A Flying Tigers Novel
Chapter 1
15 August 1941
Neal Gavril’s best friend stood swaying on wide legs by the open window of the wood-paneled train compartment, punching his right fist into his left hand. The in-rushing air smelled of brackish coal smoke and decaying tropical jungle as the narrow-gauge steam engine chugged through the lush Burmese countryside.
“I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those blazing hot P-40s,” Kevin Muldowny said, the smack of fist on palm punctuating his sentence.
Neal Gavril’s other best friend lounged with his feet up on the well-upholstered bench across from him, fanning himself with a copy of the Rangoon Times.
“I can’t wait to get out of this blazing hot train car,” Tom Luster said.
Neal, on the seat across from Tom, spied a gleaming golden pagoda.
“I can’t wait to look inside one of those weird-looking temples,” he said.
Kevin turned and slugged Neal in the arm. “Quit gawking at the local color,” he said. “We’re not here on a travelogue. We’re here to fight Japs.”
“Aww, leave the yogi alone,” Tom said. “It’s probably cooler inside. Bet it’s why they’re all pointy, to angle the sun off ‘em.”
Neal rubbed his biceps. “As long as we’re here,” he said, “I’d like to see how the natives live. There’s a lot more to life than flying and fighting.”
“Yeah, drinking and womanizing,” Tom said.
“Yeah, more flying and more fighting,” Kevin said.
Neal sat back in his seat. “I give up,” he said.
He looked out the window and thought back to the day last spring when a recruiter came to the officer’s club at their Army Air Corps base in the States and talked about a new group authorized by President Roosevelt to provide China with US pilots and military aircraft to defend their cities against Japanese. “You’ll get double your Army pay, plus five hundred bucks for every Japanese plane you shoot down,” said the recruiter, a retired Navy commander. “We’re calling it the American Volunteer Group.”
After a few beers in an off-base bar, Kevin had talked Neal and Tom into leaving their B-17 bomber squadron and signing the year-long contract.
“We’re going to fight the Japanese or the Germans sooner or later,” Kevin’d said. “So better to get in now. Then, when Uncle Sam comes in swinging, we’ll have twenty times the experience of the other shoe clerks around here. We’ll be able to write our own ticket.”
“On top of that,” he’d added, “we’ll get to fly fighters. No more milk-hauling in gut-bucket bombers.”
Now, after five weeks on a steamship across the Pacific to Rangoon, they were heading north to a remote British Royal Air Force base, where they would learn to fly P-40 fighter aircraft before heading to China to face the Japanese.
Still standing by the window, Kevin shifted his stance and announced: “Yeah, it is hot in here. Let’s bring in more air.” He pushed open the compartment door, which, in the style of British trains, swung directly outside. He stuck his head into the thick, muggy wind, sniffing the breeze like a dog.
Neal knew Kevin was about to do something crazy. He and Tom sat forward, attentive. Kevin pulled himself back into the compartment and reached into his duffel. He grabbed a Colt .45 Automatic, cocked it, and moved back to the door. He took aim at a passing telegraph pole. A gunshot rang loud in the small compartment. Splinters flew from the pole.
“Nailed it!” Kevin said.
He tracked another pole. BAM. “Spiked it again! Your turn.”
Neal and Tom jumped to their feet and rifled through their bags. Each retrieved an identical gunmetal blue forty-five. They’d all bought them together at a ramshackle waterfront gun shop in San Francisco the day before they left the States.
Tom shouldered Kevin aside, assumed a slight crouch, and took careful aim. He fired. No splinters.
“That was definitely a miss,” Kevin said.
“Wrong,” Tom said. “You couldn’t see anything because I hit dead center. I’ll do it again.”
Tom wet his index finger with his tongue and wiped the front sight on the barrel, as if some speck of dirt there might mar his aim. BAM!
This time splinters flew.
“Okay, my turn,” Neal said. He stepped to the doorway, made his calculation, and squeezed the trigger.
BAM!
No splinters. A miss.
“Look out Japs! Neal’s coming,” Kevin shouted.
“The pole was crooked,” Neal said.
Like usual, Kevin and Tom managed to do everything as if born to it, Neal thought. Try again.
BAM! No splinters. Another miss.
“Third time’s the charm,” he said.
BAM! A cloud of thin wood fragments.
“Well, maybe you’ll get a Jap after all,” Kevin said, slapping him on the shoulder.
“If they don’t get him first,” Tom said.
A few more detonations and Neal heard a pounding on the inner door to the compartment. Through the glass, he saw the conductor, stiff and formal in his dark uniform. He slid open the door.
“What’s going on in here?” the conductor said.
The three men looked at each other. Neal went first. “Oh, so sorry, we didn’t know it was a problem,” he said. “We do it all the time in the States.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, “where we come from, all the telephone poles have targets on them.”
“Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to report you,” the conductor said.
Kevin stared at the man and made a low growl, like a cornered dog.
The conductor took a step back.
“Oh, I wouldn’t talk about reporting people,” Neal said. “That kind of talk upsets my friend here.”
Kevin growled more loudly.
“Yeah,” Tom said, “the last time this happened, the poor train man ended up with a broken arm.” He touched his elbow.
“Just leave us alone with him, sir,” Neal said. “We’ll make him stop.”
“Well… alright,” the conductor said, uncertainty crossing his face. “As long as you promise to cease shooting your guns. It alarms the other passengers.” He backed out and slammed the compartment door.
The three men broke out laughing.
“You definitely put the fear of God into that fellow, Kevin,” Neal said.
“Oh, but ‘it alarms the other passengers,’” Tom said.
“The growling dog works every time,” Kevin said, plopping back in his seat. “Hey, what was the name of that bar we were in last night? ‘The Golden Grill?’ ”
“‘The Silver Grill,’” Neal said.
“Yeah, well, did you get a look at those waitresses?” Kevin said. “Knock me out and send for the smelling salts!”
“It was their eyes,” Tom said. “Because they were half and half.”
“They call them Anglo-Asian,” Neal said. “I read about ‘em on the way over.”
“Yeah, well, whatever they were, that babe that sat down next to us was ‘bee-you-tee-full,’” Kevin said, drawing out each syllable. “Something about her blue eyes and long dark hair just knocked me out. I gotta see her again.”
“You can buy them,” Tom said. “I was talking to a Brit. They have rooms upstairs, right over the bar.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Kevin said.
“Of course,” Tom said, putting his feet up on his bags. “I’d never pay for it myself.”
Tom would never need to, Neal thought. Tom was tall and blonde with chiseled features – the type of man that women couldn’t take their eyes off. His green eyes always had a twinkle, as if he knew something no one else knew. “He could charm the birds out of the trees,” an army buddy had once said of him.
Kevin was plain looking. He had straight brown hair and brown eyes and was not at all tall – he’d just made the height requirement for flight school. But his torso was trim and well-muscled. He’d broken his nose in a boxing match and wore a mustache to hide an old harelip scar. But many women, Neal thought, would find the package manly and attractive.
Neal knew his looks were okay. He had well-shaped dark brown eyes evenly set under strong eyebrows, with a long straight nose and finely wrought lips. He was taller than average – though not so tall as Tom – and his physique was lean. Sometimes he would catch sight of himself in a mirror and think: not bad. Not a Clark Gable but maybe a Tyrone Power. Other days he looked like nobody. That stymied his confidence with women – not that he didn’t keep trying.
“I just can’t wait to get in the cockpit of one of those fighters,” Kevin said, back up on his feet and pacing the compartment.
“We know, we know,” Tom said.
“And to get into the fight against those godless Japanese.”
“Yes, yes,” Tom said, now turning back to the newspaper.
Neal nodded to be agreeable. Flying had been his passion since the day he watched a biplane sputter over his house in Waltham, Massachusetts, as a young boy. And to be able to fly regularly was the main reason he joined the Army Air Corps and now found himself in Burma. But when he was honest with himself, he was uncertain about the fighting part. He wondered if he could pull the trigger to kill another man.
He probably would, he told himself, because it was the right thing to do. A few months ago, he and Kevin had seen a newsreel showing Japanese bombers over some Chinese city. The film showed innocent civilians running for shelter and then an aftermath scene of torn bodies bleeding in the streets.
Something had to be done to stop the Japanese. He felt sure of that. And, too, there was the lure of the Orient. He’d read Kipling as a child and devoured books like Fighting Aces and The Royal Road to Romance as a teenager. The East had always seemed so exotic and entrancing.
But now, in the face of it, on this train, heading to a fighter base, he couldn’t help but wonder: Am I a good enough pilot to avoid being killed myself?
Neal was unsure why Tom signed up. Oh, he talked like Kevin about wanting to fight the Japanese and fly fast planes. But Neal suspected the real reason was the money. The extra pay – not to mention the $500 bonus for every plane shot down – was bigtime dollars.
Neal knew Tom’s family had struggled during the Depression. He’d visited his home in California when they were on a training flight. His father was a down-and-out radio salesman and his mother, as far as he could tell, was once a very pretty woman who had slipped inside a bottle and never found her way out. Yes, Tom had his reasons.
The train began to slow.
“Coming into the station,” Kevin said, once again leaning out the compartment door.
Soon the three men were in the dust-covered Studebaker sent to fetch them. They trundled along rutted roads for half an hour. The driver, an American volunteer pilot like themselves named Erik, played tour guide on the way to the base.
“There’s only a few P-40s here so far,” Erik said. “We’re still waiting for the bulk to be assembled in Rangoon… The place is surrounded by jungle. I hope you like humidity. It’s hotter than a Turkish bath…Everything gets moldy after a few days. Oh, and the insects seemed to have declared war on humans out here. You’ll see…. Chennault runs a pretty tight ship but he knows he can’t push too hard since we’re all volunteers…. They call him ‘old leatherface’ – tanned by years of sun and wind in open cockpit – the guy is the real deal…. I’d advise you to get a bike as soon as you can. Use of the base car is limited and it’s the only way to get into town where the booze is…. Some of the guys think they’re really hot pilots and it’s hard to squeeze past their heads when you meet them on the way to the latrine. But most of the guys are good Joes…. Food is crap, lots of rice and curry stuff and mysterious meat someone hacked off a water buffalo – which is why we’re always on our way to the latrine.”
Eventually, Erik pulled up in front of a collection of long open-air shacks. “Now arriving,” he said, his voice shifting to the nasal tone of a conductor, “at the Keydaw airfield in Toungoo. First stop: pilot’s barracks.”
Neal stared at the structures. The nearest building was made of teakwood, with woven bamboo sides and a thatched roof. The windows were wide open – no glass, no screens.
“Cripes,” Neal said, “You mentioned bugs. What keeps the flies out?”
“Flies are the least of your worries,” Erik said. “The place is amok with creepy crawlers. But the open-air aspect helps keep it cooler at night.
“Jesus,” Tom said, “I’ve seen beach combers who live in better shacks than this. Remind me again why we signed up for this outfit.”
“To kill Japs,” Kevin said.
“To see the world,” Neal said.
“Now I remember,” Tom said. “I hated life in the army.”
Chapter 2
16 August 1941
Victoria Worthing gazed out the open window of her second-floor Rangoon apartment, took a sip of her tea, and thought about the three fast-talking Americans who turned up at the Grill last night.
They had barged into the place like they owned it. They were loud. They rudely pointed at other people. They walked like cowboys in a Western movie.
She was used to entertaining all manner of men, and from a diversity of nationalities. Mostly British colonists, of course, but also a fair share of Australians and New Zealanders. Now and again, she’d been with a wealthy Indian. And once she had spent the night with a Jewish man who had come from Iraq. He’d said he found Rangoon more tolerant than Baghdad. And why not? Rangoon was said to be the most international city in the Far East.
But these Americans were different somehow. So brash, so loud, so self-confident.
She stood at the window each morning and contemplated the day ahead – a day that started just before noon and would run until the early morning hours. This was her quiet time. A time to think about the past. A time to reflect on the present. A time to ponder the future.
Outside, a diversity of people flowed along the sunbaked streets and sidewalks. British men in energetic mid-day stride on their way to lunch. Anglo-Indian clerks from the Secretariat, stretching their legs before the afternoon grind. Burmese women strolling efficiently from the market with baskets of vegetables. Here and there a low-caste honey bucket carrier shuffling toward the river, his shoulders bowed under the weight of contents removed from the thunder boxes of sahibs and memsahibs.
Orderly and organized, she thought. Each aware of his place in the Empire. Well, she, too, understood her place. And she was desperate to improve it.
Victoria’s father was British and her mother was Indian. Her mother had worked for the family of Samuel Worthing as an “ayah” – a nanny – caring for Worthing’s three legitimate children, an especially important role since his wife often took long holidays in England. When Victoria came along, at first her mother took care of her along with the other three. She could remember playing with her “sisters” in the family’s garden in their home on the outskirts of Rangoon and sleeping each night with her mother on their small bed in the servant’s quarters.
One day, when she was four, her mother developed a fever. Within a few days, she was dead. There was a small funeral. Soon after her father came to her.
“You lucky pretty girl,” he’d said. “I’m going to send you to a beautiful school where you’ll make lots of new friends and learn from good teachers.”
“But I want to stay here, with you, Papa,” she’d said. “And with my sisters.”
“Oh, I’m sure the new girls you meet will be just like your sisters,” he’d said.
With that, he’d packed up her things and drove her himself to Bishop Drever’s School for Boys and Girls. She’d cried herself to sleep every night but gradually came to accept her fate. She later learned the school was a common destination for the offspring of British officials who had unsuitable liaisons with “dusky” women.
She’d come to realize that, as an Anglo-Indian, she had a very specific place on the ladder of Colonial society. In relation to the ruling British, she was on a lower rung, but not the lowest. She was, after all, half British. Pure Indians were certainly lower.
She was also higher than the native Burmese, who held an uncertain position on the ladder. On the one hand, it was their land and they were the majority. On the other hand, they were the subjects of colonial rule, and in need of British supervision and guidance.
In her case, though, she was an outsider to the Burmese – as were all Indians or those who were related to Indians. The Burmese looked down on Indians, who’d been brought over by the British as laborers and clerks. They were interlopers.
And then, of course, as a woman she dropped a rung or two on every ladder. Whatever their race, British, Burmese, or Indians, men were always at the head of the line.
But one of the priests at the Home showed her the way up and out, even if that was not his intention. His fleshly attentions led her to realize that her beauty and her body were something that men greatly desired. They were a commodity that could be used to provide for herself – and, with luck, climb the ladder of society.
She had also come to believe there was no shame in this, whatever the nuns had said. Soon after she left Bishop Drever’s, an older woman had explained the important role played by beautiful women.
“We’re shining ornaments that keep society moving,” the woman had said. “You can find it in the Jataka Tales. Ancient royalty kept courtesans to, how shall I put it, relieve the stresses and tensions of court life. This was known to all, even to the men’s wives, who lived rich and respected lives themselves. We’re known as the ‘jewels of the country.’”
Everyone in Burma knew the Jataka tales. They were staples of childhood bedtime stories. They were even discussed in the orphanage where Victoria grew up. The nuns there called them Buddhist fairy tales. Filthy fairy tales.
But Victoria had come to see that the Jataka Tales told the truth – as did their modern equivalent, the movies. She spent long hours in flickering cinemas most afternoons, soaking up images of slender women in sleek satin gowns and men in tailored black tuxedos. She poured through movie fan magazines. They were stacked high on her bedside table and select pages – including glamorous color advertisements – were posted on her walls.
The stories produced by Hollywood had much in common with the Jataka tales, she thought. One way or another, women made their way in the world by the degree to which they pleased and catered to men.
She’d been standing by the bar last night with two other waitresses, talking about the gown Kathryn Hepburn wore in a movie she’d seen that afternoon, when the three Americans came in. She watched closely as they moved through the club.
At the lead was a compact, muscular man with a moustache, who charged ahead at such an aggressive tilt that it seemed as if he was about to fall on his face, saved only by his swift forward motion. He was followed by a lean brown-haired man of medium height, whose eyes constantly roamed the room as he marched. Both were trailed by a tall blond man, very handsome, whose long legs made him seem to float as he moved.
Like the flare of a match in a dark room, she saw that these new arrivals might offer new possibilities for her life. Their brashness and assuredness suggested there were other ways of being, ways that existed outside the colonial order but were also potent and powerful. Might these men somehow offer an avenue out of her sorry existence where her Anglo-Indian heritage also marked her as an outsider? She existed, she knew, in a nether place, belonging neither to the ruling British community nor to the native Burmese majority. Those like her rarely had a clear path to the kind of settled life all the girls secretly dreamed about. But these newcomers acted as if they could walk through fire to get what they wanted. She had to get to know them.
The three men had settled in a booth in the back of the club. Victoria signaled with her eyes to the other waitresses that she would take first call on these customers. Then she’d walked slowly over to their booth, her hips a studied sashay.
“Where are you handsome young men from?” she’d asked.
“The States,” said the tall blonde one.
“We’re with the American Volunteer Group,” said the man with straight brown hair. “Heard of that?”
“No, I haven’t,” she said.
“Well,” he continued, “we’re pilots and we’ve come over to help the Chinese fight off Japanese bombers. We’re training here in Burma but will be going to China in a few months.”
Victoria was vaguely aware of the war brewing up north. She’d seen a few newsreels about the Japanese bombings in China. One scene of naked and broken bodies on staircase had made her shut her eyes. Why must they show this in the cinema, she’d thought. All the British officers she knew said the Chinese would never dare attack a British colony like Burma.
“My name is Neal, by the way,” the brown haired one continued. “Neal Gavril.”
“Victoria.”
“I’m Kevin,” said the mustached one. “Kevin Muldowny. American on the outside but Irish on the inside.”
“Which is nothing to be proud of,” said the blond. Kevin slugged him in the arm. The man didn’t react and only said: “I’m Tom, by the way. Tom Luster. I’m just plain American.”
“You’re the first Burmese women we’ve met,” Neal said.
“I’m not actually Burmese,” Victoria said. “My father was English and my mother was Indian. Quite a different thing here.”
Kevin reached over the punched Neal in the arm. “Yeah, dope, ‘quite a different thing.’” He shifted his gaze back to Victoria. “Forgive my buddy here. He sometimes gets too nosey. So what’s it like here in Rangoon?”
Victoria and the other girls called these silly questions “gap shap,” the Hindi term for idle talk. During quiet times in the afternoon before the evening rush, she and the other waitresses often sat in the back of the club, chairs pulled in a circle, mocking the way men always thought they were being so sly as they worked their way up to the inevitable pitch: “So what are you doing later?”
At this point in the conversation, her goal was to lead the discussion back around to them. Men liked best to talk about themselves.
“Oh, I like Rangoon just fine,” she said. “But tell me more about this ‘American group.’”
“Like my buddy said,” Kevin replied, “we’re pilots. We’re from the States. There’s about a hundred of us. Roosevelt did some deal with Chinese Generals, so it’s all on the up-and-up, us coming over here to do some fighting.”
“We’re on our way tomorrow to some old RAF base in place called Toungoo,” Tom added. “Going to go through the checklist on how to fly fighters.”
“So you’re actually with the Royal Air Force, then?” Victoria asked. She knew quite a few RAF men. Many of the pilots based at the Rangoon aerodrome were frequent customers at the Grill.
“Naw, we’re independent,” Kevin said. “Working under that Generalissimo up there – Chain Sky-Check or whatever his name is.”
“Yeah, see, technically we’re part of the Chinese Air Force. Only we get paid way better. Five hundred deep green American simoleons for each Jap plane we shoot down.”
“And we’ll be shooting down a lot of them,” Kevin said, stuttering out the sound “rata-tata-rata-tata” and panning his hands around as if he had a gun in his hand.
Victoria smiled. “If you’re volunteers,” Victoria said, “and you’re getting paid, it sounds like you’re kind of like pirates.”
The three men broke out in laughter. “Yeah, pirates,” Kevin said with a huge grin. “We’re pilot pirates, aren’t we boys? Shiver me timbers.”
“Flying the bounding blue,” Neal said.
“In search of Chinese gold,” Tom said.
They raised their glasses in salute. Kevin looked at Victoria and patted the wooden bench beside him, inviting her to sit.
She’d smiled and slid in next to him.
Yes, she thought, taking another sip of tea before breaking away from her apartment window and moving to ready herself for the evening ahead, the Americans would surely add a new element to the mix of people and opportunities in Rangoon. She wondered whether she would see them at the Grill again.
Chapter 3
18 August 1941
Thiha Kaung hurried along under the spreading tamarind trees, their leaves dark against the fading purple evening sky, making his way across the Rangoon University campus. He wanted to get to the meeting room early, to discuss with his compatriots the arrival of some American pilots in Rangoon, but he’d been delayed by his sister.
“We need to talk about father,” his sister had said as he started out the door. “I’m worried about him.”
“How so?” Thiha said.
“He’s not eating well. I think he’s feeling ill but won’t confess it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Maybe you can talk to him,” she said. “Maybe convince him to see a doctor. He only hears it from me. He needs to hear it from you.”
His sister always got her way with him. She was beautiful and dynamic and when she looked at him with her soft, pleading eyes, he had no choice but to give in. “Okay, I’ll talk to him,” he’d said.
Thiha’s father had listened politely but then said simply: “You and your sister worry too much. If I don’t eat much, it’s because I’m busy with my work.” His father was one of the few Burmese professors among the mostly English faculty at Rangoon University, and he was always concerned with making the right impression. Thiha at first begged with him to listen to reason but then hotly called him an “old fool” for working so hard for the British. Things spiraled from there.
Now, as he rushed to his meeting, Thiha chastised himself for giving in to his sister. It was always useless to argue with his father. He will never change, he thought. Why did I bother?
As he neared the Student Union building, he spotted the red and gold flag of the fighting peacock, dangling on its pole in the evening doldrums. It was symbol of their struggle against British oppression – and the sight took him back three years ago to when the depths of British injustice had been fully revealed.
A sophomore then, he’d joined a student-led march one day in December 1938 on impulse. At the time, Thiha hadn’t paid much attention to politics, and was even mildly sympathetic to the British, since his father was a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile. But he’d been curious to see what his friends were talking about.
They took buses from the student union into central Rangoon that day. They formed up and marched on the Secretariat building, the seat of British power.
At first the atmosphere had been of a parade. Students, striking oil workers, and even some farmers had walked along together, carrying colorful banners. At the lead was a young man named Aung Gyaw. He hoisted the peacock flag on a long pole.
As they neared the Secretariat, there was a commotion. Out of nowhere, Indian police officers and European sergeants moved in on horses, lashing out with clubs. One of the sergeants struck Aung Gyaw on the temple. He reeled forward. The policeman hit him again. The stick broke, snapping in two pieces.
One of the pieces hit Thiha in the shoulder, knocking off balance. When he looked up, Aung Gyaw was on the ground, blood flowing onto the street. Thiha moved forward to help. A girl handed him a handkerchief and he kneeled next to the young man and tried to staunch the bleeding. The side of his head was caved in.
As he gently dabbed at the wound, something hard struck his collarbone. Looking up, he saw an Indian policeman holding a club high over his head. “Get away from him,” he shouted. “Get down on the ground.”
The officer struck him again, harder, sending Thiha to the pavement. “Stay down, now,” he said.
At that moment – his cheek in the grit, his shoulder throbbing with pain, and his nostrils filled with the scent of Aung Gyaw’s blood – Thiha had sworn to join this movement and do all he could to drive the British from his country.
Today, Thiha was a leader in the Pukka Sahibs, as they called themselves. His energy and determination had won him the chairmanship of their branch at Rangoon University. Even though he’d graduated in June, he used the campus as a base of operations, seeking new recruits to their cause.
He bounded up the stairs at the Student Union. He was the first to arrive at the common room. He closed several windows and latched them shut. Although this August night was hot and humid, he didn’t want the uninvited to listen in. The topic for tonight’s meeting was the arrival of a group of Americans – pilots here to fight for the Chinese, according to the rumors.
Thiha had seen several of the Americans already. Although it was the largest city in Burma, Rangoon remained in many ways a small town and the arrival of a loud group of newcomers with funny accents and a habit of getting very drunk had drawn attention.
Thiha had also spotted a group of Americans flirting with a couple of local girls. Not Anglo-Indians, who everyone knew were immoral misfits, but native, sweet, shy Burmese girls in long wraparound skirts and sandals. He’d thought that moment of his sister, who could easily be prey for them. So when the group’s unofficial advisor, Colonel Suzuki of the Japanese secret service, told Thiha he had a special mission for him involving the Americans, he was happy.
Other students filtered into the meeting room. They greeted each other as brothers. Their name, Pukka Sahibs, meant “good gentleman” after all. It’s what the British Masters called themselves. They took keen amusement in the irony.
“Comrades,” Thiha said, speaking in Burmese, “let’s come to order.”
The group, now about a dozen, settled around Thiha, who stood at a lectern. Like Thiha, most wore longyis, the traditional Burmese long wrapped skirt worn by men, and open front collarless jackets. But a few wore Western clothes.
“I have word from our friends in the Asian Co-Prosperity sphere,” he continued. “They have given us a new task: to find out more about these Americans. I’m sure you have seen them already in our beloved city. What are their intentions? Are they here to support the British? How many of them are there?”
“I hear hundreds are coming,” said Khin Nyunt, who studied agronomy and always had dirt under his fingernails.
“I saw them unloading airplanes from a ship in the harbor,” said Ma Thida, a freshman whose face was red and splotchy with acne. “One fell in the water. It made a big splash.”
The group laughed.
“This is precisely the kind of thing we need to know about,” Thiha said. “Only exact numbers. One hundred, two hundred, how many soldiers? How many airplanes?”
“And then what?” Khin Nyunt asked.
“We will report it to our Imperial friends,” Thiha said. “And await orders.”
“Should we be so willing to spy, to do whatever they ask?” said U San Nu, the Union’s vice chairman, a law student with thick glasses. “It’s not that I don’t object to the British, but aren’t we just trading one master for another?”
There were murmurs of assent.
Thiha’s face flashed warm, but he controlled his pique. “My brother, I understand your concern. And believe me, I do not accept for a minute that our Japanese friends always have our best interests in mind. But they are, after all, Asians. They understand our point of view. They are not like the British, with their innate attitude of superiority.”
“But if we spy for them,” U San Nu said, “what will they ask of us next? Fighting in the streets? Sabotage? Have you heard about Mahatma Gandhi in India? I say we study his movement of non-violent action.”
Thiha frowned but recovered. “I am not at all in favor of violence,” he said. “But let us not forget the violence the British perpetrate against us, how the police have struck us down.” He looked around the group, staring each member in the eye. “Now, can we get back to discussing how to learn more about these new oppressors?”
Chapter 4
25 August 1941
When she spotted Neal, Kevin, and Tom sauntering across the main yard at the RAF airfield in Toungoo, Cathy Lovett was taking an inventory of pills in the medicine cabinet at the small base hospital. The whole place was little more than an open-air thatched hut, four rooms opening onto a long narrow veranda, and she chanced to look up and out the open window. She’d been flown up from Rangoon the night before on the group’s shiny twin-engine utility plane and had been ushered right in to the base’s small clinic, where she’d been assigned to the group as a nurse.
She’d heard at breakfast that Colonel Chennault would be lecturing to the pilots today and she imagined that the three men were heading over to hear him.
Her eyes focused on Tom, ambling along in that long-legged gait of his. So handsome. Her heart fluttered like one of the red-winged blackbirds that darted over the wheat fields back home in Kansas.
Then the old hawk of doubt struck. She’d been raised a strict Methodist, with the idea that a woman must never let her guard down and must always protect her virtue. On top of that, her mother had always said handsome men weren’t to be trusted.
“The sweeter the candy, the bigger the tummy ache,” she liked to say. Cathy figured out later that her mother’s views came from the repeated infidelity of her husband – Cathy’s father – who doted on Cathy and never let on that anything was wrong until one day he just left and never came back, leaving her mother and her older brother to run the farm. “I should have known better than to trust a man like that,” she once said. “He was too darn good looking.”
Now she had to ask herself: was Tom too handsome to be trusted? Or was her mother wrong about that idea? Well, maybe it would be her own experiment to find out. And anyway, she told herself, it wasn’t just that he was good-looking. He had other fine qualities, too.
She’d first seen him on the ship that carried them all to Burma. She was one of two nurses among a second group of pilots, ground crew, and other personnel hired to defend Chinese cities from Japan. There were about a hundred of them, travelling secretly aboard a small Dutch ocean liner. The passenger manifest recorded them as musicians, artists, salesmen, even acrobats – anything but pilots. They said it was to throw off Japanese spies. She herself had been listed as a teacher. “I don’t quite know why being listed as a nurse would be so threatening,” she’d told herself at the time. But later, when two American warships escorted their liner through South Pacific waters frequented by the Japanese, she knew the situation was serious.
Cathy always told herself that she’d become a nurse because she enjoyed helping people. Which was true. But getting into nursing school was also a way off the farm. She’d joined the Army, she told herself, out of genuine patriotism. She loved America. But frankly, the prospect of a secure job in hard times was an added incentive to enlistment. She came to Rangoon because it sounded so exotic. She’d remembered a talk given once by some missionaries at her old church. So it was easy to sign up when Doc Shultz asked if she wanted to accompany him and a bunch of hot young pilots to China.
On the liner to Rangoon, Cathy had been the center of masculine attention. She and Jo, the other nurse for the group, had been the only women on board, other than some missionary wives, and they’d been kept so busy fending off advances that she failed at first to notice the tall blonde from California.
But gradually she realized he was one of the few who did not make passes at her. Unlike so many men, who made goo-goo eyes at her, he just smiled wryly when they ran into each other, holding himself aloof. Over time, that made him seem even more attractive.
She soon found out he was also funny. Shortly after leaving Hawaii, while everyone was playing shuffleboard, Tom had made a droll comment that caused her to laugh out loud and spill iced tea on herself. Embarrassed, she’d run to her cabin. But he’d been the only one in the group who didn’t laugh at her. She appreciated that.
And he was independent-minded. Another time, at a port of call in the South Pacific, everyone was standing around the saltwater swimming pool that had become one of the main recreations of shipboard life. Without warning, Tom said, “You know, I think it’s pretty stupid to be swimming in a pool on the boat in the middle of the ocean instead of just swimming in the ocean.” And then he just dove over the side. Everyone laughed and jumped in after him, including her.
And then there was the day they crossed the equator, when all the “pollywogs” who hadn’t been in the southern hemisphere before had their hair washed in dry cement and soot by the “shellbacks.” Tom had stepped forward to say that he’d take a double dose so the ladies could stay clean. He’d looked so comical, his blond hair matted and streaked with grime. But he flashed this cock-eyed smile at her, which made him seem all the more gallant.
Nothing much else really happened between them on the journey over. They’d played a few shuffleboard games together. And once he joined her by the rail for a few minutes of idle conversation. But Cathy was too shy to make advances on her own.
Now, watching Tom walk across the compound, Cathy thought that surely here, a million miles away from civilization, there would be more opportunities to meet and chat and find out whether her throbbing heart was telling her something real or just spinning a fantasy.