“Good for you,” Peggy said, and she meant it. Plenty of towns Carbondale’s size, all across the country, might as well have closed up shop for good after the market crashed in 1929. Since she was here on business, she felt she had to add, “I hope that means you’ll reach for your wallets when it comes time to buy your war bonds.”
“Well, I figure we will.” Vaughan’s double chin wobbled when he nodded. “People here are proud to be Americans. They work hard, sure, but they know they’re better off than they would be if Great-Grandpa stayed in the old country. The Irish, now, they got out ’cause Great-Grandpa was starving. My folks didn’t have it quite so bad, not from the stories I’ve heard, anyway. But I went Over There in 1918, and I was proud to do it.”
“Good for you,” Peggy said again. “My husband was the same way.” She didn’t tell him that she and Herb had lived more than comfortably enough even when the country hurt worst. She didn’t tell him she’d had enough money to stay in Europe for a couple of years, either. The way things worked out, she wished she’d never boarded the liner to begin with.
“There you go,” Vaughan said. “Let me grab your overnight bag there, and I’ll take you to your hotel. It’s only two, three blocks away. And the Rotarians’ hall where you’ll talk is right next door.”
“That all sounds great,” Peggy said, again most sincerely. Some places were better organized, some not so well. Vernon Vaughan seemed to have things under control.
The hotel would never make anyone forget the Ritz Carlton. But it would do. She’d stayed in plenty of worse places on the other side of the Atlantic: she didn’t have to trot down the hall to the bathroom, for instance. And she wouldn’t have to scramble for the shelter when air-raid sirens started shrieking.
She talked about that when she went next door to speak. “They’re still having air-raid alerts on the West Coast, though,” she said. “We have to make sure no enemy can ever strike at us at home. Not ever! When I was in Europe, I saw for myself how horrible that was.”
People applauded her then. But they sat on their hands when she talked about helping England now that she was back in the fight against Germany. Carbondale wasn’t the ideal place for that line, even if she realized as much half a minute later than she should have. What had Vernon Vaughan said? The town was full of Irish and Welsh. And why had their ancestors crossed the ocean? To get out from under their English landlords and overlords.
Time to ad-lib, then. “You may not love England,” she said, “but if you think Hitler’s a better bargain, I’m here to tell you you’re out of your ever-loving minds. If you get on England’s bad side, she’ll break you if she can. If you get on Hitler’s bad side, he’ll kill you—and as many of your friends and neighbors as he can catch, to make sure they don’t get any nasty ideas like freedom on their own.”
That drew a little handclapping, but not much. Peggy went back to laying into Japan. Sooner or later, she expected, there would be a reckoning with the Nazis. But it would probably have to be later. People like the ones in the Rotarian hall here showed why FDR couldn’t go and declare war on Germany. If old Adolf had declared war on America, now …
Well, it hadn’t happened. The best thing the USA could do now against the evil day was strengthen herself as much as she could. If that meant whipping up hatred against the Japs, okay, she’d whip it up. We were fighting them, after all. And we weren’t doing any too well against them right this minute, either.
“Show your hearts with the red, white, and blue!” she finished. “Everybody talks about being a patriot, but patriotism takes more than talk. Put your money where your mouth is, folks. You can’t fight a war with nothing but talk. I wish you could, but you can’t. It takes cash, too.”
She hadn’t expected much. This wasn’t a big city, or even a medium-sized one. And Welshmen, at least, had almost the same kind of name for stinginess as Jews.
But she did great. The bonds the men of Carbondale bought wouldn’t mature for years. Washington could spend the greenbacks they forked over right now. Both sides seemed to think it was a good bargain.
Afterward, Mr. Vaughan took her to dinner at an Italian place down the street. The tablecloths were red and white checks. There was a poster of a Venetian gondolier on one wall, and of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on another. Despite the clichés, the spaghetti and meatballs were fine. Peggy could see the cook. He looked more like a mick than a wop, but he knew what he was doing.
And he had the advantage of American abundance. With plenty of food and plenty of fuel, if you screwed up the food it was your own damn fault, not that of your ingredients the way it might be in screwed-up Europe.
As they ate and drank red wine, Vaughan did his best to put a move on her. Peggy pretended not to notice. He wasn’t her type—not even close. Still and all, getting noticed that way felt good. It reminded her she was alive. It wasn’t that Herb never acted interested. Even so …
“Well …” The druggist put a fin on the table, which made him an extravagant tipper. He climbed to his feet. “Let me walk you back to the hotel.”
“Thanks.” Two glasses of ordinary Chianti didn’t make Peggy susceptible. She was more amused that he kept pitching than anything else.
She had no trouble shedding him in the hotel lobby. That behind the front desk stood a large, strong-jawed maiden lady who plainly disapproved of everything enjoyable under the sun only made it easier.
Up in her room all by herself, she pulled out a mystery story and read till she got sleepy. What with the wine and all that filling food, it didn’t take long. Vernon Vaughan wouldn’t have had much fun with her even if he had got past the dragon downstairs—not unless he enjoyed necrophilia, he wouldn’t.
He was there to take her back to the station the next morning. “Sorry if I got out of line last night,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Peggy told him. “I’m heading home, that’s all.”
So she was. And before long she’d look forward to getting out into the boondocks again. How smart had she been to ignore him, then? That she could wonder said not everything in Philadelphia was the way she wished it would be.
Chapter 24
Narvik again. Julius Lemp was not a happy man. Namsos would have been better. Wilhelmshaven would have been wonderful. But it was Narvik, so the U-30 could get back up to the Barents Sea as soon as possible. More fuel for the diesels, more eels for the tubes, more food for the crew, and away they’d go again.
He’d already complained to the powers that be here about Narvik’s shortcomings as a liberty port. His crew had already tried to take the place apart—and they weren’t the only gang of U-boat sailors to join the rising against authority.
Predictably, authority didn’t forget. When the U-30 tied up, she was greeted at the pier by a squad of shore patrolmen, all of them wearing Stahlhelms and all of them carrying Schmeissers.
“Well, this is a fine crock of herrings,” Lemp growled at the chief petty officer in charge of the squad. “You’d think we’d put in at Aberdeen by mistake.” He shook his head. “No, by God! The Royal Navy’d give us a better hello than this, to hell with me if it wouldn’t.”
The steel helmet’s beetling brim only made the CPO’s features seem even more wooden than they would have otherwise. He saluted stiffly. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said. “No one is going to tear Narvik up again—that’s what the people here have in mind.”
Daylight was already leaking out of the sky, though it was only midafternoon. Before long, arctic night would fall: Narvik lay north of the Arctic Circle. “Disgraceful,” Lemp snarled.
“Sir, if you didn’t lead such a pack of hooligans, there wouldn’t be a problem,” the shore patrolman answered in a gruff monotone.
“If this place weren’t a morgue—” But Lemp could see this was an argument he’d lose. The shore patrol didn’t just have the firepower. The bastards had the backing of the bigger bastards here, the ones with all the gold stripes on their sleeves.
He let the shore patrolmen lead the U-boat sailors off to whatever passed for fun in Narvik. Then the mechanics fell on his submarine. He was glad to see them. Unlike either the high command or the shore patrol, they seemed to be on the same side as the men who actually did the fighting.
He thought about staying away from the officers’ club in sympathy for the way his men were being treated. He didn’t think about it long, though. The alternative was staying cooped up in his tiny, curtained-off cabin in the stinking, claustrophobic pressure hull.
He did make a point of repairing to the club in his grimy working togs instead of putting on a proper uniform. No one there said a word about it, though. The shorebound officers were evidently used to U-boat skippers’ eccentric ways.
Those shorebound men did let him know that plans actually were in the works for an officers’ brothel, and one ratings could patronize as well. That plans were in the works didn’t mean the brothels were working yet. Lemp thought that was a damn shame. He was a few years older than the men he commanded. He didn’t burn quite so hot as most of them. But that didn’t mean he didn’t burn at all. Oh, no—nowhere close. He would have welcomed a grapple with a nice, warm girl, even if it was purely a business transaction.
Since he couldn’t screw, he drank. He’d got to the bottom of his third stiff schnapps, hoping they would improve his attitude. All they succeeded in doing was making him dizzy. They were strong, and he was tired; they hit him hard. Only later did he stop and wonder what would happen when the U-30’s ratings started drinking. That was when he remembered the one sailor’s wink. As such things have a way of being, that was also just exactly too late.
A burst of submachine-gun fire brought silence smashing down in the officers’ club. A moment later, another burst rang out. “Good God!” somebody said. “Have the Royal Marines landed, or what?”
There was a cheerful thought. If English raiders were swooping down on Narvik, they could do a hell of a lot of damage. Most of the German forces here belonged to the Kriegsmarine. The only reason they were here at all was to go after convoys bound for Russia. Shore patrolmen wouldn’t stand much of a chance against cold-blooded professionals.
One of those shore patrolmen rushed into the officers’ club. He looked around wildly before his gaze fixed on Lemp. “Come quick,” he shouted, “before those maniacs of yours tear this whole base to shreds!”
Just what it deserves, Lemp thought. The words almost came out—such were the dangers of three strong drinks. But he managed to stifle them. Instead, he said, “If they had more ways to blow off steam without getting in trouble, they’d do that. They wouldn’t brawl.”
“They’re a pack of criminals, nothing else but,” the shore patrolman retorted. “If you don’t calm them down, they’ll get courts-martial for making a mutiny. That’s a capital crime.” By the way he spoke, he thought the U-30’s men deserved no better than a blindfold and a cigarette.
“Take me to them,” Lemp said. He had to pay close attention to where he put his feet when he followed the shore patrolman out of the officers’ club.
It was cold outside, cold and dark. The northern lights’ wavering curtains danced in the sky, now red, now gold. Lemp spared the aurora a glance, no more. It wasn’t as if he didn’t see it on a lot of frigid winter nights.
He could have found the fighting without his guide. Men were yelling and screaming. Whistles blew frantically. Things broke—often, by the sound of it, over somebody’s head. Two shore patrolmen dragged a wounded buddy from the fray. “Making a mutiny,” the man with Lemp repeated grimly.
“They’re just drunk and disorderly, and they hate this miserable place,” the U-boat skipper answered, hoping he was right. If the lads had got the bit too far between their teeth, they’d be in big trouble in spite of anything he could do. To try to convince himself things were as he wanted them to be, he added, “I do, too. Who wouldn’t?”
“You weren’t smashing up the officers’ club when I found you, though … sir,” the shore patrolman said. Lemp judged a discreet silence the best response to that.
From out of the gloom ahead came a shout: “Halt! Who comes? Friend or foe?”
It wasn’t the kind of challenge the shore patrol would issue. Not only that, Lemp recognized the voice of the rating doing the shouting. “It’s me, Willi—the skipper,” he called back. “Playtime’s over. You boys have had your fun—and you’ve made your point, too.”
He waited. If Willi and the other sailors rejected his authority, they really were on their way to military courts and the brig, if not worse. Several men up there argued back and forth. When the chain of command broke, you had to figure out who had authority. At last, Willi said, “Well, come ahead, sir. You can help us pick up the pieces.”
“Enough is enough,” Lemp said as he advanced, trying to pour oil on troubled waters.
“Enough is too much,” the shore patrolman beside him put in, trying to make a bad situation worse. Lemp contrived to step on the man’s foot.
As had been true the last time things went arsey-varsey, not all the brawling sailors came from the U-30. But the rioters had done a more thorough job of tearing Narvik to pieces this time around. They weren’t brawling for the fun of it; they were brawling because they were furious about what passed for a base up here in the frozen north. Lemp did sympathize, but he had to hope very hard that they hadn’t got themselves in too deep.
“If you give it up now, you probably won’t land in too much trouble. You’re good fighting men, and the Reich needs you for the war effort,” he told them. “But if you push it even a centimeter further, they’ll land on you hard. You haven’t just pissed them off this time. You’ve scared them, and that’s worse.”
“They treat us like shit when we come in from a patrol, they’d better be scared,” growled a sailor from another U-boat. But the fight had gone out of the men. They’d made their point. There wasn’t much else they could do, not here at the frigid end of nowhere. They gave it up. Lemp headed back toward the officers’ club, hoping the argument he’d used with the sailors would also work on their superiors—and his.
HIDEKI FUJITA LOVED being a sergeant again. He was meant to have two stars on each collar tab—he thought so, anyhow. And Unit 113 was a much smaller outfit than Unit 731 had been. That made him seem a much bigger frog.
Unit 113 was also a much less experimental place than Unit 731 had been. Here, they went out and did things. That suited Fujita fine, too. He was no big brain, and knew he never would be. But when somebody pointed him at a job, he would take care of it.
Not only that, he had a knack for getting the most out of the men under him. He’d knock them around when they deserved it, but he didn’t give them bruises for no better reason than to show his cock was bigger than theirs. As long as they hopped to it, they didn’t need to worry about him.
They went on spreading disease through Yunnan Province. If the Chinese died from the plague and from cholera, they wouldn’t be able to do so much with the military equipment England sent them. Even more to the point, if the Chinese feared they would die from those dreadful diseases, their panic helped Japan at least as much as real illness would.
Major Hataba assembled the men in the unit to say, “We have received an official commendation from the Imperial War Ministry in Tokyo for our contributions to victory in China. Banzai for the Emperor!”
“Banzai!” the soldiers shouted, Fujita loud among them. “Banzai!”
Hataba did not remind the men of Unit 113 that he’d also wanted to use bacteria against the English in India. No doubt he was doing his very best to forget all about that. Fujita remembered it, but not very often. It hadn’t happened, so it didn’t matter. E
veryone was better off not remembering a plan that hadn’t come to fruition.
It wasn’t as if the Japanese didn’t have other things to think about. Fujita came from Hiroshima, in the south. Winters in Mongolia, Siberia, and Manchukuo had left him horrified and amazed. What was alleged to be the approach of winter in Burma left him horrified and amazed, too, but not the same way.
“Eee!” he said to another sergeant. They were drinking warm beer together; there was no other kind of beer to drink. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about hot, sticky weather. But this makes the worst August in Hiroshima feel like February.”
“Hai.” The other man nodded. His name was Ichiro Hirabayashi. He was a career noncom; he’d spent his whole adult life in the Imperial Army. Nothing seemed to faze him much. “Your clothes rot. Your boots rot. You start to rot, too. I’ve learned more about ringworm and jock itch and athlete’s foot and all that crap than I ever wanted to know since I got here.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Fujita said dolefully. “I had jock itch so bad, I thought I’d got a dose from one of the comfort women in Myitkina.”
Hirabayashi laughed at that. Fujita didn’t think it was so funny. A medical assistant had given him some nasty-smelling ointment to smear on his privates. It helped some. It wasn’t a cure, though. He still itched in all kinds of places where he couldn’t scratch without being crude.
The other sergeant drank more beer. In reflective tones, he said, “I hate this miserable place, you know? I hate the weather. I hate the rot. I hate the bugs. I hate the sicknesses. I hate the Burmese, too.”
“What’s wrong with the Burmese?” Fujita asked. He could see why Sergeant Hirabayashi hated everything else about Burma.
“They’re lazy. They’re shiftless. They’re thieving. They don’t talk any language a civilized man can understand.” Hirabayashi spoke with great conviction. A British colonial administrator pouring down gin and tonics in Mandalay a year earlier might have said the same thing, even if he would have said it in English rather than Japanese.
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 42
