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 a
rmorer 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.
Well, Peggy wasn’t thrilled when Herb went off and did whatever he did for the government, either. She walked out of the train station and caught a northbound bus. The Packard mostly sat these days. The gas ration was too small to let you go anywhere you didn’t really need to.
Things could have been worse, though. She knew that. In Hitler’s Germany, doctors were the only civilians who could get any gas at all. Most private cars had had their batteries and tires confiscated for the war effort. The Nazis weren’t melting them down to turn them into tanks and U-boats, but that was probably just a matter of time. From all she’d heard, things weren’t much better in France and England. She wondered what they were like in Japan. How many cars had the Japs had to begin with? It wasn’t as if they built them for themselves, the way the European countries and America did.
The very idea of Japanese-made autos set her to laughing softly as she got off the bus. What were Japanese factories good for except cheap tin knockoffs of better goods made somewhere else? If you saw something with MADE IN JAPAN stamped on it, you knew it would fall apart if you looked at it sideways.
But the laughter stopped as she headed home. American fighting men had assumed the Japs’ planes and warships were made of tinfoil and scrap metal and rubber bands, too. That turned out not to be quite right. The Jap Navy ruled the Pacific everywhere west of Hawaii, and it seemed only dumb luck that the Rising Sun didn’t fly over Honolulu, too.
She hadn’t bothered locking the front door when she and Herb headed for the station. She knew there were burglars, but she didn’t worry that anyone would break into the house the minute the people who lived there left for a little while. People who did worry about silly stuff like that were also people who snapped their fingers all the time to keep the elephants away.
Sure enough, no one had absconded with the silver and the fine china by the time she got back. No masked thug waited in the foyer to knock her over the head and beat it out the door with her handbag. It was just the good old familiar house, empty but for her. She turned on the stove and waited for the coffee to start perking again.
Coffee, now, coffee was a blessing she appreciated. Considering the horrible stuff that degraded its name and reputation on the Continent, she didn’t think she’d ever take the real McCoy for granted again.
She turned on the radio. A chorus of singers was celebrating the virtues of Ivory soap. Another chorus, this one masculine, sang the praises of Old Gold cigarettes. A happy couple made it plain they wouldn’t have been happy if not for Spam. A local shoe store told the world-or as much of it as this station’s signals reached-that it was having a sale. Eventually, music that wasn’t trying to sell you something came on.
That didn’t mean it was good music. Peggy turned the dial. The next station over boasted-if that was the word-a fast-talking comic going through ways of beating the very mild American rationing system. His routine lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny.
Peggy thought so, anyhow, and changed the station again. Maybe somebody who hadn’t seen what real shortages were like would have thought the comedian was a riot. But all the commercials she’d listened to before made it plain how much the United States still had, and how much of that abundance remained available to civilians. If you complained about it, what were you but a spoiled little brat?
Or maybe you were just an American who’d never been abroad and had no standards of comparison. By all the signs, that made you the world’s equivalent of a spoiled little brat. People here hadn’t the faintest idea of how lucky and how well off they were.
On the next station Peggy found, a woman was talking seriously about wives and girlfriends who feared their menfolk would be unfaithful to them after being in the service for a while, or who were afraid they might decide to look for new companions themselves once they got lonely enough. That was a genuine problem, all right, here and in every other country at war. Even so, Peggy twisted the tuning dial again, and twisted it hard. She knew too well what a problem it was, and didn’t want to have to think about it now.
She finally found some news. The world report was over, though. A train derailment in South Dakota had killed four people. The longshoremen’s union on the West Coast was threatening a strike if working conditions didn’t improve-and local authorities were threatening to jail all the union leaders if the longshoremen did presume to strike. The mayor of Kansas City was under arrest on corruption charges, some of which went all the way back to
before the last war. “Another machine politician bites the dust,” the newsman intoned piously.
“Business as usual,” Peggy said, and turned the dial again. This time she discovered, to her surprise, a baseball game. The Athletics had scheduled their matchup with the Browns for ten in the morning: “To give the people who work the later shifts the chance to see it,” their broadcaster explained. Since the A’s and the Browns had both sunk like a rock in the standings ever since Opening Day, odds were not too many fans would have gone to Shibe Park no matter when the game started. Peggy did admire Connie Mack. He’d managed the A’s since the start of the American League, back when she was a little girl. The Tall Tactician, people called him. He wore a suit and a hat, even in the dugout. He’d had some great teams-but not lately.
The Browns, by contrast, had never had any great teams. They were the only American League franchise without a pennant to their name. When you played in the same town as the powerhouse Cardinals, drawing crowds was tough. The Phillies, at least, were as wretched as the A’s, and historically even more so.
Peggy listened to the game till the bottom of the hour. The A’s botched a rundown. The Browns’ left fielder dropped not one but two fly balls. Both clubs were in midseason form. At half past, she switched stations again (not without regret, for the ballgame was funnier than the comic making wisecracks about rationing) and found some more news.
She got the international reports, but they mostly consisted of both sides’ lies about what was going on in Russia. Whoever finally came out on top in the war, truth had been one of the first casualties. She wondered if anything could bring it back to life. She doubted that. After Dr. Goebbels’ ministrations and those of his Soviet counterparts, it would need Jesus’ touch even more than Lazarus had.
Then the newsman talked about skirmishes on the Franco-German frontier. Peggy smiled. With a two-front war on his hands, the Fuhrer wouldn’t be doing the same.
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