“Ah, your mama.” Cullum also made a point of smiling. He might not be eager to tangle with Pete-after what happened to Klinsmann, nobody was-but he didn’t want to back down to him, either. More to the point, he didn’t want to be seen as backing down.
Pete understood that. He didn’t have a lot of empathy. But he’d served long enough in Peking and Shanghai to understand the idea of face. He could see that making Bob Cullum lose face wouldn’t be good for him. A senior noncom could always come up with ways to make a junior noncom’s life miserable. So he didn’t push things, and neither did Cullum, and they both stayed tolerably content.
Then the Ranger and the two baby flattops-they were the Suwannee and the Chenango-steamed out on patrol, and Pete was more than tolerably content. Hitting back at the Japs still roused a fierce, primal pleasure in him, better than anything this side of sex (and more closely related to it than he understood-he was anything but an introspective man).
Because the escort carriers couldn’t get out of their own way-they cruised at fifteen knots-it also struck him as a patrol in slow motion. The Ranger and all the escorting cruisers and destroyers had to amble along at the same paltry pace. But Wildcats from the converted freighters joined the combat air patrol above the flotilla. If they ran into a Japanese force, two more squadrons of dive-bombers and torpedo planes would tear into the enemy.
That did matter. It might end up mattering one hell of a lot. On the other hand … “We better not let the Japs catch us unawares, like,” Peter remarked to Sergeant Cullum at gun drill one morning. “It ain’t like the baby flattops can get away from ’em. They can’t run, and they can’t hide, neither.” He beamed, pleased at his own wit.
If Cullum even noticed it, he didn’t let on. He broke into an off-key rendition of “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River” and an equally atrocious soft-shoe routine by the dual-purpose five-incher.
Pete was not inclined to strafe him the way Brooks Atkinson or any other critic in his right mind would have. He was too busy being amazed for that even to occur to him. “Fuck me up the asshole!” he exclaimed, and pointed across the blue, blue Pacific at the slowpoke escort carrier. “She is named for that dumb river, isn’t she?”
“Speaking of dumb …” Cullum said pointedly. “You just now noticed, Hercule Poirot?” He pronounced it poi-rot, as if the native Hawaiians’ staple had gone bad.
“Who?” Pete wouldn’t have known who Hercule Poirot was even with his name said the right way. Sherlock Holmes he could have handled. Anyone more obscure? He would have dropped the ball. Hell, he had dropped it. He went on, “I knew the fucking song. Jeez, who doesn’t? But I never figured it was about a real place.”
“Well, it is.” Now Bob Cullum spoke with exaggerated patience.
“Well, ain’t that nice?” Unconsciously, Pete used the line and the intonation of a performer in a Vitaphone Variety-an early stab at a talkie, well before The Jazz Singer-he’d watched when he was a kid. Japanese interrogators could have shoved burning bamboo slivers under his fingernails without getting him to remember the skit with the top part of his mind.
Floatplanes launched from the cruisers’ catapults were the flotilla’s long-range scouts. You had to hope they would spot Japanese ships before the Japs spotted them. And you had to hope that, if they did, they’d be able to relay a warning before some slanty-eyed son of a bitch in the cockpit of a Zero hacked them out of the sky.
Neither of those hopes struck Pete as especially good. American scouts had already missed Japanese naval units more than once in the Pacific. And one of those sedate floatplanes wouldn’t last long against a Zero, much less against a swarm of Zeros. It’d last … about as long as the Suwannee would, say, in a gun duel with a Jap battlewagon.
Not that the Ranger would last one whole hell of a lot longer. But the Ranger could make twenty-nine knots. She might manage to flee from such an unfortunate encounter. The Suwannee and the Chenango couldn’t even do that. A battleship would devour them at its leisure.
Something overhead that wasn’t a Wildcat or a floatplane drew Pete’s nervous glance. Then he relaxed … fractionally. “Gooney bird,” he explained to Bob Cullum, who’d sent him a quizzical stare.
“Ah.” The other leatherneck nodded. “Yeah, they’re all over this stretch of the Pacific, aren’t they?”
“Damn right they are,” Pete said. “They’re just about big enough to shoot down, too.”
“Bad luck!” Cullum said. “No luck’s worse’n that! Fuck, I’d sooner bust ten mirrors than shoot an albatross.”
“Okay, okay. All right, already. Keep your hair on, man. I was just kidding around.” Pete knew about how hurting an albatross was worse than breaking a mirror while walking under a ladder as a black cat sauntered across your path. Anybody who’d ever put to sea in the tropical Pacific did, even if-like Pete-he’d never heard of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
But Bob Cullum took the superstition to extremes. No matter how much Pete apologized, the other Marine muttered about curses and misfortunes for days. By the time he finally shut up, Pete was tempted to head for Midway with a machine gun and a flamethrower, to wipe the breeding colony of gooney birds off the face of the earth.
Only one thing stopped him: the Japs held the island. He wondered if they felt the same way about albatrosses as white men did. If not, they might be settling the great big birds’ hash for him. He could hope, anyhow.
Chapter 18
“Sir!” Sergeant Hideki Fujita stood at rigid-to say nothing of corpselike-attention. His salute was so perfect, even so extravagant, that the pickiest, the most worst-tempered, drillmaster could have found nothing wrong with it. “Reporting as ordered, sir!”
“At ease, Sergeant,” Captain Ikejiri said. Fujita eased his stiff brace a little, but still felt anything but easy. What noncom would, when summoned out of the blue by an officer? The first thing that went through Fujita’s mind was What have I done now? Sensing as much, Ikejiri went on, “You’re not in trouble.”
“Sir!” Fujita repeated, and went back to attention. When they were really after you, didn’t they try to lull you into a false sense of security?
“At ease, Sergeant,” the captain said again, more sharply this time. “How would you like to get away from Burma-about as far away from Burma as you can go and stay in the Japanese Empire?”
“Sir?” It was the same word for the third time in a row, but now Fujita meant it as a question.
“I’m asking you. I’m not telling you. You can say no. You won’t get in trouble if you do say no, and no one will think less of you if you do,”
Captain Ikejiri said. “But you’ve been eager to see action, and here-or rather, there-is a chance for you to see more than you would if you stayed in Myitkyina.”
“I don’t understand, sir,” Fujita said cautiously.
“I know you don’t. That’s why I called you in: to explain what your choices are.” Ikejiri let his patience show. “You will know there was some talk of using our special techniques against the Englishmen in India.”
He was a good officer, a conscientious officer. Even here, with nobody listening but Fujita, who was already in the know, he didn’t talk openly about bacteriological warfare. He took security seriously, so seriously that he censored himself, perhaps without even noticing he was doing it.
“Oh, yes, sir!” Fujita nodded. He would have loved to give England a taste of Japan’s medicine.