“Moscow speaking,” the newsreader said, as if any Soviet citizen could wonder where his news came from. “French and English tanks have begun to probe Hitlerite defenses in Belgium. The Fascist monsters claim that many of our allies’ armored fighting vehicles were destroyed, but, like any of Dr. Goebbels’ claims, that one is bound to be a lie.”
Flyers drunk and sober nodded, Stas among them. Goebbels did lie. Then again, so did his own lords and masters. And France and England were suddenly allies again, not jackals scavenging scraps from the German hyenas. In other words, France and England didn’t have expeditionary forces on Soviet soil any more.
He wondered whether his comrades-even the relatively sober ones-noticed the change. He couldn’t very well ask them. Asking would be showing that he noticed. It would also be asking for a one-way ticket to the gulags. Even fighting the Nazis was a better bet than that.
Wearing rubber gloves and a gauze mask like the ones surgeons used in the operating room, Hideki Fujita helped manhandle a wheeled cart along a dirt airstrip toward a waiting Army bomber. The other soldiers pulling and pushing the cart along also came from Unit 113, and also had on masks and gloves.
He wondered how much the protective garb helped. All he knew was, he hadn’t come down sick yet. No. He knew one thing more: he didn’t want to, either, not with the diseases the unit was generously donating to the Chinese farther north.
Thump! One of the cart’s wheels went into a pothole. A couple of the porcelain bomb casings on the cart clattered against each other. One of them made as if to fall off. If it did … If that casing broke … Fujita wasn’t the only khaki-clad man frantically shoving the germ bomb back where it belonged. The soldiers wanted to give their enemies in China this present. Get it themselves? Oh, no!
“Eee! Careful there!” said the armorer in charge of the cart. “Treat these babies like they’ve got real explosives in them.”
He had a Tokyo accent that sounded as modern as next week. He was only a sergeant like Fujita, but it was the kind of accent the noncom from the country associated with officers and orders. And the fellow spoke plain good sense. If anything, the porcelain casings were worse than explosives. If a real bomb hit you, it was probably sayonara in a hurry. From what these bastards carried, you’d have time to hurt … and to regret.
The Kawasaki Ki-48 to which the men from Unit 113 lugged the germ-warfare bomb reminded Fujita of a Russian SB-2. He’d been on the receiving end of visits from those beasts in Mongolia and Siberia, and had seen several on the ground, knocked down by Japanese fighters or antiaircraft guns. Somebody’d told him that the SB-2’s design had inspired the Ki-48. He didn’t know whether that was true. He did know the Russian bombers had caused a lot of trouble. However his own side got planes like them, he was glad to see the Rising Sun on this machine’s wings and fuselage.
A bombardier stuck his head out of the open bomb-bay doors. “So you’ve got my packages for me, neh?” the man said. “Why didn’t you do them up with ribbons and fancy bows?”
“Funny. Funny like a truss,” the armorer said. He and the bombardier grinned impudently at each other. The armorer turned back to his work crew. “Come on, boys. Let’s get ’em into the plane. And be careful, remember! Don’t act any dumber than you can help.”
They loaded the porcelain casings into the bomb bay. The space was cramped, and grew more so as one porcelain casing after another went into place. The bombardier gave directions. That impudent grin came back to his face-he liked telling people what to do. He’d have to take orders, not give them, while he was flying. The men up in the cockpit were bound to be officers. He’d seem no more than a beast of burden in a uniform to them.
“You should wear a mask, too,” Fujita told him. “What’s in these eggs isn’t anything you’d want for yourself.”
“Eggs, huh? That’s pretty funny.” But the bombardier shook his head. “I have too many other things to worry about to bother with a mask. Those Chinese rat bastards, they shoot at you when you’re over their cities, y’know. And they send up fighter planes, too, the assholes. You earn what they pay you when you go up in one of these crates. It’s not like it is for you guys, where you’ve got nothing to do but eat and sleep and screw comfort women.”
The unfairness of that almost took Fujita’s breath away. It wasn’t just that he’d put in his time and then some fighting the Russians. But he would much rather have faced antiaircraft fires and fighters’ machine guns than the bacteria Unit 113 turned into weapons.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hotly. “Some of the things I could tell you-” He broke off. If he did tell anybody about those things, even bacteria would be the least of his worries. The Kempeitai-the Japanese secret military police-would take him apart a millimeter at a time.
“Yeah?” By the way the bombardier spoke, he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Hai. Honto,” Fujita insisted. And it was true, as he knew full well. No matter how true it was, though, he couldn’t talk about it. And when he didn’t, the bombardier laughed at him.
He and his comrades hauled the cart away from the Ki-48. “Nothing you could do, Sergeant,” a soldier said sympathetically. “If that guy wants to take a chance on coming down sick, he’s too big a jerk to worry about any which way.”
“Hai. Honto,” Fujita repeated, in the same tone of voice he’d used with the bombardier. The other men chuckled.
They sprawled on the grass by the edge of the airstrip. Before long, the pilot and copilot climbed into the bomber’s cockpit. As Fujita lit a cigarette, the plane’s engines growled to life. Flame and gray smoke belched from the exhaust pipes. The bomber taxied down the strip and climbed into the air. The landing gear folded up into the wings. One after another, more Ki-48s loaded with germ bombs took off. They formed up into a neat V and flew north.
“Let me have a smoke, will you?” the armorer said. As Fujita handed him the pack, the fellow went on, “Well, the Chinamen’ll catch it now. Just what they deserve, too.” He lit a cigarette and gave back the pack. His stubbly cheeks-he was heavily bearded for a Japanese-hollowed when he sucked in smoke. He blew it out again. “If they’d just see they need us to knock their heads together and turn their stupid country into a place that really works …”
“If they had that kind of sense, they wouldn’t be Chinamen to begin with,” Fujita said. “Even in the places where we run the show, you can’t turn your back on ’em for a minute.”
“These Burmese, now, they know what’s what,” the armorer said. The coal on the end of the cigarette glowed red as he took another deep drag. “They had the Englishmen telling ’em what to do before we cleared out those big-nosed fellows. They’ve got to figure we’re a better bargain.”
“No honor to white men,” Fujita said. “They fight well enough. You could even say they’re brave-as long as the fighting goes on. But if they lose, they just give up.”
All the Japanese soldiers shook their heads in wonder and scorn. If you lost, better to kill yourself and get everything over with at once. You forfeited your humanity-certainly your manhood-when you surrendered. Your captors could do anything they pleased with you. Here in Burma, English prisoners were building a railroad through the jungle. Up in Manchuria, Unit 730 tested its germs on Russian, English, and American captives-and on the luckless Chinese they got in large numbers.
After a while, Fujita said, “We ought to get back to the unit,” but his voice held no conviction. The armorer was attached to the airstrip. He also stayed put instead of getting up and going back to whatever his duties were. If somebody needed him, he’d hear about it. In the meantime, why not grab the chance to sit around and do nothing?