The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (18 page)

York sat in the valley formed by Codorus Creek. It was a medium-sized town: 50,000 people, or maybe a few more. It had been a brick-making center, and many of the older neighborhoods
were one brick home or apartment house after another. The public buildings and the many Gothic churches were of red brick with white trim, as if they’d come from early nineteenth-century England.

The local women’s club had arranged for her to speak at the First Presbyterian Church, a few blocks east of Continental Square. It was another Gothic brick building, built in 1789 and rebuilt in 1860.
For variety’s sake, perhaps, its brickwork was painted gray; the renovation added brownstone and wood trim. Loretta Conway, the woman who picked her up at the station, told her the graveyard next to the church held the remains of James Smith, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“That’s nice,” Peggy said.

Her nonchalance flustered the woman from York, but only for a moment. Then Mrs.
Conway turned pink. “I forgot you’re from Philly,” she said. “You’ve got more Revolutionary War stuff there than you know what to do with, don’t you?”

“Pretty much,” Peggy answered. She knew York had some, too, and she was ready to be a good sport if Loretta wanted to show it off, but the other woman didn’t. Instead, she talked—very sensibly (which meant her views matched Peggy’s)—about the need
to knock the snot out of the Japs and to keep Hitler from getting too big for his britches. She had a twenty-year-old son who’d just volunteered for the Marines. That
brought the war home for her in a way Peggy hadn’t felt since Herb got back from Over There in 1919.

“Maybe you should give the speech,” Peggy said.

“Forget it,” Loretta answered. “I go up in front of more than four or five people,
I freeze up like a block of ice.”

Peggy laughed. “Okay. You aren’t the only one, heaven knows. But whatever else they say about me, I’m not shy.”

She got her chance to prove it a little later. The church wasn’t packed, but it came close. The minister, a white-haired man named Ruppelt, introduced her. “Here is a lady who can talk about the world situation because she’s seen more of it than most
people, Mrs. Peggy Druce.”

She got polite applause as she stepped up to the lectern. “Thank you, Reverend Ruppelt,” she said. “A lot of what I saw, I wish I never did. But that’s the point about war, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening to our boys in the Philippines right now. If the Japs had been a little luckier, it might be happening in Hawaii, too. So we’ve got some work we need to take care
of. If Hirohito thinks Japan can do whatever it wants in the Pacific, FDR’s going to show him things don’t work that way.”

More applause, and more enthusiastic. Peggy warmed to her task: “When I finally did get to England, a customs man there said, ‘Welcome to freedom.’ I was glad to hear it, too. But what’s freedom worth if you use yours to take away somebody else’s? Isn’t that what England’s
doing in Russia right now? Didn’t she learn better right here in Pennsylvania in 1776? And how can you expect to stay friends with us if you’re friends with Hitler, too?”

If she’d been talking with Herb, she would have said
in bed with Hitler
. She almost did here. She thought her husband would have been proud of her because she showed restraint. You didn’t talk about sex in church.

And she didn’t
need to. The raucous clapping that followed showed people got the message even when she kept it clean. The ones with minds that ran in the same gutter as hers could gloss
in bed with Hitler
for themselves. The others … were dull, but they were here, too.

They cheered—some of them stood up—when Peggy got done. They bought bonds. They contributed to the Democrats. And they made sure she’d be on
the road a lot from now on.

Chapter 8

B
efore coming to Pingfan, Hideki Fujita had never had anything to do with Americans. The only white men he’d dealt with were the Russians who’d tried to kill him in Mongolia and Siberia, and the Russian prisoners on whom the Japanese microbiologists and biochemists experimented here.

You had to watch yourself
with Russians. They were tough, and they were sneaky. If they saw an opening, they would grab it in a heartbeat. But as long as you made sure they recognized they couldn’t get away with anything, they grew docile enough.

Pingfan held tens of thousands of Russians. Most of the men who’d surrendered around Vladivostok were marched here afterwards. Not all of them made it here—nowhere close. Fujita
had been one of the soldiers herding them along. He knew how many fell by the wayside. He also knew how fast the Japanese scientists were using them up. Still, the experimental station had plenty left.

Americans … Americans were different. They were different all kinds of ways. There weren’t very many of them. The U.S. Marines had had only small garrisons in Peking and Shanghai. A lot of the
Marines
in both places had made the Japanese kill them after war broke out between the two countries. Despite being insanely outnumbered, they’d killed a lot of Japanese, too. You had to respect men like that.

In the end, though, some of the Marines did surrender. Perhaps to pay them back for the fight their comrades put up, they got shipped straight to Pingfan. The Japanese scientists were excited
to have them. American POWs let them try to tailor germ-warfare weapons against Anglo-Saxons in particular.

Which was fine—for the scientists. Fujita and his soldiers had to ride herd on the Americans in the meantime. They had to keep them from making trouble, and they had to keep them from escaping. And Fujita didn’t need long to figure out that Americans were born troublemakers.

Russians would
escape if you gave them half a chance, too. And Chinese! No one in his right mind would trust Chinese to stay where they belonged unless you kept your eye on them every second—and they knew you were keeping your eye on them every second. Then they couldn’t behave better.

But the Americans played games with the system that Fujita wouldn’t have believed if they hadn’t been messing around with him.
The essential feature in controlling them was the count. They stood in ranks of ten, which made it easy for the guards to know exactly how many of them there were on any given morning or evening.

Or it should have made things easy. Somehow the Marines managed to convince the Japanese that there were three more of them than there were supposed to be. How? Fujita didn’t know. Obviously, they were
moving around in the ranks, but not where anybody could catch them at it.

He’d already worked out that one of the chief nuisances was a big, burly fellow named Szulc. The American didn’t understand Japanese, of course. He didn’t understand Chinese, either—Senior Private Hayashi was a smart fellow, and knew quite a bit.

“I am very sorry, Sergeant-
san
, but I think he really is ignorant and not
faking,” Hayashi reported to Fujita.

“How could he be?” Fujita asked irritably—everything about Szulc irritated him. “These Marines serve in China for years. They must learn some of the language while they’re there.”

“It seems not, Sergeant-
san
. Please excuse me, but it does.” Hayashi didn’t want Fujita working off that irritation on him.

Fujita growled like an angry tiger. A sergeant could
do pretty much as he pleased with—and to—the men under him. But thumping Hayashi wouldn’t tell him how the Americans were pulling off their stupid stunt. Neither would thumping Szulc, if nobody could understand him when he yelled as he got thumped.

Sudden inspiration struck. Fujita snapped his fingers in delight. “Some of our scientists went to the university in America,
neh?
They’ll know English,
and they’ll be able to talk to this Szulc.” He couldn’t even pronounce the round-eyed devil’s name. In his mouth, it came out something like
Shurutzu
.

“That’s right! They will!” Hayashi said. When a sergeant came up with a halfway decent idea, of course a senior private sounded enthusiastic.

“Good. Glad you think so, too.” Fujita pointed to Hayashi. “So you get one of the scientists to find
out how the Americans are doing whatever they’re doing. It’s gone on for four days now. That’s too stinking long.”

“Me? Why me?” Shinjiro Hayashi yipped, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“You’re the educated fellow,” Fujita answered remorselessly, as Hayashi must have known he would. “So go use some of your education for a change.” Fujita himself felt like an idiot whenever he had to talk to one
of the microbiologists. That, no doubt, was a feeling they did nothing to discourage.

Sighing as if to say he didn’t think life was fair, Hayashi went off to do as he was told—a definite good point in a subordinate. Fujita already knew life wasn’t fair. He’d had his nose rubbed in it again and again before he made sergeant. Life wasn’t fair now, either, but most of the time he found himself on
the other end of the stick for a change.

Hayashi eventually came back with a man who wore spectacles and a white lab coat as if they were extensions of his skin—the way, say, Fujita wore a uniform. “Here is Dr. Doi, Sergeant-
san
,” Hayashi said. “He will ask Szulc the questions you need.”

“Good.” Fujita bowed deeply to Doi, inferior to superior. “Thank you very much for your help, sir.”

“You
are welcome. I am glad to assist. I am also glad for the chance to practice my English. When you do not speak a language for a while, it gets rusty.”

Armed guards brought Szulc over to the compound. He towered over them. He’d be a rough customer in a fight. But who wanted to fight a man who’d thrown away his honor by surrendering? To Dr. Doi, Fujita said, “Please ask him how the Americans are
making the count come out wrong.”

Doi spoke English. Fujita could hear that he sounded slow and uncertain. Szulc’s reply was a quick bass rumble that couldn’t have sounded more different from the Japanese scientist’s reedy tenor if it had burst from the throat of a buffalo. Dr. Doi frowned. “He says he does not understand what I say.”

Fujita frowned, too, ominously. “Is that likely?”

“No one
will ever think I am an American, but he should be able to follow me,” Doi answered.

That was about what Fujita had expected. “All right, then,” he said, and nodded to one of Szulc’s guards. The man gave Szulc one in the side of the head with his rifle butt. Szulc yelled and staggered, but he didn’t fall over. He didn’t dab at the blood running down his cheek and chin, either. He did give Fujita
a hate-filled glare. Fujita cared nothing for that. “Please ask your question again, Doi-
san
. Please also tell him he’ll get worse if he keeps playing the fool.”

More English from the bacteriologist. Whatever Szulc said this time, it was different from before. It seemed less scornful. A rifle butt to the side of the head would do that, as Fujita had reason to know. “He says he understands now,
but he knows nothing about how the count is disarranged,” Doi reported.

“That’s funny, but not funny enough to laugh about,” Fujita said. “Tell him this, very plainly—the next time the count is out of order, we’ll kill enough Americans to set it right.”

“That would waste an important resource,” Dr. Doi protested in Japanese.

“Please tell him anyhow, sir. Let him and the others think we will
do it. That will make them behave themselves. I can hope so, anyhow.”

“Ah. All right. I understand.” Doi returned to English. Szulc studied
Fujita, as if sniffing for a bluff. Fujita gave back his stoniest stare. On his own, he certainly would kill POWs who complicated his life. Why not? It wasn’t as if prisoners of war were human beings any more. They were just … 
maruta
. Szulc muttered something.
Doi said, “He will take word of this back to camp, even though—he claims—he knows nothing of the scheme.”

“He claims,
hai
.” Fujita gestured to the guards. “Take him back.”

As usual, Fujita had two different men run the count that evening before supper. One reported the proper number of Americans, the other one Marine too few. Fujita lost his temper. He had all the Americans lie down so they
couldn’t move without being instantly noticed. He used gestures to explain to them that they’d get shot if they were noticed. This time, the count came out three men light.

“Zakennayo!”
Fujita shouted. “How long ago did they get away, and how big a start on us do they have?”

Those were both good questions. He had an answer for neither. Big, strong white men should have been conspicuous around
Pingfan. Were the locals sheltering them from the Japanese? Another good question. Fujita wasn’t sure he had an answer for that one, either, but he could make a pretty good guess.

“We need to report this,” Senior Private Hayashi said regretfully.

“I know,” Fujita answered, more regretfully still. They’d catch it for allowing an escape, and catch it again for not noticing right away. But they
couldn’t cover it up. Somebody’d blab. Even the American Marines might, to get their guards in trouble.
“Zakennayo!”
he yelled again, even louder this time.