West and East

Chapter 11

Down screamed the Stuka. Vaclav Jezek had never yet met a man who'd lived through a dive-bomber attack and didn't hate the German warplane with a fierce and deadly passion. Outside of a few luckless people down in Spain, no one had hated the Stuka like that longer than he had. He'd been dive-bombed on the very day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, and more often than he cared to remember since.

"Get down!" he yelled to Benjamin Halevy, who was working his way across the field with him.

"I am down," the Jewish sergeant answered. So was Jezek. He lay flat as a flapjack. The smells of grass and dirt filled his nostrils.

That Stuka screeched like a soul tormented in hell. The sirens built into the landing gear were one more piece of German Schrechlichkeit. Vaclav sneaked a glance at it. It looked funny. What were those pods under its wings? Not bombs, surely.

The dive bomber couldn't have been more than fifty meters off the ground when fire blasted from the ends of the gun barrels projecting from the pods. That was when Vaclav realized they were gun barrels. Till then, he'd hardly noticed them-no great surprise, not when the Stuka was hurtling down at several hundred kilometers an hour.

As it pulled out of the dive and roared away, answering fire spurted from the rear decking of a French tank. The tank started to burn. The crew bailed out and ran for cover.

"Bastard's got big guns under there!" Halevy exclaimed.

"Tell me about it!" Vaclav answered. "What can we do to stop him?"

"Shoot him down," Benjamin Halevy said. "If you've got any other bright ideas, I'd love to hear them."

Vaclav didn't, however much he wished he did. He watched the Stuka climb high into the sky again, then dive at another French tank. He and Halevy both fired at the ugly, predatory warplane. If they hit it, they didn't harm it. At least one of the rounds it fired at the tank struck home-the motorized fort slewed to a stop, flame and smoke rising from the engine compartment. Again, the Stuka flew off at treetop height, then started to climb once more.

Another screaming dive. Another stricken French tank. "Jesus Christ!" Jezek said. "He can do that all day long!"

"Oh, I don't know," Halevy said. "Sooner or later, he's bound to run out of gas or ammo-unless we run out of tanks first."

"Happy day!" Vaclav sent him a reproachful look. "You really know how to cheer me up, don't you?"

"It could be worse," the Jew said.

"Oh, yeah? How?" Vaclav demanded.

"The Nazis could have a dozen Stukas armed like that, not just one," Halevy answered. "Looks like they're trying this out to see if it works. If it does, they'll put guns on more planes."

"Well, they will, on account of it damn well does," Jezek said. "Does it ever!" Three smashed tanks-three tanks smashed from an unexpected direction-had shot the Allied advance in this sector right behind the ear. Everyone was staring wildly into the sky, wondering if that Stuka would come back again.

And it did. This time, it had to dive through a storm of small-arms fire. But a dive-bomber was armored against nuisance bullets. The designers must have realized it would run into some. Letting them disable it didn't seem such a good idea, so the engineers made sure they wouldn't. Germans, Vaclav thought glumly. They take care of those things.

"Sure they do," Benjamin Halevy agreed when he said that out loud. "They wouldn't be so dangerous if they fucked up all the time, like a bunch of Magyars or Romanians."

"Well, you didn't say 'like a bunch of Slovaks,' anyway," Vaclav said.

"Or them," Halevy replied. "They're so fucked up, they jumped into bed with the Nazis, right?"

"Afraid so. When the Germans invaded us, I had this one Slovak in my squad, and I wasn't sure whether he'd shoot at them or try to shoot me." Vaclav grimaced and spat, remembering.

"So what did he end up doing?" the Jew asked in tones of clinical interest.

"Well, he didn't try and plug me straight off-I will say that for him," Jezek answered. "After that, fuck me if I know. We were right at the point of the bayonet, if you know what I mean, and things fell apart pretty fast. Maybe a Stuka blew him to kingdom come. Or maybe he surrendered to the Nazis. If he did, he's likely a sergeant in the Slovak army by now."

"In the Slovak army." By the way Halevy said it, it tasted bad in his mouth. Well, it tasted bad in Vaclav's mouth, too. Czechs no more believed Slovaks had a right to their own country than Germans believed Czechs had a right to theirs. Slovaks were bumpkins, country cousins, hillbillies who talked funny and drank too much and beat their wives. Only country cousins could take the Hlinka Guard and a fat windbag like Father Tiso seriously.

And now Slovakia was a country, with Father Tiso as its tinpot Fuhrer, or whatever the devil they called him. The Hlinka Guard did its best half-assed imitation of the SS. And Bohemia and Moravia, the cradle of the Czech nation since time out of mind, had been bombed and shelled to kingdom come, and the German occupiers treated them exactly the way locusts treated a ripe wheatfield. Life could be a real son of a bitch sometimes.

Sometimes it could be a lot worse than that.

"You know what we ought to do?" Halevy's question derailed Vaclav's gloomy train of thought, which might have been just as well.

"What's that?" Vaclav asked. No, he wasn't sorry to think about something else.

"We ought to let our brass know the Germans have themselves a new toy," the sergeant said. "If those assholes can pull a stunt like that, we should be able to do the same thing, right?"

"Right," Jezek said, but his voice lacked conviction. The Germans were good at pulling new stuff out of the hat. That was part of what made them Germans, at least in a Czech's eyes. How good the French and English were at the same game… The war was a long way from new, but the French were just now figuring out that German tank tactics beat the snot out of their own half-bright ideas.

Benjamin Halevy gave him a crooked grin. "C'mon, man. We've got to try," the Jew said. "We keep our mouths shut, nobody with the clout to do anything about it will find out what's going on for another month and a half. You think the tankers'll tell?"

Vaclav considered that, but not for long. Tankers thought their big, clattering mounts were perfect. They wouldn't want to admit that the enemy had come up with a big new flyswatter. Sighing, Jezek said, "Let's go."

The next problem, of course, was getting an officer to listen to them. Two noncoms, one a Czech, the other a Czech and a Jew (naturally, the French thought of Halevy as a Czech, even if he'd been born in France-he spoke Czech, didn't he?), didn't have an easy time getting through to the fellows with fancy kepis. At last, though, a captain said, "Yes, I've already heard about this from other soldiers."

"And?" Halevy said. The captain looked at him. He turned red. "And… sir?" Even Vaclav, with his fractured French, followed that bit of byplay.

"I will do what I can," the captain said. "I don't know how much I can do. I am not in the air force, after all."

Sergeant Halevy translated that for Vaclav. Then he went back to French to inquire, "Sir, if no one says anything at all to the air force, what will happen then?" He also turned the question into Czech.

"Rien," the officer replied. Nothing was a word Jezek followed with no trouble. The Frenchman went on, "But it could also be that the air force will do nothing just because the army is screaming at it to move."

"Those pilots don't want everybody in the army spitting at them, they'd better start treating German tanks the way the Nazis treated ours," Vaclav said. Sergeant Halevy did the honors with the translation. Vaclav thought it sounded better in Czech than it did in French.

"Yes, yes," the captain said impatiently. He looked from one grubby front-line soldier to the other. "Now, men, you have done your duty. You have done what you thought you had to do, and you have done it well. You can do no more in this regard-it is up to me to take it from here. I will do so. You had best return to your own positions, before the officers set over you start wondering where you are, and why."

Go away. Get lost. The message, once Halevy translated it, was unmistakable. And the Jew and Vaclav went. What else could they do? Maybe the officer would make some progress with his superiors and the air force; maybe not. But two foreign or half-foreign noncoms couldn't. Back to the war, Vaclav thought gloomily, and back to the war it was. THE SPANISH NATIONALISTS HAD ALWAYS had more artillery, and better artillery, than the Republicans. Up on the Ebro front, Chaim Weinberg had got resigned to that. It was part of the war and something you had to deal with, like the endless factional strife between Communists and anarchists on the Republican side. Since the Soviet Union supplied Communist forces in Spain while the anarchists had to scrounge whatever they could wherever they could, the red flags had had a big advantage over the red and black.

Now nobody supplied anybody in Spain, not in any reliable way. Everyone was too busy with the bigger war off to the northeast. Both sides had forgotten about this particular brawl between progressive and reactionary forces-except for the people still doing the fighting and dying here.

The Nationalists still had the guns Hitler and Mussolini had lavished on Marshal Sanjurjo. What they didn't have any more were the endless crates of high-quality Italian and German ammunition. They'd already fired it off. So if they wanted to shoot at the Republicans defending Madrid, they had to use shells they made themselves.

Spanish factories didn't turn out nearly so much ammo as the ones in Germany and Italy. Not only that, Spanish artillery rounds, like Spanish small-arms ammunition, were junk.

Chaim didn't know why that should be so, but it was. At least half the shells the Nationalists threw at the Republicans lines just north of University City were duds. He would have liked to think the workers in the munitions plants were sabotaging their Fascist masters. He would have liked to, but he couldn't. The ammo that reached the Republicans from factories in Madrid and Barcelona was every bit as crappy. The workers on the Republican side should have had every incentive to do the best work they could. They did have every incentive, in fact, but the best work they could do wasn't very good.

"And what do you expect?" Mike Carroll asked when Chaim complained about that. "They're Spaniards, for Chrissake. They're brave. They'd give you their last bullet or their last cigarette or the shirt off their back. But they haven't heard about the twentieth century. Hell, they haven't heard much about the eighteenth century-and what they have heard, they don't like. As far as they're concerned, it's still 1492. They've cleaned out the Moors, and they're waiting to see what happens when that Columbus guy gets back."

As if to punctuate his words, another dud thudded in fifty meters away and buried itself in the hard brown dirt. That was too close for comfort; it would have been dangerous had it gone off. Chaim nodded-what Mike said held some truth. But only some, as he pointed out: "So how come the Republic won the election, then? The kind of progressive government Spain had-the kind our chunk's still got-doesn't come out of 1492. Not out of 1776, either."

"Think of it as a peasant uprising," Carroll said. "Spain was like Russia. It was one of the places where the jerks on top came down hardest on everybody under them. So of course it was the place where the reaction against oppression hit hardest. That's how the dialectic works, man."

More shells came in from the Nationalist gun pits off in the hills. Some of these burst, fortunately none too close to the arguing Internationals. Chaim peeped over the parapet to make sure Sanjurjo's soldiers weren't trying anything under cover of the barrage. He ducked down in a hurry: no point letting snipers get a good look at him. Then he took out a pack of Gitanes and lit one.

"Can I bum a butt off you?" Mike asked eagerly. "I'm all out."

"Sure," Chaim answered without rancor, holding out the pack. Mike would do-had done-the same for him plenty of times.

The big blond American leaned close to Chaim for a light. "Thanks." Carroll took a drag. He made a face as he exhaled. "Fuck me if I know how the Frenchies smoke these goddamn things all the time."

"Better than nothing," Chaim said, which wasn't disagreement. He chuckled sourly. "See? This is what it really comes down to: shitty shells and shitty tobacco, not the dialectic."

"Oh, no." Mike stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. "Oh, no. Everything comes down to the dialectic in the end. Without the dialectic, the world makes no sense. And if the world makes no sense, who gives a rat's ass about shells and cigarettes?"

"If you don't, how come you keep working on your bombproof there?" Chaim retorted. "And who just scrounged that cigarette? Wasn't it some guy who looks a lot like you?"

With the evidence still sending up a thread of smoke from the corner of Carroll's mouth, he couldn't very well deny the charge. He did look exasperated. And he had his reasons, which he proceeded to spell out: "If a political officer hears you talking like that, you'll be lucky if you get off with public self-criticism. You could end up in a lot more trouble than that, and you know it."

Chaim did. He didn't like it. He took American-style freedom of speech for granted. He also took the revolution of the proletariat for granted. When one set of ideals ran headlong into the other like a couple of linemen on a football field, he ended up with a bad case of… what did the guy with the glasses and the chin beard call it at this one lecture he'd gone to?

"Cognitive dissonance!" he said happily.

"Huh?" Mike said. He could talk about the dialectic till everything turned blue, but if something wasn't in the Marxist-Leninist lexicon, he didn't know and didn't want to know. Chaim thought that made him narrow, but more Communists were made in his image than in Chaim's.

"Never mind," Weinberg said. Then, alert as a prairie dog at a rattlesnake convention, he sat up and pointed north. "What's that?" he asked, his voice rising in alarm.

"Airplanes!" Mike said. "Lots of airplanes!" Cigarettes and ammo might not trump the almighty dialectic, but airplanes did. Carroll wasted no more time discussing them. He dove into the bombproof Chaim had been teasing him about only a few minutes earlier.

Chaim had a bombproof, too, shored up with whatever bits of timber he could liberate. He didn't jump into it right away. He had a prairie dog's curiosity. It made him stare up at the swarm of Ju-52/3s and He-111s rumbling across the sky, all of them, it seemed, straight toward him. The Junkers trimotors were obsolete as bombers, except in Spain. The Heinkels still did their deadly work everywhere from England to the Soviet border.

Where were the Republican fighters that would have given this air armada a hard time? Wherever they were, they weren't here, and here was where they needed to be. When bombs started tumbling out of the enemy planes, Chaim dove for his burrow like any prairie dog that wanted to live to raise a new litter.

Air attack was even worse than artillery bombardment. Chaim thought so when he was being bombed, anyhow. When he was being shelled, his opinion changed. It changed again when machine guns tried chewing him to bits. Whatever was happening to you right now was the worst thing in the world… till something else happened.

This was plenty bad enough. Dirt trickled down between his bits of planking. It wasn't just that it got on the back of his neck as he huddled there. If one of those bombs set all the dirt above him crashing down, he would die without any direct enemy wound. How good had his carpentry been? One way or the other, he'd find out. No, he didn't want it to be or the other.

More and more bombs whistled down. Bombs were easy to make: impact fuses, explosives, and sheet metal. Even Spaniards had a tough time screwing up the combination. The Nationalists had it down solid. "Enough already, goddammit!" Chaim screamed. No one paid any attention to him.

Eventually, bombs started falling farther away. The drone from the bombers' engines faded, then disappeared. It was over-till the next time. Chaim crawled out. He nodded to Mike Carroll, who was emerging from his bombproof at the same time. Then he peered over the battered parapet, to make sure Sanjurjo's men weren't rushing forward to take advantage of the bombing run.

They weren't. German troops probably would have been. However brave Spaniards were-and both sides were, above and beyond the call of duty-they weren't what anyone would call efficient. The landscape had been drastically rearranged. Except for a few saplings leaning at odd angles, it might have come straight from the cratered moon.

Seeing he wouldn't need his rifle right away, Chaim set it down. He pulled another Gitane from the pack. He missed his mouth the first time he put it in, and he needed three or four tries before he could light a match.

Mike watched with knowing eyes. "I've been there," he said. "Give me another one, will you?"

"Sure," Chaim said. If the other International had teased him, he probably wouldn't have. But Mike had indeed been through the mill with him. They smoked together. Little by little, Chaim stopped shaking. Cigarettes helped as much as anything, except maybe brandy. Trouble was, nothing helped much. "WATCH YOURSELF, PETE," Herman Szulc warned. "Here come the Japs."

"I see 'em," Pete McGill answered. They'd patched things up, after a fashion. And on Shanghai's mad, crowded streets, missing Japanese soldiers was harder than seeing them. The Japs were the only people who behaved as if all the Chinese frantically hawking this, that, and the other thing-and the Europeans who livened up the throngs-weren't there at all. They marched straight ahead. If you didn't clear out, they'd knock you down with rifle butts (or just shoot you, if they happened to be in a lousy mood) and then walk over you. You couldn't do anything about it. Shanghai was theirs.

Pete got out of the way, along with his Marine buddies. They stood out in the crowd, not just because they were white but because they stood a head taller than most of the Chinese around them. Pete met the eyes of a noncom. He nodded first, with respect but without fear. Respect would do. The Jap nodded back, as if to say, Maybe some other time, but not now. Then he shouted at his men. They were already stiff as robots. They got stiffer yet.

"Goddamn monkeys think they're as good as white people," Szulc muttered.

"Watch it, Herman," Sergeant Larry Koenig snapped. "Too many folks here savvy some English."

"Yeah, yeah," Szulc said. They weren't on duty; he didn't have to kowtow to Koenig because the sergeant had those three stripes on his sleeve.

"You better watch it, Herman." Pete still enjoyed sticking the needle in. "Way you go on, you figure Polacks are as good as white people."

"Ah, your mother," Szulc said. If he'd been drunk they might well have started banging away at each other right there. But it was still morning. Nobody'd got potted… yet.

Another company of Japanese soldiers marched by. They did think they were as good as white men. Their faces were hard and impassive, but every line of their bodies shouted their pride. We beat the crap out of the Russians once, and now we're doing it again, they might have yelled. And if you Yankees want to fuck around with us, step right up. We'll knock your ass over teakettle, too.

They couldn't have been more different from the Chinese who scrambled away from them. The Chinese knew they were licked. Everybody knocked them around. They couldn't do a damn thing about it, any more than a wife stuck in a rotten marriage could when her husband beat her up for the hell of it. She might hate. Hell, she had to hate all the more when she had no hope. Hate or not, though, she was stuck. She had to take it. So did the Chinese.

"Good thing the Japs don't know you got yourself that White Russian girlfriend," Herman Szulc said with a leer. "They'd probably figure she was radioing everything you tell her straight to old Joe Stalin."

"Jesus Christ, Herman, shut the fuck up!" Pete said. "You open your big dumb mouth any wider, you'll fall right in."

"Who you callin' dumb?" Szulc growled. Some dumb guys didn't have a hint that they weren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Others were uneasily aware that their candlepower left something to be desired. You really pissed them off when you called them stupid, because down deep they feared you knew what you were talking about. Szulc was one of those. He folded his hands into rocklike fists.

"Knock if off, Herman," Sergeant Koenig told him. "You got him, so he got you back."

"He called me a Polack first," Szulc said. Sometimes the Marine Corps looked a lot like third-grade recess.

Koenig only laughed. "Yeah? So? What are you, a sheeny like Weinstein?"

"Not me!" Szulc crossed himself. "He ain't just a yid, neither. He's a fuckin' Red. If anybody's sending shit to Stalin, he's the guy."

It was a good thing Max wasn't there, or he would have tried to clean Szulc's clock for him. It wasn't that he wasn't a Red. But he didn't let anybody rag on him for being a Jew. There weren't many Jewish leathernecks. The handful Pete had known were uncommonly tough, even for the Corps.

Before anything else could happen, the clock in the tower of the new Customs House chimed the hour. Pete checked his watch. It was a few minutes fast, so he adjusted it. "Hurray for Big Ching," he said. It wasn't Big Ben, but it was halfway around the world from London.

"Lottery ticket?" a woman screeched in the Marines' faces.

"No wantchee," Pete said, shaking his head. He'd picked up a bit of pidgin English since coming to Shanghai. It wasn't used much in Peking. There, the locals either knew English or, much more often, they didn't. Here, pidgin seemed a halfway house between English and Chinese. People who'd been here longer than he had said it held bits of Portuguese, too, and a mostly Chinese way of putting words together.

"My no savvy," the woman said.

"You savvy plenty good," Koenig told her. "Get lost." That wasn't proper pidgin, but she understood it anyhow. She said something in Chinese that sounded like a cat getting its tail stepped on. Koenig only laughed. "Good thing I don't know what that meant, or I'd have to do something about it," he said.

Then the woman spoke two words of perfectly clear English-"Fuck you!"-and accompanied them with the appropriate gesture. Pete wondered whether she'd learned that from a leatherneck or an English Marine. She'd got it down solid, wherever she'd found it.

And Larry Koenig went nuts. "No slanty-eyed cunt's gonna give me the finger!" he yelled, and started after her with intent to maim, or maybe to murder. Pete and Herman Szulc looked at each other for a split second. Then they both grabbed the sergeant and held on for dear life.

"Take it easy, man!" Pete said. "You'll set all the Chinks off!" Sure enough, the small, golden-skinned men and women were pointing and giggling at the spectacle of two white men trying to hold back a third.

"Like I give a shit! Let me go, goddammit!" Koenig tried something Pete had last seen from a dirty-fighting coach before he went overseas.

He still remembered what to do about it-remembered without thinking, the knowledge literally beaten into him. He jerked, twisted… and Koenig gasped in pain. "I'll break your wrist if you try any more of that," Pete said, and the other man had to know he meant it. "Now calm down, okay?"

What Koenig said then would have made a Marine sergeant blush-except he was one. "C'mon, man-take an even strain," Szulc advised, also not letting go. "Just an old Chinese broad. She's gone now anyway." So she was; the crowd had swallowed her up.

"I'll find her. I'll wring her scrawny neck when I do, too," Koenig ground out. He surged against the Marines who held him-but he didn't try anything else cute.

"You and McGill've been in China too long. You're both going Asiatic yourself," Szulc opined. "You want to clobber this gal for nothing, and he's all mushy over that gold-digging taxi dancer. This place'll drive anybody nuts if he stays long enough."

If Pete hadn't been hanging on to Koenig for all he was worth, he would have taken a swing at Szulc himself. Then the Chinese would have been treated to the spectacle of three Americans, each trying to beat the crap out of the other two. Even Japanese soldiers would have laughed at that. When the people who hated you fought among themselves, how could you lose?

Simple. You couldn't. And so Pete didn't clobber Herman Szulc, no matter how much Herman deserved it. And Koenig did eventually calm down-enough so they could let go of him, anyhow. And they walked on through Shanghai just as if it were their town after all. NORTH. The front faced north. To Hideki Fujita, that meant one thing and one thing only: the Kwantung Army stood firmly astride the Trans-Siberian Railway. If the Russians wanted to do anything about it, they would have to come to the Japanese. He didn't think they would have an easy time doing that. His own countrymen had attacked the railroad in other places, too. Japanese radio claimed all kinds of breakthroughs against the Red Army, but Fujita had seen enough to understand that not everything the radio said was exactly true. You needed to impress the foreigners who were bound to be listening.

He did know what was happening behind him. Japanese engineers were systematically tearing up the railroad track and mining the ground on which it had lain. The Russians wouldn't have an easy time putting the Trans-Siberian Railway back together even if they did drive off the Kwantung Army.

And, without the railroad, Vladivostok would starve. Bombers from Japanese aircraft carriers and from bases in Manchukuo already pounded the town. The Russians were hunkering down for a siege. Well, they'd done the same thing at Port Arthur. It hadn't saved them then. Fujita didn't think it would save them now.

He pictured a map in his mind. Would the Emperor take Vladivostok for Japan, or would he say it was territory redeemed for Manchukuo? It didn't really matter one way or the other. Japanese influence would predominate no matter which flag flew there.

Then Russian artillery opened up. The Reds hadn't gone away, even if Fujita wished they would have. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the flight of the shells by the way they snarled through the air. He relaxed. Nothing aimed at him-not this time.

He lit an Aeroplane. Smoke helped when you couldn't take a drink. Everything around you seemed a little less important while you had a cigarette going. It was as if… as if you were laying down a smoke screen against the outside world.

He liked that well enough to say it out loud. Shinjiro Hayashi grinned and dipped his head. "Oh, very good, Sergeant-san!" he said.

If Hayashi, with his education, appreciated the joke, that meant it was a good one… didn't it? Fujita wished he wouldn't have had the afterthought. He remembered the days when he was a private himself. Any stupid joke the sergeant cracked was funny, for no other reason than that he was a sergeant. If you didn't laugh, he'd thump you like a drum. Of course sergeants slapped privates around; that was what privates were for. If you didn't keep your sergeant greased, the army would get even more miserable than it already was for a private.

Now Fujita had a thin gold stripe and two stars on his red collar tabs. Now he was the one who expected the sorry bastards under him to laugh at whatever came out of his mouth. And they did. Oh, they did. They knew where their rice came from, all right. But that meant he couldn't trust them. They would laugh even if he said something stupid-no, especially if he said something stupid. He remembered doing that. What was sweeter than laughing at a puffed-up sergeant who was playing the fool and didn't even know it?

Nothing, for a private. All the more reason for a sergeant to watch himself. Privates were unreliable, officers thought they were little tin gods… You had to take care of yourself. Nobody would do it for you.

That also applied when the Russians came. Some of the people you led wouldn't be sorry to see you dead. If they got the chance to arrange that in a way that wouldn't land them in trouble, they were liable to do it.

Those were thoughts Fujita wished he hadn't had when Lieutenant Hanafusa came up to him and said, "You've done well since you got here, Sergeant. I wondered about you, because you didn't have much experience fighting in forests. But nobody can say you haven't picked it up in a hurry."

"Thank you very much, sir." Fujita wondered what Hanafusa had in mind. He also wondered if he would have done better to stay on Manchukuo's Mongolian frontier, where only sandstorms kept you from seeing for kilometers every which way and where any tree was a prodigy.

And so he heard the platoon commander's next words with a mournful lack of surprise: "We need some prisoners for interrogation. Take your squad forward and get me a couple. Try not to make too much of a fuss while you're doing it."

"Yes, sir," Fujita said-the only thing he could say. He did ask, "Right now, sir, or may we wait till after dark?"

Lieutenant Hanafusa looked surprised, as if the possibility had never crossed his mind. It probably hadn't. He'd got the order from above, and hadn't thought twice about it. After a few seconds, he said, "I suppose it will keep that long."

"Yes, sir," Fujita repeated. He couldn't say Thank you again; he would have meant it this time. Scooting forward at night, he and his men had at least a chance of coming back in one piece.

It started raining before the squad set out. Fujita didn't know whether to take that for good luck or bad. It would make finding Russians harder. But it would also make it harder for the Reds to hear his men coming. Nothing he could do about it either way. He just had to hope for the best.

"Stick close together," he told the Japanese. "We'll grab the first couple of men we catch and head on back." He made it sound easy. Whether it would be…

He had a compass that glowed in the dark. Without it, he probably would have blundered around in circles. Even by daylight, you couldn't see very far in these woods. At night, in the rain… He wondered what Lieutenant Hanafusa would say if he came back and told him the squad couldn't find any Russians. Nothing good. He was sure of that.

He walked right into a tree. "Zakennayo!" he snarled. It would have been worse if he weren't wearing his helmet. He would have mashed his nose instead of scratching his cheek. Muffled-and sometimes not so muffled-curses from his men said they were having their troubles, too.

How were you supposed to walk straight when you couldn't see where you were putting your feet? Only luck nobody sprained an ankle, or maybe broke one. And the lieutenant was back somewhere warm and dry. Of course he was. He was an officer.

Then somebody bumped into him. Before he could call his own man a clumsy idiot, the other fellow growled, "Metyeryebyets!"

Fujita didn't quite know what the endearment meant. He did know it wasn't in Japanese. "Grab him, boys!" he said happily.

The Red Army man didn't want to get grabbed. Fujita hit him in the side of the head with his entrenching tool. The Russian was wearing a helmet, but it rang his bell anyhow. If he hadn't had the helmet, Fujita might have smashed in his skull. That would have been a waste of some good luck.

Hanafusa wanted a couple of prisoners. If they didn't nab somebody else… Maybe I can blame it on the rain, Fujita thought. Or maybe not. Officers looked for results. If you didn't give them what they told you to get, whom would they blame? Themselves, for giving idiotic orders? Fat chance!

And than Senior Private Hayashi whooped, "I've got another one!" By the shouts and scuffle that followed, who had whom wasn't obvious. The Russians must have sent out their own patrol, and it had blundered straight into Fujita's. Sometimes luck counted more than skill. The Japanese snagged the second Red Army man.

A Russian opened up with a submachine gun, but none of the bullets came anywhere close to the the Japanese. The Red was firing blind. "Let's get out of here!" Fujita said. He'd never had an order obeyed with such alacrity.

Japanese sentries almost fired on the patrol before Fujita convinced them he was on their side. He hadn't come in where he thought, and had to make his way back to Lieutenant Hanafusa. "All right-you got them," Hanafusa said, eyeing the battered, unshaven, miserable-looking Russian captives. "Not so bad, neh?"

If Fujita used the entrenching tool on Hanafusa's skull, they'd kill him a millimeter at a time. He knew that, but his hand twitched all the same. He made it hold still. "No, sir," he said expressionlessly.