by Robert Adams
Fitz chuckled silently. "That big bozo reminds me of some DIs I've had the misfortune to know better than Td have preferred. Whatever he said to the stringbean, there, probably translates into 'When I want some shit out of you, mister, 111 squeeze your head!' He wants his situation report from the first man on the scene, not from any johnny-come-latelies."
While the first-arrived spearman spoke, answering apparent questions put to him by both the big man and the smaller, seven more of the orientals appeared from out the defile, six of them armed with the lances, one carrying what looked like some kind of axe—a broad, metal head on a haft about two feet long. This one handed something long and slender to the smaller man who had come out with the bigger
one, but the bushes were so thick in that area that Fitz could not see clearly what it might be.
After a brief conference between the big man and the smaller who had arrived with him, the bigger one began to bark short, terse phrases and the spearmen formed into two ranks, the spears of the rear rank projecting between the men of the first. At a measured, slow pace, the spearmen bore down upon the predatory monster, the twelve spearpoints winking brightly in the sunlight.
Having just gotten the carcass over to where the other side of flesh could be easily torn off, the beast had to turn from it and make to defend it. It first hissed like an old steam locomotive, then followed that with a healthy roar, but the scavengers did not halt or even pause in their advance, drawing closer and still closer to the contested loll and its defending, rightful owner.
The sun had not yet been up long enough to make it truly warm in this shady place at waters edge, but Fitz's binoculars showed him rivulets of sweat on more than one of those dusty, yellow-brown feces. Yet not one of them hesitated or slowed or even looked like halting and turning back from the mighty, awesome beast; regardless of any justifiable fears, regardless of the rough, rock-strewn ground, the two dressed ranks came on, staunch and steady, blank-faced, spears held ready for the thrust.
"Barbarians, hell!" thought Fitz. "For all their primitive appearance and those spears, those bastards can't be anything but trained, drilled, disciplined troops—veterans, from the performance they're giving out there."
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At that moment, as the ranks of ill-armed little men bore down to do battle with the huge, scaly, blood-streaked monster, Fitz finally got a clear, unobstructed view of the hands and body of the small man who had been with the big one and who now strode on a pace or so ahead of him, just behind the second rank of the spearmen. That was when all the bits and pieces fell into place in the watchers mind.
"Of course," he breathed, almost aloud, "that's why the damned language sounded so familiar. It's been a good thirty years, but God knows I used to hear the bastards shouting and screaming and chattering enough, back then, to remember the sounds and rhythms of their speech for a lifetime. Could these be from that time, that war? How should I know? Considering the time that Sir Gautier came from, the era of the man who became Cool Blue, and the date I entered into whatever this place really is, it could easily be ... as easily as not be. They could be from an earlier time than the era of World War Two; if they are, that might be the explanation of why they don't have firearms, just what look like handmade spears, an axe and a set of Japanese samurai swords.
"Some of the guys actually learned some Japanese. If only I had, too, I might be able to under— Hey, wait a fucking minute! I forgot, I'm a telepath now. If I can understand, even converse with a grey panther, a blue lion and a eleventh- or twelfth-century Norman, then why the hell not a Japanese?
"But wait another minute. Sir Gautier and his bunch were anything but friendly when they first came across me. I had to end up killing one of them
and ail-but kill Sir Gautier himself. I wonder . . . can I just enter the mind of one of those men down there without him knowing? Hell, I wish Puss or Cool Blue or somebody would tell me how this thing works, is really supposed to work, not just force me to blunder through everything the way they have. Dammit all, it's not fair!"
He sighed. "Well, the only way to find out whether or not I can is to try it. At least f m nowhere near as vulnerable to those Japs down there as I was to Sir Gautier and his guys, back when I first met them. I doubt if even those resourceful little Nips would be able to climb the straight, unbranched trunk of this tree easily or quickly should they even suspect that I'm hidden up here. And even if they did try to climb up, I've got enough pistol ammo in it and on my belt to kill them all with rounds left over long before any one of them got within spear-range.
"So the only question remaining now is which one do I start on? The big, mean-looking one? No, he's probably the sergeant, that's what he acts and sounds like. No, the one with the pair of samurai swords is probably an officer; I'll try to get into his mind first. Here goes."
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infantry and one attached light tank have gotten to in the elapsed time before he had decided to stop moving about to no purpose and established a more or less permanent camp?), Kaoru had no slightest trace of an idea where they were. His entire packet of maps was meaningless and the radio never produced anything other than static.
Pressed hard and unremittingly by the mixture of opponents facing them—British, Indian, American and Chinese—battalion command's decision had been to shorten the supply lines by dint of a quick night withdrawal and regrouping at a specified and hopefully more defensible point to the northeast. At the briefing of company commanders, Kaoru had carefully marked out on his map the route he and his company were to take, marking also significant compass coordinates in the margins. He and his newly inherited company also had been "rewarded" with the "honor" of escorting and zealously guarding one of the few remaining and therefore infinitely precious Type Ninety-five light tanks with its cart of diesel fuel, lubricants and ammunition.
The company had departed almost on schedule, leaving their vacated positions manned with a skeleton crew of barely trained, ill-armed Korean conscripts under command of a few Japanese and with orders to fight to the last bullet and bayonet for the glory of the Emperor. Banzai!
It had been raining, or course, it seemed that it always rained on night marches; Kaoru assumed that that was just the natural order of things on military campaigns. The march had been slow, exhausting and frustrating in the extreme, most of their troubles
relating to the light tank. The outmoded track vehicle had sat out most of the preceding two years in some army salvage compound somewhere until necessity had seen it and its mates brought back into field service, and the long neglect and storage under very adverse conditions became more than apparent on the march. Everything that conceivably could go wrong with the motorized abortion seemed to have chosen that night on that wet, muddy, slippery, miserable route to so do.
The crew of the tank had not proven all that much help with their weapon, all of them having been trained and done their fighting on later models; moreover, they tended to treat infantrymen—even while these were performing back-breaking labor on behalf of them and their cranky machine—with scathing contumely, deferring to Kaoru and his junior officers and NCOs because of the varying degrees of rank they held. Had the senior officers not been so adamant about the value of the tank that he and his company were to accompany and guard from harm, Kaoru would have early on had it stripped, booby-trapped and abandoned along the route, but much later he was to find glad that he had not done so.
Company Sergeant Kiyomoto proved the salvation of the problems with the recalcitrant tank. The big, tough veteran had served, it developed, with a mechanized infantry unit in China seven years before, and though not formally trained in automotive mechanics, he was the son of a blacksmith, understood metals, and owned a quick, intuitive mind as well as prodigious physical strength. If one of the crew members could tell him precisely what was the proper
purpose of a non- or ill-functioning part or assembly, it had been found that he could almost always restore it to some near-semblence of that f
unction, though usually by way of highly unorthodox methods.
But because of the repeated delays and enforced halts on the march, the dawn had found them still less than halfway to their rendezvous with the rest of the battalion. After he had carefully chosen an off-trail position that was not only easily defensible from ground attack but would be reasonably simple to conceal from air reconnaissance, Kaoru had had the company radio assembled and its generator attached, and had sent the previously agreed-upon, coded message until battalion had responded. Once he had apprised them of his position, he had gone off the air.
Though it was not at all the season for heavy rains, the rain that had so tormented and hampered them on the night before not only continued during the succeeding day but at times increased in its intensity, with periods of heavy drizzle being followed by long bursts of blinding precipitation throughout the whole of the grey, cold, miserable day. Even worse, by nightfall the small stream that they had had to cross to reach their encampment area was become a raging, roaring, white-crested torrent. Two of his men were swept away and presumably drowned while vainly attempting to get a safety line across it.
The tank commander informed him that his vehicle could not possibly ford to such a depth and that a bridge must therefore be constructed. No, he knew nothing about such matters, that was the function of such low-echelon types as engineers and infantry.
The radio was cranked up and activated and battalion, when at last it responded, heard out the encoded problem, then ordered Kaoru to either remain in place until the torrent's waters ebbed low enough for the tank to cross or, better, march cross-country and parallel to the trail until he came across a way to get back on his assigned route of march, but in any and all cases, to arrive at his destination with the tank.
The tank and its mule cart had been enough retardation to any land of a steady advance on the now-inaccessible track, but trying to get them cross-country was an all-but-insurmountable problem to Kaoru and his part of an infantry company. No one could move any faster than dog-tired men could hack a way through vegetation, haul away obstructions and fill holes or soft places, all the while sweating, tortured by all manner of noxious insects and leeches, having to be every wary of poisonous snakes, scorpions and huge spiders. Edges of machetes and axes quickly became dulled and so close to useless that it was necessary to keep a section constantly sharpening the tools. Ropes snapped and had to be knotted together to await resplicing at a later time. And all the while that so many were striving for them, the tank officer, his crew and two mule drivers sat by in idleness, making rude comments about infantrymen in general and these in particular, while flatly refusing to aid in their own salvation by joining the work crews. Nor could Kaoru do aught to change the situation, since the ever-sarcastic and arrogant tank officer outranked him by one grade.
By superhuman efforts, the column had, by late
afternoon, advanced all of about three kilometers, Kaoru estimated, and when the lead line of axe- and machete-men broke through into a more or less clear area filled with tumbled and overgrown stone ruins, he called a halt for the day. Enough was enough; he doubted his men could endure much more such labor this wet, waning day.
A squad was sent to scout out the ruins and returned to report no signs of recent human habitation. So they went into another wet camp. After he had reported and given the compass bearings of his position to battalion, Kaoru was briefly castigated for making so little distance from the previous night's position, but then he had expected such.
Soon after dark the sky above cleared, stars and moon shining bright and full over the forested hills. The roar of aeroplanes was heard twice during that night, but the camp had been well laid out and well camouflaged, the efforts of Kaoru's force aided by nature in the form of many large trees with thick, overhanging foliage and by the long-forgotten builders of the stone ruins in provision of so many places wherefrom the glows of smokeless fires could not be seen from above.
But warplanes and hostile men were not the only enemies of these Sons of Nippon in the trackless wilds of Burma, circa 1945. In the wan, grey and misty false dawn, a tiger tried to get at the mules and ended by ferociously mauling the guard, whose bayoneted Arisaka rifle made precious little impression upon the four hundred pounds of cat. However, the screams of the man brought the nearby tank crew to wakefulness, and the effect of over a hundred rounds
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of 7.7mm ball from the hull machinegun rapidly reduced the predator (and the unfortunate guard, as well) into a virtual blood pudding.
When he had examined the scene and taken the reports, Kaoru disgustedly asked of the tank commander, "Lieutenant, why didn't you use the 37mm as well? Then there'd be less to dispose of."
That worthy, engaged in carefully polishing the long, yellow-white cuspid he had had one of his men pry from out the upper jaws of the much-perforated tiger, replied languidly, in his usual, supercilious way, "Because the tube was not charged, my dear Naka, while the hull gun had an opened breech with a belt in place. Any other questions, Naka?"
Seething with rage, but keeping his color and his outward calm intact, Kaoru had politely thanked the despised tank officer and stalked off, in the light of the new rainless day, to send out a patrol or two to hopefully find a quicker, easier way back to the track than would be a climb up than a descent down the slopes of the heavily forested hill that now separated them from their previous route of march. It was either that or backtrack the previous day's march and go back to where they had been when first they had left the track . . . and he had a notion that battalion would not approve that course at all, for all that it might prove the easiest and fastest in the long run.
But just before the patrols returned, neither of them with at all promising information, Sergeant Kiyomoto had come and reported to him in his proper, by-the-book way. He had informed his superior that there was, behind a screening of vegetation, a high,
wide opening at the base of the steep hill to the west, the one that separated them from the track. The roof, walls and pavement of the seeming tunnel was of ancient worked stone, and it seemed to run directly through the hill in a straight line, light being visible at the other end of it.
Kaoru had first felt his heart leap, then he had frowned—that cursed tank and mule cart! —and he had asked, dubiously, "But is it high enough, wide enough, to take the tank, Sergeant?"
The opening, when he paced it off, certainly was more than wide enough for the tank, and easily high enough, Kaoru had then estimated. Then, once the highly discouraging reports of the patrols had been received and disgested, he had had a supply of torches prepared and he, Lieutenant Ozawa and Sergeant Kiyomoto had gone almost the full length of the underhill tunnel, often slipping or sliding on the damp, slimy stonework floor, while half-seen things scurried and scuttled and slithered out of their path and away from the dim and flaring light of the torches. The brush and vines and small trees at the western mouth of the tunnel had been too thick for him to get much of a look at what lay outside it save that there was a gradually descending slope and a stream at the base of the hill, as he had seen on his maps of the area. Although he could see only a rise of sorts lined with trees beyond the stream, he knew that the track must lie just the other side of that tree line.
Immediately upon their return, he had set his company to the sole task of fashioning torches with which to light their way in transit of the long, very dark tunnel to the western side of the steep hill.
Then he had gone to impart of this finding of a quick and easy way back to their assigned route of march to the tank commander. He had thought that his information would please the officer. He was quickly made aware of just how wrong he was.
Not even trying to mask his impatience, the armor officer had heard Kaoru out in foot-tapping silence, then he snapped, "Impossible, Naka, utterly impossible, you must put your uniformed aggregation of cretins to the task of finding another way. My tank is of exceeding value just now, to the Army, to the very Empir
e. It must be given the care you would give a personal possession of the very Son of Heaven, our Emperor, had such been placed within your keeping.
"Why, what if the machine should break down, develop some type or variety of trouble within that tunnel? Do you think it could be repaired by torchlight, even by your hulking, rural blacksmith of an infantry sergeant? I think not!
"Besides, these ruins all are incredibly ancient, uncared for, given any land of repair who knows how many centuries ago, and that applies to your precious tunnel, too. Naka, it could well be a real deathtrap, for in case you hadn't noticed the fact, tanks make noise, they make a great deal of noise, enough noise that the vibrations of that noise might very well bring the whole of that damned hill down upon us all.
"I must tell you this, Naka, my estimation of your fitness for command—indeed, of your overall intelligence—has not been at all enhanced by this last few days' blunders and real lack of even the bare rudiments of effective leadership of that idiot rabble you
choose to call a company of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. And now this suggestion that I take part in your lunacy? No, Naka," he had shaken his head, "I fear that in all conscience, it must be my duty to inform the battalion commander of just how inept you are and rather strongly suggest your quick replacement/'
It had all welled up in Kaoru then, welled up with such force and pressure as to defy restraint. But, as was his way, the final bursting forth had come not in physical violence or in shouts of rage. "What's your real problem, Lieutenant," he had inquired gently, solicitously, "are you afraid of the dark? Afraid of going through an old tomb? Afraid of Burmese ghosts, is that it?"
The only thing that had saved Kaoru's life at that moment had been that the tank commanders 8mm Nambu pistol had failed to fire—as was common in that ill-designed model—and before he had been able to clear it, the quick and powerful Sergeant Kiyomoto had twisted it from out his hands.
