At the Midway (28 page)

As Jones' body was piped on board the
Brooklyn
, Lieber stood at port arms above the gangway.  The ship was crowded with photographers, who had difficulty keeping their tripods steady as choppy water from the Channel disturbed the harbor.  It was as if the ghosts of drowned British sailors were intent on one last broadside against their old foe.

Suddenly, Lieber was overcome by nausea.  He vomited roundly and loudly on the bier.

As fast as he could clean himself off, he found himself in the Marine Barracks at the Portsmouth Navy Yard.  This was sally port of the Atlantic Cruiser Squadron, which the Leathernecks had cruelly dubbed the 'Atlantic Harmless Squadron.'  He made countless marches to York Beach and back--twenty miles in full pack--and every so often he pulled OD duty.  This entailed handling and manhandling drunken sailors and marines as they staggered back from the bars in Kittery.  He never had the heart to arrest anyone.  The New Hampshire base was home to the Navy Prison, whose guards were notoriously sadistic.

The Marine Corps counted ten thousand men and officers under its banner, most of whom were stationed either on ships, at embassies, or at any one of dozens of American outposts around the world.  Portsmouth was considered a waystation, not a permanent assignment, for anyone who stopped there.  While at the Yard, he barracked in a comfortable New England
-
style building.  An Irish girl came in from Kittery to cook for the marines.  For all the forced marches and police duty, it was a life of relative luxury.  To the German, it seemed someone was softening him up for a blow.

He half-expected the orders he finally received:

The Philippines.

After Admiral Dewey defeated the Spanish at Manila Bay, the Filipinos' jubilation soured quickly when they discovered the Americans weren't liberators, but one more occupying army.  Their reaction was swift and deadly.  The Americans called it the Philippine Insurrection.  A drawn
-
out affair with a few pitched battles and innumerable ambuscades.  In 1902 it was officially declared suppressed.  But there were still skirmishes and back-alley ambushes.

For all its remoteness, the village was world famous.  During the Insurrection, C Company of the 9th Infantry had been ambushed there.  Two
-
thirds of the soldiers had been killed.  Many of those men had tried to surrender.  They'd been subjected to unspeakable tortures before being allowed to die.

The marines were sent in.  They had only one thing in mind, and they did it.  At the ensuing court marshal it became known that the marine commander had ordered his men to kill every native over ten years of age.

A war like that could not be forgotten or forgiven in the space of a few years.  When Lieber arrived there were still isolated atrocities.  The stray soldier or marine was occasionally murdered by disaffected tribesmen.  But most of them had been won over, albeit grudgingly.  Uncle Sam was investing millions of dollars in the Phillipines.  Roads, railways, bridges and telegraph lines began to crisscross the islands.  The far parts could suddenly hear and touch each other.  Power stations, schools and sewage systems sprouted in the towns and villages.  During his nine months on Samar, Lieber worked like a navvy.  He cursed the day he'd heard of the
Fall of Port Arthur
, where he had met the marines who convinced him to enlist.

While doing battle with a renegade tribe in the interior, he found himself shouldering arms alongside a Moro Muslim--one of the former, much-feared
insurrectos.
  He suddenly realized the absurdity of his occupation.  He was a German fighting for America, allied with a Moro also fighting for America, over a country that was not America's.

Malaria ended his stint.  Given massive doses of atrabine, his skin turned a rich yellow.  As if to mock his condition, the Corps transferred him to Tientsin, where he remained for a year. The marines stationed there kept themselves busy by dodging battles between the various factions of Christian and non-Christian Chinese.  When Lieber's company was withdrawn, he was sure he would finally return to his adopted homeland.

He returned to America, all right.

Midway was a territory of the United States.

Neither the Corps nor the ghost of John Paul Jones could forgive him his moment of nausea in Marseilles.  Lieber acquiesced silently.  His father had come to America to escape Prussian hauteur and indifference.  By entering the military Heinrich had, in a sense, returned to the fold.  He was philosophical enough to accept the consequences of his action.  One more stupid life-lesson to learn and put behind.  Once his term of enlistment was up, he would kiss the Corps goodbye.

There was a slight juggling at the stern.

"Flitz!  Ovuh there!"

Ace was pointing toward one of the outcrops of coral in the lagoon.  Lieber stared hard at the water between the skiff and islet, but saw nothing beyond some gooney birds bobbing aimlessly on the small waves.

Ace shrugged.  "I thought I saw one, Flitz."

"And you a fisherman...."

The Japanese drew a rueful countenance.  He frequently accompanied Lieber on his shark hunts.  He was as perplexed as the German by their sudden absence.

"Where are they?" Lieber groused.  They had not seen the tell-tale dorsal of a shark for well-nigh two days.  Unusual.  As long as he'd been on Midway, he'd never had to perform the arduous chore of chumming the water to lure sharks to the lagoon.  If a deadly hammerhead was not lurking about, there would at least be a sand shark or two.  But now... nothing.

Without forethought, he jumped into the water.

"Flitz!"

"
Verdammen Japanisch
!" Leiber cursed, raising a wet fist.  Only ten years as an American, and already his German was ungrammatical.  Most immigrants remained clustered in ethnic communities.  They handed down the language of the Fatherland to their children, while reinforcing it in themselves.  But Lieber was not only isolated from these lingual islands, he was separated from consistent language of any sort.  He'd been sent to lands where French, Spanish, Tagalog and Mandarin were spoken.  The Corps itself was a polyglot.  And the man in the boat above him was shouting in Japanese
-
-
cussing up a dung heap, for all Lieber knew.  His own speech had become a mishmash of half
-
sentences and pig
-
phrases.  That his Low German would suffer drastic erosion in the ebb and tide of foreign tongues was only to be expected.

Muffled shouts came from above as Ace fought to keep the skiff upright.  It would serve the little yellow bastard right if it overturned. 
Call me 'Flitz' one more time and I'll
push you in.

The Oriental curses vanished in the oily underwater sounds.  Lieber's spite was supplanted as the glowing wonderland of the lagoon greeted him--Midway's tiny sea, circumscribed by a five-foot high coral reef.  Rich, inexplicable aqua and emerald shadings shuddered under the uncommon blue.  Coral spiraled up from below, craggy green and jagged red.  Castles for red snappers, moray eels, lobsters, parrot fish.  Between the coral, ripples of light danced over small sand deserts, winking in and out, as full of undulating mirages as the Sahara.

It was odd how, crossing the ocean in a ship packed with émigrés, his sea sickness had fostered a deep revulsion for the sea
-
-
its waves, its interminable breadth, its smell.  Yet here, he was able to bob around like a cork with no ill effects.  Leaping in was like hopping on board a fat, warm, willing fraulein.  The lagoon a luxurious female... which almost made up for the complete absence of real women on Midway.  The immigrant ship, and the Brooklyn incident that had landed him here, were anomalies.  Modern man's way of navigating the mains was a fiction, a trumped up means of separating himself from reality.  The difference between plying the ocean and being in the ocean was the difference between sump and crisp sea.

His head broke the waves a couple dozen yards from the skiff.  Ace waved at him dourly. Leiber brought up a hand and made a slashing motion across his throat.  Interpreting this as a distress signal, Ace began rowing furiously in his direction.

Leiber shook his head, figuratively slashed his throat again, and forced a wide grin.  Ace kept coming.  Cupping his hands around his mouth, Leiber bellowed:

"If I cut my throat, maybe then the sharks will come!"

Ace did not pause.

It was humiliating.  What if someone on shore was watching?  Would they think the little yellow bastard was rushing to save the noble, brawny German from drowning?  What a hoot they would get out of that!

"If I cut my own throat, maybe then the sharks will come!"  Leiber cut across his throat several more times and laughed loudly.

"Flitz! Flitz!"  Ace nearly knocked his head off with an oar as he drew alongside of him.

Leiber chopped a slice of water with the side of his hand, sending it into the Japanese' face.

"Don't struggle, Flitz!  Here, grab this!"  Ace held out his shark grapple.

"Ah!  Ah!  No!  No!"  Leiber hit his own head in exasperation.  "If I cut my own throat, then maybe the sharks will come!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!"

"Just grab hold!  I'll pull you in!"

A series of unintelligible sounds convinced Ace that Leiber was in even worse trouble than he'd first thought.

"Grab hold, Flitz!  Grab hold!"

"Listen to me, you yellow demon!"  Leiber raised his hand, and with each of his words sent a shock of water into Ace's concerned face.   "If... I... cut... my… throat... then... maybe... the... sharks... will... come!"

"Flitz... are you drowning?"

"Nein!"

"Then what are you saying?"

"Repeat after me.  If…."

"If...."

"I cut my throat...."

"I cut my throat...."

"Then maybe...."

"Then maybe...."

"The sharks...."

"The sharks...."

"Will come...
Verstehen
?"

"We're staying?"

Leiber broke into a long string of guttural expletives Ace could not begin to follow.  He was still wearing an expression of concern and perplexity when Leiber took hold of the gunwhale and tipped the skiff over.

"Flitz!  Flitz!  Help!  I can't swim!"

Another series of gunshots could be heard from Eastern Island.

1732 Hours

"No one in the world can hold a Springfield perfectly still when it goes off.  But you plebes've got to learn to hold it still
before
you pull the trigger.  Let's try the prone again."

The squad went down on their stomachs.  A moment later there were howls of pain and anger as Sergeant Ziolkowski began walking on them, stepping from ass to ass like a boy hopping rocks in a stream.

"Jesus, Top!"

"I think you have me confused with someone else.  Now tell me the truth.  Don't you think a little damage to your manhood might improve your aim?  What was that?  Did someone call me a fucking Polack?  Well, that's better than Sweet Jesus.  I'm a fucking Polack, yeah.  I'm the worst fucking Polack of your worst fucking nightmare."

One of them rolled away to avoid being stepped on.

"Enderfall!  Get your ass back here!  You're the worst of the lot.  How the hell did you get in the Corps?"

He flexed his red chevrons and stepped away for a minute to allow their curses to subside. In fact, most of them were decent shots, due in no small part to his violation of Navy regulations. No permanent alteration of a standard issue firearm was allowed.  But Springfields were not serviceable as issued, in the sergeant's estimation.  The steel band near the muzzle held the wooden stock so tightly to the barrel that it did not allow for lengthening.  He showed his men how to pare away wood around the band so that the barrel would slide rather than bend when heat expanded it.  He also taught them how to set the trigger pull, ream the rear aperture to make it larger, and file down the bolt-stop.  He even had them blacken their gun
-
sights with candle wax.

Any of these procedures would have provided grounds for a demotion if a training camp commandant had found out.  Lieutenant Anthony knew about it, of course.  It was virtually impossible to hold any secrets in a place as tiny as this.  But he chose to ignore the improvised gunsmithing for the simple reason that he'd done the same things to his rifle years before.  This was not the national shoot at Camp Perry, Ohio, after all.  Anthony had once attended the Governor's Match to watch rifle teams from the Army, Navy, National Guard and Marine Corps test their skill against each other.  Rules for the match were provided by the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, and they were strictly enforced.  There had been a great scandal when the Navy's midshipmen, who'd scored highest, were disqualified when it was discovered they had applied their emery clothes in places they shouldn't have.  But the rules themselves were the scandal.  You did not teach men how to survive on the battlefield by forcing them to comply with unnatural strictures.  One did not fight a modern battle wearing dress gloves.