“We’re fairly isolated here,” Captain Lu explained as he, Sam and Max made their way through the small village market.  “However, we knew the Japanese were going to invade so several members of the Naval High Command took certain precautions.”
        “Must not’ve worked, since you got buggered anyway,” Max muttered.
        “Max,” Sam warned.  “Forgive me; my husband is known for being outspoken.”
        “I share his opinion, Captain Vreeland.  There are several bunkers here that hold a dragon’s hoard of weapons and all the parts we could gather from the Germans before they left.  We should be able to keep you supplied.”  He smiled mirthlessly.
        “I look forward to putting those weapons to good use,” Sam replied, equally seriously.  “You said that you’re fairly isolated, but what’s stopping the Japanese from coming anyway?”
        The canine gave a short and unpleasant-sounding laugh.  “We’ve spread the word around the province that the village is a refugee camp for lepers.”
        “Ah.” 
        A small boy stepped out of an alleyway and gazed at the newcomers.  The young mouse’s fur was russet, but his headfur had been shaved away, possibly to prevent the spread of lice, and the effect was to make his ears look almost ridiculously oversized.  He wore a yellow undershirt that hung on him to his ankles, with a scrawl of childishly-rendered Chinese characters on it.
        Sam translated it with difficulty:  “Hully gee.”
        Captain Lu followed her gaze and said, “We actually are hiding some refugees that fled south after Shanghai was attacked.  I’m afraid no one knows that little fellow’s name.” 
        Max looked at the child for a moment, then walked over to him while rolling up his shirt sleeves.  He smiled at the mouse, made several passes through the air and with a flourish plucked a pack of chewing gum from behind one of the child’s ears. 
        He gave it the boy, who giggled and clapped.  “There you go, Kid,” Max said.
        “Part of our contract is to train an all-Chinese crew,” Sam said.  “We have over a dozen sailors aboard now.  Care to ask your men if any of them are interested?”
        Captain Lu smiled.  “I can do better.  We have a small contingent of sailors already here, just waiting for you to show them what needs to be done.  But I’ll ask my men as well.  Are you boarding or just sinking your targets?”
        “Depends on the situation, but we’ve looted two ships – “
        “The first was practice,” Max interjected.  They were walking past a shop and the aroma of roasting seasoned pork made his nostrils flare. 
        The cooking meat was cut into thick, broad strips and skewered, dripping with rendered fat while an aroma of garlic and ginger floated around them.  Max exclaimed, “Look, Sam!  Sizzling weasel on a stick!  Can we get some?”
        “Um,” the canine said, “that’s not weasel – “
        “Just Max, joking around.  Understanding his sense of humor will take time, Captain,” Sam said as the fox started haggling with the shop’s owner.  He soon walked back to them, two skewers of meat in one paw while he munched contentedly on a third.  “You’ll get fat, Max.”
        “Hah.  Just more of me to love, Sam.”
        “Feh.”

        That night the crew voted to have a party.  They had sunk several ships on the way up and they were now among friends.
        A party sounded like a great idea.
        U-666’s record player had been brought ashore for the occasion, and a small storehouse had been cleared.  Lee, the boat’s chef, superintended the cooking while furs ate or danced.
        Lefty sat a short distance apart from the rest, nursing a small bottle of cold sake and a dish of roast pork and noodles.  He looked up as a female voice asked, “May I sit beside you?”
        The woman was feline, with white fur, black headfur that reached in a single ebon wave to her waist, and startling green eyes.  She was dressed in a red silk evening gown that, judging from the creases at certain points, had been in her luggage when she left Shanghai and had been kept there for far too long.
        The charcoal-furred feline smiled.
        “Of course you may,” he said, moving slightly aside for her and gazing at her appreciatively as she sat.  “My name’s Manuel, but friends call me Lefty.”  His smile encouraged her to think of him as a friend.
        “I am Jiang Ching,” the woman replied with an answering smile, “from Shanghai.  I was a singer at the Europa before last year.”  That surprised Lefty; the Europa was the best night spot in the European zone of the city.  “Now, I am a refugee.”
        “I’m sorry about that,” he said.  “Part of what we’re doing here is trying to help China.”
        She nodded toward his left arm.  “Did you get hurt that way?”
        His ears dipped slightly.  “I’d be lying if I said so.  It was a few years ago, but I put my paw where I shouldn’t have.  The machine chewed my claws for me.”
        Her look was genuinely sympathetic and she snuggled close to him.  “That is too bad.”
        His nostrils twitched, followed by his whiskers and his tail. 
        She smelled very nice.
        That is, until she sighed, the breath flowing almost like a liquid across his left ear and down across his nose.
        It was everything he could do to keep from coughing.  The breath was redolent of hot peppers and way too much garlic, and he fancied he could feel the fur in his ear scorching to a crisp.
        She was beautiful, yes.
        But the lady had a breath on her like a dragon.
        He had stiffened a bit in shock at the impact of her breath, and she misinterpreted the action, snuggling closer and brushing a kiss against his cheek.
        It’d been a long time.
        He was certain he could overlook her breath in favor of other attributes.
        As Lefty and Ching stood and slipped into the shadows Max, dressed in a rumpled brown suit, waved for quiet and gently removed the phonograph needle from the record, then took the record off the turntable.  “Ladies and gentlemen, this next dance is ours.”  He flipped another record onto the player and placed the needle gently on the disc.
        A slow beat started that turned into a tango, and a soft cheer was raised as Sam appeared on the dance floor, dressed in a green silk gown that fitted her tightly in all the right places and was slit almost to her waist.  In time to the music she moved across the makeshift dance floor to Max, who she suddenly grabbed by the cheekruffs, bent low, and kissed him between his eyes.
        The two then moved into a standard tango step and ended up in the center of the room, where Sam spun the fox and, holding his head again, stared down into his eyes.
        Max brought his paws up between hers and out, breaking her hold on him and following it up with a vicious backpawed slap across her face.  She spun to face away from him and he kicked her in the buttock, sending her flying to land facedown on the floor.
        As she started to rise his foot caught her behind the knee and she landed sitting upright; he grabbed her headfur and dragged her out to the middle of the floor again, then hauled her to her feet.  He grabbed her by the waist, spun her, and flipped her almost casually over his head.
        All of this in time to the driving tango beat.
        Max brushed his headfur back as Sam got to her feet and danced up behind him.  She grasped his shoulders, spun him around to face her, and in time to the beat slapped him back and forth across the muzzle with her open paws.
        There were, of course, subtle clues that this wasn’t the two of them trying to kill each other.
        A flexed muscle here, an anticipatory twitch there.
        But it looked real enough.
        She shoved him back and off his feet with an almost contemptuous motion, and as he landed flat on his back she advanced on him, hooking his right shoulder with her foot and flipping him over, then doing it again and again until he ended facing up at the ceiling again.  She then put the toe of her shoe under his neck and pulled him into a sitting position.
        He raised a paw and she grabbed it, hauling him to his feet and planting her paws around his neck.  Max put his paws on her waist and they danced back to the center, then Sam pulled her husband’s face into her cleavage.
        His paws covered hers, taking a firm grip on her wrists as her own grip shifted to his ears.
        She started to spin, dragging him with her until his feet left the ground, and then she let him go.  He landed a few feet away, curled into a ball to absorb the impact before springing to his feet and running back to her just in time to take her in his arms and share a kiss as the music ended.
        There was dead silence as the fox and the badger stood panting, then a round of applause, cheers and catcalls made them both break into wide grins.  Sam curtsied and Max bowed and while they accepted the crowd’s applause Sam looked around.
        No sign of Lefty, or that white-furred feline.
        Good for him.
        Bob had his paws over the orphaned mouse child’s eyes.  There was a different scrawl of Chinese characters across his grubby shirt.
        ‘Wow.’

        Nearly half an hour later Sam and Max were sharing a table while they relaxed.  “That was a neat trick, tossing me over your head like that,” the badger femme observed.
        “Yeah, wasn’t it?  I was trying to surprise you.”
        “You break me up, little buddy,” she said, toasting him with an open bottle of Tsingtao beer.  “You’re lucky I don’t toast this over your pointy head, though – you should warn a girl.”
        “Next time, sugar.”  He slurped his tea noisily and asked, “Have you seen Lefty?”
        “I think he went off with some woman.”
        “Good.  He was looking a little down in the mouth.  Think he’s showing her his bag of tricks?”
        “Ha ha.  Doubt it.  You know, I haven’t seen Hans or Fritz either.  All night.”
        “You think they’re – “  Max waggled a paw from side to side.
        Sam thought a moment.  “No, I don’t think so, but you can’t be sure about Germans.  Remember that trip we took back in ’34?”
        The fox grinned.  “Yes, Berlin.  The Club Schwarze Katz.”
        “Hot jazz – “
        “Hot women.” 
        He ducked her slap.
       
        They had been working on this for almost three weeks, hiding most of the ingredients in the engine room or the aft torpedo compartment and scavenging parts from the ships that had been looted.
        Now it was ready.
        “We have it all, Hans?”
        “Ja, Fritz.”
        “So.  Dann wir beginnen.”  The brown streaks in the wolf’s fur looked black as he struck a match and knelt, gently touching it to a small gas mantle.  A small blue flame popped into existence at the approach of the match, and Fritz gradually raised the gas pressure until the fire was going with a soft roar.
        Fritz backed out from under the small tank and inspected it critically as the mixture within slowly started to boil.  Hans checked the water level in the condenser.
        After several minutes, the first drops started to appear from the spigot, then more drops and finally a steady flow.  First letting maybe an ounce spill out on the ground, Hans started to collect the flow in a glass jar.  The container was quickly filled as the system began working to its full potential.  “So?” Fritz asked.
        Hans took an experimental sniff, then sipped.
        His eyes bulged and he started coughing as Fritz laughed.  “Gut, ja?”
        The gray wolf eventually stopped coughing, wiped the tears from his eyes and panted, “Ja.  Sehr gut.”  He laughed.  “Ein sehr ausgezeichnetes Haber-Bosch Prozess.”

        The party was starting to wind down and Sam looked up as Hans set a small glass down in front of her.  “What’s this?” she asked.
        Fritz set down an identical glass for Max.  “We have been working on an essential item, Kapitan,” he explained.  “Please, try it.”
        The liquid in the glass was a deep blue, and smelled strongly of orange.  Sam sniffed at it and looked up at the two wolves.  “You’ve started up a still?”
        “Yes,” Hans replied.  “We started with some materials from our first port, with equipment – “
        “Nothing off my boat.”
        “Surely not.  The mash has been cooking for several weeks, and we flavored it with a bottle or two of Curacao from that yacht.”
        “That so?” Max asked.  He picked up the glass, sniffed and drank.  His eye went wide and he breathed deeply for a few seconds.
        “WOW!  That’s great stuff!” he exclaimed.  “Try it, Sam.”
        Sam drank her portion, and she coughed.  “Yeah, that’s pretty potent,” she said.  “We might use it as a solvent, eh Max?”
        Her husband paled slightly under his fur.  “Excuse me, honeyfur, I’ll see you back aboard the boat,” and he got up and walked out.       


March 12:

        “Ach . . . mein Kopf . . . “  The wolf whined as he held his paws over his ears in a futile attempt to block out the sound of the diesels.  He winced again, and accepted a mug of hot coffee from Lefty with a grateful nod.
        The feline had returned the morning after the party in a fine humor and smelling strongly of feline musk.
        For some reason, he also smelled faintly of garlic.
        The submarine had slipped its moorings that night, running on the surface before reaching its new hunting grounds due east of Shanghai and the Yangtze estuary. 
        Hunting there promised good results.
        “I told you last night you should dilute that stuff a bit, or at least drink it with something, like Orca-Cola,” Lefty said after sipping from his own mug.
        Fritz nodded gingerly, eyes still closed as he tried to get his alcohol-poisoned brain back into some semblance of order.  “You know,” he finally managed to say, “I’ve been wondering.”
        “About what?”
        “That yacht we pirated back in February.”
        “Yes?”
        “What does Max have against the owner?  He seemed to take the yacht’s destruction very seriously.”
        The charcoal-gray feline grinned and tapped at an oil gauge before replying, “Well, I wasn’t there, but I heard all about it a lot later.  About five years or so back, Sam and Max were in Singapore – they weren’t married then – lining up some business contacts for the Naval Syndicate with a few of the big firms down there.  One of the companies they looked into was Morpion’s.”  He sipped at his coffee.
        “Hmm.  They had just finished signing a contract with Louie for some industrial solvents – really strong stuff – when Max figured out that what they were paying for was not what they were actually getting.  It was cut.”
        “Cut?”
        “Diluted four to one with water.”  Lefty smiled thinly.  “It would be about as strong as what’s come out of your still,” and he chuckled softly as Fritz whined in pain again.
        “Sam and Max confront Louie, who tells them that Rain Island signed the contract and there’s nothing they can do about it.  Max gets angry and starts doing what Max does – “
        “Smashing things?”
        “Pretty much.  Louie gets mad and starts calling Max nasty names, then all of a sudden says, ‘If you want your precious sludge, take it!’  And he throws a smaller container of the solvent – the uncut stuff – right at Max.”
        Fritz winced again, this time in sympathy.
        “He managed to keep it out of his eyes, so Sam tells me, but it started to make his clothes smoke.  He got out of them, but complained that he was on fire and ran out naked – straight into a monsoon downpour.”
        “So he washed it off.”
        “Yeah, along with about a third of his fur,” Lefty said and smiled at the look of horror on Fritz’s face.  “Depilated him from his chin to his thighs, and took about six weeks to grow back.
        “Ever since, that fox’s been waiting to get his revenge on M. Morpion.”
        “Beautiful revenge, too,” Fritz remarked.  “Max is a bit of a buffoon.”
        “Yeah.”
        “So what does Sam see in him?”
        Lefty set his coffee mug down on one engine’s exhaust manifold to keep its contents warm.  “With Max, sometimes you have to look under the surface.”  Using his good right paw and his three-fingered steel prosthetic left, he pantomimed a volume of empty space roughly twelve inches long and two inches wide.
        Fritz’s eyes bulged in disbelief.
        Lefty shrugged and picked up his mug.  “That’s the long and the short of it.  I’m sure she married him for other reasons, though.”

        As the sun was rising the sub encountered a small freighter that surrendered almost as the first warning shot splashed across her bow.  The sub drew up alongside and Max led the boarding party in storming the ship’s bridge and radio room. 
        Sam placed a paw on Lt. Chang’s arm before he could join his crew.  “Yes, Captain?” the canine asked.
        “Lieutenant, if there’s a cargo aboard that warrants it, how would you like to lead a prize crew and take that ship up to Macao?  I’m sure your government can use whatever they may have aboard, and they can surely use the money selling it would bring.”
        The Husky grinned widely and came to attention.  “Thank you, Ma’am.”
        The badger returned the salute just as formally before matching his grin.  “Fair winds and a following sea, Lieutenant.”
        The freighter’s Japanese crew was loaded onto lifeboats after it was determined that its cargo of food and sake would fetch a good price, and as they rowed away under the watchful eyes of the U-666 the Chinese sailors prepared to get the ship underway.


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