The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (51 page)

“Alles gut?”
Lemp called down, rubbing at his stinging eyes.

More profanity from below made it clear that
nichts
was
gut
. The diesels didn’t miss a beat, though. Whatever the sudden flood had done, it hadn’t soaked the engine room.

Which turned
out to be a good thing, because a rating let out a horrified squeal: “Ship dead ahead!”

Too many things were happening too fast. Lemp spun like a man
suddenly hit from behind. If it was a destroyer, they were dead. No matter how alert you were, you couldn’t hope to fight it out on the surface taken by surprise.

But it wasn’t a warship. It was a big, rusty freighter, maybe a straggler from a
convoy on the way back to England. “Hard left rudder! Emergency full power!” Lemp screamed down the hatch at the same time as the freighter’s whistle blared a warning. Peter was down there. He would obey instantly. Whether instantly was fast enough to do any good … they’d know much too soon.

The steam whistle shrilled again. If the freighter turned with the U-30, the U-boat was sunk—literally.
Sailors at the ugly old ship’s bow pointed at the submarine. They were close enough to let Lemp see their open mouths and staring eyes as the U-30 and freighter slid past each other. Then one of the sailors caught sight of the U-30’s wind-whipped ensign. His eyes got even wider. Lemp thought they’d bug right out of his head.

He must have figured we were Russians
, the U-boat skipper realized.
The freighter’s captain must have thought the same thing, or he would have rammed the boat. Some English admiral—maybe even the First Sea Lord—would have pinned a medal on his chest. That wasn’t going to happen now.

One of the sailors up on the conning tower asked, “Are we going to track that damned pigdog and do for him, Skipper?”

No one would have claimed Julius Lemp was not aggressive. Certainly
no one from the torpedoed
Athenia
would have claimed any such thing. All the same, Lemp wasn’t sorry to see the freighter vanish into mist and spray and sleet as abruptly as it had appeared.

And the more he thought about pursuing it, the less he liked the idea. “No, we’ll throw this one back,” he answered. “Her skipper will be dodging and zigzagging for all he’s worth—and chucking every gram
of coal he’s got into the furnace, too. We’d only find the rustbucket by luck … and who knows how far away the convoy escorts are?”

None of the ratings said anything more. Lemp would have been astounded if they had. Commanding the U-boat was his job, nobody else’s. Did the sailors up there with him seem unusually subdued, though? Did they think he should have gone after the freighter?

More to
the point, would they, or one of them, report him for not going after the ship? Would some
Kriegsmarine
board decide he’d shown defeatism or lack of fighting spirit or whatever the hell they called it these days? Would Party
Bonzen
court-martial him on account of it, or put him on the beach?

He hated to have to think that way, which didn’t mean he didn’t do it. Bad things happened to politically
naïve people. Then again, bad things also happened to politically pushy people—at least to the ones who didn’t shoot up the ladder at top speed. You had to be aware without making the people who paid close attention to such things aware that you were aware. It could be a tightrope act.

And so, when he finally did go below, he logged the incident in the most particular detail, noting every detail
of bad weather and dreadful visibility. That might—likely would—save his bacon if he had to try to explain himself to the
Kriegsmarine
.

But if he had to explain himself to the SS? He grimaced. The blackshirts listened when they felt like it. When they didn’t, they went ahead and did whatever they would have done anyhow.

In his tiny cabin—separated from the rest of the boat by a curtain, which
made him the only man aboard to enjoy (if that was the word) so much privacy—he listened to what was going on around him. No cries warning of other ships came from the watchstanders on the conning tower. That was his biggest, most immediate worry. Everything else sounded pretty much normal, too, which came as a relief. If the ratings who had a brief from one security service or another to spy on
him were plotting with one another, they were doing it where he couldn’t hear, and they weren’t doing it where they were disturbing the rest of the crew.

Nice of them
, Lemp thought. He hadn’t fretted about security men when the war started. In those innocent days, he’d only cared about fighting the enemy. He wished things were still so simple now.

HIDEKI FUJITA HAD
been through the fringes of
a couple of typhoons in Japan. Till he got to Burma, he’d thought that meant he knew something
about rain. Now he had to admit he’d been nothing but an amateur.

In the monsoon, water poured down by the warm bucketload. You could stand outside naked and wash off. Men did, whenever they felt the need. What you couldn’t do was dry off again afterwards. Water dripped through thatched roofs and pounded
off galvanized iron. Even when the soldiers of Unit 113 weren’t being deluged, the stifling humidity made sweat stick to them so they felt as if they were.

Quite a few soldiers wore nothing but loincloth and zoris in the rain. Before long, Fujita was one of them. Leaving on a uniform, even a tropical-weight uniform, only ensured it would rot faster. It would rot anyway, but you could make things
take longer.

Despite the ghastly weather, the war went on. Now that Japan was fighting England in Asia, the English suddenly were doing everything they could to help China keep the Emperor’s forces busy. Supplies came from India to Yunnan Province in southern China by road and by air. They were no more than a trickle, but a trickle that annoyed the Japanese.

Occupying the Chinese end of the
supply line was impossible. The Empire was stretched too thin. She didn’t have enough soldiers, and too many of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops stood in the way. Making it hard for the Chinese to collect the supplies or do much with them … That was a different story.

And that was the kind of thing Unit 113 could help with. Fujita helped load porcelain bomb casings full of cholera bacilli and rodents
infected with plague. Whenever bombers could take off, they carried the germ bombs over the mountains into China. The town of Baoshan, in western Yunnan, was a special target because of the rail lines to Kunming, the provincial capital, that ran through it.

Before long, reports came back that Baoshan was suffering from disease outbreaks. That was the signal for more bombers to attack the place.
These carried ordinary high explosives and incendiaries. Hideki Fujita didn’t think Baoshan would burn very well if it was as wet up there as it was down here, but—surprise!—none of his superiors asked for his opinion.

Some of what they did worked, even if Fujita couldn’t find out exactly which part. They wanted the people who lived in Baoshan to flee from the town and spread sickness through
the Chinese countryside. Japanese soldiers monitoring radio signals from Yunnan reported that Unit 113’s officers were getting what they wanted.

They were so pleased by their results, they gathered the unit’s enlisted men together so they could brag about what they’d accomplished. A major named Hataba stood on a table to let everyone see him. “It is now established that Chinese forces have had
to evacuate Yunnan Province,” he declared. “They take sickness with them wherever they go. And they cannot gather the goods England tries to give them.”

A sergeant standing by Fujita clapped his hands. “Good!” he said. “That’s good! That’s very good!”

“
Hai!
Very good!” Fujita agreed. He really did think it was. But he would have agreed even if he’d thought it was a disaster. Now that he’d been
demoted to corporal, he’d quickly relearned the necessary art of sucking up to sergeants. They’d make you sorry if you didn’t, and you couldn’t do anything about it. All you could do was grease them up and try to keep them happy.

The sergeant’s noise and his own servile reply made Fujita miss a little of what Major Hataba was saying. When he could pay attention again without the risk of getting
thumped, what he heard was, “—not just in China. Our illustrious unit, and others working on related projects, can punish the English in India the same way. Everyone knows India has been full of disease since the beginning of time. It’s even filthier and more backward than China. Who there would realize why an epidemic started where the English were loading up their goods to send them on to the
Chinese bandits?”

He paused, waiting expectantly for an answer. The assembled soldiers gave him the one he wanted: “Nobody, Major-
san
!”

“Nobody. That’s right.” Up on his rickety table, Hataba nodded. “I am obtaining the authorization we will need to give the English and the Indians everything they deserve. And we will!”

“Hai!”
the soldiers shouted, and,
“Banzai!”

One hot, wet, sticky day followed
another. No planes from Unit 113 dropped disease bombs on India, though the attacks against China continued.
Fujita was less surprised than some of the men he worked with when Major Hataba’s sought-for authorization proved slow in coming. Up in Manchukuo, Unit 731 had always worked in the darkest secrecy. Why wouldn’t it be the same for the germ-warfare units down here?

And even if the Chinese
figured out what Japan was doing to them, well, who cared about the fuss Chinamen kicked up? They sounded like a bunch of hysterical geese when they got excited. It would be different if England realized the Japanese were waging germ warfare against her. When England said something, the whole world listened.

England might not just talk, either. She might hit back. China hadn’t a prayer of matching
Japan’s science. But England was one of the places from which Japan had learned science to begin with.

What kind of bacteriological-warfare program did England have? Fujita had no idea. Did his superiors know? All he could do was hope so.

Whether they knew or not, his superiors—or rather, his superiors’ superiors—refused to issue the order Major Hataba craved. Perhaps they feared to break secrecy.
Or perhaps they just weren’t inclined to take any chances they didn’t have to.

Gradually, the men in Unit 113 quit talking about India. They pretended no one had ever said anything about it. Had they done otherwise, Major Hataba would have lost face. If that happened to an officer, what could he do but make everybody who served under him sorry?

Fujita settled in. Myitkyina had a military brothel
staffed by Burmese comfort women the Japanese had recruited—or just grabbed. The one Fujita mounted started crying as soon as he finished and got off her. He didn’t care. Why should he? He was happy. And a comfort woman was only a convenience, like a rubber rain cape.

The day after he got back from his leave in Myitkyina, Major Hataba summoned him. Ignoring his hangover, he stood at stiff attention
and saluted like a machine. “Reporting as ordered, sir!” he said, wondering how much trouble he was in and whether he could wiggle out of it.

But the major wasn’t in a mood to pull the wings off flies. He said, “At ease, Corporal.” Fujita relaxed … fractionally. Hataba went on, “You’re a good man. I’m glad to have you here. The people at Unit 731 were stupid to let you go, if you want to know
what I think. You’re wasted as a corporal. I’m making you a sergeant—let’s see how you do.”

He handed Fujita two silver metal stars—one for each collar tab. “Put these on. You’ll help us more with two stars on each tab than with one.”

“
Domo arigato
, Major-
san!
” Fujita bowed low, grateful inferior to superior. The joy he felt at getting his rank back made coming inside the unhappy Burmese comfort
woman seem as nothing beside it.

“You’re welcome, Sergeant. And you’re dismissed.” Major Hataba might promote him, but he wasn’t about to waste a whole lot of time on him.

So what? Fujita bowed again, almost as deeply. He didn’t think his feet touched the ground as he left the major’s presence. As soon as he could, he affixed the new stars to the red tabs with the yellow stripe across the middle.
The tabs looked so much better now that they had their second stars back! He thought so, anyhow.

People noticed when he walked around the little base. “Congratulations, Sergeant-
san
!” a private said, and gave him a cigarette and a light. Even as a corporal, he could have knocked a private around. But a sergeant could do it with more flair. A sergeant could do anything with more flair. And all
the corporals who’d been senior to him would need to watch themselves from here on out!

Chapter 22

W
hen you came out of the line here, you couldn’t toddle off to an
estaminet
to soak up some wine and chat up the barmaid. This was war without distractions, and Alistair Walsh missed them.

Even the Italians weren’t much of a distraction. That was the only good part of the fighting here. As Sergeant Billings
had said, some of their units weren’t too bad. Most, though, didn’t really have their hearts in the fight. When English forces outmaneuvered them, they would surrender with smiles on their faces. It happened again and again, because the English had more tanks and far more lorries than Mussolini’s boys.