belching coal smoke was almost unfairly easy. She even obligingly zigzagged to present her flank.
“Torpedo one — los!.. Torpedo two — los!” Lemp commanded as soon as he had the shot lined up. Twin wet whooshes meant the eels were on their way. Both hit. One was a dud; it thunked off the coal-burner’s flank. But the other eel tore a hole in her stern before Lemp really started swearing. She soon began to settle in the water.
By then, Lemp and the helmsman had swung the U-30 toward another target, this one a bit more than a kilometer off. A longish shot, but he launched only one torpedo: he saved the last one in the forward tubes for self- defense. Reloading was a slow, sweaty job, and his boat wouldn’t stay forgotten now that he’d announced himself.
Cheers echoed through the U-boat when the eel struck home. As soon as it did, Lemp pulled away from the convoy. The snort let him go twice as fast underwater as he could have without it. And you had to sense when you shouldn’t get greedy. There would be plenty of other chances-provided he didn’t throw himself away on this one.
Had Corporal Hideki Fujita stood any straighter and stiffer, anyone seeing him would have thought he’d been carved from wood. But would a sculptor have included a saluting mechanism of such mechanical perfection?
“Requesting permission to speak to you, Captain- san!” Fujita said, his voice an emotionless rasp.
Captain Masanori Ikejiri returned the salute. “Hai? Nan desu-ka?” He could have just told Fujita to dry up and blow away. That he asked him what it was instead showed he didn’t despise the very ground on which the demoted noncom walked. That was something, anyway. It was more than most of Fujita’s superiors seemed willing to admit.
“Please excuse me, sir, but I am not useful here now that my bungling has made me lose face.” If Fujita was going to grovel, he’d grovel as hard as he could. No sense to half measures, not here, not now. And he was sure groveling was his only chance to escape this humiliating situation-unless he killed himself, of course. That was always a possibility, but he didn’t want to die, not yet. “Let me serve the Empire somewhere else in some different way. Please, sir, let me go forth with my rifle and kill the Empire’s enemies.”
Ikejiri eyed him. If the captain wasn’t from a noble family, Fujita would have been amazed. He had the air of effortless ease and style plenty of people tried to imitate, but rarely with much luck. You needed to be born to it, to take it for granted, to bring it off as you should.
He also had any Japanese officer’s uncompromising attitude. “If you fail, you must take the consequences,” he said coolly.
“Yes, sir. But here at this place I don’t have much chance to make up for failing,” Fujita replied. “Put me in front of the enemy, Captain- san, and I’ll show the Emperor what I can do.”
“There are more kinds of courage, Corporal, than the one it takes to charge a machine-gun position,” Ikejiri said.
“Captain- san?” All Fujita really heard was his new, reduced rank. Corporal was a grade a man should hold on the way up to something better. Holding it again, on the way down from something better, burned like lye.
“You have to be brave, don’t you, to do your job in spite of any trouble you had?” the captain said. “Yes, other people will know what happened. But your duties here at Pingfan are still important.”
“Sir, I want to kill something!” Fujita blurted desperately. “Even the maruta laugh at me.”
“Hard to be laughed at by a log,” Ikejiri said in musing tones. “Can’t you make them afraid to open their mouths while you’re close enough to hear them?”
“Oh, yes, sir. And I do.” Fujita’s hands folded into reminiscent fists. “But the sons of assfucked whores go on laughing at me behind my back. I know they do.” You couldn’t pound a man into the ground for an amused glint in his eye, even if the man was also a log. American maruta were too scarce and too valuable to let guards smash them around for the fun of it. Some of the bacteriologists’ experiments required subjects in good condition. Prisoners at Pingfan often got plenty to eat because of that, not the starvation rations men base enough to surrender deserved.
“Hmm.” Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “We don’t usually give men back to the ordinary military once they get stationed here. They know too many things that are nobody else’s business.”
“I wouldn’t blab, sir! By the Emperor, I’d never say a word! Not a peep!” Fujita had been proud of knowing things about Japan’s war effort that not many people knew-even if, as a noncom off a farm, he didn’t understand much about the scientific details. Now he would gladly have forgotten everything.
In another army, Ikejiri might have mentioned the risk of his getting captured. To do so here would have been an unbearable insult. The captain knew Fujita would rather die.
Again, he could have just told Fujita to shut up and do as he was told. Fujita had been more than half expecting that. Maybe he would have obeyed. Maybe he would have obeyed for a while and then blown his brains out. Even he wasn’t sure. And if he wasn’t, how could Captain Ikejiri be?
Rubbing his chin again, the officer said, “How would you like to get away from this encampment for a while, Corporal?”
“Doing what, sir?”
“You know we are making weapons here-weapons to use against the Chinese and the Americans and anyone else who stands in the way of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Fujita nodded, remembering the ride deep into the country to test the germ bomb on the Russian maruta. Relief filled him. He’d feared Ikejiri would give him something worthless, something useless, to do. But finding out how to kill Chinese in carload lots sounded important.
“All right, then.” Captain Ikejiri spoke quickly now, with the air of a man who’d come to a decision. “You may do that. We have air bases that deliver special weapons where they are needed. I will transfer you to one of those.”
“Thank you, sir! Oh, thank you!” Fujita said, all but jumping for joy. With any luck at all, the people who served on that air base wouldn’t know what kind of bakayaro he’d been here. One thing sure: he wouldn’t have prisoners laughing at him any more.
“Maybe you shouldn’t thank me just yet.” Masanori Ikejiri’s voice was dry. “You will be going into more danger than you’re likely to face here. Make sure your rifle is clean and well oiled.”
“It is, sir!” Fujita assured him. “All I have to do is throw a few things in my duffel and I’m ready to leave.” He’d been eager to come to Pingfan. Now he was even more eager to get away.
“Don’t get too excited-it won’t happen quite so fast.” The captain’s voice stayed dry. “We have to go through the proper channels, and the paperwork will take a while. But I’ll put in the transfer right away.”
Something in his tone said right away meant as soon as you quit bothering me. For a wonder, Fujita realized as much. He wanted to grab the officer’s hand and kiss it. For another wonder, he had sense enough to see that wouldn’t do him any good. He saluted again-a salute extravagant enough to come out of a movie and to make a drill sergeant snarl curses at him. He figured Captain Ikejiri had earned this one.
The only person he told about the upcoming transfer was Senior Private Hayashi. They’d served together for a long time, and Hayashi had, or at least showed, more sympathy than most soldiers. “Good luck,” he said. “I hope the fellow who takes your slot isn’t too big a chucklehead.”
“Why should you worry?” Fujita said with a wry grin. “After all, you’ve had enough practice putting up with me.”
“You aren’t bad. You’ve never been bad,” Hayashi said. “You beat us when we’d earned it, but not just for the sake of showing us what a big cock you’ve got. What more could a private want from a noncom?” By the way he said it, wanting even that much-or that little-was an exercise in optimism.
And so it was. Back before Fujita got promoted, plenty of brutal corporals and sergeants thumped him for no better reason than that their rank gave them the right. That was how things worked in the Japanese army. Fujita couldn’t imagine things working any other way.
Getting the transfer took longer than he thought it should. Only fear that Captain Ikejiri would rescind it if Fujita bothered him kept the corporal from asking what had gone wrong. He made himself wait. He couldn’t think of many tougher things he’d done as a soldier.
At last, the precious form came through. With it came a note that said a truck would take him to Harbin. Once there, he would ride the train and then… well, it got complicated then. He’d end up in Yunnan Province, or maybe in Burma, depending on how things went before he arrived. He couldn’t have found Yunnan on a map to save his life. He wasn’t so sure about Burma, either.
