The newsreader spoke of the anticipated harvest and by how much it would exceed the norms established by the agricultural planners. Only the planners had any real idea of how much grain came in across the country. If they cooked the books to make things sound better, who would stop them? Who else would even know? As long as people didn’t start starving, nobody. And if people did start starving, it might be for reasons political rather than agricultural. Anyone who didn’t believe that could ask the surviving Ukrainians.
“Stakhanovite shock brigades continue to increase steel, coal, and aluminum production,” the newsreader said proudly. “Output rises even as factories are knocked down and transported east, out of range of the Hitlerite savages and their terror-bombing campaign.”
“Good. That’s good,” murmured the pilot sitting next to Mouradian. It would indeed be good if it was true. That it could be true struck Stas as most unlikely. The less you said, sometimes, the better. He said not a word here.
The newsreader blathered on and on. He seemed to speak very candidly: everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Mouradian smiled a little when that occurred to him. Too bad it was a joke he would have to keep to himself. Somehow, he didn’t think the NKVD would find it funny.
When music finally came out of the speaker instead of the newsreader’s perpetual optimism, Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky addressed the squadron: “Well, boys, you heard it yourselves. We’re going to make nice with the little slanty-eyed shitheads for a while. One thing at a time, I always say. Once we give the Nazis what they deserve, we’ll go back to the East and pay what we owe there. Oh, yes. You’d best believe we will.”
Speaking of perpetual optimism … Did the squadron commander really believe what he was saying? If he did, Stas wanted some of whatever he’d been drinking. Or maybe not. Whatever it was, it was probably too full of sugar to be palatable for an ordinary man.
Then again, perhaps you needed that kind of spirit—and that kind of spirits—if you were going to keep serving the Soviet Union. They weren’t flying from the airstrip they’d used when they first took their Pe-2s into action against the Germans and Poles. German bombers had worked that one over.
As far as Mouradian could see, the new Russian plane was better than any bomber the Luftwaffe used. It had at least as large a bomb load, and it was faster and more maneuverable than the German bombers. But that mattered only so much. Back in the day, the SB-2 really had been able to outrun the biplane fighters it met in Spain. Against the Bf-109, it turned into a death trap. If the Germans had chased the Pe-2 across the sky with Heinkel and Dornier bombers, everything would have been lovely. Sadly, the Messerschmitt fighter remained more than a match for the Petlyakov machine as well.
But the USSR was a big place—bigger, maybe, than the Nazis fully understood. They had only so many 109s: nowhere near enough to cover all of Soviet airspace all the time. The Pe-2s stood a much better chance of getting through and coming back than did the older, slower SB-2s. Not for the first time, Mouradian hoped Sergei Yaroslavsky and Ivan the Chimp remained among those present.
PLENTY OF TRAIN LINES in southern France went down toward Spain. Only two actually crossed the border: one near the Atlantic, which led into territory loyal to Marshal Sanjurjo, and this one hard by the Mediterranean, which took the Czech soldiers who had fought for France against Germany into the Republic to fight Fascism now that France wasn’t interested any more.
Vaclav Jezek made a sour face when Benjamin Halévy told him that. “So those French assholes could be shipping shit to Sanjurjo at the same time as they’re giving us to the Republic?” he said.
“That’s about the size of it,” Halévy agreed. He was heading into exile, too.
Because he was, Vaclav saw fit to add, “Nothing personal.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the Jew replied. “I think they’re assholes, too.” He wore a new uniform from the army of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, with a Czech sergeant’s three dots on his shoulder straps replacing the French hash mark on his sleeve. Running a finger between his collar and his neck, he grumbled, “I’m still not used to the way this damn thing fits.”
“If you’re a Czech, you never fit in the way you’re supposed to,” Vaclav said. “You’d better get used to it.”
Halévy raised a gingery, ironic eyebrow. “I think I can just about manage that, you know?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Vaclav felt foolish. The only way Jews would ever feel at home anywhere was to get their own country. Fat chance of that! And even if they did, they’d probably kick Christians and Moslems around just because they could. They were human beings, weren’t they?
Till Vaclav got to know Halévy, he wouldn’t have bet a single Czech koruna that Jews were human beings. He’d scorned them, distrusted them, despised them for no better reason than that they had their own funny religion—and, as often as not, they were too goddamn smart for their own good.
Halévy was no dummy. He wouldn’t put Einstein out of business any time soon, though. And he made a good noncom, even if he’d had his cock clipped. He took war seriously. He wouldn’t be wearing a Czech uniform, he wouldn’t be carrying Czech papers in his pocket, if he didn’t. Even the French weren’t dumb enough to try to make Jews fight on the same side as Nazi Germany. He could have sat out the war in safety. He could have, but he didn’t want to.
On second thought, who said he was no dummy?
Over the border, Vaclav saw the last of the French tricolor. He was glad to see the last of it, even if the colors were the same as those of his conquered homeland. They stood for liberty, equality, and fraternity, and what did any of those have to do with fighting side by side with Adolf Hitler? Damn all, as far as he was concerned.
On the other side of the frontier flew the Spanish Republic’s flag—another tricolor, this one of red, yellow, and purple. It was certainly gaudier than France’s standard, or Czechoslovakia’s. But the Republic hadn’t turned its back on whatever those colors stood for. It wouldn’t still be fighting if it had.
Marshal Sanjurjo’s side had another flag yet. Well, to hell with him. This was the one Vaclav had chosen. It might not be his first or even his second choice, but it seemed better than anything else out there right now.
The train wheezed to a stop. At first, he thought it had broken down again. The French had given the Czechs going off to fight in Spain the worst rolling stock they had. Their good passenger cars and new locomotives were hauling French troops east to fight the Russians. That being so, breakdowns were almost a badge of honor.
But no. This was some kind of customs inspection. Normally, countries frowned on large bands of uniformed men importing weapons. These weren’t normal times, though. Vaclav doubted he would live to see normal times again.
He stared when a Republican officer came into the car. He supposed this was an officer, anyhow—what else would the fellow be? But the man was bareheaded, and wore denim coveralls over a collarless worker’s shirt. He looked more likely to repair a clogged drain than to give orders.
“Revolutionary chic,” Benjamin Halévy whispered to Vaclav. After that, the fellow’s outfit made more sense. He spoke a sentence in a language that wasn’t French but sounded something like it. Vaclav couldn’t even swear in Spanish. He was surprised, but not very surprised, when Halévy answered in what sounded like the same tongue.
After a bit of back and forth, the Republic officer grinned and nodded and went on to the next car. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Vaclav told the Jew in admiring tones.
“Not Spanish—Catalan. Kind of halfway between Spanish and French,” Halévy answered. “And I don’t speak it, but I can fake it some.”
“Ah.” Jezek nodded. He could make a stab at Slavic languages not his own. It didn’t always work—he’d been reduced to speaking German with the Polish soldier who interned him. But it was usually worth a try. He hadn’t thought that the Romance languages might work the same way. He found a more relevant
question: “So what did the guy want?”
“To make sure we’ve come to fight for the Republic and against the Nationalist shitheads—I think that’s what he called them.”
“Sounds right to me,” Jezek said. “What did you tell him?”
“That we were really here for a picnic, and to meet all the pretty Spanish gals,” Halévy replied without changing expression.
“Ahh, your mother.”
“She was a pretty gal, but not Spanish.” Halévy seemed willing to tell bad jokes all day. Vaclav planted an elbow in his ribs, not hard enough to hurt but to suggest he should quit acting like a jerk. It was a forlorn hope, and Vaclav knew it. Still, you had to make the effort. Vaclav also knew all about making the effort despite forlorn hope. If he hadn’t, would he have come to Spain?
Another officer strode into the car. This one wore khaki, and he had on a cap with a flat crown. If his pink skin, broad face, and pale eyes hadn’t told which army he belonged to, the uniform would have. He greeted the Czechs not in Spanish but in Russian, which he confidently expected them to understand.
Vaclav caught the gist, anyhow. Most of his countrymen probably did. The USSR had helped Czechoslovakia when nobody else would. Now the Czechs were helping Spain, the Soviet Union’s ally, when hardly anyone else would. He thanked them for that.
Had he left it there, everything would have been fine. But he went on to say something to the effect that now the Czechs would have to follow Stalin’s orders like everybody else. That was what Vaclav thought he said, anyhow. The Russian took no questions. He went on to inflict his greetings on the next car farther back.
“Did he say what I thought he said?” Vaclav asked Halévy.
“I don’t know,” the Jew answered. “But what I thought he said, I didn’t like it for beans.”
“Neither did I,” Vaclav said. “That probably means we both think he said the same stupid thing.”
“What can you do?” Halévy said with a sigh. “He’s a Russian. Without the Russians, the Republic would have lost the war a long time ago. Then France would have had to ship us to Paraguay or something when she switched sides.”
“Is there a war in Paraguay? I hadn’t heard about a new one, and I thought the old one was over,” Vaclav said.
“For all I know, it is,” the Jew replied. “The French government would ship us over there any which way. They’re my people, too, and I know how they work. If nobody’s fighting there now, they’d count on us to start something.”
That had an appalling feel of probability to it. Vaclav said, “Me, I was thinking they’d send us to China if they didn’t have Spain. Everybody hates the Japs, pretty much—even the Russians.”
“You’re right. They do,” Benjamin Halévy agreed. “The Japs may play even less by the rules than Hitler and Stalin do.” He threw his hands in the air in mocking triumph. “And they said it couldn’t be done!”
The train chose that moment to jerk into motion again. On they went, deeper into Spain and a brand-new war.
PETE MCGILL WAS GETTING to the point where he could move pretty well on crutches. He could even hobble fifty feet or so with just a cane. And he’d made it from his bed to a chair nearby with no artificial aids whatever, for all the world as if he were a normal human being. One of these days, the cast on his arm would come off, and then he could truly start working on getting his strength back.
He couldn’t wait. He wasn’t the only injured serviceman in Manila who wanted to get back into action as fast as he could, or else a little faster. When he listened to the radio or read a paper, he could add two and two and get four. He might have had trouble in school, but he sure didn’t in the real world.
Russia had patched up a cease-fire with Japan. She was trying to fight Hitler with everything she had. Okay, fine, but that also meant the Japs wouldn’t have any distractions any more. Oh, they were stuck in China, but they could lick the Chinks whenever they set their minds to it. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops wouldn’t parade through Tokyo any time in the next hundred years. And neither would Mao Tse-tung’s, no matter how much Stalin wished they would.
Well, if Japan had gone and started clearing her decks for action, where would the action be? To Corporal Pete McGill, right about here looked like the best answer to that question.
It wasn’t as if the prospect of a war between Japan and the United States was a first-class military secret. The exact plans for fighting it were bound to be secret, of course. But almost every Navy file and leatherneck could give the short version of those plans. (Pete wasn’t nearly sure Army guys could do the same thing: a firm Marine Corps belief was that men who joined the Army were a few ice cubes short of a whole tray.)
When you got down to it, the thing looked simple. The U.S. Navy would steam west from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Navy would steam east from Tokyo Bay. Wherever they bumped into each other, they’d start slugging away. The last fleet standing would go on and thump hell out of the other side till they got sick of it and gave up. Not subtle. Not pretty. But plans didn’t have to be. They just had to work, and being simple sure didn’t hurt.
Things like aircraft carriers did complicate the game. Pete assumed his side knew how many the Japs had so they could make more. That wasn’t necessarily the wisest assumption, but Pete had never tried to persuade American taxpayers to fork over for national defense. What he didn’t know could hurt him, but he didn’t know that, either.
He figured the fight would look like Jutland from the last war, only bigger. Somebody’d described the English admiral at Jutland as the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Both the American and Jap commanders in the next fight would wear the same mantle, whether they liked it or not—and chances were they wouldn’t.
The logical place for the big smashup was somewhere in Philippine waters. Japan would want to clear the USA out of this colony so close to the Home Islands. Do that and you’d also deprive the U.S. Navy of bases within striking distance of Japan. And the Americans wouldn’t be able to interfere with whatever Japan decided to do in China and French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.
Which was why Pete wanted to get back to active duty as soon as he could. Every Navy ship had a Marine detachment. On battlewagons and cruisers, Marines served the secondary armament: not the great big guns in the turrets, but the next size down. Marines kept order on smaller warships, and did whatever else people told them to do. If the Navy was going to fight the big fight against the Japs, Pete wanted to be there and join in.
A physical therapist gave him exercises to help him heal faster. He performed them with a dedication that amazed and alarmed the man. “If you tear a tendon working out, you won’t do yourself any good,” the fellow said severely.
“Right,” Pete answered. Take this guy seriously? Forget it! For one thing, he wondered if the therapist was a faggot. For another, he subscribed to the informal Marine Corps creed: anything worth doing was worth overdoing.
The therapist didn’t need long to realize that Pete was hard of listening. “Why are you pushing yourself like that?” he demanded. “It won’t change things by more than a few days one way or the other.”
“Could be a big few days,” Pete said stubbornly. “Could be the difference between getting a ship and staying beached.”
That, the therapist couldn’t very well misunderstand. “Even if you do get beached, Corporal, there’ll still be plenty for you to do,” he said. “Or don’t you think the Japs will try to land troops in the Philippines when the balloon goes up?”
“Huh,” Pete said: a thoughtful grunt. He’d worried so much about the big head-on collision between navies that he hadn’t wasted time with what might happen on land. Maybe he should have.
Or maybe not. “Doesn’t matter whether they do,” he said. “That’ll just be a watchacallit—a secondary engagement, like. I aim to be where the real action is. I owe those yellow sonsabitches plenty—better believe I do. The more I can give ’em back in person, the better I’ll li
ke it.”
“Well, you won’t like a torn Achilles’ tendon, so take it easy, okay?” the physical therapist said.
“I’ll … try.” Pete couldn’t have sounded more grudging if the man had recommended that he quit screwing for the next five years.
He’d had to quit screwing while he was laid up. He hadn’t been interested, either, not while he was mourning Vera. It would have seemed disloyal to her memory. Come to that, it still did, which didn’t keep him from noticing whenever he spotted anything female and under the age of fifty.
People told dirty stories about military nurses and about how they’d blow you or jack you off if you needed it and you didn’t have anyone of your own to take care of things for you. Pete had hoped those stories were the straight goods. They weren’t just dirty. They were … what was the word? Therapeutic came pretty close.
The next sign of their truth he found would be the first. Oh, the gals were one hundred percent nonchalant when they handled your John Henry in the line of duty. But none of them here showed the least bit of interest in doing anything with Pete’s but shoving it in a bedpan. Too bad, he thought, and so it seemed.
Time hung heavy. Everything in the Philippines seemed to move as lazily as the ceiling fans that stirred the air without cooling it. There was talk of air-conditioning the hospital, but there seemed to be neither will nor money to get on with the job. The talk was as desultory as everything else. Best guess was that the system would be installed by 1949 or the day before Philippine independence, whichever came last.
People grumbled about the mere idea of Philippine independence. There was already a small Philippine army, under the command of Douglas MacArthur. He served the Philippines with the exalted rank of field marshal, to which he couldn’t aspire in the U.S. Army if he stayed in till he was 147.
“Goddamn Filipinos can fucking well keep him,” said a U.S. Army sergeant in Pete’s ward. “When he ran the Bonus Army out of Washington, my old man and my uncle were two of the guys he rousted.”
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 34
