The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (9 page)

I’ll worry about that later
, Lemp told himself. He did not hold the Red Navy in high regard. Yes, the Ivans were brave. But he’d spent most of the time since the
war started facing off against the Royal Navy out in the North Sea and the Atlantic. Those were the best surface sailors in the world. Better than their opposite numbers in the
Kriegsmarine
? He nodded to himself. They were the men from whom the Germans—and everybody else—tried to learn their craft. Set against competition like that, the Russians didn’t come close to measuring up.

He went to the
big, pier-mounted binoculars on the conning tower. They had a narrow field of view, but more magnification and far more light grasp than the ones he and the ratings wore on straps around their necks. And now he wasn’t scanning for things that might be there. Something was, and he knew just where to look for it.

Distant waves leaped toward him. So did that smoke smudge, not quite so low on the
horizon now as the U-boat hurried toward it. Before long, he got what he was waiting for: both the U-30 and the enemy ship rose on swells at the same time. He didn’t get to study that lean shark shape for very long, but he didn’t need long, either.

“Destroyer,” he said crisply.

He glanced at his own boat’s exhaust. There wasn’t that much to see. Diesels ran cleaner than turbines, and his engines
were smaller than the ones powering the Soviet ship. An outstanding lookout might spot his
smoke or, now, the U-boat’s silhouette against the sky. But how many outstanding lookouts did the Red Navy boast? Not many. And not many German officers were better equipped to judge that than he was.

So he waited, and waited, and waited some more as the gap closed. Only when he figured any halfway-awake
fellow with binoculars was liable to see the U-30 did he order the ratings below. As usual, he was the last man off the conning tower. As he dogged the hatch behind him, he ordered, “Take her down to
Schnorkel
depth and raise the periscope.”

“
Schnorkel
depth. Aye aye,” Hammerstein said. The snort let the diesels breathe under water. It gave the boat better performance than she had on her electric
motors … as long as she didn’t dive deep. The Dutch had invented the gadget, but more and more German U-boats used it these days.

Also, of course, the
Schnorkel
’s stovepipe tube and the skinnier one that housed the periscope were a lot harder to spot than the U-30’s hull would have been. Lemp peered through the ’scope and tried to work out the destroyer’s speed, course, and distance.

“Have we
got a shot?” the exec asked.

“I … think so,” Lemp said slowly. “They have no idea we’re around. They’re strolling along at eight knots, tops.” That was about a quarter of the destroyer’s full speed. “We’re within four kilometers now. We can close some more, too.”

He fed the course and speed information to Hammerstein, who had a kind of glorified slide rule that helped him calculate the torpedo
settings. Regulations said the skipper’s
Zentrale
was to be closed off from the rest of the boat. Like most skippers, Lemp ignored that reg. Easier just to call orders forward than to shout through the voice tube.

They closed to just over two kilometers. That was still a longish shot, but it was as good as they were likely to get. Any closer and somebody on the Russian destroyer was liable to
wake up and spoil things. A ship like that could show them her heels easy as you please … or make an attack run instead, which wouldn’t be any fun.

Lemp ordered a spread of three torpedoes. One by one, at his shout of
“Los!”
, the eels sprang away from the U-30. Seawater gurgled into the boat’s forward ballast tanks to make up for the several tonnes of weight now vanished and to keep the trim
level.

The stopwatch’s hand seemed to crawl around the dial with maddening slowness. Lemp looked from it to the periscope’s eyepiece again and again. The destroyer made sudden smoke and started to turn … too late. The first eel caught her up near the bow, one of the others not far from the stern. Both explosions rumbled through the U-30. As badly broken as a dog hit by a car, the destroyer went
down fast.

“They got a signal off, dammit,” the radio operator said, emerging from his tiny sanctum.

“Change course to 270,” Lemp said. “We’ll stay at
Schnorkel
depth. Let’s see their planes spot us then.”

“Right you are, Skipper. I am changing course to 270.” The exec swung the U-30 back toward the west, the direction from which the boat had come. A rare smile spread across his face. “The
lords will be extra happy we’ve made a kill, eh?”

“Think so, do you?” Lemp smiled, too. The most junior crewmen—the lords, in U-boat crews’ jargon—bedded down in the torpedo room. As long as it was full of eels, some of them slept on top of torpedoes. Once the reloads went into the tubes, they’d have more room to place their bedrolls and sling their hammocks. To them, that had to outweigh sinking
a Soviet destroyer. It didn’t for Julius Lemp, but he knew how they felt all the same.

SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA
was busy counting logs. The count had to come out perfect for every unit at Pingfan under his command. If it didn’t, somebody would catch hell. Oh, the logs would, of course, but they counted for nothing in a Japanese soldier’s view of things. The person who would catch hell if the count
screwed up was the man in charge—Fujita himself.

He glowered at the logs as he counted them. The
maruta
stood at stiff attention, their faces as expressionless as they could make them. They, or most of them, wanted the count to come out right, too. Until the Japanese authorities were satisfied, the prisoners of war wouldn’t get fed.

That simple truth should have nipped all escape attempts in
the bud. If somebody got out of one of the barbed-wire enclosures, nobody
who stayed behind would get anything to eat. The
maruta
didn’t get that much to eat as things were. They would have got even less if the bacteriologists of Unit 731 didn’t need reasonably healthy subjects for some experiments.

In spite of themselves, the
maruta
shivered. Pingfan was a little south of Harbin, but only a
little. Winters in Manchukuo were nothing to sneeze at—unless you got influenza or pneumonia or any of the other illnesses you could catch all by yourself in cold weather.

Fujita felt the chill himself, and he wore a fur cap with earflaps, a double-breasted greatcoat with a fur collar and a thick lining, heavy mittens, and
valenki
he’d taken off a dead Russian in the forests on the far side of
the Ussuri. The
maruta
—Red Army men in this enclosure—had only their ordinary service uniforms.

They also had more than cold weather to worry about. To the Japanese bacteriologists, they were nothing but guinea pigs to be used up as needed. That the Japanese called them something like logs showed what they thought of them. Brave soldiers, proper soldiers, wouldn’t have let themselves get captured.
Proper officers wouldn’t have surrendered, not when they were defending a place as vital to their country as Vladivostok.

(The other useful thing about calling a POW a log, of course, was that you didn’t have to think of him as a human being once you started doing it. Japanese soldiers—and scientists, too—had trouble thinking of prisoners as human beings like themselves anyhow. By surrendering,
you threw away your manhood, your self: your honor, in essence. Who could possibly care what happened to you afterwards? But tagging the POWs at Pingfan
maruta
made that dehumanizing process all but official.)

One of the privates helping Fujita with the count—doing most of the actual work, in other words—came up to him and stood at attention, waiting to be noticed. After a delay designed to remind
the soldier he was only a private, Fujita deigned to nod. “Yes?”

“Please excuse me, Sergeant-
san
, but I make the count out to be a hundred and seventy-four.”

“Does that include the two bodies?” Fujita pointed toward the corpses lying in front of the Russians’ neat ranks. You had to show your
dead. How else could the guards be sure they hadn’t run off to join the Chinese bandits bedeviling Manchukuo
and to spread wild, lying rumors about what went on at Pingfan?

“
Hai
, Sergeant-
san
.” The private nodded eagerly. The other new conscript with Fujita hustled up a moment later and reported the same figure. They’d gone down opposite sides of the prisoners’ ranks, so they couldn’t have put their heads together to come up with it.

It also matched the number of men this compound should hold, taking
the deaths yesterday into account. Fujita knew that—he kept track of such things—but he checked the figure on the paper stuck in his clipboard even so. He couldn’t afford to be wrong, not on something this important. Yes, 174. Nobody’d run off in the night, not here.

He raked the Red Army men in the front row with his eyes. They were only prisoners, after all. They deserved no better.
“Khorosho!”
he shouted. His accent was terrible, but he didn’t care. It was up to the round-eyed barbarians to be grateful that he’d wasted any time to learn a few words of their stupid, ugly language.

“
Arigato gozaimasu
, Sergeant-
san
!” the Russians chorused. Naturally, they had to thank him for finding their numbers acceptable. They reached as one for the mess tins on their belts—if they had belts—and trooped
off to the kitchen for their meager morning meal.

Fujita pointed to the scrawny dead bodies. “Have these disposed of when the
maruta
come back,” he told the privates.

“Yes, Sergeant-
san
!” one of them said, while the other went, “Of course, Sergeant
-san!
” Fujita had taken his lumps while he was a private. Now he could hand them out. These fellows had to keep him sweet, as he’d had to suck up
to his sergeant before. That was how the system worked.

Later that day, a microbiologist came up to him. “Sir!” Fujita said, stiffening to rigor mortis–like attention. “What do you need, sir?” Whatever it was, Fujita would get it for him or die trying. His orders were that a scientist’s white lab coat was as good as an officer’s collar tabs. If somebody wearing one gave him orders, he had to
follow them.

An officer would knock you around at the slightest suspicion of reluctance. The scientists were friendlier than that, or maybe just more naïve. Dr. Tsuruo Yamamura was a nice guy. Sometimes he even said
please when he told people what to do, a courtesy no officer would ever show. He did it now: “We have a new shipment of
maruta
coming in by train this afternoon. Please take a squad
of guards and meet them at half past three, then take them to the new compound—is it number twenty-seven?”

“Yes, sir. Compound twenty-seven.” Fujita tore off a parade-ground salute.

“Be gentle with them unless they try to escape,” Yamamura said. “They are important to the war effort.”

“Yes, sir!” the sergeant repeated. But then he risked a questioning “Sir?” He wasn’t used to orders like the
ones he’d just got.

Dr. Yamamura was willing, even eager, to explain, where an officer would have either snarled or hauled off and belted Fujita for his gall. “These are American Marines captured in Peking and Shanghai,” the bacteriologist said. “Their reactions to our experiments will help show how Americans and Englishmen differ from Chinese and Japanese, and will let us make more effective
weapons to use against them.”

“I see,” Fujita said slowly. He’d talked to more than a few soldiers who’d served in one or another of the major Chinese cities. From what they said, American Marines were very bad news: big, tough, clever fighters who backed away from nobody. If they were as tough as all that, though, why did they let themselves be taken prisoner instead of killing themselves or
making their foes finish them?

That wasn’t a sergeant’s worry. Being at the railroad siding with a squad well before 3:30 was. Fujita made sure he and his men were in place. The train down from Harbin, naturally, ran late. That also wasn’t his worry—or anything close to a surprise.

More than a hundred Americans stumbled off the train when it finally showed up. They’d been packed in like rice
grains jammed into a sack. Close to half of them wore dirty bandages that showed they’d been wounded. They jabbered in incomprehensible English.

Shouts and gestures with bayoneted rifles got them moving in the right direction. Most of the time, the Japanese soldiers would have clouted some of them with rifle butts to speed things along. But Fujita had spelled out Dr. Yamamura’s orders, so his
men took it easy.

Compound 27 had a barracks hall with a central stove inside the barbed wire. The prisoners wouldn’t be too crowded. They could recover from whatever they’d gone through on the train. Fujita thought they were almost living in a hotel. By the way his men rolled their eyes, they also figured the Americans had it soft. But they were only soldiers. The officers and scientists set
over them didn’t care a sen’s worth what they thought.

SOMEWHERE OR OTHER
,
Adam Pfaff had got his hands on a pair of field glasses. They were such an obviously useful thing for an infantryman to have, not even Awful Arno complained about them. And Baatz complained about everything. He’d sure pissed and moaned about the gray paint Pfaff had slapped on his rifle’s woodwork. Somehow, though, the
nonregulation Mauser hadn’t made the world come to an end or handed the war to the Ivans on a silver platter. Baatz was used to the piece by now. Willi Dernen wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started ordering other people to paint theirs the same way.

Had Willi owned binoculars, he would have used them for something practical, like ogling girls getting into or out of clothes from ranges where
they couldn’t catch him at it. His buddy didn’t do that—or, if Pfaff did, he didn’t brag about it or share the field glasses when he spotted something juicy the way most guys would have. Instead, when he wasn’t using them to search out male Ivans with rifles, he pointed them up into the sky. He tended to mumble to himself when he did that.