The War That Came Early: West and East (27 page)

This was plenty bad enough. Dirt trickled down between his bits of planking. It wasn’t just that it got on the back of his neck as he huddled there. If one of those bombs set all the dirt above him crashing down, he would die without any direct enemy wound.
How
good had his carpentry been? One way or the other, he’d find out. No, he didn’t want it to be
or the other
.

More and more bombs whistled down. Bombs were easy to make: impact fuses, explosives, and sheet metal. Even Spaniards had a tough time screwing up the combination. The Nationalists had it down solid. “Enough already, goddammit!” Chaim screamed. No one paid any attention to him.

Eventually, bombs started falling farther away. The drone from the bombers’ engines faded, then disappeared. It was over—till the next time. Chaim crawled out. He nodded to Mike Carroll, who was emerging from his bombproof at the same time. Then he peered over the battered parapet, to make sure Sanjurjo’s men weren’t rushing forward to take advantage of the bombing run.

They weren’t. German troops probably would have been. However brave Spaniards were—and both sides were, above and beyond the call of duty—they weren’t what anyone would call efficient. The landscape had been drastically rearranged. Except for a few saplings leaning at odd angles, it might have come straight from the cratered moon.

Seeing he wouldn’t need his rifle right away, Chaim set it down. He pulled another Gitane from the pack. He missed his mouth the first time he put it in, and he needed three or four tries before he could light a match.

Mike watched with knowing eyes. “I’ve been there,” he said. “Give me another one, will you?”

“Sure,” Chaim said. If the other International had teased him, he probably wouldn’t have. But Mike had indeed been through the mill with him. They smoked together. Little by little, Chaim stopped shaking. Cigarettes helped as much as anything, except maybe brandy. Trouble was, nothing helped much.

“WATCH YOURSELF, PETE,”
Herman Szulc warned. “Here come the Japs.”

“I see ’em,” Pete McGill answered. They’d patched things up, after a fashion. And on Shanghai’s mad, crowded streets, missing Japanese soldiers was harder than seeing them. The Japs were the only people who behaved as if all the Chinese frantically hawking this, that, and the other thing—and the Europeans who livened up the throngs—weren’t there at all. They marched straight ahead. If you didn’t clear out, they’d knock you down with rifle butts (or just shoot you, if they happened to be in a lousy mood) and then walk over you. You couldn’t do anything about it. Shanghai was theirs.

Pete got out of the way, along with his Marine buddies. They stood out
in the crowd, not just because they were white but because they stood a head taller than most of the Chinese around them. Pete met the eyes of a noncom. He nodded first, with respect but without fear. Respect would do. The Jap nodded back, as if to say,
Maybe some other time, but not now
. Then he shouted at his men. They were already stiff as robots. They got stiffer yet.

“Goddamn monkeys think they’re as good as white people,” Szulc muttered.

“Watch it, Herman,” Sergeant Larry Koenig snapped. “Too many folks here savvy some English.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Szulc said. They weren’t on duty; he didn’t have to kowtow to Koenig because the sergeant had those three stripes on his sleeve.

“You better watch it, Herman.” Pete still enjoyed sticking the needle in. “Way you go on, you figure Polacks are as good as white people.”

“Ah, your mother,” Szulc said. If he’d been drunk they might well have started banging away at each other right there. But it was still morning. Nobody’d got potted … yet.

Another company of Japanese soldiers marched by. They
did
think they were as good as white men. Their faces were hard and impassive, but every line of their bodies shouted their pride.
We beat the crap out of the Russians once, and now we’re doing it again
, they might have yelled.
And if you Yankees want to fuck around with us, step right up. We’ll knock your ass over teakettle, too
.

They couldn’t have been more different from the Chinese who scrambled away from them. The Chinese knew they were licked. Everybody knocked them around. They couldn’t do a damn thing about it, any more than a wife stuck in a rotten marriage could when her husband beat her up for the hell of it. She might hate. Hell, she had to hate all the more when she had no hope. Hate or not, though, she was stuck. She had to take it. So did the Chinese.

“Good thing the Japs don’t know you got yourself that White Russian girlfriend,” Herman Szulc said with a leer. “They’d probably figure she was radioing everything you tell her straight to old Joe Stalin.”

“Jesus Christ, Herman, shut the fuck up!” Pete said. “You open your big dumb mouth any wider, you’ll fall right in.”

“Who you callin’ dumb?” Szulc growled. Some dumb guys didn’t have a hint that they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Others were uneasily aware that their candlepower left something to be desired. You really pissed them off when you called them stupid, because down deep they feared you knew what you were talking about. Szulc was one of those. He folded his hands into rocklike fists.

“Knock if off, Herman,” Sergeant Koenig told him. “You got him, so he got you back.”

“He called me a Polack first,” Szulc said. Sometimes the Marine Corps looked a lot like third-grade recess.

Koenig only laughed. “Yeah? So? What are you, a sheeny like Weinstein?”

“Not me!” Szulc crossed himself. “He ain’t just a yid, neither. He’s a fuckin’ Red. If anybody’s sending shit to Stalin, he’s the guy.”

It was a good thing Max wasn’t there, or he would have tried to clean Szulc’s clock for him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a Red. But he didn’t let anybody rag on him for being a Jew. There weren’t many Jewish leathernecks. The handful Pete had known were uncommonly tough, even for the Corps.

Before anything else could happen, the clock in the tower of the new Customs House chimed the hour. Pete checked his watch. It was a few minutes fast, so he adjusted it. “Hurray for Big Ching,” he said. It wasn’t Big Ben, but it was halfway around the world from London.

“Lottery ticket?” a woman screeched in the Marines’ faces.

“No wantchee,” Pete said, shaking his head. He’d picked up a bit of pidgin English since coming to Shanghai. It wasn’t used much in Peking. There, the locals either knew English or, much more often, they didn’t. Here, pidgin seemed a halfway house between English and Chinese. People who’d been here longer than he had said it held bits of Portuguese, too, and a mostly Chinese way of putting words together.

“My no savvy,” the woman said.

“You savvy plenty good,” Koenig told her. “Get lost.” That wasn’t proper pidgin, but she understood it anyhow. She said something in Chinese that sounded like a cat getting its tail stepped on. Koenig only laughed. “Good thing I don’t know what that meant, or I’d have to do something about it,” he said.

Then the woman spoke two words of perfectly clear English—“Fuck you!”—and accompanied them with the appropriate gesture. Pete wondered whether she’d learned that from a leatherneck or an English Marine. She’d got it down solid, wherever she’d found it.

And Larry Koenig went nuts. “No slanty-eyed cunt’s gonna give me the finger!” he yelled, and started after her with intent to maim, or maybe to murder. Pete and Herman Szulc looked at each other for a split second. Then they both grabbed the sergeant and held on for dear life.

“Take it easy, man!” Pete said. “You’ll set all the Chinks off!” Sure enough, the small, golden-skinned men and women were pointing and giggling at the spectacle of two white men trying to hold back a third.

“Like I give a shit! Let me go, goddammit!” Koenig tried something Pete had last seen from a dirty-fighting coach before he went overseas.

He still remembered what to do about it—remembered without thinking, the knowledge literally beaten into him. He jerked, twisted … and Koenig gasped in pain. “I’ll break your wrist if you try any more of that,” Pete said, and the other man had to know he meant it. “Now calm down, okay?”

What Koenig said then would have made a Marine sergeant blush—except he was one. “C’mon, man—take an even strain,” Szulc advised, also not letting go. “Just an old Chinese broad. She’s gone now anyway.” So she was; the crowd had swallowed her up.

“I’ll find her. I’ll wring her scrawny neck when I do, too,” Koenig ground out. He surged against the Marines who held him—but he didn’t try anything else cute.

“You and McGill’ve been in China too long. You’re both going Asiatic yourself,” Szulc opined. “You want to clobber this gal for nothing, and he’s all mushy over that gold-digging taxi dancer. This place’ll drive anybody nuts if he stays long enough.”

If Pete hadn’t been hanging on to Koenig for all he was worth, he would have taken a swing at Szulc himself. Then the Chinese would have been treated to the spectacle of three Americans, each trying to beat the crap out of the other two. Even Japanese soldiers would have laughed at that. When the people who hated you fought among themselves, how could you lose?

Simple. You couldn’t. And so Pete didn’t clobber Herman Szulc, no matter how much Herman deserved it. And Koenig did eventually calm down—enough so they could let go of him, anyhow. And they walked on through Shanghai just as if it were their town after all.

NORTH
. The front faced north. To Hideki Fujita, that meant one thing and one thing only: the Kwantung Army stood firmly astride the Trans-Siberian Railway. If the Russians wanted to do anything about it, they would have to come to the Japanese. He didn’t think they would have an easy time doing that. His own countrymen had attacked the railroad in other places, too. Japanese radio claimed all kinds of breakthroughs against the Red Army, but Fujita had seen enough to understand that not everything the radio said was exactly true. You needed to impress the foreigners who were bound to be listening.

He did know what was happening behind him. Japanese engineers were systematically tearing up the railroad track and mining the ground on which it had lain. The Russians wouldn’t have an easy time putting the Trans-Siberian Railway back together even if they did drive off the Kwantung Army.

And, without the railroad, Vladivostok would starve. Bombers from Japanese aircraft carriers and from bases in Manchukuo already pounded the town. The Russians were hunkering down for a siege. Well, they’d done the same thing at Port Arthur. It hadn’t saved them then. Fujita didn’t think it would save them now.

He pictured a map in his mind. Would the Emperor take Vladivostok for Japan, or would he say it was territory redeemed for Manchukuo? It didn’t really matter one way or the other. Japanese influence would predominate no matter which flag flew there.

Then Russian artillery opened up. The Reds hadn’t gone away, even if Fujita wished they would have. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the flight of the shells by the way they snarled through the air. He relaxed. Nothing aimed at him—not this time.

He lit an Aeroplane. Smoke helped when you couldn’t take a drink. Everything around you seemed a little less important while you had a cigarette
going. It was as if … as if you were laying down a smoke screen against the outside world.

He liked that well enough to say it out loud. Shinjiro Hayashi grinned and dipped his head. “Oh, very good, Sergeant-
san
!” he said.

If Hayashi, with his education, appreciated the joke, that meant it was a good one … didn’t it? Fujita wished he wouldn’t have had the afterthought. He remembered the days when he was a private himself. Any stupid joke the sergeant cracked was funny, for no other reason than that he was a sergeant. If you didn’t laugh, he’d thump you like a drum. Of course sergeants slapped privates around; that was what privates were for. If you didn’t keep your sergeant greased, the army would get even more miserable than it already was for a private.

Now Fujita had a thin gold stripe and two stars on his red collar tabs. Now he was the one who expected the sorry bastards under him to laugh at whatever came out of his mouth. And they did. Oh, they did. They knew where their rice came from, all right. But that meant he couldn’t trust them. They would laugh even if he said something stupid—no, especially if he said something stupid. He remembered doing that. What was sweeter than laughing at a puffed-up sergeant who was playing the fool and didn’t even know it?

Nothing, for a private. All the more reason for a sergeant to watch himself. Privates were unreliable, officers thought they were little tin gods … You had to take care of yourself. Nobody would do it for you.

That also applied when the Russians came. Some of the people you led wouldn’t be sorry to see you dead. If they got the chance to arrange that in a way that wouldn’t land them in trouble, they were liable to do it.

Those were thoughts Fujita wished he hadn’t had when Lieutenant Hanafusa came up to him and said, “You’ve done well since you got here, Sergeant. I wondered about you, because you didn’t have much experience fighting in forests. But nobody can say you haven’t picked it up in a hurry.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Fujita wondered what Hanafusa had in mind. He also wondered if he would have done better to stay on Manchukuo’s Mongolian frontier, where only sandstorms kept you from seeing for kilometers every which way and where any tree was a prodigy.

And so he heard the platoon commander’s next words with a mournful lack of surprise: “We need some prisoners for interrogation. Take your squad forward and get me a couple. Try not to make too much of a fuss while you’re doing it.”

“Yes, sir,” Fujita said—the only thing he could say. He did ask, “Right now, sir, or may we wait till after dark?”

Lieutenant Hanafusa looked surprised, as if the possibility had never crossed his mind. It probably hadn’t. He’d got the order from above, and hadn’t thought twice about it. After a few seconds, he said, “I suppose it will keep that long.”

“Yes, sir,” Fujita repeated. He couldn’t say
Thank you
again; he would have meant it this time. Scooting forward at night, he and his men had at least a chance of coming back in one piece.