Last Orders: The War That Came Early (20 page)

But, with the Americans at one end of that stretch and the Japs at the other, those rocks and atolls turned into important menaces to navigation. Most of them remained too small to matter to even the most megalomaniac military mind. Most, but not all. There was, for instance, the one called Tern Island.

Tern Island lay halfway between Midway and the main Hawaiian islands. It was nowhere near as big as Midway, but it was big enough to have its area measured in acres rather than square feet. It was also big enough so as not to disappear when the tide ran high.

Japan couldn’t do, or didn’t seem willing to do, anything with Tern Island (the name gave a hint about the place’s usual natives). Even Midway lay at the very end of their logistics chain. The U.S. Navy, however, had taken a shine to the place. And the United States could do things with, and to, it.

Pete McGill watched from the deck of a baby flattop as construction battalions—Seabees, the Navy called them—leveled the top of the island and built a runway on it. Four escort carriers covered the freighters that had brought the Seabees and their equipment all the way up here to the middle of watery nowhere. Shark-graceful, shark-swift destroyers covered the slow, ugly carriers.

U.S. fighters from the baby flattops flew a continuous combat air patrol above the little fleet and above Tern Island. If Jap Bettys wanted to come down and bomb the construction work, they could try. The fighters were there to make sure they didn’t have an easy time of it, though.

The powers that be had ordered Pete aboard the brand-new—but still not very shiny—USS
Block Island
for two reasons. That was how it
looked to him, anyhow. For one thing, he knew all about the five-inch antiaircraft guns that were the biggest weapons the carrier mounted on a freighter hull carried. If Japanese planes got through the CAP and attacked the
Block Island
, he could serve the gun and try to knock them down.

For another, he was a trained paratrooper now. He had the badge to prove it. He didn’t know why the Navy was building the runway on Tern Island. Nobody told a leatherneck sergeant shit like that. But he also didn’t need to be a fancy-Dan admiral with stars on his shoulder boards and with his sleeves all encrusted in gold to make some pretty fair guesses.

That most of the other Marines aboard the
Block Island
—and, he figured, most of them on the other escort carriers, too—also wore tiny, shiny metal parachutes on their chests only solidified his guesswork. Nor was he the sole Marine doing the guessing.

They didn’t have much else to do. The skipper sounded general quarters once or twice a day, just to keep people on their toes. He generally picked the most annoying times to start the klaxons hooting, too. But then, once you got to your post and you found out it was nothing but another drill, you stood down and went back to whatever you’d been doing before. And you went back to being bored.

Redistributing the wealth was against regulations, which didn’t mean the Marines—and the swabbies—didn’t do it. A deck of cards, a pair of dice: they helped make time go by. When you steamed round and round Tern Island and nothing happened, time needed all the help it could get.

A good bit of the available wealth ended up in Pete’s pocket. He’d never make a great brain. He knew that. He was rather proud of it, in fact. But he could by God play poker. He’d learned, and paid for the privilege of learning, in the small, select Marine Corps garrison in Peking. Most of the men with whom he’d served were either dead or prisoners of the Japs. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, he didn’t know what would be.

Another Marine put ten bucks in the pot after the draw. Pete took another look at his own hand: two pairs, fours and nines. He didn’t rub his chin or do anything else to show what he was thinking or even
that he was thinking. Such lapses got expensive. He just tossed in his hand. Rudy didn’t bet like that unless he held something juicier than two crappy pairs.

That was how things seemed to Pete, anyhow. A sailor called Dusty had a different opinion. He saw Rudy’s sawbuck and raised him another one. Rudy raised back. Dusty looked less happy then. He threw in another ten. “Call,” he said.

Rudy showed a jack-high flush. Dusty said something filthy. He threw down three queens. Grinning, Rudy scooped up the cash. He glanced over at Pete. “I shoulda cleaned you out, too,” he said.

“Ah, go clean under your foreskin,” Pete told him. Everybody sitting on the circle on the deck laughed. Dusty started shuffling for the next deal. Pete had nothing but garbage in his hand, so he threw it away after the ante. Winning money was good, but not losing more than you could help counted just as much.

It wasn’t that he never bet when he held nothing or raised on a busted straight. You had to do that kind of thing every so often, or you got predictable, and being predictable was death. But you also had to pick your spots, and this didn’t feel like a good one to him.

He threw away another worthless hand. He lost with three kings the way Dusty had lost with three queens. He won a little pot. Then he bet a pair of tens as if they were a straight flush. He lost that one, too. Bluffing was hard here. The guys didn’t care so much about money because they had so little to spend it on.

Win a little, lose a little, win a bigger hand, lose a couple of small ones. Then damned if he didn’t draw two to three sevens and get back a pair of deuces. Not a mansion of a full house, but a full house just the same.

If the skipper calls an alert now, I’ll strangle the son of a bitch
, he thought. He didn’t bet it the way Rudy had with his straight, with flags flying and trumpets blaring. He didn’t want to scare people off. He wanted to keep them in, so he could take more of their greenbacks. If somebody else had something pretty good, so much the better.

And somebody else did: a broad-shouldered Marine corporal named Myron. He was one of those guys who got five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. He had to shave twice a day. He raised a couple
of times more often than he should have. When Pete kept raising back, he finally suspected a trend and called.

Pete showed off the boat.
“Malakas!”
Myron said. He slammed an ace-high flush down on the steel plate. Pete gathered in the pot. If he ever got back to Honolulu, he could have himself quite a spree.

One of the things you didn’t do was walk out of the game right after you’d cleaned up. Now Pete wanted the
Block Island
’s captain to hit the switch for the klaxons. He wouldn’t mind an excuse to run to his battle station with all that lovely moolah in his front pocket. (Peking duty had also taught him to carry his money there. Putting it behind you only tempted the pickpockets, and the thieves in Peking put Americans to shame.)

He lost a hand where he had nothing to speak of, then another one where he tried to fill a straight but didn’t make it. He didn’t raise so much on that one, not when Rudy made it plain he was holding something. And he was: a full house of his own. Myron didn’t get burned so badly that time. Maybe he was learning, or maybe he just had bad cards.

Then the sirens did start screaming. Pete grabbed his helmet, hurried up to the flight deck, and ran over the planking there to the five-inch dual-purpose gun in front of the island. The gun could fight surface ships as well as planes, but if anything much more ferocious than a garbage scow attacked the
Block Island
, the baby flattop was in deep trouble.

No Jap bombers or fighters overhead: only the CAP. Another drill, nothing more. Over on Tern Island, the runway stretched. A bulldozer dumped rocks into the Pacific. Maybe that strip would end up longer than the islet, the way a carrier’s flight deck overhung the hull. Pete didn’t care one way or the other. He wondered if the poker game would start up again after the all-clear. He rather hoped it wouldn’t.

Like the
Luftwaffe
, the Red Air Force was designed to have its planes fly from dirt airstrips near the front. To the
Luftwaffe
, Russia’s
rasputitsa
came as a horrendous surprise. If Nazi troops on the ground needed air support but the Stukas couldn’t fly because they’d got stuck
in the mud, those foot soldiers would take a pounding. It happened again and again.

Of course, Soviet ground troops who needed air support during the
rasputitsa
also didn’t get it. Soviet infantry and armor generals, though, mostly knew better than to put their men in spots like that during the fall rains and the spring thaw. Mostly. Like every other army since the beginning of time, Stalin’s had its share of high-ranking donkeys.

Whether the generals knew he couldn’t fly right now or not, Anastas Mouradian understood it perfectly well. So did every other pilot and copilot in his squadron. They caught up on their sleep. They ate like pigs. Some of them helped groundcrew men work on engines and controls and other things on their planes that needed repair.

Quite a few of them drank their way through the mud time. And when a Russian drank, he didn’t drink to get a little buzz and to laugh louder than he would have sober. A Russian drank to get drunk, to drown himself in vodka.

Staying loaded for six weeks twice a year horrified Stas. He had but one liver to give for his country, and filling himself full of antifreeze like that wasn’t his idea of fun. But the Russians who did drink like that seemed to manage fine. And when the fighting started up again and they had to go back to flying, they sobered up enough to do their jobs.

But the
rasputitsa
was a lonely season for him. Being sober when most of the people around you had got wrecked wasn’t much fun. Ironically, the best companion he had was his copilot and ancient enemy, Isa Mogamedov. Whether he was a Muslim who clung to his faith’s ban against alcohol or he was simply moderate like a lot of people from the Caucasus, he didn’t make a hobby of getting shitfaced whenever he couldn’t fly.

They played chess to kill time, which wasn’t something you could do drunk. The Azeri won three or four times for every victory Stas managed to scratch out. He likely could have won more often than that. But, like any good wagon driver, he saw that the horse had to get a carrot every once in a while or it would simply refuse to go.

When they weren’t playing chess, they talked. Each flavored his
Russian with a different accent: Mouradian’s throaty, Mogamedov’s more hissing. The old imperial language was the only one they shared. They talked endlessly about the Pe-2, how to make it bomb better and how to get away when the 109s and 190s zipped through the sky like hornets.

Stas would have liked to talk about other things. One of these days, the war would end. He was starting to hope he might live through it. What kind of country would the Soviet Union be afterwards? What kind of chances would a still-young veteran find in it? Would they know true Communism at last, or would things stay more complicated?

He would have bet Mogamedov wondered about such things, too. But if the Azeri did, he said no more about them than Anastas Mouradian. You might talk about things like that with your brother. If you were a trusting soul, you might even talk about them with the first cousin who’d grown up across the street from you. Either way, you’d do it late at night, behind doors not just closed but locked, and very likely in the dark.

Talk about them with your bomber crewmate? Yes, you kept each other alive every time you pulled back the yoke and brought the Pe-2 up into the air again. That was one thing. Trusting your crewmate not to sell you out to the NKVD? That was something else again. If the Great Terror of the 1930s proved anything, it proved you couldn’t trust anybody not to sell you out.

And so they talked about cylinders and carburetors and keeping an eye on the armorers when they were loading the ammunition belts that fed the Pe-2’s machine guns. If the bastards weren’t careful, a gun would jam just when you needed it most.

Mogamedov said, “You have to make sure they’re sober when they’re putting the cartridges into the belts, too.”

“Some people do take some watching, don’t they?” Stas agreed. Neither of them said out loud that most of the groundcrew men were Russians, and that most Russians would get smashed on any day of the week that had
day
in it. Not in so many words, they didn’t. But both of them looked at the most numerous folk in the USSR from the outside. Jews also did that. It was no accident that so many men from the Caucasus
and Jews had risen to the top of the Soviet power pyramid. Outsiders were driven harder than those who had numbers on their side.

Back when the last war started, a lot of Russia’s top generals had had German blood. But that had nothing to do with competence: only with noble blood. If those Russian generals with German names had known what they were doing, Stas knew he might be flying a plane with the Tsar’s old red, white, and blue markings on it. But they hadn’t, and the Red revolution swept them all away.

Not quite out of the blue, Mogamedov said, “We
will
beat the Hitlerites. I’m sure of it.”

“Of course we will.” Stas couldn’t very well have said anything else. To doubt victory out loud was to ask for a bullet in the back of the neck; someone stupid enough to do that was too stupid to be worth anything in the gulag. The NKVD would think so, anyhow. He added, “The way the Nazis treat the lands they stole from us shows how well off we are under General Secretary Stalin.”

“It does!” Mogamedov beamed at him. “That’s very well put.”

“Spasibo,”
Stas said modestly. He felt like a man who had plenty to be modest about, all right. If it took a foreign invasion where the enemy destroyed everything he could and enslaved and brutalized everyone whose land he overran to make Stalin seem good by comparison, what kind of recommendation was that for the Soviet ruler?

But it did sound good, especially if you said it without audible irony. Stas appreciated irony in its place. He used it when he was talking about things where it wouldn’t land him in trouble: unappetizing rations, say, or anything else where anyone would grouse. Sometimes even Russians smiled when he did.