Days of Infamy

X

JIRO TAKAHASHI WANTED to spend as much time out on the ocean as he could. When he was on the Pacific, he wasn’t in that miserable tent in the botanical garden. When he was out there, he didn’t quarrel so much with his sons, either. They talked about things that had to do with the Oshima Maru, not so much about politics and what it meant to be a Japanese or an American. That was all to the good, because he didn’t see eye to eye with Hiroshi and Kenzo.

And he found he liked sailing the sampan. He’d put to sea with her with the diesel for so long, he’d come to take it for granted. You pointed her bow in the direction you wanted to go, started the engine, and away you went. It took about as much skill as drawing a straight line with a pencil. (Knowing where you wanted to go was a different story. That took skill.)

When you sailed, though, every move you made depended on something outside the sampan. If the breeze shifted and you wanted to keep going in the same direction, you had to shift the sails to account for the change. If the wind died, you couldn’t go anywhere. If you were running against it, you had to go like a drunken crab, zigzagging now one way, now the other, traveling ever so much farther-and slower-than you would in a straight line.

His sons had got the hang of handling the sails as fast as he could have wanted. He remained better at it than they did, though. He knew it, and so did they. After one long tack closer to the wind than the beamy sampan had any business getting, Kenzo said, “That was very pretty, Father.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Jiro found himself smiling. He called back to Hiroshi at the rudder: “We’re going to come about. Are you ready?”

His older son nodded. “Hai, Father.”

“All right then-now!” Jiro swung the sails from one side of the mast to the other. He and his sons ducked as the boom slid by, then quickly straightened again. Hiroshi shifted the rudder to help guide the Oshima Maru onto her new course. The sails filled with wind. They were off on the other tack. Jiro’s smile got broader.

“You couldn’t have done that better if you tried for a week,” Kenzo said admiringly. Jiro bowed slightly at the praise. It warmed and embarrassed him at the same time. He knew he’d done well, too. But a proper Japanese would have said something more on the order of, Not bad. Kenzo’s extravagant compliment was much more American.

One bad thing about even the most perfect tack: it brought the sampan closer to Kewalo Basin. However crabwise she traveled, the Oshima Maru neared land each passing minute. Jiro didn’t want to come ashore. But there wasn’t much point to fishing if you didn’t bring the catch home.

He cut another strip of dark pink meat from the fat belly of an ahi. He and his sons ate better on the Pacific than they did on land-one more reason to want to stay at sea. The tuna’s flesh was almost as rich as beef.

Kenzo also cut himself some ahi. As he chewed, he said, “We’ll have Doi paid off before too long.”

“Well, yes.” Jiro nodded. “The way things are now, though, it doesn’t matter that much. So we get a little more money. So what? What can we buy with money these days?”

“Not much.” But Kenzo couldn’t help adding, “That’s because we’re cut off from the mainland-the mainland of the United States. That’s where we got everything we needed, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.”

“Before long, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will make up for the things we can’t get from the USA,” Jiro said stubbornly.

His younger son rolled his eyes. “Don’t hold your breath.”

Even on the Pacific, politics reared its ugly head. “We’ll see,” was all Jiro said; he didn’t feel like fighting. For a wonder, Kenzo took it no further, either. But the silence as they glided into the basin had the charged quality of the air just before a thunderstorm.

When they tied up at one of the quays, work kept them too busy to quarrel. The Japanese soldiers in charge of taking the fish weighed the catch and paid the Takahashis. As usual, the sergeant in charge of the detail asked, “Personal use?” when the fisherman took fish off the Oshima Maru.

“Hai,” Jiro said. “And I have some for the honorable Japanese consul, too.”

The sergeant bowed to him. “Yes, you’ve done that before-I remember. It shows a true Japanese spirit and feeling.” Delighted, Jiro bowed back. Whatever his sons were thinking, none of it showed on their faces. The sergeant waved them all away from the sampan harbor.

Their first stop, as usual these days, was Eizo Doi’s shop. As they were going in, a tall, suntanned haole came out. He saw the fish they were carrying and started to laugh. He said something in English. Kenzo nodded and answered in the same language. They went back and forth for a little while. Then the white man walked off with a smile and a wave. “What was that all about?” Jiro asked.

“He said he’s paying Doi off for putting a sail on his surfboard, of all the crazy things,” Kenzo answered.

“That is peculiar,” Jiro agreed. “But he could go out a lot farther with the sail than without it. If he doesn’t have a boat, I suppose it would be the next best thing.”

Kenzo nodded. “That’s what he said.”

Jiro talked about it with the handyman after they gave him his fish. “Yeah, I thought the haole was a baka yaro,” Eizo Doi said. “Who besides a prime jerk would come up with something that weird? But he says it works pretty well, and he gave me some good mackerel. These days, you don’t complain about any food you get.”

“Hai. Honto,” Jiro said, and then, “You’re getting so much fish from so many people, you could do some dealing on your own.”

“It’s against occupation regulations,” Doi said. For a moment, Jiro thought that meant he wasn’t doing it. Then the fisherman realized Doi hadn’t said any such thing. If he was dealing on the side, keeping quiet about it was a good idea.

After they left the handyman’s, Jiro and his sons went their separate ways. They headed back to the tent while he went on up Nuuanu Avenue to the consulate. Hiroshi and Kenzo wanted nothing to do with that. Jiro hadn’t tried to persuade them to join him, even if that might have looked good to the occupying authorities. He knew he would have got nowhere.

By now, the sentries outside the compound recognized him. They nudged one another as he came up the street. “Hey, it’s the fisherman,” one of them said. “What have you got today, fisherman-sama?” He and his pals laughed. Jiro smiled, too. Lord Fisherman sounded ridiculous. With Oahu so hungry these days, though, the fancy title was less absurd than it might have been.

“See for yourselves.” Jiro held up a good-sized fish with a long, high dorsal fin and a body blue and green above and golden below. The soldiers exclaimed-its like hardly ever got up into Japanese waters. “They call this a mahimahi here,” Jiro said. “It’s very good eating, as good as any tuna.”

“If it tastes as good as it looks, it’ll be wonderful,” said the sentry who’d called him Lord Fisherman. “But you can’t tell by looks. The fugu ’s the ugliest fish in the world, near enough, but it’s the best eating-if you live through it, anyway.”

Jiro nodded. “That’s the truth.” The fugu was a puffer fish that blew itself up into a huge, spiny ball to keep other fish from eating it. Its flesh was uniquely delicious-and deadly dangerous, for the puffer also produced a paralyzing poison. Skilled chefs knew how to cut away the dangerous entrails and leave only the safer meat behind. Dozens of Japanese fishermen killed themselves every year trying to prove they knew how to do the same thing.

“Well, I’m sure the consul will be glad to see you. Go on in,” the sentry said.

“Thanks,” Jiro said, and he did.

Secretaries and clerks exclaimed at the mahimahi. Jiro wondered how much fish Nagao Kita shared with them. That was something he couldn’t ask. It was the consul’s business, not his. He didn’t get to see Kita, either. “So sorry, Takahashi-san,” a clerk told him. “He’s in consultation with Army officers right now.”

“He’s come out before,” Jiro said.

“Not this time, I’m afraid. They’re… very serious, these Army men,” the clerk said. Jiro got the feeling he didn’t care for the Japanese officers at all. The fellow continued, “Morimura-san will take charge of the fish, though.”

“Ah.” Jiro brightened. “That will do.”

He liked the chancellor at the consulate. Tadashi Morimura was young to hold such a responsible post-he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He had a long face, handsome in a slightly horsey way, and had lost the first joint of his left index finger in some accident. “Thank you very much, Takahashi-san,” he said. “That is a very thoughtful gift for the honorable consul. I know he will be glad to have it.” He didn’t say anything about whether Kita would share, either.

“I am glad to be able to help. I know times are hard,” Jiro said.

“They will get better.” Morimura rose from behind his desk. He was of slightly above medium height, which made him several inches taller than Jiro, and wore a sharp Western-style suit. “I am going to put the-mahimahi, did you say? — in the icebox for now, to keep it fresh for Kita-san. Please don’t go-I’d like to talk for a little while.”

“Of course,” Jiro said. “It is a privilege to talk to such an important man.”

“You give me too much credit,” Morimura said with becoming modesty. “Please wait. I’ll be right back.” He was almost as good as his word. Maybe he has to make room in the icebox, Jiro thought as he sat in front of the desk. It’s a big fish. When Morimura came back, he offered Jiro a cigarette from a gold case.

“Thank you, Morimura-san.” Jiro bowed in his seat. He hadn’t tasted tobacco in a couple of weeks. He savored the first drag. “That’s very good.”

“Glad you like it. It’s the least I can do.” The younger man lit a cigarette, too. After blowing out a long plume of smoke, he asked, “Where did you catch such an interesting fish?”

“It was southwest of here, sir,” Jiro answered. “We sailed for about half a day-we had a nice strong breeze to take us along.”

“How many other sampans did you see while you were on the fishing grounds?”

“All told? Let me think.” Jiro puffed on the cigarette, smoking as slowly as he could to stretch out the pleasure. It did help him concentrate. “There were… five or six. Those were just the ones I could see, you understand. Bound to be plenty more out there.”

“Yes, I understand,” the consular official said. “Were they all sailing boats? Did you see any that had motors?”

“No, sir. Not one with a motor.” Jiro didn’t need to think about that. “Where would a boat with a motor get fuel?”

“Well, you never can tell,” Morimura replied-and what was that supposed to mean? “But I thank you very much for telling me what you saw… and for the mahimahi, too, of course. Kita-san will also be very grateful for the fish. I’ll be sure to tell him you were the one who brought it.”

He let Jiro finish the cigarette, then eased him out the door. Jiro scratched his head. Unless he was crazy, Morimura cared more about the sampans that he’d seen than about the lovely fish. Jiro wondered just what exactly the chancellor at the consulate did to earn his pay.

KAPIOLANI PARK WAS a big place. Before the Japs turned it into a POW camp, it had had plenty of trees-mostly pines. A lot of them had already come down to give the Americans firewood. Now, as a pair of prisoners banged away with axes, another pine swayed as if in a strong breeze.

Fletch Armitage stood in a good-sized crowd watching the amateur lumberjacks. It gave him something a little out of the ordinary. Two squads of Japanese soldiers also watched the tree-fellers-and the other prisoners. They were there to make sure the axes didn’t disappear into the camp after the job was done. None of the Americans got close to them. When other trees came down, everyone had seen that they had short fuses.

“No more shade,” a prisoner near Fletch said sadly. Fletch nodded, but his heart wasn’t in it. He liked shade as much as the next guy, but you didn’t have to have it in Hawaii, the way you would in a place where the sun could knock you dead. He was as pale as anybody in the camp, but even he could see that firewood counted for more. He wondered what the POWs would do when no more trees were left inside the barbed-wire perimeter.

A crackle like distant machine-gun fire snapped his attention back to the pine. “Timberrrr!” yelled one of the woodcutters-a cry he’d surely learned at the movies and not in the great north woods. Down came the tree, and slammed into the grass. Fletch wished it would have fallen on the Japs, but no such luck. They were too canny to let themselves get smashed.

The sergeant in charge of the guards collected the axes. Only after he had them both did he shout something in Japanese to his men. They chose volunteers-that was what it amounted to-and handed out saws. The POWs they’d picked went to work turning the fallen pine, which had to be sixty or seventy feet tall, into chunks of wood convenient for cooking food and boiling water. The guards watched these prisoners no less intently than they had the axemen. As far as they were concerned, saws were weapons, too.

Watching a fallen tree turned into firewood was less interesting than watching it fall in the first place. Along with most of the crowd, Fletch drifted away. If he hung around, there was always the chance that the Japs would find work for him, too. The Geneva Convention said officer prisoners genuinely had to volunteer to work, but the Japs hadn’t signed it and respected it only when they wanted to. They didn’t feed him well enough to make him feel like doing anything more than he had to.

“How’s it going, Lieutenant?” That was Arnie, the ersatz artilleryman who’d surrendered along with Fletch.

“What could be better? It’s the beachfront by Waikiki, right?” Fletch said. “I’m just waiting for the waitress to bring me another gin and tonic.”

Arnie grinned. He was skinnier than Fletch remembered. Of course, Fletch was probably skinnier than he remembered, too. He just didn’t get to see himself very often. Arnie said, “You got a good way of looking at things.”

“My ass,” Fletch told him. “If I had a good way of looking at things, I would have gone over the hill with Clancy and Dave.”

“Wonder what the hell happened to ’em,” Arnie said.

“Whatever it is, could it be worse than staying in the Royal Hawaiian here?” Fletch asked. He got another smile out of Arnie. Considering how things were in the camp, that was no mean feat.

But nobody was laughing a couple of days later. The guards started shouting for a lineup in the middle of the morning. That was out of the ordinary. By now, Fletch had learned to view anything out of the ordinary with suspicion. The Japs didn’t break routine to hand out lollipops.

He hoped there’d been an escape. Most of him hoped so, anyhow. People who left the perimeter on work details talked about “shooting squads”: groups of ten where, if one man ran, all the others got it in the neck. That was a brutally effective way to convince prisoners not to try to make a break-and to stop the ones who did want to try. There were no shooting squads inside the camp, though. If somebody’d dug a tunnel and sneaked off, more power to him.

Fletch’s hopes sank when the guards didn’t count and recount the men lined up in neat rows. They would have if they thought they were missing people, wouldn’t they? The commandant scrambled up onto a table in front of the POWs. As soon as he got up there, all the prisoners bowed. There would have been hell to pay if they hadn’t. Much less athletically, a local Japanese in a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his tubby build clambered onto the table with the officer.

The Jap commandant shouted in his own language. He had one of those voices that could fill up as much space as it had to. A whole regiment could have heard his orders on the battlefield. The interpreter tried twice as hard and was half as loud: “We have captured four American soldiers. They did not surrender at the proper time. This makes them nothing but bandits. We treat bandits the way they deserve. Let this be a lesson to all of you.”

Guards marched in the four Americans. Poor bastards, Fletch thought. They’d been stripped to the waist. Their faces and torsos showed cuts and bruises. The Japs must have worked them over after they were caught. One of them staggered like a punch-drunk palooka. How many times had they hit him in the head? If he didn’t know everything that was going on around him, maybe he was luckier than his buddies.

None of them was Dave or Clancy. Fletch was glad of that. And then, in short order, he wasn’t glad of anything any more. To him, hung by the thumbs had always been a joke, something people said but nobody would ever do.

The Japs weren’t kidding. They tied ropes to a horizontal length of wood that had to be twelve feet off the ground, and to the Americans’ thumbs. They were viciously precise about it, too, making sure their captives had to stand on tiptoe to keep their thumbs from taking all their weight. Once they’d tied them, they gagged them. And then they walked away.

Another shout from the camp commandant. “Dismissed!” the interpreter said.

Japanese soldiers stood guard around the four Americans. They made sure none of the ordinary POWs drew near. The men they’d captured just hung there, without food, without water, without hope. Fletch didn’t need long to realize the Japs intended to let them die there. Every so often, one of them would sag down off his toes as weariness overcame him, only to be jerked up again by the agony in his hands. The rags tied over their mouths didn’t muffle all the noises they made.

It took six days before they hung limp and unmoving. The guards cut them down with bayonets. They crumpled to the ground. Even after that, though, one of them tried to roll himself up into a ball. The Japs stared at him, gabbling in their own language. One of them ran off to get an officer.

When the officer came back with him, he took a look at the feebly wiggling American, then snapped out a command in his own language. “Hai! ” the guards chorused. Three of them raised their rifles and aimed them at the man they’d made into an example. The Arisakas barked together, too. After that, the American didn’t move any more.

With gestures, the guards ordered some of the POWs to drag the dead bodies to the burying ground. There already was one, for men who came down sick and couldn’t find the strength to get better on what the Japs fed them-and for men the Japs killed one way or another.

Fletch was the third man a guard pointed at. He didn’t try protesting that the Japanese couldn’t make him work. If he had, he figured two more POWs would have dragged him to the burying ground. The corpse whose ankle he had hold of didn’t weigh much; all the water was gone from it.

“You damn sorry son of a bitch,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” The corporal who had the other leg shook his head. “He’s liable to be the lucky one. It’s over for him. How long will it last for us?” Fletch had no answer. The dead man’s head bumped along the ground. Will that be me one day? Fletch wondered. He had no answer for that, either.

“WHERE ARE YOU going?” Hiroshi Takahashi asked.

“Away from here. Any place at all away from here,” Kenzo answered. They were both speaking English to keep their father from knowing what they were saying. “I can’t stand hanging around this miserable tent.” He didn’t come right out and cuss; his dad knew what swear words were, all right.

“You better be back before we go out again, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Hiroshi warned.

“Yeah, yeah.” Kenzo ducked out of the tent before his brother could nag him any more. The way his father kept taking fish to the Japanese consulate, and the way he kept coming back looking as if he’d just had tea with Hirohito… Some of the reverence for the Emperor Kenzo had learned as a little boy still lingered, but knowing that Hirohito reigned over a country at war with the USA carried more weight. No matter what his old man thought, Kenzo remained determined to stay an American.

He had to bow, though, when a Japanese patrol marched up the street toward him. He’d learned how to do that properly as a little boy, too. The noncom who headed up the patrol recognized him as a countryman and bowed back, which he wouldn’t have done for a haole. That made Kenzo angry, not proud, but he didn’t show what he was thinking.

He bowed again several times as he walked through Honolulu. His route would have looked random to someone who didn’t know the city well-and who didn’t know what had happened in it and to it since the Rising Sun went up over Iolani Palace. Since almost all food was supposed to go into community kitchens, the markets that had sprung up here and there were highly unofficial. Sometimes the Japs closed down one or another. More often, the people who ran them figured greased palms were part of the cost of doing business.

Fish here (sure as hell, he’d seen Eizo Doi selling some of what he got), taro there, rice somewhere else, yet another place for fresh vegetables… Yeah, you had to know your way around. You had to know your way around when you were buying, too, or you’d lose your shirt. The way things were these days, people with food they could sell had the whip hand.

But Kenzo wasn’t looking to buy. Going out on the Oshima Maru kept him fed. It also gave him food to bargain with. If he wanted a coconut, he could trade a flying fish for it. He didn’t need to lay out a stack of greenbacks fat as his fist. You could still buy almost anything if you had enough money, but enough swelled every day. People bargained frantically. Kenzo heard curses in half a dozen languages.

Whenever he saw a blond girl about his own age, he tensed. Was it…? Whenever he got close enough to tell, he added some curses of his own to the electric air because, again and again, it wasn’t. He began to wonder if he was wasting his time. That only made him shrug. How could he be wasting it if he was doing what he wanted to do?

And then, when he was almost sure he wouldn’t run into Elsie Sundberg, he did. She was carrying a cloth sack that looked heavy, but that didn’t show what it held. Smart, Kenzo thought-a lot smarter than carrying food out in the open. The hungrier people got, the likelier they were to steal.

He waved. For a moment, Elsie didn’t think that was aimed at her. For another moment, she looked alarmed that she’d caught an Oriental’s eye. Then she recognized him. He almost laughed at the look of relief that passed over her face before she smiled and waved back. He picked his way toward her past hard-faced sellers and excitable buyers.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you? How are things?”

“Hi, yourself,” Elsie answered. “Not… too bad. I want to thank you again for that fish you gave me. That really helped my whole family a lot.”

“No huhu.” Kenzo did laugh then. Why not? A Jap tossing a Hawaiian word to a haole girl… If that wasn’t funny, what was? “Hope people aren’t giving you a rough time.” Hope the Japanese aren’t treating you the way whites treated local Japs before the war. He wondered why he hoped that. Wasn’t turnabout fair play? But Elsie had never treated him like a Jap-not till things got strange after the shooting started, anyhow, and then only for a little while.

She shrugged now. “Sign of the times,” she said, which neatly echoed what he was thinking.

“You have any trouble getting that tuna home?” he asked.

Elsie shrugged again. “A little. But I was lucky. There were cops around both times, so things didn’t get too messy. If those so-and-sos had got any pushier, I would’ve kicked ’em right where it hurts most. I was ready to.” She did her best to look tough.

Back in high school, Kenzo wouldn’t have imagined her best could be that good. But everybody’d had some painful lessons since then. “That’s the way to do it,” he said. “Uh-you want company taking your stuff home today?”

She hesitated, much the same way she had when he waved to her across the makeshift market. Then, as she had that time, she smiled again, smiled and nodded. “Sure, Ken. Thanks.”

“Okay.” Now he paused. “Your folks gonna start pitching a fit when you come up to the front door with a Jap?”

She blushed. He watched in fascination as the color spread up from her neckline all the way to the roots of her hair. But, yet again, she didn’t need more than a moment to gather herself. “Not when it’s somebody I went to school with,” she said firmly. She eyed him. “Is that good enough for you?”

“Yeah.” This time, Kenzo answered right away. She would have got mad at him if he hadn’t, and she would have had a right to. “You ready to go or you need more stuff?”

“I’m ready.” As if to prove it, Elsie hefted the bag. “Come on.”

Kenzo had hustled till he was almost breathless, hoping to run into her. Now that he’d succeeded, he had trouble finding things to say. Honolulu wasn’t a great big city; every step brought him that much closer to good-bye, which was the one thing he didn’t want to tell her.

Elsie did her best to help, asking, “How are your brother and your father?”

“Hank’s okay.” Kenzo used the name by which Hiroshi was known to haoles. “My dad…” He didn’t know how to go on with that. At last, he said, “Dad was born in the old country, and he’s… he’s happier with the way things are now than we are.”

“Oh.” She walked on for a little while. “That must make things… exciting to talk about.” Like him, she was looking for safe ways to say inherently unsafe things.

“Exciting. Yeah.” He laughed, not that it was funny. “Things get so exciting that most of the time we don’t talk about anything but fishing. You don’t want to whack somebody over the head with a brick on account of fishing.”

“I guess not.” Elsie took another few steps. He realized she had to feel as wary around him as he did around her. “You’re lucky that you’re able to go out there, especially with so many people hungry.”

“Some luck,” he said bitterly. “If I were really lucky, I’d be in college now. Then I could be working on a degree instead of a line full of hooks. Of course, afterwards I’d probably go out fishing with my old man anyway, because who’s gonna hire a Jap with a degree?”

“Was it really that bad?” Elsie was white. She hadn’t had to worry about it. She hadn’t even had to know the problem was there.

“It wasn’t good-that’s for darn sure,” Kenzo answered. “Lots more Japanese with good educations than places for them to work. You put somebody with a university degree in a shoe store or a grocery or out on a sampan and he starts wondering why the heck he bothered. You let him watch somebody with green eyes and freckles get the office job he’s better qualified for and he won’t be real happy about it.”

Quietly, Elsie said, “It’s a wonder you aren’t happier about how things are now.”

“I’m an American,” Kenzo said with a shrug. “That’s what everybody told me, even before I started going to school. People told me that, and I believed it. Heck, I still believe it. I believe it more than the Big Five do, I bet.” The people who ran the Big Five-the firms of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and the Theo. H. Davies Company-pretty much ran Hawaii, or they had till the war, anyhow. They ran the banks, they ran the plantations, they did the hiring, and they did the firing. And the higher in their ranks you looked, the whiter they got.

Another proof of who’d been running things here for the past fifty years was the neighborhood they were walking through as they neared Elsie’s house. These large homes-mostly of white clapboard with shingle roofs-on even larger lots were nothing like the crowded shacks and tenements west of Nuuanu Avenue, the part of town where Kenzo had grown up. They didn’t shout about money; they weren’t so rude or vulgar. But they admitted it was there, even the ones that had been wrecked or damaged in the fighting. And the people who lived in them were white.

Somebody had neatly mowed the Sundbergs’ front lawn. Kenzo wondered whether Elsie’s father pushed the lawnmower every Sunday morning or they had a gardener. Before the war, he would have bet on a gardener. Now? He admitted to himself that he wasn’t sure.

The front door opened before he and Elsie got to it. Mrs. Sundberg looked a lot like Elsie. Like her daughter, she also looked alarmed for a moment-what was this Jap doing here? Then, even without Elsie telling her, she realized which Jap he was likely to be, and her face cleared. “Mr. Takahashi, isn’t it?” she said politely.

“That’s right, Mrs. Sundberg.” Kenzo was polite, too.

“Thank you for the fish you gave us. It was very generous of you,” she said. He nodded; he’d expected something like that. But she went on in a way he hadn’t expected: “It’s good to see you here. Now we can give you something, too.”

“Huh?” he said, which was not the most brilliant thing that could have come out of his mouth, but she’d caught him by surprise.

She smiled a slightly superior smile-a very haole smile. Elsie, who hadn’t got that trick down pat yet, giggled instead and then said, “Come on in, Ken.”

Mrs. Sundberg’s smile slipped a little, but only a little, and she put it back fast. “Yes, do,” she said. “We have lemonade, if you’d like some. Elsie, you get it for him, and I’ll go out back and do the honors.”

Inside, the house was pure New England: overstuffed furniture with nubbly upholstery, lots of turned wood stained a color close to dark cherry, and more pictures on the wall and knickknacks on tables and shelves than you could shake a stick at. “Thanks,” Kenzo said when Elsie did bring him some lemonade. That didn’t surprise him. Lots of people had lemon trees, you couldn’t do much with lemons but squeeze them, and Hawaii did still have plenty of sugar-if not much else. She carried a glass for herself, too. He sipped. It was good.

Mrs. Sundberg came back inside with half a dozen alligator pears, the rough skin on some dark green, on others almost black. “Here you are,” she said proudly.

“Thank you very much!” Kenzo meant it. Alligator pears-some people called them avocados-were a lot harder to come by than lemons. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “The darker ones are ripe now; the others will be in a few days. Feel them. When they start to get soft, they’ll be ready to eat.”

“Okay. That’s great. Thanks again.” Kenzo was glad she’d given him a number he could share evenly with his brother and his father. Had she done it on purpose? Probably; she wouldn’t miss a trick like that. He’d told Elsie what his living arrangements were, and that his mother hadn’t made it. If Elsie’d mentioned it even once, Mrs. Sundberg wasn’t the sort who’d forget.

He thought she would hover over him and her daughter, but she didn’t. She went off into the back of the house somewhere. Somehow, that left him more on his best behavior than if she had hovered. He and Elsie talked about people from high school while they drank their lemonade.

When he finished his, he said, “I better go.”

Elsie didn’t say no. She did say, “Thanks for walking me home. That was nice of you,” which was almost as good.

“It’s okay. It was good to see you.” That was about a tenth of what Kenzo meant. Gathering his courage, he tried again: “Could we maybe, uh, see each other some more one of these times?”

He’d already seen she wasn’t as good as her mother at masking what she thought. He didn’t need to be a private eye or somebody like that to read what she was thinking. She’d known him a long time, but he was Japanese. He was Japanese, but she’d known him a long time-not quite the same as the other. Being Japanese meant something different now from what it had before December 7. Whatever it meant, he wasn’t a collaborator, or no more than you had to be to survive when the place where you lived was occupied. And so…

“Yes, we can do that,” she said.

“Swell!” He grinned like a fool. “So long.” He didn’t think his feet touched the ground at all as he went down the walk and out to the street.

THE TRAIN CHUGGED to a stop. “Pensacola!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Pensacola!”

Joe Crosetti leaped up from his seat. He grabbed his duffel bag from the overhead rack and slung it over his shoulder. All his worldly goods in a canvas sack-he felt proud, not impoverished. And he was so excited, he could hardly stand still. “Pensacola Naval Air Station!” he said. “Wings! Wings at last!”

Orson Sharp shouldered his duffel, too. “Keep your shirt on, Joe,” he said mildly. “They’re not going to let us fly this afternoon.”

“Yeah, but soon,” Joe said. “We can fly here. We’re gonna fly here. It’s not like Chapel Hill, where we couldn’t.”

“Okay,” his roommate said. Joe had the feeling he was hiding a laugh, and wondered if he ought to get mad himself. But then, as the swarm of cadets surged toward the door, he forgot all about it.

The last time he’d got off a train, it was in the middle of a North Carolina winter. He liked spring in Florida a hell of a lot better. He got a glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico. Just that glimpse told him he didn’t know as much about the ocean as he thought he did. The Pacific off San Francisco could be green. It could be gray. It could even be greenish blue or grayish blue. He’d never seen it, never imagined it, a blue between turquoise and sapphire, a blue that was really blue. The color made you want to go swimming in it. People went swimming off of San Francisco, too, but they came out of the water with their teeth chattering when they did.

Beside him, Orson Sharp said, “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”

That made Joe blink. To him, this was a variation on a theme. To the kid from Utah, it was a whole new song. “You wanted to be a Navy flier before you even knew what all that wet stuff was like?” Joe said.

Sharp didn’t get angry or embarrassed. “I figured I’d find out what I needed to know.” He was hard to faze.

“Buses! Buses to the Air Station this way!” somebody shouted. Cadets started heading this way. In the middle of the crowd and short, Joe didn’t even see which way the shouter pointed. He just went along, one more sheep in the flock. If everybody else was wrong, he’d be wrong, too, but he’d have a lot of company. They couldn’t land on him too hard unless he goofed all by his lonesome.

The buses were where they were supposed to be. A placard in front of the first one said, TO PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION. This time, the flock had done it right. Cadets lined up to get aboard. The Navy was even bigger on lining up than grade school had been.

Joe got a little look at Pensacola as the bus rolled south and west toward the Naval Air Station. A lot of the streets had Spanish names. He remembered from an American history course that Florida had belonged to Spain once upon a time, the same as California had. He shook his head in wonder. He’d never expected that to matter to him-when would he get to Florida? But here he was, by God.

Oaks and palms and magnolias all grew here. The air was mild and moist, although this extreme northwestern part of Florida wasn’t a place winter forgot altogether, the way, say, Miami was. Frame and brick buildings, some with big wrought-iron balconies on the upper stories, lined the streets.

“Reminds me a little of New Orleans,” said somebody behind Joe. The comparison would have meant more to him if he’d ever been to New Orleans.

Whites and Negroes walked along the sidewalks and went in and out of shops and homes. They seemed not far from equal in numbers. As it had been in North Carolina, that was plenty to tell Joe he was a long way from home. Colored people in San Francisco were few and far between.

Because of the name, he’d figured the Naval Air Station would lie right next to the town. But it didn’t; it was half a dozen miles away. On the way there, Joe’s bus passed a massive fort of brickwork and granite. “This here is Fort Barrancas,” the driver said, playing tour guide. “The Confederates held it for a while during the War Between the States, but the Federals ran ’em out.”

Joe had heard people talk about the War Between the States in North Carolina, too. In San Francisco, it had always been just the Civil War. Cadets from the South seemed a lot more… serious about it than those from other parts of the country. Of course, their side had lost, which doubtless made a difference.

“Over there across the channel on Santa Rosa Island is Fort Pickens,” the driver went on. “It could’ve touched off the war if Fort Sumter didn’t. The Confederates never did take it, even though the fellow who attacked it was the same man who’d built it before the war. They kept Geronimo the Apache there for a while after they caught him, too.”

Leaning out past Orson Sharp, Joe got a glimpse of Fort Pickens. It had five sides, with a bastion at each corner. Even now, it looked like a tough nut to crack. He imagined gunfire sweeping the sand of Santa Rosa Island and shivered a little. No, trying to take a place like that wouldn’t have been any fun at all.

And then he forgot all about the Civil War or the War Between the States or whatever you were supposed to call it. Along with the gulls and pelicans fluttering over Fort Pickens, he spotted an airplane painted bright yellow: a trainer. The buzz that filled the bus said he wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, either. Excitement blazed through him. Before long, he’d go up in one of those slow, ungainly machines-except it seemed as swift and sleek as a Wildcat to him.

Pensacola Naval Air Station itself was a study in contrasts. The old buildings were old: brickwork that looked as if it dated from somewhere close to the Civil War. And the new ones were new: some of the plywood that had gone into hangars and administrative buildings hadn’t been painted yet, and hadn’t started weathering yet, either. And out beyond the buildings sprouted a forest of tents.

The driver might have been reading Joe’s mind. “You gentlemen will be staying in those for a while, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’re putting up real housing as fast as we can, but there’s a lot going on, and we’ve had to get big in just a bit of a hurry, you know.”

That got laughs all through the bus. A couple of years earlier, nobody’d wanted to hear about national defense, much less talk about it. Now nobody wanted to pay attention to anything else. But making up for lost time was no easier, no more possible, than it ever was.

Brakes groaning, the bus stopped. The cadets shouldered their duffels again. As they descended, a lieutenant commander came out of the closest old brick building and greeted them with, “Welcome to Pensacola Naval Air Station, gentlemen. You will have no mothers here. We assume you’re old enough to take care of yourselves till you show us otherwise-at which point we’re liable to throw you out on your ear. Now if you’ll line up for processing…”

Processing here was for the cadets about what it was for a cow going through the Swift meat-packing plant in Chicago. Joe didn’t end up with USDA CHOICE stamped on his backside, but that was almost all he escaped. The paperwork he filled out made what he’d done at Chapel Hill seem like the kindergarten course. “We ought to drop this stuff on the Japs,” he grumbled to Orson Sharp. “It’d smash ’em flatter than a ten-ton bomb.”

“It can’t be helped.” Sharp took everything, even bureaucratic nonsense, in stride. Joe didn’t know whether to admire him or to want to clobber him.

They shared a two-man tent a good deal more spacious than their four-man dorm room. Joe looked at a mimeographed handout a bored petty officer had given him. He rolled his eyes up to the heavens and let out a theatrical groan.

“For heaven’s sake, what is it?” Sharp asked. Any other cadet in the group would have said something more pungent than for heaven’s sake.

“Listen to this.” Joe read from the handout: “ ‘Flight training and academic preparation will continue in the ratio of three parts to two. Academic subjects to be covered will include the following: navigation, ordnance and gunnery, indoctrination, recognition, communications, and airplane engines.’ We’re stuck with more classes, for cryin’ out loud.” He would have been more pungent himself with anybody but his roommate. He refused to admit that Orson Sharp was a good influence on him.

“Well? We need to know all those things.” Sharp was so reasonable, he could drive anybody nuts.

“I thought we were done with notebooks and desks and tests. Lord knows I hoped we were.” Joe refused to cheer up, even though he already knew a lot about engines.

“I’m not thrilled, either, but we can’t quit now. We just have to go through with it.” Sharp wasn’t wrong. Joe didn’t clobber him. He couldn’t have said why, not to save his life.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA was working in a Honolulu office that had once housed a U.S. Navy officer. The space was larger and better appointed than anyone below flag rank would have had in Japan, but nothing out of the ordinary here. His work was nothing out of the ordinary, either. That left him slightly discontented. He wouldn’t have minded leaving Oahu and going on to fight in the Philippines or the Dutch East Indies. Things were too quiet here. He wanted new problems to sink his teeth into.

He hadn’t had that thought more than ten minutes before an excited radioman ran into his office and exclaimed, “Sir, one of our picket boats has sighted two American carriers heading toward these islands!”

“Well, well,” Genda said. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the Yankees to try to raid Hawaii. “Give me more details.”

“Sir, there are no more details,” the radioman answered. “The picket boat’s signal cut off in the middle of the message.”

“Ah, so desu. I understand.” Genda nodded. No, he wouldn’t be able to get more details from the picket boat’s crew. No one this side of the Yasukuni Shrine for the spirits of the war dead would. Now he had to think about what to do to make sure the Americans paid for their folly. “Akagi and Soryu have been notified?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Captain Hasegawa says he wants to let the American ships come closer before he launches his attack against them. The Americans will have to come closer if they’re going to strike at Oahu.”

“Hai. Honto,” Genda said. That was why the picket boats were out there, some more than a thousand kilometers north and east of the island. No carrier-based bombers could fly that far and return to the ships that had launched them. Genda looked at his watch. It was almost three. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans intended to run in towards Oahu all through the night, as the Japanese strike force had done back in December. Thinking out loud, he went on, “We caught them by surprise, though. They won’t play the same trick on us. We’ll be ready and waiting tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Do you need me to pass anything on to either of our carriers?”

“Just one thing-good hunting.”

THE AIRSTRIP BY Haleiwa had to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Out beyond the grass and the palm trees and the beach was the vast turquoise expanse of the Pacific. Neither the beauty nor the perfect climate did anything to salve Lieutenant Saburo Shindo’s temper. When he looked north to the Pacific, he saw only an opportunity he would not have. The Americans stuck their head in the tiger’s mouth when he happened to be ashore. Others aboard the Akagi and the Soryu would hunt them at sea. As for him…

Feeling like a caged tiger himself, he paced back and forth at the edge of the runway. The pilots drawn up at attention there followed him with their eyes. He glared at them, then deliberately stopped so they had to look west, into the sinking sun, to see him.

“I hope we will be unlucky,” he said. “I hope the men on our carriers will find the Americans and sink them before they can make their night run towards Oahu. But if the carrier pilots fail, we will see American planes overhead early tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”

“Hai! ” the fliers chorused.

“You had better,” Shindo snarled. “Because you will be up and waiting for them when they arrive. You will be waiting for them, and you will make them sorry they dared come anywhere near this island. Do you understand that?”

“Hai! ” they chorused again.

Shindo scowled. “All right, then. I will be up there with you, and I will be watching. Anyone who lets an American escape-even one American, do you hear? — will answer to me. I am more dangerous to you than any stinking Yankee pilot ever born. Do you understand that?”

“Hai! ” the pilots said once more.

“Good. You’d better.” Shindo turned his back. “Dismissed.” He heard the men muttering, but he didn’t look at them again. Let them mutter. As long as they were worrying about him, they wouldn’t worry about the enemy. That was what he had in mind.

JANE ARMITAGE BROKE a nail weeding her potato patch. She hardly bothered to swear. That wasn’t because she didn’t want to seem unladylike. She couldn’t have cared less. These days, though, a broken nail was nothing to get excited about. She looked down at her hands. Before the war started, the only mark they’d had was a small callus on the side of her right middle finger: a writer’s callus. Now hard yellow calluses banded her palms. Her fingers were battered and scarred. Her nails… didn’t bear thinking about. They’d been a disaster even before she broke the latest one. She bit it off short and reasonably straight-why wait to go back to the apartment and dig out a manicure scissors? Then she got back to work.

Pretty soon she’d be able to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down toward the Waianae Range. A shower would be-not quite heavenly, not without hot water, but welcome even so. Then she could go have supper. She was amazed how important food had become in her life now that she didn’t have enough of it. Just thinking of supper was enough to make her stomach rumble. It would go on rumbling after she ate, too.

Never enough… Everyone in Wahiawa got thinner by the day. That had to be true of everyone on Oahu, everyone in the Territory of Hawaii, but Jane hadn’t gone outside of Wahiawa since the fighting started. She felt as if she’d fallen back through time like someone in an H. G. Wells story. What was she but a peasant from the Middle Ages, tied to her little plot of land?

She paused again in her weeding. This time, it wasn’t a broken fingernail but a distant droning in the sky. She frowned. The Japs didn’t fly all that much, certainly not so much as the Army Air Corps had before Hawaii changed hands. Maybe they didn’t have as much fuel as they would have liked. Or maybe they just didn’t think they had anything to worry about. Whatever the reason, they didn’t.

And the swelling drone didn’t sound as if it came from Japanese planes. Jane had heard enough of them to know what they sounded like. She looked up. Coming out of the northeast, over the Koolau Range, was a V of big, two-engine, twin-tailfinned airplanes. She stared at them, hardly daring to hope that…

They flew right over Wahiawa, low enough to let her make out the stars on their wings. They were! They were American planes!

Jane wanted to yell and scream and dance, all at the same time. She heard cheers here and there. She heard them, but she didn’t do anything except go on staring up at the sky. Too many people were out and about. Someone might see her and report her to the Japs if she celebrated too hard. You never could tell, and you didn’t want to take a chance.

How had they got here? They looked too big to be carrier planes. Had they flown all the way from the Pacific Coast? If they had, they surely couldn’t carry enough gas to get back. What were they going to do?

What they were going to do now was attack Wheeler Field, not far southwest of Wahiawa. A few antiaircraft guns started shooting at them, but only a few. The Japs must have been as taken aback as the Americans were when the war started. Would some Japanese politician stand up in whatever they used for a parliament and make a speech about April 18, the way FDR had about December 7? By God, I hope so! Jane thought savagely.

Crump! Crump! Crump! Yes, that was the noise of bursting bombs. Jane had become altogether too well acquainted with it to harbor any doubts. Give it to ’em! Give it to the lousy sons of bitches! She didn’t say a thing. She thought her head would burst with the effort of holding those loud, loud thoughts inside.

Not everybody bothered. She heard an unmistakable Rebel yell. And somebody shouted, “Take that, you fucking slant-eyed bastards!” She didn’t recognize the voice. She hoped nobody else did, either.

A column of greasy black smoke rose into the sky, and then two more in quick succession. They weren’t anything like the massive pall that had marked Pearl Harbor’s funeral pyre, but they were there. The bombers had hit something worth hitting.

The dinner bell rang, summoning people all over Wahiawa to the community kitchen. Jane’s amazement grew by leaps and bounds. For a few wonderful minutes, she hadn’t even realized she was hungry.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA snatched up the jangling telephone in his office. “Moshi-moshi! ” he said impatiently. An excited voice gabbled in his ear. Genda’s impatience gave way to astonishment. “But that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. More gabbling assured him that it wasn’t. “How the-?” He broke off. He heard bombs going off in the distance, not at Wheeler Field-that was too far away for the sound to carry-but off to the west. Hickam! he thought in dismay. “So sorry, but I’ve got to go,” he told the officer on the other end of the line, and hung up before the man could squawk any more.

He rushed downstairs and out onto the sidewalk in front of his office building. The sun was dropping down toward the Pacific. Genda caught glints of light off airplane wings. He knew the silhouette of every plane Japan made. Those weren’t Japanese aircraft.

They were, they could only be, American. He watched them drone east past the southern edge of Honolulu. He knew every carrier-based U.S. warplane by sight, too. He had to. The planes he saw weren’t any of those, either.

Other people also realized they belonged to the USA. The whoops and cheers that rang out all over Honolulu told him as much. If he’d had any doubts that Hawaii wasn’t fully reconciled to Japanese occupation, those whoops would have cured them.

Those weren’t carrier-based aircraft. They were… “Zakennayo! ” Genda exclaimed. He seldom swore, but here he made an exception. Those were U.S. Army B-25s.

A million questions boiled in his head. How did they get here? came first and foremost. They didn’t have the range to fly from California. The answer to that one formed almost as fast as the question did. The Americans must have flown them off one of the carriers the picket boat had spotted. Genda bowed slightly toward the U.S. bombers in token of respect. That had taken imagination and nerve.

But the next question was, How do they aim to recover their planes and theirair crews? He couldn’t imagine that the United States would send men off on a suicide mission. He also couldn’t see how the USA planned to get them back. He scratched his head. It was a puzzlement.

Yet another good question was, What are we doing about this? The Japanese didn’t seem to be doing very much. A few antiaircraft guns started firing. A few puffs of black smoke stained the sky around the B-25s. Genda saw no signs that any of them was hit.

He also saw no fighters going after them. Had the Yankees blasted all the runways on Oahu? Genda couldn’t believe it. There weren’t nearly enough American bombers to do anything of the sort. More likely, they’d just caught the Japanese with their pants down. Nobody had expected the raiders till tomorrow morning. The Americans had pulled a fast one-the B-25s, with their greater range, could launch far sooner than the usual carrier-based planes would have.

The Akagi and the Soryu would be rushing north to meet the American carriers… which probably wouldn’t be anywhere near so far south as the Japanese thought they were. And Japanese fighters based here on Oahu didn’t seem to be reacting very well at all.

The Yankees may have done us a favor, Genda thought. This was-this could only be-a raid, a pinprick, an annoyance, a stunt. It wouldn’t and couldn’t settle anything. He imagined U.S. newspapers with headlines like WE STRIKE BACK AT HAWAII! People on the American mainland would cheer-and would have the right to.

But what would happen if and when the Americans seriously attacked Oahu? Genda didn’t know whether they could. But now he was sure as sure could be that they wanted to. They weren’t going to accept what had happened in the central Pacific as a fait accompli.

We weren’t ready here, Genda thought. We weren’t ready, and they’ve embarrassed us. They’ve made us lose face. That wouldn’t happen again, though. Genda intended to be one of the men who made sure it wouldn’t happen again. If the Yankees returned, they wouldn’t find Oahu too flustered to fight back. The island would be ready to repel them.

Meanwhile, still without much harassment from the ground or from the air, the B-25s buzzed off in the direction of Diamond Head. No matter what Genda might plan for the future, today belonged to them. Genda went back up to the office as fast as he’d hurried down to the street. Yes, today belonged to the Americans. He got on the telephone to do his best to ensure that tomorrow wouldn’t.

CHOW TIME. HORRIBLE glop. Not enough of it-nowhere near enough of it. Fletch Armitage didn’t care. He looked forward to every meal he got in the Kapiolani Park POW camp with greater anticipation than he ever had when he was going to some pretty fancy restaurants back on the mainland.

He didn’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out why. These days, he had an insider’s understanding of relativity. When you were already well fed, even the finest supper could be only so nice. And when you were hungry, any food at all, even food you would have turned your nose up at when times were better, couldn’t be anything less than wonderful.

In those days, more good food had been just a surfeit. Fletch had wondered when he would start to get a potbelly. Here and now, every grain of rice kept him breathing for another-how long? A minute? Five minutes? Who could say? But he would rather have had a T-bone with all the trimmings than Jane wearing nothing but a smile.

He wondered how she was. Had she stayed in Wahiawa or fled in front of the oncoming Japanese? Fletch had no way to know, of course. He had no way to know which would have been better, either. The Japs had gleefully strafed refugees, and in the end there’d been no way to stay in front of them. Had there been, he wouldn’t have been standing in line in a POW camp.

A fly landed on his arm. He slapped at it. It buzzed away. Then his ear caught another buzz, this one up in the sky. He wasn’t the only one who heard it, either. Somebody pointed west, toward downtown Honolulu. Somebody else said, “What the hell are those?”

Since the planes were coming out of the sun, what they were wasn’t obvious for a little while. But then somebody else said, “Fuck me if they ain’t B-25s!”

As soon as the soldier said it, Fletch knew he was right. Those sleek lines and twin tail booms couldn’t have belonged to any other aircraft. Fletch wished Hawaii would have had a few squadrons of them instead of the lumbering Douglas B-18s that weren’t fast enough to run or well enough armored to fight. Then he wondered what difference it would have made. The Japs would have shot up the B-25s on the ground, too.

And then-and only then-Fletch wondered what the hell B-25s were doing flying over Japanese-occupied Oahu. He wasn’t the only one slow on the uptake-far from it. The cheering in the camp had hardly started before he was yelling his head off. Everybody was yelling a few seconds later, yelling and shaking hands and pounding buddies on the back.

Not more than ten seconds later, the machine guns on the guard towers around the camp cut loose. The prisoners inside hit the dirt with the unanimity of conditioned reflex. Only after Fletch lay flat did he poke his head up for a split second to see what the hell was going on. The Japs in the towers weren’t shooting at their captives. They were blazing away at the bombers.

“Dumb assholes,” said a sergeant lying next to Fletch. “Those planes are too high up for small arms to hit.”

“Let ’em waste ammo,” Fletch said. “At least it’s not coming in on us.” The sergeant nodded.

The B-25s flew on by. East of Diamond Head, they swung up toward the north. That was when Fletch started trying to figure out not only what they were doing but how they’d got here. They couldn’t have taken off from San Francisco. They wouldn’t have made it to Oahu in the first place, let alone had a prayer of getting back. Could the big, hulking brutes have flown off a carrier? He wasn’t sure; he was no Navy man. But he would have bet the farm the stork hadn’t brought them.

Quite a few of the POWs were Navy men. Some of them swore up and down that no Army bombers could have got airborne off a carrier’s short flight deck. They couldn’t come close to explaining how else the bombers had arrived over Oahu, though. As that sank in, their protests faded.

The cheering didn’t last long. A captain-Army variety, not Navy-said, “You wait and see-the Japs’ll make us pay for yelling for our own goddamn side.”

“Of course they will. They’ve lost face,” another officer said.

Fletch found that horribly likely. What could be more embarrassing than enemy bombers showing up over an island you thought you owned? Surprise, guys, Fletch thought. The Japs cared more about prestige than Americans did, too.

Slowly, the chow line started snaking forward again. Here and there, men had dropped mess kits when they dove for cover as the guard-tower machine guns opened up. They squabbled over which one was whose and over who’d been a clumsy idiot and stepped on one: all serious business because it centered on food.

No juicy T-bone for Fletch or anybody else at the Kapiolani camp-just rice and leaves that might have been vegetables or might have been weeds, and not enough of either. He hated it and he wanted more, both at the same time. But however unsatisfactory a supper it made, he felt better afterwards than before. For a little while, his body was only yelling at him that it was hungry. It wasn’t screaming, the way it usually did.

Here and there, prisoners whistled or hummed “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” and other patriotic songs. Nobody sang the words out loud. That would have been asking for trouble. Some of the guards knew English, and some of the local Japanese had thrown in with the occupiers. Even the tunes were dangerous. Fletch admired the POWs who showed what they were feeling without wanting to irritate the occupiers. He didn’t doubt that everybody felt the same way. Why stick your neck out to show it?

And one flight of bombers couldn’t be anything more than a nuisance to the Japs. They might remind Hawaii-and Tokyo-that the USA was still in the fight, but they weren’t about to bundle the Empire of Japan back across the Pacific. Too bad, Fletch thought, eyeing the barbed wire surrounding him. Too goddamn bad.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO wasn’t usually a man to show what he felt. Right now, though, he was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. The officers set over him had talked about an American attack at first light tomorrow morning. He’d been ready to meet that. He’d had his fellow fighter pilots at Haleiwa ready to meet it, too.

They hadn’t been ready for the single U.S. bomber that swooped low over the airstrip here now as afternoon passed into evening, dropped a stick of bombs, and roared off to the south. Had there been three bombers instead of one, they could have wrecked the whole field. Bombs from the one were bad enough. No Zeros could take off till those holes got filled in.

“Isogi! ” Shindo shouted at the bulldozer operator. The Army noncom tipped his hat to show that he was hurrying. Blue, stinking diesel smoke belched from the bulldozer’s exhaust pipe. The lowered blade shoved dirt into one of the last holes in the ground. The big, snorting machine tamped the dirt down flat with the blade and with its caterpillar treads.

Pick-and-shovel men would have taken a couple of days to repair the damage. Shindo knew that. Here, the sun still stood in the sky, though it sank toward the western horizon with each passing minute. And each passing minute meant one minute fewer in which he could hope to gain revenge.

As if moving in slow motion, the bulldozer cleared the runway. “Let’s go!” Shindo shouted to his men. They ran for their fighters. As soon as Shindo slammed his canopy shut, a groundcrew man spun his prop. The Zero’s engine roared to life. Obeying another groundcrew man’s signals, Shindo taxied out of the revetment that had saved the plane from damage and out to the runway.

He gave the Zero the gun. It bounced a couple of times as it ran over the hasty repairs the bulldozer had made, but he had no trouble getting into the air. He grudged the time he had to wait for his comrades to join him. As soon as they’d all taken off, they streaked away to the northeast after the now-vanished American bombers.

Where? Shindo didn’t know, not exactly. He was going on dead reckoning and gut instinct and the sketchy reports he’d got from other parts of Oahu. Any of those might have been wrong. All of them might have been wrong, and he knew it only too well. If they were… If they were, he’d see nothing but sky and ocean till he ran low on fuel or ran out of light.

He admired the Yankees’ nerve. They’d got everybody on Oahu jumping like fleas on a hot plate. Including me, he thought sourly. He still hadn’t figured out how they intended to get picked up. He couldn’t believe they’d be able to land on a carrier, even if they’d left from one. Would they ditch in the ocean and trust to luck? That seemed to stretch trust further than it ought to go.

“There, Lieutenant!” An excited voice in his earphones made him stop puzzling over it. “Isn’t that them, about ten o’clock low?”

“Hai.” Shindo, by contrast, sounded perfectly calm. He estimated the American bombers’ course and radioed it back to Oahu. It might help the Japanese carriers and their planes find the ships that had launched the B-25s. That done, he said, “Now we make them pay.”

It wouldn’t be easy. They had scant daylight left. And the bombers had seen them, too. The B-25s dove for the deck. They had a very fair turn of speed. They weren’t as fast or as maneuverable as the Zeros (nothing was as maneuverable as a Zero except the Japanese Army’s Hayabusa fighter, which was much more lightly armed), but they didn’t dawdle.

They also showed they had teeth. The machine gunners in their dorsal turrets blazed away at Shindo and his comrades. And those were heavy machine guns. A Zero must have got in the way of a few rounds, for it tumbled into the Pacific trailing smoke and flame. One reason Zeros were so fast and maneuverable was that they were lightly built. When they got hit, they paid the price.

Shindo chose a B-25. He gave it a burst from his own machine guns. Those were just rifle-caliber weapons. He made hits. He was sure of that. But the bomber kept flying as if nothing had happened to it. Sturdy construction and armor plate might make a plane slow and sluggish, but they too had their advantages.

Another Zero cometed into the sea. Shindo swore. Who was supposed to be shooting down whom? He brought another bomber into his sights. This time, he opened up with his twin 20mm cannon. A couple of hits from them would knock anything out of the sky. Getting the hits was the problem. They fired none too fast and carried only a limited store of ammunition.

Get in close, he thought. That was the fighter pilot’s number-one rule. Get in close enough and you couldn’t miss. Shooting at long range was the most common and worst mistake novices and bad pilots made. Once the enemy filled your windshield, you didn’t scare him when you opened up. You killed him.

The Americans knew that as well as Shindo did. Tracers streaked past his Zero. But they had to aim guns in turrets, which wasn’t easy. He pointed his fighter’s nose at the B-25 and started shooting. Chunks flew from the bomber. For a long, dreadful moment, he thought it would keep going all the same. But it heeled over and smashed down into the ocean. Even then, though, it left only an oil slick, not a floating patch of fire like a Zero. Another place the Yankees added weight was in self-sealing fuel tanks that really worked.

Three more B-25s-and another Zero-went into the Pacific before Shindo broke off the attack. If he and his comrades were going to get back to Oahu with any light in the sky, they had to turn south now. The bombers kept on heading northeast, as if they intended to fly to California. They couldn’t get there, though. Shindo wondered again what they did intend to do.

As he made for Oahu, he also wondered if he’d pursued too long. And then he saw that the groundcrew at Haleiwa had lit up the airstrip with parked cars and trucks and a searchlight that had stood in front of a movie theater. His landing was a long way from elegant, but he made it.

A groundcrew man with a flashlight guided him to a revetment. He killed the motor, leaped out of his Zero, and ran for the radio in the headquarters tent. He wanted to find out whether carrier-based aircraft could catch the enemy’s ships.

Other pilots came to listen with him. A couple of hours later, they got a nasty jolt. Instead of the Japanese finding the American carriers, a U.S. sub found the Soryu. The Yankees must have hoped the Japanese would charge after them, hoped and had submarines lying in wait. Now Shindo listened anxiously, fearing the carrier would sink. Not till after midnight was it plain the ship would survive. Two torpedoes had struck her, but only one exploded. Had they both… But they hadn’t, and the Soryu limped back toward safer waters.

With her came the Akagi. There would be no pursuit of the U.S. raiders after all. However they intended to recover their planes and crews, they could go ahead and do it.