Now, suddenly, all that was tottering. The Japs were on the way. They weren’t white men. They were little and kind of brown themselves. They’d made the Boise bail out of Manila Bay like a cat running from a big, mean dog. They had troops on the ground in the Philippines now. And they were heading this way, because they were desperately hungry for the oil and tin and rubber the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya had in such abundance.
And it didn’t look as if the Dutch-or the Americans, or the British, or the Australians-would be able to stop them. Against what Japan could throw into the fight, the white powers didn’t have enough troops or ships or planes, and what they did have wasn’t good enough.
Pete could see that. He wouldn’t have been in Surabaya if the Americans could have hung on in Manila. If he could see it, didn’t it stand to reason the Javanese could, too? If they figured the Japs were going to set them free or take them over, why did they have to kowtow to white men any more?
How many of them listened to Japanese propaganda on the radio every chance they got? How many were quietly helping the invaders? Pete had no way to know stuff like that. He did know the Boise ’s skipper had put even the harborside dives off limits for the ship’s crew. They were officially judged unsafe, and not just because the local joy girls would give you the clap. The Dutch, who were supposed to run this town, wouldn’t go through the streets in groups smaller than squadsized. If they did, they were much too likely to get their heads smashed with a brick or their throats slit.
A plane buzzed over the Boise: a Dutch fighter with fixed landing gear. Everybody said the Japs built junk. Everybody said that, yeah, but they’d sure done a number on the U.S. Army Air Force in the Philippines. The Dutch plane looked hotter than an Army Peashooter, but not by one whole hell of a lot.
Joe Orsatti eyed the Dutch plane, too, and the orange triangles under the wings. “A Fokker,” he remarked.
“A mother-Fokker,” Pete agreed.
Orsatti sent him a pained look. “Har-de-har-har. Y’oughta take it on the road.”
“I did,” McGill answered. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
“Funny again-like a truss.”
“I know,” Pete said. “But I’d sure rather see those triangles than the big old Jap meatballs.”
“Better get used to it,” Orsatti said. “Five wins you ten we ain’t gonna stick around here real long. We’re useless here. We gotta get up farther north if we’re gonna keep the Japs from landing, y’know what I’m saying?”
“Uh-huh,” Pete replied, not altogether happily. “Talk about sticking your head in the tiger’s mouth…”
“Gonna be a shitass excuse for a fleet, all right,” the other Marine said. “Us, a coupla our destroyers, some Dutch tin cans, that limey light cruiser… Should be fun, getting all of us dancing to the same tune.”
Pete hadn’t thought about that. He’d been away from ships too long before he found himself back aboard the Boise. Trying to get skippers from three countries to act in concert? “Fun. Right.” One thing for sure: the Japs wouldn’t have that problem.
They might have others. Pete could hope so. If they didn’t, the allies here were in a lot of trouble. Pete had seen enough of the Japanese in China to have more respect for them than a lot of higher-ranking Americans did. They might not be white men, but they were sturdy and tough. And they were proud of not being white, the same way a lot of Americans and Englishmen-and, evidently, Dutchmen-were proud because they were.
Perhaps because Orsatti had had a lot of shipboard duty, his feel for what the fleet at Surabaya would do next was pretty good. They headed north two days later. Pete wondered if word had come in that Japanese landing forces were on the way. No one said so-but then, nobody ever told the guys who would do the fighting and dying any more than they absolutely had to know. Sometimes not even that.
Then the destroyers steamed away and left the light cruisers behind. “Something’s goin’ on,” Orsatti opined.
“You oughta be a detective-a private dick, like,” Pete told him, which won another dirty look. They were practicing at the five-inch gun, uneasily aware that the practice could turn real any second. Lookouts constantly eyed the skies. Planes that appeared out in the middle of the ocean would be Japanese. Did the enemy fleet have carriers along? They’d struck at Hawaii, but that hadn’t gone so well as they would have liked. Manila, unfortunately, proved a different story.
Night fell. The gun crews were on watch and watch, so Pete’s sleep got ruined. He gulped hot coffee to keep his eyes open. He wasn’t the only one. Drinking java near Java was… almost funny.
The Boise sliced through the Java Sea, kicking up a phosphorescent bow wave and wake. If any Japanese subs were in the neighborhood… With any luck at all, we’re going too fast for ’em, Pete thought, yawning. He wasn’t used to sack time chopped into little bits. Yeah, it had been too long.
“Our destroyers are in contact with enemy warships and transports off Borneo,” the intercom blared in harsh, metallic tones. “They are making torpedo runs at the transports.”
Pete waited to hear reports of Jap freighters blown to smithereens, and he wasn’t the only one. But the intercom stayed quiet after that. Little by little, he realized the silence wasn’t a good sign. So did the other leathernecks on the gun crew. Their high spirits faded.
The sun came up within a few minutes of 0600, as it always did in these waters. A plane buzzed down out of the north to look over the allied fleet. Orders came to fire at it. All the antiaircraft guns on the Boise roared together. The bursts didn’t come close to reaching the plane. It saw what it wanted to see and flew away. And nobody said another word about the destroyers and what they might be doing-or what might have been done to them. Pete kept his mouth shut along with everyone else. But he knew damn well that wasn’t a good sign.
A horse slogged up a road pulling a panje wagon after it. The wagon had tall wheels and an almost boat-shaped bottom. Russian peasants had-and needed-plenty of experience building wagons that could plow through even the thickest mud.
Thaw’s early this year, Ivan Kuchkov thought. More freezes would probably come, but little by little the winter snowfall would melt and soak into the ground. For the next four to six weeks, nobody would go anywhere very fast. No one in his right mind would order any major actions during the rasputitsa, because action just bogged down in the mud.
The Poles knew as much about the rasputitsa, the mud time, as their Russian neighbors. The Germans had fought in the East last year and during the last war, so they knew something. Ivan had heard they knew enough to steal as many panje wagons as they could, anyhow. Their trucks got stuck in the muck just like everybody else’s.
What the Germans’ French and English lackeys knew… Kuchkov’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a nasty grin. He suspected the Red Army would teach them a few lessons. He also suspected they wouldn’t enjoy the instruction. The few schoolmasters Kuchkov had known used a switch to make sure their teaching sank in. The Red Army had a bigger switch than even the meanest, most brutal village schoolmaster, and could swing it harder.
Lieutenant Obolensky squelched up. Kuchkov pretended not to see him. It was at least possible that Obolensky needed to talk to somebody else in the squad. Avram, maybe; the nervous little Jew had his fingers in a million different pies. Ivan wouldn’t have been surprised if he was NKVD.
But no. Obolensky looked around till he spotted Kuchkov. “Come here a moment, Sergeant,” he said.
“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Lieutenant!” That was never the wrong answer. Kuchkov added a salute. The mud tried to suck off his boots as he made his way over to the junior officer. When he got there, he stood and waited. Let Obolensky show his cards.