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Lo smiled. So did two or three of his buddies. The others just sat, still and watchful. Lo said, “If you are prisoners, you must want to help the oppressed peasants and workers strike a blow for freedom.”
Liu Han’s translation wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as that. Fiore cocked his head to one side anyway. Traveling through small and medium-sized towns in an America staggered by the Depression, he’d heard plenty of guys standing on crates at street corners who talked like that. He pointed a finger at Lo. “You’re a Red, that’s what you are-a Communist, a Bolshevik.”
Liu Han didn’t recognize any of the English (or Russian). She stared and spread her hands, at a loss to interpret. But one of the terms made sense to Lo. He nodded soberly to Bobby Fiore, as if to say he was smarter than the Chinese had figured. Then he spoke to Liu Han, letting her know what was going on.
She didn’t gasp as if she’d just seen a rat scurry across the floor, the way a lot of American women would have. She just nodded and tried to explain to Fiore, then fell silent when she realized he already understood. “They not bad,” she told him. “They fight Japanese, more than Kuomintang does.”
“Okay,” he said. “The Reds were on our side before the Lizards came, sure. And everybody wants to give them a good swift kick. But what do these guys want with me?”
Lo didn’t answer, not with words. Instead, he nudged one of his comrades. The young man reached under his tunic and pulled out a grenade. He didn’t say anything, either. He just let it sit in the palm of his hand.
Bobby didn’t need more than a heartbeat before the light went on in his head. He started to laugh. “So you want me to do your pitching for you, huh?” he said, not caring that neither Lo nor Liu Han understood what he was talking about. “I wish Sam Yeager was here. You think my arm’s hot stuff, you oughta see his.”
Lo politely waited till he was done before speaking. Liu Han hesitantly translated: “They want you-” She forgot the English for throw, but made a gesture to show what she meant. Fiore nodded. Then she pointed at the grenade.
“Yeah, I already worked that out,” Fiore said. He’d worked out some other things, too: if he said no, for instance, he and Liu Han were liable to end up wearing whatever Chinamen used for concrete overshoes. This wasn’t just a shakedown. If he said no, he was a big danger to these people. From everything he’d ever heard, Bolsheviks didn’t let people who were dangerous to them keep walking and breathing.
And besides, he didn’t want to say no. He wished he could have chucked some grenades at the Lizards back in Cairo, Illinois, after they caught him the first time. That would have kept him out of this whole mess. Even though he did care for Liu Han, he would have given a lot to be back in the good old U.S. of A.
Since he couldn’t have that, giving the little scaly bastards a hard time here on the other side of the world would have to do. “So what do you want me to blow up?” he asked Lo.
Maybe the Red hadn’t expected such enthusiastic cooperation. He talked in low tones with his friends before he turned back to Liu Han. She sounded worried as she told Fiore, “They want you to go with them. No say where.”
He wondered if he ought to insist that Lo tell Liu Han where he’d be. After a second’s doubt, he decided that would be stupid. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell anybody, especially the Lizards… and, if she didn’t know, the Reds would have less reason to come after her to shut her up in case things went wrong.
He got to his feet. “Let’s go take care of it,” he said to Lo.
He felt edgy, almost bouncy, as he walked, as if Mutt Daniels (and he wondered what had happened to old Mutt) had flashed him the sign to steal home on the next pitch. Well, why not? He wasn’t just trying to steal home. He was going into combat.
Sooner or later, he was sure, he would have volunteered for the Army. But even then, he would have trained for months before he got the chance to see action. Now-it was as if he’d got his rifle and headed up to the front line one right after the other. No wonder he felt all loosey-goosey.
He blew Liu Han a kiss. Lo and his fellow Bolsheviks snickered and said things that were probably rude to one another: Chinese men weren’t in the habit of showing they gave a damn about their women. Well, to hell with them, too, he thought. Liu Han managed a return smile, but he could see she was frightened about this whole business.
Night in the prison camp was darker than anything Fiore had known back in the States, even in the panicky blackouts that had followed Pearl Harbor. Few of the huts had any windows, and few of what windows there were had lights showing through them. If the moon was up in the sky, a thick layer of clouds made sure nobody could see it. Though that made Fiore stumble along, he didn’t bellyache, not even to himself: darkness would give the Lizards a harder time spotting him. That he liked.
The Chinese picked their way through the black as if they had headlights. A couple of times, Bobby Fiore heard people getting out of their way in a hurry. A large group of disciplined men traveling confidently was something few wanted to mess with. He liked that, too.
Before long, he had no idea where in the camp Lo was taking him. It all looks alike to me, he thought, and stifled a nervous giggle. He didn’t know if the Bolsheviks were walking him around in circles to get him lost or if it just worked out that way, but lost he undoubtedly was.
Lo opened the door of a shabby little hut, gestured for his companions and Fiore to go in. The inside of the hut was darker than the alley had been. That didn’t stop Lo. He shoved aside a heavy wooden chest-by all appearances, the only furniture in the place-and pulled up a square piece of board underneath it. He and two of his friends dropped down into the tunnel the board concealed.
One of the remaining Reds nudged Fiore and pointed to the round mouth of the tunnel. He went into it with all the eagerness of a man walking to the electric chair. As he had when he left the hut he shared with Liu Han, he learned new lessons about how dark darkness could be. As far as his eyes were concerned, he’d just gone blind. But with Chinese ahead and Chinese pushing him on from behind, he could have no doubt about which direction to go.
The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for him to stand upright, or even to crouch. He had to crawl along on hands and knees, and even then the top of his head kept bumping on the roof and showering clods of dirt down onto his neck. The air in the tunnel smelled like moist earth, dank and musty, and felt dead, as if nobody had any business breathing down here.
He had no idea how long he crawled, either in time or distance. It seemed forever, either way. He imagined the tunnel was sloping up several times, but each one proved to be just that: imaginary. Without eyes to help it, his sense of balance played tricks on him.
At last, though, he smelled fresh air. He hurried forward, and now found himself going unmistakably upward as well. He scrambled out and lay gasping in relief in a hollow in a field. After the tunnel, that seemed a wonderful luxury. It also seemed almost bright as day. The other three Chinese Reds came out of the hole just as eagerly as he had. That made him feel better.
Lo cautiously raised his head. He turned to Bobby Fiore, pointed. Fiore raised his head, too. Off in the distance sat a Lizard guard station on the camp perimeter. Fiore mimed lobbing a grenade in that direction. Lo smiled, his teeth startlingly white in the darkness. Then he reached out and thumped Fiore on the shoulder, as if to say, You’re okay, Mac.
He whispered something to one of the other young men, who handed Bobby Fiore a grenade. He felt for the pin, found it. Lo held up fingers close to his face-one, two, three. Then he, too, mimed throwing. “Yeah, I know I gotta get rid of it,” Fiore said laconically.
The fellow who’d given him the grenade proved to have three more, which he also passed on. Fiore took them, but less enthusiastically each time. He figured he could throw one, maybe two, and get away in the confusion, but anything after that and he’d be asking to get blown to pieces.
But the Reds weren’t asking him to do anything they weren’t game for the
mselves. Some of them pulled out pistols from the waistbands of their trousers; Lo and one other fellow had submachine guns instead-not tommy guns like gangsters, but stubbier, lighter weapons of a make Fiore didn’t recognize. He wondered if they were Russian. Any which way, he was glad he hadn’t tried using that baseball bat back in his hut.
Lo started crawling through the field-beans were growing in it, Fiore discovered-toward the Lizard outpost. The other raiders and Fiore trailed after him. The reek of night soil (as poetic a way of saying shit as he’d ever heard) filled his nostrils; the Chinese used it for fertilizer.
The Lizards obviously weren’t expecting trouble from the outside. The humans easily got within fifty yards of their perimeter. Lo looked a question to Bobby Fiore: was this close enough? He nodded. Lo nodded back and thumped him on the shoulder again. For a Chinaman and a Communist, Lo was all right.
The raiders slithered out into a rough skirmish line. Lo stayed close by Fiore. He gave his comrades maybe a minute and a half to find firing position, then pointed to Fiore and then to the guard station.
I get to open the show, huh? It was an honor Fiore could have done without, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He yanked the pin out of one of the grenades, hurled it as if he’d just taken a relay in short right and was trying to nail a runner at the plate. Then he flung himself flat on the stinking ground.
Bang! The blast was oddly disappointing; he’d expected more. But it did what it was supposed to do: it got the Lizards’ attention. Fiore heard hissing shouts, saw motion in and around the guard post.
That was what the Chinese had been waiting for. Their guns opened up with a roar quite satisfyingly loud. Lo went through a whole magazine in what seemed no more than a heartbeat; his submachine gun spat a flame bright and searingly yellow as the sun. He rammed in another clip and started shooting again.
