Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  “Have we got anything we really need to know about U-30’s latest patrol right this minute, gentlemen?” the rear admiral asked his colleagues. His tone warned that they’d damned well better not. And they didn’t. He nodded once more, with an older man’s dour satisfaction, and gave his attention back to Lemp. “Sehr gut. You are dismissed. I hope you enjoy your liberty while the repair and replenishment crews go over your boat.”

  “Danke schon,” Lemp repeated. Liberty! He hadn’t even thought about that. He’d have to go out and get drunk. Not only that, he’d have to get the whole crew drunk, from his exec and the engineering officers down to the lowliest “lords”: the junior seamen who bunked in the forward torpedo room.

  How much would the carouse cost? More than the jump in pay from lieutenant to lieutenant commander brought in for a couple of months-Lemp was only too sure of that. Well, you couldn’t make an omelette without chocolate and powdered sugar and whipped cream. And it wasn’t as if a U-boat skipper who spent most of his time at sea got a lot of chances to throw his cash around. He could afford it. Whether he could afford it or not, he knew he had to do it.

  He saluted the board again, this time with a proper military gesture rather than the one from the Party. Did the senior officers show a touch of relief when they gave back the same salute? If they did, Lemp didn’t have to notice, not today he didn’t.

  His feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to his U-boat. Ratings and junior officers saluted him. He returned their gestures of respect and gave back his own to the handful of men he passed who outranked him. The journey from the board room to the boat was more than half a kilometer, but seemed to take no time at all.

  That tall figure on the conning tower could only be Gerhart Beilharz. The Schnorkel expert greeted Lemp with an enormous grin, a salute-most unusual on a U-boat, where such surface-navy formalities went down the scupper-and the words, “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander!”

  Lemp gaped. “How the devil did you know, when I just now found out myself?”

  Beilharz’s grin got wider. Lemp hadn’t thought it could. “Jungle telegraph, how else?” the younger man said.

  And that was about the size of it. Lemp knew he’d never get anything that came closer to a straight answer. Nothing went faster than the speed of light … except gossip at a naval base. Maybe somebody from the repair crew had heard something and brought word to the boat. Or … Oh, who the hell cared?

  The sailors who hadn’t yet headed out for the taverns and brothels of Wilhelmshaven made a point of shaking their skipper’s hand and thumping him on the back. “About time!” they said; several of them profanely embroidered on the theme.

  They like me. They really like me, Lemp realized, more than a little surprised that they should. He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t an enormously likable man. His focus was too inward; he had next to nothing of the hail-fellow-well-met in him. And he was the skipper, the great god of his small, stinking world. You could respect a god. You could admire one or fear one. Loving one, despite what the preachers claimed and proclaimed, was a lot harder. Gods and mortals didn’t travel in the same social circles.

  Except sometimes they did. Lemp gathered up the officers and ratings still aboard the U-30. “Come along with me, boys,” he said. “We’ll see how many crewmates we can gather up, too. I’m buying-till you head for the whorehouses, anyway.”

  “Three cheers for Lieutenant Commander Lemp!” Peter shouted, and the sailors lustily followed the helmsman’s lead. Turning back to Lemp, Peter added, “You should get promoted more often, Skipper.”

  “Damn right I should,” Lemp replied, which made his men laugh raucously. They hadn’t started drinking yet, so it must have been a good line for real.

  Despite flak guns on rooftops and in parks and little squares, Wilhelmshaven had taken bomb damage. Of course a German naval base near the Dutch border would make a juicy target for the RAF. But the air pirates wouldn’t come over while brief winter day lit the landscape (not so brief here as it was up in the Baltic or, worse, the Barents Sea, where the sun stayed below the horizon for a long stretch around the solstice).

  The men poured down beer and schnapps. Lemp bled banknotes. Well, he’d known he would. If he got plastered himself, he wouldn’t care … so much. He drank till his head started spinning. When the men sought pleasures even more basic than beer, Beilharz guided him to an officers’ maison de tolerance. Hearing that he was celebrating a promotion, the madam let him go upstairs with a pretty, round-faced young redhead for free.

  “I’m a patriot, I am,” the madam declared. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil!” Lemp echoed. He patted his girl on the backside. Before long, he’d salute her in a way older and more enjoyable than any Party rituals.

  These days, leathernecks and swabbies aboard the Ranger walked soft around Pete McGill. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he could have done without. When you showed you could damn near kill a guy with your bare hands, naturally people on the carrier would notice. Just as naturally, they’d go out of their way to make sure you didn’t want to do unto them as you’d done unto Barney Klinsmann.

  Barney was out of sick bay at last, and back on light duty. He still insisted he’d fallen down stairs. Nobody believed him, but the polite fiction kept Pete out of the brig.

  Two new carriers had steamed to Pearl from the West Coast. They were both makeshifts. Their official title was escort carrier. Everybody called them baby flattops or sometimes jeep carriers, though. They were freighters with flight decks, was what they were. They could hold only half as many planes as a fleet carrier like Ranger, and they couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless you dropped ’em off a cliff.

  That was the bad news. The good news was, they were here now. New fleet carriers were supposed to be in the pipeline, but it hadn’t spit them out yet. They were expensive and complicated and slow to build. You could make baby flattops in a hurry. Okay, they had their drawbacks. Drawbacks or not, they let Uncle Sam fly more planes in the Pacific. Pete was all for anything that did that.

  Bob Cullum pointed out another flaw the escort carriers had: “Goddamn things are ugly as sin.”

  “Well, so are you, but the government still thinks you’re good for something.” Pete smiled when he said it-the other sergeant was senior to him. And he was just needling Cullum. He didn’t want to get into another fight. No one would have accused him of being a peaceable man, but he aimed as much of his rage as he could at the Japs.

  “Ah, your mama.” Cullum also made a point of smiling. He might not be eager to tangle with Pete-after what happened to Klinsmann, nobody was-but he didn’t want to back down to him, either. More to the point, he didn’t want to be seen as backing down.

  Pete understood that. He didn’t have a lot of empathy. But he’d served long enough in Peking and Shanghai to understand the idea of face. He could see that making Bob Cullum lose face wouldn’t be good for him. A senior noncom could always come up with ways to make a junior noncom’s life miserable. So he didn’t push things, and neither did Cullum, and they both stayed tolerably content.

  Then the Ranger and the two baby flattops-they were the Suwannee and the Chenango-steamed out on patrol, and Pete was more than tolerably content. Hitting back at the Japs still roused a fierce, primal pleasure in him, better than anything this side of sex (and more closely related to it than he understood-he was anything but an introspective man).

  Because the escort carriers couldn’t get out of their own way-they cruised at fifteen knots-it also struck him as a patrol in slow motion. The Ranger and all the escorting cruisers and destroyers had to amble along at the same paltry pace. But Wildcats from the converted freighters joined the combat air patrol above the flotilla. If they ran into a Japanese force, two more squadrons of dive-bombers and torpedo planes would tear into the enemy.

  That did matter. It might end up mattering one hell of a lot. On the other hand … “We better not
let the Japs catch us unawares, like,” Peter remarked to Sergeant Cullum at gun drill one morning. “It ain’t like the baby flattops can get away from ’em. They can’t run, and they can’t hide, neither.” He beamed, pleased at his own wit.

  If Cullum even noticed it, he didn’t let on. He broke into an off-key rendition of “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River” and an equally atrocious soft-shoe routine by the dual-purpose five-incher.

  Pete was not inclined to strafe him the way Brooks Atkinson or any other critic in his right mind would have. He was too busy being amazed for that even to occur to him. “Fuck me up the asshole!” he exclaimed, and pointed across the blue, blue Pacific at the slowpoke escort carrier. “She is named for that dumb river, isn’t she?”

  “Speaking of dumb …” Cullum said pointedly. “You just now noticed, Hercule Poirot?” He pronounced it poi-rot, as if the native Hawaiians’ staple had gone bad.

  “Who?” Pete wouldn’t have known who Hercule Poirot was even with his name said the right way. Sherlock Holmes he could have handled. Anyone more obscure? He would have dropped the ball. Hell, he had dropped it. He went on, “I knew the fucking song. Jeez, who doesn’t? But I never figured it was about a real place.”

  “Well, it is.” Now Bob Cullum spoke with exaggerated patience.

  “Well, ain’t that nice?” Unconsciously, Pete used the line and the intonation of a performer in a Vitaphone Variety-an early stab at a talkie, well before The Jazz Singer-he’d watched when he was a kid. Japanese interrogators could have shoved burning bamboo slivers under his fingernails without getting him to remember the skit with the top part of his mind.

  Floatplanes launched from the cruisers’ catapults were the flotilla’s long-range scouts. You had to hope they would spot Japanese ships before the Japs spotted them. And you had to hope that, if they did, they’d be able to relay a warning before some slanty-eyed son of a bitch in the cockpit of a Zero hacked them out of the sky.

  Neither of those hopes struck Pete as especially good. American scouts had already missed Japanese naval units more than once in the Pacific. And one of those sedate floatplanes wouldn’t last long against a Zero, much less against a swarm of Zeros. It’d last … about as long as the Suwannee would, say, in a gun duel with a Jap battlewagon.

  Not that the Ranger would last one whole hell of a lot longer. But the Ranger could make twenty-nine knots. She might manage to flee from such an unfortunate encounter. The Suwannee and the Chenango couldn’t even do that. A battleship would devour them at its leisure.

  Something overhead that wasn’t a Wildcat or a floatplane drew Pete’s nervous glance. Then he relaxed … fractionally. “Gooney bird,” he explained to Bob Cullum, who’d sent him a quizzical stare.

  “Ah.” The other leatherneck nodded. “Yeah, they’re all over this stretch of the Pacific, aren’t they?”

  “Damn right they are,” Pete said. “They’re just about big enough to shoot down, too.”

  “Bad luck!” Cullum said. “No luck’s worse’n that! Fuck, I’d sooner bust ten mirrors than shoot an albatross.”

  “Okay, okay. All right, already. Keep your hair on, man. I was just kidding around.” Pete knew about how hurting an albatross was worse than breaking a mirror while walking under a ladder as a black cat sauntered across your path. Anybody who’d ever put to sea in the tropical Pacific did, even if-like Pete-he’d never heard of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

  But Bob Cullum took the superstition to extremes. No matter how much Pete apologized, the other Marine muttered about curses and misfortunes for days. By the time he finally shut up, Pete was tempted to head for Midway with a machine gun and a flamethrower, to wipe the breeding colony of gooney birds off the face of the earth.

  Only one thing stopped him: the Japs held the island. He wondered if they felt the same way about albatrosses as white men did. If not, they might be settling the great big birds’ hash for him. He could hope, anyhow.

  Chapter 18

  “Sir!” Sergeant Hideki Fujita stood at rigid-to say nothing of corpselike-attention. His salute was so perfect, even so extravagant, that the pickiest, the most worst-tempered, drillmaster could have found nothing wrong with it. “Reporting as ordered, sir!”

  “At ease, Sergeant,” Captain Ikejiri said. Fujita eased his stiff brace a little, but still felt anything but easy. What noncom would, when summoned out of the blue by an officer? The first thing that went through Fujita’s mind was What have I done now? Sensing as much, Ikejiri went on, “You’re not in trouble.”

  “Sir!” Fujita repeated, and went back to attention. When they were really after you, didn’t they try to lull you into a false sense of security?

  “At ease, Sergeant,” the captain said again, more sharply this time. “How would you like to get away from Burma-about as far away from Burma as you can go and stay in the Japanese Empire?”

  “Sir?” It was the same word for the third time in a row, but now Fujita meant it as a question.

  “I’m asking you. I’m not telling you. You can say no. You won’t get in trouble if you do say no, and no one will think less of you if you do,”

  Captain Ikejiri said. “But you’ve been eager to see action, and here-or rather, there-is a chance for you to see more than you would if you stayed in Myitkyina.”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Fujita said cautiously.

  “I know you don’t. That’s why I called you in: to explain what your choices are.” Ikejiri let his patience show. “You will know there was some talk of using our special techniques against the Englishmen in India.”

  He was a good officer, a conscientious officer. Even here, with nobody listening but Fujita, who was already in the know, he didn’t talk openly about bacteriological warfare. He took security seriously, so seriously that he censored himself, perhaps without even noticing he was doing it.

  “Oh, yes, sir!” Fujita nodded. He would have loved to give England a taste of Japan’s medicine.

  “Good. Then you will also know that it was decided not to proceed with this. The concern was that we were too likely to be found out, and that that would not be advantageous for the Empire,” Ikejiri said.

  “I had heard that, hai.” Fujita nodded once more. Like most ordinary soldiers, he was all for giving the white men the plague or smallpox or cholera or whatever else Japan had in its bag of tricks now, and for worrying about consequences later. Eagerly, he asked, “Do we have permission to operate against England now, sir?”

  “Against England? No,” Captain Ikejiri said, and Fujita’s chin went down onto his chest in disappointment. But the officer went on, “We do have permission to begin special warfare against the Americans in Hawaii. If they can’t use those islands, they will have to try to fight the war from the coast of their continent. Obviously, that would be difficult and expensive for them, and most desirable for us.”

  “Yes, sir. I can see how it would be,” Fujita replied, picturing a map. An extra three or four thousand kilometers of sea voyage each way? Oh, the Americans would love that!

  “The special unit will be set up on the island called Midway,” Captain Ikejiri said. “The Navy has long-range bombers that can reach the Hawaiian islands from Midway. I am being transferred to the new facility. I would like to have some men along I know I can rely on. So, Sergeant-will you come to this Midway place with me?”

  “Yes, sir!” Hideki Fujita didn’t hesitate. He knew nothing about Midway Island except that it wasn’t Burma. What else did he need to know?

  Nothing in Burma, nothing that had anything to do with Burma, happened right away. That would have annoyed Fujita more had it also surprised him more. He’d spent a long time in the Army now. He’d come to see how very little that had to do with soldiering happened right away-the main exception being the arrival of an unwelcome bullet or shell.

  No, transfer requests had to snake up the chain of command. Approvals-assuming there were approvals-had to wind their way back down. Transportation orders nee
ded to be cut. Planes had to get off the ground.

  In due course, the unit threw a farewell party for Captain Ikejiri and the noncoms and private soldiers who would accompany him to Midway. It got kind of drunk out. In one skit, the men who were staying behind mimed his party falling off the edge of the world. They howled laughter. Fujita found himself less amused. Captain Ikejiri clutched the hilt of his officer’s sword hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

  “Take it easy, sir,” Fujita whispered to him. “If you start taking heads, people will talk about you.”

  Ikejiri smiled thinly. “I know that, Sergeant. I really do. But I thank you for reminding me just the same. The temptation is there, believe me.” With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, he moved his right hand away from the curved sword.

  He and the men who accompanied him and their caged animals and infected fleas and bacteriological cultures crowded an Army transport plane that looked a lot like an American DC-3 (the resemblance was not a coincidence; Japan had been building the design under license since before the war). From Myitkyina, they flew to Bangkok-Siam was a Japanese ally.

  They got stuck there for a couple of days. No one seemed to have heard they were coming, which meant no one wanted to allocate the transport fuel so it could go on. If Captain Ikejiri had been annoyed at the going-away party, he was furious now. When he stormed off the plane, Fujita wondered if Siamese-or Japanese-heads would roll.

  But the telegram proved mightier than the sword. Once Ikejiri used his connections, what must have been a peremptory wire came back to Bangkok. Local officials fell all over themselves refueling the transport and getting it out of there. They might have feared that some of the unit’s diseased fleas would get loose and touch off epidemics in their town. Watching Captain Ikejiri’s smile of grim satisfaction as gasoline gurgled into the plane’s tanks, Fujita suspected they might have had excellent reason for such fears.