One of the privates helping Fujita with the count-doing most of the actual work, in other words-came up to him and stood at attention, waiting to be noticed. After a delay designed to remind the soldier he was only a private, Fujita deigned to nod. “Yes?”
“Please excuse me, Sergeant- san, but I make the count out to be a hundred and seventy-four.”
“Does that include the two bodies?” Fujita pointed toward the corpses lying in front of the Russians’ neat ranks. You had to show your dead. How else could the guards be sure they hadn’t run off to join the Chinese bandits bedeviling Manchukuo and to spread wild, lying rumors about what went on at Pingfan?
“ Hai, Sergeant- san.” The private nodded eagerly. The other new conscript with Fujita hustled up a moment later and reported the same figure. They’d gone down opposite sides of the prisoners’ ranks, so they couldn’t have put their heads together to come up with it.
It also matched the number of men this compound should hold, taking the deaths yesterday into account. Fujita knew that-he kept track of such things-but he checked the figure on the paper stuck in his clipboard even so. He couldn’t afford to be wrong, not on something this important. Yes, 174. Nobody’d run off in the night, not here.
He raked the Red Army men in the front row with his eyes. They were only prisoners, after all. They deserved no better. “Khorosho!” he shouted. His accent was terrible, but he didn’t care. It was up to the round-eyed barbarians to be grateful that he’d wasted any time to learn a few words of their stupid, ugly language.
“ Arigato gozaimasu, Sergeant- san!” the Russians chorused. Naturally, they had to thank him for finding their numbers acceptable. They reached as one for the mess tins on their belts-if they had belts-and trooped off to the kitchen for their meager morning meal.
Fujita pointed to the scrawny dead bodies. “Have these disposed of when the maruta come back,” he told the privates.
“Yes, Sergeant- san!” one of them said, while the other went, “Of course, Sergeant — san! ” Fujita had taken his lumps while he was a private. Now he could hand them out. These fellows had to keep him sweet, as he’d had to suck up to his sergeant before. That was how the system worked.
Later that day, a microbiologist came up to him. “Sir!” Fujita said, stiffening to rigor mortis-like attention. “What do you need, sir?” Whatever it was, Fujita would get it for him or die trying. His orders were that a scientist’s white lab coat was as good as an officer’s collar tabs. If somebody wearing one gave him orders, he had to follow them.
An officer would knock you around at the slightest suspicion of reluctance. The scientists were friendlier than that, or maybe just more naive. Dr. Tsuruo Yamamura was a nice guy. Sometimes he even said please when he told people what to do, a courtesy no officer would ever show. He did it now: “We have a new shipment of maruta coming in by train this afternoon. Please take a squad of guards and meet them at half past three, then take them to the new compound-is it number twenty-seven?”
“Yes, sir. Compound twenty-seven.” Fujita tore off a parade-ground salute.
“Be gentle with them unless they try to escape,” Yamamura said. “They are important to the war effort.”
“Yes, sir!” the sergeant repeated. But then he risked a questioning “Sir?” He wasn’t used to orders like the ones he’d just got.
Dr. Yamamura was willing, even eager, to explain, where an officer would have either snarled or hauled off and belted Fujita for his gall. “These are American Marines captured in Peking and Shanghai,” the bacteriologist said. “Their reactions to our experiments will help show how Americans and Englishmen differ from Chinese and Japanese, and will let us make more effective weapons to use against them.”
“I see,” Fujita said slowly. He’d talked to more than a few soldiers who’d served in one or another of the major Chinese cities. From what they said, American Marines were very bad news: big, tough, clever fighters who backed away from nobody. If they were as tough as all that, though, why did they let themselves be taken prisoner instead of killing themselves or making their foes finish them?
That wasn’t a sergeant’s worry. Being at the railroad siding with a squad well before 3:30 was. Fujita made sure he and his men were in place. The train down from Harbin, naturally, ran late. That also wasn’t his worry-or anything close to a surprise.
More than a hundred Americans stumbled off the train when it finally showed up. They’d been packed in like rice grains jammed into a sack. Close to half of them wore dirty bandages that showed they’d been wounded. They jabbered in incomprehensible English.
Shouts and gestures with bayoneted rifles got them moving in the right direction. Most of the time, the Japanese soldiers would have clouted some of them with rifle butts to speed things along. But Fujita had spelled out Dr. Yamamura’s orders, so his men took it easy.
Compound 27 had a barracks hall with a central stove inside the barbed wire. The prisoners wouldn’t be too crowded. They could recover from whatever they’d gone through on the train. Fujita thought they were almost living in a hotel. By the way his men rolled their eyes, they also figured the Americans had it soft. But they were only soldiers. The officers and scientists set over them didn’t care a sen’s worth what they thought.
Somewhere or other, Adam Pfaff had got his hands on a pair of field glasses. They were such an obviously useful thing for an infantryman to have, not even Awful Arno complained about them. And Baatz complained about everything. He’d sure pissed and moaned about the gray paint Pfaff had slapped on his rifle’s woodwork. Somehow, though, the nonregulation Mauser hadn’t made the world come to an end or handed the war to the Ivans on a silver platter. Baatz was used to the piece by now. Willi Dernen wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started ordering other people to paint theirs the same way.
Had Willi owned binoculars, he would have used them for something practical, like ogling girls getting into or out of clothes from ranges where they couldn’t catch him at it. His buddy didn’t do that-or, if Pfaff did, he didn’t brag about it or share the field glasses when he spotted something juicy the way most guys would have. Instead, when he wasn’t using them to search out male Ivans with rifles, he pointed them up into the sky. He tended to mumble to himself when he did that.
“What do you see up there? Bombers?” Willi asked one evening at sunset when he caught Pfaff doing it. He didn’t hear aircraft engines, but that might not signify. Sometimes the Ivans flew so high, you couldn’t hear them. And spotting planes against the darkening sky was a bitch. Again, binoculars would clearly come in handy.
But the other Gefreiter shook his head without lowering the field glasses. “Heavenly bodies,” he answered.
That made Willi think of naked women again. He wasn’t as big a cockhound as some of the guys, but he wasn’t a priest, either. Nowhere close. He looked up into the sky himself. He didn’t see any naked girls up there, only the first-quarter moon and a growing number of stars. He said so.
This time, Pfaff did lower the binoculars. He shook his head again in some annoyance. “Not that kind of heavenly bodies,” he said. It wasn’t that he had anything against women, either.
“Well, what, then?” Willi inquired. He was getting annoyed himself.
“If you really want to know, I was looking at the moon.”
Willi eyed it himself. There it was, up in the sky. It looked like half a coin. The straight line that ran from top to bottom wasn’t quite straight. It seemed ever so slightly chewed, which made it different from the rest of the moon’s outline. It still wasn’t very exciting, or even interesting. Again, Willi didn’t hesitate to say so.