The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (29 page)

Few prisoners had any boots at all. They’d been plundered after they gave up. Well, of course they had. As soon as a man surrendered, he stopped being a man. He was just a beast, a thing, to be used as his captors found convenient … or amusing.

Fujita had put a few fallen prisoners out of their misery. Couldn’t have them slowing up the column, after all. But he’d never fired into a mass of Russians just to watch them go down. When he had to kill, he killed quickly and cleanly, as the guard in front of him had done. He saw no sport in gutshooting men or bayoneting them so they died a centimeter at a time.

But he said not a word to the Japanese soldiers who enjoyed doing things like that. It wasn’t as if standing orders forbade mistreating prisoners of war. During the last fight against the Russians, such orders had been in place. Japan wanted to show the European powers and America she’d built the same kind of civilization they already had.

Now, by all the signs, the people who ran the country didn’t care what the European powers and America thought. Surrender had long been a disgrace in Japan. If the captors of soldiers who gave up felt like mistreating them or even killing them, no so-called laws of war stood in the way.

And Japan had never ratified the Geneva Convention. The Europeans’ silly rules weren’t going to hold back the Empire, either. Nothing was, not any more.

Peasants in the fields—maybe native Manchus, maybe Chinese settlers—stared at the column of white men in ragged khaki. None stared from close range, however. Not only was the column unfamiliar and therefore alarming; it was guarded by Japanese soldiers, and so doubly alarming.

Yes, Manchukuo was Japan’s ally—Japan’s puppet, if you wanted to be unkind about it. But the local peasants didn’t see Japanese soldiers as allies. They saw them as plunderers, as locusts. Fujita had served in Manchukuo for some time now. He knew the peasants had their reasons
for seeing his comrades that way. On the other hand, they
were
peasants. No doubt they would have kept their distance from Chinese soldiers (or, for that matter, from Brazilian soldiers), too.

Lieutenant Hanafusa strode by, a one-man parade. Being an officer, he wasn’t burdened with a rifle and a heavy pack. He could afford to waste energy showing off. (And he too wore a pair of supple Russian boots, so his feet would be happy.) “Sir, may I ask you a question?” Sergeant Fujita called to him.

“What is it?” Hanafusa returned.

Fujita got the idea that, if the lieutenant didn’t care for the question, someone would be unhappy immediately thereafter. He also had a good notion of who that someone would be. Well, too late to back off now. “Have you heard yet, sir, just where we’re supposed to be going with all these miserable prisoners?”

To his vast relief, Hanafusa nodded. “As a matter of fact, I have. There’s a camp—or some kind of facility, anyhow—at a place called Pingfan.”

“Where would that be, sir?” Fujita knew he was pressing his luck. He bowed to the officer. “Please excuse me, but I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, I hadn’t, either, when somebody told me about it,” Lieutenant Hanafusa said, with more generosity than he usually showed. “It’s about twenty-five kilometers south of Harbin.”

“Ah, so desu!”
Fujita exclaimed. He knew where Harbin was, all right. Any Japanese who’d spent some time here would have. Not only was it one of the biggest cities in Manchukuo, it also looked more like a Western town than most places here. That sprang from the strong local Russian influence, which persisted even now. And it was a major rail center; you went through Harbin if you needed to get anywhere in Manchukuo. Fujita had done it several times. He tried one more question: “What will they do with them there?”

“Beats me. That’s for the damned Russians to worry about,” Hanafusa replied. “All I know is, we’re taking them to something called Unit 731. The people who run it want prisoners. Now that we’ve taken so many, our job is to deliver the sorry bastards to them.”

“What are they going to use them for? Or will they use them up?”

“Beats me,” Hanafusa repeated cheerfully. “That’s for the Russians to worry about, too. Maybe after we make the delivery I’ll go back up to
Harbin and screw a blond Russian whore—one more reminder that we beat them.”

“Yes, sir. That sounds good, sir.” Fujita grinned.

Hanafusa started to strut off, then caught himself. “Oh, that reminds me, Sergeant. You
were
vaccinated for smallpox when you went into the Army, weren’t you?”

“I sure was!” Fujita winced at the memory. “It took. I was sick for a couple of days. My arm swelled up like it was poisoned, and I got a big old blister full of pus.”

“I had the same thing happen to me. Not much fun, was it?” But Lieutenant Hanafusa nodded, as if satisfied. “That’s all right, then.”

“What’s all right, sir? Why do you need to know a silly thing like that?”

“It ties in with what people say about Unit 731,” the lieutenant said. The answer might have made sense to him, but it didn’t to Fujita. The sergeant was going to ask him to explain, but Hanafusa did hurry away this time. Fujita had already pushed him as far as a noncom could reasonably push an officer, and maybe a little further besides.

He’ll come back. It’s still a long way to Harbin. If he’s in a good mood, I can find out later on
, Fujita thought. He rubbed his arm. It felt fine now, but he still wore a nasty scar from the vaccination. And he remembered how little sympathy the doctors had shown. One of them told him,
You’d be a lot sicker than this if you really came down with smallpox
.

Fujita knew that was true. One of his grandfathers had a pocked face, and mourned a younger brother who hadn’t survived the disease.

“Food, please, sir?” another Russian prisoner whined in bad Japanese.

“No food now. Food later,” Fujita answered. Idly, he wondered whether the white man had ever been vaccinated.

THEY’D REMOVED THE CANNON
from Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka for this mission. He wasn’t shooting up Russian panzers today. His plane and half a dozen others would try to take out a railroad bridge over the Dnieper near Borisov.

Colonel Steinbrenner nodded to the pilots he’d chosen. “I picked you boys for a reason,” he told them. “You’re the best I’ve got. That bridge has got to go. The Reds are hauling all kinds of crap over it. Don’t let me down. Don’t let the
Reich
down, either.”

The flyers nodded. Hans-Ulrich noticed that the wing commander didn’t say anything about not letting the
Führer
down. He didn’t make a fuss about it, but he noticed. How could you help noticing such things when everybody’d got so maniacal about security and loyalty these days? Yes, the powers that be thought Steinbrenner was all right. He wouldn’t have replaced Colonel Greim if they hadn’t. But you never could tell whether they’d change their minds.

“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked after he finished the briefing. One of the other pilots stuck up his hand. The colonel nodded. “What is it, Franz?”

“Borisov is in Russia,
nicht wahr
?” Franz Fischbach said.

“In Byelorussia, actually. But yes, inside the Soviet Union, if that’s what you meant,” Steinbrenner answered. “The gloves are off. I’ll say that again, to make sure you get it.
The gloves are off
. The Reds have been bombing us whenever they found the nerve. Now we get to show them what they bought. Don’t you like it? If you don’t, I’ll find somebody else to go instead.”

“Oh, no, sir. Don’t worry about me,” Fischbach said quickly. Any other reply and he could have kissed his flying career good-bye. “I just wanted to make sure the brass bothered to check the map.”

That got a chuckle from the wing commander. “Yeah, you never can tell with the fellows with the fancy shoulder straps.… Other questions?” He looked surprised when he got one. “What’s on your mind, Peter?”

“Are we knocking the Reds around to help persuade England and France to throw in with us?” Peter Tannenwald inquired. “That’s what you hear everywhere.”

“I’ve heard it, too. I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. Hans-Ulrich had also heard it. He hoped it was true. It would make life easier. Steinbrenner went on, “You’d do better asking somebody from the Foreign Ministry, not me.”

“Oh, sure, sir.” Tannenwald grinned at him. “Only you’re right here, and those clowns are back in Berlin.”

“That’s true, but they know the answer, and I just wish I did. All I know is, you’ve got to go get that bridge,” Steinbrenner said. “Good luck to you all. I hope to see every one of you back here before very long.”

Hans-Ulrich hoped that would happen, too. The Germans and Poles had just about cleared the Red Army out of Poland. They’d pushed into the northern Ukraine from southeastern Poland. The Pripet Marshes, which lay on the Polish-Byelorussian border, slowed their advance in that part of the front. No German panzers were anywhere near Borisov, not so far as Hans-Ulrich knew.

Franz Fischbach summed up what that meant: “We don’t want to get shot down behind the Russian lines, you’re saying.”

“Not unless you’ve got a big insurance policy and you need your next of kin to cash it in right now,” Steinbrenner agreed dryly. By all the signs, the Russians cared little for the Geneva Convention. They hadn’t signed it. That meant the Germans didn’t need to follow its rules when dealing with Red prisoners. But it also meant the Russians did as they pleased with Germans they captured. You heard stories about foot soldiers ingeniously mutilated, maybe after they were dead, but maybe not, too. Some pilots made sure they always kept a round in their pistol, to keep the Russians from having fun with them if their luck soured. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t worried about such things before. Flying against Borisov … 
I’d better see to it
, he thought.

After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Dieselhorst asked him about what was going on. Hans-Ulrich explained the mission. Dieselhorst nodded impatiently.
“Ja, ja,”
he said. “But what about the Western powers? Are they going to come to their senses, or will they go on fighting us instead?”

“Peter asked Colonel Steinbrenner the same thing.”

“And …?”

“And the colonel said he should talk to the fellows in striped trousers, ’cause they might know and he didn’t.”

Dieselhorst snorted. “Those fairies don’t know their ass from their elbow. Sure would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to worry about the Western front.”

“You’re right. It would. But the colonel can’t do anything about that,
and neither can we. All we can do is bomb the snot out of the Ivans, so we will.”

“Sounds good by me.” The sergeant sent him a crooked grin. “And then you can try and get back to Bialystok and see your half-Jewish girlfriend.”

Rudel’s ears heated. “Sofia’s not my girlfriend.” That was true, although not from lack of effort on his part. “I don’t know what kind of
Mischling
she is.” That was also true. She was maddeningly vague about herself. She might have been almost a full-blooded Jew. Or she might just have been an uncommonly swarthy Pole. In these parts, half the time nobody was sure what anybody else was.

Flying the mission seemed easier than facing Sofia, anyhow. The Russians could only kill him in the air or torture him and then kill him if they caught him on the ground. They couldn’t humiliate him, make him feel he was twelve years old again, and at the same time make him feel more electrically alive, more sparky and sparkly, than he’d ever felt before.

As soon as his Stuka crossed over into territory the Reds still held, they started shooting at him. They opened up with everything they had: not only antiaircraft guns but also machine guns and rifles. That small-arms fire would fall far short of the plane. All they were doing with it was putting themselves in danger. A bullet falling from a couple of thousand meters could kill you if it landed on your unprotected head. The Germans wasted much less ammo like that: not none, but much less.

He droned along behind and to the left of Peter Tannenbaum’s plane, the flight leader. If Peter didn’t know the way to Borisov, they were all shafted. Hans-Ulrich kept an eye peeled for Soviet fighters. Messerschmitt pilots scorned the biplanes and flat-nosed monoplanes the Red Air Force threw against them. But a fighter all but helpless against a 109 could hack a Stuka out of the sky with the greatest of ease.

“See anything, Albert?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube.

“Only the rest of our boys,” Dieselhorst answered. “I wish they’d given me two heavy machine guns back here instead of one ordinary piece. Then I’d really stand a chance against whatever came after us.”

Roughened by static, Tannenbaum’s voice came through Hans-Ulrich’s
earphones: “I see the target ahead at one o’clock. Everybody have it?”

That ribbon of water through the flat landscape had to be the Dnieper. And those steel curves marked the bridge. It looked as graceful as most in Germany. Given Russian slovenliness, that surprised Rudel. It was so all the same. “Got it,” he said, his confirmation intermingled with the others.

One by one, the Stukas flipped a wing in the air and dove on the target. The Ivans knew how important the bridge was. Their flak sent up puffs of black smoke all around the bombers. Most of the shells burst behind them. Gunners often underestimated how fast a diving Stuka could go. But Franz Fischbach shouted in pain and despair and fear. His Ju-87 plunged faster than any of the others, and didn’t pull up. An enormous explosion and a pillar of black smoke marked where it slammed into the ground.

Hans-Ulrich released his bombs and hauled back on the stick for all he was worth. The climb was the real danger point, not the dive. The Stuka wasn’t very high, and it moved slower and slower as it shed the momentum it had.

“Somebody got the bridge,” the backwards-facing Sergeant Dieselhorst reported.

“Good,” Rudel answered. “I hate it when our men go down.” Another flyer would have talked of friends going down. Hans-Ulrich had precious few friends in the
Luftwaffe
. The other pilots had come to respect his skill and courage. Like him? That seemed to be asking too much. But he had more urgent things to worry about, starting with staying alive.