Two Fronts (42 page)

Herb coughed again. This time, his embarrassment wasn’t nearly so faint. “Yeah, that,” he admitted.

“Well, what about it?” Peggy asked.

“I don’t have to go back there any more, on account of they’ve closed down the project. Turned out to be a bust, a boondoggle. No, let’s call a spade a stinking shovel. It was a rathole, was what it was. And God only knows how many millions of dollars they poured down it, too. If I were a Republican, I’d take it to the
Chicago Tribune
.”

“Oh, puh-leeze!” Peggy sounded as disgusted as she felt. “Westbrook Pegler and company? All they want to do is hold FDR’s feet to the fire.”

“Eleanor’s, too,” Herb corrected with lawyerly precision. “I’ll tell you, though, Roosevelt deserves a hotfoot for this one, swear he does.” He stopped—reluctantly, but he did.

“This isn’t the serial before the feature,” Peggy snapped. “You can’t leave me with a cliffhanger like that. C’mon—give. You know I don’t go yakking all over the place.”

“I’m not supposed to,” Herb said, more to himself than to her. She kept quiet, hoping he would talk himself into it. Which he did: “Well, nuts to that. The project’s dead as King Tut. And you’re right. You don’t blab. So … These scientists had some kind of scheme—I think it was based on something that leaked out of Germany in some kind of way, but don’t hold me to that—anyway, a scheme for making a super-duper bomb, one that could blow up a whole city.”

“You mean like in the pulps with the green men with the eyestalks and the built blondes in the brass bathing suits on the cover?” Peggy said. You saw them on the newsstands all the time. She’d bought a few—who didn’t? The stories were usually better than those wretched covers, even if that wasn’t saying much. You didn’t want to be seen reading them: they were almost as bad as Tijuana Bibles.

“Uh-huh, just like those.” Herb nodded once more. “But there were some people who you’d think had their heads on straight pushing this thing. Einstein, for instance.”

If you knew about one nuclear physicist, it had to be Einstein, with his mustache and his flyaway hair. He was a Jew. He’d got out of Germany not too long before the Nazis would have made escape impossible. “Even with him, it was no go?” Peggy asked.

“You got it,” Herb said. “Oh, maybe the thing would’ve worked in the end. Maybe. But it would’ve taken years and years to figure out how, and it would’ve cost billions in the end.”

“Billions?” Peggy wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “With a B?”

“With a B,” her husband agreed solemnly.

“Wow.” She had trouble even imagining that much money. She remembered that, when the astronomers discovered Pluto (and when Walt Disney named Mickey’s mutt after the new planet), they said it was so-and-so many billion miles from the sun. How many
so-and-so many
was, she couldn’t recall. Any many billion miles was still a hell of a lot. “They didn’t really blow that much, did they?”

“Nah.” Now Herb shook his head. “Just millions. I don’t even think they blew tens of millions. The accountants’ll have a field day working it out to the last dime—you bet they will. But the government threw up the stop sign before the guys with the glasses and the slide rules and the funny foreign accents could get rolling in style.”

“Thanks to you.” Peggy was proud of him, and wanted him to know it.

“Well, not just thanks to me.” Herb was too modest to claim the entire success for himself. But he was also proud that part of it belonged to him. He went on, “One of these years, we may need something like that, if it turns out to be possible after all. We sure don’t need it right away, though. We’ve got more important things to worry about now.”

“Like licking the Japs?” Peggy suggested.

“Yeah, like that. Like making sure they don’t land in San Francisco is more like it.” Herb rolled his eyes at the way the war in the Pacific was going for the United States.

Peggy asked, “How come Einstein and the other scientists were pushing this super-duper, super-expensive bomb so hard?”

“Well, I don’t know all the details. I’m no slide-rule twiddler myself.” Herb sounded glad that he wasn’t, and who could blame him? “But like I said, there was some kind of experiment in Germany right after the war started. It didn’t get published—the Nazis quashed that. But the physicists gossip amongst themselves, war or no war, just like lawyers or doctors or ladies playing bridge or anybody else. Einstein got wind of it some kind of way, and he sweet-talked FDR into throwing money at it. For a while, anyhow.” He grinned, glad he’d helped put the kibosh on such foolishness.

If it was foolishness … Unease trickled through Peggy. “Did the Nazis try to keep quiet about this experiment or whatever it was because their big brains are working on the super-duper bomb, too?” It wouldn’t be so good if they got one, which was putting things mildly.

“If they are, they’d do better to set their Reichsmarks on fire and throw them away,” Herb declared. “They’d get rid of ’em quicker if they did, but that’s the only way they would. Believe me, babe—nobody’s gonna figure out how to pull off this stunt any time soon, if it’s possible at all.”

“Okay.” Peggy sure wanted to believe him. She made herself one more bourbon on the rocks. That helped.

EVERY SO OFTEN
, Mitsubishi G4Ms on Midway took off for night raids on the Hawaiian islands. Hideki Fujita admired the Navy bombers. They were fast and sleek and had enormous range.

After a while, though, he got to talking—and he got to drinking—with the ratings who dropped bombs on the Americans and who manned the 20mm cannon the G4Ms carried as a sting in the tail. Their opinion of the plane they flew was much lower than his.

To begin with, they called the G4M the Flying Cigarette Lighter. “You know why it’s got such range?” one of the rear gunners demanded in the tent that served as a noncoms’ club. He was pouring down sake as if he feared they’d outlaw it tomorrow; his face had gone red as the rising sun.

“So it can do things like fly from Midway to Hawaii and back?” Fujita suggested—reasonably, he thought. He didn’t like to hear the plane maligned, not when he’d be heading from Midway to Oahu or one of the other islands in a G4M himself before too long.

“
Iye!
” The rear gunner vigorously shook his head. “No!” he repeated, even louder than before. “It’s got that range on account of it’s a lightweight. And it’s a lightweight ’cause the engineers who designed it were full of shit.” He gulped more sake.

“Huh?” Fujita wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

“Full of shit,” the Navy man said again, so he had. “No self-sealing gas tanks. No armor for the crew. No wonder it starts to burn if an American shoots a dirty look at it. The dumbass engineers wanted it to be fast.
Zakennayo!
No bomber’s gonna be fast enough to outrun fighters. You go up in that damn thing, it’s almost like you’re cutting your belly open.” He mimed commiting
seppuku
. Then he upended his cup again and poured more from the pottery pitcher.

“Thanks a lot,” Fujita mumbled. His own first flight was only a few days away.

“Huh?” the rear gunner said. Then he nodded, more to himself than to Fujita. “That’s right. You’re going up in one of those sorry bastards yourself, aren’t you? Almost forgot about that. Gonna give the Yankees a little present, right?”

“That’s the idea, anyhow,” Fujita agreed.

“Something better than ordinary bombs, they say,” the Navy guy persisted.

“That’s the idea,” Fujita said once more.

“So what is it?” the rear gunner asked. “Poison gas? Something like that? Everybody on Midway’s going bugshit trying to figure out what’s up with you people. You all keep your mouths shut as tight as a whore’s legs before you pay her.”

“We aren’t supposed to talk about it,” Fujita answered primly.

“Yeah, yeah. Who am I gonna tell? What am I gonna do? Hop into a G4M, fly it down to Honolulu, land there and start singing to the Americans? Give me a break, pal!”

Fujita saw he’d have to make himself clearer: “We have orders not to talk about it.”

“No kidding, you do! I still think that’s a bunch of crap.” The Navy man downed another cup of sake. “And you know what else? Just before you clowns got out here, the docs lined up the whole garrison and gave us shots like you wouldn’t believe. My arm swelled up like a dead cow. I couldn’t hardly do anything with it for the next three days.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that. Like you say, I wasn’t even on Midway yet.” No matter what the rear gunner thought, no matter how sore his arm had been, the doctors here had known exactly what they were doing. The germs Captain Ikejiri had brought along weren’t fussy about whether they infected Americans or Japanese.

The Navy man wasn’t done complaining, either. “And how come they’re delousing us all the time now? You’d think we were filthy or something. They didn’t do that before you guys came. It’s fucking weird, you ask me.”

“I haven’t got anything to do with that, either.” Fujita told the technical truth there, but no more than the technical truth. Delousing treatments also killed fleas, or had a better chance of killing them than anything else on Midway was likely to do. And, when fleas were liable to carry the plague, killing them looked like an even better idea than usual.

“Weird,” the rear gunner repeated. He could say what he wanted. Fujita couldn’t say anything at all, not about what the rear gunner wanted to know. Even drunk, he knew he couldn’t. If that left the other fellow unhappy, it was his hard luck.

Fujita’s own hard luck came when he climbed up into a G4M’s bomb bay. The groundcrew men loaded the bay with the pottery-bomb casings that held rats loaded with fleas and other disease-dispersal agents. Night was falling. They were in subtropical latitudes—not so far south as Burma, but subtropical even so. There wasn’t a lot of difference between summer and winter nights. But there was some, and they would take advantage of the extra darkness at this season of the year.

The G4M rolled down the rough runway and climbed into the air. The engines’ drone seemed to come from somewhere inside Fujita. He put on his oxygen gear and also ran oxygen lines into the casings. That wasn’t guaranteed to keep the rats alive—but then, keeping them alive wasn’t completely necessary. The fleas were tougher.
They’d
make it to Hawaii, all right. Having the rats able to run around might spread sickness faster, though.

Even if night soon fell, navigating was easy. Midway lay at the northwest end of a chain of little islands that ended with the bigger ones of Hawaii. Peering out through a machine-gun blister, Fujita watched one low islet after another pass beneath the bomber. It was as if whichever fire
kami
spat out the main Hawaiian islands got more and more tired as it also spat out the ones that lay north and west of them. Or maybe those northwestern islands were the old ones, and the bigger islands, the ones where people actually lived, just hadn’t worn down yet.

It was interesting to think about. Fujita doubted whether anyone would ever actually know. When Kauai came into sight, the G4M took a long loop around it. The Americans had airstrips there. Night fighters found targets more by luck than any other way, but why find out whether this was some round-eyed pilot’s lucky night?

On to Oahu. This was only one plane. With any luck at all, the Americans wouldn’t pay any attention to it. If they did notice it, wouldn’t they just think it was one of theirs, doing whatever a plane flying over Oahu in the middle of the night did?

Right up until they started shooting at him, Fujita hoped they would. After that, he just hoped he would live. He watched tracer rounds climb up toward the G4M. They were beautiful. He hadn’t had such a good view in China. He felt as if he were on top of a fireworks display, looking down at it from above. Then the shells started bursting. The bomber bounced in the air. Fujita wished that Navy guy had never told him what a flimsy piece of construction a G4M was.

“Open the bomb bay! Drop the bombs!” The pilot flying the plane sounded scared enough to wet his flight suit. That did nothing for Fujita’s own confidence.

He yanked at the levers that opened the bomb-bay doors. They weren’t in the same place as they were in a Ki-21, but he knew where to grab and how to pull. Opening them, though, gave him a much better view of the antiaircraft fire that was trying to knock him down. More levers—again, positioned differently from those in the Army bomber he’d flown before—let the casings full of germs and diseased animals fall free. Along with them went a few incendiaries and ordinary high-explosive bombs, to give the enemy something else to think about and to distract him from the ones that were the main point of the mission.

“Bombs away!” he reported, as if the pilot hadn’t already put the G4M into a tight turn and headed back toward Midway at full throttle. He closed the bomb-bay doors again to improve streamlining. They gave Kauai an even wider berth on the way home: the Americans there would be alerted now. But they never saw a single enemy fighter. And, better yet, not a single enemy fighter saw them.

SHIRTLESS LIKE THE
rest of the Marines and sailors in line with him, Pete McGill stood under the warm Hawaiian sun. Back on the mainland, there were plenty of places where the snow was still as high as an elephant’s eye. If you didn’t already have a good tan here, even the winter sun stood plenty high enough in the sky to fry your hide.

“This is a pain in the ass, you know?” Bob Cullum groused.

“Is that where they’re gonna shoot us?” Pete said. “I thought they were gonna get us in the arm. That’s why we’re like this, right?” He thumped his bare chest. Thanks to the shoulder that had got smashed up in the Shanghai movie-house bombing, he wore some impressive scars. Men from other ships, who weren’t used to seeing him with his shirt off, eyed his torso with respect.

“I dunno,” Cullum answered. “It ain’t like they tell anybody what’s going on, for Chrissake.”

“And this surprises you because …?” Pete said. Cullum threw a slow-motion punch at him. Just as slowly, Pete blocked it. They both grinned.

A balding guy with a big, hairy beer belly that yelled
Petty officer!
growled, “Knock off the horseplay, you two!”