Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read online

  Walsh leaned close so Scholes could get a light from his cigarette. Most of the German fire was a couple of hundred yards long. That was about the only good news Walsh could find.

  He’d just ground the tiny butt of his latest smoke under the heel of his boot when the barrage stopped. Beside him, Scholes flipped off the safety on his Lee-Enfield. “Now we see if the buggers mean it or not,” he said.

  That was also how things looked to Walsh. If the Germans did mean it, they’d throw men and tanks into the attack and try to push the British forces back toward the border between Belgium and France. Otherwise, they’d sit and wait and make the Tommies come to them.

  They’d done a lot of sitting and waiting lately. With positions hardened by reinforced concrete, with MG-42s waiting to turn any enemy attack into a charnel house, with tanks that had bigger guns and thicker armor than anything the Allies boasted, why shouldn’t the Nazis wait? The Western Front was narrow. Their foes had to come at them head-on. They could bleed them white without paying too high a butcher’s bill of their own.

  But trusting the Germans to do the same thing every time didn’t pay. Several English Bren guns started shooting all at nearly the same time. A mournful shout spelled out what that meant: “Here they come!”

  Scholes popped up onto the firing step, squeezed off a couple of rounds, and quickly ducked down again. Alistair Walsh stuck his head up for a look, but only for a look. In place of a rifle, he carried a Sten submachine gun, one of the ugliest weapons ever invented. The stamped metal pieces were more botched together than properly assembled. Some of them looked as if they’d been cut from sheet metal with tin snips; for all Walsh knew, they had. If you dropped a Sten, chances were it would either fall apart or go off and shoot you in the leg.

  At close quarters, though, it spat out a lot of slugs in a hurry. A Lee-Enfield could kill out past half a mile. Inside a couple of hundred yards, the Sten was the horse to back.

  The Germans weren’t inside a couple of hundred yards yet. They had to work through the gaps in their own wire, cross the space between their stuff and the stuff the English had put up, and get through that before they could start jumping down into the trenches.

  Their machine guns made it dangerous for any Tommy to stick his head up over the parapet and shoot at them. Twenty feet down the trench from Walsh, an Englishman bonelessly toppled over backwards. A bullet had punched a neat hole in his forehead. It had probably blown half his brains back into his tin hat, but Walsh couldn’t see that—a small mercy.

  Possibly a bigger mercy was that he hadn’t seen any German tanks moving up with the foot soldiers. He especially dreaded the fearsome Tigers, which smashed British armor as if it were made to the same shoddy standards as the Sten gun.

  He popped up again and squeezed a short burst at the oncoming Germans, more to encourage his own men than to put the fear of God in the Fritzes. “Keep your peckers up!” he called to the soldiers in dirty khaki. “Stand firm and they’ll turn tail. Wait and see!”

  They did, too. Some of them lurked in no-man’s-land for a while. A few machine-gun teams set up in shell holes so they could rake the English line from shorter range. You could do that with an MG-42. No other gun—certainly not the Bren, fine weapon though it was—combined mobility and firepower so well.

  But MG-42s that came out of their concrete machine-gun nests were MG-42s that trench mortars could reach. The mortar bombs weren’t noisy leaving their tubes, and flew almost silently. They went bang only when they burst. One by one, the Fritzes’ gun crews either died or pulled back toward their own line.

  As things quieted down, Jack Scholes turned to Walsh and asked, “ ’Ow’d you know they was bluffin’, loik?”

  “No armor,” Walsh answered.

  “Ah. Roight.” Scholes nodded. What trade would he ply if he weren’t a soldier? Sneak-thief was Walsh’s first guess. “They’d’ve been roight up our arse’ole wiv a few tanks along, eh?”

  “Too right, they would,” Walsh said. “But without ’em they were just yanking our chain. They killed a few of us, we killed a few of them, and none of it will change the way the war turns out even a ha’penny’s worth.”

  “Wot would?” Scholes sounded interested and intrigued, as if he weren’t used to thinking this way but found he liked it. “Droppin’ a bomb on ’Itler’s ’ead?”

  “That ought to do something,” Walsh agreed.

  “Too many back in Bloighty like the bastard, though,” Scholes said. “We never would’ve gone in wiv ’em if Winston ’adn’t bought ’imself that plot.”

  “No. We wouldn’t,” Walsh said tightly. The Cockney kid couldn’t know he’d met Winston Churchill. He remained convinced Churchill’s death hadn’t been an accident. Afterwards, it had taken what amounted to a military coup to oust the let’s-pal-with-the-Nazis appeasers. And, if the war didn’t start going better, another coup might put them right back in.

  Sergeant Hideki Fujita didn’t mind days on Midway—not too much, anyhow. There wasn’t a lot to do on the small, low island at the northwestern tip of the chain that led down to Hawaii. But the weather was mild even if it was often muggy. You could fish from the beach. You’d eat whatever you caught, too. It was more interesting and tastier than the rations that came from the Home Islands. Midway was at the very end of the Japanese supply lines, and sometimes a line frayed. Fishing helped people from going hungry, too.

  Japanese G4M bombers could reach the main Hawaiian islands from Midway. They could, and they did. Sometimes they dropped explosives. Sometimes they found other presents for the Americans. Fujita was there as part of the bacteriological-warfare detachment. He’d had experience with such things in Manchukuo and Burma. To the people here, that made him an expert, even if he was just a sergeant.

  And so he’d made the long flight to Oahu in the belly of a G4M, doing bombardier duty. He’d launched pottery bomb casings full of plague-infected rats and anthrax powder and cholera germs on Honolulu. In spite of an amazing fireworks display of antiaircraft fire, he’d made it back here, too.

  But, while Japanese bombers could fly southeast down to the main Hawaiian islands, American bombers could also come northwest up to Midway. Like most Japanese soldiers, Fujita scorned America’s fighting spirit. When U.S. soldiers found themselves in a bad position, they surrendered. Dozens of Marines became experimental animals for the Japanese bombers in the compound outside of Harbin. Men who hadn’t fought to the death deserved no better.

  Whatever you could say about the Americans, though, they were rich. They knew what to do with machines, too. That was why Fujita hated and feared Midway nights. Japanese G4Ms flew occasional missions against Hawaii. When they flew, they went one or two at a time. Here at the end of the supply lines, the Japanese Empire could afford no more. It could barely afford so much.

  When the Americans flew against Midway, they sent bombers in great swarms, a hundred at a time—two hundred, for all Fujita knew. Bombs rained down on the island by the thousands. He knew that entirely too well. The only shelter was in shallow trenches scraped in the sand. Midway had hardly any real dirt. It was sand or rock.

  Every bombing pounded the Japanese living quarters worse. The Americans weren’t all that accurate, but they didn’t need to be. They dropped so many bombs, some were bound to hit. Those barracks halls weren’t in great shape to begin with, either. Japan had captured them from the Yankees when the Empire seized Midway. After each air raid, engineers worked to repair the damage. It grew faster than they could keep up with it.

  The only thing on Midway that the Japanese engineers went out of their way to fortify were the desalinization plant and the fuel dump that kept it going. Those got covered over with steel-reinforced concrete. Freighters brought in the stuff along with rice and munitions. They had to. Without the desalinization plant—captured from the Americans—Midway was uninhabitable by more than a handful of men. It simply didn’t have the fresh water to support more.

  When the sun ca
me up after yet another U.S. air raid, Fujita stood up in the trench where he’d been trying to grab a little sleep. The landscape reminded him of nothing so much as one of the shabbier suburbs of hell. Most of Midway was nothing but dunes with scraggly bits of grass here and there. The bombs tore the sorry vegetation to bits.

  They did worse to man’s works on the island. The runways were cratered. Some of the American bombs had hard, thick noses. They penetrated before their delay fuses went off. That made for more damage to things like runways. Fujita wondered if those bombs could also pierce the reinforced concrete protecting the desalinization plant.

  If they could, they hadn’t done it yet. The plant’s motors kept chugging away. It pulled salt water out of the Pacific and turned the stuff into something people could drink. The water still tasted metallic, but the doctors swore it wouldn’t hurt you. They drank it, too, so they evidently believed what they said.

  All the Japanese planes on the island hid in sandbagged revetments covered with camouflage netting. The only way a bomb could find them was by luck. Drop enough bombs and one or two were bound to get lucky. Two pyres of black, greasy smoke climbed high into the blue, blue sky. The netting burned, too, adding its smoke to that from the planes.

  The barracks … Well, the less said about the barracks, the better. They’d been pounded hard before. They were even more knocked around now. A couple of small fires burned in them, too, but those were as nothing next to the blazing airplanes.

  Another sergeant stood up a few meters from Fujita and also surveyed the damage. “Eee!” Ichiro Yanai said mournfully. He gave Fujita a sour grin. “Aren’t you glad you volunteered to come way the demon out here and give the round-eyed barbarians a kick in the slats?”

  “Well, I was,” Fujita answered. “But now they’re kicking our slats, and that isn’t half so much fun.”

  “Hai! You’ve sure got that right!” Yanai looked southeast, in the direction from which an American fleet would surely come. “What do we do if they send soldiers here instead of just bombing us?”

  Fujita’s glance went toward the smoldering barracks. He knew where his rifle was, but he wouldn’t want to try to get it right now. He shrugged broad shoulders. He was a peasant from a long line of peasants; he’d been working on his father’s farm when conscription got him.

  “What can we do?” he said. “Fight till we can’t fight any more. Maybe we’ll throw them back into the sea.” His wave encompassed the whole broad, blue Pacific. “Or if we don’t … Well, our spirits will meet at the Yasukuni Shrine, neh?”

  “That’s right. That’s just right!” Yanai nodded vigorously. The spirits of all Japanese war dead gathered at the shrine in Tokyo. Fujita was as sure of that as he was of any religious matter.

  His eye searched for the little separate tent compound not far from the desalinization plant. Captain Ikejiri’s bacteriological-warfare unit kept tight security, even on an island like Midway, from which no rumor could easily escape.

  No bombs seemed to have hit it. He let out a silent sigh of relief. If the infected animals got loose, or if the bombs splashed germs all over the island, that wouldn’t be so good. Yes, the garrison here had been immunized against everything this side of housemaid’s knee. It wouldn’t be good even so. Chances were people would come down sick anyway—not even Japanese science knew how to immunize against everything.

  And the island would become uninhabitable to anybody who hadn’t been immunized like that. Anthrax spores could sit in the soil—well, in the sand here—for years, maybe for centuries, till a suitable host came along. Then they would stop being spores and start being germs again. If you weren’t immunized, they would kill you in short order.

  “At least they don’t seem to have wrecked any of the supply depots,” Yanai said. Those weren’t far from the desalinization plant, either. Yanai must have thought Fujita was looking at them. He knew in a general way which unit Fujita was attached to. Even in a place like this, where everyone was in everyone else’s pockets, he didn’t know any details. Yes, the bacteriological-warfare people knew how to keep their lips buttoned.

  “Wouldn’t be so good if they broke our rice bowls, would it?” Fujita said. Some of his training involved ways to make sure outsiders didn’t learn anything they shouldn’t know. In a garrison on the Empire’s fringes, food was always a good way to change the subject.

  Sure enough, Yanai shuddered and said, “I don’t want to go hungry!”

  “Who does?” Fujita agreed. Inside himself, he smiled. Damned if the training didn’t work.

  As a veteran U.S. Marine, Sergeant Pete McGill had done almost everything a fighting man could do by land or sea. He hadn’t done much in the air, though. At any rate, he hadn’t till now.

  The C-47 droned along over central Oahu. He’d already fitted the long strap that connected his parachute to the static line that ran along the starboard side of the transport’s fuselage. They didn’t trust you to pull your own rip cord. This did the job for you, and made sure you wouldn’t end up as a big splatter on the ground several too many thousand feet below.

  A gunnery sergeant with a drill instructor’s lemon-squeezer hat firmly strapped to his head stood by the portside door. “In about a minute, the light’ll start going green,” the gunny yelled over the noise of engines and wind. All the twenty-odd paratroopers were supposed to know that, but he was a good instructor, and took nothing for granted. “Every time it flashes, one of youse goes out. One! Youse guys got that?” He thrust out his chin and looked very fierce.

  “Yes, Sergeant!” the men chorused. Pete hid a grin as he shouted out his answer. He said youse and youse guys, too—he came from the Bronx. The gunny’s accent wasn’t the same as his—he would have guessed Philly—but there was another big-city man among the hicks and Rebs who filled out the Corps.

  “Okay,” the instructor went on. “Slide forward one place every time a guy goes out of the plane. You get to the door, hang on to the sides, one with each hand. Put your left foot on the sill. Swing your right foot forward and step out. Don’t jump. That’ll take you too goddamn close to the tailplane, which you don’t want. Just step. You’ll fall. Oh, yeah. Bet your ass you will.” He looked at the guy closest to the door and barked, “Take your place!”

  The leatherneck obeyed. Everybody else slid down one. Pete moved from sixth to fifth. The jump light went green. The first Marine half stepped, half jumped from the C-47. No matter what the gunny said, the urge to leap if you were going to go at all was strong.

  “Number two, take your place!” the instructor shouted. The next Marine did. The light turned green. Out he went. “Number three, take your place!”

  Number four didn’t go out as soon as he saw the green light. The gunny put a strong hand on the small of his back and shoved. That took care of that, and wasted less than a second. McGill had heard they had somebody like that stationed by the door on every combat run. No paratrooper with a sudden case of cold feet would be able to gum up the works.

  Number five stepped out into space according to plan. Then it was Pete’s turn. The wind tore at him and stripped tears from his eyes. He grabbed at cold aluminum with both hands and planted his left boot on the metal sill. When the light turned green, he brought his right foot forward and fell away from the plane.

  You were supposed to yell Geronimo! when you jumped. What came out of his mouth that first time was a long, heartfelt “Shiiiit!”

  It cut off abruptly as the strap attached to the static line yanked the chute out of its canvas pack and opened. His world went gray for a second at the jolt. Then the blood came back to his brain. Here he was, floating in the air under the world’s biggest umbrella canopy.

  In battle, he’d go in a lot lower. The Japs would be shooting at him while he descended on them. The less chance to do that they had, the better. But this wasn’t battle. It was training. He could look around and gawk and admire a view only soaring birds had enjoyed till a few years before.

  Down
he came. Much of northwestern Oahu didn’t have much on it and wasn’t soaking wet. The combination made good landing country. You needed to bend your knees and tuck your chin against your chest. When you hit, you took the impact as best you could. They told you to roll with it.

  The ground swelled—not anywhere near so fast as it would have if he were falling free, but it did. He’d thought about soaring birds in general a moment before. Now he thought about albatrosses in particular. Some other Marine had told him about watching them glide in at Midway and crash-land every goddamn time. The way he made it sound, it was hilarious.

  Well, if any albatrosses were landing on Midway these days, the goddamn Japs were watching them. And watching a crash landing might be funny. If anybody was watching Pete right now, the bastard might laugh his ass off. Going through a crash landing was a whole different ballgame.

  An albatross who didn’t like the way things were going could flap and gain height and try it again somewhere else. A guy under a parachute didn’t have that luxury. You were supposed to be able to spill wind from the canopy by shifting your weight. So the instructors claimed. Maybe you could, too, after a few more practice jumps. This first time, Pete wasn’t inclined to experiment.

  Here came the ground. He bent and tucked as he’d been told to do. Wham! He might have controlled his crash a little better than an albatross did, but not a whole lot. And he hit hard. Not long before he joined the Marines, his girlfriend’s musclebound brother unexpectedly walked into the apartment they shared with their folks. He’d gone out a second-story window then, and landed like a ton of bricks. He thought he hit harder now.

  Now, though, he had boots, knee and elbow pads, and a helmet on his head. He rolled a couple of times, realizing he hadn’t sprained or broken anything. Then he used the lines that attached him to the chute to get the air out of it. He didn’t have to cut himself free to keep from being blown all over the place. The bookkeepers would be happy—here was another parachute they could use again.