The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (34 page)

Cheers echoed through the U-boat when the eel struck home. As soon as it did, Lemp pulled away from the convoy. The snort let him go twice as fast underwater as he could have without it. And you had to sense when you shouldn’t get greedy. There would be plenty of other chances—provided he didn’t throw himself away on this one.

HAD CORPORAL
HIDEKI FUJITA
stood any straighter and stiffer, anyone seeing him would have thought he’d been carved from wood. But would a sculptor have included a saluting mechanism of such mechanical perfection?

“Requesting permission to speak to you, Captain-
san
!” Fujita said, his voice an emotionless rasp.

Captain Masanori Ikejiri returned the salute.
“Hai? Nan desu-ka?”
He could have just told Fujita
to dry up and blow away. That he asked him what it was instead showed he didn’t despise the very ground on which the demoted noncom walked. That was something, anyway. It was more than most of Fujita’s superiors seemed willing to admit.

“Please excuse me, sir, but I am not useful here now that my bungling has made me lose face.” If Fujita was going to grovel, he’d grovel as hard as he could.
No sense to half measures, not here, not now. And he was sure groveling was his only chance to escape this humiliating situation—unless he killed himself, of course. That was always a possibility, but he didn’t want to die, not yet. “Let me serve the Empire somewhere else in some different way. Please, sir, let me go forth with my rifle and kill the Empire’s enemies.”

Ikejiri eyed him. If the
captain wasn’t from a noble family, Fujita would have been amazed. He had the air of effortless ease and style plenty of people tried to imitate, but rarely with much luck. You needed to be born to it, to take it for granted, to bring it off as you should.

He also had any Japanese officer’s uncompromising attitude. “If you fail, you must take the consequences,” he said coolly.

“Yes, sir. But
here at this place I don’t have much chance to make up
for failing,” Fujita replied. “Put me in front of the enemy, Captain-
san
, and I’ll show the Emperor what I can do.”

“There are more kinds of courage, Corporal, than the one it takes to charge a machine-gun position,” Ikejiri said.

“Captain-
san
?” All Fujita really heard was his new, reduced rank. Corporal was a grade a man should hold on
the way up to something better. Holding it again, on the way down from something better, burned like lye.

“You have to be brave, don’t you, to do your job in spite of any trouble you had?” the captain said. “Yes, other people will know what happened. But your duties here at Pingfan are still important.”

“Sir, I want to kill something!” Fujita blurted desperately. “Even the
maruta
laugh at me.”

“Hard to be laughed at by a log,” Ikejiri said in musing tones. “Can’t you make them afraid to open their mouths while you’re close enough to hear them?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And I do.” Fujita’s hands folded into reminiscent fists. “But the sons of assfucked whores go on laughing at me behind my back. I know they do.” You couldn’t pound a man into the ground for an amused glint in his eye, even if
the man was also a log. American
maruta
were too scarce and too valuable to let guards smash them around for the fun of it. Some of the bacteriologists’ experiments required subjects in good condition. Prisoners at Pingfan often got plenty to eat because of that, not the starvation rations men base enough to surrender deserved.

“Hmm.” Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “We don’t usually give men
back to the ordinary military once they get stationed here. They know too many things that are nobody else’s business.”

“I wouldn’t blab, sir! By the Emperor, I’d never say a word! Not a peep!” Fujita had been proud of knowing things about Japan’s war effort that not many people knew—even if, as a noncom off a farm, he didn’t understand much about the scientific details. Now he would gladly have
forgotten everything.

In another army, Ikejiri might have mentioned the risk of his getting captured. To do so here would have been an unbearable insult. The captain knew Fujita would rather die.

Again, he could have just told Fujita to shut up and do as he was told. Fujita had been more than half expecting that. Maybe he would have obeyed. Maybe he would have obeyed for a while and then blown
his brains out. Even he wasn’t sure. And if he wasn’t, how could Captain Ikejiri be?

Rubbing his chin again, the officer said, “How would you like to get away from this encampment for a while, Corporal?”

“Doing what, sir?”

“You know we are making weapons here—weapons to use against the Chinese and the Americans and anyone else who stands in the way of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

“Oh, yes, sir.”
Fujita nodded, remembering the ride deep into the country to test the germ bomb on the Russian
maruta
. Relief filled him. He’d feared Ikejiri would give him something worthless, something useless, to do. But finding out how to kill Chinese in carload lots sounded important.

“All right, then.” Captain Ikejiri spoke quickly now, with the air of a man who’d come to a decision. “You may do that.
We have air bases that deliver special weapons where they are needed. I will transfer you to one of those.”

“Thank you, sir! Oh, thank you!” Fujita said, all but jumping for joy. With any luck at all, the people who served on that air base wouldn’t know what kind of
bakayaro
he’d been here. One thing sure: he wouldn’t have prisoners laughing at him any more.

“Maybe you shouldn’t thank me just
yet.” Masanori Ikejiri’s voice was dry. “You will be going into more danger than you’re likely to face here. Make sure your rifle is clean and well oiled.”

“It is, sir!” Fujita assured him. “All I have to do is throw a few things in my duffel and I’m ready to leave.” He’d been eager to come to Pingfan. Now he was even more eager to get away.

“Don’t get too excited—it won’t happen quite so fast.”
The captain’s voice stayed dry. “We have to go through the proper channels, and the paperwork will take a while. But I’ll put in the transfer right away.”

Something in his tone said
right away
meant
as soon as you quit bothering me
. For a wonder, Fujita realized as much. He wanted to grab the officer’s hand and kiss it. For another wonder, he had sense enough
to see that wouldn’t do him any good.
He saluted again—a salute extravagant enough to come out of a movie and to make a drill sergeant snarl curses at him. He figured Captain Ikejiri had earned this one.

The only person he told about the upcoming transfer was Senior Private Hayashi. They’d served together for a long time, and Hayashi had, or at least showed, more sympathy than most soldiers. “Good luck,” he said. “I hope the fellow
who takes your slot isn’t too big a chucklehead.”

“Why should you worry?” Fujita said with a wry grin. “After all, you’ve had enough practice putting up with me.”

“You aren’t bad. You’ve never been bad,” Hayashi said. “You beat us when we’d earned it, but not just for the sake of showing us what a big cock you’ve got. What more could a private want from a noncom?” By the way he said it, wanting
even that much—or that little—was an exercise in optimism.

And so it was. Back before Fujita got promoted, plenty of brutal corporals and sergeants thumped him for no better reason than that their rank gave them the right. That was how things worked in the Japanese army. Fujita couldn’t imagine things working any other way.

Getting the transfer took longer than he thought it should. Only fear
that Captain Ikejiri would rescind it if Fujita bothered him kept the corporal from asking what had gone wrong. He made himself wait. He couldn’t think of many tougher things he’d done as a soldier.

At last, the precious form came through. With it came a note that said a truck would take him to Harbin. Once there, he would ride the train and then … well, it got complicated then. He’d end up in
Yunnan Province, or maybe in Burma, depending on how things went before he arrived. He couldn’t have found Yunnan on a map to save his life. He wasn’t so sure about Burma, either.

He didn’t care. He could go to the other end of the world for all the difference that made to him. More than half of him hoped he would. If nobody knew him when he finally arrived, wherever that was, wonderful. What
more than a fresh start could a man down on his luck hope for?

THEY PINNED
the Order of the Red Star on Anastas Mouradian for shooting down a Flying Pencil. He wished winning the medal would
have meant more to him. What it did mean boiled down to two things. First, he’d taken a chance and lived through it. And, second, the authorities might cut him a little more slack with the medal than they
would have if he hadn’t won it.

Sadly, he understood he couldn’t count on the second one to hold true. If the NKVD decided he was a nuisance, he’d end up in a gulag or dead as fast as the
Chekists
could arrange it. If they only wondered, the medal might make them give him the benefit of the doubt.

Well, it might.

With the war not going so well, he needed any good-luck charm he could grab. The
powers that be in the Soviet Union were like bad-tempered children. When they didn’t get their way, they threw tantrums. Bad-tempered children smashed toys, or maybe dishes. Bad-tempered Soviet commissars and their flunkies smashed people instead.

Mouradian didn’t worry about his own side more than he did about the Germans. Hitler’s minions were actively trying to kill him. The NKVD wasn’t. He
didn’t think it was, anyhow.

Still, he couldn’t help noting that, in a perfect world, he wouldn’t have had to worry about his own side at all. What? This world was imperfect? What a surprise! What a disappointment!

If this were the perfect world, or even a better world, the Nazis and their parasites wouldn’t be closing in on Smolensk. But they were, despite the Soviet armed forces’ best—certainly
most fervent—efforts to stop them. Radio Moscow tried its hardest to deny that. These days, though,
Luftwaffe
bombers could reach the USSR’s capital. Once, they’d knocked Radio Moscow off the air for several hours. Only once, but Stas didn’t take it for a good sign.

And, if this were the perfect world, or even a better one, the Soviet move against Romania would have bothered the Fascists more.
A blow against their soft underbelly … Only the underbelly turned out not to be so soft. These days, the fighting wasn’t in eastern Romania. It was in the western Ukraine. No doubt because it was, Radio Moscow mentioned it as seldom as possible.

So Stas relied on things he heard unofficially. You couldn’t always rely on such things. Then again, you couldn’t always rely on Radio Moscow, either,
though saying so, or even lifting an eyebrow at the wrong
time, could cost you your life. Unofficially, some Ukrainians were greeting the Nazis as liberators, giving them bread and salt and strewing flowers in the path of their armored personnel carriers.

Unofficially, things in the Ukraine had been very bad before the war. Soviet authorities were bound and determined to liquidate the kulak class.
And well they might have been—the richer peasants hadn’t cared to give up their land and flocks and tools and join collective farms. The authorities broke them. Nobody knew how many Ukrainians died—starved or shot—in the collectivization process. Or, if anyone did know, he wasn’t talking.

If some of the survivors didn’t act like good Soviet citizens now, whose fault was that? Theirs, of course,
or it would be if the USSR won. Then they’d look down the barrel of another round of retribution. In the meantime, maybe they were getting some of their own back.

Stas did wonder how much. He also heard unofficial things about how the Germans behaved in Soviet territory. Some of those things were hard to believe. If the Nazis acted that way in the Ukraine, they’d wear out their welcome in a hurry.
Maybe they wouldn’t be so stupid down there.

Or maybe they would. Stas wouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t as if Stalin hadn’t acted like a bloodthirsty monster enforcing his will there.

The Armenian flyer sighed after he got back to his tent. He was alone there—it was safe enough. As safe as anything could be these days, anyhow. No, when Stalin behaved like a bloodthirsty monster, he wasn’t
acting. He was showing what he really was. And so was Hitler.

Which one made the worse bloodthirsty monster? Stas was damned if he knew. The English had had an affair with Hitler and decided they would rather dance with Stalin. The French, by contrast, stayed in bed with the Nazis. So did the Poles … but they would have slept with Stalin had Hitler jumped them first.

Stas almost welcomed the
next mission. Wasn’t a clean chance of getting killed better than the muddy ocean of doubts that had filled his thoughts lately? He could make himself believe it … right up till the moment when shell fragments slammed into the Pe-2. As soon as that happened, he discovered how much he wanted to live.

The engines still sounded all right. There was no fire. He gave the instrument panel a quick,
frightened once-over. The fuel gauge stayed steady. So did oil pressure. He cautiously tried the controls. All seemed in working order.
“Bozhemoi!”
he said—with feeling. “I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.”

Another German antiaircraft shell burst close to the bomber. The Pe-2 staggered in the air, but no more clangs or rattles warned of another hit.

Ivan Kulkaanen frowned. He fiddled with his
earphones. His frown deepened. “Radio’s out,” he reported.

No one was talking in Stas’ earphones at the moment, either. Was that because no one was talking or because nobody could get through? Mouradian did some fiddling of his own. Then he eyed the set’s dials. He hadn’t done that before—he’d had more urgent things to worry about. Sure enough, every needle lay dead against its peg.

“Well, it
could be worse,” he said. “We can get back without a radio, and they’ll slap in another one or splice the cut wires or do whatever else needs doing.”