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I clenched my fists. Maybe I would hit the old man after all. Maybe I wouldn’t stop hitting him for a while.
“I won’t say it aloud if you don’t want me to,” Pop said.
I turned and started for the door. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was getting away from Pop.
He followed and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, so I whirled with a roundhouse right. He leaned back just in time, and my knuckles brushed his mustache.
“Jesus Christ, son,” Pop exclaimed.
I grabbed his scrawny arms and pushed him away. He staggered back, but didn’t fall.
“He was a Jap,” I said. I was trembling. “He was trying to kill me not five minutes before. And it was an order. It was an order from a goddamn colonel.”
Pop took a deep, quaking breath and adjusted his glasses.
“It was an order,” I said.
Pop nodded. “I know. And now I need you to listen to me again. Are you listening, Private?”
I glared at him.
“Here it is, then,” Pop said. “No one, and I mean no one—not your chaplain, not the general, not anyone back home, and sure as hell not me—no one would condemn what you did. If the circumstances had been reversed, that Jap would have done the same to you, and he wouldn’t have waited for an order.”
I could still see him lying there, his blood staining the thin crust of snow a sudden crimson. He had been as small as a child. His uniform had looked like dirty play clothes.
He was a Jap. But he was on the ground. With his hands tied behind his back. His sword was gone.
Pop wasn’t finished. “The problem isn’t that you followed the order. The problem is that out of the three thousand Japs you boys fought on Attu, we took only twenty-eight prisoners. I’m not saying that killing the rest was a bad thing. But prisoners can be valuable. Especially if they’re officers. And a man with a sword might have been an officer. So someone would have wanted to ask him things like, what’s your rank, who are your immediate superiors, where are your maps, what were your orders, what’s your troop strength on Kiska, and where does Yamamoto go to take his morning shit. That sort of thing.”
Pop was talking a lot, again. It wore on my brain. And Yamamoto’s plane had been shot down a month before we’d hit Attu. But at least now I had something else to think about.
“You mean we need a supply of Japs?” I said.
Now Pop smiled his thin smile. “I mean that a lieutenant colonel in the Intelligence Section did a stupid thing. He wasn’t even supposed to be near the fighting. But that banzai charge came awfully close. So in rage or fear, he forgot his job and ordered you to destroy a military intelligence asset. That’s an act that could negatively affect his chances for promotion.” Pop pointed at me again. “If anyone happened to testify to it.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to make the pain at the base of my skull go away.
“I don’t understand how anything you just said adds up to anything we saw today,” I told him.
Now Pop pointed past me, toward the door. “That’s why there’s more to find out, and that’s why I need you to help me with it. There was one other man on the mountain with us this morning. And since you and he were freezing and fighting on Attu while I was elsewhere, I think he might be more willing to part with any answers if you’re present.”
That made some sense. The Cutthroat hadn’t liked me, but he might respect me more than Pop.
Still, there was one thing that I knew Pop had left out in all his talk. “What about the eagle?” I asked.
Pop bared his false teeth.
“That’s the key,” he said. “That’s why we have to talk with the Scout again. Remember what he said about magic and power? Well, he also said that he told those same stories to officers on Attu.” He went past me to the door. “Now, will you come along?”
I turned to go with him, then hesitated.
“Wait a minute.” I was still trying to clear my head. “Are you saying the colonel believes in Eskimo magic?”
Pop held up his hands. “I have no idea. But magic and religion are based on symbols, which can be powerful as hell. And I know the lieutenant colonel does believe in that. After all, there’s one symbol that he very much wants for his own.”
I was still confused by most of what Pop had said. But this one part, I suddenly understood.
A full colonel was called a “bird colonel.”
