Another officer strode into the car. This one wore khaki, and he had on a cap with a flat crown. If his pink skin, broad face, and pale eyes hadn’t told which army he belonged to, the uniform would have. He greeted the Czechs not in Spanish but in Russian, which he confidently expected them to understand.
Vaclav caught the gist, anyhow. Most of his countrymen probably did. The USSR had helped Czechoslovakia when nobody else would. Now the Czechs were helping Spain, the Soviet Union’s ally, when hardly anyone else would. He thanked them for that.
Had he left it there, everything would have been fine. But he went on to say something to the effect that now the Czechs would have to follow Stalin’s orders like everybody else. That was what Vaclav thought he said, anyhow. The Russian took no questions. He went on to inflict his greetings on the next car farther back.
“Did he say what I thought he said?” Vaclav asked Halevy.
“I don’t know,” the Jew answered. “But what I thought he said, I didn’t like it for beans.”
“Neither did I,” Vaclav said. “That probably means we both think he said the same stupid thing.”
“What can you do?” Halevy said with a sigh. “He’s a Russian. Without the Russians, the Republic would have lost the war a long time ago. Then France would have had to ship us to Paraguay or something when she switched sides.”
“Is there a war in Paraguay? I hadn’t heard about a new one, and I thought the old one was over,” Vaclav said.
“For all I know, it is,” the Jew replied. “The French government would ship us over there any which way. They’re my people, too, and I know how they work. If nobody’s fighting there now, they’d count on us to start something.”
That had an appalling feel of probability to it. Vaclav said, “Me, I was thinking they’d send us to China if they didn’t have Spain. Everybody hates the Japs, pretty much-even the Russians.”
“You’re right. They do,” Benjamin Halevy agreed. “The Japs may play even less by the rules than Hitler and Stalin do.” He threw his hands in the air in mocking triumph. “And they said it couldn’t be done!”
The train chose that moment to jerk into motion again. On they went, deeper into Spain and a brand-new war.
Pete McGill was getting to the point where he could move pretty well on crutches. He could even hobble fifty feet or so with just a cane. And he’d made it from his bed to a chair nearby with no artificial aids whatever, for all the world as if he were a normal human being. One of these days, the cast on his arm would come off, and then he could truly start working on getting his strength back.
He couldn’t wait. He wasn’t the only injured serviceman in Manila who wanted to get back into action as fast as he could, or else a little faster. When he listened to the radio or read a paper, he could add two and two and get four. He might have had trouble in school, but he sure didn’t in the real world.
Russia had patched up a cease-fire with Japan. She was trying to fight Hitler with everything she had. Okay, fine, but that also meant the Japs wouldn’t have any distractions any more. Oh, they were stuck in China, but they could lick the Chinks whenever they set their minds to it. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops wouldn’t parade through Tokyo any time in the next hundred years. And neither would Mao Tse-tung’s, no matter how much Stalin wished they would.
Well, if Japan had gone and started clearing her decks for action, where would the action be? To Corporal Pete McGill, right about here looked like the best answer to that question.
It wasn’t as if the prospect of a war between Japan and the United States was a first-class military secret. The exact plans for fighting it were bound to be secret, of course. But almost every Navy file and leatherneck could give the short version of those plans. (Pete wasn’t nearly sure Army guys could do the same thing: a firm Marine Corps belief was that men who joined the Army were a few ice cubes short of a whole tray.)
When you got down to it, the thing looked simple. The U.S. Navy would steam west from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Navy would steam east from Tokyo Bay. Wherever they bumped into each other, they’d start slugging away. The last fleet standing would go on and thump hell out of the other side till they got sick of it and gave up. Not subtle. Not pretty. But plans didn’t have to be. They just had to work, and being simple sure didn’t hurt.
Things like aircraft carriers did complicate the game. Pete assumed his side knew how many the Japs had so they could make more. That wasn’t necessarily the wisest assumption, but Pete had never tried to persuade American taxpayers to fork over for national defense. What he didn’t know could hurt him, but he didn’t know that, either.
He figured the fight would look like Jutland from the last war, only bigger. Somebody’d described the English admiral at Jutland as the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Both the American and Jap commanders in the next fight would wear the same mantle, whether they liked it or not-and chances were they wouldn’t.
The logical place for the big smashup was somewhere in Philippine waters. Japan would want to clear the USA out of this colony so close to the Home Islands. Do that and you’d also deprive the U.S. Navy of bases within striking distance of Japan. And the Americans wouldn’t be able to interfere with whatever Japan decided to do in China and French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.
Which was why Pete wanted to get back to active duty as soon as he could. Every Navy ship had a Marine detachment. On battlewagons and cruisers, Marines served the secondary armament: not the great big guns in the turrets, but the next size down. Marines kept order on smaller warships, and did whatever else people told them to do. If the Navy was going to fight the big fight against the Japs, Pete wanted to be there and join in.
A physical therapist gave him exercises to help him heal faster. He performed them with a dedication that amazed and alarmed the man. “If you tear a tendon working out, you won’t do yourself any good,” the fellow said severely.
“Right,” Pete answered. Take this guy seriously? Forget it! For one thing, he wondered if the therapist was a faggot. For another, he subscribed to the informal Marine Corps creed: anything worth doing was worth overdoing.
The therapist didn’t need long to realize that Pete was hard of listening. “Why are you pushing yourself like that?” he demanded. “It won’t change things by more than a few days one way or the other.”
“Could be a big few days,” Pete said stubbornly. “Could be the difference between getting a ship and staying beached.”
That, the therapist couldn’t very well misunderstand. “Even if you do get beached, Corporal, there’ll still be plenty for you to do,” he said. “Or don’t you think the Japs will try to land troops in the Philippines when the balloon goes up?”
“Huh,” Pete said: a thoughtful grunt. He’d worried so much about the big head-on collision between navies that he hadn’t wasted time with what might happen on land. Maybe he should have.
Or maybe not. “Doesn’t matter whether they do,” he said. “That’ll just be a watchacallit-a secondary engagement, like. I aim to be where the real action is. I owe those yellow sonsabitches plenty-better believe I do. The more I can give ’em back in person, the better I’ll like it.”
“Well, you won’t like a torn Achilles’ tendon, so take it easy, okay?” the physical therapist said.
“I’ll… try.” Pete couldn’t have sounded more grudging if the man had recommended that he quit screwing for the next five years.
He’d had to quit screwing while he was laid up. He hadn’t been interested, either, not while he was mourning Vera. It would have seemed disloyal to her memory. Come to that, it still did, which didn’t keep him from noticing whenever he spotted anything female and under the age of fifty.