All he managed to do with Vaclav was remind him he was hungry. The Czech poured some olive oil that wasn’t quite past it on a roll that pretty much was and gnawed away. Olive oil at its best tasted medicinal to him; in Prague, you were more likely to find it at a drugstore than in a grocery. Why would you want the stuff when you could have butter instead?
Why? Olives didn’t thrive in Czechoslovakia. In Spain, they grew like weeds: the short, pale-barked trees with the gray-green leaves were everywhere you looked. Butter didn’t want to keep in the Spanish heat, either; that the Spaniards were casual about cleanliness couldn’t help. And so … olive oil.
A dust cloud on a road leading up to the front said something motorized was heading this way. “Well, well,” Vaclav muttered, there in his hole. “What have we here?” He swung the elephant gun so the sight would bear on the approaching vehicles.
What they had were three Italian CV33 tankettes-the English would have called them Bren-gun carriers, and they were based on the English design. Two mounted a pair of 8mm machine guns in their little turrets, while the one in the lead carried a 20mm cannon. They bore the Nationalist emblem-a white circle with a black X through it-so Vaclav supposed they had Spanish crews.
They’d been obsolete for years. At its thickest, their armor was only 15mm. They were just the kind of vehicles his equally obsolete antitank rifle was designed to fight.
Obsolete didn’t always mean useless. Real tanks would have smashed them in short order. Vaclav doubted the Republic had any real tanks within twenty-five kilometers. Armor was hard to come by in a backwater like Spain. Against soldiers with nothing better than rifle-caliber weapons, the tankettes could prove as deadly as they had in Abyssinia and other backwaters.
Vaclav waited. He didn’t want to open up on the CV33s at extreme range. Even his fat bullets would need plenty of oomph to punch through their steel, thin though it was.
As soon as the Czechs and Internationals in the trenches saw the tankettes, they started shooting at them with machine guns. The rounds sparked off their armor. The CV33s kept coming. The machine-gun fire did discourage most of the Nationalist foot soldiers from coming with them. Vaclav liked that. Even if he could stop the tankettes, foot soldiers might hunt him down and get their revenge.
The CV33s’ machine guns and toy cannon-it wasn’t too different from what a Panzer II carried-spat death at the Republican line. Vaclav fired at the cannon-carrying tankette. Swearing at the elephant gun’s vicious kick, he worked the bolt and fired again. The tankette slewed sideways and stopped.
He swung the massive French rifle toward one of the others. A shot through the front hull to discourage the driver, another through the turret to make the gunner unhappy. A hatch popped open in the turret as the tankette nosed down into a crater and didn’t come out again. Vaclav fired once more. The would-be escapee’s chest exploded into red mist. What was left of him slid back into the CV33.
Now … What would the last one do? If it knew where he’d been shooting from and plastered his hole with machine-gun bullets, he might not get the chance to return fire. But the no doubt badly trained crew hadn’t seen him and had seen enough. The tankette turned around and tried to get away.
He put two rounds into-probably through-the engine. The armor was thinner there. Gasoline and motor oil hit hot metal in places they weren’t supposed to. Smoke and fire roared up through the cooling vents. The smoke let the tankette’s crew get out and get away.
As if the antitank rifle were a lover, Jezek patted it. He’d stopped an armored assault in its tracks. As long as he was up against something as outdated as the piece he carried, he could still do just fine.
Chapter 23
Pete McGill was glad to be out on patrol aboard the Ranger. Yeah, bad shit could still happen to him. A Jap sub might sink the carrier. Three Jap carriers might show up, heading straight for Pearl. Their Zeros would make short work of the combat air patrol, and then their dive-bombers and torpedo planes would make short work of the Ranger.
But he was a Marine. They paid him-not much, not even with three stripes on his sleeve, but they did-to go where bad shit could happen to him. He did his stolid best not to worry about it.
Besides, he could have been worse off. “You know what?” he said to Bob Cullum.
“You’d sooner be in Philadelphia?” the other leatherneck suggested, proving his taste in flicks ran to W.C. Fields.
“I’ll tell you, man, right this minute I’d sooner by anywhere but Honolulu,” Pete answered. “I’d sooner be out here, and I shit you not. God damn the Japs. God damn the rats.”
“Who would’ve imagined we’d see anthrax in Honolulu in this day and age?” Cullum said. “I never even heard of anthrax till they started giving shots. And the plague, too.”
“Plague was one of the things we always worried about on duty at the legation in Peking,” Pete said. “We had lots of traps and lots of cats to keep the rats away. Never saw it while I was there-told you that before-but some of the guys who were old hands when I first came, they said they’d lost buddies from it back in the day.”
“I hear you,” Cullum said. “But I bet there’s been plague in China as long as there’ve been Chinamen. Not like that in Hawaii. There wasn’t any till the Japs went and brought it to us. None of that anthrax shit, neither.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past the Japs, not anything at all. Stinking slanty-eyed assholes.” Pete hardly even noticed he was cursing them, he did it so automatically.
“Boy oh man, I bet all the bars and the cathouses on Hotel Street are going broke.” By the way Bob Cullum said it, that was the worst consequence of the outbreak of disease in Honolulu. Mournful still, he went on, “I mean, you lay a broad and you don’t use your pro kit, maybe she gives you the clap. Nobody dies from the fuckin’ clap. It just hurts like hell for a while when you piss.”
“Uh-huh.” Pete nodded. “Come down with the clap and you worry about trouble with the brass. Come down with anthrax or the plague and you worry about trouble with Saint Peter.”
Sergeant Cullum laughed. “Good one! Now we just hope like hell we don’t have any rats on the ship.”
“I’ve never seen one,” Pete said. Sure, the Ranger’s mooring lines always wore the usual outward-facing hollow copper cones designed to keep the rodents from boarding. The carrier also boasted a ship’s cat. They’d got a big red tabby out of the Honolulu pound and named him Rusty. How much hunting he did, though, was open to question. He spent a lot of time in the galley, where the cooks fed him and fed him. He was already noticeably plumper than he had been when he came aboard.
Even if he’d spent all his time going after rats, whether he could have murdered every last one of them was also open to question. Pete remembered a photo he’d seen of a couple of dozen dead rats and mice found aboard a freighter after the ship was fumigated. Also in the photo was the ship’s cat, which hadn’t got off before they turned loose the gas.
An albatross soared past the carrier. It didn’t really have a wingspan as wide as a fighter’s, but it sure seemed to.
“Goddamn Japs don’t just break international law. They kick it while it’s down and then they shit on it.” Cullum returned to the business at hand.
“You got that right.” Pete nodded again. “They fight us the same way they fight the Chinamen-dirty. You believe what you read in the papers, they started this germ-warfare crap on them years ago.”
“I believe that. The fuckers have it down to a science,” Cullum said. “But if you believe everything you read in the papers, you’re a sucker and a sap, is what you are.”
“Oh, sure.” Pete knew that. Not knowing it, he supposed, was the mark of a sucker and a sap. He absentmindedly scratched an itch. Then, noticing what he’d done, he rolled his eyes. “Every time I itch, I wonder if I’m gonna squash a flea when I scratch.”
If you did kill a flea when you scratched, you had standing orders to report to sick bay on the double. The docs down there could
n’t do anything much for you if the glands under your arms and in your groin started swelling up, but they had an isolation ward so maybe you wouldn’t infect your shipmates.
“And when you gotta shower with seawater and saltwater soap, bet your ass you’re gonna have itches,” Cullum said. “If they let us take Hollywood showers all the time, I almost wouldn’t mind the plague, y’know? It’d be doing me some good, anyhow.”
“Then you wake up,” Pete said. “Not enough fresh water on the ship to use for washing.”
“Tell your granny how to suck eggs,” Cullum retorted. “And clean the wax outa your ears while you’re at it. I said if.”
The Ranger’s Wildcats buzzed in circles above the ship and its escorts, ready to do what they could if the Japanese attacked with airplanes instead of germs. From everything Pete had seen and heard, a Wildcat stood a chance against a Zero, but not a great chance. The American fighters had to slash and run and slash again. If you tried to dogfight a Zero, the first thing you’d wonder was how he’d managed to turn inside you and get on your tail. That was also much too likely to be the last thing you’d ever wonder.
A radar antenna spun round and round, round and round, on top of the carrier’s island. It could warn of approaching planes long before you saw them or heard them. They were talking about using radar to direct gunfire, too. Pretty soon, it would all be one side’s machines squaring off against the other side’s machines. Men wouldn’t have to study war any more, because they wouldn’t be good enough at it to have a prayer of winning.
When Pete brought out that conceit, Sergeant Cullum gave him a funny look. “So what’ll lugs like you and me do then?” he asked.
“Play football. Drink. Brawl in bars,” Pete answered. “Same kind of shit we do now, only without the uniforms.”
“But the uniforms are what makes it matter.” Cullum had been a Marine even longer than Pete. He might have been reciting the Athanasian Creed. By the conviction with which he spoke, he more than half thought he was.
So did Pete. “I won’t argue with you, man.” Since he’d cut closer to the bone than he’d meant to, he changed the subject: “I wonder how much in the way of supplies will have got to Hawaii by the time we’re back at Pearl.”
“There’s an interesting question!” Cullum exclaimed.
Interesting it was, as in the Chinese curse. The USA had to hang on to Hawaii. Without it, fighting a war against Japan was impossible. But Hawaii couldn’t feed or fuel itself. Without shiploads of stuff from the mainland, it would starve. The last thing merchant sailors wanted to do was come down with some horrible disease themselves or bring it back to the West Coast. People on the West Coast were screaming bloody murder and having hysterics. Los Angeles and Oakland had held Kill-a-Rat Days, and proudly displayed piles of long-tailed little corpses. They were kidding themselves if they thought they’d got them all, of course.
“It’s a mess, all right,” Pete said.
“Everything we do in this lousy war is a mess,” Cullum said. “You think we’ll ever get one right from the start?”
“Don’t hold your breath, is all I’ve got to tell you. You’ll turn bluer than a Billie Holiday song if you do,” Pete answered.
He scratched again. No flea crunched under his fingernail. He worried every time he did it anyhow. You couldn’t not worry, even when you were fine. That might have been the scariest thing of all about germ warfare. Whether or not the germs got under your skin, the fear did.
The Japanese naval base-the former American naval base-on Midway made Myitkyina, Burma, seem like Tokyo by comparison. You could walk around on the little islet. None of it reached higher than a few meters above the sea from which it halfheartedly rose. After Burma’s extravagant greenery, the few scrubby grasses that struggled to grow on sand and rocks seemed all the more pathetic.
You could go down to the sea and fish. That was more than just a way to make time pass by. Whatever you pulled out of the water, you could eat. For Japan, Midway was at the very end of a long, long supply line. It was also close to the American naval and air bases farther south and east. Not a lot of freighters made the journey to try to supply the imperial sailors and soldiers there. Not all the ships that tried succeeded.
So fresh-caught fish became an important part of what everyone there ate. Fujita gobbled as much sushi and sashimi in a month as he would have in a year in the Home Islands. You couldn’t get sashimi any fresher than what you’d just caught yourself and cut to pieces with a bayonet or a utility knife.
Or you could hang around the barracks that had formerly housed American Marines and Navy men. Bombardment from the air and sea had battered the barracks as the Japanese took Midway. Repairs to the buildings were haphazard at best. Even so, the quarters-if not the food-seemed luxurious by the standards Fujita was used to.
He needed a while to learn to ignore the chug of the generators that powered the desalination plant. They ran night and day. Fresh water was in short supply on Midway. Cisterns captured what rainwater they could. Water would have been scarcer still if not for the plant, which was taken over from the Americans.
A noncom who’d been there longer than Fujita said, “When we attacked, we were careful not to shell the water-making factory, and our planes didn’t bomb anywhere close to it. We were afraid the Yankees would blow it up themselves when they saw they were going to lose the island, but they didn’t.”
“That’s good luck,” Fujita said.
“Hai.” The other sergeant nodded. He was a stocky fellow a few years older than Fujita. His name was Ichiro Yanai. He went on, “It was like they never expected us to get here, and they didn’t know what to do when we did.”
“Russians can be like that, too,” Fujita said. “White men are hard to figure out. Half the time, I don’t think they know what they’re going to do before they do it.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Yanai answered. “But I don’t care how inscrutable they are.”
“There’s a ten-yen word for you!” exclaimed Fujita, who hoped he understood what it meant.
Sergeant Yanai chuckled self-consciously. “It is, isn’t it? … Where was I going with this? … Ah, hai. They were stupid here, is what they were. They could have given us all kinds of misery if they’d wrecked the waterworks so bad, we couldn’t have fixed it. I don’t even know if we make installations like this one. If we do, shipping one all the way out here sure wouldn’t have been easy. And I’m not sure you can keep any kind of garrison here on nothing but rainwater.”
Fujita looked around. Sand. Rock. Scrub. Sea-endless sea in every direction. Airstrips, with bombers and fighters near them in revetments covered with nets designed to make them look like more sand and scrub from the air.
Gliding in for a landing on one of the strips was not a G4M Navy bomber but an albatross. “Oh, this should be good!” Fujita said.
“Hai!” Yanai’s eyes glowed in anticipation.
An airborne albatross was a miracle of flight. Fujita had never imagined that anything so enormous could also be so graceful. The birds spent almost their whole lives on the wing, and it showed.
An albatross coming in for a landing was a disaster waiting to happen. This disaster didn’t have long to wait. The bird put down its weak little legs as if they were landing gear. If only it could have grown a wheeled undercarriage instead! It was going much too fast for its feet to have a prayer of stopping it or even slowing it down.
It somersaulted-tumbled, really-along the sandy tarmac, head over tail. Its wings stuck out at ridiculous angles. Why they didn’t break-or break off-Fujita had no idea.
The albatross finally came to rest on its back. The first time Fujita watched one land like that, he was sure it must have killed itself. A G4M that flipped over would have burst into flames and incinerated its crew. But that first albatross had just wiggled up onto its legs and walked away. So did this one now. They were made to crash. The birds already on the sand ignored the spectacle that fascinated the
two sergeants. Why shouldn’t they? They’d all come back to earth the same way. Unlike the Japanese, they took it for granted.
“After we captured Midway, a newsreel crew came out here to photograph us so people back home could see what we’d done,” Yanai said. “That was what they came for, but they ended up using a lot of their film on the albatrosses. They couldn’t get over them.”
“I believe it,” Fujita said. “You never get tired of watching them. They don’t come in the same twice in a row, not ever. They always find some new way to smash themselves.”
“It’s never one you expect, either,” Yanai said.
“Has anyone found out what they taste like?” Fujita asked. They weren’t like chickens, that was for sure-you wouldn’t eat both wings and still be hungry for more.
“Oh, yes. They’re pretty fishy-not what you’d call good,” the other sergeant said. “You can eat them if you have to, but they’re more fun to watch than they are to shoot.”
“They’re more fun than anything else you can do on this island,” Fujita said, a certain edge in his voice. The base here wasn’t big enough for the authorities to have bothered bringing in any comfort women to keep the troops happy. Extra mouths to feed, the old men reasoned coldbloodedly. The people in charge of things here had to be too old to get it up very often. Had Fujita known Midway suffered from that kind of shortage, he wouldn’t have come a quarter of the way around the world to drop germ bombs on the Yankees’ heads.
“Nothing I can do about that.” Yanai had no trouble following him. “Nothing you can, either.”
A few days later, American four-engined bombers hit the island. Zeros zoomed up to try to fight them off. The U.S. planes fought back. Unlike G4Ms, they could take a lot of bullets and keep flying. They also spat out a lot of bullets. They bristled with heavy machine guns. The Zeros shot down at least one of them, but a pair of Japanese Navy fighters tumbled into the Pacific.
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