The Big Switch

Chapter 15

“All right.” It wasn’t all right, not even slightly, but Luc Harcourt wasn’t about to admit it till he found out what the hell was going on here. Since he didn’t know, he asked: “What the hell is going on here?”

One of the poilus in front of him had a fat lip. The other had a mouse under one eye. They glared at each other as if they would sooner have tangled with machine guns than with fists. Fat Lip jerked a thumb at Mouse. “Sergeant, this con is a filthy Communist. He says he doesn’t want to fight the Russians no matter what kind of orders we get.”

“Merde,” Luc said wearily. He’d been waiting for this kind of crap to break out. The only thing that surprised him was how long it had taken. “Did you really say that, Boileau?” Were you really that dumb?

“You bet I did, Sergeant.” The man with the shiner sounded proud of his own stupidity. He gave his accuser a withering glance. “And Paul here isn’t just a squealer. The fairy wants to suck Hitler’s cock.”

“Listen to me,” Luc said. “Listen hard, because this is your first, last, and only chance. You can’t make a mutiny. You can’t disobey orders or tell other people to disobey orders. If you do, they’ll shoot you. Have you got that through your thick wooden head? Well? Have you?”

“I hear you,” Boileau answered. “I know you have to come out with that kind of garbage. But you’re a proletarian, too, right? Where’s your class consciousness? I bet one man in three won’t follow orders to attack the heartland of the glorious Socialist revolution. Your precious government can’t shoot all of us. To the barricades!” He thrust a clenched fist in the air.

“Quit trying to sound like Victor Hugo,” Luc said, which earned him a wounded look.

“You ought to have the military gendarmerie take him away, Sergeant,” Paul said. “He’s talking sedition!”

Boileau thrust his arm in the air again, this time in a Nazi salute. Paul jumped on him. They fell to the ground, slugging and swearing. “Cut it out!” Luc yelled. “Cut it out, goddammit!” When they didn’t, he kicked them both with savage impartiality.

For a bad moment, he wondered if that would make them gang up on him. Fortunately, it didn’t. They separated. Now Boileau had two black eyes, while Paul, whose last name Luc couldn’t-and didn’t want to-remember, was bleeding from the nose.

“Save it for the enemy, will you?” Luc snapped.

They might have been doing a vaudeville turn out in the provinces. Their timing impeccable, they pointed at each other and chorused, “ He’s the enemy!”

“No. Nom d’un nom, no,” Luc said. “We’re all Frenchmen together. We do what the government tells us, or we’re all screwed together.”

“We do what the government tells us, and we’re all screwed together,” Boileau said. The Communist soldier walked away, rubbing at sore ribs.

“Are you going to let him get away with that?” the rightist soldier demanded indignantly.

“Paul…”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“Why don’t you fuck off?” Luc made it a friendly suggestion. Under it, though, lay the warning that he would whale the kapok out of Paul if the private didn’t fuck off. Paul eyed him, considering. The sergeant’s hash mark didn’t change Paul’s mind. Luc’s look of anticipation was a different story. Muttering, Paul departed-not in the same direction Boileau had chosen. That was good, anyhow.

It was the only good thing Luc could see about the situation. He did what he did when he didn’t know what else to do: he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. If anybody was above (or maybe below) politics, Demange was the man. He hated the whole human race, white, black, yellow, brown, and Red.

Luc poured out his tale of woe, finishing, “How many sergeants are trying to deal with this shit right now, all over France? What can I do about it? What can anybody do about it? We’re liable to have a civil war on our hands!”

“Yeah, I know,” Demange said, the perpetual Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitching as he spoke. “You aren’t the first guy who’s come to me up in arms about it, either.”

“What can I do?” Luc asked again.

“Sounds like you did what you could-and I hope you booted both those assholes good and hard,” Demange said. “As long as they remember they’re soldiers and do what you tell ’em, we’re all right. If they don’t…” His ferret face screwed up in a nasty grimace. “If they don’t, it’s gonna be worse than 1917.”

“Ai!” Luc winced. Any Frenchman would have. Things in 1917 had got mighty bad. After one more failed offensive against the Boches, whole divisions of the French Army had mutinied. A combination of executions and granted privileges kept things below the point of full explosion, but barely. The army was useless for the rest of the year. The Germans could have walked over it in the spring or summer if they’d ever learned about the mutinies. Somehow, they didn’t. Germans could be blind in the most peculiar ways.

Demange glanced east. German soldiers wandered around out in the open, confident the cease-fire would hold. Part of the deal was that they would evacuate France once the French and English went into action with them against Russia, but they were still here now. “Want to find out what they think about it?” Demange asked with a sour sneer.

“I already know. They’re laughing their nuts off,” Luc said bitterly.

“You don’t want to fight alongside ’em, either, do you?” Demange said.

“No more than you do,” Luc answered. “I don’t mind shooting Russians. Plenty of Russians nobody’d miss for a minute, I bet. But son of a bitch, Lieutenant! Marching with the fucking Nazis?”

“It’s like you said to your privates-if they tell us, ‘Do it,’ we’ve got to do it,” Demange said. “Will I jump up and down about it? Not a goddamn prayer I will. But maybe it’ll turn out for the best-I dunno.”

“Fat chance… sir,” Luc said.

“Sorry, kid. I don’t know what else to tell you,” the older man said. “This is what they’ve cooked for us, and we’ve got to eat it.”

“Even if it tastes like shit?”

“Even then.” Demange sounded disgusted, but he nodded. “No matter how crappy it tastes, mutiny’d taste worse. They’d beat on you for causing trouble, and then they’d make you do what you mutinied to try and get out of.”

That struck Luc as much too likely. All the same, he said, “Not if the mutineers won.”

Demange laughed in his face. “Good fucking luck!”

“It happened in 1789,” Luc said stubbornly.

Demange laughed some more. “And what did they end up with? The Revolution, and the Terror, and Napoleon. And Napoleon, he was the Hitler of his day, by God! He marched ’em all over everywhere, and they got their balls shot off while they were yelling, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Pretty fucking lucky, right?”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Luc said. Demange raised a questioning-or more likely a challenging-eyebrow. Luc explained: “Whenever I feel lousy, you can always find a reason I should feel worse.”

Demange’s brief grin showed irregular, smoke-yellowed teeth. He took off his helmet and bowed with a flourish, as if he were a nineteenth-century musketeer doffing a plumed, beribboned broad-brimmed hat. “At your service, mon petit ami. ”

Luc made gagging noises. The lieutenant chuckled, coughed, and chuckled again. “You’re stuck with it. You may as well enjoy it as much as you can.”

“That’s what you told her, right?”

This time, Demange laughed out loud. Luc was proud of himself; he could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d really amused the veteran. That thought swung him in a new direction. He was a veteran himself, and had been for a while now. And what had it got him? More worries-that was all he could see.

The division tramped East, back toward the German border. The men went proudly-it wasn’t as if they were defeated troops. Out in front of each regiment, bandsmen with swallow’s nests on their shoulders played marching tunes with tubas and trumpets and drums. Some of the men sang as they marched.

Willi Dernen remembered his father talking about the endless singing as the Kaiser’s army headed for the last war. Those poor bastards hadn’t known what they were getting into, though they found out pretty damn quick. Willi had already been through the mill. He didn’t feel like making noise.

Besides, Awful Arno made enough racket for the whole squad, maybe for the whole platoon. Baatz couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, but he loudly insisted on trying. He was trying, all right-trying to everybody who had to listen to his godawful noise. Short of taping Baatz’s mouth or his own ears shut, Willi didn’t know what to do about that.

They marched and sang their way through a French village. No one came out to bid them farewell. Willi didn’t care. He was as glad to see the last of the place as the villagers were to see him gone. As long as nobody opened up on the departing Germans with a long-hidden varmint rifle, he was happy.

Under the singing, he remarked on that to the fellow marching beside him. The other Landser nodded. But sure as hell Arno Baatz owned a pair of rabbit ears. Despite everyone’s singing-including his own raucous efforts-Awful Arno heard the low-voiced remark. He stopped caterwauling the tune to speak in pompous tones: “Don’t be silly, Dernen. Security forces confiscated all the French firearms. Lists of registered weapons at the police stations made it easy.” Without waiting for an answer, he started abusing the music again.

Willi wouldn’t have answered him anyway, except perhaps with a snort of derision. The Gestapo might have got most of the registered weapons, but what about the ones that weren’t? There were bound to be some, and probably lots. Weren’t the froggies people like everybody else? There’d be guns they wanted to keep quiet about, either because they didn’t feel like dealing with the police or because they used those guns in ways the flics wouldn’t fancy.

And so he wasn’t very surprised when a couple of francs-tireurs took potshots at the regiment in front of his from the woods off to one side of the road. The officers in charge of that outfit didn’t seem surprised, either, even if Awful Arno was. They sent a whole company into the woods to dig out the obstreperous Frenchmen.

When the Germans came back empty-handed, Willi also wasn’t very surprised. The Frenchies would have had a line of retreat worked out, or else a hiding place good enough for them to trust their lives to it. You didn’t open up on a regiment unless you figured you could get away with it.

Optimistic amateurs opened up on the soldiers twice more before they got to the border. The second time, the Germans did hunt down one of them. Two Landsers dragged his body out of the woods by the feet. They tied it, upside down, to a stout tree branch as a warning to others. If the French were on the Germans’ side now, they needed to act like it.

Willi didn’t breathe easy till his unit crossed back into Germany. It wasn’t far from where he and Wolfgang Storch had scouted out the hesitant French invaders going on two years ago now. He looked around for someone to tell that to. The only other man close by who’d been there then was Arno Baatz. Willi kept his mouth shut.

When they marched through a village in the Reich, schoolchildren waving swastika flags cheered from the sidewalk. Willi would rather have looked at older girls, but what could you do?

They took the Landsers to a barracks hall. “Gott im Himmel!” Willi said. “Everything’s so clean!”

“And so neat!” another soldier added.

Fresh white paint gleamed on the walls. It was a new coat; Willi could still smell it. The cots and footlockers were laid out as if they were part of a study in geometry and perspective. The cots’ iron frames had got a fresh coat of black paint. Not a single light fixture held a burnt-out bulb.

It almost seemed wrong to have real, live soldiers-dirty, smelly men in grimy uniforms all torn and patched, foulmouthed lazy smokers and snuff dippers and spitters-profane a place as sterile as an operating theater. That didn’t keep them from claiming cots and plopping packs on the dark wool blankets.

They stripped off their uniforms and headed for the communal showers. Willi wrinkled his nose at the soldier next to him. “Are those your feet, Konrad, or did somebody die in your boots?”

“It’s your auntie’s twat, is what it is,” Konrad answered. Laughing, they went off to clean up.

The Landsers splashed one another and flicked towels at behinds like the boys they’d been not long before. But few boys came with the many and various scars the soldiers wore. Few boys came with the lines on their faces, either, or the eyes that seemed to look everywhere at once.

“What are they going to feed us?” somebody asked, and that was the next good question.

“Dead Russian,” somebody else said. The laughs that followed were nervous. It sounded like a joke, but not enough like one.

What they did end up getting was the usual army swill: potatoes and sauerkraut and smelly cheese and sardines. There was plenty of it; Willi patted his belly after he finished. But field kitchens scrounging off the French countryside turned out better chow. So did soldiers heating up rations and leftovers and whatever the hell for themselves. To the cooks, it was just another job. They cared about getting it over with, not about making it good.

As a Gefreiter, Willi didn’t have to worry about getting tapped for washing dishes or any of the other enjoyable duties doled out to lowly privates. He flopped down onto the cot and made the world go away simply by closing his eyes. One of the lights blazed right above his head. Other soldiers were playing cards and talking and generally making nuisances of themselves. He didn’t care. He was sound asleep less than two minutes after his head hit the pillow.

The regiment had four days’ furlough in the little village. Willi got drunk at the Bierstube. The lager was weak, but that only meant you needed to drink more and piss more. He tried to pick up a blond barmaid. She laughed at him. Awful Arno was more direct: he grabbed her ass. She hauled off and slapped him hard enough to spin his head around. The soldiers packing the place clapped and cheered. Everybody loved the corporal.

Willi was nursing a headache when they marched away. One of the other soldiers said, “I wonder if the froggies’ll be using that hall now that we’re clearing out.”

“They’re welcome to it, as long as they come shoot Ivans with us,” Willi said. “I just wish I could hang around and watch one of ’em try to feel up that gal at the tavern.”

“Silence in the ranks, Dernen!” Awful Arno shouted furiously. He hadn’t cared about anyone else talking in the ranks. And even the routine order didn’t satisfy him-he scowled at Willi and added, “Shut the fuck up!”

“Yes, Corporal,” Willi said. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was exactly what they told you.

Along with everybody else, he climbed aboard a train. As far as he knew, this was the same route he’d taken when he went home on leave. Sure as hell, the train rolled through Breslau. Most of the men came from these parts. Some of them waved out the windows, not that it was likely anyone who’d recognized them would see.

This time, the train didn’t stop at his old stomping grounds. It kept going, up to the Polish border and beyond. At the border, one Polish soldier came aboard each car, as if to say This is our country . Poles were proud, touchy people. Willi’d seen that in Breslau; a lot of them lived there.

It might be their country, but more and more it was Germany’s fight. What would come of that? A bunch of dead Germans, Willi thought, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t end up one of them.

Winston Churchill got a hero’s funeral. That didn’t make Alistair Walsh any happier about the politician’s demise. If anything, it only threw petrol on his suspicions.

Assorted Conservative Party dignitaries walked behind the hearse and a riderless black horse with polished black boots reversed in the stirrups. At the politicians’ head strode Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a gray heron with a black bowler and an umbrella. The day was sunny, but the umbrella seemed at least as much a part of him as, say, his small intestine.

Walsh shook his head. Everybody knew the PM always had his umbrella. Whether he had guts wasn’t nearly so obvious.

Why were the Tories laying on a memorial like this for a man most of them couldn’t stand? Come to that, how and why had Churchill walked in front of a speeding Bentley? Important people didn’t do such things… did they? Not very often-Walsh was bloody sure of that.

Guilty consciences, he thought unhappily as the slow funeral procession passed him. That’s what it smells like to me.

He wondered if there wasn’t also a touch of guilt in the way the authorities hemmed and hawed about returning him to duty. He wouldn’t have stayed in London to watch the funeral procession if they’d been sure what to do with him. Why the devil did I have to be the one who saw Rudolf Hess come down? Somebody had to, but why me?

Quite a few men in Army khaki, Royal Navy deep blue, and RAF blue-gray lined the route of the procession. Like Walsh, many of them doffed their caps in silent tribute when the hearse rolled by. They weren’t so silent when Chamberlain followed. Several hisses floated through the warm, damp summer air. So did calls of “Shame!”

Chamberlain might have been oblivious. His small head, set atop a long neck and tall, thin, angular frame, only made him seem the more birdlike. Had he suddenly thrust forward and straightened up again with a wriggling fish clenched in his jaws, Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised.

But no. The Prime Minister passed close enough to let Walsh see a small muscle under his left eye twitch. Walsh wouldn’t have believed Chamberlain had been issued a conscience at birth, but he might have been wrong.

Behind the PM walked Lord Halifax. If Chamberlain looked like a heron, Halifax resembled a walking thermometer. He was tall-even taller than the Prime Minister-and lean, with a big bald head that looked like a rugby ball standing on end. He smiled at something the man next to him said. Assuming he’d ever come equipped with a conscience, it wasn’t troubling him now.

Not all the spectators were military men-not even close. There were many ordinary civilians: housewives and greengrocers and shop-girls and chemists and secretaries and clerks. Almost all of them wore somber black to pay their respects to the dead man. Some of the women dabbed at tears behind dark veils. Churchill had always been more popular among the people than the gray men who held the reins of power. Unlike them, he was a recognizable human being. Having met him, Walsh knew how very human he was.

And, because he was a recognizable human being, he roused dislike as well as admiration. A furlong or so down the street from Walsh stood a knot of Silver Shirts, supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They were in uniform, something Walsh hadn’t seen since war was declared. He thought there was a law against it, but he wasn’t sure. If there was, the authorities were looking the other way.

The Silver Shirts bawled organized abuse as Churchill’s body rolled past them. The man standing to Walsh’s right nodded. “That’s telling the daft old bugger,” he declared.

“Think so, do you?” Walsh asked in conversational tones.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.” The man was younger and larger than Walsh. “What about it, sport?”

Walsh slugged him in the jaw. He was a veteran of the front and of years of bar fights. Nothing in his expression or the direction in which he looked warned that he was about to do anything at all. The chap who liked the Silver Shirts better than Churchill never knew what hit him. He toppled as if all his bones had turned to gravy.

A bobby rushed up. “ ‘Ere, what did you go and do that for, Staff Sergeant?” He was about Walsh’s age. No doubt he’d done a tour in the trenches the last time around, to recognize the noncom’s rank emblem so readily.

“He spoke ill of the dead,” Walsh answered quietly.

“That’s right-he did,” a woman behind Walsh said.

“Like that, was it? Spoke ill of Winnie, did ’e, with ’im on ’is way to the grave?” The bobby clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I’ll let you off with a caution, then, but take yourself somewhere else before ’e comes to, like.”

“Obliged, Officer.” Take himself elsewhere Walsh duly did. He steered clear of the band of Silver Shirts. He would only have got into another fight, and against so many he wouldn’t have come off well.

Another man of about his own age, this one wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer, came after him. “Will you let me buy you a pint, friend?” the Royal Navy man said. “Or a shot, or whatever your pleasure may be? If you hadn’t coldcocked that bastard, I’d’ve landed on him with you.”

He looked like a good man to have on your side in a fight. He was strong and stocky and plainly knew his way around. Walsh gave his name and stuck out his hand.

The CPO took it. He had a grip like a vise. “Douglas Green, at your service. The cheek of those Mosley maniacs, to heckle Churchill when he’s not even in the ground! I’d like to break all their heads, I would.”

“Save a few for me, by God,” Walsh answered. “If we are where I think we are, there ought to be a pub around this corner and half a block down.”

They were. There was. The two veterans went in together. Walsh ordered a pint of bitter, Green a whiskey. They raised their glasses together. “To Winston!” they chorused, and they both drank.

“Amen,” the bartender said. “He was a right good one, he was, not like the cabbageheads running things nowadays.” He had to be over sixty; his bushy mustache was white as fine flour. “You blokes mind if I turn up the wireless a bit? They’ve got the ceremony on, and I don’t hear so good when other folks are talking at the same time as what I’m listening to.”

“Go ahead,” Walsh said. “I know what you mean.” Age hadn’t dulled his hearing, not yet. Countless bullets going off near his ear had, though.

In hushed tones, a BBC broadcaster said, “The cortege now approaches St. Paul’s. Inside, after the customary prayers and a sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister will say a few words.”

“Oh, Winston’d love that, he would,” the barman said.

“If he wasn’t already dead, it’d kill him,” Walsh agreed.

“Bore him to death,” Douglas Green put in. The man behind the bar liked that so much, he gave them the next round on the house. Walsh drank up, though none too happily. The last funeral the BBC had broadcast was George V’s, four and a half years earlier. Like the rest of the obsequies, this worried Walsh instead of comforting him. Churchill hadn’t been in power. Why were the present rulers making such a show of these rites, if not to make the public look away from them? See how sorry we are he’s dead? they might have been saying. They might have been, but Walsh didn’t think they were.

Prayers and sermon were almost invincibly conventional. William Cosmo Gordon Lang, senior prelate of the Church of England, couldn’t have been duller if he were Neville Chamberlain. Or so Walsh thought, till Chamberlain took the microphone.

“England has lost a patriot,” the PM said, “and we shall go on to accomplish his desires.” That almost made Walsh choke on his beer. How was Chamberlain going to justify such an enormous lie? He did his best: “Early on, Winston Churchill recognized the dangers and evils of Bolshevism. After the last war, Britain attempted to nip the canker in the bud. Sadly, we failed then, despite Churchill’s best efforts. This time, with God’s help, we shall succeed.”

His claque in St. Paul’s applauded. “God’s help? What about Hitler’s?” Green said.

“Churchill knew Germany was dangerous before anybody ever heard of Bolsheviks,” Walsh added. “Will Chamberlain say anything about that?”

Neville Chamberlain said not a word.

“Hey, you! Sergeant! Yes, you! Whatever your name is.”

“Fujita, sir!” Hideki Fujita sprang to attention and saluted. “At your service, sir!” He hoped he wasn’t in trouble.

Evidently not. The captain had been at Japan’s research center at Pingfan longer than Fujita had-how much longer, the sergeant had no idea. But the man, who seemed to be a doctor or scientist as well as an officer, wasn’t especially harsh. Now that he had Fujita’s attention, he said only, “Fetch me two maruta, right away.”

“Two logs! Yes, sir!” Fujita saluted again. Then he asked, “Do you need a particular kind of log, sir, or will any of them do?”

“Good question.” The captain actually smiled at a noncom, which had to prove he didn’t come out of the Regular Army. “Let me have a couple from the ones you just brought here.”

“Right away, sir!” With one more salute, Fujita hurried off.

The size, the scale, of the Pingfan complex astonished him. It was six kilometers square. Before he got here, people were calling it a village. There had been a Chinese village named Pingfan here. Japanese authorities had driven off the natives, except for the ones whom they’d put to work building what they needed.

This wasn’t a village any more. It was a city, with its own railroad spur. It had a swimming pool and even a geisha house (not for the likes of him: for the officers). And it had the tightest security he’d ever seen anywhere.

The outer fence was electrified with killing voltage. So were the compounds that housed the maruta. Each compound-and the outer perimeter-also boasted plenty of barbed wire, and machine guns atop towers that could sweep wide areas with fire. The relatively weak gates-by the nature of things, they couldn’t be electrified-had large guard contingents at all times.

And all that was just the outer reaches of Pingfan! The citadel where the scholarly captain worked had a solid wall five meters high, so no one on the outside could see what went on within. More barbed wire and electrified wire topped the wall. Nobody inside could come out without permission from those in authority. It also worked the other way around.

Fujita didn’t know what went on inside that citadel. Asking questions was strongly discouraged-which understated things. As Fujita had seen elsewhere, there were things about which it was better not to get too curious.

He approached the lieutenant in charge of one of the gate garrisons. Saluting, he said, “Sir, Captain-I think his name is Sugiyama: please excuse me, but I’m new here-well, anyway, he needs two Russian logs right away.”

“Captain Sugiyama.” The lieutenant slowly nodded. “Yes, I know him. All right, Sergeant. Wait here. I’ll get them for you.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

After a brief colloquy with the lieutenant, one of the men from the garrison shouted into the POW compound in Russian. A couple of the prisoners Fujita had helped escort from Vladivostok shambled up to the gateway. They were scrawny, filthy, and shaggy-hardly human beings at all, to the sergeant’s eyes. No wonder the Japanese called the prisoners here logs.

At that, the POWs who’d made it to Pingfan were the lucky ones. Ravens and vultures and foxes and flies feasted on the flesh of the thousands of Russians who’d died along the way. The Japanese had marched them hard and fed them little. Why take pains for men who’d surrendered?

Two squads of soldiers aimed their rifles into the compound as the pair of volunteers came forth. No one who wasn’t authorized would come out… and the prisoners wouldn’t try a mass escape.

As soon as the two maruta emerged, the Japanese soldiers closed the gate again and snapped all the locks shut. The posts to which the locks were affixed were steel, and were mounted in concrete. Nobody without a bulldozer, or more likely a tank, could knock them down.

One of the Russians gave Fujita a doglike grin. Pointing to the inner citadel, he spoke in broken Japanese: “Good food in, hai?”

“ Hai. Good food,” Fujita agreed. For all he knew, it was true. Plenty of supplies went in there. Maybe the maruta got their fair share of them. Who could say for sure? No one on the outside. And the hope helped keep the Russians docile. He gestured with his rifle. “You go now.”

Go they did. The one who knew some Japanese translated for his companion. Even if he hadn’t, the gesture should have been unmistakable. Neither of the large, smelly men gave Fujita any trouble. That was all he cared about.

An armored door to the citadel opened. The Russians went inside. The door closed in Fujita’s face. He couldn’t even see anything interesting beyond the wall. Khaki canvas screened whatever was in there away from prying eyes.

Not all the prisoners in the outer area were Russians. There were also pens full of Chinese maruta. Some of them were soldiers who’d been taken in battle; the war between Japan and China dragged on and on, no end in sight. But others were prisoners from jails in Manchukuo and Japanese-occupied China. And there were pens full of women and children. Where they came from, Fujita didn’t know. He did know the men in the citadel sometimes called for female logs.

And he knew how the Chinese arrived: in big black vans without any windows. Every so often, one or more of them would pass through the outer perimeter and disgorge the people it carried. Some of the Chinese were in bad shape when they came out. That didn’t bother Fujita. As far as he was concerned, the Chinese deserved everything they got.

One day, a fancy black Mercedes convertible-not at all the kind of car anyone would expect to see on Manchukuo’s wretched roads-pulled into Pingfan. Out jumped a tall Japanese in colonel’s uniform. He wore an upswept mustache, as if he came from the Meiji era.

Everyone fussed over him and all but kowtowed before him. So this is Colonel Ishii, Fujita thought, impressed in spite of himself. Unit 731 at Pingfan was Colonel Shiro Ishii’s creation. He was a bacteriologist, a water-purification expert, and a Regular Army officer. This was the first time Fujita had seen him; he was just back from a trip to Japan.

“Let’s see how things are going!” he shouted, and took off on a whirlwind inspection tour. Junior officers hurried along in his wake.

This was a doctor? Most of the physicians Fujita had seen-and Pingfan was crawling with them-were shy, self-effacing, quiet fellows. Not Ishii! He had a big, booming voice and an abrupt, aggressive manner. He went here, there, everywhere, always barking out questions. When he liked the answers he got, he grinned and patted a subordinate on the back. When he didn’t, he glowered and shouted and shook his fist in people’s faces. He acted a lot like a sergeant dealing with privates, in other words. Fujita wouldn’t have been surprised had he actually belted somebody, but he didn’t, or not where the real sergeant could see him.

No real sergeant would have hurled around the technical terms Colonel Ishii used. He talked about infection rates and vectors and plague and cholera and typhoid and paratyphoid. He talked about rodent breeding and insect breeding. He talked about anthrax and glanders and horses and cattle and spores. Much of it flew straight over Fujita’s head, except that he recognized it as scientific.

Ishii talked too much, as far as Fujita was concerned. But how could a sergeant say something like that to a senior officer? Simple-he couldn’t.

“I may be going off again before too long, either back to Japan for another lecture or off to south China to see what happens when we put some of what we’ve learned into action,” Ishii told his men. “Even when I’m gone, though, I know you’ll carry on with the work. Isn’t that right?”

“Hai!” they chorused.

“We are protecting Japan. We are serving the Emperor. Isn’t that right?” Ishii shouted.

“Hai!” the men repeated, louder this time.

“Good. Very good.” The colonel who was also a bacteriologist nodded, apparently satisfied. “Any country foolish enough to make Japan angry will regret it for ten thousand years! And isn’t that right, too?”

“Hai!” everyone yelled again.