bombers got hit and plunged toward the Pacific. That was what they got for having the nerve to come over in broad daylight! Fujita wasn’t the only Japanese fighting man to raise a cheer.

Another bomber got hit, and then another one. The Americans weren’t buying anything cheaply today. But the bombs kept raining down, too. A near miss knocked Fujita over onto his back, half buried him in sand, and left his ears too abused to hear anything much below a shout.

Air raids always seemed to last forever. Digging a finger into one ringing ear, Fujita scrambled out of the trench when the American planes finally flew off to the southeast. Unless an officer grabbed him and told him to do something else, he intended to go over to the lagoon and fill his belly with fresh-killed fish. Even bombs brought some good with them.

He saw that the airstrips had taken another beating. It would be a while before the G4Ms on Midway could even try to repay the Yankees for what they’d done here today. If you didn’t count the potency of germs, it was an uneven fight. Japan was at the very end of her reach here, while American strength in Hawaii kept growing and growing.

Fujita had almost got to the lagoon when the air-raid sirens began to screech again. He heard them as if from very far away, but hearing them at all made him swear. The Americans wouldn’t be coming back, and they wouldn’t throw two separate waves of planes at Midway … would they? Why? What point to it?

But those were more planes coming in from the direction toward which the bombers had flown. These were much lower, and differed in shape. Fujita rubbed his eyes, not to get sand out of them but in disbelief. These airplanes had a familiar outline. On his journeys across the vast reaches of the Japanese Empire, he’d flown in more than one Showa L2D3-1a. How could he not recognize them when he spied them now? What were they doing coming up from the southeast?

Only they weren’t Showas. Somebody’d told him once that the Japanese transport was a license-built version of the U.S. DC-3. These were the American originals, with stars on wings and fuselage in place of the Rising Sun. They’d come close enough for him to spy such details now—and to give him a good look at the men parachuting out of them one after another after another. The sky was full of silk.

He didn’t hang around to admire the spectacle. Instead, he unslung his rifle and started to fight. He’d never dreamt Midway might be invaded from above. But even though he hadn’t, the Americans had.

Some Japanese soldiers were already firing at the paratroopers, and at the planes that carried them. One transport blew up in midair, showering Midway with blazing wreckage.
“Banzai!”
Fujita whooped.

He quickly emptied one clip, then another. He took more from a countryman’s corpse. The dead man didn’t need the rounds any more, while Fujita could still kill Americans with them.

He fired again at the men wafting down. Then a Yankee already on the ground sent a bullet that kicked up sand by his feet. He dove for cover. Standing up to fire at the parachutists wasn’t safe any more.

Everyone was running every which way, Americans and Japanese
alike. The Yankees had mostly come down in the less garrisoned western part of the island, but not all their drops put them where they were supposed to go. The Japanese had trained against invasion from the sea till Fujita was sick of it. Anybody with eyes in his head could tell that the Americans would want Midway back if they could get to it.

But no one—at least no one with the authority to give orders here—had dreamt the Americans would come by air. No one had planned what to do in case that happened. Without planning, the Japanese were at a disadvantage. They never had been great improvisers.

“We will defend the barracks and the desalinization plant and the special unit!” shouted an officer—Fujita presumed the man was an officer, anyhow—with a loud, authoritative voice. “They will give us the best cover. And we’ll see how the Yankees do with only the water they brought along.”

Whether the fellow with the loud voice was on officer or not, the command made good sense to Fujita. If the Americans had to come straight at defensible positions, they’d pay a high price for every centimeter of sandy soil they seized. Maybe other Japanese forces would be able to relieve the garrison. Or maybe it would be able to dispose of all the paratroopers and go on harassing Hawaii.

An American machine gun spat funny-looking red-orange tracers not far enough above the ground. The Yankees fed their machine guns from belts, not aluminum strips, so they could fire longer continuous bursts. And for every tracer you saw, there were all the ordinary rounds you didn’t. You also had to hope none of those rounds saw you.

Japanese soldiers whom some of those rounds had seen lay sprawled in the sand. A dreadfully wounded man pulled a grenade off his belt, yanked out the pin, and rolled onto the little bomb. His body took the full force of the burst. Not the perfect form of seppuku, but it would serve. He wasn’t suffering any more, and he wouldn’t need to worry about disgracing himself and his family by being captured.

By the way the Americans kept pushing forward, they didn’t think the garrison could stop them. As the sun slid down the sky toward the western horizon, Fujita began to believe they were right. More of them had landed than he’d guessed, and transports kept flying in to drop
reinforcements and supplies. They wouldn’t have to fight with just the water they’d brought.

“Sergeant!” a captain called. “Can you take a squad and drive the Yankees off that little bit of high ground there?” He pointed to show the position he meant. “It gives them too good a firing position—they can rake these trenches if they bring up machine guns.”

“Hai!”
Fujita saluted. What was he going to do, tell the captain no? He didn’t think a whole company could drive the Americans off that swell of ground, but the garrison didn’t have a company to commit in the first place. He grabbed a squad’s worth of soldiers and sailors and told them what they had to do.

No one told him no, either. The men just nodded. They hefted their rifles. One attached a fresh magazine. Then they were up and scuffing over the sand toward the low but dangerous hillock.

Like autumn leaves, they began to fall. Had Fujita been a samurai, he would have used the line in his death poem. But he was only a sergeant trying to do a job. He knew he would fail, but the trying somehow mattered.

He made it farther than he thought he would—all the way up the swell. He was wounded once before he reached the top. His leg hurt, but he kept going. And he shot an American there before he caught two more rounds in the chest. He fell as if in slow motion in a film. A Yankee with three stripes on his left sleeve brought up his rifle to finish him off. Flame from the muzzle. And then, as in that film, final fadeout.

Theo Hossbach missed the radioman’s position in the old Panzer II for one very good reason. The wireless set in the obsolete little machine sat back by the fireproof—everyone hoped!—bulkhead separating the fighting compartment from the one that held the engine. It was the warmest place in the panzer to sit. Even on the worst Russian winter days, it wasn’t too bad … once you persuaded the engine to start, anyhow.

He had a much better chance of staying alive in this Panzer IV. He also felt he had a much better chance of freezing to death. Up here at
the front of the chassis, he was as far from the nice, warm engine compartment as he could get. His breath smoked. His teeth chattered. The Panzer IV had a heater, but it didn’t do much.

Adi Stoss’ breath smoked, too. The driver didn’t seem to care. “How’d you like to play football in weather like this?” he said. “The pitch’d be frozen hard, and the ball would bounce like it was out of its mind.”

“No thanks!” Theo might have put more expression into his answer than he’d intended.

Adi laughed. “Yeah, it’d be even worse for a ’keeper, wouldn’t it? Us outfield players, we’re running around and banging into each other. We stay warm that way. ’Keepers, you’ve got to stand in front of your nets and turn into ice cubes. Well, everybody knows you guys are nuts.”

“Your mother,” Theo said, which made Adi laugh some more. As far as Theo was concerned—as far as any goalkeeper was concerned—the notion that their position attracted eccentrics was a slander perpetrated by ten-elevenths of the footballing world. That in itself went a long way toward proving the outfield players’ point.

Then a sharp order blared in Theo’s earphones: “The regiment is to assemble at once in the birch forest in the northwest corner of map square Green-17. All units acknowledge immediately.”

“Acknowledging,” Theo said, and gave the panzer’s number. As soon as he’d done that, he gave the news to Adi and to Hermann Witt.

“That’s not where we were going,” the panzer commander said with commendable calm. “Who’ll plug the hole we’re leaving in the line?”

“Don’t know,” Theo said: the truth, but not a helpful truth.

“Something’s fucked up somewhere,” Witt said. Theo thought that was very likely, as it was on every other day since the creation of the world. The sergeant went on, “Well, if we lose the war because the Ivans pour through the hole, nobody can blame us for obeying orders.”

“Who says?” Adi put in, and he too had a point. Nevertheless, he swung the panzer to the southwest and chugged toward the rendezvous.

They got there a couple of hours later. By then, Adi was muttering darkly about how close to dry the fuel tank had got. Theo had yet to
meet a panzer crewman who didn’t mutter about fuel every once in a while … or more often than that. Panzers didn’t sip gas. They gulped it. They all but inhaled it. And getting more was never as automatic as it should have been.

Other worries first
, Theo thought as he climbed out of his steel shell. It was even colder in the open air. He had on a wool sweater and long johns under his black coveralls. He was cold anyway. He lit a cigarette. It didn’t warm him up, but he enjoyed it anyhow.

More Panzer IVs, and a handful of beat-up IIIs, clattered into the woods. More crewmen in panzer black got out and started loudly and profanely wondering what they devil they were doing there. Theo thought it was too cold and too Russian out for such important philosophical questions, but what did he know? He knew he didn’t have the answer, which put him one up on most of his comrades.

“
Achtung! Achtung!
Gather around me, dedicated soldiers of the
Grossdeutsches Reich!
” That loud voice belonged to Major Stähler, the National Socialist Loyalty Officer. Theo and the whole crew had as little to do with him as they possibly could. With Adi driving their panzer, even that little seemed like too much.

“Maybe he knows something,” Witt said.

“That’d be a first,” Adi remarked. Theo heard him, but he didn’t think the sergeant did.

“Our regiment—our brave and reliable regiment—has been chosen for an important military honor,” Stähler went on as the crewmen gathered around him. “You will have heard certain lying rumors about disaffection, even rebellion, within the boundaries of the
Grossdeutsches Reich
.”

As a matter of fact, Theo had heard those rumors. He didn’t suppose anyone in the regiment hadn’t. Adi seemed to know an awful lot about what was going on in and around Münster. He never got mail from home, but he damn well did keep his ear to the ground. And, from what he said in a low voice when no one untrustworthy could overhear, a hell of a lot was going on around there.

“We must ruthlessly stamp out treason without mercy so the war effort can proceed to our certain final triumph,” Major Stähler said. “Rebels against the state, the Party, and the
Führer
must be suppressed.
They must be, and they shall be. And our regiment has been chosen as one of the instruments of suppression.”

He sounded proud to announce that. The panzer crewmen’s hum of low talk suddenly rose. Some of them were bound to be proud, too—like any German outfit, the regiment had its share of enthusiastic Nazis. Some, yes, but far from all.

Stähler went on, “Since the police and the security services have not been able to bring order to certain regions in the western areas of the
Reich
, the
Wehrmacht
will insure that obedience to our beloved
Führer
is restored. As I said, we are part of that effort.”

If the
Führer
was so beloved, why did he need a regiment of panzers to restore obedience? Theo wondered about things like that. He also wondered how many other soldiers wondered likewise. But then something else the National Socialist Loyalty Officer said lit up inside his mind like a searchlight. So they were bound for the western part of Germany, were they? Surely it was no accident that most of this regiment came from Breslau, not far from the Polish border. The Nazis might be bastards, but they were sly bastards. They knew better than to send a unit where the men might have to open fire on their cousins and sisters and mothers and granddads and kid brothers.

“And so,” Major Stähler finished up, “tomorrow we shall proceed to the nearest railhead. From there we shall return to our dear
Grossdeutsches Reich
and cleanse it once and for all of the filth of treason and betrayal.” He looked out at the assembled panzer crewmen. “Any questions?”

No one said a word. You had to be the world’s biggest
Dummkopf
to ask questions of someone like Major Stähler. You wouldn’t find out anything worth knowing, and whatever you said would land you in trouble. The major was just trolling for suckers. He didn’t catch anybody this time. Theo wondered why he bothered trying.