It was warm enough for mosquitoes right now. Siberian mosquitoes were numerous, savage, and large. A Japanese joke said one of them had landed at an airstrip, and groundcrew men pumped a hundred liters of gasoline into it before they realized what it was. Fujita thought it was a joke.

You didn't notice the bites when they happened. If you didn't feel the mosquito walking on your skin, or see it there, the damn thing would fly away happy. You'd feel it later, though-you'd itch for a week. Scratching only made things worse, too.

Back of the line, Japanese soldiers lit candles of camphor or citronella. You couldn't do it at the front. The scent, wafting on the wind, told the Russians where you were. They were like animals; they'd take clues a civilized man, a Japanese man, wouldn't even notice, and they'd use them to kill you.

An officer's whistle squealed like an angry shoat. "Advance!" Lieutenant Hanafusa shouted. "We have to push their guns away from the railroad line!"

Right now? Fujita wondered. A sergeant couldn't ask something like that out loud, not unless he wanted to get busted back to private-or, more likely, shot for cowardice. You'd disgrace your whole family if you did. Your father wouldn't be able to hold his head up at work. Your mother couldn't show her face at the vegetable market any more. Your little sister would never find a husband-or, maybe worse, she'd marry a latrine cleaner.

All that went through Fujita's head in less than a heartbeat. And so, instead of asking questions, he scrambled out of his hole, shouted, "My squad-advance!" and ran forward, clutching his rifle in hands whose palms were wet with fear-sweat.

Into the woods on the far side of the tracks. He wasn't alone. His squad-and the rest of the company-went in there with him. That made things a little easier. He didn't know whether misery loved company, but it needed company.

Were there Russians in the woods? Of course there were. There always were. Their damned machine guns started yammering right away. Cleverly hidden soldiers would let you run past, then shoot you in the back. They died after that, of course, but they didn't seem to care. They were so indifferent to death, Fujita wondered if they were human.

He got a flash of something moving, bounding away from the racket of combat as fast as it could. He started to bring his Arisaka up to his shoulder, then checked the motion, his jaw dropping in awe. "Damned if there aren't," he said softly.

"Aren't what, Sergeant?" asked a soldier at his elbow.

His cheeks heated; he hadn't meant to be overheard. "Tora," he answered. "That was a tiger over there." He pointed. "I've seen a tiger, a live tiger."

"You should have killed it," the other soldier said. "That'd be a hell of a souvenir. A tiger's skin? I hope so! I wish I'd seen it." He sounded jealous and wistful.

But Fujita shook his head. "It was too beautiful. I couldn't." He'd seen too much of war, here and in Mongolia. War was ugly, the ugliest thing there was. And war, he was certain, had nothing to do with tigers. "HELLO, PEGGY! How are you?" The receptionist at the U.S. embassy in Berlin greeted Peggy Druce with an all-American smile and a harsh Midwestern accent that would have set her teeth on edge back in the States but sounded heavenly here at the heart of the Third Reich.

"Hello, Lucinda. How's your daughter these days?" Peggy had been stuck in Berlin so long, she was on a first-name basis with everybody at the embassy and knew everybody's problems.

Lucinda's smile got wider. "She's much better, thanks. Those new pills, those waddayacallems, sulfas, fixed her up like magic-I just got a letter from her. And her husband finally has a job. He's riveting in an airplane factory that opened up a coupla miles from where they live."

"That does sound good," Peggy said. An airplane factory opening up in Omaha?-she thought it was Omaha. That sounded strange. Maybe FDR had decided the United States did need to be ready for trouble, just in case. Maybe he'd persuaded Congress that that might be a pretty decent idea. Having met war face-to-face, Peggy thought you had to be a jackass not to see it was a good idea. But when you were talking about Congressmen…

Lucinda continued, "And Mr. Jenkins is waiting for you. Go right on upstairs to his office." She chuckled. "Maybe you won't come around here all the time in a while. Maybe you'll be on your way home."

"Home." It sounded like a dream to Peggy-a receding dream, one she couldn't remember so well as she wished she could. She headed for the stairs, trying to drum up optimism inside herself, to believe she wasn't just going through the motions one more time. It wasn't easy. Nothing had been easy since German shells started falling on Marianske Lazne.

CONSTANTINE JENKINS-UNDERSECRETARY: gold-filled Roman-looking letters on a black nameplate on a door. At the moment, it was a closed door. Peggy fumed. It shouldn't have been. She was right on time, and Lucinda had said the undersecretary was ready. Peggy'd always been one to grab the bull by the horns. She knocked briskly.

The door opened. Constantine Jenkins looked out at her: mid-thirties, tall, thin, pale, almost handsome "Oh, yes," he said, his voice low and well-mannered. If he wasn't a queer, Peggy'd never seen one. "Give me five minutes, please. Something's come up."

Those five minutes stretched to fifteen. Peggy was ready to snarl, maybe to bite. Then the door opened again. Out came a short, trim, graying man with four gold stripes on the sleeves of his uniform. The naval attache gave her a brusque nod and a murmured "Sorry about that," then hurried down the corridor.

"Come on in," Jenkins said.

Still a little irked-maybe more than a little-Peggy went on in. "What was that all about?" she snapped.

"Business I had to take care of," he answered, which told her exactly nothing. He held out a package of Chesterfields-they came from the States through Sweden and Switzerland, in diplomatic pouches. "Cigarette?"

"Oh, God, yes!" If anything could fix Peggy's mood in a hurry, real tobacco could. What you were able to buy in Germany got lousier by the day. She let him light the coffin nail for her-he had exquisite manners. Smooth, flavorful smoke filled her lungs. "Wow!" she said. "You put up with Junos for a while, you forget what the real stuff is like. And Junos are pretty good, at least next to the other German brands."

"So I've heard," he said coolly. With those diplomatic pouches, he didn't have to pollute his lungs with German tobacco, or whatever it was. After he got a Chesterfield of his own going, he asked, "What can I do for you today?"

"Tell me how to get to Stockholm or Geneva or Lisbon or anywhere else that'll let me get back to America," Peggy answered.

He sighed out smoke. "I'm sorry. I wish I could. Believe me, you aren't the only American who wants to be somewhere else." He paused. "I wouldn't recommend Lisbon, not when you have to cross Spain to get there."

"Okay. The hell with Lisbon. How about Copenhagen? Oslo? Athens, even, for crying out loud? Jesus, I'd take Belgrade right now. Anywhere but here!" Peggy said.

Jenkins spread well-manicured hands. "Difficult to arrange for anyone. More difficult for you, because you haven't so much as tried to hide how you feel about the Nazis."

"Wouldn't that make them want to get rid of me?" she demanded.

"Not when they fear what you'll say once you get to a neutral country," the undersecretary replied.

Peggy took a last angry puff on the Chesterfield and stubbed it out in a glass ashtray on Jenkins' desk. German officials had told her the same thing. She'd made them all kinds of promises. They hadn't believed her. Maybe they weren't so dumb as she wished they were.

"As it happens," Jenkins said, "I have two tickets for the opera tonight. My, ah, friend has come down sick. Would you care to go with me?"