The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Still and all, that didn’t mean he didn’t try. He wore oilskins over his peacoat, and a wide-brimmed, waterproof hat. He was soaked anyhow. Sleet stung his cheek whenever he faced into the wind, which seemed to have come straight down from the North Pole. The waves that slapped the submarine had taken a running start from that wind, too.

  One of the ratings on the conning tower with him tried to clean salt spray off binocular lenses for the third time in ten minutes. He looked through the Zeiss glasses again, then let them thump down to his chest on their strap with a disgusted growl. “Lousy things are worse than useless,” he complained to Lemp, or possibly to God.

  God didn’t answer. Lemp did: “I know, Franz. I’m not using mine, either, not right now.”

  “We don’t have to worry about planes, anyway, not in this crap we don’t,” Franz said. “You’d have to be nuts to take off to begin with. If you didn’t kill yourself doing that, you’d never spot a U-boat. And if you did spot one, you’d lose it again before you could do anything about it.”

  “We hope,” Lemp said. And Franz had to nod to that, because you never could tell. Life was a bitch sometimes. You just never could tell. The Russians were nuts enough, or stubborn enough, to put planes in the air regardless of the weather. And they were used to operating in awful conditions, more used to it than the Germans were. If one of their seaplanes came out of nowhere, it might be able to deliver an attack before the U-30 vanished in the swirling snow and mist. U-boat skippers who didn’t stay nervous all the time didn’t come home again.

  U-boat skippers who did stay alert all the time, and who insisted their crews do the same, were iron-arsed sons of bitches. All you had to do to know that was talk to any sailor who’d served under Julius Lemp. He’d recite chapter and verse—and book, too, if you gave him time and fed him a couple of seidels of beer.

  Normal watches up on the conning tower lasted only two hours. You could sweep your field glass across the sky just so long before you stopped noticing things. As Franz had seen, sweeping field glasses across the sky on a day like this was a losing proposition. Lemp sent the ratings below at the appointed hour. New men, also dressed in foul-weather gear, took their places.

  Lemp stayed topside himself awhile longer. He made and enforced the rules; he could break them if he chose. A gull scudded by. He would have sworn its golden eyes bore a fishy look that had nothing to do with herring or cod. What’s this crazy human doing out here in weather like this? Why isn’t he back on land where he belongs?

  A big wave slapped the U-30 when the boat was already rolling to port. The crest tried to throw Lemp and the ratings on the conning tower with him into the sea. He grabbed the rail and hung on tight, spitting frigid salt water. More seawater cascaded down the hatch. Along with the U-boat’s usual foul smells, volleys of foul language poured out of the hatch a moment later. The men in the pressure hull would have to get rid of the water as best they could—and fix whatever the unexpected bath had shorted out.

  “Alles gut?” Lemp called down, rubbing at his stinging eyes.

  More profanity from below made it clear that nichts was gut. The diesels didn’t miss a beat, though. Whatever the sudden flood had done, it hadn’t soaked the engine room.

  Which turned out to be a good thing, because a rating let out a horrified squeal: “Ship dead ahead!”

  Too many things were happening too fast. Lemp spun like a man suddenly hit from behind. If it was a destroyer, they were dead. No matter how alert you were, you couldn’t hope to fight it out on the surface taken by surprise.

  But it wasn’t a warship. It was a big, rusty freighter, maybe a straggler from a convoy on the way back to England. “Hard left rudder! Emergency full power!” Lemp screamed down the hatch at the same time as the freighter’s whistle blared a warning. Peter was down there. He would obey instantly. Whether instantly was fast enough to do any good … they’d know much too soon.

  The steam whistle shrilled again. If the freighter turned with the U-30, the U-boat was sunk—literally. Sailors at the ugly old ship’s bow pointed at the submarine. They were close enough to let Lemp see their open mouths and staring eyes as the U-30 and freighter slid past each other. Then one of the sailors caught sight of the U-30’s wind-whipped ensign. His eyes got even wider. Lemp thought they’d bug right out of his head.

  He must have figured we were Russians, the U-boat skipper realized. The freighter’s captain must have thought the same thing, or he would have rammed the boat. Some English admiral—maybe even the First Sea Lord—would have pinned a medal on his chest. That wasn’t going to happen now.

  One of the sailors up on the conning tower asked, “Are we going to track that damned pigdog and do for him, Skipper?”

  No one would have claimed Julius Lemp was not aggressive. Certainly no one from the torpedoed Athenia would have claimed any such thing. All the same, Lemp wasn’t sorry to see the freighter vanish into mist and spray and sleet as abruptly as it had appeared.

  And the more he thought about pursuing it, the less he liked the idea. “No, we’ll throw this one back,” he answered. “Her skipper will be dodging and zigzagging for all he’s worth—and chucking every gram of coal he’s got into the furnace, too. We’d only find the rustbucket by luck … and who knows how far away the convoy escorts are?”

  None of the ratings said anything more. Lemp would have been astounded if they had. Commanding the U-boat was his job, nobody else’s. Did the sailors up there with him seem unusually subdued, though? Did they think he should have gone after the freighter?

  More to the point, would they, or one of them, report him for not going after the ship? Would some Kriegsmarine board decide he’d shown defeatism or lack of fighting spirit or whatever the hell they called it these days? Would Party Bonzen court-martial him on account of it, or put him on the beach?

  He hated to have to think that way, which didn’t mean he didn’t do it. Bad things happened to politically naïve people. Then again, bad things also happened to politically pushy people—at least to the ones who didn’t shoot up the ladder at top speed. You had to be aware without making the people who paid close attention to such things aware that you were aware. It could be a tightrope act.

  And so, when he finally did go below, he logged the incident in the most particular detail, noting every detail of bad weather and dreadful visibility. That might—likely would—save his bacon if he had to try to explain himself to the Kriegsmarine.

  But if he had to explain himself to the SS? He grimaced. The blackshirts listened when they felt like it. When they didn’t, they went ahead and did whatever they would have done anyhow.

  In his tiny cabin—separated from the rest of the boat by a curtain, which made him the only man aboard to enjoy (if that was the word) so much privacy—he listened to what was going on around him. No cries warning of other ships came from the watchstanders on the conning tower. That was his biggest, most immediate worry. Everything else sounded pretty much normal, too, which came as a relief. If the ratings who had a brief from one security service or another to spy on him were plotting with one another, they were doing it where he couldn’t hear, and they weren’t doing it where they were disturbing the rest of the crew.

  Nice of them, Lemp thought. He hadn’t fretted about security men when the war started. In those innocent days, he’d only cared about fighting the enemy. He wished things were still so simple now.

  HIDEKI FUJITA HAD been through the fringes of a couple of typhoons in Japan. Till he got to Burma, he’d thought that meant he knew something about rain. Now he had to admit he’d been nothing but an amateur.

  In the monsoon, water poured down by the warm bucketload. You could stand outside naked and wash off. Men did, whenever they felt the need. What you couldn’t do was dry off again afterwards. Water dripped through thatched roofs and pounded off galvanized iron. Even when the soldiers of Unit 113 weren’t being deluged, the stifling humidity made sweat stick to them so they felt as if they were
.

  Quite a few soldiers wore nothing but loincloth and zoris in the rain. Before long, Fujita was one of them. Leaving on a uniform, even a tropical-weight uniform, only ensured it would rot faster. It would rot anyway, but you could make things take longer.

  Despite the ghastly weather, the war went on. Now that Japan was fighting England in Asia, the English suddenly were doing everything they could to help China keep the Emperor’s forces busy. Supplies came from India to Yunnan Province in southern China by road and by air. They were no more than a trickle, but a trickle that annoyed the Japanese.

  Occupying the Chinese end of the supply line was impossible. The Empire was stretched too thin. She didn’t have enough soldiers, and too many of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops stood in the way. Making it hard for the Chinese to collect the supplies or do much with them … That was a different story.

  And that was the kind of thing Unit 113 could help with. Fujita helped load porcelain bomb casings full of cholera bacilli and rodents infected with plague. Whenever bombers could take off, they carried the germ bombs over the mountains into China. The town of Baoshan, in western Yunnan, was a special target because of the rail lines to Kunming, the provincial capital, that ran through it.

  Before long, reports came back that Baoshan was suffering from disease outbreaks. That was the signal for more bombers to attack the place. These carried ordinary high explosives and incendiaries. Hideki Fujita didn’t think Baoshan would burn very well if it was as wet up there as it was down here, but—surprise!—none of his superiors asked for his opinion.

  Some of what they did worked, even if Fujita couldn’t find out exactly which part. They wanted the people who lived in Baoshan to flee from the town and spread sickness through the Chinese countryside. Japanese soldiers monitoring radio signals from Yunnan reported that Unit 113’s officers were getting what they wanted.

  They were so pleased by their results, they gathered the unit’s enlisted men together so they could brag about what they’d accomplished. A major named Hataba stood on a table to let everyone see him. “It is now established that Chinese forces have had to evacuate Yunnan Province,” he declared. “They take sickness with them wherever they go. And they cannot gather the goods England tries to give them.”

  A sergeant standing by Fujita clapped his hands. “Good!” he said. “That’s good! That’s very good!”

  “Hai! Very good!” Fujita agreed. He really did think it was. But he would have agreed even if he’d thought it was a disaster. Now that he’d been demoted to corporal, he’d quickly relearned the necessary art of sucking up to sergeants. They’d make you sorry if you didn’t, and you couldn’t do anything about it. All you could do was grease them up and try to keep them happy.

  The sergeant’s noise and his own servile reply made Fujita miss a little of what Major Hataba was saying. When he could pay attention again without the risk of getting thumped, what he heard was, “—not just in China. Our illustrious unit, and others working on related projects, can punish the English in India the same way. Everyone knows India has been full of disease since the beginning of time. It’s even filthier and more backward than China. Who there would realize why an epidemic started where the English were loading up their goods to send them on to the Chinese bandits?”

  He paused, waiting expectantly for an answer. The assembled soldiers gave him the one he wanted: “Nobody, Major-san!”

  “Nobody. That’s right.” Up on his rickety table, Hataba nodded. “I am obtaining the authorization we will need to give the English and the Indians everything they deserve. And we will!”

  “Hai!” the soldiers shouted, and, “Banzai!”

  One hot, wet, sticky day followed another. No planes from Unit 113 dropped disease bombs on India, though the attacks against China continued. Fujita was less surprised than some of the men he worked with when Major Hataba’s sought-for authorization proved slow in coming. Up in Manchukuo, Unit 731 had always worked in the darkest secrecy. Why wouldn’t it be the same for the germ-warfare units down here?

  And even if the Chinese figured out what Japan was doing to them, well, who cared about the fuss Chinamen kicked up? They sounded like a bunch of hysterical geese when they got excited. It would be different if England realized the Japanese were waging germ warfare against her. When England said something, the whole world listened.

  England might not just talk, either. She might hit back. China hadn’t a prayer of matching Japan’s science. But England was one of the places from which Japan had learned science to begin with.

  What kind of bacteriological-warfare program did England have? Fujita had no idea. Did his superiors know? All he could do was hope so.

  Whether they knew or not, his superiors—or rather, his superiors’ superiors—refused to issue the order Major Hataba craved. Perhaps they feared to break secrecy. Or perhaps they just weren’t inclined to take any chances they didn’t have to.

  Gradually, the men in Unit 113 quit talking about India. They pretended no one had ever said anything about it. Had they done otherwise, Major Hataba would have lost face. If that happened to an officer, what could he do but make everybody who served under him sorry?

  Fujita settled in. Myitkyina had a military brothel staffed by Burmese comfort women the Japanese had recruited—or just grabbed. The one Fujita mounted started crying as soon as he finished and got off her. He didn’t care. Why should he? He was happy. And a comfort woman was only a convenience, like a rubber rain cape.

  The day after he got back from his leave in Myitkyina, Major Hataba summoned him. Ignoring his hangover, he stood at stiff attention and saluted like a machine. “Reporting as ordered, sir!” he said, wondering how much trouble he was in and whether he could wiggle out of it.

  But the major wasn’t in a mood to pull the wings off flies. He said, “At ease, Corporal.” Fujita relaxed … fractionally. Hataba went on, “You’re a good man. I’m glad to have you here. The people at Unit 731 were stupid to let you go, if you want to know what I think. You’re wasted as a corporal. I’m making you a sergeant—let’s see how you do.”

  He handed Fujita two silver metal stars—one for each collar tab. “Put these on. You’ll help us more with two stars on each tab than with one.”

  “Domo arigato, Major-san!” Fujita bowed low, grateful inferior to superior. The joy he felt at getting his rank back made coming inside the unhappy Burmese comfort woman seem as nothing beside it.

  “You’re welcome, Sergeant. And you’re dismissed.” Major Hataba might promote him, but he wasn’t about to waste a whole lot of time on him.

  So what? Fujita bowed again, almost as deeply. He didn’t think his feet touched the ground as he left the major’s presence. As soon as he could, he affixed the new stars to the red tabs with the yellow stripe across the middle. The tabs looked so much better now that they had their second stars back! He thought so, anyhow.

  People noticed when he walked around the little base. “Congratulations, Sergeant-san!” a private said, and gave him a cigarette and a light. Even as a corporal, he could have knocked a private around. But a sergeant could do it with more flair. A sergeant could do anything with more flair. And all the corporals who’d been senior to him would need to watch themselves from here on out!

  Chapter 22

  When you came out of the line here, you couldn’t toddle off to an estaminet to soak up some wine and chat up the barmaid. This was war without distractions, and Alistair Walsh missed them.

  Even the Italians weren’t much of a distraction. That was the only good part of the fighting here. As Sergeant Billings had said, some of their units weren’t too bad. Most, though, didn’t really have their hearts in the fight. When English forces outmaneuvered them, they would surrender with smiles on their faces. It happened again and again, because the English had more tanks and far more lorries than Mussolini’s boys.

  “You have to understand, sir, it doesn’t work this way all the time,” Walsh told Lieutenant Preston w
hen another band of Italians waved white flags after the briefest exchange of fire. “For those dagos, it’s nothing but a game. You come up against Fritz, though, and you’ll find out he means it.”

  The subaltern nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Quite,” he said. “It is a bit like playing football when the other side’s down to nine men, isn’t it? Hardly seems sporting.”

  “Bugger sporting … sir,” Walsh said earnestly. “You lose men here, they don’t get up again after the referee blows his bleeding whistle. It’ll take the Judgment Trump to set ’em on their pins again.”

  Wilf Preston stared at him. The youngster’s eyes were blue as sapphires. They were also red-tracked with weariness, just like Walsh’s. Sun and wind and sand had burned and chapped Preston’s fine, fair skin. “I do grasp the difference, Sergeant,” he said, his voice starchy with indignation.

  Devil you do. But Walsh couldn’t say that. “Yes, sir” would have to do. “Besides,” Preston went on, “wouldn’t you sooner have it easy than rough?”

  Maybe he wasn’t a complete twit. Walsh sketched a salute. “Now that you mention it, sir,” he answered, “yes.”

  Only later did he wonder how true that was. Had he asked Ronald Cartland to stay in England and help turn young hooligans into proper soldiers, the MP would have arranged that as effortlessly as he’d seen to this. And Walsh would have done something useful to King and country, something where he could have lived comfortably and where he would have been most unlikely to catch a packet.

  Instead, he’d requested service here, and here he was. A fat black fly landed on the back of his hand. He squashed it before it could bite him. It had a nasty smell, like shit mixed with blood. And you couldn’t kill them all. There were just too many. Beelzebub—lord of the flies. He’d had the Bible pounded into him when he was a boy, same as most Welshmen. Till this campaign, though, he’d never realized what a dark and terrible god old Beelzebub must have been.