THE FALLEN AIRMEN
ALL MORNING the sound of artillery fire had crossed the river from Pootung. A column of incendiary smoke, broader than the group of burning warehouses, leaned over the water and darkened the Nantao shore. From the front seat of the Buick parked on the mud flat, Jim watched the flashes of gunfire in the dusty windshield. The American artillery pieces brought up by the Nationalists emitted a harsh and wet noise, as if their barrels were filled with water. Hidden from the sun, a gloomy air lay over the slack tide that swilled against the beach. The glowing barrel of the Kuomintang howitzer behind the Pootung mole flickered against Jim’s knuckles as he held the steering wheel of the Buick, and lit up the conning tower of the beached submarine a hundred yards away.
Jim noticed a reconnaissance aircraft emerge from the smoke cloud, shaking off the wisps of black vapor that streamed from its wings. A flight of three American bombers approached from the southwest. The gunfire ceased, and a torpedo boat fortified with sandbags set out across the river, ready to collect any stray canisters.
A dozen parachutes fell from the B-29s and streaked swiftly to the ground. The canisters were loaded, not with Spam, Klim and the Reader’s Digest, but with ammunition and explosives for the Kuomintang troops. The battalion, with its artillery support, was rooting out the last of the Communist units that still hung on among the ruins of the Pootung warehouses. On the mole, the corpses of dead Communist soldiers were stacked like firewood.
In the silence after the bombers had passed, Jim could hear the aching rumble of artillery barrages from Hungjao and the open country to the west of Shanghai. At least three Nationalist armies were closing around Shanghai, jockeying among themselves for control of the airfields, dockyards and railway lines, and above all for the stocks of weapons and munitions left behind by the Japanese. Collaborating with the Nationalists, though sometimes fighting against them, were the remnants of the puppet armies, groups of renegade Kuomintang driven back to the coast, and various militia forces recruited by the local warlords who had returned to Shanghai.
Swept in front of these rival armies, like dust before a set of colliding brooms, were tens of thousands of Chinese peasants. Columns of refugees wandered the countryside, trying to shelter in the fields and looted villages, turned away from the gates of Shanghai by advance units of Nationalist armies.
It was these refugees, the bands of starving coolies armed with knives and hoes, whom Jim most feared. Avoiding them at all costs, Basie and his bandit group stayed close to any battle that was taking place. On the eastern fringes of Nantao, between the dockyards and the seaplane base, was a no-man’s-land of wharves, warehouses and deserted barracks which the Kuomintang militias and the peasant refugees found too near to the fighting across the river at Pootung. Here Basie and the remaining six members of the gang camped out in the bunkers and concrete forts, with little left to them but the prewar Buick and the vague hope of selling themselves to a Nationalist general.
Now even the car was proving too obvious a target for the Kuomintang gunners.
“You sit behind the wheel, Jim,” Basie had told him as the bandits left the Buick on the mud flat. “Pretend you’re driving this fine car.”
“Say, can I, Basie?” Jim held the steering wheel as the men stood on the black beach beside the car and prepared their weapons. Their faces flinched at the sound of the explosions that crossed the water. “Are you going to the stadium, Basie?”
“Right, Jim. Remember those years in Lunghua—we have an investment to protect. The Nats want to take over Shanghai and keep out any foreign business interests.”
“Is that us, Basie?”
“That’s you, Jim. You’re part of the foreign business community. When we get back you’ll have a fur coat and a case of scotch whiskey for your dad.”
Basie stared at the ruined warehouses and the corpses stacked on the mole, as if seeing them loaded with all the treasure of the East about to be freighted back to Frisco. Jim felt sorry for Basie and was tempted to warn him that the stadium was probably empty, stripped by the Kuomintang troops of the few valuables that had survived the sun and rain. But Basie had taken the hook and was now running eagerly toward the gaff. With luck, if he survived the attack on the stadium, he would throw away his rifle and walk back to Shanghai. Within a few days he would be a wine waiter at the Cathay Hotel, serving with a flourish all the American officers who stepped ashore from the cruiser moored by the Bund . . . .
When Basie and the men had gone, vanishing among the ruined warehouses on the quay, Jim studied the magazines on the seat beside him. He was sure now that the Second World War had ended, but had World War III begun? Looking at the photographs of the D-day landings, the crossing of the Rhine and the capture of Berlin, he felt that they were part of a smaller war, a rehearsal for the real conflict that had begun here in the Far East with the dropping of the atom bombs. Jim remembered the light that lay over the land, the shadow of another sun. Here, at the mouths of the great rivers of Asia, would be fought the last war to decide the planet’s future.
Jim wiped his blood from the steering wheel as the shelling began again from the Pootung shore. His nose had been bleeding on and off for two weeks. He swallowed the blood and watched the open road that ran from the wharves toward the distant stadium. A hundred yards from the Buick, two Chinese militiamen had climbed onto the bows of the beached submarine. Rifles slung over their shoulders, they ignored the battle across the river and walked along the deck to the conning tower.
Jim unlatched the driver’s door. It was time to leave, before the militiamen noticed the Buick. From the heap of cans, cigarette cartons and ammunition clips on the floor of the car he selected a chocolate bar, a tin of Spam and a copy of Life. When the two Chinese were behind the conning tower, he stepped onto the mud flat. Crouching below the embankment wall, he ran toward the stone ramp of a Shanghai River police jetty. Little more than two miles to the north were the tenements and godowns of the Old City, and beyond them the office blocks of downtown Shanghai, but Jim ignored them and set out again for Lunghua Airfield.
•
Smoke rose from the Olympic stadium, a thin white plume fed by a single flame, as if Basie and his gang had lit a bonfire of furniture in the stands. The artillery barrages from Pootung and Hungjao had fallen silent, and Jim could hear the brief bursts of rifle fire from the stadium.
Searching for shelter, Jim left the exposed country road. He walked through the wild sugarcane that covered the waste ground beside the northern perimeter of Lunghua Airfield. A screen of trees and rusting fuel tanks separated him from the open plain of the landing field, the ruined hangars and pagoda. Cartridge cases lay on the narrow path at his feet, chips laid in a brassy trail. Jim followed the straggling wire, avoiding the swarms of flies that clustered over the miniature bowers in the banks of nettles.
On either side of the pathway the bodies of dead Japanese lay where they had been shot or bayonetted. Jim stopped by a shallow irrigation ditch, in which an air force private lay with his hands tied behind him. Hundreds of flies devoured his face, enclosing it in a noisy mask. Unwrapping his chocolate bar and fanning the flies from his face with the magazine, Jim walked through the sugarcane. Dozens of dead Japanese lay in the nettles as if they had fallen from the sky, the members of a youthful armada shot down as they tried to fly to their home airfields in Japan.
Jim stepped over a collapsed section of the perimeter fence and moved through the derelict aircraft that lay among the trees. Their fuselages had wept rivers of rust in the summer rain. The flies raged at the morning light, a vast anger about nothing. Leaving them, Jim set out across the grass expanse of the airfield. Inside one of the ruined hangars a group of Japanese waited in the shade, listening to the rifle fire from the stadium, but they ignored Jim as he walked across the field.
Jim stared at the concrete runway below his feet. To his surprise, he found that the surface was badly cracked and stained with patches of oil, scored by the marks of tires and wheel struts. But now that World War III had begun, a new runway would soon be laid. Jim reached the end of the concrete strip and strode through the grass toward the southern perimeter of the airfield. The ground rose to the overgrown hillocks left by the original earthworks, then shelved into the valley where the Japanese trucks had once delivered their loads of building rubble and roof tiles.
Despite the deep nettles and the hot September sunlight, the valley seemed filled with the same ashy dust. The banks of the canal were as pale as the conduit of a mortuary stream in which the dead were washed. The burst casing of an unexploded bomb lay in the shallow water, like a large turtle that had fallen asleep trying to bury its head in the mud.
Aware that the vibration of a low-flying Mustang might trip its detonator, Jim pressed on into the valley, parting the nettles with his magazine. He tossed the tin of Spam into the air, caught it with one hand, but on the second throw lost it among the reeds. Hunting about in the thick grass, he at last found it near the water’s edge, and decided to eat the chopped ham before it slipped through his hands for good.
Sitting on the bank of the canal, he washed the dirt from the lid. A drop of blood fell from his nose into the water and was instantly attacked by myriads of small fish no longer than a match head. As a second drop struck the surface, there was a violent struggle that seemed to involve entire nations of minute fish. They swerved through the water, unaware of the sunlit surface, ferociously attacking each other. Clearing his mouth, Jim leaned over and released a ball of pus from his infected gums. It fell like a depth charge among the fish, driving them into a frenzy of panic. Within a second the water was empty except for the dissolving pus.
Losing interest in the fish, Jim stretched out among the reeds and studied the advertisements in his magazine. He listened to the deeper sound of the artillery fire. The guns of Siccawei and Hungjao were louder, as the rival Nationalist armies closed their grip on Shanghai. He would eat his Spam and then make a last effort to return to Shanghai. He was certain that Basie and the bandit gang never intended to return to the Buick and had left Jim on the mud flat to draw away any Chinese soldiers who might have followed them to the river.
In the grass nearby, a head nodded twice, approving this strategy. Jim lay rigidly, the last of the chocolate trapped in his throat, startled by this intimate apparition. Someone was lying in the reeds a few feet from him, his knees almost touching the water’s edge. As if trying to reassure Jim, the head nodded again. Jim reached out one hand and parted the grass, carefully examining the figure’s face. The round cheeks and soft nose, pinched by the privations of a wartime childhood, were those of a teen-age Asiatic, some villager’s son come here to fish. The boy lay on his back, surrounded by a wall of grass and reeds, as if sharing a four-poster bed with Jim and quietly listening to his thoughts.
Jim sat up, the rolled magazine raised above his head. Through the swarming flies he waited for the sound of footsteps in the long grass. But the valley was empty, its bright air devoured by the flies. The figure moved slightly, crushing the grass. Too idle to stop himself, the lazy youth was sliding down the bank into the water.
With all the caution learned during the long years of the war, Jim climbed to his knees, then stood up and stepped through the reeds. Calming himself, he looked down at this dozing figure.
In front of him, wearing a bloodstained flying overall with the insignia of a special attack group, was the body of the young Japanese pilot.