Polar Bear Blues: A Memoir Of The Endless War (The Endless War. Book 1)

by Steve Wishnevsky

  “I have been teaching them how to make a decent chowder. We could start with that.” He held up a hand, the waiter was there as fast as if he had popped out of the fifth dimension. “Three chowders, a bread platter.” He turned to us. “Water, tea, or coffee?”

  Maeve cocked an eye at me while refilling her glass. “Naked?”

  “Some local… tribe, I suppose. I read about them in an old National Geographic, was able to connect them to Eppi, solve a small mine disposal problem.”

  “Your boyfriend has a brain that is able to make odd but useful connections. Very useful in this case.” He looked over at my class. “You are not drinking?”

  “Whiskey is becoming a bit harsh for me in my old age. I find I have been cutting back, with all the work, and all. Perhaps a beer?”

  He waved again, the waiter poofed into existence, Eppi asked, “You would ask Old Wu for a bottle of his private brandy for my friend here?”

  “Sir.” We ate, I sipped at the superb brandy, prune, I thought. It was a lovely deep purple hue. The soup was wonderful, the salmon steaks covered the plates, an amazing meal. Behind us, the sailors drank and roistered, somewhat more subdued than before, with Japanese at one end of the long bar, Americans, or at least whites at the other.

  “What happened to all of what’s his name… Remus’s men?.. I thought they owned this place?”

  “Actually, they are all on board ships. Headed north.” His finger touched his lips.

  “North.” He nodded. “What the…” Vladivostok. I had enough wit to swallow that word. His eyes twinkled so much I thought it might blind a few sailors across the room. “You ever play chess?”

  “I am Russian. I am just not very good at it. My mind wanders.”

  “Then you understand the concepts of the split, the pin, the feint, and the sacrifice?”

  “Of course.”

  “Keep that in mind for the next two weeks. We are about to make a very impressive feint, a move to distract our enemies from our real thrust. I don’t want to spell anything out, but you know as much of the tactical situation as anyone. I suggest you use your natural wit, and you will understand what we are trying to accomplish. It’s obvious, really. That’s the problem with modern warfare. Everybody can see what you can do, everybody sees what you have to do it with, and so it’s like playing poker with all your cards face up.”

  “You play chess with all the pieces visible.”

  “I knew you would understand. I need you to send me a reliable man as an observer. Reliable, but not completely familiar with this area. This arena of war.”

  “I know just the man. He is supposed to be running the Bulletin, but could be easily distracted.”

  “Does he drink?”

  “Only to excess. No more than a normal reporter.”

  “Perfect. I will need him onboard the Takasago before eleven o’clock tonight.”

  “He’s a Jew. Arthur Marx. You will love him.”

  “Jews are hard to fool.”

  “I’m sure you will think of something. Thanks for the dinner, we best go hunt up Marx. He has been known to vanish after dark.”

  “Thanks. I will blow so much smoke up his ass, he will never know what hit him.” He shook out hands, asked, “You want to take the bottles?”

  >>>>>>>

  We took the Maxwell back to the Bulletin, found Marx hard at work scribbling copy for the typesetters, the rotary shop next door was started to get cranked up for the night’s run. Justine seemed to be in charge of both shops, I suspected she had had it out with Marx, but I didn’t ask. “Justine, we need a special correspondent for a big story. We want to take Arthur.”

  “You say we, you mean the Army?”

  “The Recon Office is under the direct command of General Hodges.”

  “I really can’t spare… But take him. If you could find me another literate male, I would be ever so grateful.”

  “It will only be for a week. You don’t want to use a woman as your leg man?”

  “We don’t get the respect. And frankly, the ability to take a few shots with the boys is always a big part of the job. A woman tries that, and men always assume she wants sex.”

  “I will ask Hodges. In the morning. Things are moving fast. A word to the wise.”

  “Understood. We will do our best. What cannot be cured must be endured.”

  “Justine, don’t worry. You are doing fine, your copy is better than I could write. You could be a bit more… Common, if not exactly vulgar, but you are doing very well in a challenging job. We do appreciate your work, and I assure you that the General appreciates your work too. Anything you need, just come to me or Ray Reynolds. I promise.”

  That night, I lay there, trying to think, trying to think like Hodges and Epstein. What were they up to? Playing chess? Vladivostok? I still thought that they thought that the real threat was from the south, up the Silk Road and hooking through the deserts. Perfect tank and airplane territory. No place to hide, a slugging match, fustest with the mostest. Patton’s dream come true.. So why would he want to futz around with Mexico? Canada? What the fuck good was Canada? And what was he going to do with all the pissed off Canadians and Mexicans. Lots of Ukrainians in Canada, all sorts of square-heads. So…

  Then I got it. He was going to send all those assholes over here, let them get slaughtered. If we all got turned into mulch under Goering’s tank treads, so much the better. If we won, or pulled a draw, then he was that much closer to making the world safe for his kind of people. It must have broke his black heart to have to fight the Germans and Brits for so long, but you just knew he would never compromise and make nice face. Look at it that way, he wanted them to join him. Crazy, but he was crazy. Crazy like a rabid fox.

  If that was true, then what were Hodges and Eppi up to? Well, first thing, they had to survive. That meant they had to stop the Germans, the Reds, and all those motley assholes that were coming down our throats. So the way to do that was to hit them where they weren’t. Or… it finally came to me… make them go someplace you wanted them to be. Vladivostok would do. It was the ass end of no place. The Japs had wanted it forever, it was a thorn in their side, an insult to their pride. A prideful lot. And they needed an army… or two…

  So if we had Vlad, we being the Japs and us, then we could land any number of troops. Right onto the Line. If those troops were more deportees, Mexicans and mongrel Americans…. Then…. I gave up on sleep, left Maeve sleeping, made coffee, poured a shot of that good brandy in it, found my pen and paper. If the Japanese had the West Coast of the Pacific, and the Americans, with or without Patton, had the East Coast, then Fat Hermann could piss up all the ropes he wanted to, for all the good any of that would do him. We could play meat-grinder, just like the Germans had played on us in France, and there was no way they could get the handle. No way in hell they could get enough navy out here to fuck with us. The Japs had to remember what they had done to the Russians back in the first decade of this century. Shit, it was their National Epic.

  I was still writing when Maeve’s alarm clock went off, and she got dressed for her jaunt. I made a fresh pot of coffee, fried her a couple of eggs and kissed her bon voyage. Work to be done. The first job was to find a replacement for Marx. A call to Ray Reynolds disclosed the information that he had a few overeducated lay-a-bouts in his office who were in search of a career in journalism. “Really?”

  “Of course.” He said, “They just don’t know it yet. Some people just don’t understand what a serious business Hodges is involved in. Some refuse to learn. You need amiable people who are good conversationalists, but not overwhelmed with energy?”

  “Exactly. And if they perchance overindulge in spirituous liquors?” I chuckled. Not many laughs these days, get what you can. “That would be typecasting, at the very worst.”

  “Fine, I’ll round up a half dozen and ship them over to Justine. She can sort them out.”

  “She is perhaps as serious as Hodges, but her stakes are not as high. She
believes in abstractions.”

  “Perfect.” He waited a beat. “You talked to Epstein?”

  “I did. And I think I have some sort of idea of what is going on.”

  “I just bet. Stop over some time soon, and we will make sure we are not working at cross purposes.”

  “Actually, I have a memorandum on my… speculations in hand.”

  “Then run it over before lunch, and you can take the new volunteers back to the Bulletin.”

  “A plan. See you in an hour or two.”

  So I did, ran through the night’s abstracts, the Arabian Sea action was over, the Brits and Krauts pulled back to Karachi, further deponent saith not. I imagined the INN had been hurt, they almost would have had to have been, but they weren’t talking either.

  There was a little coming in on Australian shortwave, relayed messages from that RAN cruiser, the Adelaide, but they were all in code. The problem seemed to be that the survivors were in fact mutineers, and nobody knew if they were heroes or pirates. One thing for sure, they were a long way from home. Australia had applied to join with Japan in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, GEACPS, or whatever they wanted to call it, but that had not been finalized, and was largely considered to be a tissue of decorum over a plain and simple land grab. Not that anybody wanted to say that in public, of course. The German Empire was remaining silent, to avoid having to admit how much British Colonial land they had lost.

  There was also interminable wrangling going on in Geneva over the final terms of the Peace Treaty to end the Great War. The man problem was that the foundations of Empire, empires, were shifting under the polished mahogany conference table, nobody knew anything, and if they did, they weren’t admitting it. One hoped the Swiss were selling all parties lots of gin. They would need it. Interesting times. We were getting more useful information from interviewing the deportees, Ray would send us over stacks of crude reports, and Peaches had a few people sorting through them whenever we had a chance. I had an idea of making a master map showing the displacements in North America, and mentioned it to her, as soon as she had a few cups of coffee under her belt. She grumped, but agreed.

  We scribbled our summary of the abstracts, I had another cuppa, and went off to run my errands. Such a domestic type.

  >>>>>>

  I had a day, two days of normal work, nothing much to do but everything, with worry for Maeve to fill in the cracks. It seemed real quiet. Too quiet, except for endless convoys of tanks and troops rolling though Dalny to the Railroad Station to be loaded and send north up the South Manchurian Line. Maeve came back on the third day, “A milk run,” she said, and was immediately sent north on a photo run to Harbin. A look at the map showed that Harbin was the transportation hub for the whole part of Northeast China, where the South Manchurian line met the Chinese Eastern Railroad. I flipped a few books and found that the CERR had been a quick way to get the rails to Vladivostok while the main Trans-Siberian had been constructed. There was also a pretty good sized river, the Song-hua, which wandered all over hell and gone to reach the Pacific far north, near the northern end of the Japanese-occupied island of Sakhalin. Very interesting.

  We had a few troops in Harbin, that was where the South Manchurian Line joined the CERR, but whoever occupied that city would own that whole end of Siberia, cut Vladivostok off from whatever was left of Russia, and generally throw all sorts of monkey wrenches in all sorts of machinery. There were a few other side-lines, east to Chang-chun, and a cut off west to Qiqihar, which was the one we usually used to supply the Line.

  But, we could rattle a lot of nerves putting a lot of troops in Harbin proper. The terrain around there was flat and rolling, the rivers meandered as they willed, and it looked to be good tank territory.

  I decided to go to the Feniks to rest my mind and see if they could come up with another bottle of Bushmills for my lady friend. They were glad to see me, the place was empty, no Japanese salvage men, no Yankee sailors, nobody. I got my hooch, ran up the docks to take a look… Poof. No four hundred foot long Takasago. His salvage ship was working on the newly raised dry dock, but the improvised one and the Japanese salvage ship were gone too. Nice magic trick, Eppi.

  I swung by the Sisterhood on my way home, no Ruby. Nobody home. I see. Or rather, I didn’t see. What you don’t see is what you don’t get. I needed to go talk to Ray, find out more about this Harbin place. So went there, just in time for lunch.

  He was willing to bend my ear. “You should read a book,” He teased. “But there is probably not much there, the Britannica can’t use words to adequately describe what a mess that place is. I was there for a while. It was a sleepy little village on a river, until they built the Chinese Eastern Line. It quickly turned into a rail hub, construction center, and administrative center.”

  “Hell on Wheels, they called places like that in the States.”

  “If you say so. That was in 1898. It was Chinese, but the Russians could give a shit. The new road cut the distance to Vlad, and Harbin was the starting point of the South Manchurian Line to Port Arthur. So in the first Russo-Japanese War...”

  “1904,” I put in to show I was paying attention.

  “… Russia used Harbin as its military operations base for Northeastern China. A hundred thousand troops or so. After the Russians got beat so bad, a lot of the soldiers just stayed. A bunch of foreigners, looking for easy money showed up, Yanks, Germans, French, all sorts of people. Chinese businessmen started companies to work in brewing, food and textiles. Harbin became the economic hub of northeastern China and an international metropolis.”

  “Boomtown City.”

  “Right. Like the oil fields in Texas. It grew so fast that they had a bunch of epidemics, they were burning bodies in the streets to stop the plague. But the population still grew rapidly, it got up to a hundred thousand or so just as the Endless War was getting rolling good.”

  “They must have picked up a lot of deserters and refugees. Of course,” I said. “Then when the Revolution hit, all sorts of defeated Russian White Guards and refugees retreated to Harbin, I guess. Just like Shanghai. Or worse.”

  “Somebody told me it was the largest Russian enclave outside the Soviet Union. Lots of Jews, over twenty thousand. The Republic of China discontinued diplomatic relations with Imperial Russia in 1920, so many Russians found themselves stateless.”

  “You know all this how?”

  “I used to drink with an émigré White Russian colonel up there. He died a few months ago.”

  “Of drink.”

  “Of course. But he was a hell of a story teller. In ’24, the Nationalists decided to only employ Russians and Chinese on the railroads, a lot of people were left stateless. Like my friend David.”

  “David? A Jew?”

  “I guess. Anyway, most went Soviet, but they were still hung out to dry. Warlords kept seizing the CERR, but we were forced to take over the CERR and the TSRR when we showed up in ’19, in Vladivostok. We just took what we needed, worked around Harbin. They have a decent rail ring around the city, Russian style, they tell me, so we just let them fester on the vine. Then in ’29, when we were sent to take Dalny, we just threw up a couple of spur lines, and bypassed Harbin entirely. Too big a mess for us to try and fix.”

  I got the plan. “But now you need it. Or more likely, you want the Germans and the Reds to think you need it.”

  “Bingo. I knew I could count on you.”

  “Jeeze. This is going to make the word “cluster-fuck” obsolete.” I was impressed. “If we win, it will be brilliant tactics, and if we blow it, nobody will ever know.”

  “Correct. Get to work, Miles, get to work.”

  “Slave driver.”

  >>>>>>>>

  There were still a few hours left before Maeve could get back, at the earliest, and she might well run out of daylight and have to lay over someplace. So. Go to work? I could do that. The Radio Room was buzzing, word was finally coming in about the great naval victory of the Imperial Navy ag
ainst the Combined Fleets. There was little detail, still no word from the British and Germans, the IN claimed a “dozen” dreadnaughts sunk. Of course they had been pretty tightlipped about the great victory in the South China Sea, a few months ago, too. I looked closer, and what little they had said was on the Japanese language stations, not the English NKH. Some inscrutable pride thing was all I could figure. I could ask Ken, especially if I didn’t expect an answer. Alien damn people anyway.

  The Mexican War was still at a standstill, the Panama Canal was expected to be opened “Soon”, and Argentina was making belligerent noises at President Hoover. I had half an idea, asked Isis, “You ever live in Harbin?”

  “For a few years. I came here from there. I had to leave, you never knew who to bribe to be safe, and Comrade Stalin might discover I was living there.”

  “Would he want you for something?”

  “We had words long ago. He never forgets…” She face screwed into a pain mask for a second, then smoothed again.

  “Forgets what?”

  “Anything. Ever. He is as evil a man as there is on this earth. Never forget that. Not for one second. Evil.”

  I wondered if he had raped her, but all I said, was, “We need to know about Harbin. Anything you remember. And you could write another few pages on this Stalin. Anything you can remember. What he drinks, what he smokes, who he likes, who he trusts.”

  “The answer to the last two questions is one word. Nobody.”

  “Well, do what you can. Hodges needs to know who he is dealing with.”

  “Don’t deal with him. Kill him. Like a bug. A diseased bug. Vermin.”

  “Write it down.” She firmed herself, went back to her desk, started writing. Writing and staring at the wall. Good enough. I went to our motley library, started making notes on the Silk Road. If I had read Ray’s hints correctly, that was the real action coming. Be prepared, boy scout.

  A few hours of head scratching, and it came down to a choke point at this place Jiu-quan, which like everything else in this god-forsaken country was a thousand miles away. Jiu-quan was nine hundred miles south of Verkhneudinsk, another nine hundred from Xilin Gol, and a mere seven hundred from Ulan Bator.