“I’m sure he would agree with you,” Herb remarked.
“So what?” Peggy said. “Next to Hitler, Attila the Hun is a bargain. I ought to know. I’ve talked to the man.”
“To Attila?” her husband asked, not innocently enough.
Peggy sent him a severe look. “Hitler. As. You. Know. Perfectly. Well.” She bit off the words one by one, as if from a salami.
“Okay, okay,” Herb said. “Did you ever talk to Hess, too, or meet him?”
“I saw him a couple of times. I never really met him,” Peggy answered. “Do you think he parachuted out over London or Paris or wherever it was, the way people are saying?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Oh, yeah? Name two.”
“Mm … There were the Braves in 1914.”
“That’s one,” Peggy said.
Her husband said nothing for some little while. Then he spread his hands, as he might have done after turning over a bad dummy at the bridge table. “Maybe I can’t think of anything else that peculiar. But it’s been a pretty crazy war any way you look at it, hasn’t it?”
“Think so, do you? I’ll tell you something.” Peggy took a deep breath, then proceeded to do exactly that: “America’s even stranger than all the crazy places I saw in Europe. The ostrich with his head in the sand is wearing an Uncle Sam top hat.”
“Honey, I don’t want to see us in the war,” Herb said. “I went Over There. I saw the elephant. That’s what my granddad would have called it, anyway: what he did call it after he came home from the Army of the Potomac. The only reason I’ve ever been glad we couldn’t have kids is that a son of mine would be draft age right about now. Some of the things I did, some of the things I saw … I wouldn’t wish them on my son.”
“Herb—” Peggy didn’t know how to go on. They hardly ever brought up the subject of children; it was too raw and painful. In the early days of their marriage, she’d miscarried three times in the space of two years. After that, her doctor warned her that any more tries probably wouldn’t succeed, and would put her life in danger. So she and Herb had relied on French letters and on techniques some people called perverted, and remained fond of each other’s company to this day.
If something was necessarily missing, well, what could you do? Something was missing from everybody’s life. Peggy had more leisure—and more money—with which to travel. Most of the time, she and Herb could look on the bright side of things.
(She hadn’t worried about any of that when she ended up letting Constantine Jenkins into her bed in Berlin. She’d been so sloshed, she hadn’t worried, or thought, about one goddamn thing then. She’d guessed the embassy undersecretary was queer. She’d been pretty sure, in fact. If he was, he sure could switch-hit every now and then. Only luck he didn’t put a bun in her oven. And wouldn’t that have fouled up her life?)
She took a deep breath. “Somebody’s got to stop Hitler. If that means us, it means us, no matter what it costs.”
“Maybe,” he said. Unlike her, he held back a lot of what went through his mind. Most of the time, she thought that made him easier to live with. Most of the time, but not always. After a moment, he added, “But if Chamberlain and Daladier are pushing him forward, who’s going to ask us to hold him back?”
The question was painfully good. The only reason the USA had gone into the last war was to pull England and France’s chestnuts out of the fire. Still, Peggy found a possible answer: “Stalin?”
Her husband snorted. “He may ask, but who’ll listen to him? Not enough Russian votes—or Red votes, come to that—to get FDR’s bowels in an uproar, especially with this third-term boom. Most people don’t want a war. They can finally see the end of the Depression, or they think they can, and they just want to stay under their own vine and fig tree.”
Peggy’s strict parents had sent her to Sunday school every week till she got big enough to put her foot down and quit going. Bits and pieces of it stuck to this day. She could come out with chapter and verse from Micah (in the King James version, of course; her folks seemed to think that was what God had used to talk to the Hebrews): “ ‘But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.’ ” She sighed wistfully. “Boy, that’d be swell!”
Herb smiled, whether at the quotation or at the old-fashioned slang she couldn’t tell. “It would, wouldn’t it? The way it looks to most people, we’ve got the Atlantic and the Pacific instead of the vine and the fig tree. With all that water between us and trouble, why worry?”
As usual, he sounded calm and reasonable. And Peggy usually liked him to sound that way, which only proved the old saw about opposites attracting. “England thought it was safe behind the Channel, too, till Hitler started bombing London,” she snapped.
“Kaiser Wilhelm did the same thing the last time around,” Herb answered. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”
“It’s not,” Peggy insisted.
“What’s the difference?”
“Hitler hits harder.” Listening to herself, Peggy thought she might have come up with a campaign slogan for the Führer. But Hitler didn’t need to worry about campaign slogans any more. That was one of the advantages of being a dictator. Now everybody else had to do the worrying.
“I’m not the person you need to tell. Roosevelt is,” Herb said.
“Well, I’ll do that, then,” Peggy declared. She’d met the President before; his New York background was not so very different from hers here in Philadelphia. She couldn’t hop on a train to Washington and walk into the White house with the confident expectation that he would see her right away. If she wrote him a report on what she’d seen and what she thought about it, though, she did think it would reach him.
What he’d do afterwards, and whether he’d do anything … That, she’d just have to find out. Her parents had also made sure she could type. There’d been other crashes before this latest one. Somebody with a salable skill always had an edge. She sat down at the family Royal and began getting the past year and a half down on paper.
A RUSSIAN PRISONER staggered, stumbled, slumped to his knees, and then, with a small groan, rolled over on his side. The Japanese guard tramping along fifty meters or so in front of Hideki Fujita walked over to the skinny, filthy man on the ground. He shouted at the luckless fellow. The Russian only lay there. The Japanese soldier kicked him: once, twice, three times.
The prisoner groaned again, louder. He tried to stand but could not. He looked up at the guard. His hands spread in a hopeless last appeal.
Hopeless indeed. Not even wasting a bullet, the guard bayoneted him in the throat. The Russian thrashed his life away. It didn’t take long; he had little life left to lose.
Sergeant Fujita trudged past the still feebly writhing body. He didn’t spare it so much as a sideways glance. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen plenty of others just like it. And it wasn’t as if plenty of the Red Army men who’d surrendered outside of Vladivostok but still managed to shamble along through Manchukuo wouldn’t keel over themselves pretty soon.
One of the prisoners—a man shaggy as a bear, because he hadn’t shaved or trimmed his hair since the surrender—caught Fujita’s eye and stretched out an imploring hand, palm up. “Food, please, soldier-sama?” the Russian said in bad Japanese. Lord soldier—the fellow knew which side his bread was buttered on.
It didn’t help him, not here. “They’ll feed you soon,” Fujita said roughly. The prisoner’s blank stare said he didn’t understand. Fujita simplified things even more: “No food now. Food later. Keep marching.”
Keep marching. That was the essential command. Fujita was glad he had the pair of fine Russian boots he’d taken from a dead soldier in the Siberian woods. They were much easier on his feet than the clodhoppers the Japanese Army issued. What the Russians didn’t know about leather wasn’t worth knowing.
Few prisoners had any boots at all. They’d been plundered after they gave up. Well, of cour
se they had. As soon as a man surrendered, he stopped being a man. He was just a beast, a thing, to be used as his captors found convenient … or amusing.
Fujita had put a few fallen prisoners out of their misery. Couldn’t have them slowing up the column, after all. But he’d never fired into a mass of Russians just to watch them go down. When he had to kill, he killed quickly and cleanly, as the guard in front of him had done. He saw no sport in gutshooting men or bayoneting them so they died a centimeter at a time.
But he said not a word to the Japanese soldiers who enjoyed doing things like that. It wasn’t as if standing orders forbade mistreating prisoners of war. During the last fight against the Russians, such orders had been in place. Japan wanted to show the European powers and America she’d built the same kind of civilization they already had.
Now, by all the signs, the people who ran the country didn’t care what the European powers and America thought. Surrender had long been a disgrace in Japan. If the captors of soldiers who gave up felt like mistreating them or even killing them, no so-called laws of war stood in the way.
And Japan had never ratified the Geneva Convention. The Europeans’ silly rules weren’t going to hold back the Empire, either. Nothing was, not any more.
Peasants in the fields—maybe native Manchus, maybe Chinese settlers—stared at the column of white men in ragged khaki. None stared from close range, however. Not only was the column unfamiliar and therefore alarming; it was guarded by Japanese soldiers, and so doubly alarming.
Yes, Manchukuo was Japan’s ally—Japan’s puppet, if you wanted to be unkind about it. But the local peasants didn’t see Japanese soldiers as allies. They saw them as plunderers, as locusts. Fujita had served in Manchukuo for some time now. He knew the peasants had their reasons for seeing his comrades that way. On the other hand, they were peasants. No doubt they would have kept their distance from Chinese soldiers (or, for that matter, from Brazilian soldiers), too.
Lieutenant Hanafusa strode by, a one-man parade. Being an officer, he wasn’t burdened with a rifle and a heavy pack. He could afford to waste energy showing off. (And he too wore a pair of supple Russian boots, so his feet would be happy.) “Sir, may I ask you a question?” Sergeant Fujita called to him.
“What is it?” Hanafusa returned.
Fujita got the idea that, if the lieutenant didn’t care for the question, someone would be unhappy immediately thereafter. He also had a good notion of who that someone would be. Well, too late to back off now. “Have you heard yet, sir, just where we’re supposed to be going with all these miserable prisoners?”
To his vast relief, Hanafusa nodded. “As a matter of fact, I have. There’s a camp—or some kind of facility, anyhow—at a place called Pingfan.”
“Where would that be, sir?” Fujita knew he was pressing his luck. He bowed to the officer. “Please excuse me, but I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, I hadn’t, either, when somebody told me about it,” Lieutenant Hanafusa said, with more generosity than he usually showed. “It’s about twenty-five kilometers south of Harbin.”
“Ah, so desu!” Fujita exclaimed. He knew where Harbin was, all right. Any Japanese who’d spent some time here would have. Not only was it one of the biggest cities in Manchukuo, it also looked more like a Western town than most places here. That sprang from the strong local Russian influence, which persisted even now. And it was a major rail center; you went through Harbin if you needed to get anywhere in Manchukuo. Fujita had done it several times. He tried one more question: “What will they do with them there?”
“Beats me. That’s for the damned Russians to worry about,” Hanafusa replied. “All I know is, we’re taking them to something called Unit 731. The people who run it want prisoners. Now that we’ve taken so many, our job is to deliver the sorry bastards to them.”
“What are they going to use them for? Or will they use them up?”
“Beats me,” Hanafusa repeated cheerfully. “That’s for the Russians to worry about, too. Maybe after we make the delivery I’ll go back up to Harbin and screw a blond Russian whore—one more reminder that we beat them.”
“Yes, sir. That sounds good, sir.” Fujita grinned.
Hanafusa started to strut off, then caught himself. “Oh, that reminds me, Sergeant. You were vaccinated for smallpox when you went into the Army, weren’t you?”
“I sure was!” Fujita winced at the memory. “It took. I was sick for a couple of days. My arm swelled up like it was poisoned, and I got a big old blister full of pus.”
“I had the same thing happen to me. Not much fun, was it?” But Lieutenant Hanafusa nodded, as if satisfied. “That’s all right, then.”
“What’s all right, sir? Why do you need to know a silly thing like that?”
“It ties in with what people say about Unit 731,” the lieutenant said. The answer might have made sense to him, but it didn’t to Fujita. The sergeant was going to ask him to explain, but Hanafusa did hurry away this time. Fujita had already pushed him as far as a noncom could reasonably push an officer, and maybe a little further besides.
He’ll come back. It’s still a long way to Harbin. If he’s in a good mood, I can find out later on, Fujita thought. He rubbed his arm. It felt fine now, but he still wore a nasty scar from the vaccination. And he remembered how little sympathy the doctors had shown. One of them told him, You’d be a lot sicker than this if you really came down with smallpox.
Fujita knew that was true. One of his grandfathers had a pocked face, and mourned a younger brother who hadn’t survived the disease.
“Food, please, sir?” another Russian prisoner whined in bad Japanese.
“No food now. Food later,” Fujita answered. Idly, he wondered whether the white man had ever been vaccinated.
THEY’D REMOVED THE CANNON from Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka for this mission. He wasn’t shooting up Russian panzers today. His plane and half a dozen others would try to take out a railroad bridge over the Dnieper near Borisov.
Colonel Steinbrenner nodded to the pilots he’d chosen. “I picked you boys for a reason,” he told them. “You’re the best I’ve got. That bridge has got to go. The Reds are hauling all kinds of crap over it. Don’t let me down. Don’t let the Reich down, either.”
The flyers nodded. Hans-Ulrich noticed that the wing commander didn’t say anything about not letting the Führer down. He didn’t make a fuss about it, but he noticed. How could you help noticing such things when everybody’d got so maniacal about security and loyalty these days? Yes, the powers that be thought Steinbrenner was all right. He wouldn’t have replaced Colonel Greim if they hadn’t. But you never could tell whether they’d change their minds.
“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked after he finished the briefing. One of the other pilots stuck up his hand. The colonel nodded. “What is it, Franz?”
“Borisov is in Russia, nicht wahr?” Franz Fischbach said.
“In Byelorussia, actually. But yes, inside the Soviet Union, if that’s what you meant,” Steinbrenner answered. “The gloves are off. I’ll say that again, to make sure you get it. The gloves are off. The Reds have been bombing us whenever they found the nerve. Now we get to show them what they bought. Don’t you like it? If you don’t, I’ll find somebody else to go instead.”
“Oh, no, sir. Don’t worry about me,” Fischbach said quickly. Any other reply and he could have kissed his flying career good-bye. “I just wanted to make sure the brass bothered to check the map.”
That got a chuckle from the wing commander. “Yeah, you never can tell with the fellows with the fancy shoulder straps.… Other questions?” He looked surprised when he got one. “What’s on your mind, Peter?”
“Are we knocking the Reds around to help persuade England and France to throw in with us?” Peter Tannenwald inquired. “That’s what you hear everywhere.”
“I’ve heard it, too. I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. Hans-Ulrich had also heard it. He hoped it was
true. It would make life easier. Steinbrenner went on, “You’d do better asking somebody from the Foreign Ministry, not me.”
“Oh, sure, sir.” Tannenwald grinned at him. “Only you’re right here, and those clowns are back in Berlin.”
“That’s true, but they know the answer, and I just wish I did. All I know is, you’ve got to go get that bridge,” Steinbrenner said. “Good luck to you all. I hope to see every one of you back here before very long.”
Hans-Ulrich hoped that would happen, too. The Germans and Poles had just about cleared the Red Army out of Poland. They’d pushed into the northern Ukraine from southeastern Poland. The Pripet Marshes, which lay on the Polish-Byelorussian border, slowed their advance in that part of the front. No German panzers were anywhere near Borisov, not so far as Hans-Ulrich knew.
Franz Fischbach summed up what that meant: “We don’t want to get shot down behind the Russian lines, you’re saying.”
“Not unless you’ve got a big insurance policy and you need your next of kin to cash it in right now,” Steinbrenner agreed dryly. By all the signs, the Russians cared little for the Geneva Convention. They hadn’t signed it. That meant the Germans didn’t need to follow its rules when dealing with Red prisoners. But it also meant the Russians did as they pleased with Germans they captured. You heard stories about foot soldiers ingeniously mutilated, maybe after they were dead, but maybe not, too. Some pilots made sure they always kept a round in their pistol, to keep the Russians from having fun with them if their luck soured. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t worried about such things before. Flying against Borisov … I’d better see to it, he thought.
After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Dieselhorst asked him about what was going on. Hans-Ulrich explained the mission. Dieselhorst nodded impatiently. “Ja, ja,” he said. “But what about the Western powers? Are they going to come to their senses, or will they go on fighting us instead?”
“Peter asked Colonel Steinbrenner the same thing.”
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 21
