“Uh-huh.” Pete nodded. “Come down with the clap and you worry about trouble with the brass. Come down with anthrax or the plague and you worry about trouble with Saint Peter.”
Sergeant Cullum laughed. “Good one! Now we just hope like hell we don’t have any rats on the ship.”
“I’ve never seen one,” Pete said. Sure, the Ranger’s mooring lines always wore the usual outward-facing hollow copper cones designed to keep the rodents from boarding. The carrier also boasted a ship’s cat. They’d got a big red tabby out of the Honolulu pound and named him Rusty. How much hunting he did, though, was open to question. He spent a lot of time in the galley, where the cooks fed him and fed him. He was already noticeably plumper than he had been when he came aboard.
Even if he’d spent all his time going after rats, whether he could have murdered every last one of them was also open to question. Pete remembered a photo he’d seen of a couple of dozen dead rats and mice found aboard a freighter after the ship was fumigated. Also in the photo was the ship’s cat, which hadn’t got off before they turned loose the gas.
An albatross soared past the carrier. It didn’t really have a wingspan as wide as a fighter’s, but it sure seemed to.
“Goddamn Japs don’t just break international law. They kick it while it’s down and then they shit on it.” Cullum returned to the business at hand.
“You got that right.” Pete nodded again. “They fight us the same way they fight the Chinamen-dirty. You believe what you read in the papers, they started this germ-warfare crap on them years ago.”
“I believe that. The fuckers have it down to a science,” Cullum said. “But if you believe everything you read in the papers, you’re a sucker and a sap, is what you are.”
“Oh, sure.” Pete knew that. Not knowing it, he supposed, was the mark of a sucker and a sap. He absentmindedly scratched an itch. Then, noticing what he’d done, he rolled his eyes. “Every time I itch, I wonder if I’m gonna squash a flea when I scratch.”
If you did kill a flea when you scratched, you had standing orders to report to sick bay on the double. The docs down there couldn’t do anything much for you if the glands under your arms and in your groin started swelling up, but they had an isolation ward so maybe you wouldn’t infect your shipmates.
“And when you gotta shower with seawater and saltwater soap, bet your ass you’re gonna have itches,” Cullum said. “If they let us take Hollywood showers all the time, I almost wouldn’t mind the plague, y’know? It’d be doing me some good, anyhow.”
“Then you wake up,” Pete said. “Not enough fresh water on the ship to use for washing.”
“Tell your granny how to suck eggs,” Cullum retorted. “And clean the wax outa your ears while you’re at it. I said if.”
The Ranger’s Wildcats buzzed in circles above the ship and its escorts, ready to do what they could if the Japanese attacked with airplanes instead of germs. From everything Pete had seen and heard, a Wildcat stood a chance against a Zero, but not a great chance. The American fighters had to slash and run and slash again. If you tried to dogfight a Zero, the first thing you’d wonder was how he’d managed to turn inside you and get on your tail. That was also much too likely to be the last thing you’d ever wonder.
A radar antenna spun round and round, round and round, on top of the carrier’s island. It could warn of approaching planes long before you saw them or heard them. They were talking about using radar to direct gunfire, too. Pretty soon, it would all be one side’s machines squaring off against the other side’s machines. Men wouldn’t have to study war any more, because they wouldn’t be good enough at it to have a prayer of winning.
When Pete brought out that conceit, Sergeant Cullum gave him a funny look. “So what’ll lugs like you and me do then?” he asked.
“Play football. Drink. Brawl in bars,” Pete answered. “Same kind of shit we do now, only without the uniforms.”
“But the uniforms are what makes it matter.” Cullum had been a Marine even longer than Pete. He might have been reciting the Athanasian Creed. By the conviction with which he spoke, he more than half thought he was.
So did Pete. “I won’t argue with you, man.” Since he’d cut closer to the bone than he’d meant to, he changed the subject: “I wonder how much in the way of supplies will have got to Hawaii by the time we’re back at Pearl.”
“There’s an interesting question!” Cullum exclaimed.
Interesting it was, as in the Chinese curse. The USA had to hang on to Hawaii. Without it, fighting a war against Japan was impossible. But Hawaii couldn’t feed or fuel itself. Without shiploads of stuff from the mainland, it would starve. The last thing merchant sailors wanted to do was come down with some horrible disease themselves or bring it back to the West Coast. People on the West Coast were screaming bloody murder and having hysterics. Los Angeles and Oakland had held Kill-a-Rat Days, and proudly displayed piles of long-tailed little corpses. They were kidding themselves if they thought they’d got them all, of course.
“It’s a mess, all right,” Pete said.
“Everything we do in this lousy war is a mess,” Cullum said. “You think we’ll ever get one right from the start?”
“Don’t hold your breath, is all I’ve got to tell you. You’ll turn bluer than a Billie Holiday song if you do,” Pete answered.
He scratched again. No flea crunched under his fingernail. He worried every time he did it anyhow. You couldn’t not worry, even when you were fine. That might have been the scariest thing of all about germ warfare. Whether or not the germs got under your skin, the fear did.
The Japanese naval base-the former American naval base-on Midway made Myitkyina, Burma, seem like Tokyo by comparison. You could walk around on the little islet. None of it reached higher than a few meters above the sea from which it halfheartedly rose. After Burma’s extravagant greenery, the few scrubby grasses that struggled to grow on sand and rocks seemed all the more pathetic.
You could go down to the sea and fish. That was more than just a way to make time pass by. Whatever you pulled out of the water, you could eat. For Japan, Midway was at the very end of a long, long supply line. It was also close to the American naval and air bases farther south and east. Not a lot of freighters made the journey to try to supply the imperial sailors and soldiers there. Not all the ships that tried succeeded.
So fresh-caught fish became an important part of what everyone there ate. Fujita gobbled as much sushi and sashimi in a month as he would have in a year in the Home Islands. You couldn’t get sashimi any fresher than what you’d just caught yourself and cut to pieces with a bayonet or a utility knife.
Or you could hang around the barracks that had formerly housed American Marines and Navy men. Bombardment from the air and sea had battered the barracks as the Japanese took Midway. Repairs to the buildings were haphazard at best. Even so, the quarters-if not the food-seemed luxurious by the standards Fujita was used to.
He needed a while to learn to ignore the chug of the generators that powered the desalination plant. They ran night and day. Fresh water was in short supply on Midway. Cisterns captured what rainwater they could. Water would have been scarcer still if not for the plant, which was taken over from the Americans.
A noncom who’d been there longer than Fujita said, “When we attacked, we were careful not to shell the water-making factory, and our planes didn’t bomb anywhere close to it. We were afraid the Yankees would blow it up themselves when they saw they were going to lose the island, but they didn’t.”