Two Fronts

Chapter 14

Pete McGill was always happy when the Ranger steamed out of Pearl and headed west. They were going out to give the Japs hell. Giving the Japs hell was what he wanted more than anything else on earth.

Some of the other Marines who served with him were less enthusiastic. “Man, those assholes, they can sink us, too,” a corporal named Barney Klinsmann said at breakfast the morning after they headed out on patrol. He shoveled corned-beef hash into his face as if he thought they’d outlaw the stuff tomorrow. Some guys needed to get their sea legs under them before they started stuffing themselves like that. Not him.

“Fuck ’em,” Pete said flatly. “You don’t think we’ll lick ’em, fuck you, too. In the heart.”

Klinsmann surged to his feet. Pete was big and as solid as he could be after his injuries-he’d worked hard putting muscle back on. The other guy had a couple of inches and twenty pounds on him even so. He didn’t care. He stood, too. “Nobody talks to me that way, you bastard,” Klinsmann growled.

Other leathernecks grabbed them and kept them from going at each other. “Take an even strain, the both of youse,” Sergeant Cullum said. “We’re supposed to be fighting the slanties, remember?”

“I remember,” Pete said. “This bum, he wants to hide under his bunk instead.” He tried to point at Klinsmann, but the Marines holding his arms wouldn’t let go.

“Bullshit,” the bigger man said. “I just said we gotta watch ourselves. And we do, on account of this here is the only carrier in the Pacific what still floats. The only American carrier, I mean. The Japs, they got a shit-pot full.”

“Enough, dammit.” Cullum let his impatience show. “Am I gonna hafta talk to an officer or somethin’?”

That subdued both Pete and Barney Klinsmann, as he must have known it would. Squabbles between noncoms weren’t worth getting excited about-till an officer noticed them or had them brought to his attention. Officers could throw the book at you. Pete often thought the book was the only reason officers existed.

He quit struggling against the men who held him. So did Klinsmann. Cautiously, their fellow Marines turned them loose. They both settled down to their interrupted breakfasts. Sergeant Cullum beamed beatifically at one and all.

As they walked out of the galley, Pete spoke in a low voice: “You know that little compartment aft of the portside heads, the one where they stow the mops and brushes and shit like that?”

“Oh, fuck, yes,” Klinsmann answered, also quietly. “What time you wanna be there?”

“How about 0200 tomorrow?” Pete said. “Not like we need a bunch of busybodies around.”

“You got that right,” the other man said. “See you then.”

When Pete officially slid out of his bunk at 0530, one eye was almost swollen shut. He had a cut lip and a broken bottom eyetooth. His ribs felt as if someone had been kicking them. Well, someone had. They didn’t seem broken, though, so that was okay. He dry-swallowed a couple of Bayer’s finest, not that they’d help one hell of a lot. He didn’t feel a day over ninety-seven.

Sergeant Cullum raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You go and trip over the deck rivets again?” he inquired.

“That’s right.” Pete moved his mouth as little as he could. Talking hurt. So did breathing, come to that.

“What happened to Barney?” Cullum asked.

“Barney who?” Pete answered, deadpan. “You givin’ the deck rivets names now? That’s a little Asiatic, you want to know what I think.”

“I don’t want to know what you think. I don’t even want to know if you think,” the senior noncom said. “C’mon. Let’s go get some chow. And some joe. I run on joe like it’s gasoline.”

So did Pete. So did half-more than half-the other leathernecks and swabbies on the Ranger. The stuff they served in the galley wasn’t always good, but it was always strong. It was always hot, too. Aspirins or no aspirins, drinking it made Pete’s lips and the less visible injuries inside his mouth hurt like hell. The salt he sprinkled on his scrambled eggs and the salt already in his slice of ham were no fun, either. He ate stolidly just the same, keeping his eyes down on his own tray.

Other Marines kept looking at him. Well, his battered puss invited looks. The leathernecks kept looking around for Barney Klinsmann, too. Klinsmann was nowhere to be seen.

Very softly, Sergeant Cullum asked, “You didn’t go and kill him, didja?”

“Kill who?” Pete said. “That deck rivet you gave a name to?” But he gingerly shook his head. That hurt, too. Everything today hurt. He hoped the Japs would leave them alone till tomorrow, or even the day after. Right this minute, he wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.

But, as people and countries often found reason to say, you shoulda seen the other guy.

Eventually-after loading up on ham and eggs of his own-Cullum called down to sick bay. “You got a leatherneck name of Klinsmann down there?” he asked the pharmacist’s mate on the other end of the line.

“What’s he say?” Three or four Marines asked the same thing at the same time.

He waved them to silence, listening to what the pharmacist’s mate was telling him. When he hung up, he said, “Barney’s in there, awright. He says he tripped and fell down a stairway on his face. He’s busted up enough, the sick-bay guys almost believe him. He musta hit every tread with his nose, though, or his teeth, or one eye or the other.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Pete said when Cullum finished. A long time ago, somebody-damned if he could remember who now, but it must’ve been somebody with brains-had told him that phrase was one of the handful of things you could come out with damn near anywhere and be okay. How about that? was another one, he’d said. There weren’t many, but knowing one or two came in handy all kinds of weird ways. Whoever the guy was, he’d known what he was talking about, sure as hell he had.

“Interesting,” Sergeant Cullum echoed. “Yeah. Right. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be taking any more shit from Klinsmann for a while.”

Pete shrugged, which also hurt. “Wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Huh.” Cullum’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. “Way the guy down in sick bay was going on, Barney’s fucking lucky nobody had to send a radiogram to his next of klins, man.”

“Ouch!” Pete said when the pun got home. Several of the other leathernecks groaned. McGill went on, “I didn’t know you went in for shit like that.” By the way he said it, he might have accused the other noncom of wearing frilly scanties under his uniform.

“Too goddamn bad,” Cullum answered. “I didn’t know you went in for ruining guys. It really does sound like Barney almost woke up dead this morning.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Pete said.

“Uh-huh. And rain makes applesauce. I don’t gotta be Sherlock Holmes to see what’s going on when you’re beat up and Klinsmann’s like he got run over by a tank.”

“I got nothin’ special against Klinsmann,” Pete said.

“Good thing you don’t! If you did, some shark’d be hunting for a toothpick right now, I bet.”

“Honest to God, all I wanna do is kill Japs,” Pete insisted. “Kill Japs an’ kill Japs an’ kill more Japs.”

Nobody argued with him. The other Marines didn’t seem even a little bit interested in saying anything that might provoke him. Barney Klinsmann hadn’t worried about it, and Barney was damn near pushing up a lily right this minute. Barney was a big, tough guy, too. And a hell of a lot of good that had done him. Pete went up onto the Ranger’s flight deck to look for more Japs to kill.

The Fall RASPUTITSA meant Stas Mouradian’s Pe-2 wasn’t going anywhere for a while-unless, of course, it vanished into the bottomless mud. After rain turned to snow and mud froze hard, the air war would pick up again. And, for the first time since the war was new, Stas didn’t worry too much about going back into action.

He’d been fighting the Fascists from the very beginning. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia-four years ago now! — Mouradian had served as copilot and bomb-aimer on an SB-2 helping the Czechs from an airstrip in Slovakia. They’d called the SB-2 a fast bomber because it had proved able to outrun the biplane fighters it met in Spain. Stas had thought it would be able to do the same thing against whatever the Nazis threw at it.

Then he’d met the Bf-109. Unlike a lot of Soviet flyers who made the Messerschmitt’s acquaintance, he’d survived the first encounter. But that imaginary sound, as of breaking glass, stood for the shattering of his illusions.

Even in a Pe-2, a plane much more modern and much speedier than the old allegedly fast bomber, he still feared the 109. Bombers were made for dropping bombs. Fighters were made for shooting down other planes. If you asked a bomber to try to do a fighter’s job, you’d be sorry-although probably not for long.

When the air war did pick up again in a few weeks, chances were the Luftwaffe wouldn’t have enough 109s (or their fearsome new friends, the blunt-nosed, deadly FW-190s) to go after all the bombers the Red Air Force would throw at it. The Fritzes had to split their planes between this front and the revived one in the West.

Stas approved of that. The Germans would still throw up monstrous fireworks displays of flak, of course. Flak could kill you, too, but he didn’t worry about it the way he worried about 109s and 190s. Flak was impersonal, like the weather. If you weren’t lucky, some would hit your plane. But flak didn’t come hunting you in particular, the way fighter pilots did.

A lot of Russian flyers drank their way through the rasputitsa. To an Armenian’s way of looking at things, Russians drank at any excuse or none. And they didn’t drink for the taste of it. They drank till they got drunk or, at least as often, till they fell over.

Maybe that was because, when they drank, they drank vodka. Oh, they had beer, too, but they scorned it. What Russians mostly didn’t have was wine. Every valley in the Caucasus had its own vintage. Few of them made France look to her laurels, but a good many weren’t bad. A glass or two with a meal-that was civilized. Cultured, a Russian would say.

What was cultured about swilling vodka till you passed out? What was cultured about swilling it till you puked, or till you choked on your own puke? What was cultured about swilling it till you fell out a window, or fell through one you thought was open? Russians killed themselves like that all the time, and killed one another in drunken brawls.

You couldn’t talk about it with them, either. They wouldn’t listen, even if they happened to be sober at the time. The most they would ever say was This is how we are. This is how we’ve been forever. We aren’t about to change, not for you and not for anybody.

Change? It was to laugh. Russians reveled in the way they were. And, like any imperial nation, they tried to remake in their own image the peoples they ruled. Which other army in all the world gave its soldiers a daily ration of a hundred grams of high-octane vodka?

Oh, sure, soldiers all over the world drank. Considering what went into the soldier’s trade, how could you blame them? But, outside the Red Army, they drank unofficially. Inside the Red Army … Tanks ran on diesel fuel. Trucks ran on gasoline. Soldiers ran on vodka. That was how Stavka looked at things.

Full of such pointless reflections (and they were-that the Tsar had tried to impose prohibition during the last war was one of the reasons, and perhaps not the least of them, Tsars ruled Russia no longer), Stas slogged through the mud to the tent where flyers ate and drank (and drank, and drank) and listened to Radio Moscow.

To make sure flyers and other Soviet citizens listened only to Radio Moscow, to make sure no unauthorized opinions corrupted them, radio sets manufactured in the USSR received just the frequencies on which Radio Moscow and other Soviet stations broadcast. Somewhere (somewhere unauthorized, as a matter of fact), Stas had heard that Hitler admired the system when he learned about it, and wished Germany had one like it.

A samovar bubbled on a rickety table in one corner of the big tent. To give them their due, Russians always had tea handy. Sweet tea soothed a hangover if anything did. Tobacco smoke was thick enough to make Stas’ eyes water. Hard rolls, pork sausage, a pot of borscht, a pot of shchi if you felt like cabbage soup instead of beet soup … It wasn’t exciting, especially if you were an Armenian who expected more in the way of spices than dill and caraway seeds. But you could fill your belly.

Vodka bottles were making the rounds, too. No surprise there. They always did. No one could even think of complaining, not when the rasputitsa grounded the squadron. Stas passed one along without drinking when it came his way.

“More for me,” said the Russian to whom he handed it. The man’s larynx worked before he sent it along.

Stas cut thin coins of sausage and dropped them into a tin bowl of shchi. No, it wasn’t what he would have eaten back home. But Armenia was a little land. When you went out into the wider Soviet world, you found that Russians were an imperial nation even in such matters as what their non-Russian comrades ate.

A glass of tea in front of him might deflect the peripatetic vodka bottles. Or it might not. But he wanted the tea any which way. The thick soup was salty. So was the sausage. Tea helped dilute things.

He’d almost got to the bottom of the bowl when two more officers strode into the mess tent. Like most of the men already inside, he casually glanced up to see if the newcomers were people he wanted to talk to.

They weren’t. They were strangers. But he didn’t go right back to eating, any more than the other flyers in the squadron did. The strangers’ cap bands and collar tabs were bright blue: the color of the NKVD.

They carried identical PPD machine pistols. They had identical Tokarev pistols on their belts. But their arm-of-service color was much more frightening than their weapons. One of them glanced at a scrap of paper in his free hand. “Pyotr Konstantinovich Filimonov!” he barked.

Had Stas been the luckless Pyotr Konstantinovich, he would have run-or else he would have opened fire. It almost surely wouldn’t have helped-he knew that-but he thought he would have done it anyhow. How could they treat you any worse afterwards than they were going to anyhow?

The genuine Filimonov sprang to his feet and came to attention so stiffly, he might have been embalmed-and if he wasn’t, chances were he would be pretty soon. Well, buried, anyhow; they might not bother to embalm him in the Lubyanka or at a camp. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said, as if the Chekists were about to pin an Order of Lenin on his chest.

They had other things in mind. He must have known as much, even if he didn’t show it. The NKVD man who’d read his name tossed away the bit of paper and ground it under the heel of his boot. Both Chekists looked relieved he wouldn’t cause any trouble. They gestured with their PPDs. “Come along, then,” one of them said, and Filimonov came.

A vast silence filled the mess tent. Well, it wasn’t me-this time, Stas thought. He would have bet anything he owned that his comrades-in-arms were thinking exactly the same thing. And when another vodka bottle came his way, he grabbed it and drank like a Russian.

Ivan Kuchkov shored up the sides of his foxhole with planks from a wrecked hut a few meters away. That helped, up to a point. The muddy walls probably wouldn’t cave in and squish him now. But he was still hunkered down in a muddy foxhole that got muddier by the minute as the autumn rain went on plashing down.

“Fuck me!” he muttered. “This is pure shit!” That was his opinion of most of Red Army life. Before that, the sergeant had had an even lower opinion of Red Air Force life. Flying personnel in the Red Air Force didn’t get a vodka ration when they went on missions, which accounted for the difference.

He glanced back over his shoulder, wondering whether he’d be more comfortable in what was left of that peasant hut. He didn’t think so, which only proved not much of it was left. And, even in the rain, he was liable to get shot if he came out of the foxhole. The Germans had their lines out in the middle of the unharvested fields, and some of them were much too handy with their Mausers and machine guns.

“Stinking cunts,” Ivan said. Most of the time, he’d made a good thing out of his service to the Soviet state. He’d done better for himself as a soldier than he would have as a laborer on a collective farm or a small-time hooligan-he was sure of that.

Most of the time. But squatting in a boggy foxhole wasn’t his notion of fun. Even a real fight would have been better than dicking around here and waiting to come down with trench foot.

So he thought, anyhow, till Lieutenant Novikov, the latest zit-faced officer to command the company, squelched and slithered over to him and spoke in a low voice: “I have a job for you, Kuchkov.”

“What’s up, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ivan didn’t even add Besides your dick, the way he would have most of the time. Unlike a lot of punk officers, Novikov seemed to try hard. He didn’t get the vapors when the Hitlerites shot at him, either. So why not give the kid the benefit of the doubt?

He found out why not immediately afterwards: “Division HQ wants to interrogate some German prisoners. Take a few men-take a squad if you think you’ll need to-and go get ’em for us.”

“Fuck me!” Kuchkov said again, this time sorrowfully. He could think of a million good reasons why someone else should lead the raid, or why it shouldn’t go on in the first place. He kept his mouth shut. None of those reasons mattered a fart’s worth when weighed against Division HQ wants. What Division HQ wanted, Division HQ got.

Novikov tried to butter him up. “You’re the best man we’ve got for it. Nobody else comes close.”

“Happy cocksucking day.” Ivan knew the rest of the pricks in the company pretty well. The lieutenant was right. That didn’t make him any happier-just the opposite, in fact.

The first guy he snagged for the raiding party was Sasha Davidov. The scrawny Jew let out a sigh the Nazis could probably hear back in Berlin. “What did I do to deserve this, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked resignedly.

“You fucking well stayed alive walking point,” Kuchkov answered. “I ain’t gonna choose one of the dead pussies, y’know? They don’t move any too fuckin’ swift.”

He got the ghost of a chuckle out of Davidov. “Maybe I’ll stay lucky one more time,” he said. “Stranger things must have happened somewhere.” The Zhid didn’t sound as if he believed it.

Speaking of luck, Kuchkov had figured it would quit raining before he went prisoner-hunting. If anything made him more likely to get plugged, that would be it. But the rain came down harder than ever.

He waited till the wee small hours just the same. He gulped tea to stay awake, and gulped vodka to feel brave. He didn’t get toasted to the point where he started falling over his own feet, and he didn’t let his fellow raiders get that drunk, either.

To his surprise, Davidov didn’t drink at all. He just smoked papiros after papiros, cupping them in his hands to keep the rain from dousing them. The Jew didn’t play teetotaler all the time, so Kuchkov asked him, “What’s up with you?”

“I don’t want to miss anything, that’s all,” Davidov answered. “Maybe I wouldn’t with the vodka in me, but maybe I would, too. I’ll drink plenty after we get back-you can bet your dick on that.”

Hearing mat from him made Ivan laugh. “We’re all betting our dicks,” he said, and then, “When we grab the fucking Fritzes, you can palaver with ’em, right? I mean, you’re a Zhid, so you know Yiddish, don’t you?”

“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man said patiently. “It’s not the same as German, but it’s not as different as Ukrainian is from Russian. If they don’t kill me, they’ll understand me well enough.”

“Bugger shit-eating Ukrainian,” said Kuchkov, who’d heard more of it down here than he’d ever wanted to listen to. He didn’t notice Davidov’s irony till they were sneaking out toward the German lines. Too late to do anything about it then.

He couldn’t see more than a few meters. He couldn’t hear more than a few meters, either; the rain took care of that. If Mauser rounds cracked past, or if one of the nasty machine guns the Russians called Hitler’s saws started spitting bullets twice as fast as a Maxim gun could, he figured he’d notice that.

Through the rain, Davidov called, “Wire here! Hold up while I cut it.” He pitched his voice perfectly to reach his Red Army comrades and go no farther. Ivan hoped like hell he did, anyway. After a minute (and, presumably, after some snipping Ivan couldn’t hear), the Jew said, “All good now. This way-toward my voice.”

Kuchkov sliced the back of his hand on a barb from the cut wire. He cussed furiously under his breath. “Maybe you’ll get lockjaw, Comrade Sergeant,” one of the Russians said. “What would you do then?” The other raiders all laughed-quietly, but they did. Ivan couldn’t even think about revenge till later. The Red Army men crawled on.

“Hold up!” Davidov hissed urgently from out in front. “I can hear Germans talking.” Kuchkov cocked his head to one side. He still heard no Fritzes. Maybe the point man had stayed alive as long as he had not least because his ears were better than other people’s.

Kuchkov crawled forward. “Where are the dicks?” he asked. The Jew pointed. Ivan could barely make out his arm in the rainy gloom. He knew what he had to do now, though. He held his PPD a little tighter. Odds were it had got muddy. Well, it would work even so. German Schmeissers were much better made, but mud and grit in the works and they turned up their toes.

The Red Army men slithered closer. Now Ivan could hear the Fritzes, too. He couldn’t understand them, but they didn’t sound worried. They had no idea enemy soldiers were in the neighborhood. “Grenades!” he called to his men. “Grenades, and then we rush. Don’t shoot too fucking much. Remember, we gotta bring a couple of these bitches back alive.”

They would remember as long as remembering didn’t put their asses on the line. He was sure of that. He felt the same way. No German ever born-not even a blonde with big tits and legs up to there-was worth getting killed for.

“On three,” he said. “One … Two … Three!” Grenades flew. They burst all around the Germans (not busty blondes, he was sure-too bad!) the Russians wanted to grab. “Urra!” the Red Army men yelled as they dashed forward and jumped down into the Nazis’ fieldworks.

“Hande hoch!” Davidov screamed. Ivan was disappointed. He could sprechen that much Deutsch himself. But he couldn’t have followed the terrified babble that came back. The point man could, and did: “They surrender. They just want us not to kill them.”

“Tell ’em we won’t. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Kuchkov said. What the NKVD interrogators would do to the Fritzes once they had them … wasn’t his worry. No, that would be for the Feldgrau boys to sweat.

The other Germans came back to life in a hurry. They were pros, all right, damn them. Machine-gun tracers hissed through the wet air. But the Hitlerites fired just a little high. When you were down as flat as your buttons would let you get, a few centimeters mattered. And the captured Germans did their best impressions of squashed snakes, too. They didn’t want their own friends punching their tickets for them by mistake.

Then Ivan had to worry about his friends punching his ticket for him. He knew too well the Russians were capable of it. Yes, they knew he’d gone raiding. Yes, they expected (or at least hoped) he’d come back. They might open up anyway.

But they didn’t. After some soldiers hauled the miserable Fritzes away, Lieutenant Novikov pounded Ivan on the back. “I’ll get you a medal for this,” he said happily-his behind would have been in a sling had the raid failed.

“If it’s all the same to you, Comrade Lieutenant, I’d rather have a blowjob,” Ivan answered. “Or at least some extra vodka.”

Novikov let out a startled yip of laughter. “The vodka I can arrange. You’re on your own for getting your dick sucked.” Kuchkov nodded. That was how things worked, all right. The really good stuff, you had to grab for yourself.

Hideki Fujita stood at stiff attention before Captain Ikejiri. Anything less than stiff attention would have doomed him before he started. Even by Japanese Army standards-some of the highest in the world-Masanori Ikejiri was a stickler for discipline. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said now. “You wish …?” By his tone, he wished Fujita would dry up and blow away.

But Ikejiri acted as if he wished every enlisted man ever hatched would dry up and blow away. So Fujita didn’t let that worry him-too much. He saluted with mechanical precision. “Please, Captain-san, I would like to be placed in a position where I see more action,” he said. He’d thought about calling Ikejiri Captain-sama-Lord Captain-but decided that would be laying it on too thick even for the self-important officer.

“Oh, you would, would you?” Now Ikejiri sounded as if he had trouble believing his ears.

“Hai, Captain-san!” Fujita saluted again, then resumed his posture of respect.

Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “Well, I don’t hear that one every day,” he allowed. “Most of the time, people come in here to ask me to put them in slots where they don’t go into harm’s way.”

“Sir, I serve the Emperor. I want to serve the Emperor, may he live ten thousand years. I want to serve him the best way I can.” All of which was true. Fujita didn’t say he was bored green in Myitkyina, although that was just as true if it wasn’t even more so.

“Well, your attitude does you credit.” From Ikejiri, that was no small praise. He glanced down at some papers on the little table that did him duty as a desk. My service record, Fujita realized. The captain continued, “No one can complain about your performance since you came to Burma.”

That was why Fujita was a sergeant again. His performance in China, on the other hand, had got him demoted and made the powers that be approve his request for a transfer as soon as he handed it in. If you fouled up, you would pay for it. And he had, and he’d come to this miserable place to atone for fouling up. Now he’d managed that, too. Having managed it, he wanted more, as people have a way of doing.

“You realize, if you see more action, the Chinese will shoot at you?” Captain Ikejiri said.

“Sir, you will know I fought the Russians on the Mongolian border and in Siberia.” Fujita couldn’t sound affronted before an officer, but he wanted to. “After them, I hope I’m not going to hide under the bed on account of the Chankoro.” He brought out the scornful Japanese slang for Chinks without even noticing he did it. Japan had been taking what she wanted and needed in China ever since the end of the nineteenth century. The Chinese almost always gave way before Japan’s might. When they didn’t, they almost always lost. No wonder Japanese soldiers scorned them and their fighting skills.

“Yes, yes.” Ikejiri’s patience showed, which meant it would fray soon. “But you would be up in an airplane, and they would be shooting at you from the ground. You wouldn’t be able to shoot back. That may not be the kind of action you crave.”

“Oh, I’d shoot back at them, all right, Captain-san,” Fujita replied. “Only I’d use a different kind of bullet, neh?” Security at bacteriological-warfare units ran deep. Fujita didn’t call a Chinese a Chinese, and, just as much without thinking, he didn’t call a germ a germ.

The way he did say things made Masanori Ikejiri smile for the first time. “So you would,” the captain agreed. “Since you put it that way, Sergeant, I think we can give you what you asked for. Sure enough, your attitude is commendable-I will say that much for you.”

“Domo arigato, Captain-san!” Fujita exclaimed, saluting yet again.

Ikejiri kept smiling, but in a less pleasant way. “Don’t thank me until after you’ve flown a few missions. You may not be so happy about it then.”

Fujita thought that was nonsense-till he went on his first mission. He’d wheeled plenty of porcelain biological-warfare bomb casings across the airstrip outside of Myitkyina and loaded them into the bomb bays of the Japanese Army planes that would fly them up to Yunnan Province and drop them on the heads of the obstreperous Chinese.

Now he sat in the bomb bay himself. He’d learned which levers to pull to open the bomb-bay doors and to release the bombs and what to do-besides cussing-if the levers didn’t work the way they were supposed to. No one expected Chinese fighters to come up, but you never could tell.

And-maybe most important-he’d been briefed on how and when to use the oxygen apparatus. “It may not kill you if you don’t,” the pilot had explained. “We don’t usually fly that high. But if you forget you may be kind of stupid when we land, and you may stay that way. So remember, neh? Wakarimasu-ka?”

“Hai. Wakarimasu,” Fujita had answered. Understand he did.

One thing he hadn’t really understood was how flimsy and makeshift a warplane could seem when you scrambled up inside it. From the outside, the Ki-21 looked like an aerial shark: all deadly purpose. When you got in there and saw the ribs and realized that the fuselage was covered with aluminum skin almost thin enough for you to stick your hand through … Well, it gave you a different feel for things. True, the interior walls of many Japanese houses were no more than translucent paper-but Japanese houses didn’t go where angry people were liable to shoot at them. The bomber did.

He also hadn’t understood how noisy it would be in there. The roar and vibration from the twin engines made him wonder if the fillings in his back teeth would shake loose. It wasn’t really an idle kind of wondering, either. He sat back there, shivering in spite of his fur-lined leather flying suit, sucking in oxygen that tasted of the rubber lines it came through, and hoping like anything he wouldn’t have to visit an Army dentist when he got back to Burma.

If he got back to Burma. Yes, he’d known the Chinese shot at Japanese planes, but he hadn’t really understood what that meant. He hadn’t felt the bomber buck like a spooked stallion when an antiaircraft shell burst nearby. He hadn’t watched a ragged-edged hole suddenly appear in the fuselage’s skin when a fragment ripped through it. He hadn’t thought about what would have happened had that fragment ripped through him instead of hitting thirty centimeters farther back.

“Dump the bombs!” the pilot shouted through the voice tube. “Dump ’em right now so we can get the demon out of here!”

“Hai!” Fujita shouted back. He worked the levers the way he’d been taught. The fragment hadn’t damaged their mechanisms, anyhow. Down fell the porcelain casings, one after another.

The bomber banked steeply as it turned. The engines roared louder. Fujita took a deep breath of oxygenated air. He’d got the action he’d asked for, all right. Oh, had he ever!