The Big Switch twtce-3

by Harry Turtledove

  As the flyers had nodded for Stalin, so they nodded for the squadron leader. Anastas Mouradian made sure he wasn’t behindhand there. All the same, he got the feeling Tomashevsky hadn’t listened to the General Secretary so closely as he might have. Tomashevsky talked about the Soviet people, about Soviet science and engineering. That had been the Party line for a long time. By the way Stalin talked today, though, the line was changing. Stalin talked about Tsar Alexander and Peter the Great, about Russian victories over invaders from the west.

  Stas had heard rumors that people in the northwestern Ukraine were welcoming the Germans and their allies as liberators. He didn’t know if the whispers were true. But anyone who repeated a story like that took his life in his hands. Stas did know the Ukrainians had little reason to love Stalin or the Soviet government, not after the way they were starved by hecatombs during collectivization. After that, even the Nazis might look good by comparison.

  “Today, we fly against Velikye Luki,” the squadron commander continued. “The Poles and the French are staging through there, building up for an attack farther east. Our mission is to strike the train station and the railroad yards.” He paused, then asked, “Questions?”

  “What are the German defenses like, Comrade Colonel?” Mouradian said. Even if the Poles and French were coming through Velikye Luki, the fighters above the place and the antiaircraft guns inside would be operated by Germans. He was as sure of that as made no difference.

  Tomashevsky only shrugged. “It does not matter. We are to strike the city regardless.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian replied. Maybe the squadron commander had no idea what was waiting for them. Or maybe the Germans were loaded for bear. Before long, everybody would find out which.

  Even if the Luftwaffe had Bf-109s patrolling over Velikye Luki, Stas knew he might get away anyhow in a Pe-2. He wondered how Sergei Yaroslavsky and the Chimp were doing in that ancient SB-2. Pretty soon, with any luck at all, they’d start flying the more modern bomber, too.

  After his bold question, the mission turned out to be… a mission. Bf-109s did fly above occupied Velikye Luki, but not in swarms. There was a lot of ground fire, but there wasn’t a lot of ground fire. He watched in dismay as one bomber in the formation fell out of the sky and cometed groundward trailing flame and smoke. A couple of shell fragments clanged against his plane’s aluminum skin, but they did no damage he could find.

  At Ivan Kulkaanen’s command, Sergeant Mechnikov let the bombs fall free. Stas could only hope they landed on the target or close to it. Bombing from 6,000 meters was not an exact science. You aimed them as best you could, you dropped them, and you got the hell out of there. Stas had sat in Kulkaanen’s seat. He knew how hard the job was. Once you landed, you made the after-action report sound good. That was also part of the job. Yes, another mission, all right. And how many more still to come?

  Harbin held enough Japanese settlers to keep a daily newspaper in business. Copies came down to Pingfan, sometimes on the day they were printed, sometimes the day after. The local rag would never run the Yomiuri Shinbun out of business, but Hideki Fujita read it avidly just the same. Along with the radio, it helped remind him that there was a world beyond Shiro Ishii’s bacteriological-warfare camp.

  He needed the reminder, too. When you dealt with maruta every day, when you sent them into the secret center compound and they never came out again, you really did start thinking of them as logs. The other choice was remembering that they were human beings, even if they were Russians or Chinese. Considering the kinds of things that happened to them in there (Fujita neither knew nor wanted to know the details: the broad outlines were more than bad enough), they would have been better off if they were made of wood.

  The local paper was full of a rising tide of abuse aimed at the United States. Whoever wrote the stories roared out hatred against the country across the Pacific for refusing to sell Japan any more of the raw materials she needed. Roosevelt thinks he can bring us to our knees through economic warfare, an editorial declared. He has yet to learn that the Empire of Japan goes to its knees before no man and no nation. He has yet to learn this important fact, but we Japanese stand ready to teach him the lesson.

  Shinjiro Hayashi read the newspaper, too. He was less enthusiastic about what he found in it than Fujita was. “Are you ready to fight another war so soon, Sergeant- san?” he asked. “We just patched up a peace with Russia, and the war with China goes on and on.”

  “War with the United States isn’t our worry,” Fujita answered. “The sailors will carry the load on that one.”

  “Some of it, sure, but not all of it,” Hayashi said. “The Philippines sit just south of the Home Islands, and who runs them? The Americans, that’s who. If war breaks out, we’ll have to take them away from the USA. Otherwise, they’re a perfect base for enemy ships and planes. And it won’t be the sailors who do most of the fighting down there. It’ll be bowlegged bastards like us.”

  Fujita laughed. Neither he nor Hayashi was bowlegged, but he knew what the senior private meant. The Navy was the aristocratic service. The Army took peasants and turned them into men. It had done just that with Fujita. It had turned Hayashi into a man, too, even if he’d put on more airs than peasants before conscription-and some sergeants’ hard hands-knocked them out of him.

  “All right. Fine. That’s the Philippines,” Fujita said. “But it will still mostly be the Navy’s war.”

  “I suppose so, Sergeant- san,” Hayashi said, by which he meant he supposed no such thing but wasn’t stupid enough to come right out and tell Fujita he was wrong. “But if a fight like that starts, it won’t be a halfway affair. French Indochina, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with oil and rubber and tin… When you grab, you should grab with both hands.”

  “If you grab too much, your hands fill up and you trip over your own feet,” Fujita responded. “There’s such a thing as getting greedy, you know.”

  “I suppose so,” Hayashi said again. “But sometimes you only get the one chance. If you don’t take hold of it while it’s there, you may never see it again. It’s like a chance with a pretty girl, neh?”

  “You always grab with both hands then!” Fujita made as if to cup breasts in his callused palms. Both soldiers barked harsh male laughter.

  A couple of days later, Lieutenant Ozawa summoned Fujita to his tent. He had a little coal stove in there for warmth, but it was fighting out of its weight against winter in Manchukuo. “I need your squad to take care of something for me,” the officer said.

  “Yes, sir!” Fujita said, and saluted. He had no idea what Ozawa would tell him to do. That hardly mattered. Whatever it was, he and his men would take a whack at it. If the lieutenant wanted him to bring back a piece of rock from the moon, he wouldn’t fail through lack of effort.

  But Ozawa had nothing so ridiculous in mind. “Take as many Russian and Chinese maruta as you need,” he said. “Build a new prisoner compound. Site it at least fifty meters away from any others. Make it of a size to hold, oh, about a thousand men.”

  “Yes, sir!” Fujita repeated. For good measure, he saluted again, too. This was something he knew how to handle. “How soon do you need it ready?”

  “Three weeks should be plenty of time,” the lieutenant answered.

  Fujita considered. “That’ll be a little tight, sir, for running up all the barracks halls and everything. The weather won’t help us any.” If he didn’t get the job done on time, he wanted his excuses lined up in advance.

  “You take care of it,” Ozawa said. “You don’t want me to assign the work to someone else, do you?”

  Part of Fujita wanted just that. But if he admitted it, he wouldn’t get any other interesting work as long as he stayed at Pingfan. Not interesting in the good sense of the word, anyhow. They might give him things no one else wanted to do or was able to do, and then blame him when he had trouble. That wouldn’t be good. And so, with no hesitation the officer would notice, he replied, “No, sir.�
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  “All right, then. Three weeks. See to it,” Ozawa said. “Dismissed.”

  Fujita didn’t even mutter under his breath till he left the tent and the lieutenant couldn’t hear him any more. You didn’t want to give the jerks who ordered you around any kind of handle to let them screw you even harder. They already had enough advantage on account of their rank.

  He told Senior Private Hayashi about the new assignment and directed him to gather up the labor they’d need to construct a new compound. Hayashi might have had his own opinion about people whose rank let them give orders. If he did, he also had the sense not to put it on display.

  Laying out the barbed-wire perimeter around the new compound was easy. Any maruta could handle it, because it needed no skill. But the barracks required people who could use hammer and saw, chisel and plane. The prisoners clamored for the work, because they knew they’d get fed a little better while they were doing it. They also wouldn’t have to go into the secret inner facility while they were working. Hayashi efficiently weeded out the ones who were only pretending to be carpenters. He and the other Japanese soldiers beat up some of them to teach them not to play stupid games with their betters.

  Chinese and Russians, forced to work together, screamed and gestured at one another, trying to communicate without a common language. Hayashi knew a little Chinese; no one in Fujita’s squad spoke Russian. He had drawings to show what he required. Those pictures were worth an untold number of words. The barracks rose on schedule.

  The next interesting question was, who would live in the new compound? When new shipments of Chinese came to Pingfan, they got dumped in with their countrymen. Those barracks grew insanely crowded? So what? The same had been true of the Russians, though no new Red Army men were coming in now that peace with the Soviet Union had been arranged.

  Didn’t a new compound argue for a new kind of prisoner? So it seemed to Fujita. Lieutenant Ozawa either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. You couldn’t properly grill officers, however much you wanted to: one more proof that they weren’t good for much.

  Pete McGill got something he never expected in a million years: a combination Christmas and get-well card from the leathernecks of the Shanghai garrison. Almost everybody signed it, even guys he couldn’t stand and who he knew couldn’t stand him. Herman Szulc wrote, You don’t know how lucky you are to get away. Max Weinstein said, Power to the proletariat! If he’d told that to Pete face-to-face, Pete would’ve wanted to punch him in the snoot. Seeing the cramped scrawl on the card only made Pete miss the stubborn pinko.

  More air-raid alarms sounded in Manila these days. At first, they’d panicked the Filipinos. Now the locals ignored them. So did Pete. He was up and about, but not exactly swift. Even though the Boise had accepted him aboard, he remained on light duty. There were times when he wondered if somebody’d pulled strings to get him out of the military hospital, but he didn’t worry about it.

  He still wished he were back in Shanghai with the men he’d known for so long. If the Japs did jump, the leathernecks in China would get it in the neck. They couldn’t very well do anything else except run-and running wasn’t Marine Corps style. They’d make the best fight they could, but when there were hundreds of them and zillions of little yellow monkeys… Even the hero of a bad Western shoot-’em-up couldn’t blast that many redskins before they got him.

  Pete remembered the bet he’d won from his buddies by barging into a line of Jap soldiers and watching a movie with them. The samurai warriors in their movie wore funny clothes and had funnier haircuts. They used swords instead of six-shooters. They spoke a language he didn’t begin to understand. Such minor details aside, the flick might have been a grade-C Hollywood oater.

  Whenever Pete heard airplane engines over Manila, he got nervous. The Japs bombed the crap out of Chinese cities every chance they got. If they decided to mix it up with the USA, of course they’d do the same thing here. They’d have to be nuts not to.

  For a wonder, the American government seemed to realize as much. Some of the engines Pete heard belonged to P-40 fighters. People said those would blast the Japs’ scrap-metal planes out of the sky. Others came in pairs on fat-bellied B-18 Digby bombers. If the Japanese did come, flying to their bases and blowing them sky-high looked like a pretty decent plan.

  The American government also waved its magic wand and turned Philippine Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur back into American General Douglas MacArthur. Some of the guys Pete drank with off duty applauded that. Others just jeered. The longer soldiers had served under MacArthur, the more skeptical they seemed. Pete leaned toward the doubters. MacArthur belonged to the Army, didn’t he? Of course that meant he was likely to screw things up.

  Christmas came. So did New Year’s. Pete got a wire from his folks in the Bronx. That was nice, but it might as well have come from another world. The card from the fellows he’d served with meant more to him.

  Foreign news didn’t get any better. No one would confuse 1941 with the Millennium, not any time soon. The Nazis and their little friends kept bashing heads with the Reds. The Japanese kept banging away in China. Their foreign minister said, “No power can accept the dictates of another without becoming a slave.” That was the translation, anyhow. Maybe it sounded friendlier in Japanese, but, again, Pete leaned toward the doubters. Then the foreign minister clammed up altogether. Nobody at all took that for a good sign.

  Manila went right on having air-raid drills. The day after New Year’s, a nervous antiaircraft-gun crew opened up on a Digby. They shot it down. That was good news as far as gunnery went. Pete didn’t suppose the other Digbys’ flyers thought so. If a bunch of jumpy, half-trained American soldiers could knock a B-18 out of the sky, what would Jap veterans do to them? What would Jap fighters do to them? Those were… interesting questions, weren’t they?

  The second Sunday of January was the twelfth. The night before, Pete had gone out and got crocked. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d got crocked on Saturday nights in the Far East. He couldn’t remember what all had happened on some of those nights, either. That was the point, for him and a swarm of guys just like him. If getting crocked on Saturday night wasn’t a great American military tradition, he didn’t know what would be.

  Maybe waking up on Sunday morning feeling like death. Pete lived up to that one, in spades. “The fuck?” he muttered, trying to figure out exactly what kind of ungodly racket had ripped him untimely from the womb of sleep-and from the oblivion of all the cheap whiskey he’d poured down the night before.

  He didn’t need long to figure out what the racket was: all the air-raid sirens in town were going off at once. “Jesus H. Christ!” groaned the guy in the bunk above his. “Has to be that cocksucking MacArthur. He’s the only asshole big enough to boot us out of the sack at sunup on a fucking Sunday morning!”

  If MacArthur was that big an asshole, Pete was all for stringing him up by the balls. He was also all for gallons of hot coffee, a handful of aspirins to finish corroding his stomach lining but quiet his pounding head, and some more ZZZs after the sirens quit screeching.

  If they ever did. A moment later, antiaircraft guns added a bass note to the cacophony. More Digbys? Pete wondered vaguely. Some of the guys at the guns would catch hell.

  Or would they? If those were Digbys overhead, they were fighting back. Bombs crumped down. They didn’t land that close to the cruiser-but they weren’t that far away, either.

  “Holy motherfucking shit! I think we’re under attack!” exclaimed the Marine in the upper.

  “Nothing gets by you, does it, Sherlock?” Pete said.

  “Huh?” the other guy said. It wasn’t a brilliant comeback, but Pete didn’t gig him for it. Instead, he scrambled out of the bunk, trying to find out what the hell was going on. He didn’t forget his hangover-he would have had to be dead for real to do that-but he did shove it aside. For once, he had more important things to worry about.

  Klaxons hooted. “All hands! Battle sta
tions! All hands! Battle stations!” boomed from the loudspeakers.

  On light duty, Pete didn’t have a battle station. He got topside as fast as he could anyway. The sky was full of planes and puffs of antiaircraft fire. Shrapnel started pattering down. He suddenly wished for a tin hat. Some of those chunks of shell casing could put your lights out for good if they came down on top of your head.

  Most of the planes overhead had unfamiliar lines-but not that unfamiliar, not to him. He’d seen them every now and then in China. He’d seen the big red meatballs on their wings and fuselages, too. Sure as hell, they were Japs. He didn’t know why he should be so surprised and outraged, but he was. The Philippines belonged to the US of A, God damn it to hell! Those enemy warplanes had no business coming here, no business at all.

  Overhead, a brightly painted Peashooter dueled a Japanese fighter. Americans laughed at the shit the Japs manufactured, but the plane with the meatballs was far faster and more maneuverable than the (admittedly obsolescent) American machine. The Peashooter spun toward the ground, trailing a plume of fire and smoke. No parachute blossomed in the muggy air. Scratch one American flyer, Pete thought.

  Then the Japanese fighter’s pilot spotted him and the other Marines and sailors on the Boise ’s deck. He dove on them, machine guns blazing. Pete couldn’t move fast no matter how much he wanted to-and he wanted to one hell of a lot. Bullets spanged off steel. Wounded men screeched. The fighter roared away at not much over stack height.

  Something not nearly far enough away blew up with a rending crash. Of course the Japs were coming after the Far East Fleet. Small as it was, they were bound to have carriers offshore. They’d want to make damn sure nobody could go after those precious ships.