This was a different bartender now. “Beer,” Fujita said, and set some occupation money on the bar. The native scooped up the bill and made it disappear. He filled a mug and handed it to the sergeant.
It wasn’t good beer, either. It was thin and sour. But beer was harder to screw up than sake or whiskey, even if the bar did serve it at room temperature. The barmen swore up and down that the English wanted it that way and complained if it was cold. Fujita had never known a barman who wouldn’t lie, but he couldn’t see why the Burmese would come up with such unlikely nonsense. Maybe they meant it-you never could tell. He hadn’t figured Englishmen were so stupid, though.
He carried the mug over to an empty table (he didn’t lack for choices) and sat down in one of the massive wooden chairs that were another holdover from England. In Japan, a chair like that would have marked a daimyo, a great lord. Ordinary people sat on mats or made do with stools. The English had different ideas about what was comfortable. Maybe they had more wood, too. They must have, if this paneled barroom gave any clues.
After he drank the first beer, he had another, and then a couple of more to weight down the earlier ones. By then, his head was buzzing nicely. It might not have been the best beer in the history of brewing, but it packed a punch, all right. He shambled over to the barman again. “Where do I piss?” he asked.
The Burmese jerked a thumb at a door he hadn’t noticed amidst all the fancy woodwork. As soon as he opened the door, the smell told him the water didn’t run any more. He got rid of his beer and escaped as fast as he could.
“Another, Sergeant-san?” the bartender asked.
“No, thanks.” Fujita walked out. He thought about going back to the brothel, but he wasn’t sure he could manage another round. Having a girl look through him was one thing. Having a girl sneer if he couldn’t keep it up was something else again, something much worse. Even if she had too much sense to show she was sneering, she would anyhow. He knew that.
Which left … what? He didn’t want to go back to his unit so soon. What was leave for but getting away from the people whose ugly faces you saw every day? Well, down the block stood the movie house. He could sit in the dark there and not think about anything. If the film turned out to be a stinker, he could fall asleep. Nobody’d care.
The movie house took only Japanese money. He paid his fifty sen and went inside. As in the hotel lobby, ceiling fans spun without accomplishing much. A newsreel showed Japanese tanks roaring forward in China, Japanese bombers dropping their loads on Hawaii, and a POW camp in the Philippines full of skinny, dirty Americans bearded like animals. He wondered whether they’d get shipped to Unit 731, or whether the Japanese Army would set up a germ-warfare center near the camp.
Then the feature came on. It was set in China, and featured espionage, intrigue, and a gorgeous heroine. The people playing Chinese probably were: they spoke very bad Japanese. The hero foiled their plot to bomb a general’s residence and got the girl. It was as good a way to kill a couple of hours as any Fujita could have found.
He paused at a newsstand next to the movie house. A Japanese magazine showed a greenish-skinned Roosevelt on the cover. The American President’s teeth were sharp and pointed like a vampire’s. He looked like something that would sleep in a coffin and come out at night to suck blood, all right. Creatures like that weren’t native to Japanese legend, but Fujita was one of the many, many people who’d shivered through Dracula when it came to the Home Islands.
He bought a girlie magazine instead. You could always think about pretty girls and what you wanted to do with them. Vampires were a sometime thing.
And then he did head out into the countryside again. His unit, no matter how much he might want to get away from it, was as close to home as he had. Too bad, he thought. It’s true, but too bad all the same.
Air-raid sirens howled, both on the Ranger and ashore. Pete McGill tumbled out of his bunk and dashed for his antiaircraft gun. “Battle stations!” the PA system howled unnecessarily. “All men to battle stations!”
Searchlights were already stabbing up into the warm tropical night. Here and there, they picked out the silver sausages of barrage balloons that had sprouted above Pearl Harbor and Honolulu to make life difficult for Japanese bombers. They didn’t stab any of the bombers themselves. The Japs flew high above the barrage balloons and sensibly painted their planes’ bellies matte black.
Guns ashore and aboard the ships at Pearl were already going off. Tracers added to the Fourth of July atmosphere the powerful searchlights created. Pete had no idea whether the guns were radar-guided or just putting lots of shells in the air in hopes of hitting something.
Something was up there, all right. Through the guns’ thunder, Pete caught the drone of the bombers’ unsynchronized engines. To him, Bettys sounded like flying washing machines. Their motors didn’t have the rich, masculine growl that American planes’ did.
They also caught fire at any little hit. Americans often called them Zippos-they lit the first time, every time. They’d got slaughtered when they came over Oahu by daylight. Hitting them at night was a whole different story, though. They did have their virtues. They were fast for bombers. And they had a hell of a long range: the flip side of the lack of protection that made them such lightweights. These bastards had flown all the way from Midway.
Here and there, bomb bursts outshouted the antiaircraft guns. Pete’s gun started shooting at-well, something. He passed shells one after another. Sweat soaked him.
Off in the distance, a Betty cometed down into the Pacific, trailing smoke and flame. Somebody’d got lucky, anyhow. As the English, the French, and the Germans had found out before them, the Americans were discovering that stifling nighttime air raids was anything but easy. By the engine noises up in the sky, some night fighters had got airborne. They also needed to be lucky to find the enemy, though.
They needed to be lucky not to get shot down by the flak the guns on the ground and on the ships were throwing up, too. Anybody down below who saw or imagined he saw anything up above would do his goddamnedest to knock it down. If it happened to be on the same side as he was, well, that was its hard luck.
What saved most of the night fighters was the same thing that saved most of the Bettys: when you were shooting four miles straight up into the darkness, chances were you’d miss. Even as he grabbed another heavy brass shell, Pete understood that.
Shrapnel pattered down. He put on a helmet-one of the new pots that were replacing the English-style steel derbies U.S. soldiers and Marines had used since the last war. If you got hit in the head by sharp fragments of steel and brass coming down from four miles up, you’d be sorry, but not for long.
The all-clear sounded after twenty minutes or so. Some of the gunners were so keyed up, they kept firing for a while even after they had no more targets. Not the ones on the Ranger, though-this was a ship with discipline.
“Raid’s over,” Sergeant Cullum said, and lit a Camel. After a deep drag, he went on, “Now we can all hit the sack again, right?”
Most of the answers he got were inventively profane. Leathernecks who’d been jerked out of bunks and hammocks and straight into combat were running on nerve ends. Their hearts would be pounding too hard to let them sleep as quickly as they’d wakened.