The local paper was full of a rising tide of abuse aimed at the United States. Whoever wrote the stories roared out hatred against the country across the Pacific for refusing to sell Japan any more of the raw materials she needed. Roosevelt thinks he can bring us to our knees through economic warfare, an editorial declared. He has yet to learn that the Empire of Japan goes to its knees before no man and no nation. He has yet to learn this important fact, but we Japanese stand ready to teach him the lesson.
Shinjiro Hayashi read the newspaper, too. He was less enthusiastic about what he found in it than Fujita was. “Are you ready to fight another war so soon, Sergeant- san?” he asked. “We just patched up a peace with Russia, and the war with China goes on and on.”
“War with the United States isn’t our worry,” Fujita answered. “The sailors will carry the load on that one.”
“Some of it, sure, but not all of it,” Hayashi said. “The Philippines sit just south of the Home Islands, and who runs them? The Americans, that’s who. If war breaks out, we’ll have to take them away from the USA. Otherwise, they’re a perfect base for enemy ships and planes. And it won’t be the sailors who do most of the fighting down there. It’ll be bowlegged bastards like us.”
Fujita laughed. Neither he nor Hayashi was bowlegged, but he knew what the senior private meant. The Navy was the aristocratic service. The Army took peasants and turned them into men. It had done just that with Fujita. It had turned Hayashi into a man, too, even if he’d put on more airs than peasants before conscription-and some sergeants’ hard hands-knocked them out of him.
“All right. Fine. That’s the Philippines,” Fujita said. “But it will still mostly be the Navy’s war.”
“I suppose so, Sergeant- san,” Hayashi said, by which he meant he supposed no such thing but wasn’t stupid enough to come right out and tell Fujita he was wrong. “But if a fight like that starts, it won’t be a halfway affair. French Indochina, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with oil and rubber and tin… When you grab, you should grab with both hands.”
“If you grab too much, your hands fill up and you trip over your own feet,” Fujita responded. “There’s such a thing as getting greedy, you know.”
“I suppose so,” Hayashi said again. “But sometimes you only get the one chance. If you don’t take hold of it while it’s there, you may never see it again. It’s like a chance with a pretty girl, neh?”
“You always grab with both hands then!” Fujita made as if to cup breasts in his callused palms. Both soldiers barked harsh male laughter.
A couple of days later, Lieutenant Ozawa summoned Fujita to his tent. He had a little coal stove in there for warmth, but it was fighting out of its weight against winter in Manchukuo. “I need your squad to take care of something for me,” the officer said.
“Yes, sir!” Fujita said, and saluted. He had no idea what Ozawa would tell him to do. That hardly mattered. Whatever it was, he and his men would take a whack at it. If the lieutenant wanted him to bring back a piece of rock from the moon, he wouldn’t fail through lack of effort.
But Ozawa had nothing so ridiculous in mind. “Take as many Russian and Chinese maruta as you need,” he said. “Build a new prisoner compound. Site it at least fifty meters away from any others. Make it of a size to hold, oh, about a thousand men.”
“Yes, sir!” Fujita repeated. For good measure, he saluted again, too. This was something he knew how to handle. “How soon do you need it ready?”
“Three weeks should be plenty of time,” the lieutenant answered.
Fujita considered. “That’ll be a little tight, sir, for running up all the barracks halls and everything. The weather won’t help us any.” If he didn’t get the job done on time, he wanted his excuses lined up in advance.
“You take care of it,” Ozawa said. “You don’t want me to assign the work to someone else, do you?”
Part of Fujita wanted just that. But if he admitted it, he wouldn’t get any other interesting work as long as he stayed at Pingfan. Not interesting in the good sense of the word, anyhow. They might give him things no one else wanted to do or was able to do, and then blame him when he had trouble. That wouldn’t be good. And so, with no hesitation the officer would notice, he replied, “No, sir.”
“All right, then. Three weeks. See to it,” Ozawa said. “Dismissed.”
Fujita didn’t even mutter under his breath till he left the tent and the lieutenant couldn’t hear him any more. You didn’t want to give the jerks who ordered you around any kind of handle to let them screw you even harder. They already had enough advantage on account of their rank.
He told Senior Private Hayashi about the new assignment and directed him to gather up the labor they’d need to construct a new compound. Hayashi might have had his own opinion about people whose rank let them give orders. If he did, he also had the sense not to put it on display.
Laying out the barbed-wire perimeter around the new compound was easy. Any maruta could handle it, because it needed no skill. But the barracks required people who could use hammer and saw, chisel and plane. The prisoners clamored for the work, because they knew they’d get fed a little better while they were doing it. They also wouldn’t have to go into the secret inner facility while they were working. Hayashi efficiently weeded out the ones who were only pretending to be carpenters. He and the other Japanese soldiers beat up some of them to teach them not to play stupid games with their betters.
Chinese and Russians, forced to work together, screamed and gestured at one another, trying to communicate without a common language. Hayashi knew a little Chinese; no one in Fujita’s squad spoke Russian. He had drawings to show what he required. Those pictures were worth an untold number of words. The barracks rose on schedule.
The next interesting question was, who would live in the new compound? When new shipments of Chinese came to Pingfan, they got dumped in with their countrymen. Those barracks grew insanely crowded? So what? The same had been true of the Russians, though no new Red Army men were coming in now that peace with the Soviet Union had been arranged.
Didn’t a new compound argue for a new kind of prisoner? So it seemed to Fujita. Lieutenant Ozawa either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. You couldn’t properly grill officers, however much you wanted to: one more proof that they weren’t good for much.
Pete McGill got something he never expected in a million years: a combination Christmas and get-well card from the leathernecks of the Shanghai garrison. Almost everybody signed it, even guys he couldn’t stand and who he knew couldn’t stand him. Herman Szulc wrote, You don’t know how lucky you are to get away. Max Weinstein said, Power to the proletariat! If he’d told that to Pete face-to-face, Pete would’ve wanted to punch him in the snoot. Seeing the cramped scrawl on the card only made Pete miss the stubborn pinko.
More air-raid alarms sounded in Manila these days. At first, they’d panicked the Filipinos. Now the locals ignored them. So did Pete. He was up and about, but not exactly swift. Even though the Boise had accepted him aboard, he remained on light duty. There were times when he wondered if somebody’d pulled strings to get him out of the military hospital, but he didn’t worry about it.
He still wished he were back in Shanghai with the men he’d known for so long. If the Japs did jump, the leathernecks in China would get it in the neck. They couldn’t very well do anything else except run-and running wasn’t Marine Corps style. They’d make the best fight they could, but when there were hundreds of them and zillions of little yellow monkeys… Even the hero of a bad Western shoot-’em-up couldn’t blast that many redskins before they got him.