The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (60 page)

“We must hold the enemy in place. The country is in danger,” Stalin went on. “Every wrecker and traitor we capture must and shall face the most severe punishment.”

Around Mouradian, heads in the squadron ready room solemnly bobbed up and down. Stas made himself nod, too, so as not to seem out of place. Anyone who paid attention to what he read and heard followed more than the mere words blaring out of the radio speaker.
The most severe punishment
was a government euphemism for execution, commonly by bullet in the back of the neck. And, by
every wrecker and traitor
, Stalin meant everyone who disagreed with him, even in the slightest or most trivial way. The show trials and purges before the war proved that.

“We shall fight for the
Rodina
! We shall fight for holy mother Russia!” Stalin declared. “Alexander beat Napoleon! Peter the Great beat the Swedes! We beat the Teutonic Knights—filthy, plundering Germans—when
they
invaded us! And our cause, the Russian cause, is just again! We will win again!”

Several of the flyers in the ready room banged their hands together and burst into cheers. The ones who did were Russians to a man.

As for Mouradian, he had to fight the impulse to dig a finger into his ear and see if the canal was clogged with wax. Stalin had mentioned the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union in his speech. He’d mentioned them, yes—and then he’d proceeded to forget all about them. Instead, he’d used as many symbols from Russian history as he could find. Not Soviet history—Russian. Stas had never dreamt he would hear a Soviet leader talk about holy mother Russia.

That Stalin himself was no more Russian than a Kazakh or an Uzbek obviously bothered the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR not at all. Holy mother Russia didn’t mean much to Stas Mouradian. That wouldn’t bother Stalin, either. Armenia was only a little place, jammed into the bottom left-hand corner of most maps. The vast expanse of Russia
was
the map.

Martial music thundered out of the radio. It wasn’t martial music Stas had heard before, which meant exactly nothing. Stalin had factories from here to Khabarovsk cranking out planes and tanks and guns and uniforms as fast as they could. He had swarms of collective farms cranking out food as fast as they could (and if he had to starve millions of people to force more millions to labor on those farms, he’d proved he would do that without batting an eye). Of course he would have conservatories full of composers cranking out martial music as fast as they could. If the composers didn’t feel like serving the Soviet Union that way, what would they do then? They’d start
de
composing, that was what.

And the crazy thing was, the martial music worked. By the time the piece finished, Mouradian wanted to belt somebody in the chops—by choice, somebody in a field-gray uniform and a coal-scuttle helmet. He understood that he was being manipulated. Understanding it and being able to stop it were as different as tea and tobacco.

The squadron CO was, not surprisingly, a Russian. The Soviet Union held as many Russians as all its other peoples put together. And the USSR had sprung up like a flower fertilized by the Russian Empire’s corpse (some would say, like a vulture feeding on the Russian Empire’s corpse, but not—usually—Mouradian). It was no surprise that Russians still ran so much of the USSR. Depressing, sometimes, but no surprise.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky waited till the last strains of the brand-new martial composition had faded away. Then he stood up and said, “You all heard Comrade Stalin’s brilliant speech. He promised the Soviet people victory. We are going to deliver that victory, Comrades. We are going to use our wonderful new airplanes—the finest products of Soviet science and engineering—to show the Fascist hyenas and their plutocratic lackeys hell on earth. Less than the sons of bitches deserve, too.”

As the flyers had nodded for Stalin, so they nodded for the squadron leader. Anastas Mouradian made sure he wasn’t behindhand there. All the same, he got the feeling Tomashevsky hadn’t listened to the General Secretary so closely as he might have. Tomashevsky talked about the Soviet people, about Soviet science and engineering. That had been the Party line for a long time. By the way Stalin talked today, though, the line was changing. Stalin talked about Tsar Alexander and Peter the Great, about
Russian
victories over invaders from the west.

Stas had heard rumors that people in the northwestern Ukraine were welcoming the Germans and their allies as liberators. He didn’t know if the whispers were true. But anyone who repeated a story like that took his life in his hands. Stas did know the Ukrainians had little reason to love Stalin or the Soviet government, not after the way they were starved by hecatombs during collectivization. After that, even the Nazis might look good by comparison.

“Today, we fly against Velikye Luki,” the squadron commander continued. “The Poles and the French are staging through there, building up for an attack farther east. Our mission is to strike the train station and the railroad yards.” He paused, then asked, “Questions?”

“What are the German defenses like, Comrade Colonel?” Mouradian said. Even if the Poles and French were coming through Velikye Luki, the fighters above the place and the antiaircraft guns inside would be operated by Germans. He was as sure of that as made no difference.

Tomashevsky only shrugged. “It does not matter. We are to strike the city regardless.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian replied. Maybe the squadron commander had no idea what was waiting for them. Or maybe the Germans were loaded for bear. Before long, everybody would find out which.

Even if the
Luftwaffe
had Bf-109s patrolling over Velikye Luki, Stas knew he might get away anyhow in a Pe-2. He wondered how Sergei Yaroslavsky and the Chimp were doing in that ancient SB-2. Pretty soon, with any luck at all, they’d start flying the more modern bomber, too.

After his bold question, the mission turned out to be … a mission. Bf-109s did fly above occupied Velikye Luki, but not in swarms. There was a lot of ground fire, but there wasn’t a
lot
of ground fire. He watched in dismay as one bomber in the formation fell out of the sky and cometed groundward trailing flame and smoke. A couple of shell fragments clanged against his plane’s aluminum skin, but they did no damage he could find.

At Ivan Kulkaanen’s command, Sergeant Mechnikov let the bombs fall free. Stas could only hope they landed on the target or close to it. Bombing from 6,000 meters was not an exact science. You aimed them as best you could, you dropped them, and you got the hell out of there. Stas had sat in Kulkaanen’s seat. He knew how hard the job was. Once you landed, you made the after-action report sound good. That was also part of the job. Yes, another mission, all right. And how many more still to come?

HARBIN HELD ENOUGH
Japanese settlers to keep a daily newspaper in business. Copies came down to Pingfan, sometimes on the day they were printed, sometimes the day after. The local rag would never run the
Yomiuri Shinbun
out of business, but Hideki Fujita read it avidly just the same. Along with the radio, it helped remind him that there was a world beyond Shiro Ishii’s bacteriological-warfare camp.

He needed the reminder, too. When you dealt with
maruta
every day, when you sent them into the secret center compound and they never came out again, you really did start thinking of them as logs. The other choice was remembering that they were human beings, even if they were Russians or Chinese. Considering the kinds of things that happened to them in there (Fujita neither knew nor wanted to know the details: the broad outlines were more than bad enough), they would have been better off if they were made of wood.

The local paper was full of a rising tide of abuse aimed at the United
States. Whoever wrote the stories roared out hatred against the country across the Pacific for refusing to sell Japan any more of the raw materials she needed.
Roosevelt thinks he can bring us to our knees through economic warfare
, an editorial declared.
He has yet to learn that the Empire of Japan goes to its knees before no man and no nation. He has yet to learn this important fact, but we Japanese stand ready to teach him the lesson
.

Shinjiro Hayashi read the newspaper, too. He was less enthusiastic about what he found in it than Fujita was. “Are you ready to fight another war so soon, Sergeant-
san
?” he asked. “We just patched up a peace with Russia, and the war with China goes on and on.”

“War with the United States isn’t our worry,” Fujita answered. “The sailors will carry the load on that one.”

“Some of it, sure, but not all of it,” Hayashi said. “The Philippines sit just south of the Home Islands, and who runs them? The Americans, that’s who. If war breaks out, we’ll have to take them away from the USA. Otherwise, they’re a perfect base for enemy ships and planes. And it won’t be the sailors who do most of the fighting down there. It’ll be bowlegged bastards like us.”

Fujita laughed. Neither he nor Hayashi was bowlegged, but he knew what the senior private meant. The Navy was the aristocratic service. The Army took peasants and turned them into men. It had done just that with Fujita. It had turned Hayashi into a man, too, even if he’d put on more airs than peasants before conscription—and some sergeants’ hard hands—knocked them out of him.

“All right. Fine. That’s the Philippines,” Fujita said. “But it will still mostly be the Navy’s war.”

“I suppose so, Sergeant-
san
,” Hayashi said, by which he meant he supposed no such thing but wasn’t stupid enough to come right out and tell Fujita he was wrong. “But if a fight like that starts, it won’t be a halfway affair. French Indochina, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with oil and rubber and tin … When you grab, you should grab with both hands.”

“If you grab too much, your hands fill up and you trip over your own feet,” Fujita responded. “There’s such a thing as getting greedy, you know.”

“I suppose so,” Hayashi said again. “But sometimes you only get the
one chance. If you don’t take hold of it while it’s there, you may never see it again. It’s like a chance with a pretty girl,
neh
?”

“You always grab with both hands then!” Fujita made as if to cup breasts in his callused palms. Both soldiers barked harsh male laughter.

A couple of days later, Lieutenant Ozawa summoned Fujita to his tent. He had a little coal stove in there for warmth, but it was fighting out of its weight against winter in Manchukuo. “I need your squad to take care of something for me,” the officer said.

“Yes, sir!” Fujita said, and saluted. He had no idea what Ozawa would tell him to do. That hardly mattered. Whatever it was, he and his men would take a whack at it. If the lieutenant wanted him to bring back a piece of rock from the moon, he wouldn’t fail through lack of effort.

But Ozawa had nothing so ridiculous in mind. “Take as many Russian and Chinese
maruta
as you need,” he said. “Build a new prisoner compound. Site it at least fifty meters away from any others. Make it of a size to hold, oh, about a thousand men.”

“Yes, sir!” Fujita repeated. For good measure, he saluted again, too. This was something he knew how to handle. “How soon do you need it ready?”

“Three weeks should be plenty of time,” the lieutenant answered.

Fujita considered. “That’ll be a little tight, sir, for running up all the barracks halls and everything. The weather won’t help us any.” If he didn’t get the job done on time, he wanted his excuses lined up in advance.

“You take care of it,” Ozawa said. “You don’t want me to assign the work to someone else, do you?”

Part of Fujita wanted just that. But if he admitted it, he wouldn’t get any other interesting work as long as he stayed at Pingfan. Not interesting in the good sense of the word, anyhow. They might give him things no one else wanted to do or was able to do, and then blame him when he had trouble. That wouldn’t be good. And so, with no hesitation the officer would notice, he replied, “No, sir.”

“All right, then. Three weeks. See to it,” Ozawa said. “Dismissed.”

Fujita didn’t even mutter under his breath till he left the tent and the lieutenant couldn’t hear him any more. You didn’t want to give the jerks
who ordered you around any kind of handle to let them screw you even harder. They already had enough advantage on account of their rank.

He told Senior Private Hayashi about the new assignment and directed him to gather up the labor they’d need to construct a new compound. Hayashi might have had his own opinion about people whose rank let them give orders. If he did, he also had the sense not to put it on display.

Laying out the barbed-wire perimeter around the new compound was easy. Any
maruta
could handle it, because it needed no skill. But the barracks required people who could use hammer and saw, chisel and plane. The prisoners clamored for the work, because they knew they’d get fed a little better while they were doing it. They also wouldn’t have to go into the secret inner facility while they were working. Hayashi efficiently weeded out the ones who were only pretending to be carpenters. He and the other Japanese soldiers beat up some of them to teach them not to play stupid games with their betters.

Chinese and Russians, forced to work together, screamed and gestured at one another, trying to communicate without a common language. Hayashi knew a little Chinese; no one in Fujita’s squad spoke Russian. He had drawings to show what he required. Those pictures were worth an untold number of words. The barracks rose on schedule.

The next interesting question was, who would live in the new compound? When new shipments of Chinese came to Pingfan, they got dumped in with their countrymen. Those barracks grew insanely crowded? So what? The same had been true of the Russians, though no new Red Army men were coming in now that peace with the Soviet Union had been arranged.

Didn’t a new compound argue for a new kind of prisoner? So it seemed to Fujita. Lieutenant Ozawa either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. You couldn’t properly grill officers, however much you wanted to: one more proof that they weren’t good for much.