Two Fronts (53 page)

If you did kill a flea when you scratched, you had standing orders to report to sick bay on the double. The docs down there couldn’t do anything much for you if the glands under your arms and in your groin started swelling up, but they had an isolation ward so maybe you wouldn’t infect your shipmates.

“And when you gotta shower with seawater and saltwater soap, bet your ass you’re gonna have itches,” Cullum said. “If they let us take Hollywood showers all the time, I almost wouldn’t mind the plague, y’know? It’d be doing me some good, anyhow.”

“Then you wake up,” Pete said. “Not enough fresh water on the ship to use for washing.”

“Tell your granny how to suck eggs,” Cullum retorted. “And clean the wax outa your ears while you’re at it. I said
if
.”

The
Ranger
’s Wildcats buzzed in circles above the ship and its escorts, ready to do what they could if the Japanese attacked with airplanes instead of germs. From everything Pete had seen and heard, a Wildcat stood a chance against a Zero, but not a great chance. The American fighters had to slash and run and slash again. If you tried to dogfight a Zero, the first thing you’d wonder was how he’d managed to turn inside you and get on your tail. That was also much too likely to be the last thing you’d ever wonder.

A radar antenna spun round and round, round and round, on top of the carrier’s island. It could warn of approaching planes long before you saw them or heard them. They were talking about using radar to direct gunfire, too. Pretty soon, it would all be one side’s machines squaring off against the other side’s machines. Men wouldn’t have to study war any more, because they wouldn’t be good enough at it to have a prayer of winning.

When Pete brought out that conceit, Sergeant Cullum gave him a funny look. “So what’ll lugs like you and me do then?” he asked.

“Play football. Drink. Brawl in bars,” Pete answered. “Same kind of shit we do now, only without the uniforms.”

“But the uniforms are what makes it matter.” Cullum had been a Marine even longer than Pete. He might have been reciting the Athanasian Creed. By the conviction with which he spoke, he more than half thought he was.

So did Pete. “I won’t argue with you, man.” Since he’d cut closer to the bone than he’d meant to, he changed the subject: “I wonder how much in the way of supplies will have got to Hawaii by the time we’re back at Pearl.”

“There’s an interesting question!” Cullum exclaimed.

Interesting it was, as in the Chinese curse. The USA had to hang on to Hawaii. Without it, fighting a war against Japan was impossible. But Hawaii couldn’t feed or fuel itself. Without shiploads of stuff from the mainland, it would starve. The last thing merchant sailors wanted to do was come down with some horrible disease themselves or bring it back to the West Coast. People on the West Coast were screaming bloody murder and having hysterics. Los Angeles and Oakland had held Kill-a-Rat Days, and proudly displayed piles of long-tailed little corpses. They were kidding themselves if they thought they’d got them all, of course.

“It’s a mess, all right,” Pete said.

“Everything we do in this lousy war is a mess,” Cullum said. “You think we’ll ever get one right from the start?”

“Don’t hold your breath, is all I’ve got to tell you. You’ll turn bluer than a Billie Holiday song if you do,” Pete answered.

He scratched again. No flea crunched under his fingernail. He worried every time he did it anyhow. You couldn’t
not
worry, even when you were fine. That might have been the scariest thing of all about germ warfare. Whether or not the germs got under your skin, the fear did.

THE JAPANESE NAVAL
base—the former American naval base—on Midway made Myitkyina, Burma, seem like Tokyo by comparison. You could walk around on the little islet. None of it reached higher than a few meters above the sea from which it halfheartedly rose. After Burma’s extravagant greenery, the few scrubby grasses that struggled to grow on sand and rocks seemed all the more pathetic.

You could go down to the sea and fish. That was more than just a way to make time pass by. Whatever you pulled out of the water, you could eat. For Japan, Midway was at the very end of a long, long supply line. It was also close to the American naval and air bases farther south and east. Not a lot of freighters made the journey to try to supply the imperial sailors and soldiers there. Not all the ships that tried succeeded.

So fresh-caught fish became an important part of what everyone there ate. Fujita gobbled as much sushi and sashimi in a month as he would have in a year in the Home Islands. You couldn’t get sashimi any fresher than what you’d just caught yourself and cut to pieces with a bayonet or a utility knife.

Or you could hang around the barracks that had formerly housed American Marines and Navy men. Bombardment from the air and sea had battered the barracks as the Japanese took Midway. Repairs to the buildings were haphazard at best. Even so, the quarters—if not the food—seemed luxurious by the standards Fujita was used to.

He needed a while to learn to ignore the chug of the generators that powered the desalination plant. They ran night and day. Fresh water was in short supply on Midway. Cisterns captured what rainwater they could. Water would have been scarcer still if not for the plant, which was taken over from the Americans.

A noncom who’d been there longer than Fujita said, “When we attacked, we were careful not to shell the water-making factory, and our planes didn’t bomb anywhere close to it. We were afraid the Yankees would blow it up themselves when they saw they were going to lose the island, but they didn’t.”

“That’s good luck,” Fujita said.

“
Hai
.” The other sergeant nodded. He was a stocky fellow a few years older than Fujita. His name was Ichiro Yanai. He went on, “It was like they never expected us to get here, and they didn’t know what to do when we did.”

“Russians can be like that, too,” Fujita said. “White men are hard to figure out. Half the time, I don’t think they know what they’re going to do before they do it.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Yanai answered. “But I don’t care how inscrutable they are.”

“There’s a ten-yen word for you!” exclaimed Fujita, who hoped he understood what it meant.

Sergeant Yanai chuckled self-consciously. “It is, isn’t it? … Where was I going with this? … Ah,
hai
. They were stupid here, is what they were. They could have given us all kinds of misery if they’d wrecked the waterworks so bad, we couldn’t have fixed it. I don’t even know if we make installations like this one. If we do, shipping one all the way out here sure wouldn’t have been easy. And I’m not sure you can keep any kind of garrison here on nothing but rainwater.”

Fujita looked around. Sand. Rock. Scrub. Sea—endless sea in every direction. Airstrips, with bombers and fighters near them in revetments covered with nets designed to make them look like more sand and scrub from the air.

Gliding in for a landing on one of the strips was not a G4M Navy bomber but an albatross. “Oh, this should be good!” Fujita said.

“
Hai!
” Yanai’s eyes glowed in anticipation.

An airborne albatross was a miracle of flight. Fujita had never imagined that anything so enormous could also be so graceful. The birds spent almost their whole lives on the wing, and it showed.

An albatross coming in for a landing was a disaster waiting to happen. This disaster didn’t have long to wait. The bird put down its weak little legs as if they were landing gear. If only it could have grown a wheeled undercarriage instead! It was going much too fast for its feet to have a prayer of stopping it or even slowing it down.

It somersaulted—tumbled, really—along the sandy tarmac, head over tail. Its wings stuck out at ridiculous angles. Why they didn’t break—or break off—Fujita had no idea.

The albatross finally came to rest on its back. The first time Fujita watched one land like that, he was sure it must have killed itself. A G4M that flipped over would have burst into flames and incinerated its crew. But that first albatross had just wiggled up onto its legs and walked away. So did this one now. They were made to crash. The birds already on the sand ignored the spectacle that fascinated the two sergeants. Why shouldn’t they? They’d all come back to earth the same way. Unlike the Japanese, they took it for granted.

“After we captured Midway, a newsreel crew came out here to photograph us so people back home could see what we’d done,” Yanai said. “That was what they came for, but they ended up using a lot of their film on the albatrosses. They couldn’t get over them.”

“I believe it,” Fujita said. “You never get tired of watching them. They don’t come in the same twice in a row, not ever. They always find some new way to smash themselves.”

“It’s never one you expect, either,” Yanai said.

“Has anyone found out what they taste like?” Fujita asked. They weren’t like chickens, that was for sure—you wouldn’t eat both wings and still be hungry for more.

“Oh, yes. They’re pretty fishy—not what you’d call good,” the other sergeant said. “You can eat them if you have to, but they’re more fun to watch than they are to shoot.”

“They’re more fun than anything else you can do on this island,” Fujita said, a certain edge in his voice. The base here wasn’t big enough for the authorities to have bothered bringing in any comfort women to keep the troops happy. Extra mouths to feed, the old men reasoned coldbloodedly. The people in charge of things here had to be too old to get it up very often. Had Fujita known Midway suffered from that kind of shortage, he wouldn’t have come a quarter of the way around the world to drop germ bombs on the Yankees’ heads.

“Nothing I can do about that.” Yanai had no trouble following him. “Nothing you can, either.”

A few days later, American four-engined bombers hit the island. Zeros zoomed up to try to fight them off. The U.S. planes fought back. Unlike G4Ms, they could take a lot of bullets and keep flying. They also spat out a lot of bullets. They bristled with heavy machine guns. The Zeros shot down at least one of them, but a pair of Japanese Navy fighters tumbled into the Pacific.

Bombs whistled down on the island. They seemed to fall at random; the Zeros did at least joggle the Americans’ elbows. Lying in a shallow trench, Fujita heard explosions far and near. He hoped the albatrosses weren’t getting blown up. They hadn’t done anything to deserve to be bombed.

He knew he had. War was like that. You hurt the people on the other side every chance you got, as hard as you could. If they didn’t give up, they paid you back with all the strength they had. Eventually, one side or the other decided it had had enough and gave up.

It seemed a stupid way to settle the world’s disagreements. No doubt it
was
a stupid way, only nobody had come up with a better one. People had been fighting wars, some smaller, some larger, for as long as there’d been people. Chances were they’d go right on fighting them, too.

And Japan always wins in the end. Always
, Fujita thought. That made him feel a little better as the American bombs kept falling on Midway, but not so much as he’d hoped.

BULLETS CRACKED PAST
, a meter or two above Aristide Demange’s head. The Germans were spraying the French lines with machine-gun fire again. They wanted to keep Demange’s countrymen from getting frisky.

Most of the rounds you never saw. Some were tracers, so the assholes serving the MG-34 or MG-42 could see what their stream of bullets was doing. When one of those flew by, you thought you could light your cigarette on the red streak it left in the air.

Demange lit a Gitane—with a match. He spat the tiny butt of the last one he’d smoked into the mud. A couple of good, hard puffs started reducing the new smoke as well.

How many packs have I gone through since the war started?
he wondered. He didn’t know the answer in numbers, but sometimes numbers didn’t matter. He’d gone through as many packs as he could, and he had the cough to prove it. The only times he hadn’t chain-smoked were when the tobacco ration didn’t get through to wherever he happened to be.

He’d felt weird then: light-headed, dizzy, shaky. Probably too much oxygen getting through to his brain. He couldn’t imagine what else might cause it.

Down the trench from him, the Communist private named Marcel groused, “Don’t those
cochons
ever run low on ammo?” He was the tall one of the pair, not the short—Demange finally had them straight.

“Hold up the red flag with the hammer and sickle on it,” the lieutenant said, Gitane bobbing in his mouth as he spoke. “That’ll make the Nazis fold up and run away. Sure it will.”

Marcel sent him a reproachful look. “The Fascist swine are in retreat in the Soviet Union, sir.” Several more bullets cracked over them as the enemy murder mill traversed. Marcel grimaced. “They sure aren’t in retreat here in Belgium.”

“You
stupid
piece of shit.” Demange enjoyed it when he could focus his boundless scorn for all mankind on one luckless individual. “The dumb
Boches
bit off more than even they could chew over there. They’re fighting on a front a couple of thousand kilometers across. When they have to fight here, too, of
course
they’re gonna get stretched too thin and have to fall back from the Ivans. It’s not ’cause Stalin is the second goddamn coming of Jesus Christ, you dumb prick. It’s because he has a fucking huge country.”

“He runs it with power to the proletariat, too,” Marcel said. “If we would only do that—”

He got no further. Demange cut him off. “My ass,” the veteran growled. “I was there, kid. I saw the Russian proletariat. Hell, I shot some of the Russian proletariat. A bunch of those guys, when they found out we were Frenchmen instead of Germans, they went over to us faster than those machine-gun bullets are going over us now. Some of them went over to the Nazis, too, but most of ’em figured Hitler was an even bigger
salaud
than Stalin. That’s the figuring you’ve got to do—which one of ’em makes the worst
con
.”