The War That Came Early: West and East (4 page)

American, British, and French warships lay alongside Japanese naval vessels in the harbor. Their guns were supposed to give the Western powers bargaining strength against the Chinese and the Japs. They’d done the job against the Chinese … till the Chinese didn’t hold Shanghai any more. Against Japan? Japan had far more firepower here than all the Western powers put together.

And Japan had fighters and bombers galore, which the Western powers here didn’t. The crew of the American gunboat
Panay
could have preached a sermon about that. Japanese airplanes had sent her to the bottom
of the Yangtze. Oh, the Japanese government apologized and paid an indemnity afterwards, but that didn’t do the dead sailors a hell of a lot of good.

So Americans, and Westerners generally, had to watch themselves in Shanghai these days. But you could still have yourself a hell of a good time if you did watch yourself. Things cost more here than they did in Peking. With only a corporal’s pay, Pete noticed the difference. Still, compared to Honolulu or even Manila, Shanghai remained a pretty good deal.

It had compensations Peking lacked, too. Most of the dance-hall hostesses at the clubs here were White Russians, refugees first from the Red takeover and then from the Japanese domination of what was now called Manchukuo. McGill couldn’t remember the last time he’d danced with a white woman in Peking. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Here, he could do it as much as he wanted, for anything from ten cents to a dollar Mex a dance, depending on how fancy the joint was. And some of the White Russian gals were real stunners, too.

Stunners or not, a lot of them were vampires who could put Bela Lugosi to shame. Their main goal was separating soldiers and sailors and businessmen from cash. Between dances, they wanted to drink. You ordered them champagne or wine or whiskey. They got ginger ale or apple or grape juice or weak tea. It went on the chit as booze, though. You paid—through the nose. Some of Pete’s naïve buddies wondered how the girls could drink so much and never show it.

He knew better than that, anyhow. If the girl he was dancing with was pretty enough, he didn’t care … too much. And Vera, tonight, was all that and then some. Her hair was the color of Jean Harlow’s. If a peroxide bottle helped it along (as it was supposed to have done for Harlow), Pete didn’t feel like fussing. She had big blue eyes, a button nose, and a mouth as red and sweet-looking as a strawberry. Moving south, she came equipped with everything else a girl needed, too.

And she could really dance. She danced well enough to make Pete, a man born with two left feet, feel like a good dancer himself. She also clung to him tighter than a coat of paint. If that wasn’t inspiration, he didn’t know what would be. She must have felt his hard-on bumping
against her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She let him kiss her, too. Her mouth turned out to be even sweeter than it looked.

They went on clinging to each other after the music stopped. A slinky Chinese gal in a dress slit up to there brought fresh drinks to the sweating Chinamen in black tie who played some pretty good hot jazz.

Somebody tapped Pete on the shoulder. Distracted, he half turned. There stood a buddy of his, a Marine named Puccinelli. Grinning, the dago said, “Why don’t you make an honest woman out of that broad, man? You looked like you were gonna lay her right here on the dance floor.”

“Why don’t you get lost, Pooch?” McGill suggested sweetly. If he’d thought Vera would go for it … She might have been pouring down phony drinks, but Pete hadn’t. He’d guzzled enough real whiskey to make it seem like fun, not craziness.

Vera tugged at his arm. “A little champagne?” she said. “Dancing makes you thirsty, yes?”

Dancing made Pete horny. “How’s about you and me go off somewhere quiet, just the two of us?” he asked.

Even half in the bag, he watched the cash registers chinging behind the White Russian girl’s big baby blues. He gave his own mental shrug. It wasn’t as if he thought she was with him because of the charm of his own blunt, ruddy features. If you were looking for love, or even for a facsimile that seemed reasonable while it was going on, in places like this, you needed to keep your wallet in your hand.

“Sixty dollars Mex,” Vera said.

That was four times the going rate for a Chinese girl in a Shanghai brothel. It was also fifteen bucks American, or a goodly part of a month’s pay. But when John Henry started yelling … you really wished that asshole on the train hadn’t had four of a kind. “Ouch,” Pete said.

Vera considered. She wasn’t like a whorehouse whore—she had some discretion about clients and prices. Her features softened a little. “All right, Yankee. For you, fifty Mex,” she said.

She does like me—some, anyway
, Pete thought. He also knew damn well she wouldn’t come down twice. “Where can we go?” he asked.

She took his arm. “Follow me,” she said. Right then, he would have followed
her through ice or fire or a minefield. He didn’t have to go that far: only to a little room over the dance hall.

It had a bare, dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling, a mattress on an iron bed frame, one cheap chair, and a nightstand with a pitcher and basin and a couple of folded towels on top. It was astringently clean and astringently neat, which made it stand out among the many whores’ rooms Pete had visited.

“You like it?” Vera’s mouth twisted as she slid out of her dress. “It is my palace.”

“Sweetheart, any room with you in it is a palace,” Pete said hoarsely. He might regret blowing so much jack tomorrow, but he sure didn’t now. She looked even better naked than she had in the tight-fitting silk. He hadn’t dreamt she could.

She gave him a wry smile. “An eager one like you, almost I forget I do this for money.”

Pete wished she hadn’t said
almost
. But, right this minute, he didn’t care why she was doing it, as long as she was. He flicked off the light and reached for her. Even in the sudden darkness, he knew just where the bed lay.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BORISOV GLOWERED
at the assembled Red Air Force pilots and copilots. “You people have been sitting around on your asses too damn long,” the squadron commander growled. “High time you went out and earned some of the rubles the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union are paying you.”

Lieutenant Sergei Yaroslavsky stirred on his folding chair. That was monstrously unfair, and Borisov had to know it. It wasn’t the flyers’ fault that the unpaved Byelorussian airstrip turned to gluey mud in the spring thaw.
Everything
turned to mud during the fall and spring
rasputitsas
.

“Time to make the Poles sorry they climbed into the sack with that dog turd of a Fascist, Hitler,” Borisov went on. “If they think they can get away with refusing the USSR’s just demands, they’d better think twice.”

Now Sergei nodded. That was more like it. Blame the enemy, not your own side.

Sitting next to him, Anastas Mouradian raised a thick, dark eyebrow. One of these days, the copilot and bomb-aimer aboard Sergei’s SB-2 would end up in more trouble than he could hope to escape. An emotional Armenian, he couldn’t keep what he was thinking off his face.

Enough propaganda. Just give us the mission and let us take care of it
. Something like that had to be in Stas’ mind. It was in Sergei’s mind, too, but he had sense enough not to show it. What nobody saw wouldn’t get reported to the NKVD.

Of course, the NKVD could haul you away and shoot you or chuck you into a camp north of the Arctic Circle with no excuse at all. But why make things easy for the Chekists? If you gave them a reason to jump on you, you were almost asking for it, like a girl in tight clothes that didn’t cover enough of her.

“Our target is the railroad line that runs southeast from Wilno to Molodetschna,” Colonel Borisov went on. Wilno to the Russians, Vilna to the Poles, Vilnius to the Lithuanians … one town with three names, depending on who was talking about it and who held it at any given moment. It was in Poland’s hands now. Marshal Smigly-Ridz had refused to give it back to the USSR. The Lithuanians also wanted it again, though they hadn’t ruled there for centuries.

Sergei didn’t show annoyance, and he didn’t show relief, either. Whether he showed it or not, he felt it. They weren’t going to fly into East Prussia today. It wasn’t that the Germans didn’t have fighters and antiaircraft guns inside of Poland—they did. But they seemed much more serious about defending their own people than they did about protecting a bunch of Poles.

“Questions?” Borisov asked.

No one said anything. Borisov did not have a manner that encouraged queries. His face said,
Don’t waste my time
. Not all questions did waste time, but the ones that didn’t got asked no more than the ones that did.

After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Ivan Kuchkov asked his superiors, “Well, how are they going to fuck us over this time?”

“The railroad coming out of Wilno,” Sergei answered.

“That won’t be so bad,” Kuchkov said. He was the bombardier, in
charge of actually dropping the bombs on the enemy’s head. It took brute strength, and he had plenty. He was short and squat and muscular. He was also one of the hairiest human beings Sergei had ever seen. People called him “the Chimp,” but rarely to his face—you took your life in your hands if you did.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Yaroslavsky said.

“I was hoping the same thing,” Anastas Mouradian said, which sounded almost identical but meant something different.

Most of the winter whitewash had been scrubbed off their SB-2. What was left gave the Tupolev bomber’s summer camouflage of brown and green an old, faded look. The SB-2 itself was starting to seem old and faded to Sergei. The two-engined machine had seemed a world-beater in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. It could outrun and outclimb the biplane fighters Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists and their Italian and German allies threw against it.

But those days were long gone now. Sergei and his crewmates had fought as “volunteers” in Czechoslovakia. There, he’d made the unhappy discovery that the SB-2 was no match for the German Messerschmitt 109. Quite a few of his comrades who’d discovered the same thing didn’t come back to the
Rodina
. Bf-109s had done far too many of the Motherland’s flyers in this latest squabble with the Poles and Germans, too.

Better bombers were supposed to be on the way. Till they arrived, the SB-2 soldiered on. It was what the Soviet Union had. If losses ran high … Well, they did, that was all. Factories could crank out more planes, and
Osoaviakhim
flight schools could crank out more pilots.

Armorers wheeled bombs over to the plane. The carts didn’t sink into the ground, a sure sign the
rasputitsa
was done at last. “Here’s hoping they all land on the Hitlerites’ cocks,” Kuchkov said.

“And the Poles’,” Sergei added.

“Fuck the Poles. Fuck their mothers, fuck their daughters, fuck their sisters, and fuck their ugly old aunties, too,” Ivan declared. He was, as Sergei had seen before, a man of limited vocabulary and strong opinions. “The Poles aren’t worth shit. The fucking Germans, they’re the ones we need to worry about.”

He wasn’t wrong. Sergei had seen enough of the Germans to alarm him, too. “They won’t stop us,” the pilot declared. Neither Kuchkov nor Mouradian tried to tell him any different.

Both big radial engines on the SB-2 thundered to life. Sergei ran through the checklist. Everything came up green. Other bombers were jouncing down the runway and flying west. When his turn came, Sergei joined them. Getting up in the air again felt good. Till the shooting started, he could remember what a joy flying was supposed to be.

But the shooting started all too soon. During the winter, Soviet troops had bitten off a disappointingly small chunk of northeastern Poland. A few of them fired at the westbound SB-2s, on the theory that anything in the air was bound to be dangerous. The Chimp’s profanity echoed brassily through the speaking tube that connected the bomb bay and the cockpit.

And the Poles banged away at the bombers for all they were worth. Black puffs of smoke burst among the SB-2s. The antiaircraft fire was so quick and accurate, Sergei wondered if Germans were manning the guns down on the ground. One of the SB-2s had to turn back with smoke and flame coming from the starboard engine. Yaroslavsky hoped the crew got down safely.

That clang was a chunk of shrapnel biting into the fuselage. Sergei eyed the gauges. He tested all the controls.
“Khorosho?”
Mouradian asked.

“Da, khorosho,”
Sergei answered, and everything
did
seem fine. Part of him that only came out in times of stress wanted to thank God. The New Soviet Man who ruled his mind more often than not told that other part to shut up and go away.

There was the railroad line, stretching off toward Wilno. “Borisov didn’t tell us where he wanted us to hit it, did he?” Mouradian said.

Sergei thought back. “No, I don’t believe he did.” That probably meant some Red Air Force higher-up hadn’t told Borisov. Maybe none of the higher-ups had even stopped to worry about it. Since they figured one length of track was as good as another … “I’m going to start the bombing run.”

He flew straight and level, changing course only as Mouradian aligned
them more closely on the railway line. “Now, Ivan!” Mouradian bawled through the speaking tube, and the stick of bombs fell free.

As soon as they did, Yaroslavsky swung the bomber into a hard turn and mashed down the throttle. Even Polish fighters could outrun the SB-2, and if Messerschmitts were in the neighborhood …

Messerschmitts
were
in the neighborhood. The slab-sided fighters tore into the SB-2s that had pressed deeper into Poland. A blast from the dorsal machine-gun turret said one of them was thinking about coming after Sergei’s plane. “Gutless whore!” Ivan yelled. “He’s running like a prick with the clap!”

“Too bad!” Sergei said. He exchanged a look with Mouradian. They wore identical shaky grins. No matter how the Chimp felt, neither was sorry that German hadn’t kept chasing them.
No, not a bit
, Sergei thought, and came down on the throttle even harder.