The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (25 page)

On the other hand, those scientist-officers didn’t take him
inside the enormous walled-off facility that was Pingfan’s beating heart. He didn’t know what happened to the
maruta
who went in there, not in any detail. He wasn’t interested in finding out, either. And, unless you were a scientist yourself, once you went behind those high walls, you didn’t come out again: not alive, anyhow.

For a little while, he’d feared he’d infuriated the authorities enough
to make them decide to turn him into a
maruta
. Next to that fate, a couple of beatings didn’t seem so bad.

The sergeant soon set over him, a bruiser named Toshiyaki Wakamatsu, made him remember all the reasons he’d despised sergeants before becoming one himself. Wakamatsu was loudmouthed and brutal. He fawned on officers but wouldn’t listen to anyone of rank lower than his own.

Was I like that?
Fujita wondered. He hoped not, but feared he might have been. He couldn’t ask the enlisted men from his squad. They’d never give him a straight answer, any more than he would give one to Wakamatsu. Giving straight answers was a most un-Japanese thing to
do. You told your superiors what you thought they wanted to hear. If they had any sense, they knew how to interpret what you said. If they didn’t,
their heads swelled up with all the praise you lavished on them.

Sergeant Wakamatsu had his own way of dealing with the Americans. He couldn’t talk to them, any more than Fujita had been able to. Fujita had learned that some of the Americans knew scraps of Chinese. Senior Private Hayashi spoke Chinese fluently. Fujita said not a word of that to the man now holding down his place. Neither did
Hayashi. His silence made the demoted noncom feel good. The clever senior private still felt loyal to him—or at least didn’t want to do the blowhard who’d taken his slot any favors.

Instead of talking to the Americans, Wakamatsu gestured to show what he wanted. When the prisoners didn’t catch on fast enough to suit him, he clouted them. That helped him less than he’d seemed to think it would.

“Bakatare! Bakayaro!”
he roared at the Yanks. Had he really expected them to cooperate? If he had, he was an idiot himself, even if he called them by that name. Prisoners might have lost their honor simply by letting themselves be captured, but they didn’t go out of their way to help their captors. Anyone with a gram of sense should have been able to see that.

Since Sergeant Wakamatsu couldn’t
 … Fujita did his best to stay out of the sergeant’s way. His new superior was setting himself up to crash and burn. Fujita didn’t want to catch fire when Wakamatsu did. He hardly cared if the authorities gave him back his old collar tabs.

He kept an eye on the American named Herman Szulc. Wakamatsu still hadn’t figured out that Szulc was a leading troublemaker. And Szulc had a buddy, a smaller
fellow called Max Weinstein. One look at that fellow and anyone with a suspicious mind would hear alarm bells.

Weinstein knew some Chinese. Fujita had heard him jabbering with the laborers who did the work around Pingfan that the Japanese didn’t care to do for themselves. Sergeant Wakamatsu must have heard him, too. Did Wakamatsu take any special notice? Fujita was convinced Wakamatsu wouldn’t
have noticed his own cock if he didn’t need to piss through it now and then.

“What is the American saying?” Fujita asked Senior Private Hayashi.

“When I’ve heard him, he’s been trying to get extra food from the Chinese,” the conscripted student answered.

“What do you suppose he’s talking about with them when you’re not around to hear?” Fujita persisted.

“Please excuse me, Sergeant-
san
—
I mean,
Corporal-
san
—
but how am I supposed to know that?” Hayashi sounded and looked as exasperated as an inferior could afford to do when responding to a superior’s stupid question.

But Fujita still didn’t think it was so very stupid. “Come on. Use your fancy brains,” he snapped. “Is the American a Red? Have the Chinese Reds infiltrated our labor force?”

The Japanese often worried more about Communists
in China than they did about the forces that followed Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The Communists were sneakier than the regular Chinese forces, and they made more trouble. They were committed to what they did in ways the regular Chinese forces couldn’t approach.

All the same, Senior Private Hayashi replied, “How can an American be a Red? The Yankees hate Communists almost as much as we do.”

“Maybe,” Fujita replied, in tones that declared he didn’t believe it for a minute. And he had his reasons, too: “In that case, how come they’re cheering when England stops helping Germany and starts helping the miserable, stinking Russians again?” He knew exactly how he felt about the Russians. How else could he feel, considering the too many times they’d come too close to killing him?

To his
surprise, Senior Private Hayashi had a comeback. “I think it’s because Hitler scares Roosevelt, Corporal-
san
,” he said. “Hitler scares just about everybody. He would scare us, too, if he weren’t on the far side of the world.”

“Nothing scares Japan,” Fujita declared.

“Of course, Corporal-
san
.” Hayashi might have been humoring a boy who was too little to know he’d come out with something silly.

“Nothing does, dammit,” the nettled Fujita said. “If anything scared us, would we have beaten the Red Army? If anything scared us, would we go to war against America and England at the same time as we’re fighting in China?”

Hayashi pursed his lips, as if wondering how much he might safely
say. He and Fujita had served side by side in Mongolia and Siberia before coming to Pingfan. Even so, he
chose his words with obvious care: “I hope it doesn’t happen that we bit off more than we can chew.”

“Don’t be silly! The Navy is kicking the crap out of the American fleet,” Fujita said. “The Yanks are on the run. The Philippines are falling. If the Americans want a war with us, they’ll have to fight their way through islands that belong to us.
Honto?
”

“Honto,”
Hayashi said, because it
was
true. Somehow, though, even his agreement sounded dubious.

Fujita didn’t push it. He’d lost face as well as rank; he didn’t want to antagonize someone who still seemed to respect him. He went back to what they’d been talking about before: “Do pay attention to that Weinstein. If he starts talking to the Chinamen about anything
but
food—”

“Shall I tell Sergeant Wakamatsu?” Hayashi broke in.

“Oh, yes. Of course. That’s just what you should do.” No one could claim Fujita hadn’t given the proper response. If his tone didn’t match his words … well, how could you report something like that? He and Hayashi both smiled. Yes, they understood each other, all right.

Chapter 11

B
am! Bam! Bam!
A battery of German 88mm antiaircraft guns thundered away at the Russian bombers high overhead. Willi Dernen watched puffs of black smoke appear among the planes. None of them caught fire and fell out of the sky, though. How many thousands of meters up there were they? However many it was,
they didn’t make easy targets.

Even though the gunners kept missing, Willi waved to them as he trudged past their position. He liked having 88s around. They might have been designed as flak guns, but the high mucky-mucks had made sure they could do other tricks, too. They had armor-piercing rounds in their inventory, for instance. And a high-velocity AP round from an 88 could make even a KV-1
say uncle, when the huge Soviet panzers laughed at almost every other weapon in the German inventory.

“Come on, Dernen! Get it in gear!” Arno Baatz barked.

“Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier!”
Willi answered, as abjectly as if Awful Arno were a field marshal, not a lousy corporal. He did get it in gear, too—for half a dozen paces. As soon as Baatz started yapping at someone
else, Willi slowed down
again. He hadn’t figured it would take long, and it didn’t.

“Naughty, naughty,” Adam Pfaff said in a prison-yard whisper Awful Arno would never hear.

“Ahh, your mother.” Willi’s reply was no louder. They both chuckled as they marched on. Hating the noncoms set over you was as old and as universal as soldiering. Willi was sure the Ivans’ privates couldn’t stand their corporals and sergeants,
either. He would have bet the Japanese and the Amis felt the same way. Caesar’s legionaries must have felt the same way, too. So did King David’s warriors, chances were.

When Willi told that to Pfaff, his buddy snorted. “Who cares what David’s guys thought?” said the
Landser
with the gray Mauser. “They were nothing but a bunch of kikes.”

Willi laughed, but nervously. He eyed Pfaff from under
the beetling brim of his
Stahlhelm
. Was Pfaff joking, or did he mean that? Willi had no enormous use for Jews, but he didn’t get all hot and bothered about them. He figured the Nazis’ hot air was just that and no more. Most of the soldiers in his outfit seemed to feel the same way.

Most, but not all. Some
Landsers
took all the hot air as seriously as SS men would. And some of these Russian villages
and towns were chock full of Jews. He’d watched some bad things happen. He hadn’t joined in, but he also hadn’t tried to stop anything or report anybody. Reporting, he knew instinctively, was a waste of time at best, and might land
him
in trouble. Better to look the other way.

So far as he knew, Pfaff hadn’t killed kikes for the fun of it or soaked a Jew’s beard in oil and set it on fire or done
anything else along those lines. So far as he knew, his buddy hadn’t gang-raped any Jewish—or Russian—women, either. But that was only so far as he knew. One of the things he knew for sure was that he didn’t know very far.

Artillery shells howled past overhead. Those weren’t from the 88s: they were 105s, searching for the Russians on the ground. And it didn’t sound as if any of them would fall
dangerously short. You were just as maimed if your own side’s shell blew off your leg as you were when the enemy did it to you.

MG-34s rattled, off to the northeast. Slower-firing Russian machine guns answered. Willi’s stomach knotted, the way it always did when he
got close to places where he could get hurt. He unslung his rifle and made sure he had a cartridge in the chamber. “Ready to have
some fun?” he asked.

“Aber natürlich!”
Adam Pfaff said, as gaily as if he were a girl Willi had invited to dance. But this was the
Totentanz
, and not everyone would get up after the drumbeat of death stopped.

“Let’s go! Forward! We’ll give the
Untermenschen
the hiding they’ve got coming to them!” Awful Arno shouted. He was a true believer in all the stuff Dr. Goebbels cranked out, sure as hell.
But then he said the magic words: “Follow me!”

He might be—as far as Willi was concerned, he had to be—the biggest unwiped asshole in the history of the world. If only he were yellow, that would have made the perfect finish for his personality, such as it was: a maraschino cherry on a bowl of ice cream, so to speak. But, whatever else you could say about Arno Baatz, you couldn’t call him a coward.
He was as brave as anyone could want a soldier to be, and then a little more besides.

And anyone who yelled “Follow me!” commonly found men who
would
follow. A noncom or officer laying his own life on the line got
Landsers
to do the same. Even colonels and generals led from the front in this war. People who’d gone through the mill the last time talked about how their superiors stayed kilometers
behind the line and ordered them to their doom. No more.

Those MG-34s were firing from hastily dug foxholes, not from a regular trench line. With the front so fluid, there was no regular trench line. Soldiers in
Feldgrau
crouched in other foxholes and sprawled behind scrapes that might or might not stop a bullet. Some of them got up and advanced with the newly arrived units. Others stayed right
where they were. They did lay down supporting fire for the troops moving forward. Willi gave them … some … credit for that.

A bullet cracked past his head. He threw himself flat and wriggled forward on his belly through grass tall enough to hide him from the Russians—as long as he didn’t do anything stupid like sticking his butt in the air, anyhow. Every so often, he’d go up on one knee, fire,
and then flatten out again. Nobody was tracking his movements, anyhow: the proof of which was, he didn’t get killed when he popped up.

He wondered how the Russians used this stretch of ground when no one was fighting over it. Did they graze sheep or cattle or horses on it? Or did it just lie here not doing anything? Germany didn’t have much land like that, but Russia seemed full of it. The country
was so goddamn big that, even though it had a lot of people, it didn’t have nearly enough to use all these vast sweeps of ground. This one might have been forgotten—or, for all Willi knew, maybe no one had ever paid enough heed to it to begin with for anybody to forget it now.