At the Midway Read online

  Muffled shouts came from above as Ace fought to keep the skiff upright. It would serve the little yellow bastard right if it overturned. Call me 'Flitz' one more time and I'll push you in.

  The Oriental curses vanished in the oily underwater sounds. Lieber's spite was supplanted as the glowing wonderland of the lagoon greeted him--Midway's tiny sea, circumscribed by a five-foot high coral reef. Rich, inexplicable aqua and emerald shadings shuddered under the uncommon blue. Coral spiraled up from below, craggy green and jagged red. Castles for red snappers, moray eels, lobsters, parrot fish. Between the coral, ripples of light danced over small sand deserts, winking in and out, as full of undulating mirages as the Sahara.

  It was odd how, crossing the ocean in a ship packed with émigrés, his sea sickness had fostered a deep revulsion for the sea‑‑its waves, its interminable breadth, its smell. Yet here, he was able to bob around like a cork with no ill effects. Leaping in was like hopping on board a fat, warm, willing fraulein. The lagoon a luxurious female... which almost made up for the complete absence of real women on Midway. The immigrant ship, and the Brooklyn incident that had landed him here, were anomalies. Modern man's way of navigating the mains was a fiction, a trumped up means of separating himself from reality. The difference between plying the ocean and being in the ocean was the difference between sump and crisp sea.

  His head broke the waves a couple dozen yards from the skiff. Ace waved at him dourly. Leiber brought up a hand and made a slashing motion across his throat. Interpreting this as a distress signal, Ace began rowing furiously in his direction.

  Leiber shook his head, figuratively slashed his throat again, and forced a wide grin. Ace kept coming. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Leiber bellowed:

  "If I cut my throat, maybe then the sharks will come!"

  Ace did not pause.

  It was humiliating. What if someone on shore was watching? Would they think the little yellow bastard was rushing to save the noble, brawny German from drowning? What a hoot they would get out of that!

  "If I cut my own throat, maybe then the sharks will come!" Leiber cut across his throat several more times and laughed loudly.

  "Flitz! Flitz!" Ace nearly knocked his head off with an oar as he drew alongside of him.

  Leiber chopped a slice of water with the side of his hand, sending it into the Japanese' face.

  "Don't struggle, Flitz! Here, grab this!" Ace held out his shark grapple.

  "Ah! Ah! No! No!" Leiber hit his own head in exasperation. "If I cut my own throat, then maybe the sharks will come! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

  "Just grab hold! I'll pull you in!"

  A series of unintelligible sounds convinced Ace that Leiber was in even worse trouble than he'd first thought.

  "Grab hold, Flitz! Grab hold!"

  "Listen to me, you yellow demon!" Leiber raised his hand, and with each of his words sent a shock of water into Ace's concerned face. "If... I... cut... my… throat... then... maybe... the... sharks... will... come!"

  "Flitz... are you drowning?"

  "Nein!"

  "Then what are you saying?"

  "Repeat after me. If…."

  "If...."

  "I cut my throat...."

  "I cut my throat...."

  "Then maybe...."

  "Then maybe...."

  "The sharks...."

  "The sharks...."

  "Will come... Verstehen?"

  "We're staying?"

  Leiber broke into a long string of guttural expletives Ace could not begin to follow. He was still wearing an expression of concern and perplexity when Leiber took hold of the gunwhale and tipped the skiff over.

  "Flitz! Flitz! Help! I can't swim!"

  Another series of gunshots could be heard from Eastern Island.

  1732 Hours

  "No one in the world can hold a Springfield perfectly still when it goes off. But you plebes've got to learn to hold it still before you pull the trigger. Let's try the prone again."

  The squad went down on their stomachs. A moment later there were howls of pain and anger as Sergeant Ziolkowski began walking on them, stepping from ass to ass like a boy hopping rocks in a stream.

  "Jesus, Top!"

  "I think you have me confused with someone else. Now tell me the truth. Don't you think a little damage to your manhood might improve your aim? What was that? Did someone call me a fucking Polack? Well, that's better than Sweet Jesus. I'm a fucking Polack, yeah. I'm the worst fucking Polack of your worst fucking nightmare."

  One of them rolled away to avoid being stepped on.

  "Enderfall! Get your ass back here! You're the worst of the lot. How the hell did you get in the Corps?"

  He flexed his red chevrons and stepped away for a minute to allow their curses to subside. In fact, most of them were decent shots, due in no small part to his violation of Navy regulations. No permanent alteration of a standard issue firearm was allowed. But Springfields were not serviceable as issued, in the sergeant's estimation. The steel band near the muzzle held the wooden stock so tightly to the barrel that it did not allow for lengthening. He showed his men how to pare away wood around the band so that the barrel would slide rather than bend when heat expanded it. He also taught them how to set the trigger pull, ream the rear aperture to make it larger, and file down the bolt-stop. He even had them blacken their gun‑sights with candle wax.

  Any of these procedures would have provided grounds for a demotion if a training camp commandant had found out. Lieutenant Anthony knew about it, of course. It was virtually impossible to hold any secrets in a place as tiny as this. But he chose to ignore the improvised gunsmithing for the simple reason that he'd done the same things to his rifle years before. This was not the national shoot at Camp Perry, Ohio, after all. Anthony had once attended the Governor's Match to watch rifle teams from the Army, Navy, National Guard and Marine Corps test their skill against each other. Rules for the match were provided by the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, and they were strictly enforced. There had been a great scandal when the Navy's midshipmen, who'd scored highest, were disqualified when it was discovered they had applied their emery clothes in places they shouldn't have. But the rules themselves were the scandal. You did not teach men how to survive on the battlefield by forcing them to comply with unnatural strictures. One did not fight a modern battle wearing dress gloves.

  Ziolkowski continued his lecture. If their next assignment was the Philippines or China or Latin America, his boys just might make it through alive.

  "You! Adjust that sling on your arm. Don't let it hang useless. It's not your dick, you know. Let it help you! All right, snappers, the left elbow goes directly under the right. Keep your body at a left angle to the target. Spread your feet apart, the insides flat on the ground. Hold the rifle on the left heel, not on your palm. There's no need to grip the stock. Got it?"

  "Aye, Top!" came the chorus.

  "Move your hands up to the sling-band, but don't press against it. That would push the rifle away from your shoulder and you'd waste time pulling it back. By then you'd be dead."

  "Hell, Top. This is Camp Perry shit. We won't get time for this in a real scrape."

  "You saying you won't get time to aim? What do you plan to do in a battle, boy? Whittle your dick? You get trapped in some palmetto scrub, you'll bless the day I taught you to shoot. Enderfall! Ever try kissing a Moro? You'll end up kissing his black ass if you don't sight your target. The Corps might not miss you, but your Mum will."

  No one laughed.

  "Grip the rifle lightly--lightly--placing your thumb on the stock. Now lift the butt to the shoulder. Don't lift your right elbow off the ground or look toward your shoulder. Enderfall! Didn't Saint Francis bless you this morning? What the hell--"

  "I'm a southpaw, Top."

  "I'm not surprised."

  Like NCOs world over, he considered his men a disreputable lot. The fact that they were indeed a disreputable lot did not help. Out of his nineteen men, three were
known to have spent long terms in the brig, three others probably had, one was mentally incompetent, two were physically incompetent, and Private Enderfall was probably a sexual deviant. A shameful percentage of misfits. Christ, it wasn't as if they were sailors.

  To top it all, Sergeant Ziolkowski could not sharpen his eye with an occasional boost of whiskey. He would have fought any comer who suggested marines were all drunkards . But the fact of the matter was that 'dead marine' was slang for an empty bottle of hooch in every one of the armed services. And that's what Midway was: one giant dead marine.

  Half the men present had served on the China Station, and the comparison was stark. In Hankow one could buy some of the finest wines in the world from French commission agents. In Chefoo a case of Haig Scotch could be had for $10. And though the temperature staggered around the hundred-degree mark in summer, one could always sit under a punkah fan with a Gordon's gin sling to compensate for the weather.

  A few bottles were brought ashore when the supply ships came in, but that happened only twice a year. Attempts were made to rectify the situation. Grass, bushes, berries‑‑anything that fermented was distilled in a quest for a viable local brew. To no avail. Kittrell had read how the Mongols brewed an intoxicant from fermented mare's milk. Midway had plenty of donkeys wandering about its two main islands. The herd used to haul materials for the relay station had bred freely. But when they attempted the Mongol recipe, the result smelled so bad no would could get near it, let alone drink the vile concoction.

  With one exception. Ziolkowski was not one to be put off by mere smell and appearance. He'd fought the Boxers in China, had been among those who stormed Peking and rescued the foreign legations. He'd seen action at Lofa, where Chinese corpses had been piled in huge, loathsome masses. During the Filipino Insurrection he'd seen and smelled things no sane man would even want to imagine. "This is the milk of kindness after what I've been through," he boasted to the enlisted men. When they continued to look at him doubtfully, he added, "Hell, when I was with the Scouting Fleet I visited every cantinero in the Caribbean. I've been to places where the water smelled worse than this."

  He spent a week in the tiny infirmary after only half a cup of Midway's own koumiss.

  The men potted away at the twenty-inch bull's-eyes for a quarter hour, with meager results.

  "All right, if you can't shoot straight, I'll have to tell you about the Death of a Hundred Cuts."

  The men moaned. Whenever the sergeant was feeling particularly vindictive, he would regale them with details of an execution he'd witnessed in Peking. Each recital dealt with a single cut, elaborated upon so lovingly that the men grew nauseous just listening. "Last time I told about... what was it? Cut Number Thirty-four? Now, Cut Number Thirty-five... that was a thing to behold. Just behind the ear--" He stopped when he spotted Lieutenant Anthony coming up the beach. "All right, snappers. Up on your feet. Here comes the teniente."

  "Goddamn, Top," said one man getting up slow. "You buried my whacker."

  "Shouldn't've been hard in the first place. Pr'sent-Hupp!"

  "And how are our marksmen doing today, Sergeant?" said Anthony.

  "Shipshape and Bristol fashion, sir," Ziolkowski said. Not a complete lie. It was the sergeant's perfectionism that prevented him from being satisfied.

  "Don't go heavy on the ammunition," Anthony advised. "We only have four cases of six-millimeter left."

  Ziolkowski kept a placid countenance. Anthony possessed the cardinal virtue all NCOs cherished: He let his sergeant handle the men. But he also possessed the one character trait Ziolkowski could not abide in any man: he whined. Lieutenant Anthony had served honorably in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. He could not comprehend why he'd been relegated to this flyspeck in the Pacific. The mystery at times moved him to near‑hysteria. Catching the sergeant's ear, he would repeat his service record over and over‑‑not asking "why?", but letting the inference speak for itself. A bit of tact that went unappreciated by Ziolkowski. The lieutenant was a whiner. He could not accept his fate‑cum‑orders. The sergeant himself had participated in several notable campaigns, had been wounded twice, had been recommended for the Navy Cross. And still, he was here. All because he called an ignorant ass an ignorant ass, and the ignorant ass in question also happened to be a captain.

  Nothing to whine about, especially for a lifer. It wouldn't take much luck for him to see action again. Could be the Philippines again. Could be Latin America. Could be anywhere, the way the world was going. No reason for complaint. No cause to debase himself by whining.

  The lieutenant was also a master at opening old wounds. The six-millimeter ammunition he referred to was for the Lee rifles, which Ziolkowski had sworn would never be used by any squad of his. He had first seen the Winchester-produced Lee while a Legation guard in Seoul. When some Korean soldiers attacked the ultimate symbol of imperialism in the Hermit Kingdom, an American‑owned electric streetcar, the marines were sent in to save the property. During the riot, Ziolkowski found the Lee about as useful as a club. Unlike the Springfield Model 1903, in which the bolts were pulled up, back and forward, the Lee bolt was pulled forward and back. In a hot firefight this action threw off a man's aim. Since its camming power was poor next to the Mauser and Springfield, the Navy began foisting the unloved weapon on marines and sailors stationed at remote outposts where little trouble was expected.

  It did not matter that their worst enemy on Midway was boredom. When Ziolkowski arrived and found only Lees on the island, he called in some favors. The next supply ship brought four crates of Springfields.

  Lieutenant Anthony was well aware that the unloved Lees were locked away in a supply shed. But every so often he mentioned the six-millimeter, an ironic reminder that replacing the Lees had been unauthorized. It was strange behavior in the man who was supposed to be in charge.

  "Well... uh... good job, Sergeant. Carry on."

  Anthony slouched away.

  "What are you staring at, Enderfall?" Ziolkowski bellowed. "The target's out there."

  "But, Top, you heard the lieutenant. We can't waste--"

  "We've plenty of three-aught left. If you don't think so, I'll put you to counting it. By the way, Enderfall... I'm giving you butts, again."

  Which meant Enderfall would have to stand near the targets and indicate hits with a dotter--dangerous because the Top sometimes liked to wing a shot by his ear just to show it could be done.

  1850 Hours

  Sometimes, just before making a fool of himself, Lieutenant Anthony was aware that he was about to make a fool of himself. But to stop and reconsider what he was doing or saying would, he felt, be cowardly. One had to plow ahead in life. Damn the torpedoes, damn the consequences....

  Damn.

  He had promised himself to stop mentioning the Lee rifles to Ziolkowski, because doing so only made him look foolish. Yet he'd done it again. There was something about this place that, to one degree or another, affected them all the same way:

  It turned them into clowns.

  What had he done to deserve Midway, the most distant dumping ground for misfits ever conceived? He had an honorable record. He'd seen action in Nicaragua. At least, whenever his unit approached a group of rebels, the rebels broke and ran. His most memorable event had been his bout with dysentery. As for his tour of duty in Haiti... at least he had carried a gun. But his main job in Port-de-Paix had been to hire natives to go out and shoot other natives.

  Not much, but enough for a captaincy, at least. Instead, he got....

  Depoy, who'd been caught making moonshine in the First Point Barracks at Guantanamo.

  Kittrell. As much as Anthony sought his company, he could not ignore the fact that the chess genius had been found to be speculating in fruit shipments at one of the Caribbean banana‑ports.

  The hapless Lieber, who'd done nothing more (or less) than puke at an awkward moment.

  There were the more sinister cases--Enderfall, for one, and Hoffman, who'd killed a contratista
(a banana plantation overseer) who had had too much casusa in a barroom brawl on the Mosquito Coast. Self-defense. Nothing would have come of it, except that the plantation was owned by a large, influential U.S. fruit packing company which chose to take offense.

  All of which went to highlight Anthony's predicament. He'd done no wrong… offended no one… kissed the requisite asses with nary a complaint.

  "Only for two years," he kept telling himself. But the world was speeded up. Things were happening with kinescopic rapidity over the horizon. Midway's record prior to the relay station consisted primarily of shipwrecks, madness and suspected cannibalism. Not a proper history--and you could not participate in history without a history of your own or at least a place with something resembling a civilized past.

  There was a crunch as a gooney bird crashed to the ground nearby. Nothing to be alarmed about. That was how gooney birds almost always landed. They were, sadly, the perfect emblem for the marines stationed here. The most notable bird on the island was also a clown.

  This one dug its long yellow bill out of the sand and shook its black-tipped wings. Anthony looked away. He found their eyes, gleaming darkly from under their long white lashes, curiously unsettling. They were like the eyes of the last woman he'd slept with. Falling back gently, she had glanced up receptively, redolent with musk and wisdom....

  He had been here too long. It was so futile to think of women. To make one's self swell with cheerful abandon, only to be faced with an enormous absence. It made Anthony's mouth dry. Why, this deprivation could almost tempt him to go over the hill--only there was no hill to go over.

  Most of the gooney birds had departed earlier that summer, flying as far west as the Kuriles before returning to the atoll. The few left were either unattached males, moping about like the rejected suitors they were, or gooneys who'd returned early from their aimless migration for no particular reason and who would soon leave again for no particular reason.