Somewhere not far away, a cricket chirped. It fell silent as the Nationalist soldiers went by. "Mierda," Joaquin muttered under his breath. An alert Republican sentry might wonder why the bug suddenly shut up.
He couldn't do anything about that. All he could do was go on. The Republicans had barbed wire in front of their positions, damn them. Most wiring in Spain was halfhearted: a few strands, easy to cut through and to get through. Not here. The Internationals took war seriously. Damn them, too, in spades.
"No worries," Major Uribe said. He had wire cutters. The lengths twanged as they parted one by one. The noise seemed very loud to Joaquin, but the enemy didn't start shooting. Maybe the Mother of God was watching over him. The major hissed in the darkness. "Come along, lambs. All clear now."
On they went, mostly on their bellies. There was the parapet. In. Grab. Out. It would be easy. It could be easy.
"At my count of three, we rush," Uribe whispered. "Uno… Dos…"
He never got to tres. All hell broke loose. Internationals popped up along the parapet and started blasting away with everything they had. The Nationalists shrieked in despair. Major Uribe ran forward, sword drawn. Starlight glittered on the blade-for a moment. Then a bullet caught him. He groaned and fell. The sword flew from his hand.
Another bullet grazed Joaquin's shoulder. "Aii!" he howled, and then clapped both hands to his mouth. The more noise he made, the easier the target he gave the enemy. Well, a slug had found him anyhow. Blood dripped warm down his arm.
The firing eased for a moment. From the trench, someone called out in accented Spanish: "Surrender! Come in now! We'll take prisoners if you do. If you don't, you're dead. First chance, last chance, only chance. Now!"
How many meters back to his own lines? Too many. Joaquin was sure of that. Maybe they would take prisoners. His side had wanted some, after all. "I'm coming!" he said. Two or three other men also gave up. The others, he decided, would never move again, not in this life.
He slid down into the trench. An International frisked him in the dark. The fellow took everything that would have done him any good in a fight, and his wallet, too. That was a joke-he had all of seven pesetas in there. He didn't say anything. The foreigner would find out this wasn't even chicken feed.
"Get moving," the guy said in bad Spanish. "Not to do anything stupid, or I shoot you in the back.?Comprende?"
"Si," Joaquin said miserably, and then, "Where are you from?"
"Estados Unidos. Nueva Iorque," the International answered as they started toward Madrid.
"Why did you come here?" If Joaquin kept the guy talking, maybe he wouldn't shoot him for the fun of it. Maybe.
"For freedom," the American said. "Why do you want to fight for a puto like Marshal Sanjurjo?"
"For my country," Joaquin replied. The American-was he a Jew? wasn't everybody from New York a Jew? Joaquin had never talked with a Jew before-laughed at him. He would have laughed at the other fellow's so-called freedom, if only he were the one holding the rifle. But he wasn't. Head down, he shambled off into captivity. NIGHT IN THE SIBERIAN WOODS. Hideki Fujita sat in a foxhole, slapping at mosquitoes. Daytime, nighttime… The mosquitoes didn't care. They bit whenever they found bare skin. Fujita had itchy welts all over. The damn mosquitoes had bitten him right through his puttees. He wouldn't have believed they could do that till he got here, but he did now.
"Hayashi!" he called.
"What is it, Sergeant-san?" the superior private asked.
"What's the name of that bloodsucking demon in the American movie?"
"Ah! He's called Dracula, Sergeant-san," Shinjiro Hayashi answered. Fujita could hear the relief in his voice. He'd figured Fujita wanted something harder, something more dangerous. Whatever a sergeant wanted, a private had to give it to him.
"Hai! Dracula!" Fujita said, and slapped again. "The night tonight is full of Draculas. You hear them buzzing, neh?"
"That's right," Hayashi said. Not even a private with an education would ever tell a sergeant he was wrong. If he did, he'd get an education of a brand-new kind, but not one he'd want.
Fujita wanted a cigarette. He didn't light up. Who could guess where a Russian sniper might be lurking? Like any other hairy animals, the Russians were at home among the trees. A bullet might fly out of nowhere if he struck a match. Or even the smell of burning tobacco might guide a sniper toward him. Who could say how Russians knew what they knew?
They didn't know how to give up. Though the Kwantung Army had cut the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Red Army counterattacks showed that the enemy would keep trying to restore the lifeline to Vladivostok.
A buzz in the air… Fujita paused with his hand raised to swat at something. This was no mosquito: this was a deeper sound, almost a rumble. Japanese bombers flew by at night to pound Russian positions farther north. And sometimes the Russians returned the favor. These sounded like Russian machines, sure as hell. Their note was different from those of Japanese airplanes. To Fujita, it seemed more guttural, like the incomprehensible Russian language compared to his own.
"Bombers!" someone yelled in perfectly comprehensible Japanese.
Just before the bombs started whistling down, Fujita did stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it. Why not? It would make him feel a tiny bit better-and, if there were Russian snipers in the neighborhood, they'd be scared out of their wits, too. Those planes were dropping by dead reckoning, dropping blind. Bombers, as Fujita had found, were none too accurate even when they could see their targets. When they couldn't… Any Russian snipers faced at least as much danger as the Japanese on whom they preyed.
The first crashing explosions came from a couple of kilometers behind the trench line. Fujita breathed easier. Let the quartermasters and cooks and the rest of the useless people get a taste of what war was like for a change! How would they like it? Not very much, not if he was any judge.
Then he said, "Uh-oh." That didn't seem enough. "Zakennayo!" he added. The bombs were coming closer. He'd seen that happen before. After the lead plane dropped, the others would use his bursts as an aiming point. But they wouldn't want to stick around any longer than they had to. They'd drop too soon, and the ones behind them sooner still, and…
And Hideki Fujita cowered in his hole as the explosions crept nearer and nearer. "Mother!" someone wailed. "Oh, Mother!" That wasn't a wounded man's scream-it was just terror. Fujita had a hard time condemning the frightened soldier. He was about to shit himself, too.
He almost tore down his trousers so as not to foul them. Only one thing stopped him: the thought that the mosquitoes would feast on his bare backside if he did. He hadn't got bitten too badly there. He clamped down as hard as he could and hoped for the best.
Crump! That one was close. CRUMP! That one was closer-much closer. The ground shook, as if in a big earthquake. Fujita knew more about earthquakes than he'd ever wanted to learn. To their sorrow, most Japanese did.
But earthquakes didn't throw razor-sharp, red-hot shards of steel through the air. Several of them wheeped and snarled by above Fujita's head. Dirt kicked up by the explosions arced down on him. Blast tore at his ears and his lungs. He breathed out as hard as he could. It might not do much good, but he didn't think it could hurt.
Then the bombs started going off farther away. Some of them had to be landing on Red Army positions. Instead of exultation, Fujita felt a kind of exhausted pity for the Russians huddling in their trenches. It wasn't as if his own side hadn't also tried to kill him.
Did blasts murder mosquitoes? He hoped so, but was inclined to doubt it. Nothing else did much good against the droning pests.