The road meandered around endless rice paddies. The inclines and declines were shallow, but the curves were often sharp, thus making more than twenty miles an hour impossible. Sometimes there was nothing at all on the road to the horizon, and sometimes the road was packed with Chinese, walking alone or with their families or behind ox-drawn carts. The Chinese were usually deaf to the sound of a horn. So when the road was narrow, as it most often was, it was necessary to crawl along in low gear until the road widened enough to let them pass the oxcarts. But sometimes at the blast of the horn, the slowly plodding pedestrians would jump to the side of the road and glower as the convoy passed.

When they had to picnic by the side of the road, McCoy tried to stop when there was no one else on the road. But most of the time, in spite of McCoy's intentions, they were surrounded by hordes of Chinese within five minutes. Some stared in frank curiosity, and others begged for the scraps.

Or for rides. And that was impossible, of course. If they allowed Chinese in the backs of the trucks, the beds would be stripped bare within a mile.

At Ssuyango, T'anch'eng, and Weifang, McCoy spent the hours of darkness trying to find out whether various Japanese units had indeed received German field artillery pieces. And at T'anch'eng, he somewhat reluctantly took Lieutenant Sessions with him.

Sessions skillfully sandbagged him into that. He came to McCoy's room after supper, while McCoy was dressing: black cotton peasant shirt, trousers, and rubber shoes, and a black handkerchief over his head. It was less a disguise than a solution to the problem of crawling through feces-fertilized rice paddies. A complete suit cost less than a dollar. He wore one and carried two more tightly rolled and tied with string that he looped and fastened around his neck.

When he came out of a rice paddy smelling like the bottom of a latrine pit, he would strip and put on a fresh costume. It didn't help much, but it was better than running around soaked in shit.

During the stopover at Ssuyango, McCoy made a deal with a merchant: five gallons of gasoline for eight sets of cotton jackets and trousers. When Sessions came to his room at T'anch'eng, he still had three left, not counting the one he was wearing.

Sessions was politely curious about exactly what McCoy intended to do, and McCoy told him. It wasn't that much of a big deal. All he was going to do was make his way down the dikes between the rice paddies until he was close to the Japanese compound. Then he would slip into the water and make his way close enough to the compound to photograph the artillery park and motor pool. Then he would make his way out of the rice paddie, change clothes, and come back.

"How do you keep the camera dry?" Sessions asked.

"Wrap it in a couple of rubbers," McCoy said.

Sessions laughed appreciatively.

"Do you go armed?"

"I have a knife I take with me," McCoy told him. "But the worst thing I could do is kill a Jap.

Sessions nodded his understanding. Then he said, "Tell me the truth, McCoy. There's no reason I couldn't go, is there? If you were willing to take me, I mean."

"Christ, Lieutenant, you don't want to go."

"Yes, I do, McCoy," Sessions had said. "If you'll take me, I'll go."

Then he walked to the bed and picked up the peasant suit.

"I'd like to have a picture of me in one of these," he said. "It would impress the hell out of my wife."

He looked at McCoy and smiled.

"I really would like to go with you, McCoy," he said. It was still a request.

"Officers are supposed to be in charge," McCoy said. "That wouldn't work."

"You don't have to worry about that," Sessions said. "You're the expert, and I know it. It's your show. I'd just like to tag along."

"Once you get your shoes in a rice paddy, they'll be ruined," McCoy said. It was his last argument.

"Okay," Sessions said. "So I wear old shoes."

So he took Sessions with him. It went as he thought it would, and the only trouble they had was close to the Jap compound. Sessions panicked a little when he hadn't heard McCoy for a couple of minutes and came looking for him, calling his name in a stage whisper.

They didn't find any German PAK38s, but neither did they get caught. And McCoy was by then convinced that the PAK38s existed only in the imagination of chairwarming sonsofbitches in Washington, bastards who didn't have to crawl around through rice paddies or fields fertilized with human shit.

Sessions was so excited by his adventure that when they got back to the Christian Missionary Alliance Mission, he insisted on talking about it until it was way too late to even think of getting together with Ellen for a quickie before breakfast.

After it was light, they killed the roll of film in the camera by taking pictures of each other dressed up like Chinamen.

McCoy hoped that the pictures of Sessions dressed up that way might get the guy off the hook in Washington. They might decide to forget that the Japs had caught him if they saw that he had at least tried to do what they'd sent him to do.

The next night, however, McCoy refused to take Sessions with him when he went to see what he could find near the mission at Weifang. It was a different setup there, the Japs ran perimeter patrols, and he didn't want to run the risk of the both of them getting caught. Sessions didn't argue. Which made McCoy feel a little guilty, because the real reason he didn't want to take Sessions along was that he slowed McCoy down. If Sessions wasn't along, maybe he could get back to the mission in time for Ellen to come to his room.

That hadn't done any good. When he got back, Sessions was waiting for him. Sessions kept him talking (even though there hadn't been any German cannon at Weifang, either) until it was too late to do anything with Ellen. It was really a royal pain in the ass doing nothing with her during the day but hold hands on the front seat for a moment, or touch legs under a table, or something like that. Or he would catch her looking at him.

He decided to take Sessions with him to look at a motorized infantry regiment, the 403rd, near Huimin, because it was the last chance they would have on this trip. If there were some of these German cannons at Huimin, Sessions might as well be able to say he found them. Otherwise-having gotten himself caught by the Japanese-he was going to come off this big-time secret mission looking like an asshole. The pictures of him dressed up like a Chinaman weren't going to impress the big shots as much as his report that he had been caught.

McCoy was beginning to see that Sessions wasn't that much of your typical Headquarters, USMC, sonofabitch. What was really wrong with him was that he didn't know what he was doing. And he could hardly be blamed for that. They didn't teach "How to Spy on the Japs" at the Officer School in Quantico. It was a really dumb fucking thing for the Corps to do, sending him over here the way they had; but to be fair, that was the Corps' fault, not his.

And at Huimin, they found PAK38s. The 403rd Motorized Infantry Regiment (Separate) of His Imperial Majesty's Imperial Fucking Army had eight of them. And the eight had the wrong canvas covers. So they'd taken covers from the Model 94s and put them over the PAK38s.

They didn't fit. The muzzle of the PAK38s, with its distinctive and unmistakable muzzle brake, stuck three feet outside the two small canvas covers. And with the Model 94s parked right beside them-looking very small compared to the PAK38s-there was absolutely no question about what they were.

McCoy shot two thirty-six-exposure rolls of 35-mm black and white film in the Leica, and then a twenty-exposure roll of Kodacolor, although he suspected that one wouldn't turn out. Kodacolor had a tendency to fuck up when you used it at first light-McCoy had no idea why.