“What the-?” Kulkaanen exclaimed.
“I’m going to get after those Germans,” Stas answered.
A moment later, another startled question came from his radio earphones. He gave the squadron CO the same answer. Several silent seconds followed as Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky considered it. At last, he said, “Our mission is to keep the Fascists from harassing the English now that they’ve come to their senses. You’re doing that. Good luck.”
“Spasibo,” Stas said dryly. He noticed that none of the other pilots was peeling off to attack the Dorniers. That made his own job harder. It also made his Russian comrades as imaginative as so many oysters. He chuckled sourly. Tell me something I didn’t already know, he thought.
One of the things he did already know was which Flying Pencil he wanted: the last and highest in the second V. That was the fellow least able to protect himself, and also the one whose buddies could help him least.
The Do-17’s pilot and crew didn’t notice him till he was almost close enough to open up. Only one machine gun at the back of the cockpit would bear on him. He had two forward-firing machine guns, and two 20mm cannon to go with them. As tracers whipped past the Pe-2, he watched chunks fly off the German bomber’s wing. Flame licked, caught, spread. The Dornier went into a spin the pilot hadn’t a prayer of controlling.
Kulkaanen whooped. “Good shooting!” he yelled.
“Thanks.” Stas wanted more German planes. But the Flying Pencil he’d attacked must have radioed a warning to its friends before it went down. The rest of the Do-17s dove for the deck as fast as they would go. He might have caught them had he chased them. Then again, 109s might be on the way to give them a hand. A Pe-2 could give a good account of itself against a Messerschmitt, but it wasn’t something you wanted to try unless you had no choice.
He did have a choice, and made it-he flew back toward the rest of the Soviet bombers. He also had a mission to fulfill. Even though he’d shot down the German plane, he still needed to do that. Orders were, and always would be, orders.
To say Hideki Fujita was not a happy man was to prove the power of understatement. He’d got demoted to corporal for letting the three Americans escape from Pingfan, and he’d got a hell of a beating besides. Then, when neither Japanese nor Manchukuan patrols managed to stumble across the white men on the loose, he got another beating, this one worse than the first.
Adding insult to injury-literally-he remained on watch at the Americans’ compound. His superiors left him in no doubt about what would happen to him if any more Yankees got away. That would be the last mistake he was ever allowed to make.
Self-preservation made him tighten things up even more than was usual at Pingfan. The Americans’ compound ran by the clock, as if it were a factory cranking out Fords. Any prisoner in there who was late for a roll call or a lineup or even slow in bowing to a Japanese guard got pounded on with fists and boots and rifle butts.
Fujita would have done worse than that to them had the scientist-officers who ran Pingfan not made it plain they needed the Americans in relatively good shape. That disgusted him. He couldn’t even wallop the Yankees as hard as his own people had walloped him-some of his bruises were a long time fading. Where was the fairness in that?
On the other hand, those scientist-officers didn’t take him inside the enormous walled-off facility that was Pingfan’s beating heart. He didn’t know what happened to the maruta who went in there, not in any detail. He wasn’t interested in finding out, either. And, unless you were a scientist yourself, once you went behind those high walls, you didn’t come out again: not alive, anyhow.
For a little while, he’d feared he’d infuriated the authorities enough to make them decide to turn him into a maruta. Next to that fate, a couple of beatings didn’t seem so bad.
The sergeant soon set over him, a bruiser named Toshiyaki Wakamatsu, made him remember all the reasons he’d despised sergeants before becoming one himself. Wakamatsu was loudmouthed and brutal. He fawned on officers but wouldn’t listen to anyone of rank lower than his own.
Was I like that? Fujita wondered. He hoped not, but feared he might have been. He couldn’t ask the enlisted men from his squad. They’d never give him a straight answer, any more than he would give one to Wakamatsu. Giving straight answers was a most un-Japanese thing to do. You told your superiors what you thought they wanted to hear. If they had any sense, they knew how to interpret what you said. If they didn’t, their heads swelled up with all the praise you lavished on them.
Sergeant Wakamatsu had his own way of dealing with the Americans. He couldn’t talk to them, any more than Fujita had been able to. Fujita had learned that some of the Americans knew scraps of Chinese. Senior Private Hayashi spoke Chinese fluently. Fujita said not a word of that to the man now holding down his place. Neither did Hayashi. His silence made the demoted noncom feel good. The clever senior private still felt loyal to him-or at least didn’t want to do the blowhard who’d taken his slot any favors.
Instead of talking to the Americans, Wakamatsu gestured to show what he wanted. When the prisoners didn’t catch on fast enough to suit him, he clouted them. That helped him less than he’d seemed to think it would.
“Bakatare! Bakayaro!” he roared at the Yanks. Had he really expected them to cooperate? If he had, he was an idiot himself, even if he called them by that name. Prisoners might have lost their honor simply by letting themselves be captured, but they didn’t go out of their way to help their captors. Anyone with a gram of sense should have been able to see that.
Since Sergeant Wakamatsu couldn’t… Fujita did his best to stay out of the sergeant’s way. His new superior was setting himself up to crash and burn. Fujita didn’t want to catch fire when Wakamatsu did. He hardly cared if the authorities gave him back his old collar tabs.
He kept an eye on the American named Herman Szulc. Wakamatsu still hadn’t figured out that Szulc was a leading troublemaker. And Szulc had a buddy, a smaller fellow called Max Weinstein. One look at that fellow and anyone with a suspicious mind would hear alarm bells.
Weinstein knew some Chinese. Fujita had heard him jabbering with the laborers who did the work around Pingfan that the Japanese didn’t care to do for themselves. Sergeant Wakamatsu must have heard him, too. Did Wakamatsu take any special notice? Fujita was convinced Wakamatsu wouldn’t have noticed his own cock if he didn’t need to piss through it now and then.
“What is the American saying?” Fujita asked Senior Private Hayashi.
“When I’ve heard him, he’s been trying to get extra food from the Chinese,” the conscripted student answered.
“What do you suppose he’s talking about with them when you’re not around to hear?” Fujita persisted.
“Please excuse me, Sergeant- san — I mean, Corporal- san — but how am I supposed to know that?” Hayashi sounded and looked as exasperated as an inferior could afford to do when responding to a superior’s stupid question.
But Fujita still didn’t think it was so very stupid. “Come on. Use your fancy brains,” he snapped. “Is the American a Red? Have the Chinese Reds infiltrated our labor force?”
The Japanese often worried more about Communists in China than they did about the forces that followed Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The Communists were sneakier than the regular Chinese forces, and they made more trouble. They were committed to what they did in ways the regular Chinese forces couldn’t approach.
All the same, Senior Private Hayashi replied, “How can an American be a Red? The Yankees hate Communists almost as much as we do.”
“Maybe,” Fujita replied, in tones that declared he didn’t believe it for a minute. And he had his reasons, too: “In that case, how come they’re cheering when England stops helping Germany and starts helping the miserable, stinking Russians again?” He knew exactly how he felt about the Russians. How else could he feel, considering the too many times they’d come too close to killing him?