The War That Came Early: West and East Read Free Page B

to pick up your Nobel Prize.”
    Walsh told him where the hell he could go, and where he could stuff the Nobel Prize. They all laughed. They smoked another cigarette or two. And then they were ready to get on with the war again.
    SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA HAD SPENT more time than he cared to remember in Manchukuo. He’d got used to all kinds of noises he never would have heard in Japan. Wolves could howl. Foxes could yip. If he was wrapped in a blanket out where the steppe gave way to the desert, he’d fall asleep regardless. And he’d stay asleep no matter what kind of racket the animals made. Out there, he lived like an animal himself.
    He also lived like an animal here in the pine woods on the Russian side of the Ussuri, the river that formed the northeastern border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union. He dug himself a hole, he jumped down into it, and he slept. Howling wolves? Yipping foxes? Hooting owls? They didn’t bother him a bit.
    Tigers? Tigers were a different story. When a tiger roared or screamed, even gunfire seemed to hesitate for a moment. Those noises always woke him up, too, though he’d sleep through gunshots or through artillery that didn’t come too close. You had to learn to fear gunshots. Not tigers. If you heard that roar, you
were
afraid, and on the double.
    Fujita quickly found out he wasn’t the only one who felt the same way. One of the superior privates in his squad, a student called Shinjiro Hayashi, said, “Something deep down inside your head knows that whatever makes that noise wants to eat people.”
    “Hai!”
Fujita exclaimed. “That’s just it!” He came off a farm himself. He often had the feeling that Hayashi looked down his nose at him, though a Japanese private who let his sergeant know for sure that he looked down his nose at him was asking for all the trouble in the world and a little more besides. Hayashi wasn’t dumb enough to do that. And there were times when having a guy who knew things came in handy: Hayashi spoke some Chinese, for instance.
    “When we came here from the Mongolian border, they said there’d be tigers here,” said Shigeru Nakayama, another private. “I thought it was more of the same old crap they always give new people, but they meant it.”
    A major in the regiment had had his men drag in an enormous tiger carcass. He hadn’t killed it; Russian artillery had. But he took possession of the hide—and of the innards. A tiger’s gall bladder was worth plenty to the people who cooked up Chinese and Japanese medicines. You could probably get something for the rest of the organs, too.
    But Hayashi spoke another truth when he said, “The tiger will make noise to let you know it’s there. You never hear the damn Russian who puts a bullet in your back.”
    As if on cue, Russian mortar bombs started landing on the Japanese position. Like any soldier with even a little experience in the field, Fujita hated mortars. You couldn’t hear them coming till they were almost there. Then they sliced you up like a sashimi chef taking a knife to a fine chunk of
toro
. Unlike the tuna belly, you weren’t dead before they started. You sure could be by the time they got done, though.
    Fujita jumped into a hole. He had more uses for them than sleep alone. Fragments snarled by overhead. A couple of hundred meters away, a Japanese soldier started screaming as if a tiger had clamped its jaws on his leg. Several rifle shots rang out a few seconds later. Another soldier shrieked.
    “Zakennayo!”
Fujita muttered under his breath. The Russians sentelaborately camouflaged snipers high up into pines that overlooked Japanese positions. Soldiers must have come out to pick up the man the mortars wounded—whereupon the snipers did more damage.
    In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had accepted surrenders and treated enemy prisoners as well as any of the soft Western powers did, even if yielding was a disgrace in Japanese eyes. Things hadn’t worked like that on the