“We aren’t supposed to talk about it,” Fujita answered primly.
“Yeah, yeah. Who am I gonna tell? What am I gonna do? Hop into a G4M, fly it down to Honolulu, land there and start singing to the Americans? Give me a break, pal!”
Fujita saw he’d have to make himself clearer: “We have orders not to talk about it.”
“No kidding, you do! I still think that’s a bunch of crap.” The Navy man downed another cup of sake. “And you know what else? Just before you clowns got out here, the docs lined up the whole garrison and gave us shots like you wouldn’t believe. My arm swelled up like a dead cow. I couldn’t hardly do anything with it for the next three days.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that. Like you say, I wasn’t even on Midway yet.” No matter what the rear gunner thought, no matter how sore his arm had been, the doctors here had known exactly what they were doing. The germs Captain Ikejiri had brought along weren’t fussy about whether they infected Americans or Japanese.
The Navy man wasn’t done complaining, either. “And how come they’re delousing us all the time now? You’d think we were filthy or something. They didn’t do that before you guys came. It’s fucking weird, you ask me.”
“I haven’t got anything to do with that, either.” Fujita told the technical truth there, but no more than the technical truth. Delousing treatments also killed fleas, or had a better chance of killing them than anything else on Midway was likely to do. And, when fleas were liable to carry the plague, killing them looked like an even better idea than usual.
“Weird,” the rear gunner repeated. He could say what he wanted. Fujita couldn’t say anything at all, not about what the rear gunner wanted to know. Even drunk, he knew he couldn’t. If that left the other fellow unhappy, it was his hard luck.
Fujita’s own hard luck came when he climbed up into a G4M’s bomb bay. The groundcrew men loaded the bay with the pottery-bomb casings that held rats loaded with fleas and other disease-dispersal agents. Night was falling. They were in subtropical latitudes-not so far south as Burma, but subtropical even so. There wasn’t a lot of difference between summer and winter nights. But there was some, and they would take advantage of the extra darkness at this season of the year.
The G4M rolled down the rough runway and climbed into the air. The engines’ drone seemed to come from somewhere inside Fujita. He put on his oxygen gear and also ran oxygen lines into the casings. That wasn’t guaranteed to keep the rats alive-but then, keeping them alive wasn’t completely necessary. The fleas were tougher. They’d make it to Hawaii, all right. Having the rats able to run around might spread sickness faster, though.
Even if night soon fell, navigating was easy. Midway lay at the northwest end of a chain of little islands that ended with the bigger ones of Hawaii. Peering out through a machine-gun blister, Fujita watched one low islet after another pass beneath the bomber. It was as if whichever fire kami spat out the main Hawaiian islands got more and more tired as it also spat out the ones that lay north and west of them. Or maybe those northwestern islands were the old ones, and the bigger islands, the ones where people actually lived, just hadn’t worn down yet.
It was interesting to think about. Fujita doubted whether anyone would ever actually know. When Kauai came into sight, the G4M took a long loop around it. The Americans had airstrips there. Night fighters found targets more by luck than any other way, but why find out whether this was some round-eyed pilot’s lucky night?
On to Oahu. This was only one plane. With any luck at all, the Americans wouldn’t pay any attention to it. If they did notice it, wouldn’t they just think it was one of theirs, doing whatever a plane flying over Oahu in the middle of the night did?
Right up until they started shooting at him, Fujita hoped they would. After that, he just hoped he would live. He watched tracer rounds climb up toward the G4M. They were beautiful. He hadn’t had such a good view in China. He felt as if he were on top of a fireworks display, looking down at it from above. Then the shells started bursting. The bomber bounced in the air. Fujita wished that Navy guy had never told him what a flimsy piece of construction a G4M was.
“Open the bomb bay! Drop the bombs!” The pilot flying the plane sounded scared enough to wet his flight suit. That did nothing for Fujita’s own confidence.
He yanked at the levers that opened the bomb-bay doors. They weren’t in the same place as they were in a Ki-21, but he knew where to grab and how to pull. Opening them, though, gave him a much better view of the antiaircraft fire that was trying to knock him down. More levers-again, positioned differently from those in the Army bomber he’d flown before-let the casings full of germs and diseased animals fall free. Along with them went a few incendiaries and ordinary high-explosive bombs, to give the enemy something else to think about and to distract him from the ones that were the main point of the mission.
“Bombs away!” he reported, as if the pilot hadn’t already put the G4M into a tight turn and headed back toward Midway at full throttle. He closed the bomb-bay doors again to improve streamlining. They gave Kauai an even wider berth on the way home: the Americans there would be alerted now. But they never saw a single enemy fighter. And, better yet, not a single enemy fighter saw them.
Shirtless like the rest of the Marines and sailors in line with him, Pete McGill stood under the warm Hawaiian sun. Back on the mainland, there were plenty of places where the snow was still as high as an elephant’s eye. If you didn’t already have a good tan here, even the winter sun stood plenty high enough in the sky to fry your hide.
“This is a pain in the ass, you know?” Bob Cullum groused.
“Is that where they’re gonna shoot us?” Pete said. “I thought they were gonna get us in the arm. That’s why we’re like this, right?” He thumped his bare chest. Thanks to the shoulder that had got smashed up in the Shanghai movie-house bombing, he wore some impressive scars. Men from other ships, who weren’t used to seeing him with his shirt off, eyed his torso with respect.
“I dunno,” Cullum answered. “It ain’t like they tell anybody what’s going on, for Chrissake.”
“And this surprises you because …?” Pete said. Cullum threw a slow-motion punch at him. Just as slowly, Pete blocked it. They both grinned.
A balding guy with a big, hairy beer belly that yelled Petty officer! growled, “Knock off the horseplay, you two!”
“That’s ‘Knock off the horseplay, you two sergeants,’ ” Pete said. Cullum nodded. The petty-officer type looked disgusted. He couldn’t beat them over the head with his rank, because they had about as much as he did.
The line snaked forward. It looked to Pete as if every enlisted man at Pearl Harbor was in it. Officers had their own queue, which would be a lot shorter. Civilian employees at the base would get their turn tomorrow. Pete wouldn’t have minded letting them go first.
A pretty blond secretary in a thin cotton blouse and a silk skirt that showed off shapely legs walked by. She carried half a dozen manila folders. Eyeballs clicked as leathernecks and swabbies gave her the once-over. A few wolf whistles rang out. She ignored them with the air of someone who had a lot of practice ignoring such things.
“I’d like to stick her,” Cullum said, “and not in the arm, neither.”
“Amen,” Pete agreed reverently. “That’s table-quality pussy, all right.”
In due course, he and Cullum advanced into the mess hall. Instead of cooks slinging powdered eggs and vulcanized bacon, doctors stood there with needles gleaming in the electric light. The single line divided into several. Each doc stood by a little cloth-draped privacy area. “Ahh, shit,” Cullum said. “We are gonna get it in the ass.”
“Looks that way.” Pete agreed again, this time with a mournful nod.
As a matter of fact, he got a shot in each arm and one in his left lower cheek. “You may be kinda sore the next few days,” said the doc who injected him. “Don’t worry about that, or about some swelling. It’s all normal.”