The prisoner groaned again, louder. He tried to stand but could not. He looked up at the guard. His hands spread in a hopeless last appeal.
Hopeless indeed. Not even wasting a bullet, the guard bayoneted him in the throat. The Russian thrashed his life away. It didn’t take long; he had little life left to lose.
Sergeant Fujita trudged past the still feebly writhing body. He didn’t spare it so much as a sideways glance. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen plenty of others just like it. And it wasn’t as if plenty of the Red Army men who’d surrendered outside of Vladivostok but still managed to shamble along through Manchukuo wouldn’t keel over themselves pretty soon.
One of the prisoners-a man shaggy as a bear, because he hadn’t shaved or trimmed his hair since the surrender-caught Fujita’s eye and stretched out an imploring hand, palm up. “Food, please, soldier-sama?” the Russian said in bad Japanese. Lord soldier -the fellow knew which side his bread was buttered on.
It didn’t help him, not here. “They’ll feed you soon,” Fujita said roughly. The prisoner’s blank stare said he didn’t understand. Fujita simplified things even more: “No food now. Food later. Keep marching.”
Keep marching. That was the essential command. Fujita was glad he had the pair of fine Russian boots he’d taken from a dead soldier in the Siberian woods. They were much easier on his feet than the clodhoppers the Japanese Army issued. What the Russians didn’t know about leather wasn’t worth knowing.
Few prisoners had any boots at all. They’d been plundered after they gave up. Well, of course they had. As soon as a man surrendered, he stopped being a man. He was just a beast, a thing, to be used as his captors found convenient… or amusing.
Fujita had put a few fallen prisoners out of their misery. Couldn’t have them slowing up the column, after all. But he’d never fired into a mass of Russians just to watch them go down. When he had to kill, he killed quickly and cleanly, as the guard in front of him had done. He saw no sport in gutshooting men or bayoneting them so they died a centimeter at a time.
But he said not a word to the Japanese soldiers who enjoyed doing things like that. It wasn’t as if standing orders forbade mistreating prisoners of war. During the last fight against the Russians, such orders had been in place. Japan wanted to show the European powers and America she’d built the same kind of civilization they already had.
Now, by all the signs, the people who ran the country didn’t care what the European powers and America thought. Surrender had long been a disgrace in Japan. If the captors of soldiers who gave up felt like mistreating them or even killing them, no so-called laws of war stood in the way.
And Japan had never ratified the Geneva Convention. The Europeans’ silly rules weren’t going to hold back the Empire, either. Nothing was, not any more.
Peasants in the fields-maybe native Manchus, maybe Chinese settlers-stared at the column of white men in ragged khaki. None stared from close range, however. Not only was the column unfamiliar and therefore alarming; it was guarded by Japanese soldiers, and so doubly alarming.
Yes, Manchukuo was Japan’s ally-Japan’s puppet, if you wanted to be unkind about it. But the local peasants didn’t see Japanese soldiers as allies. They saw them as plunderers, as locusts. Fujita had served in Manchukuo for some time now. He knew the peasants had their reasons for seeing his comrades that way. On the other hand, they were peasants. No doubt they would have kept their distance from Chinese soldiers (or, for that matter, from Brazilian soldiers), too.
Lieutenant Hanafusa strode by, a one-man parade. Being an officer, he wasn’t burdened with a rifle and a heavy pack. He could afford to waste energy showing off. (And he too wore a pair of supple Russian boots, so his feet would be happy.) “Sir, may I ask you a question?” Sergeant Fujita called to him.
“What is it?” Hanafusa returned.
Fujita got the idea that, if the lieutenant didn’t care for the question, someone would be unhappy immediately thereafter. He also had a good notion of who that someone would be. Well, too late to back off now. “Have you heard yet, sir, just where we’re supposed to be going with all these miserable prisoners?”
To his vast relief, Hanafusa nodded. “As a matter of fact, I have. There’s a camp-or some kind of facility, anyhow-at a place called Pingfan.”
“Where would that be, sir?” Fujita knew he was pressing his luck. He bowed to the officer. “Please excuse me, but I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, I hadn’t, either, when somebody told me about it,” Lieutenant Hanafusa said, with more generosity than he usually showed. “It’s about twenty-five kilometers south of Harbin.”
“Ah, so desu!” Fujita exclaimed. He knew where Harbin was, all right. Any Japanese who’d spent some time here would have. Not only was it one of the biggest cities in Manchukuo, it also looked more like a Western town than most places here. That sprang from the strong local Russian influence, which persisted even now. And it was a major rail center; you went through Harbin if you needed to get anywhere in Manchukuo. Fujita had done it several times. He tried one more question: “What will they do with them there?”
“Beats me. That’s for the damned Russians to worry about,” Hanafusa replied. “All I know is, we’re taking them to something called Unit 731. The people who run it want prisoners. Now that we’ve taken so many, our job is to deliver the sorry bastards to them.”
“What are they going to use them for? Or will they use them up?”
“Beats me,” Hanafusa repeated cheerfully. “That’s for the Russians to worry about, too. Maybe after we make the delivery I’ll go back up to Harbin and screw a blond Russian whore-one more reminder that we beat them.”
“Yes, sir. That sounds good, sir.” Fujita grinned.
Hanafusa started to strut off, then caught himself. “Oh, that reminds me, Sergeant. You were vaccinated for smallpox when you went into the Army, weren’t you?”
“I sure was!” Fujita winced at the memory. “It took. I was sick for a couple of days. My arm swelled up like it was poisoned, and I got a big old blister full of pus.”
“I had the same thing happen to me. Not much fun, was it?” But Lieutenant Hanafusa nodded, as if satisfied. “That’s all right, then.”
“What’s all right, sir? Why do you need to know a silly thing like that?”
“It ties in with what people say about Unit 731,” the lieutenant said. The answer might have made sense to him, but it didn’t to Fujita. The sergeant was going to ask him to explain, but Hanafusa did hurry away this time. Fujita had already pushed him as far as a noncom could reasonably push an officer, and maybe a little further besides.
He’ll come back. It’s still a long way to Harbin. If he’s in a good mood, I can find out later on, Fujita thought. He rubbed his arm. It felt fine now, but he still wore a nasty scar from the vaccination. And he remembered how little sympathy the doctors had shown. One of them told him, You’d be a lot sicker than this if you really came down with smallpox.
Fujita knew that was true. One of his grandfathers had a pocked face, and mourned a younger brother who hadn’t survived the disease.
“Food, please, sir?” another Russian prisoner whined in bad Japanese.
“No food now. Food later,” Fujita answered. Idly, he wondered whether the white man had ever been vaccinated.
They’d removed the cannon from Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka for this mission. He wasn’t shooting up Russian panzers today. His plane and half a dozen others would try to take out a railroad bridge over the Dnieper near Borisov.
Colonel Steinbrenner nodded to the pilots he’d chosen. “I picked you boys for a reason,” he told them. “You’re the best I’ve got. That bridge has got to go. The Reds are hauling all kinds of crap over it. Don’t let me down. Don’t let the Reich down, either.”