He walked over to the edge of the lagoon as soon as it began to get light. Bombs had fallen in the water there. The bursts killed the little silvery fish that took refuge in the shallows from bigger, meaner fish out in the Pacific. Some of them had washed ashore. They hadn’t started to go bad.
A bayonet was rarely useful these days as a weapon of war. You fought the enemy at longer range than you could thrust with your bayoneted rifle. But a knife on your belt was still a handy thing to have. It was good for all kinds of things. Gutting little fish lying on the sand, for instance.
Another soldier was using his bayonet for the same purpose. A petty officer had a shorter knife that also did the job. He caught Fujita’s eyes. “Well, the Americans went and got our breakfast ready for us, anyhow,” he said, and ate the fish he’d just cleaned.
“Hai.” Fujita nodded. “I didn’t have sashimi for breakfast very often before I came here, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” He ate a fish, too. “A lot better than no breakfast at all.” He knew more about that than he’d ever wanted to find out. Anyone who’d been in combat for a while discovered more than he’d ever wanted to learn about missing meals.
The other soldier tossed some guts into the water. He crouched down and scooped out a fish that came up to the bait. Inside of two minutes, that one was inside him. “You won’t get any fresher than that unless you eat dancing shrimp.”
“I haven’t done that since before I went into the Army.” Fujita let out a sigh full of longing. What could be more delicious than a live shrimp peeled from its shell and still wriggling?
A gull swooped down, grabbed a dead fish, and swallowed it while flying away. The gooney birds here didn’t care about people. The gulls knew enough to be wary of them. Some of the Japanese had eaten seagulls. The only reason they didn’t do it more often was that gulls tasted bad.
One of the reasons they tasted bad was that they didn’t care what they ate themselves. They were as bad as ravens. They would eat dead soldiers if you didn’t get the bodies under the sand. Did that make you a cannibal if you ate them? Fujita hadn’t, so he didn’t worry about it.
He had other things to worry about. He went to work with pick and shovel so the G4Ms could try to pay the Americans back for their visit. Japan kept flying a few bombers in by way of Wake Island. The Americans had more, though, and could bring in planes and men and munitions more easily than Fujita’s side. Their bases were closer to their homeland than this distant outpost of Empire was.
Rice. A little shoyu for flavor. Canned squid (the Americans had blown up a lot of food, but for some reason there was still plenty of canned squid). All things considered, sashimi from fish bombed in the lagoon was a step up from anything the cooks could do with what they had.
At the garrison’s pitiful supper, everyone held the same thought uppermost in his mind. Would the Yankees come over again tonight? The only way to find out was to try to sleep and see if you made it through till morning without needing to dash for a hole in the sand. When U.S. air raids started, the soldiers and sailors used to give the antiaircraft gunners grief about not shooting down more American planes. Now the men saw the gunners did the best they could. The bombers flew high. The gunners had no searchlights to show them their targets. They had to fire at the engines’ drone and hope for the best.
Fujita rolled himself in his blanket. After a day of hard labor on the runway-still nowhere near ready to take planes-he was ready to sleep hard for as long as anybody would let him. The Americans let him till a little past midnight. Then explosions woke him. He thought some of those booms would have woken the dead.
If he didn’t want to be one of those dead, he needed to take what little cover he could find. He grabbed his belt and his rifle-ingrained military habit-and ran for a shallow, sandy trench. Bombs kept whistling down out of the sky. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if one of them whistled down right here. But what else could he think about when the ground shook and the only light was the lurid flash of explosions?
Almost the only light. A couple of guns kept blasting away at the planes overhead. Their muzzle flashes and the ice-blue streaks from the tracers they fired also gave Fujita’s eyes something to work with.
If you put enough shells in the air, sooner or later you were bound to hit something. So the gunners claimed. Other troops stationed on Midway loudly and profanely doubted it. But the gunners turned out to know what they were talking about after all.
Through the whistles and explosions and the rapid-fire booming of the guns, Fujita heard his countrymen cheering in their holes. He looked up into the night. Kilometers high in the sky, an American bomber was on fire. Flames spread up the wing to the fuselage. The plane plummeted toward the sea. When it crashed into the Pacific, wreckage and gasoline floated on the water, burning.
Rifles started going off. Fujita looked up again. Lit as if by flash bulbs, parachutes were floating down on Midway. He chambered a round in his own Arisaka and blazed away whenever he could see one. American flyers deserved whatever happened to them, especially if they didn’t have the nerve to kill themselves instead of being taken prisoner.
One of the parachutes was coming down almost right on top of him. He fixed his bayonet. He might get some combat use out of it after all. When the flyer landed, Fujita scrambled from the trench and dashed toward him. He wasn’t the only one, but he was the closest.
He could see and smell blood on the American, but the white man wasn’t dead. He reached for something on his belt-a pistol, probably. Fujita fired from no more than a couple of meters away. The flyer groaned. Fujita gave him the bayonet, again and again. The Yankee screamed till his voice faded into a choking gurgle.
“Enough,” another Japanese said. “You killed him, all right.”
“I wish I could kill them all.” Fujita stabbed the bayonet into the sand to get off as much of the American’s blood as he could. If any other men from the burning bomber came down on Midway, he knew they would meet the same reception this fellow had.
As the rest of the enemy planes growled away, Fujita plundered the corpse. He took the pistol and a couple of magazines of cartridges. He also took the Yankee’s emergency rations. They might not be good, but they’d be different, anyhow. He tossed the man’s billfold aside-American money wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t care if he slept the rest of the night or not. He’d hit back at the foe right here on Midway!
CHAPTER 11
One of the things Hans-Ulrich Rudel hated about the way the war had gone was that you couldn’t ask questions any more. Well, you could, but you had to be careful about who heard them. Otherwise, you might get a visit from Major Keller, who would wonder whether your spirit was sufficiently National Socialist.
Or Keller might just decide you were hopeless. In that case, he wouldn’t call on you. The SD or the Gestapo would. And if they took you away, who knew where you’d wind up or what would happen to you there?
No one knew, though almost everyone could make a good guess. That was another question you couldn’t ask. It was bound to bring Major Keller or worse down on you if you did.
Hans-Ulrich could still talk to Sergeant Dieselhorst, and the noncom heard news long before he did himself. Picking a time when no one stood anywhere close, Rudel quietly asked, “What’s the latest from Münster?”
“From where?” Dieselhorst said. “You mean that little town in … was it Bulgaria or Yugoslavia?”
“Bulgaria, I think.” Hans-Ulrich matched dry with dry.
The sergeant rewarded him by hoisting one eyebrow. “Martial law is the last thing I heard. I mean, the whole Reich is under martial law, or as near as makes no difference, but this is the real stuff. Curfews, and they won’t just arrest you if you get out of line. They’ll shoot you.”