What else had Fletch been right about? Jane angrily shook her head. No matter how much her in-the-process-of-becoming-ex-husband had known about soldiers and artillery pieces, he hadn’t known a goddamn thing about being a husband. If he’d been married to anything, it was the Army, not her.
She looked back at the soldiers. She looked south at the appalling black smoke rising from Pearl Harbor-and west at the smaller smoke clouds from Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks. All she’d done to Fletch was throw him out of the apartment when she couldn’t stand living with him another minute. Being married to the Army was liable to get him killed.
FLETCHER ARMITAGE STUCK a fresh five-round clip in his Springfield and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He wanted something that would hit from farther away than he could throw a rock. He still had the officer’s.45 on his hip, but he hadn’t used it for a day or two. The soldier who’d been issued the rifle wouldn’t miss it; a Japanese shell had cut him in half.
The roadblock south of Haleiwa to which he’d added his gun hadn’t held the Japanese for long. They hadn’t come straight at it. He could have slaughtered a million of them if they had. Instead, they’d gone around, through the cane and pineapple fields. The bastards were like water or mercury; they flowed through the tiniest gaps in the American line-and came out shooting on the other side.
He still had the 105mm gun. He still had the De Soto that hauled it, too. The windshield had been shot out of it. A bullet hole went through both rear doors. The round hadn’t gone through any of the men in the back seat. Fletch didn’t know why it hadn’t. Maybe God was on his side after all. But if He was, why had He turned so many Japs loose on Oahu?
A bullet from off to the left cracked past his head and ricocheted off the barrel of the field gun. He ducked, automatically and much too late. He had no idea whether the bullet was American or Japanese. If many more came from that direction, though, he’d have to pull up stakes and fall back again… if he could. If he couldn’t, he’d fall back without it, and take along the breech block so the Japs couldn’t turn the piece around and start shooting it at his side.
More shooting did come from off to the left, but most of it came from two American machine guns. They fired noticeably faster than their Japanese counterparts. Maybe the Japs, instead of flowing through a hole, had walked into a buzz saw this time. Fletch’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Jesus, he hoped so!
And so it seemed, for the shooting moved farther north. “My God,” one of the artillerymen said wearily. “I didn’t think them slanty-eyed fuckers knew how to back up.”
“I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think we’re doing it to them. There’s a difference,” Fletch said. The artilleryman paused in the act of lighting up a cigarette long enough to nod.
A wild-eyed foot soldier burst out of the cane to the left of the Kamehameha Highway. Half a dozen men around the gun swung their rifles toward him. He didn’t seem to notice how close a brush with death he’d just had. All he did seem to notice was the single silver bar on each of Fletcher Armitage’s shoulders. “Thank God!” he said. “An officer!”
“What the hell?” Fletch said. Most of the time, enlisted men wanted nothing to do with officers. They hoped their superiors would leave them alone. When a PFC actually came looking for a first lieutenant, something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
“Sir, come with me, please.” The PFC sounded close to tears. “There’s something you need to see.”
“What is it?” Fletch asked.
The soldier shook his head. “You got to see it, sir. Christ almighty!” He gulped as if fighting his stomach.
Fletch had already seen much more than he ever wanted to. War was nothing like the sanitized version the Army had got ready for in the drills on the mainland and around Schofield Barracks. People didn’t just get killed. They got blown to pieces. They got chopped to shreds. They got holes punched through them-not neat, tidy holes but ones that poured-often gushed-blood. Fletch had smelled shit and burnt meat, sometimes from the same wounded man. He’d heard shrieks that would haunt him as long as he lived-which didn’t look like being long.
By the PFC’s grime and the stubble on his chin, he’d been fighting from the very beginning of this mess. How could he not have seen and smelled and heard the same kinds of things as Fletch had? How could he not be getting hardened to what war did? What he’d seen just now, though, had shaken him to the core.
Which meant that either he was shell-shocked or that it was going to shake Fletch to the core, too. For his own sake, Fletch rooted for shell shock. But he went into the cane field with the soldier. Stalks rustled. Bugs chirped. One of them lit on him. He brushed it away, trying to walk as softly as he could.
“Eddie?” the PFC called, cradling his Springfield. “You there, Eddie?”
“Wish to hell I wasn’t,” another soldier answered from not far ahead. “You find an officer, Bill?”
“A lieutenant,” the PFC-Bill-said, damning with faint praise.
“Bring him on.” Eddie didn’t seem inclined to be fussy. “I’m with poor goddamn Wilbur. Ain’t no Japs around-now.”
Following Bill, Fletch pushed the last little way through the cane. Eddie was a stocky, swarthy private who looked straight out of Hell’s Kitchen or some other equally charming slum. He stood guard over a corpse. The dead man’s hands were tied behind his back, which Fletch saw first. Bill said, “Jap bastards caught poor Wilbur alive. Go on around, sir. Take a look at what they done to him.”
I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this went through Fletch’s mind eight or ten thousand times as he took the four or five steps that let him see what the Japanese had done to the American soldier they’d captured. And he was right. He was righter even than he’d imagined. “Fuck,” he said softly, the most reverent, prayerful obscenity he’d ever heard.
They’d bayoneted Wilbur again and again, in the chest and in the belly-but not in the left side of the chest, because that might have pierced his heart and killed him faster than they wanted to. And after he was dead (Fletch hoped like hell it was after he was dead) they’d yanked down his trousers, cut off his penis, and stuffed it into his mouth. And they must have been proud of their handiwork, too, because they’d stuck a piece of cardboard by his head. On it, one of them had written, in English, HE TAKE LONG TIME DIE.
“Fuck,” Fletch said again. “What do you need me for?”
“What do we do with him, sir?” Eddie sounded like a lost kid, not at all like a tough guy.
“Bury him,” Fletch answered at once, his mouth running ahead of his brain. His wits caught up a moment later: “Bury him, and for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody just what happened to him. But spread the word: you really don’t want the Japs to take you alive.”
Eddie and Bill both nodded. “Yes, sir,” they said together, seeming relieved somebody was telling them what to do. Then Bill asked, “What about the Geneva Convention, sir?”
“I don’t know. What about it?” Fletch pointed to the mutilated, degraded remnant of what had been a man. “How much do you think the Japs care about it? Why don’t you ask Wilbur here?”
They both flinched. “What do we do if we catch one of them?” That was Eddie.
Fletch looked down at the dead American soldier again. He knew what he was supposed to say. What came out of his mouth was, “Whatever you do, don’t come asking an officer beforehand, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir! ” Where nothing else had, that got Bill and Eddie’s enthusiastic approval.
IV
WHILE AT ANNAPOLIS, Lieutenant Jim Peterson had taken a lot of military history. Back around the time of Christ, he remembered, the Roman Empire had tried to conquer the Germans. (That looked like a damn good idea nowadays; too bad it hadn’t worked.) Augustus sent three legions into the middle of Germany under a bungling general, and they didn’t come back. The Emperor howled, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”