The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (36 page)

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled.
German
guns
, Luc thought, recognizing the reports. He was glad those 105s would come down on the Ivans’ heads, not on his. Of course, the Red Army had plenty of artillery of its own, but getting shelled by the
Boches
still struck him as the definitive experience.

“So what’s the crazy shit?” He tried to keep his voice as casual as he could.

“It’s political, that’s what.” Demange couldn’t have sounded
more disgusted if he were talking about syphilis. “You’re not one of those crazy Reds, or I wouldn’t say boo to you. But you don’t wish you were wearing a German helmet, either.”

“I should hope not! Those fuckers are heavy.” Luc had handled them plenty of times, dealing with dead or captured Fritzes. He preferred the lighter Adrian helmet he had on right this minute. But that was beside the point.
“What do you mean, political?”

“If you had your druthers, who would you rather fight, Hitler or Stalin?”

“If I had my druthers?” Luc echoed. Demange nodded. Luc spoke without the least hesitation: “If I had my druthers, sir, I’d take off this uniform and burn it. Then I’d go home and try and forget everything that’s happened to me the past going on three years.”

“
Salaud!
You don’t get that
many druthers. The Nazi or the Communist? Who’s in your sights first?”

He was serious. Seeing him serious made Luc think it over harder than he’d expected to. At last, he said, “The Germans live right next door. That makes them trouble no matter who’s in charge in Berlin.
When it’s a
cochon
like Hitler … I mean, Stalin’s no bargain, either, but he’s way the hell over here. The
Boches
are the
ones who can really do us in.”

“There you go! I knew you weren’t as dumb as you look,” Lieutenant Demange said—praising with faint damn, certainly, but praising even so. “That’s how it looks to me, too.”

“But so what, Lieutenant? Here we are in the middle of Russia. If we don’t go after the Ivans, they’ll sure kill us.”

Demange got rid of another dead Gitane. This time, he gave Luc one after
lighting up himself—another sign he was pleased. “Suppose a little bird told you they’re quietly working on stretching the Maginot Line from the Belgian border all the way to the Channel?”

“Where’d you hear that?” Luc asked. If Demange met a little bird, he’d clean it and pluck it and roast it, preferably stuffed with mushrooms.

“Never mind where. What you don’t know, nobody can squeeze out
of you.” Demange might have been talking about interrogation by the enemy, not by his own side. He went on, “What you do need to know is, this isn’t somebody who talks out his asshole. Or I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Huh,” Luc said, and then, “What do the Germans say about that?” One of the big reasons the Nazis had invaded France by way of the Low Countries was that they hadn’t wanted to bang
their heads against the works of the Maginot Line. France had figured Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg would make shield enough. Now that France knew better …

“If the Germans know what we’re up to, they haven’t said anything about it,” the veteran replied. “That’s what I hear.”

“Huh,” Luc said again, more thoughtfully this time. “Why aren’t they screaming their fool heads off? Quiet Nazis?
It sounds unnatural.”

Demange rewarded him with a twisted grin. “It does, doesn’t it? Here’s the best answer I can give you: I don’t know why. If I was Hitler, me, I’d be having kittens.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Luc agreed. If somebody who showed he’d gone over to your side by sending several divisions to help you fight your other enemies suddenly started strengthening his border against you,
you had
to have something wrong with you if you didn’t wonder why. Didn’t you?

Luc looked around. Yes, he was glad none of the other soldiers could overhear them. “So what happens now? Do we cross over to the Russians’ side of the line the way the Tommies did? Or do we wait till somebody counts three and then turn our guns on the
Boches
? I mean, I wouldn’t mind, but.…”

“What happens now? We keep on
doing what we’ve been doing till somebody with clout tells us to do something else. Then we fucking well do that instead.” Demange paused, considering. “And you never heard word one about this crap from me, understand? Try and say anything different and you won’t live to enjoy it.”

“I’m no rat,” Luc said, genuinely affronted.

“Yeah, yeah. I know that. I wouldn’t’ve said anything at all if I
thought you were,” Lieutenant Demange replied. “But this is dynamite. You’ve got to remember it’s dynamite. Otherwise you’ll get your hands blown off, and you’ll be standing there bleeding and wondering what the hell happened to you.”

A Russian machine gun opened up, not close enough to worry about. A few seconds later, a French machine gun answered. Maybe the diplomats were doing mysterious
things behind the scenes. The men who fought and died were still fighting and dying.

Demange listened to the dueling murder mills with his head cocked to one side and that wry grin still on his face. “It’s all
merde
, you know,” he said. “Every goddamn bit of it.”

“Uh-huh.” Luc nodded. All he wanted was to keep from getting ground between the gears. He’d managed so far. Another Russian machine
gun started firing. Pretty soon, the artillery would join in. How long could he stay lucky?

BE CAREFUL
what you ask for. You may get it
. Hideki Fujita must have heard that before he requested a transfer away from Pingfan. Sadly, though, it hadn’t stuck. And Captain Ikejiri had wasted no time in ridding the bacteriological-warfare unit of someone who’d screwed up.

When Fujita heard he was being
transferred to Yunnan province,
he’d assumed he would travel down through China to wherever the devil Yunnan was. As things turned out, the province lay in the far, far south, on the border with Burma. He couldn’t simply hop on a train and go there, because Japanese control in China stopped well north of the area.

No, things weren’t that simple. The train took him from Harbin to Shanghai. From
there, he took a ship to Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, newly seized from the British, he had to wait two days for a plane to Hanoi, newly taken from the French. After another flight, he landed at the airport in Mandalay: Burma, too, had belonged to England till the war got rolling. Then he took the train up to Myitkyina, near the Chinese border.

The train trip was an adventure all by itself. Even
before the fighting started, the line must have been an afterthought of empire. During combat, English soldiers had sabotaged it here and there. And the Japanese broom of conquest hadn’t come close to sweeping clean. Englishmen with rifles and mortars still roamed the countryside. So did Burmese bandits. Fujita fired out the window several times. He wasn’t always sure at whom he was shooting. He didn’t
much care, either. Nobody who was shooting at him was likely to be friendly.

Myitkyina lay in the middle of steaming jungle. Snow-capped mountains corrugated the horizon to the east and north. Signs at the train station were written in characters he couldn’t read. He grabbed the first Japanese soldier he saw and asked—almost begged—to be taken to the local army headquarters.

Since the soldier
he grabbed was only a private, the fellow couldn’t tell him to get lost. He didn’t look happy, though. “Well, come on, then,” he said gruffly. Four other Japanese soldiers who’d got off the train with Fujita eagerly followed. They seemed just as lost and confused as he was.

Not surprisingly, the functionaries who made Southern Army go had claimed the best hotel in town. It was a fourth-rate copy
of a third-rate hotel in a second-rate city in some happier English colonial possession. Getting shelled in the conquest did nothing to improve it. The clerks there rapidly dealt with the other newly arrived Japanese soldiers. Each of those men had a slot, and they fit him into it. No one seemed to have any idea what to do with Fujita.

“From the Kwangtung Army? From Manchukuo? To here?” A senior
sergeant shook his head in disbelief. “
Eee!
Someone’s played a dirty trick on you, Corporal, or maybe on us.”

“You don’t have any records that show where I’m supposed to go?” Fujita asked.

“You might as well have fallen from the moon. For all I know, you did.” The sergeant seemed to think he was a funny fellow.

“But that’s crazy.” If Fujita sounded desperate, it was only because he was. They
not only didn’t have a slot for him, they didn’t even have a board with slots to find out where he fit. And here he was, lucky not to have got killed before he made it to this miserable place. He’d thought Captain Ikejiri was doing him a favor. Ikejiri must have hated his guts.

“Well, let’s try a different angle,” the sergeant said. “What did you do when you were in Manchukuo?”

Before Fujita
could answer, several more soldiers from the train found their way to the hotel. The military bureaucrat dealt with them and seemed to forget about Fujita. The other soldiers were easy. He wasn’t. And he had to be careful about what he said. “Well, before I got here I served in Colonel Ishii’s unit,” he replied when the senior sergeant had time for him once more.

“Zakennayo!”
that worthy exclaimed.
“Who in blazes is Colonel Ishii? What does his damned unit do—besides sending people all over the Co-Prosperity Sphere, I mean?”

Fujita wondered how he should answer that. He feared he shouldn’t answer it at all. He also feared he would end up in trouble if he didn’t. But when the senior sergeant shouted Colonel Ishii’s name, a skinny little superior private with glasses pricked up his ears.
“Please excuse me, Sergeant-
san
 …” he said, and drew the noncom off to one side. They talked together in low voices for a couple of minutes.

“Oh,” the senior sergeant said loudly. “He’s with
those
people?” He turned back to Fujita. “Why didn’t you say you were with
those
people?”

Again, Fujita didn’t have to answer because the bespectacled senior private did some more urgent murmuring. The senior
sergeant threw his hands in the air. He made as if to clout the younger man, who flinched.

Frightening someone seemed to make the sergeant feel better. Fujita knew that feeling. “Security!” the sergeant said, as if it were the filthiest
word he knew. Maybe it was. He glowered at Fujita. “If you don’t tell us what you’re good for, how can we send you where you need to go?”

“If I do tell you,
I violate the orders I got to keep that work secret,” Fujita answered unhappily.

“Bah!” The senior sergeant sounded disgusted. “Go to Yanai, then.” He pointed at the senior private. “He’ll write you orders to get you out there.”

Out where?
Fujita wondered. Well, he’d find out.

And so he did. Superior Private Yanai wrote out the orders, saying, “This will take you out to Unit 113, in the 56th
Infantry Division. There’s a shed next to the train station. You get your transport there.”

“A shed? Next to the train station?” Fujita knew he sounded dismayed—or maybe furious. A kilometer back to where he’d just come from, in this heat and humidity? He wasn’t looking forward to that.

“
Shigata ga nai
, Corporal. I’m sorry.” Yanai spread his hands in what looked like real sympathy. Whether it
was or not, he was right: it couldn’t be helped. Wearily, Fujita slung his rifle over his shoulder and trudged away from the hotel. Unfamiliar gaudy birds chirped in the bushes.

The shed smelled like a barn. Both soldiers on duty there were drunk. Fujita had to shout at them to discover what they called transport: a creaking ox cart. They were in charge of a dozen or so carts, with the oxen to
haul them hither and yon. The oxen no doubt explained the smell. The first driver the men in charge of the shed hunted up had no idea where Unit 113 was stationed. They swore at him, but he insisted he’d never been there.

Things had been ragged out on Manchukuo’s border with Soviet-backed Mongolia. Here, they would have had to shape up to seem ragged. This was the raw edge of conquest. That Japanese
soldiers ruled here near Burma’s Chinese frontier should have been inspiring. That the soldiers actually at the frontier were less than the shining lights of the Japanese Army shouldn’t have been surprising. Fujita had traveled too far too fast to stay tolerant. He screamed at the stablemen. One of them was a corporal, too. He didn’t care. If the other fellow felt like fighting, he intended
to maim him for life.

He was almost disappointed when the other corporal quailed instead. Even a drunk could tell he had murder in his eyes. And the next
driver the stablemen hunted up did know about Unit 113. “I’ve been there before,” he said. “I can find it again.” He eyed Fujita. “Keep your piece handy while we go, though. You might want to fix your bayonet, too. Things can get pretty hairy
around here.”

“I found out about that on the way up.” Fujita unsheathed the bayonet and snapped it into place under his Arisaka’s muzzle.

He could have walked to Unit 113 as fast as the ox cart brought him there. He would have had to work harder, though. The trail they followed wasn’t much wider than the cart. Anything or anyone might have burst out of the jungle before Fujita or the driver
could do anything about it. The oxen took their own sweet time splashing across streams.

It was almost sunset when they reached the clearing that held Unit 113. No fancy compound here—nothing but tents. No officer of rank higher than captain, either. And nobody, from that captain down to the almost toothless old Burmese woman who cooked for the unit, had the slightest idea that Fujita was coming
or what to do with him now that he was here.

“Demons take it,” the captain said at last. “You’re really from Unit 731?” He might have been a skinny little would-be wrestler talking about someone from a famous sumo
dojo
.

“Yes, sir. I really am,” Fujita said.

“How about that? I’m sure you’ll do a lot of good here, then, with all the things you’re bound to know. For now, get some rice, pour some
of the old gal’s stew over it, and find somewhere to unroll your blanket or sling your hammock. We’ve got a lot going on here. I’m sure you’ll fit right in.”