Polar Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  “And good luck to them.”

  “I don’t know yet, but I suspect the Afghans are revolting too. No jokes.”

  “Seeing as how they are constantly in a state of war with the rest of the world, safe bet.”

  “Yeah. But I can see that once they get tanks and motorized troops out there, all hell is going to break loose. The thought of Mongols in tanks curdles my goddamn marrow, Eppi. I need to improve my education. There are all these people out there; Kazaks, and Uyghurs, Cossacks, Turkmen, Uzbecs, Kyrryks, and Tajiks, ten different kinds of Mongols, who knows? I guess every one of them has a different attitude, and they are all bad.”

  “The ‘Stans is what my geography professor called them,” was all Eppi had to say, which I did not find all that helpful.

  “All I know is what I read in old National Geographics.”

  “Your reading gave us the diver women.”

  “Yeah. I wonder where...”

  “You can find a bunch of old National Geographics? Try a library. Or the markets. Chinese never throw anything away.”

  “Yeah. I got that. Thanks.” Our steaks arrived, they probably were beef, could have been horse or mule. I didn’t much care. Best food I had in weeks. “All I really know about that part of the world is from reading that Roy Chapman Andrews book.”

  “The dinosaur egg guy?”

  “Him.”

  Eppi speared a last French fry. “I shook his hand at the Explorer’s club one time. He was hoping to come back here, he has an idea that humans evolved in Central Asia, but…”

  “The war.” I pushed my plate away, waved off the waiter. Orderly. Whatever. “The wars, I should say. I should be going about my rounds.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. But I can say you are on the right track. Hodges sees the dangers and opportunities as well as anyone can. We are working on it.”

  “So how does a Navy man help in a motorized war in the middle of a goddamn desert?”

  “Think about it. It will come to you. I can tell you that Japanese factories, like the DAT plant, are cranking out light tanks and trucks as fast as they possibly can. All our salvaged steel, copper, and brass are shipped there as fast as we can load it.”

  “I saw them salvaging copper and brass in Port Arthur when I was down there looking at the lithography plant.”

  “You should take another look. As soon as I get the dry-dock ship-shape and the USN Salvage crew gets here, I am off to Port Arthur. Things are about to start moving fast around here. We have lots of men, the salvage is paying off, fur is going to fly.”

  >>>>>>>

  We chatted through the pie, then Eppi had a hundred things to do. Stearns ran me back to the dock, as I left I drove past the Takasago, just to be nosy. Hard not to notice that the whole bow of the ship was missing, the prow, I guess you call it, and the hole had been filled with a big flat plate of steel, bigger than a double garage door… Hmmm. Garage door. Makes you think.

  I ran past the Bulletin, said hi, snatched up a few new copies to read. Not bad. There was a battle reported in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea area. No word from the combatants, but a radio station in Goa was reporting flashes, explosions, and smoke plumes offshore. Justine had an editorial reporting the change in management, with a blurb concerning equal rights for women, “of all castes and colors.” Good luck with that.

  But the proofreading was well done, the language more literate than my copy, so leave well enough alone. Stet. I cruised down Dong-bei Road to the Ferry Landing, ships being unloaded faster than one would have thought possible. That gave me an idea, so I fought traffic back to the fishing port of Ling-jiao Bay, that had never been mined, it too was jumping, an amazing variety of battered trucks, carts, and rickshaws unloading scrap metal into an equally assorted collection of ships and boats. Chinese industry in action. Fuckheads can do more with less than anybody on earth.

  So then I just had to go look at the ruins of Port Arthur, where all this scrap was coming from. It was just over a large hill, and I could see all I needed to from the top of the hill. Swarms of coolies were ripping away any source of non-ferrous metal in the ruins on land, and I could see a couple of plumes of explosions out in the bay, that told me that the diver women were on the job clearing mines. Anything for a buck, right? Enough sightseeing, back to work.

  >>>>>>>

  Lupo was resting, sleeping on the bare floor of his new room, a Spanish-looking woman helping Su-mi make whatever meal we were up to now. Her name was Olga, and she was our new office staff, typist, translator. Fine. Looked like somebody’s mom. Maeve was back with stacks of maps and photos, trying to sort them all into some sort of order. I could see that we needed tables, bulletin boards, and chalk boards, so that was a good job for me and Peaches and Isis. I had had my lunch, anyway.

  We took a flivver, a handful of silver, found a looted school building that had been turned into a thieves’ market. No gypsies in China, as far as I know, although nothing about this place would surprise me. They had everything we needed, even if they blinked a few times before selling us the fixtures off the walls. It looked like it had been a missionary school at some point, had western style blackboards and all. Didn’t have much after we left. Those Chinese sure know how to load an ox cart, or a flivver.

  By the time we got unloaded, had things more or less in their right places, it was dark, and time for a few drinks and radio watch. By switching around radios and a little judicious band selection, we could get three people transcribing three different languages at once. We kept the English stuff on the speaker, while Lupo and Isis used headphones. We were hoping for some news of the naval battle in the Indian Ocean, but the BBC was silent, as were the Germans. Perhaps a good sign.

  The US stations were also quiet, reporting only welcoming crowds in Canada and Mexico. Patton was giving “a major address” in El Paso, and little was said of anything else. The baseball season was in full swing, the radio seemed to give an inordinate emphasis to every detail of Lefty Gomez and Ty Cobb’s exploits. Cobb was expected to retire at the end of the year, and… Fuck a bunch of baseball.

  NKH, the Japanese State Radio was pretty bland too, nothing about any sea battle, a lot of verbiage concerning the Organizational Meeting of the Greater South-East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in Batavia, Java. There was a whole lot of puffery, interviews with heads of state, the usual crap news organizations pour out when they don’t want to tell you anything. I hate being so cynical, but it’s a survival trait. Plus I have experience in these matters.

  One minor note was a bragging piece about a new pursuit monoplane, the Mitsubishi 1MF10 fighter, which was being rushed into production as the first Japanese-designed all metal warplane. Well, after what we had seen at the Angarsk Airfield, they were going to need something, and need it bad. “Maeve?” That was all I had to ask.

  “I have heard a few things. It’s pretty hot, had stability problems. Killed a couple of test pilots. All-metal construction, with a monocoque duralumin fuselage, duralumin wing structure covered in fabric, open cockpit. It has a Mitsubishi A4 two-row 14-cylinder radial engine and a two-bladed prop. Fixed undercarriage. A tail dragger. Might do two hundred miles an hour. Two machine guns in the wings. Jiro Horikoshi is the designer for Mitsubishi. He’s good.”

  “Write it down.” A thought struck. “I wonder if my buddy Ken will want to share any info?”

  “One way to find out.” She said, with a sharp poke to the ribs. I can take a hint. It was past time to have it out with Mr. Ken Inahara anyway. With that in mind, I collared a bottle of booze from my room, and headed down to find his “little cubbyhole office downstairs.” It wasn’t hard to find, at least he was not. There was a little mess in the back, a ready room, perhaps, with a large coffee percolator, a box of almond cookies, and a half dozen pilots and USAS types hanging around, telling lies and smoking too many cigarettes. The air was blue with smoke and bluer with the language, even though half of the Airmen there were female. A console radio in th
e corner was blaring out some Chinese attempt at Swing, and ties were loosened. I plunked the bottle down in the center of the big table they were grouped around, and immediately became a hail-fellow-well-met. It’s not all that hard.

  They were talking about the war, the women there kept the discussion off of more normal topics, and Ken was mostly silent, sucking it all in. Oddly enough, one of the women pilots, Beth somebody, mentioned Xilin Gol. I said I had been there, and they all knew I was Maeve’s new flame. So then I was part of the gang, we could settle into serious slanging. “You got shot down in a Falcon, right?” Jimmy, another pilot asked. “I hope the Hawks can keep up with the new Fokkers. That D.IX is a hot ship.”

  “Yeah, our plane was a two-seater. We never had a chance. Maeve managed to put out the flames with a stall, and we crashed in a field.”

  “If you walked away from it, it wasn’t a crash, it was a landing.”

  “God save my fat ass from a crash then. My back still hurts.”

  “Yeah,” another sympathized. “That’s the business.” There they veered off into a long digression concerning other hard landings they had survived.

  Finally, I was able to break into lull in the conversation, “Ken, you know anything about this new all-Japanese fighter?” That got their complete attention. “The Mitsubishi 1MF10?”

  “You hear it on NKH?”

  “Of course.”

  That made him shrug and decide something. “Okay, I will level with you. We, the Japanese, particularly the Navy, have decided that our best interests are served by supporting the AEFS. You Polar Bears. It is obvious that Herr Goering will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete conquest of all of Central Asia. We had hopes, the Army had hopes, that the Germans would be happy with the Caspian and Aral oil fields.”

  “Baku and all that.”

  “Correct. But Grosse Hermann’s appetite is insatiable. And now he has millions of brutalized soldiers to utilize…”

  “Or dispose of one way or another…”

  “Right again. They could be seen as a threat to the stability of the Vaterland. He could expend them with a clear conscience. If he had one. But the real important number is the population data; Germany has sixty-seven million people, a few more than Japan. Great Britain has or had forty-five million.”

  “And,” I said, lights dawning, “The USA has a hundred and twenty-odd million.”

  “More than England and Germany combined.”

  “You need us. Or else you lose all your gains in Asia.”

  “And you need us, unless you want German Fleets off of both your coasts. Do you have any estimate of how much of your domestic trade is carried by your coastal shipping?”

  “I know it is a lot. And the Gulf Coast trade is very important.”

  “You need to keep the Caribbean as your lake to survive. You may have lost your Atlantic fisheries already.”

  “I’m a Yankee. I know that has to hurt. Bad. Not even mentioning the Panama Canal. This could be fucked. What you call choke points.”

  “Exactly. Singapore, the Panama Canal. The Germans already have the Suez Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosporus.”

  “They have Cape Town yet?”

  “Not if the Imperial Navy has anything to say about the matter. Have you heard?”

  “Ken, no. There is or was a battle off Goa, but that’s all anybody seems to know.” I thought a little more. “So what is this, a final exam in Applied History?” He just smiled, reached for the bottle. “So you have to make your own planes to hold back the Germans. The Luftstreitkräfte. If the Kaiserliche Marine can stop American ships from crossing the Pacific, we can’t get planes. We will need these 1MF10s. You need pilots. The States have been air-mad for years and years now. Lots of us have at least some idea of how to fly airplanes. Barnstormers and all those lunatics.”

  “Your Army Air Service was quite effective in France. Their casualties were high, but there were quite a few surviving veterans.”

  “Patton hated the Air Service. There must be a lot of them over here…” I looked up to see rapt nods of agreement, scowling faces, from our tablemates. “Yeah. Sorry, guys. Sucks.” They nodded again, with extra added snarls.

  “So, you can follow the logical path.”

  “If those dive bombers I saw could take out tanks and trains… Trains would be easy…” I finally listened to myself, jumped up and ran upstairs to call Ray Reynolds.

  >>>>>

  “Ray, I was just talking you your pet Jap, Ken, and he mentioned… well, I deduced that those German Dive Bombers would be deadly against trains, tunnels and bridges. Correct?”

  “This is all new to us. You saw them in action, what do you think?”

  “What do I know? But if they flew right down the rails, or down a road, they couldn’t miss, could they? I mean, there are only so many variables.”

  “I see what you mean. When they bomb from higher altitude, there are two dimensions… Three, I suppose, if you count winds…” I could hear his brain churning over the phone line. “If the variables were down to one, just… I don’t know. But sure, if you… I don’t suppose there is any defense, is there?”

  “Hitting something coming right at you at two hundred miles an hour? It would be a brave man to hold his aim with one of those bastards coming right down his throat. All I can tell you was that we were in a trench and glad to be there, too. Fucking glad.”

  “I hear you. Trains… We need AA on trains. I suppose the dive bombers will attack the locomotives…”

  “Yeah. Make a bigger bang. Those boilers get punctured and it would be impressive. Machine gun fire would be enough… Sitting ducks.” I said. I had covered a few boiler explosions back in the states. Don’t need bombs when one of those babies goes blooey. “Look, you have armored trains?”

  “Armored against infantry, maybe tanks, not aircraft. They are mostly mobile artillery batteries. Useful for what they are, but… Do airplanes have armor piercing bombs?”

  “Put fins on an artillery shell, or a naval shell, and you could…”

  “Have anything you want. I got it. Bad, bad, news.” He didn’t even take a breath. “Let me go, I have to call Billy Ardmore and Darrell Hoskins and ruin their sleep.”

  It took me a second to catch up. “The Machine Shop.”

  “Right. We have lots and lots of shells in the magazines in Port Arthur, lots of armor plate. We are in the Dive Bomber business as of right now. Tell your girlfriend. She can be in charge if she wants.”

  “I think she had her heart set on the recon job.”

  “Fine. Tell her to pick somebody. Or I will call Amelia. Nobody is getting any sleep tonight, I can tell you that.”

  “Yes, sir. You got it.”

  >>>>>>>>

  I thundered up the stairs, it was only ten, and gave the word to the troops. “But I think we need to stick to our lasts. Recon. Intelligence, as unlikely as that seems. We did our job tonight, got the right word to the right guy. So, what we need to think about, is what do we need to know next?”

  Maeve raised her hand. “We need to know if the Mongols are with us, or against us. Ulan Bator. We need to go out there and talk to people.”

  “Correct. AS fucking AP. How is our plane coming?”

  “I will go find out.”

  “I’ll drive you.” I looked around Lupo and Olga were sharing a pair of headphones, Isis was deep into another pair and Peaches was running the dial, taking notes with her other hand. Under control.

  We took the Maxwell in case we had to do some running around, I had half an idea to go to Feniks and get another jug or two. This war shit was cutting into my drinking time. But the new plane, a Ford Trimotor was just on the other side of the Airfield, well illuminated even this late. “Looks like somebody lit a fire under their asses,” she said. The doors had been removed and mechanics were strapping down fifty-five gallon oil barrels with leather belts and plumbing them together. A largish hole had been hacked in the floor, and some
body was welding together a sturdy framework that was obviously going to be bolted to the duralumin structure. “Is that for the camera?” I asked, and got a nod, no more, as my sweetie went to inspect every modification that had been done to the plane. Twice. “This boat is rated for twenty-four passengers for five hundred mile legs. Call it two tons dead load. Minus a ton of tankage and gasoline, we should be good for a thousand miles, and still be able to carry five people. She carries two hundred and thirty-four gallons of gasoline, at a little better than six pounds a gallon, I make it fifteen hundred pounds of fuel. Five of these barrels. A good safety margin.”

  “Five people?”

  “Pilot, copilot, photographer, and a couple of passengers.”

  I had that gnarl in my gut again. “I wish we had a gunner. A .50 cal would make me feel a lot more secure. Know what I mean?”

  She winked, nodded and laid a finger alongside her nose, then went to speak with the crew chief.

  >>>>>>

  We never did get much sleep that night, I had to write down what I knew about dive bombers, kept Maeve up to answer my dumb questions, then we ran it over to HQ, so we could answer more of the same. As soon as we got back to the office, Peaches had connected with something called the South African Radio League, a bunch of hams, who seemingly had promoted themselves into a National Radio Service, more or less in embryo. “What nation?” You might well ask. According to the SARL, the two main white parties, the South African Party and the National Party had just merged to form the United Party, seeking reconciliation between Afrikaners and English-speaking "Whites". This unification had been forced by the dissolution of the British Empire, and the appearance of an Imperial Japanese fleet in Cape Town. It seemed that the IJN had pulled at least a draw in whatever battle they had, but nobody was saying nothing.

  A little while later, German shortwave stations began reporting the Treaty of Helsinki that created the German-British Co-Dominion of India, “to bring the benefits of civilization” to the restless and benighted heathens and idolaters of the Subcontinent.