The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (57 page)

“They’re a pack of criminals, nothing else but,” the shore patrolman retorted. “If you don’t calm them down, they’ll get courts-martial for making a mutiny. That’s a capital crime.” By the way he spoke,
he thought the U-30’s men deserved no better than a blindfold and a cigarette.

“Take me to them,” Lemp said. He had to pay close attention to where he put his feet when he followed the shore patrolman out of the officers’ club.

It was cold outside, cold and dark. The northern lights’ wavering curtains danced in the sky, now red, now gold. Lemp spared the aurora
a glance, no more. It wasn’t as
if he didn’t see it on a lot of frigid winter nights.

He could have found the fighting without his guide. Men were yelling and screaming. Whistles blew frantically. Things broke—often, by the sound of it, over somebody’s head. Two shore patrolmen dragged a wounded buddy from the fray. “Making a mutiny,” the man with Lemp repeated grimly.

“They’re just drunk and disorderly, and they hate this
miserable place,” the U-boat skipper answered, hoping he was right. If the lads had got the bit too far between their teeth, they’d be in big trouble in spite of anything he could do. To try to convince himself things were as he wanted them to be, he added, “I do, too. Who wouldn’t?”

“You weren’t smashing up the officers’ club when I found you, though … sir,” the shore patrolman said. Lemp judged
a discreet silence the best response to that.

From out of the gloom ahead came a shout: “Halt! Who comes? Friend or foe?”

It wasn’t the kind of challenge the shore patrol would issue. Not only that, Lemp recognized the voice of the rating doing the shouting. “It’s me, Willi—the skipper,” he called back. “Playtime’s over. You boys have had your fun—and you’ve made your point, too.”

He waited.
If Willi and the other sailors rejected his authority, they really were on their way to military courts and the brig, if not worse. Several men up there argued back and forth. When the chain of command broke, you had to figure out who had authority. At last, Willi said, “Well, come ahead, sir. You can help us pick up the pieces.”

“Enough is enough,” Lemp said as he advanced, trying to pour oil
on troubled waters.

“Enough is too much,” the shore patrolman beside him put in, trying to make a bad situation worse. Lemp contrived to step on the man’s foot.

As had been true the last time things went arsey-varsey, not all the brawling sailors came from the U-30. But the rioters had done a more thorough job of tearing Narvik to pieces this time around. They weren’t brawling for the fun of
it; they were brawling because they were furious about what passed for a base up here in the frozen north. Lemp did
sympathize, but he had to hope very hard that they hadn’t got themselves in too deep.

“If you give it up now, you probably won’t land in too much trouble. You’re good fighting men, and the
Reich
needs you for the war effort,” he told them. “But if you push it even a centimeter further,
they’ll land on you hard. You haven’t just pissed them off this time. You’ve scared them, and that’s worse.”

“They treat us like shit when we come in from a patrol, they’d better be scared,” growled a sailor from another U-boat. But the fight had gone out of the men. They’d made their point. There wasn’t much else they could do, not here at the frigid end of nowhere. They gave it up. Lemp headed
back toward the officers’ club, hoping the argument he’d used with the sailors would also work on their superiors—and his.

HIDEKI FUJITA LOVED
being a sergeant again. He was
meant
to have two stars on each collar tab—he thought so, anyhow. And Unit 113 was a much smaller outfit than Unit 731 had been. That made him seem a much bigger frog.

Unit 113 was also a much less experimental place than
Unit 731 had been. Here, they went out and did things. That suited Fujita fine, too. He was no big brain, and knew he never would be. But when somebody pointed him at a job, he would take care of it.

Not only that, he had a knack for getting the most out of the men under him. He’d knock them around when they deserved it, but he didn’t give them bruises for no better reason than to show his cock
was bigger than theirs. As long as they hopped to it, they didn’t need to worry about him.

They went on spreading disease through Yunnan Province. If the Chinese died from the plague and from cholera, they wouldn’t be able to do so much with the military equipment England sent them. Even more to the point, if the Chinese feared they would die from those dreadful diseases, their panic helped Japan
at least as much as real illness would.

Major Hataba assembled the men in the unit to say, “We have received an official commendation from the Imperial War Ministry in
Tokyo for our contributions to victory in China.
Banzai
for the Emperor!”

“Banzai!”
the soldiers shouted, Fujita loud among them.
“Banzai!”

Hataba did not remind the men of Unit 113 that he’d also wanted to use bacteria against
the English in India. No doubt he was doing his very best to forget all about that. Fujita remembered it, but not very often. It hadn’t happened, so it didn’t matter. Everyone was better off
not
remembering a plan that hadn’t come to fruition.

It wasn’t as if the Japanese didn’t have other things to think about. Fujita came from Hiroshima, in the south. Winters in Mongolia, Siberia, and Manchukuo
had left him horrified and amazed. What was alleged to be the approach of winter in Burma left him horrified and amazed, too, but not the same way.

“Eee!”
he said to another sergeant. They were drinking warm beer together; there was no other kind of beer to drink. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about hot, sticky weather. But this makes the worst August in Hiroshima feel like February.”

“Hai.”
The other man nodded. His name was Ichiro Hirabayashi. He was a career noncom; he’d spent his whole adult life in the Imperial Army. Nothing seemed to faze him much. “Your clothes rot. Your boots rot. You start to rot, too. I’ve learned more about ringworm and jock itch and athlete’s foot and all that crap than I ever wanted to know since I got here.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Fujita
said dolefully. “I had jock itch so bad, I thought I’d got a dose from one of the comfort women in Myitkina.”

Hirabayashi laughed at that. Fujita didn’t think it was so funny. A medical assistant had given him some nasty-smelling ointment to smear on his privates. It helped some. It wasn’t a cure, though. He still itched in all kinds of places where he couldn’t scratch without being crude.

The other sergeant drank more beer. In reflective tones, he said, “I hate this miserable place, you know? I hate the weather. I hate the rot. I hate the bugs. I hate the sicknesses. I hate the Burmese, too.”

“What’s wrong with the Burmese?” Fujita asked. He could see why Sergeant Hirabayashi hated everything else about Burma.

“They’re lazy. They’re shiftless. They’re thieving. They don’t talk
any language a civilized man can understand.” Hirabayashi spoke with great
conviction. A British colonial administrator pouring down gin and tonics in Mandalay a year earlier might have said the same thing, even if he would have said it in English rather than Japanese.

“Well, besides that?” Fujita said.

He set Hirabayashi laughing again. “You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you?” the older man said.
“That’s good. You get up into Burma’s asshole the way we are and there’s not a hell of a lot to laugh about.”

“It’s war.
Shigata ga nai, neh
?” Fujita said.

Sergeant Hirabayashi nodded. “No, you can’t do a damn thing about it—except drink when you get the chance.” He suited action to word.

So did Fujita, who said, “One good thing, anyhow. At least the RAF doesn’t bomb us here. When I fought
the Russians in Siberia, they were always trying to drop stuff on our heads. That wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Can’t say I miss it.”

“All right. There’s something,” Hirabayashi admitted. “But I’ll tell you, it’s not much.”

“I won’t argue.” Fujita poured himself another mug of beer and downed it, and then another one after that.

He woke the next morning with a headache that pounded behind his
eyes like a piledriver. Strong tea did next to nothing to fix it. One more mug of beer helped some. The headache dulled, even if it didn’t disappear. Shouting at conscript privates let him work off more of his discomfort. He wasn’t especially proud to remember that the next day, but consoled himself with the thought that he hadn’t slugged anybody.

Odds were Sergeant Hirabayashi wouldn’t have
been so fussy. Noncoms like Hirabayashi would have led Japanese troops into action in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. Back in samurai days, men like him would have been loyal retainers to their overlords, even if they wouldn’t have worn collar tabs back then.

If I stay in the Army as long as he has, will I end up like that?
Fujita wondered. He didn’t want to be a career noncom. He
wanted to go back to the family farm and spend the rest of his days there. If he never saw another rifle or another porcelain bomb casing full of germs, that suited him fine.

No matter what he wanted, though, the Army wouldn’t turn him loose till the war ended, if it ever ended. And even after he escaped its
clutches, he sometimes wondered uneasily how he would fit down on the farm. He wasn’t
the person he had been before conscription got him. He was harder, tougher, less patient. He’d seen more of the world than he’d even imagined while he was still a civilian. He didn’t like a lot of what he’d seen, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, his horizons had broadened. A farm off in the middle of nowhere was likely to seem a farm off in the middle of nowhere, not an unquestioned home
for the rest of his life.

He didn’t know what he could do about that. No, actually he did know; he couldn’t do anything about it. Now that he’d seen the wider world, he couldn’t very well forget about it, even if he wished he could.

His father had carried a rifle in the Russo-Japanese War. Had he felt some of the same thing after he came home again? If he had, he’d managed to stifle it. Or maybe
he’d just never talked about it with his family. He must have realized they wouldn’t understand.

I do now
, Fujita thought. Young men all over Japan would understand after the war. The country would be different then, because they’d changed. How it would be different, Fujita wasn’t sure. But it would be.

Of course, not all of Japan’s young men in uniform would go home again. Fujita wasn’t thinking
about the ones who would die in battle. Their spirits would return to the Home Islands, to live forever at the Yasukuni Shrine. But, after the war was done, how many soldiers would Japan need to protect her conquests in China and Russia and the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and the East Indies?

Did Japan have that many soldiers? Could she maintain them without ruining herself? Fujita was
tempted to laugh at himself. How could he know, when he was just an ignorant peasant bumped up to sergeant? He was surprised even the question had occurred to him.

Then he wondered if it had occurred to the people who were supposed to worry about such things. That, though, was another kind of question altogether.

SARAH BRUCK SOON SETTLED
into the routine of marriage and of bakery work. If not
much time seemed available for romance, well, she was
usually too busy to miss it. And romance during wartime, at least for a Jew in the
Reich
, was a pallid, harried thing to begin with.

She did eat better than she had when she was living with her parents. But, when she wasn’t too tired, she missed the talk at their house. All the Brucks ever talked about was baking. Sarah treasured the weekend
visits she and Isidor made. She was glad they intrigued her husband, too. He sensed a wider, deeper world there than the one he was used to at home.

She didn’t treasure the air raids. As nights got longer, the RAF came over Germany more and more often. Münster, in the far northwest near the Dutch border, took more than its share of pounding: it lay within easy range of England, and bombers didn’t
need to fly through French airspace to reach it. Sarah could have done without the honor.

Fear iced through her every time the sirens’ screams jerked her headlong out of sleep. The Brucks had no proper shelter to go to, no more than her parents or any other German Jews did. They—and Sarah—huddled downstairs, between their shop counter and the ovens. That gave them some protection if a bomb hit
above them. If one blew up in the street outside, though … She resolutely refused to worry about that. If it happened, odds were she’d be too dead to do any more worrying, anyhow.

Her father gave forth with a gravedigger’s good cheer when she and Isidor visited after a raid. “Here for a while I thought they were going to throw me off the labor gang for lack of work,” Samuel Goldman said, his
eyes twinkling even though he had dark bags under them. “But we’ve had plenty to do lately.”

“I’ll bet you have!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been terrible.”

“An awful lot of houses knocked to smithereens,” Isidor agreed.

“Well, so there are.” Sarah’s father didn’t sound so cheery when he said that. He paused to light a cigarette. For a moment, Sarah took that for granted—but only for a moment.
He didn’t roll the smoke himself, with newspaper for a wrapper and tobacco scrounged from other people’s dog-ends. No: this one was machine-made, whole and new. Seeing her stare, he nodded. “We clear the wreckage, you know. Whatever we find that we can carry away, we keep. I’m not what you’d call proud of it, but I do it just like everybody else.”

“Good for you!” Isidor answered before Sarah
could. “If that’s the only choice you’ve got, you have to take it.”

“That’s what I tell myself.” Samuel Goldman nodded again. “I scavenged the same way in the trenches when we went forward. The French and the Tommies always had so much more than we did. We ate better after every advance. Mother and I are eating a little better now, too. But it feels different when you’re scavenging from the neighbors,
not the enemy.”