The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  They closed to just over two kilometers. That was still a longish shot, but it was as good as they were likely to get. Any closer and somebody on the Russian destroyer was liable to wake up and spoil things. A ship like that could show them her heels easy as you please … or make an attack run instead, which wouldn’t be any fun.

  Lemp ordered a spread of three torpedoes. One by one, at his shout of “Los!”, the eels sprang away from the U-30. Seawater gurgled into the boat’s forward ballast tanks to make up for the several tonnes of weight now vanished and to keep the trim level.

  The stopwatch’s hand seemed to crawl around the dial with maddening slowness. Lemp looked from it to the periscope’s eyepiece again and again. The destroyer made sudden smoke and started to turn … too late. The first eel caught her up near the bow, one of the others not far from the stern. Both explosions rumbled through the U-30. As badly broken as a dog hit by a car, the destroyer went down fast.

  “They got a signal off, dammit,” the radio operator said, emerging from his tiny sanctum.

  “Change course to 270,” Lemp said. “We’ll stay at Schnorkel depth. Let’s see their planes spot us then.”

  “Right you are, Skipper. I am changing course to 270.” The exec swung the U-30 back toward the west, the direction from which the boat had come. A rare smile spread across his face. “The lords will be extra happy we’ve made a kill, eh?”

  “Think so, do you?” Lemp smiled, too. The most junior crewmen—the lords, in U-boat crews’ jargon—bedded down in the torpedo room. As long as it was full of eels, some of them slept on top of torpedoes. Once the reloads went into the tubes, they’d have more room to place their bedrolls and sling their hammocks. To them, that had to outweigh sinking a Soviet destroyer. It didn’t for Julius Lemp, but he knew how they felt all the same.

  SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA was busy counting logs. The count had to come out perfect for every unit at Pingfan under his command. If it didn’t, somebody would catch hell. Oh, the logs would, of course, but they counted for nothing in a Japanese soldier’s view of things. The person who would catch hell if the count screwed up was the man in charge—Fujita himself.

  He glowered at the logs as he counted them. The maruta stood at stiff attention, their faces as expressionless as they could make them. They, or most of them, wanted the count to come out right, too. Until the Japanese authorities were satisfied, the prisoners of war wouldn’t get fed.

  That simple truth should have nipped all escape attempts in the bud. If somebody got out of one of the barbed-wire enclosures, nobody who stayed behind would get anything to eat. The maruta didn’t get that much to eat as things were. They would have got even less if the bacteriologists of Unit 731 didn’t need reasonably healthy subjects for some experiments.

  In spite of themselves, the maruta shivered. Pingfan was a little south of Harbin, but only a little. Winters in Manchukuo were nothing to sneeze at—unless you got influenza or pneumonia or any of the other illnesses you could catch all by yourself in cold weather.

  Fujita felt the chill himself, and he wore a fur cap with earflaps, a double-breasted greatcoat with a fur collar and a thick lining, heavy mittens, and valenki he’d taken off a dead Russian in the forests on the far side of the Ussuri. The maruta—Red Army men in this enclosure—had only their ordinary service uniforms.

  They also had more than cold weather to worry about. To the Japanese bacteriologists, they were nothing but guinea pigs to be used up as needed. That the Japanese called them something like logs showed what they thought of them. Brave soldiers, proper soldiers, wouldn’t have let themselves get captured. Proper officers wouldn’t have surrendered, not when they were defending a place as vital to their country as Vladivostok.

  (The other useful thing about calling a POW a log, of course, was that you didn’t have to think of him as a human being once you started doing it. Japanese soldiers—and scientists, too—had trouble thinking of prisoners as human beings like themselves anyhow. By surrendering, you threw away your manhood, your self: your honor, in essence. Who could possibly care what happened to you afterwards? But tagging the POWs at Pingfan maruta made that dehumanizing process all but official.)

  One of the privates helping Fujita with the count—doing most of the actual work, in other words—came up to him and stood at attention, waiting to be noticed. After a delay designed to remind the soldier he was only a private, Fujita deigned to nod. “Yes?”

  “Please excuse me, Sergeant-san, but I make the count out to be a hundred and seventy-four.”

  “Does that include the two bodies?” Fujita pointed toward the corpses lying in front of the Russians’ neat ranks. You had to show your dead. How else could the guards be sure they hadn’t run off to join the Chinese bandits bedeviling Manchukuo and to spread wild, lying rumors about what went on at Pingfan?

  “Hai, Sergeant-san.” The private nodded eagerly. The other new conscript with Fujita hustled up a moment later and reported the same figure. They’d gone down opposite sides of the prisoners’ ranks, so they couldn’t have put their heads together to come up with it.

  It also matched the number of men this compound should hold, taking the deaths yesterday into account. Fujita knew that—he kept track of such things—but he checked the figure on the paper stuck in his clipboard even so. He couldn’t afford to be wrong, not on something this important. Yes, 174. Nobody’d run off in the night, not here.

  He raked the Red Army men in the front row with his eyes. They were only prisoners, after all. They deserved no better. “Khorosho!” he shouted. His accent was terrible, but he didn’t care. It was up to the round-eyed barbarians to be grateful that he’d wasted any time to learn a few words of their stupid, ugly language.

  “Arigato gozaimasu, Sergeant-san!” the Russians chorused. Naturally, they had to thank him for finding their numbers acceptable. They reached as one for the mess tins on their belts—if they had belts—and trooped off to the kitchen for their meager morning meal.

  Fujita pointed to the scrawny dead bodies. “Have these disposed of when the maruta come back,” he told the privates.

  “Yes, Sergeant-san!” one of them said, while the other went, “Of course, Sergeant-san!” Fujita had taken his lumps while he was a private. Now he could hand them out. These fellows had to keep him sweet, as he’d had to suck up to his sergeant before. That was how the system worked.

  Later that day, a microbiologist came up to him. “Sir!” Fujita said, stiffening to rigor mortis–like attention. “What do you need, sir?” Whatever it was, Fujita would get it for him or die trying. His orders were that a scientist’s white lab coat was as good as an officer’s collar tabs. If somebody wearing one gave him orders, he had to follow them.

  An officer would knock you around at the slightest suspicion of reluctance. The scientists were friendlier than that, or maybe just more naïve. Dr. Tsuruo Yamamura was a nice guy. Sometimes he even said please when he told people what to do, a courtesy no officer would ever show. He did it now: “We have a new shipment of maruta coming in by train this afternoon. Please take a squad of guards and meet them at half past three, then take them to the new compound—is it number twenty-seven?”

  “Yes, sir. Compound twenty-seven.” Fujita tore off a parade-ground salute.

  “Be gentle with them unless they try to escape,” Yamamura said. “They are important to the war effort.”

  “Yes, sir!” the sergeant repeated. But then he risked a questioning “Sir?” He wasn’t used to orders like the ones he’d just got.

  Dr. Yamamura was willing, even eager, to explain, where an officer would have either snarled or hauled off and belted Fujita for his gall. “These are American Marines captured in Peking and Shanghai,” the bacteriologist said. “Their reactions to our experiments will help show how Americans and Englishmen differ from Chinese and Japanese, and will let us make more effective weapons to use against them.”

  “I see,” Fujita said slowly. He’d talked to more than
a few soldiers who’d served in one or another of the major Chinese cities. From what they said, American Marines were very bad news: big, tough, clever fighters who backed away from nobody. If they were as tough as all that, though, why did they let themselves be taken prisoner instead of killing themselves or making their foes finish them?

  That wasn’t a sergeant’s worry. Being at the railroad siding with a squad well before 3:30 was. Fujita made sure he and his men were in place. The train down from Harbin, naturally, ran late. That also wasn’t his worry—or anything close to a surprise.

  More than a hundred Americans stumbled off the train when it finally showed up. They’d been packed in like rice grains jammed into a sack. Close to half of them wore dirty bandages that showed they’d been wounded. They jabbered in incomprehensible English.

  Shouts and gestures with bayoneted rifles got them moving in the right direction. Most of the time, the Japanese soldiers would have clouted some of them with rifle butts to speed things along. But Fujita had spelled out Dr. Yamamura’s orders, so his men took it easy.

  Compound 27 had a barracks hall with a central stove inside the barbed wire. The prisoners wouldn’t be too crowded. They could recover from whatever they’d gone through on the train. Fujita thought they were almost living in a hotel. By the way his men rolled their eyes, they also figured the Americans had it soft. But they were only soldiers. The officers and scientists set over them didn’t care a sen’s worth what they thought.

  SOMEWHERE OR OTHER, Adam Pfaff had got his hands on a pair of field glasses. They were such an obviously useful thing for an infantryman to have, not even Awful Arno complained about them. And Baatz complained about everything. He’d sure pissed and moaned about the gray paint Pfaff had slapped on his rifle’s woodwork. Somehow, though, the nonregulation Mauser hadn’t made the world come to an end or handed the war to the Ivans on a silver platter. Baatz was used to the piece by now. Willi Dernen wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started ordering other people to paint theirs the same way.

  Had Willi owned binoculars, he would have used them for something practical, like ogling girls getting into or out of clothes from ranges where they couldn’t catch him at it. His buddy didn’t do that—or, if Pfaff did, he didn’t brag about it or share the field glasses when he spotted something juicy the way most guys would have. Instead, when he wasn’t using them to search out male Ivans with rifles, he pointed them up into the sky. He tended to mumble to himself when he did that.

  “What do you see up there? Bombers?” Willi asked one evening at sunset when he caught Pfaff doing it. He didn’t hear aircraft engines, but that might not signify. Sometimes the Ivans flew so high, you couldn’t hear them. And spotting planes against the darkening sky was a bitch. Again, binoculars would clearly come in handy.

  But the other Gefreiter shook his head without lowering the field glasses. “Heavenly bodies,” he answered.

  That made Willi think of naked women again. He wasn’t as big a cockhound as some of the guys, but he wasn’t a priest, either. Nowhere close. He looked up into the sky himself. He didn’t see any naked girls up there, only the first-quarter moon and a growing number of stars. He said so.

  This time, Pfaff did lower the binoculars. He shook his head again in some annoyance. “Not that kind of heavenly bodies,” he said. It wasn’t that he had anything against women, either.

  “Well, what, then?” Willi inquired. He was getting annoyed himself.

  “If you really want to know, I was looking at the moon.”

  Willi eyed it himself. There it was, up in the sky. It looked like half a coin. The straight line that ran from top to bottom wasn’t quite straight. It seemed ever so slightly chewed, which made it different from the rest of the moon’s outline. It still wasn’t very exciting, or even interesting. Again, Willi didn’t hesitate to say so.

  Pfaff handed him the field glasses. “Have a look through these. You know how to adjust them for your eyes?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ve used ’em before.” Willi aimed at the moon. It wasn’t very far out of focus even before he carefully twisted each eyepiece in turn to sharpen things up. His buddy’s vision couldn’t have been too different from his own. But once he got the image as clear as he could … “Wow,” he breathed, hardly even realizing he was making a noise.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Pfaff spoke with quiet pride, as if, instead of Galileo, he were the first one ever to see the heavens close up.

  That pride was wasted on Willi, who didn’t even hear him. The moon hung there, seeming close enough to reach out and touch if he took one hand away from the field glasses. It wasn’t just a light in the sky any more. It was a world, a world out there in space. The faint gray patches you could make out with the naked eye (and Willi didn’t so much as think of naked women, the truest proof of how fascinated he was) swelled into plains that had to be hundreds of kilometers across. Craters pocked them and filled the brighter, whiter areas of the moon.

  Shadows stretched across the craters closest to the straight line. The others, under higher sunlight, showed less contrast. “What made them?” Willi asked. “Volcanoes?”

  Adam Pfaff understood what he was talking about right away. “Nobody knows for sure. We’ve never been there, after all,” he answered. “But that’s one of the best guesses.”

  “Wow,” Willi said again, staring and staring.

  “You see the three craters, one above the next, near the sunrise line—the terminator, they call it?” Pfaff said.

  Willi peered again, then nodded. “I see ’em.”

  “They’re called Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, and Azrachel.”

  “All the shit on the moon has names?” That had never occurred to Willi before. You could make maps of what was up there, the same as you could down here. It really was another world.

  “You think they look impressive through these, you should see ’em through a telescope,” Pfaff said. “Back home, I’ve got an eight-centimeter refractor. It’s little and pretty cheap, but it’ll let you magnify a hundred times, not just seven. Then you can really start to get an idea of how much there is to see.”

  Willi tried to imagine the moon appearing that much bigger and closer than it did even through binoculars. He felt himself failing. After you’d started playing with yourself, you could try to imagine what a girl would be like, but you wouldn’t know what counted till one let you get lucky.

  “What else can you show me here?” he asked.

  “Well, you see those two bright stars close together, a little west of the moon?” Pfaff asked. Willi nodded once more. One of them was the brightest star in the sky; the other, the more easterly one, was fainter and more yellow. His friend went on, “You can take a look at them if you want. The bright one is Jupiter. Maybe you’ll see a couple of its moons if you hold the binoculars real steady. The other one’s Saturn.”

  “Rings!” Willi exclaimed, remembering from school.

  “Rings,” Adam agreed, “only the binoculars won’t show them. Through a telescope, they’ve got to be the most beautiful thing in the sky. You think they can’t possibly be real.”

  If they were more beautiful than the magnified moon, Willi wished he had a telescope. Through the field glasses … The stars stayed stars. They looked brighter and you could see more of them, but they didn’t get bigger. Jupiter and Saturn did. Jupiter especially showed a tiny disk. It probably wasn’t even a quarter as wide as the moon through the naked eye, but it was there.

  And, sure as hell, it had two little stars dancing attendance on it. That was interesting—not so glorious as the moon, but interesting all the same. “What else is there?” Willi’d ignored the heavens as long as he’d been alive. Now he wanted to look at everything at once.

  Adam Pfaff pointed to the left of the moon this time. “See those faint stars in what looks like mist? You can’t make ’em out real well because the moon’s so close, but they’re there.” Following his finger, Willi spied what he was talking about
. Pfaff said, “That’s the Pleiades. They look different through the field glasses.”

  “Different how?” Willi asked. Pfaff didn’t enlighten him, so he turned the binoculars that way. He whistled softly. Had someone taken a bag of diamonds—along with the odd sapphire and ruby—and spilled them on velvet of the deepest blue imaginable, a blue only a whisper from black, he might have made an inferior copy of what Willi saw. Jewels don’t shine by their own light. The stars of the Pleiades did. Even more than with the moon, the naked eye gave no hint of what hid in plain sight.

  “Hey, what are you clowns up to?” Arno Baatz’s grating voice made Willi yank down the binoculars, as if the corporal had caught him with dirty pictures. Baatz brayed on: “Trying to freeze your stupid dicks off? You don’t have to try real hard, not here you don’t.”

  Willi had forgotten he was cold. Out in the open in the middle of a Russian winter, that would do for a miracle till a real one came along. “We’re just looking at the moon and stuff through my field glasses,” Pfaff said. “Want to see?”

  “Nahh.” Awful Arno laughed at the idea. That saddened Willi without surprising him. “I got better things to do with my time, I do,” the corporal added. Willi almost asked him what they were, but held his tongue instead. If Baatz didn’t want to know, Willi didn’t want to tell him.

  IN THE RED AIR FORCE, political officers were like epaulets on a uniform: they were decorative, but you didn’t need them. Most of them had sense enough to know it, too. If a politruk tried to countermand a squadron commander’s orders, the arrogant fool would be ignored if he was lucky. If he wasn’t so lucky, he might leave a bomber without a parachute from several thousand meters up. Any half-clever officer could cook up paperwork explaining the unfortunate accident. It wasn’t as if the jerk it happened to would be there to give him the lie.