The Soul Of The Far East

They just seemed to be watching over the other men. She refocused again, bringing them to a height of fifty meters virtual above the deck of the ship. "They look like guards to me. They're carrying rifles with bayonets fixed. They never take their eyes off the men exercising on deck, so they can't be lookouts. Take a look at the prisoners, if that's what they are. They look Chinese to you?" She didn't insult the men by making the obvious joke about them thinking all Asians looked alike. Brennan and Taylor had both spent years working in the Far East before the war, and in the time that she'd worked with them, they'd never once given her reason to think of them as anything other than the most broad-minded of souls. It made her sort of ashamed of her own assumptions. She'd wrongly figured that everyone she met here would be dumb-arse bigots. It turned out her biggest problem with Brennan was her not sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the puppet emperors of French Indochina. It had been his specialty as a visiting fellow at Poitiers University before the war ...»