The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (18 page)

Makoto had quickly learned a lot more about Shinuoga than he had ever hoped to learn no matter how often he
had helped Uncle Fukui Hideto drive goods to the market with the cooperative’s wonderful diesel truck—the first one in the village. He had even let Makoto drive it, and as much as the nice Uncle Hideto was the kind of man to be too kind, the officers had sent Makoto on to the armored regiment instead thanks to his familiarity with motor vehicles. Not everyone had done that, and he obviously had something which the junior lieutenant thought made him fit to be examined for a transfer to the armored regiment.

And here he was, waiting for the train to leave the station in southern Mongolia to traverse the rugged mountain regions into the borderland just hours from the domain of the foreign devils.
He couldn’t have imagined being this far from home just a few years ago. It was like he had gone to another side of the world, and now he was patiently waiting to visit yet another one.

Mongolia was nothing like Annam. The flags were the same, and people spoke the same langu
age—albeit in a very strange dialect that was almost impossible to untangle—and the suits and uniforms were the same, but the country was completely different. The white, desolate winter landscape was something he had only seen in pictures, and the dry cold was nothing like he had imagined it. Like any schoolboy, he had seen the
Our Homeland
films in the local public cinema and he had been swept away by the amazing, colorful motion pictures that chronicled the great land from northern Mongolia and Manchuria in the north to distant Alaska in the east, to western Shinkyou and Punjab in the west, to the Southern Island Chain and Nanshuu in the south... It had been strange to see the large cities along the coast, the Yamato Islands—home to Kyoto, Edo, Nagoya, and Nagasaki—and the other parts of the country so distant from his village in Annam Province. As a good boy, he had watched the entire series of 6 one-hour long films with his school as the filmmakers had gone through the country region by region so that every little boy and girl could see their collective homeland—as the narrator had explained in the film. Annam was one of those provinces that was caught at a crossroads between Viet Province and Cambodia Province to the south, Burma Province to the west, the foreign country of Siam to the southwest, Yunnan Province to the north, and Kousei Province to the east. Some counties in Annam were very different from Makoto’s and were home to people who looked more Southern, more like the Siamese or the Cambodians than most people Makoto was surrounded by back home. Despite Annam’s location, it had a significant number of people with a more Northern look, character, and complexion.

The 243rd Armored
Regiment was from Annam, but the 87th Artillery, 1841th Infantry, and 1985th Infantry had been recruited from Konan, Anki, and Manila. Makoto wasn’t sure what other regiments would make up the division, but there had to be more regiments apart from the ones he knew about. According to Lieutenant Honma’s lectures, a mechanized division had eight regiments in addition to the smaller units attached to the division. There were three armored regiments, three infantry regiments, one artillery regiment, and one armored support regiment as well as companies and battalions of engineers, anti-aircraft artillery, and so on. Yet there was no mistaking that the armored regiments were the centerpiece of the division—those boys from Konan, Anki, and Manila were all going to be playing second fiddle.

Some of the boys from Manila spoke a dialect no one could und
erstand but them, and they were so far some of the more exotic men Makoto had seen with his own eyes—apart from the bizarre people in places like Yunnan, Alaska, and especially the Islanders in the Pacific Islands Province. Granted, from national studies class in school and from watching films about the country, he was aware that there were many local peoples distinct from the Chuuka, like Cambodians, Tibetans, Tai, Miao, and other little peoples—to say nothing of Eskimos, Samoans, and the other alien little peoples. Indeed, Makoto’s older brother’s mother-in-law was probably part Miao, although it wasn’t easy to tell. The line between little peoples and ordinary Chuuka was not exactly simple, unless they were really foreign-looking like Papuans or Fijians. Makoto was probably far from alone in the regiment to be descended from Yamato soldiers who had garrisoned Annam back during the Southern Pacification, and the military village system had not only provided internal security and stability, but the Chuuka soldiers working on the military farms had also had a lot of help around the farming plots from local wives, concubines, and—ultimately—sons and daughters. Makoto’s whole cooperative was a product of the military village system and generations of mixing between Yamato soldiers and peasants from the former Bastard Kingdom of Dai Viet.

The train was only carry
ing small parts of the division while other men were already at the encampment near the front and others still would be going throughout the next days or so as the division’s parts were being assembled for the first time since the division’s creation by military clerks in an office somewhere. Makoto obviously didn’t know much about the overall plan, and most of the things he had learned about the future were simply speculations from other soldiers. Lots of them were talking about how they would have to drive all through Asia, and it would be thousands of miles. But at least they wouldn’t have to walk. Oh, those poor footsloggers. Maybe they would have to hitch rides on camelback?

He assumed the generals had some sort of carefully laid out plan
like the great generals who had won the similarly great wars in the past, and he would have to trust them and just do his job and load the shells for Mou who would have to prove himself a good shot. At least Makoto’s crew was all sitting together, although two men from the section were squatting on the floor right in front of Makoto and Akino, adding to the cramped feeling. Lance Corporal Akino was the quietest member of Makoto’s crew. He was the radio operator, and alongside Kai and the sergeant the most technically educated, despite his humble background. Akino was a peasant from a cooperative like Makoto, but he came from another village far from Makoto’s belonging to the same rural township. Although he didn’t talk much, he was a big smoker, and he was one of the soldiers who worked hard to fill the car with tobacco smoke amid all the quiet talking. Makoto was already dreading trying to get to the toilet when the need would arise, but there would be no way to avoid it at least once during the trip. You probably risked burning yourself on a smoldering cigarette trying to squeeze past all the pickles to get to the small toilet booth.

After an ungodly wait
the train started to slowly roll out of the platform.
Now just another day in this damned jar
. Makoto had never thought that the army would teach him what it felt like to live the life of an orange in a crate, but he was really starting to understand what it had to be like to be boxed in and just wait for someone to pick you up and end your misery.

It was cold and dark when they had been called to stop by the men in coats with big fur caps on their heads, and it wasn’t like they could just ignore them and ride past the barbed wire that bad been put up on either side of the narrow dirt road. The Russians were easy to recognize, and Meryem told herself that she wanted to punch them in their stupid white faces when they were so close to her that she could clearly tell that one of the men had a coarse, unshaved upper lip. She was actually timid, but she was sure that she had to restrain herself when face to face with the enemy. Oh, how she wanted to kill one! At least she wanted to want to do it. It was hard to tell how the wanting would feel like, but she was obliged to hope that all the national enemies would die.

“Would you take that hat off?” one of the white men said, but Daryn knew that there was no hope for Meryem to understand him.

“She doesn’t speak Russian,” he said on Meryem’s behalf when she only looked over at him and ignored the soldier’s request.

“That isn’t a required skill, right?” one of the men giggled, not making a more explicit remark than that.

“Tell her to take her hat off,” another soldier said.

Daryn didn’t want to tell Meryem that he actually shared a tiny part of her indignation of posing as a whore. He felt bad for taunting her and being harsh on her for her pride, but he actually didn’t like these men thinking that his wife was the kind of girl who would voluntarily let these men do anything to her body. Like Meryem, Daryn would rather she die than be defiled by these bastards.

The look she was shooting Daryn was one that was partly shy, but partly frustrated, like she wanted to just ask the Russian what the hell he was trying to say. As good-natured as she was, she had a knack for exciting herself by talking about how much she hated the
white ghosts
, but she did not look very contemptuous towards them. Their eyes locked for a brief moment, but when he pointed up at his own hat, she only looked more confused.

“
Take your hat off
,” Daryn said quietly so she could understand since his gesture didn’t do the trick. “
They just want to see your face better
.”

She didn’t like him showing the papers that were supposedly from a Russian official indicating that she was a whore. Even if it wasn’t true, she felt humiliated that these ugly white soldiers would think that. Imagine a slobbering, disgusting Russian having dirty, perverted thoughts about her, leering and just… Her body sent a shudder down her spine. By God, she wanted them to just buzz off and impale themselves on something. However, she removed the fur hat on top of the scarf that covered most of her hair without verbalizing her seething indignation.

“She’s cute,” one man said to the others, but Daryn didn’t care if they thought she was a prostitute—he had to ignore his feelings.

It was part of the job, and the city of Verniy was under martial law which would otherwise make it difficult for Turks to get into the city if they weren’t on some kind of government duty like the Turkmen soldiers stationed near the city. With so many soldiers in the area, it was obvious that there would be a shortage of prostitutes, and Meryem’s license would hardly be questioned since the Russian officials must have handed them out by the thousands. To them she was just another one in a sea of girls and women filling that interchangeable role. Just more meat.

“I hope she’ll change into something a bit less manly,” the sergeant chuckled when he handed the papers back to Daryn, smiling knowingly as if he might even consider asking to take her for a ride when he would get off duty.

The squinty orientals weren’t as pretty as ordinary women, but Gennady had to be realistic. There was a conflict between quality and quantity, and when he did take the time, he found orientals to be more than worth it, and he’d rather go twice to a girl like this than once to a white girl. After all, it wasn’t the face he wanted to fuck—although her face wasn’t that bad for a little squinter.

“Of course sir,” Daryn politely said with a smile that made him feel just a little disgusted with himself.

He didn’t go farther than that, but if they would ask he could take out her dress and show her feminine clothes that would look the part. The Russian NCO looked at Meryem to a degree that Daryn worried that he fancied her while Meryem was looking over at Daryn. Daryn tried to be disinterested in her, and he kept his posture facing the sergeant rather than to look at her. He had warned her that it probably wouldn’t be appropriate for a pimp to think much of her, so he couldn’t give her reassuring looks. He should think of her as a workhorse—a human mare but not more than that.

“Alright,” the sergeant said, talking to Meryem rather than Daryn, “you get to work dear.”

Since she was looking away and stroking the head of her horse to keep her attention away from the whites, she didn’t notice the hand that came up to swat her backside. It wasn’t hard, but her back straightened like a wild animal having its tail pulled, and she gasped, not so much in indignation as in fear and surprise. She wasn’t being seductive or subtle; Daryn could see her face in the corner of his eye, a face that said far too much. Almost as soon as she realized that she had been touched by one of the men, she glared at Daryn rather than the Russian molester.

What kind of a man are you?!
Daryn knew for sure that the slap to her butt was not the act of a playful relative acting awkwardly towards a beloved girl relative. And she knew it too. Meryem had never been touched that way by anyone other than Daryn, and she certainly didn’t like it. The Russian just looked at her briefly with a leering smile, as if the swat of his hand was some kind of international compliment. As far as Daryn knew, Europeans were not actually supposed to behave that way towards another man’s wife.

When Gennady handed the passport back to the pimp he looked at the small, cute oriental girl, smiling at her, but she was looking rather bitchy. What sort of frigid little virgin was that? She wouldn’t get any customers looking like a disgruntled nun.

“Off you go, off you go,” Gennady said as he handed the pimp his papers back.

Leading the horses past the soldiers without further talk, Daryn was relieved that they had passed the worst part of their mission. Obviously things would still not be safe, but passing through teeth was a much more difficult matter than staying alive inside the belly of the beast.

The city felt more like a giant military camp than an ordinary city, something that confirmed the claims Daryn had picked up about the Russians amassing much of their army in the vicinity of the city. He was interested in the closed zone away from the city, but he left that to the Air Corps to try to examine rather than to try his luck. Civilians were forbidden from going near the fortifications and trenches the army had been building to guard the city, and he would try his best to report on troop strength from inside the city. The city was surrounded by loose barbed wire fences, which meant that security was maybe not as tight inside it. It was like the Russians had reinvented the ancient idea of walled cities with just barbed wire with small checkpoints here and there for people to use to get in or out of the city.

As they were getting down farther away from the checkpoint, Daryn was becoming more and more comfortable about pulling the wonderful trick on the enemy. They were inside all thanks to their cool. Meryem’s horse was to her right and Daryn’s to his left, so he could see that Meryem looked sicker again. She hadn’t been sick in a while, but now when they were inside the city it looked like she had suffered a relapse. Didn’t she understand that they had passed the most dangerous part now?

“
What is it
?” he asked.

“
Ugly Russians
,” Meryem muttered almost inaudibly, keeping her face straight ahead.

Was she crying? He couldn’t tell for sure, but she sounded like she was somewhere between just tired and crying, but she was keeping her eyes down on the street, and she had pulled down her furry cap so the trimmed brim concealed her eyes pretty good.

Was this what it was like? Meryem knew that if the Russians would try to get her she would have to make them kill her. She was old enough to know what the enemy would do to girls, and if that would ever be just a chance, she would rather die cleanly than be debased and then die. As much as she could understand—she wasn’t stupid—that Daryn could not defend her as her husband, she felt like she had been raped. Just a little. By the ugly Russian lecherously doing as he pleased with her. How someone could do that so casually like it wasn’t even an afterthought was a mystery to her. Had she been a nobler, more courageous woman she should have pulled out the revolver and shot the bastard.

“
I think they like you
,” he said with a scoff, as if she should feel reassured by it she could see him smirking in the corner of her eye.

Stupid!
She bit her lip rather than scold him for acting like it was all a joke to him. Was it supposed to be funny?! Was that what a man would think? He should still be thinking about getting out his gun and running back to shoot the foul white devil—even a retarded Russian would understand being blown away by a gun. Even if the evil white man thought she was a whore, he shouldn’t treat her obscenely, and Daryn shouldn’t be this disinterested. He should also fantasize about avenging her. And it wasn’t just her—what about him? He’d been defiled too when they treated his wife like that.

“
You should avenge me
,” she mumbled.

“
Be quiet woman
,” Daryn hissed, looking over his shoulder to see that no one might hear what she was saying.

Was she stupid? She surely knew that they would probably be hanged if they got caught, so why would she take offense at a soldier just copping a feel on a whore’s ass? He couldn’t blame her for being upset, but she had to be reasonable. As much as she should treasure her honor and dignity, this was one of those times when she should just swallow her pride and bear her debasement in silence. They weren’t a pair of samurai who would die to protect their dignity; if anything she should find inspiration from the fabled shinobi who would sacrifice everything that mattered to them personally in order to carry out their duty.

Meryem didn’t press him, but she wanted him to just say how sorry he was for letting that Russian touch her. She didn’t want him to run back and blow his brains out; she just wanted him to say that in a perfect world he would have whipped the dirty Russian for touching her and making fun of her. He should want to defend her, not act like he didn’t care.

The outskirts of the city had been haphazardly built up without following any obvious plan, and most of the people outside in the street were Kazakhs or foreigners—Turks from other groups like the nomadic peoples of the mountain range. Persian-speaking mountain people and the Turkic nomads of the Pamir Mountains had been moving into Russian Turkestan since even before the war when certain groups of Persian Tajiks had ignobly rebelled against the Japanese government and abandoned what had then been Japan’s Persian Protectorate situated between Shinkyou Province, Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia before Japanese Persia was subsumed into Shinkyou Province as a couple of prefectures. Even before the war that part of the country had been pretty lawless, and when Daryn was a cadet he had thought that there would have been a good chance that he would be sent there to ride around on camels and police the frontier against bandits and tribal peoples. Some pretty bloody feuds between the Kyrgyz and Tajik groups, the government’s difficulty in settling the harshly different views on adopting policy concerning “little peoples,” and the difficult terrain and lack of effective administration made for a pretty violent and lawless area where traditional tribal authority undermined the lawful authorities.

The large region around the Tenshan Mountains was a hodgepodge of peoples speaking an endless number of languages and dialects. Although Shinkyou Province in general was home to several distinct peoples with subgroups within them, the former Persian Protectorate and Russian Turkestan were infinitely more difficult to understand. An anthropologist would no doubt have much work to do across the region to map all the different peoples, and a city like Verniy brought together people speaking languages similar or completely different from anything Daryn could speak. Other than times when he could use Japanese, Kazakh, or Russian he was essentially helpless, and he had absolutely no way of talking to someone who spoke some kind of Persian or even some languages supposedly related to Kazakh.

Verniy was the largest city in Russian Turkestan, and it took some time to get from the outskirts of the city to the European style tenements closer to the heart of the city. This late in the evening there was not much traffic, but many of the people driving horse-drawn wagons or being outside on foot were soldiers—so far he had yet to see a single civilian Russian. He would have a lot of work to do sorting out which Russians were in the city so Ueno could report back to their superiors in the Intelligence Department.