"Any intercepts?" Fujita asked the runner. The Russians were tough bastards-at least for Westerners-but they had horrible radio security. Half the time, they'd send in plain language what they should have encoded.

But this time the lance corporal shook his head. "Not that I heard about, anyhow," he answered.

"All right," Fujita said. "Any gossip about what we'll do on account of this news?"

"Not that I heard about, Sergeant-san," the runner repeated.

"Too bad." Fujita made himself shrug. "One way or another, we'll find out sooner or later."

Whatever Japan did, the sergeant suspected it wouldn't happen at once. Fall and winter weren't the best time for campaigning up here. As if to prove as much, the wind swung around to blow out of the west the next morning, and carried choking clouds of yellow-brown dust from the Mongolian heartland with it.

It blew hard for three days. Dust from Mongolia blew all the way down to Peking and beyond. So close to the source, the storm was appalling. When the sky finally cleared, when the sun no longer seemed to shine through billowing smoke, the whole landscape had changed. Dunes had shifted. Some had grown, others disappeared. Dust buried the scraggly patches of steppe grass.

Captain Hasegawa, the company commander, shook his head after coming by to survey the outpost. "Can you imagine living your whole life in country like this? Turn your back on it, and half of it blows away."

The mere thought was enough to make Sergeant Fujita shudder. "Sir, as far as I'm concerned, the Mongols are welcome to it." Then he corrected himself before Hasegawa could: "Well, they're welcome to all of it that doesn't belong to Manchukuo, anyhow."

"Hai. To that much and not a centimeter more," Captain Hasegawa said. Fujita let out a small sigh of relief-he wasn't in trouble, anyhow. Hasegawa looked out over the altered countryside. "At least the Russians will have as much trouble seeing what we're up to as we do with them."

"Yes, sir." Fujita didn't care to argue, even if he wasn't one hundred percent convinced. Oh, the captain was right-the Russians wouldn't be able to operate as usual during dust storms, either. But what about the Mongols themselves? The Japanese in this miserable place were probably lucky the natives hadn't sneaked through the dust and slit all their throats.

"You heard the Russians are really going after the Germans?" Captain Hasegawa asked.

"Oh, yes, sir," Fujita said. "The runner got here the day before the storm started."

"All right," the company commander said. "Well, you can bet we'll take advantage of that. We'd have to be idiots not to."

And so? Officers are idiots all the time. Fujita didn't say that. Sergeants might take it for granted, but somebody with more gold and less red on his collar tabs wouldn't. Fujita rubbed at his eyes, which still felt gritty. His teeth crunched every time he closed his mouth. He found something safe: "Whatever they want us to do, we'll do it. You know you can count on that, sir."

Of course we'll do it. If we disobey the orders, they'll kill us. And our families back in the Home Islands will be disgraced. Sergeant Fujita knew exactly how things worked. For common soldiers and noncommissioned officers, the army was a cruel, harsh, brutal place. Officers didn't have it so bad-but they necessarily looked the other way while noncoms kept privates in line.

Many Japanese soldiers began coming up toward the front a few days later. Sergeant Fujita would rather have seen them move up during the dust storm, too. Pointing in the direction of the high ground on the other side of the Halha, he complained, "The Russians can watch everything we do."

"For now," Captain Hasegawa said. "Once we get moving, we'll take their observation posts away from them, neh?"

"Yes, sir." Fujita said the only thing he could. He wished he were as confident as the company commander-and, presumably, the high command. But the Japanese and the Russians had been banging heads on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia for a while now. The Red Army had more airplanes, more armor, and more artillery-and had had the better of the skirmishes. Why should anything change now?

As if plucking that thought out of his head, Captain Hasegawa said, "The round-eyed barbarians will worry more about the Germans than they do about us. This is our neighborhood. They look towards Europe. They can't help it."

Since Fujita had had pretty much the same notion-and since Hasegawa was his superior-he couldn't very well disagree. All he could do was hope it was true…and hope his own side brought in enough force to win once the serious fighting started.

Artillery did come forward along with the foot soldiers. So did sleek, modern monoplane fighters. Sitting on the ground, they looked as if they ought to sweep the Soviet biplanes from the sky.

Armored cars and a few tanks also rattled up to the front line. Fujita was glad to see them, and wished he were seeing more of them. This might be the back of beyond for the Russians, but they had plenty of tanks here.

"Don't worry about it," Captain Hasegawa told him when he cautiously expressed misgivings. "This isn't the only place where we'll be facing off against the Russians. We'll put our tanks where we need them most."

And where would that be? Fujita wondered. But a moment's thought gave him the answer. If Japanese armor would strike anywhere, it would strike at the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Back before the Russo-Japanese War, the Tsar had been able to ship troops down through Manchuria. The Soviets couldn't do that any more; Japan controlled the railroads in what was now Manchukuo. But, just on the other side of the border, the railroad was Stalin's key to defending Vladivostok and the rest of eastern Siberia. Break the line, take it away from the Reds, and the port and the whole vast country would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe persimmon.

The Russians weren't blind. They could see that, too. They would fight as hard as they could to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But the Russian heartland lay thousands of kilometers off to the west. Japan lay right across the sea that bore her name. The Amur separated Manchukuo from the USSR, the Yalu divided Chosen-Korea, to old people-from Stalin's ramshackle Asiatic empire. Logistics, then, were all on Japan's side.

So the big fight would be there, along the border between Japan's mainland possessions and Soviet Siberia. This Mongol business was only a sideshow. It would never be anything but a sideshow-that was how it looked to Sergeant Fujita, anyhow.

He sighed. "We're stuck here, neh?"

"Yes, I think we are." Captain Hasegawa sent him a shrewd look. "Why? Would you rather be on the Amur?"

"Yes, sir, I would." Fujita didn't beat around the bush. "What happens there really means something. This…This is nothing but a bunch of crap. Please excuse me for saying so, sir, but it's true."

He waited for a reprimand, or maybe even a slap in the face. You weren't supposed to complain about your assignment. Oh, you could grouse with your buddies. But to a superior you were supposed to pretend everything was fine. Well, things weren't fine. And, dammit, the company commander asked. All Fujita did was tell the truth. Of course, sometimes that was the most dangerous thing you could do, even more dangerous than charging a Russian machine-gun nest.

"We do need men here. We can't let the Russians and Mongols steal what's ours," Hasegawa said. "But I admit, I wish I weren't one of them, too." He shrugged. "Somebody has to do it, though, and it looks like we're the ones."

Sergeant Fujita sighed one more time: a martyr's sigh. "Yes, sir." JOAQUIN DELGADILLO WATCHED ITALIAN TANKS clank toward the front. The crews looked impressive in their black coveralls. Delgadillo didn't let the stylish uniforms fool him. The Italians looked much less impressive in full retreat, and he'd seen that move more often than he cared to remember.