Two Fronts

Chapter 18

“Sir!” Sergeant Hideki Fujita stood at rigid-to say nothing of corpselike-attention. His salute was so perfect, even so extravagant, that the pickiest, the most worst-tempered, drillmaster could have found nothing wrong with it. “Reporting as ordered, sir!”

“At ease, Sergeant,” Captain Ikejiri said. Fujita eased his stiff brace a little, but still felt anything but easy. What noncom would, when summoned out of the blue by an officer? The first thing that went through Fujita’s mind was What have I done now? Sensing as much, Ikejiri went on, “You’re not in trouble.”

“Sir!” Fujita repeated, and went back to attention. When they were really after you, didn’t they try to lull you into a false sense of security?

“At ease, Sergeant,” the captain said again, more sharply this time. “How would you like to get away from Burma-about as far away from Burma as you can go and stay in the Japanese Empire?”

“Sir?” It was the same word for the third time in a row, but now Fujita meant it as a question.

“I’m asking you. I’m not telling you. You can say no. You won’t get in trouble if you do say no, and no one will think less of you if you do,”

Captain Ikejiri said. “But you’ve been eager to see action, and here-or rather, there-is a chance for you to see more than you would if you stayed in Myitkyina.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Fujita said cautiously.

“I know you don’t. That’s why I called you in: to explain what your choices are.” Ikejiri let his patience show. “You will know there was some talk of using our special techniques against the Englishmen in India.”

He was a good officer, a conscientious officer. Even here, with nobody listening but Fujita, who was already in the know, he didn’t talk openly about bacteriological warfare. He took security seriously, so seriously that he censored himself, perhaps without even noticing he was doing it.

“Oh, yes, sir!” Fujita nodded. He would have loved to give England a taste of Japan’s medicine.

“Good. Then you will also know that it was decided not to proceed with this. The concern was that we were too likely to be found out, and that that would not be advantageous for the Empire,” Ikejiri said.

“I had heard that, hai.” Fujita nodded once more. Like most ordinary soldiers, he was all for giving the white men the plague or smallpox or cholera or whatever else Japan had in its bag of tricks now, and for worrying about consequences later. Eagerly, he asked, “Do we have permission to operate against England now, sir?”

“Against England? No,” Captain Ikejiri said, and Fujita’s chin went down onto his chest in disappointment. But the officer went on, “We do have permission to begin special warfare against the Americans in Hawaii. If they can’t use those islands, they will have to try to fight the war from the coast of their continent. Obviously, that would be difficult and expensive for them, and most desirable for us.”

“Yes, sir. I can see how it would be,” Fujita replied, picturing a map. An extra three or four thousand kilometers of sea voyage each way? Oh, the Americans would love that!

“The special unit will be set up on the island called Midway,” Captain Ikejiri said. “The Navy has long-range bombers that can reach the Hawaiian islands from Midway. I am being transferred to the new facility. I would like to have some men along I know I can rely on. So, Sergeant-will you come to this Midway place with me?”

“Yes, sir!” Hideki Fujita didn’t hesitate. He knew nothing about Midway Island except that it wasn’t Burma. What else did he need to know?

Nothing in Burma, nothing that had anything to do with Burma, happened right away. That would have annoyed Fujita more had it also surprised him more. He’d spent a long time in the Army now. He’d come to see how very little that had to do with soldiering happened right away-the main exception being the arrival of an unwelcome bullet or shell.

No, transfer requests had to snake up the chain of command. Approvals-assuming there were approvals-had to wind their way back down. Transportation orders needed to be cut. Planes had to get off the ground.

In due course, the unit threw a farewell party for Captain Ikejiri and the noncoms and private soldiers who would accompany him to Midway. It got kind of drunk out. In one skit, the men who were staying behind mimed his party falling off the edge of the world. They howled laughter. Fujita found himself less amused. Captain Ikejiri clutched the hilt of his officer’s sword hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

“Take it easy, sir,” Fujita whispered to him. “If you start taking heads, people will talk about you.”

Ikejiri smiled thinly. “I know that, Sergeant. I really do. But I thank you for reminding me just the same. The temptation is there, believe me.” With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, he moved his right hand away from the curved sword.

He and the men who accompanied him and their caged animals and infected fleas and bacteriological cultures crowded an Army transport plane that looked a lot like an American DC-3 (the resemblance was not a coincidence; Japan had been building the design under license since before the war). From Myitkyina, they flew to Bangkok-Siam was a Japanese ally.

They got stuck there for a couple of days. No one seemed to have heard they were coming, which meant no one wanted to allocate the transport fuel so it could go on. If Captain Ikejiri had been annoyed at the going-away party, he was furious now. When he stormed off the plane, Fujita wondered if Siamese-or Japanese-heads would roll.

But the telegram proved mightier than the sword. Once Ikejiri used his connections, what must have been a peremptory wire came back to Bangkok. Local officials fell all over themselves refueling the transport and getting it out of there. They might have feared that some of the unit’s diseased fleas would get loose and touch off epidemics in their town. Watching Captain Ikejiri’s smile of grim satisfaction as gasoline gurgled into the plane’s tanks, Fujita suspected they might have had excellent reason for such fears.

The airstrip at Hanoi was heavily guarded. Japan had taken over French Indochina. The French had had troubles of their own with the Annamese and other native peoples. The locals didn’t want to be occupied by Japan, either, even if the Japanese were Asians rather than white men. Whether they wanted that or not, they didn’t have enough guns to stop it. But they did have enough to make nuisances of themselves: thus the barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the airstrip.

At least the Japanese in Hanoi didn’t seem astonished that the transport had come down out of the sky. They gassed it up, did a little work on one engine, and sent it on its way. The natives didn’t shoot at it as it gained altitude. If they knew what it carried, they wouldn’t want that cargo raining down on their countryside. They weren’t supposed to have any way of knowing, but how much did that prove?

From Hanoi, the transport droned across the South China Sea to Manila. Manila, seen from the air, was a surprisingly big city. It had taken a lot of damage when the Rising Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes, not much of which had been repaired. The jungle-covered islands of the Philippines gave way to more ocean as the transport flew on to Guam. By the time the wheels hit the landing strip, Fujita hoped he would never set foot in another airplane as long as he lived.

But he couldn’t even escape the one he was on. And he still had a long way to go before he finally made it to Midway. He’d had no idea the Pacific was so vast. He’d also had no idea Midway was so small, so flat, and, except for its position, so utterly insignificant.

The really scary thing was that it was another two thousand kilometers from Midway to the Hawaiian islands, and four thousand from those islands to the U.S. mainland. Whatever else you said about this war, it had scale. He’d just come a quarter of the way around the world to position himself to strike a blow against the Americans. He’d have to do plenty more traveling before he could actually attack them.

Herb Druce poured himself a bourbon on the rocks. He handed Peggy another one. They clinked glasses. “ ‘Here’s to Three Men well out of a Boat!’ ” Herb quoted.

Peggy drank. The bourbon flamed down her throat. “That old thing,” she said with a chuckle. She didn’t know how many times she’d read Three Men in a Boat. Whatever the number was, it was large. Victorian foolishness on the Thames made a perfect antidote to the harried modern world.

When she said so, her husband nodded. But then he said, “Jerome K. Jerome lasted long enough to watch that foolishness die-literally. He drove an ambulance in France during the last war.”

“Did he?” Peggy exclaimed. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s the truth,” Herb said. “You could look it up, if you felt like looking it up. Or you could just believe me if you wanted to live dangerously.”

“I’ll try that,” Peggy said. “If I need more exercise later, I’ll take a shot at jumping to conclusions.”

“There you go.” Herb nodded. “Plenty of people get plenty of practice at that one, though, so the competition’s pretty stiff.” Ice cubes clattered as he knocked back his drink. He stared down into the glass; he might have been wondering how it had emptied so fast. When he continued, it was on a slightly different note: “If I’d been in the right place at the right time, I could’ve met him when I was Over There.”

“That would’ve been something,” Peggy said.

“Sure would. Would’ve mattered more to me than anything I did do, even if I didn’t see it that way twenty-five years ago.” Herb started fixing himself a fresh drink. “Want another one, too?”

“You bet.” Peggy drained her own glass, then handed it to him for the refill. After they clinked again, she asked, “So which Boat are you well out of?”

Her husband coughed in faint embarrassment. “Remember that business in Tennessee?”

“The one you couldn’t talk about ’cause J. Edgar Hoover would shoot you through the window with a Tommy gun if you even started to open your mouth?”

Herb coughed again. This time, his embarrassment wasn’t nearly so faint. “Yeah, that,” he admitted.

“Well, what about it?” Peggy asked.

“I don’t have to go back there any more, on account of they’ve closed down the project. Turned out to be a bust, a boondoggle. No, let’s call a spade a stinking shovel. It was a rathole, was what it was. And God only knows how many millions of dollars they poured down it, too. If I were a Republican, I’d take it to the Chicago Tribune.”

“Oh, puh-leeze!” Peggy sounded as disgusted as she felt. “Westbrook Pegler and company? All they want to do is hold FDR’s feet to the fire.”

“Eleanor’s, too,” Herb corrected with lawyerly precision. “I’ll tell you, though, Roosevelt deserves a hotfoot for this one, swear he does.” He stopped-reluctantly, but he did.

“This isn’t the serial before the feature,” Peggy snapped. “You can’t leave me with a cliffhanger like that. C’mon-give. You know I don’t go yakking all over the place.”

“I’m not supposed to,” Herb said, more to himself than to her. She kept quiet, hoping he would talk himself into it. Which he did: “Well, nuts to that. The project’s dead as King Tut. And you’re right. You don’t blab. So … These scientists had some kind of scheme-I think it was based on something that leaked out of Germany in some kind of way, but don’t hold me to that-anyway, a scheme for making a super-duper bomb, one that could blow up a whole city.”

“You mean like in the pulps with the green men with the eyestalks and the built blondes in the brass bathing suits on the cover?” Peggy said. You saw them on the newsstands all the time. She’d bought a few-who didn’t? The stories were usually better than those wretched covers, even if that wasn’t saying much. You didn’t want to be seen reading them: they were almost as bad as Tijuana Bibles.

“Uh-huh, just like those.” Herb nodded once more. “But there were some people who you’d think had their heads on straight pushing this thing. Einstein, for instance.”

If you knew about one nuclear physicist, it had to be Einstein, with his mustache and his flyaway hair. He was a Jew. He’d got out of Germany not too long before the Nazis would have made escape impossible. “Even with him, it was no go?” Peggy asked.

“You got it,” Herb said. “Oh, maybe the thing would’ve worked in the end. Maybe. But it would’ve taken years and years to figure out how, and it would’ve cost billions in the end.”

“Billions?” Peggy wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “With a B?”

“With a B,” her husband agreed solemnly.

“Wow.” She had trouble even imagining that much money. She remembered that, when the astronomers discovered Pluto (and when Walt Disney named Mickey’s mutt after the new planet), they said it was so-and-so many billion miles from the sun. How many so-and-so many was, she couldn’t recall. Any many billion miles was still a hell of a lot. “They didn’t really blow that much, did they?”

“Nah.” Now Herb shook his head. “Just millions. I don’t even think they blew tens of millions. The accountants’ll have a field day working it out to the last dime-you bet they will. But the government threw up the stop sign before the guys with the glasses and the slide rules and the funny foreign accents could get rolling in style.”

“Thanks to you.” Peggy was proud of him, and wanted him to know it.

“Well, not just thanks to me.” Herb was too modest to claim the entire success for himself. But he was also proud that part of it belonged to him. He went on, “One of these years, we may need something like that, if it turns out to be possible after all. We sure don’t need it right away, though. We’ve got more important things to worry about now.”

“Like licking the Japs?” Peggy suggested.

“Yeah, like that. Like making sure they don’t land in San Francisco is more like it.” Herb rolled his eyes at the way the war in the Pacific was going for the United States.

Peggy asked, “How come Einstein and the other scientists were pushing this super-duper, super-expensive bomb so hard?”

“Well, I don’t know all the details. I’m no slide-rule twiddler myself.” Herb sounded glad that he wasn’t, and who could blame him? “But like I said, there was some kind of experiment in Germany right after the war started. It didn’t get published-the Nazis quashed that. But the physicists gossip amongst themselves, war or no war, just like lawyers or doctors or ladies playing bridge or anybody else. Einstein got wind of it some kind of way, and he sweet-talked FDR into throwing money at it. For a while, anyhow.” He grinned, glad he’d helped put the kibosh on such foolishness.

If it was foolishness … Unease trickled through Peggy. “Did the Nazis try to keep quiet about this experiment or whatever it was because their big brains are working on the super-duper bomb, too?” It wouldn’t be so good if they got one, which was putting things mildly.

“If they are, they’d do better to set their Reichsmarks on fire and throw them away,” Herb declared. “They’d get rid of ’em quicker if they did, but that’s the only way they would. Believe me, babe-nobody’s gonna figure out how to pull off this stunt any time soon, if it’s possible at all.”

“Okay.” Peggy sure wanted to believe him. She made herself one more bourbon on the rocks. That helped.

Every so often, Mitsubishi G4Ms on Midway took off for night raids on the Hawaiian islands. Hideki Fujita admired the Navy bombers. They were fast and sleek and had enormous range.

After a while, though, he got to talking-and he got to drinking-with the ratings who dropped bombs on the Americans and who manned the 20mm cannon the G4Ms carried as a sting in the tail. Their opinion of the plane they flew was much lower than his.

To begin with, they called the G4M the Flying Cigarette Lighter. “You know why it’s got such range?” one of the rear gunners demanded in the tent that served as a noncoms’ club. He was pouring down sake as if he feared they’d outlaw it tomorrow; his face had gone red as the rising sun.

“So it can do things like fly from Midway to Hawaii and back?” Fujita suggested-reasonably, he thought. He didn’t like to hear the plane maligned, not when he’d be heading from Midway to Oahu or one of the other islands in a G4M himself before too long.

“Iye!” The rear gunner vigorously shook his head. “No!” he repeated, even louder than before. “It’s got that range on account of it’s a lightweight. And it’s a lightweight ’cause the engineers who designed it were full of shit.” He gulped more sake.

“Huh?” Fujita wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

“Full of shit,” the Navy man said again, so he had. “No self-sealing gas tanks. No armor for the crew. No wonder it starts to burn if an American shoots a dirty look at it. The dumbass engineers wanted it to be fast. Zakennayo! No bomber’s gonna be fast enough to outrun fighters. You go up in that damn thing, it’s almost like you’re cutting your belly open.” He mimed commiting seppuku. Then he upended his cup again and poured more from the pottery pitcher.

“Thanks a lot,” Fujita mumbled. His own first flight was only a few days away.

“Huh?” the rear gunner said. Then he nodded, more to himself than to Fujita. “That’s right. You’re going up in one of those sorry bastards yourself, aren’t you? Almost forgot about that. Gonna give the Yankees a little present, right?”

“That’s the idea, anyhow,” Fujita agreed.

“Something better than ordinary bombs, they say,” the Navy guy persisted.

“That’s the idea,” Fujita said once more.

“So what is it?” the rear gunner asked. “Poison gas? Something like that? Everybody on Midway’s going bugshit trying to figure out what’s up with you people. You all keep your mouths shut as tight as a whore’s legs before you pay her.”

“We aren’t supposed to talk about it,” Fujita answered primly.

“Yeah, yeah. Who am I gonna tell? What am I gonna do? Hop into a G4M, fly it down to Honolulu, land there and start singing to the Americans? Give me a break, pal!”

Fujita saw he’d have to make himself clearer: “We have orders not to talk about it.”

“No kidding, you do! I still think that’s a bunch of crap.” The Navy man downed another cup of sake. “And you know what else? Just before you clowns got out here, the docs lined up the whole garrison and gave us shots like you wouldn’t believe. My arm swelled up like a dead cow. I couldn’t hardly do anything with it for the next three days.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that. Like you say, I wasn’t even on Midway yet.” No matter what the rear gunner thought, no matter how sore his arm had been, the doctors here had known exactly what they were doing. The germs Captain Ikejiri had brought along weren’t fussy about whether they infected Americans or Japanese.

The Navy man wasn’t done complaining, either. “And how come they’re delousing us all the time now? You’d think we were filthy or something. They didn’t do that before you guys came. It’s fucking weird, you ask me.”

“I haven’t got anything to do with that, either.” Fujita told the technical truth there, but no more than the technical truth. Delousing treatments also killed fleas, or had a better chance of killing them than anything else on Midway was likely to do. And, when fleas were liable to carry the plague, killing them looked like an even better idea than usual.

“Weird,” the rear gunner repeated. He could say what he wanted. Fujita couldn’t say anything at all, not about what the rear gunner wanted to know. Even drunk, he knew he couldn’t. If that left the other fellow unhappy, it was his hard luck.

Fujita’s own hard luck came when he climbed up into a G4M’s bomb bay. The groundcrew men loaded the bay with the pottery-bomb casings that held rats loaded with fleas and other disease-dispersal agents. Night was falling. They were in subtropical latitudes-not so far south as Burma, but subtropical even so. There wasn’t a lot of difference between summer and winter nights. But there was some, and they would take advantage of the extra darkness at this season of the year.

The G4M rolled down the rough runway and climbed into the air. The engines’ drone seemed to come from somewhere inside Fujita. He put on his oxygen gear and also ran oxygen lines into the casings. That wasn’t guaranteed to keep the rats alive-but then, keeping them alive wasn’t completely necessary. The fleas were tougher. They’d make it to Hawaii, all right. Having the rats able to run around might spread sickness faster, though.

Even if night soon fell, navigating was easy. Midway lay at the northwest end of a chain of little islands that ended with the bigger ones of Hawaii. Peering out through a machine-gun blister, Fujita watched one low islet after another pass beneath the bomber. It was as if whichever fire kami spat out the main Hawaiian islands got more and more tired as it also spat out the ones that lay north and west of them. Or maybe those northwestern islands were the old ones, and the bigger islands, the ones where people actually lived, just hadn’t worn down yet.

It was interesting to think about. Fujita doubted whether anyone would ever actually know. When Kauai came into sight, the G4M took a long loop around it. The Americans had airstrips there. Night fighters found targets more by luck than any other way, but why find out whether this was some round-eyed pilot’s lucky night?

On to Oahu. This was only one plane. With any luck at all, the Americans wouldn’t pay any attention to it. If they did notice it, wouldn’t they just think it was one of theirs, doing whatever a plane flying over Oahu in the middle of the night did?

Right up until they started shooting at him, Fujita hoped they would. After that, he just hoped he would live. He watched tracer rounds climb up toward the G4M. They were beautiful. He hadn’t had such a good view in China. He felt as if he were on top of a fireworks display, looking down at it from above. Then the shells started bursting. The bomber bounced in the air. Fujita wished that Navy guy had never told him what a flimsy piece of construction a G4M was.

“Open the bomb bay! Drop the bombs!” The pilot flying the plane sounded scared enough to wet his flight suit. That did nothing for Fujita’s own confidence.

He yanked at the levers that opened the bomb-bay doors. They weren’t in the same place as they were in a Ki-21, but he knew where to grab and how to pull. Opening them, though, gave him a much better view of the antiaircraft fire that was trying to knock him down. More levers-again, positioned differently from those in the Army bomber he’d flown before-let the casings full of germs and diseased animals fall free. Along with them went a few incendiaries and ordinary high-explosive bombs, to give the enemy something else to think about and to distract him from the ones that were the main point of the mission.

“Bombs away!” he reported, as if the pilot hadn’t already put the G4M into a tight turn and headed back toward Midway at full throttle. He closed the bomb-bay doors again to improve streamlining. They gave Kauai an even wider berth on the way home: the Americans there would be alerted now. But they never saw a single enemy fighter. And, better yet, not a single enemy fighter saw them.

Shirtless like the rest of the Marines and sailors in line with him, Pete McGill stood under the warm Hawaiian sun. Back on the mainland, there were plenty of places where the snow was still as high as an elephant’s eye. If you didn’t already have a good tan here, even the winter sun stood plenty high enough in the sky to fry your hide.

“This is a pain in the ass, you know?” Bob Cullum groused.

“Is that where they’re gonna shoot us?” Pete said. “I thought they were gonna get us in the arm. That’s why we’re like this, right?” He thumped his bare chest. Thanks to the shoulder that had got smashed up in the Shanghai movie-house bombing, he wore some impressive scars. Men from other ships, who weren’t used to seeing him with his shirt off, eyed his torso with respect.

“I dunno,” Cullum answered. “It ain’t like they tell anybody what’s going on, for Chrissake.”

“And this surprises you because …?” Pete said. Cullum threw a slow-motion punch at him. Just as slowly, Pete blocked it. They both grinned.

A balding guy with a big, hairy beer belly that yelled Petty officer! growled, “Knock off the horseplay, you two!”

“That’s ‘Knock off the horseplay, you two sergeants,’ ” Pete said. Cullum nodded. The petty-officer type looked disgusted. He couldn’t beat them over the head with his rank, because they had about as much as he did.

The line snaked forward. It looked to Pete as if every enlisted man at Pearl Harbor was in it. Officers had their own queue, which would be a lot shorter. Civilian employees at the base would get their turn tomorrow. Pete wouldn’t have minded letting them go first.

A pretty blond secretary in a thin cotton blouse and a silk skirt that showed off shapely legs walked by. She carried half a dozen manila folders. Eyeballs clicked as leathernecks and swabbies gave her the once-over. A few wolf whistles rang out. She ignored them with the air of someone who had a lot of practice ignoring such things.

“I’d like to stick her,” Cullum said, “and not in the arm, neither.”

“Amen,” Pete agreed reverently. “That’s table-quality pussy, all right.”

In due course, he and Cullum advanced into the mess hall. Instead of cooks slinging powdered eggs and vulcanized bacon, doctors stood there with needles gleaming in the electric light. The single line divided into several. Each doc stood by a little cloth-draped privacy area. “Ahh, shit,” Cullum said. “We are gonna get it in the ass.”

“Looks that way.” Pete agreed again, this time with a mournful nod.

As a matter of fact, he got a shot in each arm and one in his left lower cheek. “You may be kinda sore the next few days,” said the doc who injected him. “Don’t worry about that, or about some swelling. It’s all normal.”

“Happy day … sir,” Pete said. Doctors were officers; some of them got pissy if you didn’t give them formal respect. “What the devil’s going on, anyway, if you’re stabbing everybody like this?”

“I’m afraid I’m not authorized to release that information,” the medico said with a sniff.

“Well, what happens if I swell up like a poisoned pup and die?” Pete hoped that was a waddayacallit-a hypothetical question. He’d got the hypo part, in triplicate.

Whatever you called it, it didn’t faze the doctor one damn bit. “What happens then? I’ll tell you what, Sergeant. Your next of kin sue Uncle Sam for every nickel he’s got, that’s what. And Uncle Sam throws his lawyers at their lawyers, and it all grinds through the courts till, oh, 1953. Then they settle for five dollars and sixty-nine cents, which is about what you’re actually worth. Only your folks have to split it with the shysters, so they end up screwed after all. Oh, and you’re still dead, in case you were wondering.”

Pete shuffled away, defeated. The middle-aged man in the white coat was armored in a cynicism that made his own seem made of Kleenex. And his folks wouldn’t even sue the government. They were too busy trying to make ends meet with their lousy little Bronx candy store.

“I bet I know how come we got punctured like that,” Cullum said when they got together under the warm sun again.

“I’m all ears,” Pete said. “Looks crazy as shit, but I hear real good.”

“Funny guy-funny like a chancre,” the other sergeant said with a snort. “My guess is, they’re sticking us for everything this side of housemaid’s knee on account of they’re gonna ship us to some crappy tropical island crawling with mosquitoes and leeches and Japs.”

That made more sense than Pete wished it did. “How come they can’t vaccinate you for machine-gun bullets? I wouldn’t bitch about that shot … not too much, anyhow.”

“Amen!” Cullum said. “Amen like the spooks sing it in Father Divine’s church. Machine guns are no fun at all, not unless you’re on the trigger end.”

“You got that right. ’Course, even a stopped clock’s right twice a day,” Pete said. Cullum gave him the finger. Pete rubbed his arm. Damned if it wasn’t starting to swell. And, by the way his rear end felt, he’d sit with a list for the next few days.

He needed a little while to realize that Bob Cullum’s idea, no matter how reasonable it sounded at first, didn’t explain why civilian workers at Pearl were getting their shots, too. So were the sailors on the Ranger and the other ships in the harbor. They wouldn’t be splashing ashore on some steaming beach, looking to blow the head off the first Jap they saw before he could do the same to them. Neither would the Army flyboys at Hickam, but they were meeting the needle, too.

And then Honolulu radio ordered civilians to report to hospitals or clinics or their private doctors for inoculations. “These are purely precautionary measures,” the announcer said. Then he made a liar out of himself: “No shirking will be tolerated, however. Individuals must display valid immunization certificates to acquire rationed goods of any sort. If physicians run short of vaccine, be sure more is coming from the mainland at top priority. But there is no cause for alarm. If symptoms develop, do not delay-report to a physician immediately.”

“Run that past me again?” Pete said when he heard the announcement. Several of the Ranger’s other Marine noncoms nodded.

“Symptoms of what?” Cullum asked. The radio man with the unctuous voice didn’t explain. Pete didn’t know about Cullum, but he hadn’t really expected that the fellow would.

Fifteen minutes later, the man behind the microphone repeated the order. As far as Pete could tell, he used the identical words this time. Of course there was no cause for alarm. Everything was just a precaution. But if symptoms developed, you had to drag your sorry ass to a doctor right away. If you didn’t get your shots like a good little sheep, you wouldn’t eat or drive.

Over the next couple of days, Pete heard the announcement often enough to get really sick of it-and to be able to repeat it in his sleep. None of the people who read it spelled out what the ominous symptoms were. If you came down with them, evidently you’d know.

Then Bob Cullum asked him, “When you were in China, did you ever see the plague?”

“See it? No.” Pete shook his head. “I heard about it, sure-it happens over there. But you don’t want to see it. If you’re close enough to see it, you’re close enough to catch it. Trust me, you don’t wanna do that.” He paused. Slower than it might have, a light bulb went on above his head. “How come? Is that what the radio’s jabbering about?”

“That’s what I hear,” Cullum answered.

“Fuck,” Pete said. “I never heard of the plague in Hawaii.”

“Skinny is, the Japs done it some kind of way. That and three or four other kinds of shit. That’s how come they turned us all into pincushions, like.”

“Fuck,” Pete repeated. “This ain’t the kind of war I signed up for, y’know?” Which, as he understood all too well, didn’t mean it wasn’t the kind of war he had.