Coup d'Etat

Chapter 21

If anything was more fun than changing a panzer track in mud and rain, Theo Hossbach had trouble imagining what it might be. The job resembled nothing so much as a bout of all-in wrestling, with the added chance of getting squashed if you were careless.

Having a five-man crew instead of three did help. More hands couldn’t make this work light, but they did make it a little lighter. And the gunner and loader complained just as much as the three men who’d come out of their little Panzer II together.

Which didn’t mean those three didn’t complain. “These fucking things better work, is all I’ve got to say,” Adi Stoss growled, plying spanner with might and main.

“This beast should have come with them,” Lothar Eckhardt said. The gunner wiped a wet sleeve across his equally wet forehead and went on, “I mean, they knew all along what things in Russia would be like, right?”

Adi and Hermann Witt both laughed raucously. Even Theo snorted. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, they didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Highways on the maps are horrible dirt tracks on the ground. Secondary roads on the maps aren’t there at all. They didn’t realize we’d need wider tracks on our panzers till we screamed at ’em that the Russians could keep going where we bogged down. And it’s taken a fucking year to get the Ostketten out to us so we could dance like this.”

Ostketten: East tracks. Panzers hadn’t needed wider tracks in Czechoslovakia or the Low Countries or France. They sure did here in Russia. This wasn’t much of a civilized country, or much of a civilized war.

Eckhardt stared at Hermann Witt. “But hasn’t the General Staff come out and looked at this ground?”

“Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Adi said.

“Son of a bitch!” Eckhardt said with feeling. “If they haven’t, somebody ought to stick ’em in a penal battalion. Maybe they’d learn some sense if they lived through that. And if they didn’t, who’d miss ’em?”

Penal units were a Soviet idea the Wehrmacht had borrowed. Take a bunch of guys who’d disgraced themselves by cowardice or some other mortal sin. Give them a chance at redemption-throw them in where the fighting is hottest. If they try to retreat, shoot them yourself. If they die in action, oh, well. Chances are they’ll shake the enemy doing it. And if they happen to live, you can turn them back into ordinary soldiers again. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can fill up the holes in the penal battalion with new fuckups-there are always new fuckups-and throw it into action somewhere else.

The system had an elegant simplicity. Theo was surprised the Nazis hadn’t thought of it for themselves. But then, they’d never been shy about stealing ideas from other people. Instead of talking about that-which might have made him learn more about penal battalions than he’d ever wanted to know-Theo went on manhandling the Ostketten into place on the road wheels and the idlers and, most important of all, the drive sprocket.

After close to two hours, they finished. A couple of them had vodka in their canteens instead of water. Say what you would about vodka, but it didn’t give you dysentery. The haves shared with the have-nots. Socialism was real at the front. Everywhere else, as far as Theo could tell, it was only a sour joke.

Smacking his lips, Adi said, “No dumb cop’s gonna write me a ticket for drunken driving, not today.”

“If anybody tries, mash him like a potato,” Hermann Witt said. He eyed their backbreaking handiwork. “Let’s see if we can go mash some Ivans now.”

Ostketten wouldn’t keep out shells from a T-34 or a KV-1, of course. But the panzer crew had lashed the old, narrow tracks to the glacis. They might help turn an enemy round there. Or, of course, they might not. But it was worth a try. Theo had seen several other Panzer IIIs similarly decked out. More and more crews would improvise improved armor as more Ostketten arrived.

At least the panzer’s engine started up right away. Hard freezes hadn’t begun yet, let alone the kind of weather that made a mockery of German antifreeze and motor oil. Mechanics swore this year’s antifreeze and lubricants were better than the stuff the Wehrmacht had used the year before. Theo hoped that meant they wouldn’t have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw things out enough to start. He hoped… but he didn’t really believe it.

He dripped on his seat when he took his place inside the panzer. The radioman and bow gunner was as far from the engine compartment as he could get. In the Panzer II, Theo’s station had been right on the other side of the fireproof-everyone hoped! — bulkhead. He’d warmed up in a hurry there. No such luck in this machine.

Over on the other side of the centrally positioned radio sat the driver. At Sergeant Witt’s command, Adi put the Panzer III in gear. It rattled and clanked ahead. The engine’s grinding growl seemed a long way off to Theo, who’d been used to listening to it right at his elbow.

Theo glanced over at his comrade, but Adi was paying attention to what he was doing. “How does it seem?” Theo asked. If he wanted to find out, he had to spend some words.

“Feels… a little better, maybe,” Adi answered after a judicious pause. “I don’t want to charge into the thickest slop I can find, you know, just to see if the Ostketten ’ll pull us through it. They’re liable not to, and then you’d have to call a recovery vehicle to fish us out. Everybody’d love me for that.”

If by love he meant scream at, he was right. Otherwise… Otherwise, he was a sarcastic, cynical veteran panzer man, just like thousands of others in the Wehrmacht. Well, almost just like thousands of others. As long as the authorities didn’t notice the difference, everything was fine. It had been fine for quite a while now. Theo hoped it would stay that way.

German authorities weren’t the only ones who could foul things up, of course. The Russians weren’t thrilled about having other people’s tanks gallivanting across their landscape. Theo wondered why. Now that he could see out, he could see what a broad, bleak country this was. It might not have looked so bad when the trees had leaves and the grain was greening toward gold, but the harvest was over and cold and rain had done for the leaves. The word that crossed his mind for the land hereabouts was haunted.

If you were a German panzer man, the landscape damn well was haunted. Russians wore mud-colored uniforms to begin with. And they took camouflage very seriously: more seriously than the Germans did, for sure. They wouldn’t mind rolling in the mud and rubbing it on their faces to make themselves harder to spot. They’d daub mud on their panzers, too, or drape netting over them to disguise their outlines. You might not suspect they were around till a shell slammed into your side armor from a direction you hadn’t worried about.

Adi hit the brakes. Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube: “Why’d you stop?”

“Ground up ahead doesn’t look quite right,” Stoss answered.

“What’s the matter with it? Just looks like ground to me,” the panzer commander said.

“I’ll go ahead if you want me to, but I’d sooner back up and go around,” Adi told him.

“Do that, then,” Witt said. “You don’t usually get the vapors-and if you have ’em this time, well, shit, you’re entitled once in a while.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. You’re all right, you know that?” Adi put the panzer into reverse. Theo wondered what would have happened were Heinz Naumann still in charge here. No, he didn’t wonder; he knew. Naumann would have ordered Adi to go straight ahead, just to show him who the boss was. And then they would have seen… whatever they would have seen.

As Adi was making his loop, another Panzer III did head straight across the stretch of ground he hadn’t liked. It did fine for about thirty meters. Then it hit a mine that blew off its left track. Curses from the other panzer’s radioman dinned in Theo’s earphones. Now those guys would have to wait for a recovery vehicle, or else come out of their steel shell and try to repair things well enough to limp away. If the Reds aimed an antipanzer cannon at them while they were stuck… That would be hard luck. For them.

Hermann Witt’s voice came through the speaking tube again: “Good job, Adi.”

“Thanks, boss,” the driver answered. Theo wondered what Naumann would have said after they charged into the minefield at his orders. Since the other commander had stopped one with his head, nobody would ever know now. And maybe that was just as well for everyone-except Naumann, of course.

Vaclav Jezek sprawled under a battered chunk of rusting corrugated iron between the Republican lines northwest of Madrid and the Nationalist positions. Rain drummed down on the iron. The ground around the Czech’s hidey-hole was getting muddy. No, by now it had already got muddy. Every so often, a little chilly rill dribbled in with Vaclav. Summer was over. Spanish autumn warned that Spanish winter was coming.

Some yellowing bushes concealed where the muzzle end of Vaclav’s antitank rifle stuck out from under the sheet iron. The bushes also made it harder for him to peer through the telescopic sight, but he didn’t mind. A sniper’s first commandment was Don’t let them spot you. If you didn’t honor that commandment and keep it wholly, you wouldn’t live long enough to learn the second one.

And, naturally, the rain also cut down on visibility. That blade also had two edges. Yes, Vaclav had more trouble finding likely targets. But Marshal Sanjurjo’s men would also have more trouble noticing him if he made a mistake.

He gnawed on a chunk of spicy Spanish sausage. His tongue thought Spaniards put peppers and garlic in everything this side of ice cream. They were even worse than Magyars for hotting up their food. The sausage, actually, wasn’t too bad now that he’d got used to it.

He wished for a cigarette. He had a pack in his pocket, but lighting one now would be a king-sized mistake. Even through the rain, an alert Nationalist might spot smoke leaking out from under the iron sheet.

Some of the American Internationals chewed tobacco when they got into a spot where they couldn’t light up. Vaclav thought about it, but not for long. The idea seemed too disgusting to stand. He could deal with the no-smoke jitters till night fell. Then he could either have a careful cigarette here-making sure the struck match and the coal didn’t show-or go back to the trenches and smoke his head off.

In the meantime… Waiting was a big part of the sniper’s game. If you weren’t patient, you wouldn’t last. One of these days-one of these years-Vaclav wanted to go home to a free Czechoslovakia. Letting some Spanish Fascist asshole pot him before he could wasn’t in his plans.

He moved the antitank rifle a few millimeters. Through the scope, he eyed a new stretch of the Nationalists’ rear entrenchments. It seemed no more interesting than the old stretch had. The Spaniards there were more careless than they were at the front, where an ordinary rifleman could pot anybody who unwarily stuck his head up over the parapet. They thought they were far enough away to be safe.

The hell of it was, they were right. He could have blown some of their brains out, sure. Seeing them in helmets so much like the ones the Nazis wore made him want to do it, too. But he wasn’t about to waste his precious ammo on ordinary Joses and Jorges. If you were going to snipe at long range, you wanted to get rid of the officers, the high-powered guys whose loss hurt the enemy out of proportion to their numbers.

Like this bastard, for instance. He wore an officer’s cap with a high crown and a brim, not a helmet or a service cap. The brim helped keep the rain out of his eyes, but it also told the world what he was. There were stars above the brim. How many? Small or large? That would say how big a fish Vaclav had in his sights. At this range and in this weather, he couldn’t be sure.

Whoever the jerk was, he pointed a finger at one of the ordinary soldiers and told him off in no uncertain terms. That decided the sniper watching him from afar. Anybody who thought he was such a big shot deserved whatever happened to him. Vaclav took careful aim, inhaled, exhaled, and pressed the trigger.

The elephant of a gun slammed against his shoulder. The stock was padded, but that helped only so much. And the report, always fearsome, seemed four times as loud under the sheet of corrugated iron. But the Nationalist officer fell over, which was the point of the exercise.

Vaclav quickly chambered another round. Had the Nationalists seen the muzzle flash when he shot their officer? If they had, would they come after him and try to pay him back?

No one came. He wouldn’t have wanted to hunt snipers in the rain, either. You never could tell, though. Sometimes people got upset when you murdered their officers. Sometimes, no doubt, the regular guys in the trenches hoisted one in your direction when you blew the head off some jackass they couldn’t stand. That was the kind of thing you were unlikely to hear about, which had always struck Vaclav as too damn bad.

He kept watching through the sight. He didn’t intend to fire two in a row from the same spot, not unless he got a terrific target. He’d think twice even then; shooting two in a row without moving felt almost like signing your own death warrant.

After a while, he took a small swig from his canteen. Cheap Spanish white wine tasted different from cheap French white wine, but no better. With regret, he kept it to the one small swig. The less you drank, the less you needed to get rid of. He didn’t have much room to piss under here unless he wanted to lie in it.

Some more sausage, some chewy barley bread… This wasn’t the Ritz or the Adlon, no two ways about it. Where was the barmaid with the big tits to bring him another bottle of bubbly?

Wherever she was, she wasn’t anywhere around here. He didn’t find any more overbearing officers to shoot at. You could peer through a sight for only so long. Once he decided he wouldn’t spot anything more, he pillowed his head on his arms and fell asleep.

It was dark when he woke up. Under the iron sheet, it was black as Hitler’s heart. He needed a second or two to realize he hadn’t died or been buried alive. He had a way out, a way back to his friends.

“Fuck!” he muttered. He had to give his own heart stern orders not to try to pound its way out of his chest. His hands shook. Of course, that was partly because he hadn’t had a cigarette in much too long.

He carefully backed out of the little artificial cave where he’d sheltered. It was still raining. No one in the line challenged him till he was clambering over the parapet.

“Good going, guys,” he said as he dropped down into the forward trench and fumbled for his cigarettes. “I could have been a Nationalist with a machine pistol. You never would have known the difference till I opened up.” He cupped his hands so he could strike a match in spite of the waterworks from on high.

“Nah. You would’ve made more noise getting through stuff if you were,” one of the other Czechs answered.

“You hope I would,” Vaclav said. “Some of those guys know what they’re doing, though.” It started coming down harder. He kept a hand over the cigarette so the raindrops wouldn’t put it out. After so long without, he needed more than just a drag or two to feel right.

“We heard you fire,” the other Czech said. “Get the guy you were aiming at?”

“Bet your ass,” the sniper said, not without pride. “ He won’t be telling anybody what to do again.”

“So some other jerk will do it instead.” That cynicism came from Benjamin Halevy.

With exaggerated patience, Vaclav answered, “The idea is, if we kill enough of them, they’ll run out of men-or the ones they have left won’t be worth shit.”

“Yeah, that’s the idea, all right,” the Jew agreed. “Sure is taking it a long time to work, though.”

Vaclav looked at him-looked through him, really. “If you don’t like it, you can always go back to France. The rest of us, we’re fucking stuck here. We aren’t going back to Czechoslovakia-that’s for goddamn sure.” The Nazis held-held down-two-thirds of what had been his country. Slovakia, the remaining chunk, called itself independent. It might be able to sneeze on its own. It couldn’t wipe its nose afterwards, though, till Hitler countersigned the order.

“Bite me, Jezek,” Halevy said without heat. “I’m not going anywhere, and you know it. I volunteered for this shit, same as you.”

“Maybe that proves you really are a dumb sheeny after all. You don’t usually talk like it, though,” Vaclav replied. They swore at each other in a companionable way. Nobody would be going anywhere much till the rain quit for a while, and they both knew it.

Rain. Sleet. A little snow mixed in for good-or bad-measure. Julius Lemp wondered why he’d brought the U-30 up to the surface. He could hardly see the U-boat’s bow from the conning tower, let alone anything farther away. Stumbling over a target in the storm-tossed Barents Sea would be purely a matter of luck.

True, the boat could go faster surfaced than submerged. Again, so what? If all he saw was this tiny circle… Yes, he’d sweep out more area cruising along at fifteen knots, but enough to matter? He doubted it.

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 naive 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!