Two Fronts (16 page)

“I want my hundred grams,” Fyodor Mechnikov declared, in tones that warned somebody would get hurt if the sergeant didn’t get his vodka ration right away.

Most of the time, the way Russians drank appalled Stas. Most of the time, but not always. Right after he came back from a mission, alcoholic oblivion often looked good—better than those imaginary Messerschmitts and the flak burst that could have butchered him, anyhow.

More Pe-2s landed at the airstrip. One by one, they sheltered in revetments and were hidden from above. On a dirt road north of the runway, tanks rumbled west. So did big, square-shouldered American trucks full of big, square-shouldered Red Army men.

Every one of them would get his hundred grams. And then, maybe, they’d link arms, grab their submachine guns, and swarm toward German entrenchments yelling “
Urra!
” at the top of their lungs. A few lucky ones might get to sober up and try to carry out their superiors’ next brilliant orders.

From everything Stas had seen and heard, the Red Army’s approach to putting out a fire was smothering it with bodies. The trucks kicking up dust on the road argued that they still had plenty of bodies to throw. Whether they could develop a better approach … They were Russians, after all.

He stumped over to the officers’ tent. Sweat sprang out all over him as he walked. In winter, the furs and leather in which he flew also kept him warm on the ground. It wasn’t winter any more. He didn’t quite want to run around naked, but changing into a more comfortable outfit was definitely on the list.

So was vodka. For now, loosening snaps and zippers and shedding his jacket would do. He ducked inside. He wasn’t the first flyer inside, or the first drinker. There were gherkins and slices of sausage to eat with the vodka. Pelmeni—meat-stuffed dumplings—were even better when you were setting out to tie one on, but they also took work to make. Pickles and sausage didn’t.

“To blowing the cocks off the Fascist hyenas!” another pilot said. He raised his glass, then knocked back the shot.

Stas and his comrades followed suit. The vodka snarled down his throat. He felt as if he’d swallowed a lighted spirit lamp, then had a grenade go off in his stomach. “
Bozhemoi
, that’s good!” the other pilot said. Stas wondered if they were drinking the same stuff. They were.

Isa Mogamedov stuck to tea. He drank sometimes, but not often. He was always sorry afterwards, and not just because vodka seemed to hurt him badly. Maybe he got more from his sins because he regretted them more.

Mouradian ate some sausage. It was the cheap stuff you got in wartime: more fat than meat, and about as much filler as fat. Most of the time, he would have sneered at it. Not today, not when he was going to do some serious drinking. The fat would grease his stomach lining the way oil greased the cylinders in his bomber’s engines. With luck, it would slow down the alcohol soaking into his system. It wouldn’t stop the stuff, but all you could do was all you could do.

Click!
Someone turned on the radio, which was hooked up to a truck battery. The set was a standard Soviet receiver, which meant it only brought in frequencies on which the state broadcast. You couldn’t get anyone else’s views even if you were rash and unpatriotic enough to want them. When it came to preserving their own authority, the USSR’s rulers were ruthlessly efficient.

After the set warmed up, syrupy music blared out of it. Stas wasn’t the only flyer who pulled a face. You
could
get in trouble for showing you didn’t fancy what came out of the radio, but most of the time you wouldn’t. And it was just a few minutes before the top of the hour. The news would start then. The news, of course, came with heavy doses of propaganda, but what could you do? One of the things you could do was gain facility at reading between the lines. That Stas had done.

“Moscow speaking,” the newsreader said, as if any Soviet citizen could wonder where his news came from. “French and English tanks have begun to probe Hitlerite defenses in Belgium. The Fascist monsters claim that many of our allies’ armored fighting vehicles were destroyed, but, like any of Dr. Goebbels’ claims, that one is bound to be a lie.”

Flyers drunk and sober nodded, Stas among them. Goebbels
did
lie. Then again, so did his own lords and masters. And France and England were suddenly allies again, not jackals scavenging scraps from the German hyenas. In other words, France and England didn’t have expeditionary forces on Soviet soil any more.

He wondered whether his comrades—even the relatively sober ones—noticed the change. He couldn’t very well ask them. Asking would be showing that
he
noticed. It would also be asking for a one-way ticket to the gulags. Even fighting the Nazis was a better bet than that.

WEARING RUBBER GLOVES
and a gauze mask like the ones surgeons used in the operating room, Hideki Fujita helped manhandle a wheeled cart along a dirt airstrip toward a waiting Army bomber. The other soldiers pulling and pushing the cart along also came from Unit 113, and also had on masks and gloves.

He wondered how much the protective garb helped. All he knew was, he hadn’t come down sick yet. No. He knew one thing more: he didn’t want to, either, not with the diseases the unit was generously donating to the Chinese farther north.

Thump!
One of the cart’s wheels went into a pothole. A couple of the porcelain bomb casings on the cart clattered against each other. One of them made as if to fall off. If it did … If that casing broke … Fujita wasn’t the only khaki-clad man frantically shoving the germ bomb back where it belonged. The soldiers wanted to give their enemies in China this present. Get it themselves? Oh, no!

“
Eee!
Careful there!” said the armorer in charge of the cart. “Treat these babies like they’ve got real explosives in them.”

He had a Tokyo accent that sounded as modern as next week. He was only a sergeant like Fujita, but it was the kind of accent the noncom from the country associated with officers and orders. And the fellow spoke plain good sense. If anything, the porcelain casings were worse than explosives. If a real bomb hit you, it was probably
sayonara
in a hurry. From what these bastards carried, you’d have time to hurt … and to regret.

The Kawasaki Ki-48 to which the men from Unit 113 lugged the germ-warfare bomb reminded Fujita of a Russian SB-2. He’d been on the receiving end of visits from those beasts in Mongolia and Siberia, and had seen several on the ground, knocked down by Japanese fighters or antiaircraft guns. Somebody’d told him that the SB-2’s design had inspired the Ki-48. He didn’t know whether that was true. He did know the Russian bombers had caused a lot of trouble. However his own side got planes like them, he was glad to see the Rising Sun on this machine’s wings and fuselage.

A bombardier stuck his head out of the open bomb-bay doors. “So you’ve got my packages for me, neh?” the man said. “Why didn’t you do them up with ribbons and fancy bows?”

“Funny. Funny like a truss,” the armorer said. He and the bombardier grinned impudently at each other. The armorer turned back to his work crew. “Come on, boys. Let’s get ’em into the plane. And be careful, remember! Don’t act any dumber than you can help.”

They loaded the porcelain casings into the bomb bay. The space was cramped, and grew more so as one porcelain casing after another went into place. The bombardier gave directions. That impudent grin came back to his face—he liked telling people what to do. He’d have to take orders, not give them, while he was flying. The men up in the cockpit were bound to be officers. He’d seem no more than a beast of burden in a uniform to them.

“You should wear a mask, too,” Fujita told him. “What’s in these eggs isn’t anything you’d want for yourself.”

“Eggs, huh? That’s pretty funny.” But the bombardier shook his head. “I have too many other things to worry about to bother with a mask. Those Chinese rat bastards, they shoot at you when you’re over their cities, y’know. And they send up fighter planes, too, the assholes. You earn what they pay you when you go up in one of these crates. It’s not like it is for you guys, where you’ve got nothing to do but eat and sleep and screw comfort women.”

The unfairness of that almost took Fujita’s breath away. It wasn’t just that he’d put in his time and then some fighting the Russians. But he would much rather have faced antiaircraft fires and fighters’ machine guns than the bacteria Unit 113 turned into weapons.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hotly. “Some of the things I could tell you—” He broke off. If he did tell anybody about those things, even bacteria would be the least of his worries. The
Kempeitai
—the Japanese secret military police—would take him apart a millimeter at a time.

“Yeah?” By the way the bombardier spoke, he didn’t believe a word of it.

“
Hai. Honto
,” Fujita insisted. And it
was
true, as he knew full well. No matter how true it was, though, he couldn’t talk about it. And when he didn’t, the bombardier laughed at him.

He and his comrades hauled the cart away from the Ki-48. “Nothing you could do, Sergeant,” a soldier said sympathetically. “If that guy wants to take a chance on coming down sick, he’s too big a jerk to worry about any which way.”

“
Hai. Honto
,” Fujita repeated, in the same tone of voice he’d used with the bombardier. The other men chuckled.

They sprawled on the grass by the edge of the airstrip. Before long, the pilot and copilot climbed into the bomber’s cockpit. As Fujita lit a cigarette, the plane’s engines growled to life. Flame and gray smoke belched from the exhaust pipes. The bomber taxied down the strip and climbed into the air. The landing gear folded up into the wings. One after another, more Ki-48s loaded with germ bombs took off. They formed up into a neat V and flew north.

“Let me have a smoke, will you?” the armorer said. As Fujita handed him the pack, the fellow went on, “Well, the Chinamen’ll catch it now. Just what they deserve, too.” He lit a cigarette and gave back the pack. His stubbly cheeks—he was heavily bearded for a Japanese—hollowed when he sucked in smoke. He blew it out again. “If they’d just see they need us to knock their heads together and turn their stupid country into a place that really works …”

“If they had that kind of sense, they wouldn’t be Chinamen to begin with,” Fujita said. “Even in the places where we run the show, you can’t turn your back on ’em for a minute.”

“These Burmese, now, they know what’s what,” the armorer said. The coal on the end of the cigarette glowed red as he took another deep drag. “They had the Englishmen telling ’em what to do before we cleared out those big-nosed fellows. They’ve got to figure we’re a better bargain.”

“No honor to white men,” Fujita said. “They fight well enough. You could even say they’re brave—as long as the fighting goes on. But if they lose, they just give up.”

All the Japanese soldiers shook their heads in wonder and scorn. If you lost, better to kill yourself and get everything over with at once. You forfeited your humanity—certainly your manhood—when you surrendered. Your captors could do anything they pleased with you. Here in Burma, English prisoners were building a railroad through the jungle. Up in Manchuria, Unit 730 tested its germs on Russian, English, and American captives—and on the luckless Chinese they got in large numbers.

After a while, Fujita said, “We ought to get back to the unit,” but his voice held no conviction. The armorer was attached to the airstrip. He also stayed put instead of getting up and going back to whatever his duties were. If somebody needed him, he’d hear about it. In the meantime, why not grab the chance to sit around and do nothing?

Yeah, why not?
Fujita thought. He couldn’t find any reason—not that he looked very hard.

Strange birds made strange noises in the bushes. Fujita wished he knew what they were. They had calls unlike any he’d heard in Japan or China or Siberia. Many of them, even the ones shaped like sparrows, were gaudy beyond belief. If their like had lived in the Home Islands, they would have been prized cage birds. The Burmese took them utterly for granted. Most of the time, they ignored them the way Fujita would have ignored a white-eye. Sometimes they caught them and killed them and ate them.

One of the privates fell asleep. A few minutes later, Fujita did, too. He woke up when engines announced the bombers’ return. One by one, the planes bounced to a stop on the rutted grass airstrip. Fujita counted them. They’d all come back. One had a chunk bitten out of its tail, but the groundcrew men could fix that. Before long, they’d go out again—and, pretty soon, more Chinese would sicken and die.

“ALL ABOARD!” THE
conductor shouted.

“See you in a week!” Herb Druce said on the platform at the Broad Street station. He hugged Peggy like a sailor going off on a cruise that would last for months. He kissed her like a sailor going to sea, too. Then, agile as a man half his age, he hopped up into the car that would take him—well, wherever he was heading. He’d always been conscientious, and he took security seriously. What Peggy didn’t know, she couldn’t blab if Japanese spies stuck burning slivers of bamboo under her fingernails.

That there probably weren’t any Japanese spies within a thousand miles of Philadelphia, and that they were unlikely to grab Peggy and start torturing her to learn what he was up to even if they were around, bothered him not a bit. It was the principle of the thing, dammit.

He reappeared a moment later at a window seat. Peggy waved. He waved back. The train started to roll. It was bound for Dallas. Where he would get off, whether he would get back onto another train after he did … All that was stuff he knew and she didn’t need to.

She kept waving till she couldn’t see his car any more. She wasn’t the only woman on the platform doing that—nowhere near. A few men waved, too, but only a few. Not far from her, two boys in short pants, one maybe six, his little brother a couple of years younger, were crying as if their hearts would break. Their daddy was going off to do something far away, and they didn’t like it for beans.