Days of Infamy

XIV

WITH HAWAII IN their hands, with h8k seaplanes and with submarines to refuel them, the Japanese could keep an eye on the West Coast of the United States. The big flying boats didn’t have to carry bombs every time. Getting a look at what the Yankees were up to counted for just as much, maybe more.

Commander Mitsuo Fuchida wished he could go on more H8K missions. But he had a swarm of other duties, and that one flight had to suffice for him. He did attend every briefing by pilots coming back to the Pan Am Clipper berth in Pearl City.

“The Americans are more alert than they were the first time we visited them,” Lieutenant Kinsuke Muto reported. He paused to yawn, then said, “So sorry. Please excuse me.”

None of the officers who’d gathered to hear him could possibly have been offended. Even for an H8K, the round trip to the mainland took a long time. A pilot who did most of the flying had earned the right to be tired. “Go on, Muto-san,” Fuchida urged. “You can sleep soon.”

“Hai,” Muto said. “Yes, they are more alert. The blackout is better than it was-not as good as it ought to be, but better than it was. They had fighters out looking for us. Night interceptions aren’t easy, but they found one of the planes in the flight.”

The officers listening to the briefing exchanged glances, but no one said anything. Like Fuchida, some of the others had to know about the USA’s electronic detection gear. Until someone figured out countermeasures, Muto didn’t need to.

“There was an exchange of fire,” Muto continued. “The H8K has a couple of bullet holes in the tail, but nothing serious. The pilot broke off contact and escaped. After that, all the antiaircraft guns around Los Angeles harbor started going off. The tracers helped us more than they hurt; they showed exactly where the harbor was and lit it for us.”

“What did you see?” Three officers asked the same question at the same time.

“More freighters and more Navy ships than we did two weeks ago,” Lieutenant Muto answered. “They are building strength. What else can they be building it for but a strike against Hawaii?”

“Did you see any carriers?” Fuchida asked, ahead of anyone else.

“No, sir.” Muto paused to yawn again. “I’m sure I didn’t. Carriers stand out because of their size and their flight deck. Warships, yes. Freighters-maybe troopships-yes. But no carriers.”

“If they aren’t in Los Angeles, they will be in San Diego or San Francisco or Seattle.” Fuchida spoke with complete assurance. “The question is, how many will the Americans bring against us? That will tell a large part of the story of how the fight goes.”

“Hai. Honto. Our alliance with the Germans serves us well here.” Minoru Genda sounded as precise as usual. Fuchida admired the way his friend saw not only the big picture but also how pieces of it applied to a particular situation. Genda went on, “If Germany and the USA were not at war, the Americans could move more carriers from the Atlantic and attack us with overwhelming strength.”

“We’re better than they are,” Fuchida said.

“We’ve had the advantage when we met them,” Genda responded. “We were lucky to get away from the fighting at the invasion with as little damage as we did. If that one torpedo hadn’t been a dud, they would have sunk Akagi or hurt her badly. I heard the thud, and then-nothing. I was very glad.”

“Gaining the advantage before going into the fight is part of being better,” Fuchida said stubbornly. “Our pilots are better than theirs. Zeros are better than their Wildcats. We saw that.”

“Wildcats are good enough to be dangerous with a good pilot,” Genda said.

Fuchida snorted. “If the pilot is good enough, what he flies hardly matters. But our fliers are better, all in all. As for Wildcats, they can take damage and they’re very fast in a dive. Otherwise, the Zero outdoes them in every way.”

Major Kuro Horikawa was an Army pilot. He said, “You will have Army fighters and bombers to help you against the Americans.”

Neither Fuchida nor Genda spoke right away. Major Horikawa meant well. Telling him straight out that his planes weren’t as important as he thought would make him lose face. Commander Genda chose his words with obvious care: “So far, neither side has had much luck striking ships with land-based aircraft.”

“Your planes will be very useful if the enemy lands on Oahu,” Fuchida added. “We will certainly be fighting out of the range of land-based fighters, though, and probably out of the range of most land-based bombers as well. Our goal is to defend Hawaii as far forward as possible.”

“Your G4M bombers are likely to be in the fight.” Horikawa couldn’t quite hide his resentment. “They’re land-based, even if they’re Navy aircraft.”

“They were specially designed for long range,” Fuchida said. “Even so, it is not yet decided whether they will go into the fight.” The G4Ms got their extremely long range by carrying lots of fuel. They sacrificed crew armor, self-sealing gas tanks, and structural strength for that range… and raids on Australia, Burma, and India had shown them to be extremely inflammable. Fuchida didn’t want to talk about that. The Navy didn’t air its dirty little secrets in front of the Army, any more than the Army told the Navy about its.

“We need to find out about the American carriers,” Genda told Lieutenant Muto. That was the most important order of business for him, too. Any Navy man with a gram of sense knew carriers were what really mattered. Yamato and Musashi were the biggest, most powerful battleships ever built. But if American bombers or torpedo planes flying off carriers sank them before they came within gun range of enemy battlewagons, what good were they?

As far as Fuchida was concerned, the Navy would have done better to build carriers with the steel and labor that went into the superdreadnoughts. Other opinions had prevailed, though. He couldn’t do anything about that but regret it.

“We’ll try our best to locate them, sir,” Lieutenant Muto promised.

“Good,” Fuchida said. “We caught the Americans by surprise here. They had better not do the same to us.”

“They won’t. We won’t let them,” Genda said. “If they want to take these islands back, they’ll have to go through everything we can throw at them-and we can throw a lot.”

THE BUZZ OF the Stearman’s engine grew thinner as Joe Crosetti eased back on the throttle. The runway swelled beneath and ahead of him. He checked his airspeed and angle of descent. Still a trifle steep… He pulled back on the stick, just a little, and the Yellow Peril’s nose rose a bit. Airspeed was okay, but he checked again to make sure his flaps were down. They were. They had been the last three times he checked, too.

Here came the runway. No time for second thoughts now. He just wanted to do things right. Ninety percent of the trouble in the last twenty feet… That wasn’t a second thought; his flight instructor had drilled it into him till it never left his mind.

Down! The Stearman bounced. Joe’s teeth clicked together. It wasn’t so smooth as he would have liked, but he was down. If he bounced once, he didn’t bounce twice. The little biplane taxied to a stop. Joe let out a long sigh and killed the engine. He unfastened his chute and his safety belt.

Lieutenant Ralph Goodwin strode across the tarmac to him. “Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” he said. “Pretty smooth, in fact, up until the very last moment there.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joe said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“I’ve seen people walk away from plenty worse after their first solo,” Goodwin answered. “How does it feel?”

Realization of what he’d done washed through Crosetti. “Swell, sir!” He wasn’t the first in his training squadron to solo, but he was ahead of more cadets than he was behind.

“All right, then,” Goodwin said. “Let’s see you walk away from it.”

Joe got out of the Yellow Peril. He gave the wing an affectionate pat. “When can I go up again?”

“Oh, it won’t be long,” the flight instructor said. “But you’ll be moving into a new squadron soon. They may transfer you to another base-they’ll have to check the openings here.”

As Chapel Hill had before it, Pensacola was starting to feel like home. “I hope they don’t,” Joe said.

“Wouldn’t hurt you if they did,” Goodwin told him. “You’ve got to be able to fly anywhere, not just at a place you know well. But you’ll take a step up, any which way. You’ve done what you can do on this baby. Time to see how you handle a Texan.”

“Yeah.” Joe knew he sounded less excited than he should have. He didn’t want to climb into another trainer, even a more advanced one. He wanted to get into a Wildcat and start shooting down Japs.

Longing must have been naked on his face. Goodwin laughed and clapped him on the back. “Don’t look down your nose at a Texan. The Aussies use the ones they make for ground-attack planes and light bombers-Wirraways, they call ’em. And there’s even talk that they’ll build a version with a cleaner airframe and a bigger engine and use it for a fighter.”

That struck Joe as a desperation measure. Of course, Australia was in pretty desperate shape these days. With Hawaii lost, the USA had a devil of a time getting supplies over there. And the Japs ruled the skies above the northern part of the country. Everybody wondered when they were going to invade, though it hadn’t happened yet.

“Come on,” Goodwin said. “Let me buy you a beer. You’ve earned one, by God. Just remember, you’ve got to walk before you can run. Now that you’ve soloed, you’re not taking baby steps any more.”

“Yes, sir.” Every word of that was true, and Joe knew it. Even so, he ached to be where the action was. He ached for there to be action. “Sir, when are we going to try and take Hawaii back from the Japs?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Goodwin replied. “I’ve got no idea-and if I did, I probably couldn’t tell you anyway. You want to be along for that, don’t you?”

“You bet I do-more than anything,” Joe said. “That’s why I signed up for this. And after what those bastards did to my uncle and his family-”

“You still have a chance, I’d say,” Lieutenant Goodwin told him. “Come on-let’s see about that beer.”

“Okay.” Unlike some of his buddies, Joe didn’t do a whole lot of drinking. For one thing, he was still underage. For another, he didn’t like the taste of the stuff all that much. But this was a ceremonial occasion.

Goodwin sat him down at the bar in the officers’ club and bought him a Budweiser. A couple of stools over, two lieutenant commanders were still going on about the alligator hunt of a few days past. A pair of officers had poured down more than might have been good for them and gone out into the swamp not far from the base vowing to come back with an alligator. Some time later, they’d proudly returned with a deceased snapping turtle tied to a broomstick. They’d taken it to market in Pensacola and got eleven cents a pound for it-plus ribbing that wouldn’t quit.

“Here’s to you, Joe,” Goodwin said, hoisting his own bottle of Bud. “And here’s to giving the Japs what-for.”

“Thanks.” Joe sipped cautiously. Once, when he was a little kid, his old man had let him take a swig from a bottle of beer. It had tasted nasty then. Am I poisoned? he’d squeaked. His father had laughed like hell. He still wasn’t crazy about the stuff, but it didn’t make him want to get his stomach pumped any more.

The colored man behind the bar asked, “This here the gentleman’s first solo?”

“That’s right,” Goodwin told him.

He slid a dime back across the bar. “On the house.”

“Thanks.” The flying instructor stuck the little silver coin in his pocket. “See, Mr. Crosetti? You don’t just save the country when you learn to fly. You save me money, too, so you’re really a hero.”

“Right.” Joe felt silly. Part of him recognized that this was a piece of the celebration, too. The rest was embarrassed all the same. He worked conscientiously at the beer. He supposed one was okay. If he had more than one, he didn’t think he’d be able to see straight for his afternoon classes. He had enough trouble keeping up in navigation the way things were.

When he went to the mess hall for lunch, Orson Sharp all but waylaid him. “How did it go?” his roomie demanded.

“I got up,” Joe answered. “I got down. I’m still here. I bounced the landing a little, but I’m still here.”

“All right!” Sharp grabbed his hand and squeezed it and pumped it up and down. Like everything else about the Mormon, his enthusiasm was perfectly genuine. He’d soloed the week before; his competence was perfectly genuine, too. He seemed delighted to have company, even though Joe was competition for a precious slot on a carrier. “We may be the first room where both guys have soloed.”

“Yeah?” Joe hadn’t thought about that. “I guess maybe we are. Pretty neat. Maybe we’ll stay together when we switch squadrons, too.”

“I think we’re stuck with each other,” Sharp said. “We’ll probably make ace the same day.”

“Yeah!” This time, the word burst from Joe’s throat with savage enthusiasm. And then something else occurred to him. “When you soloed, did your instructor try to buy you a beer?”

“Sure.” Orson Sharp was anything but self-conscious.

“What did you do?” Joe asked.

“I had a glass of apple juice instead,” Sharp answered calmly. “He said it looked like beer from a little ways away, but that isn’t why I did it.”

“Why did you, then?” Joe inquired, fascinated by the way his roommate did what he thought he ought to do without worrying in the least about anybody else’s opinion. He wondered if he could have matched such self-assurance. He doubted it.

Sharp looked at him. “I like apple juice.”

Joe laughed out loud. “You break me up, buddy, I swear to God.”

“That’s nice.” No, nothing bothered Sharp. “Before too long, we’ll both be breaking up the Japs.”

“Yeah!” Joe said again.

THE LANDING CRAFT bobbed in the waves as it waddled through the Pacific toward the beach. Shells flew overhead. Lester Dillon remembered those freight-train noises only too well from the First World War. Along with the rest of the men in the clumsy landing craft, he bent down a little, as if that would help if one of those shells came down here instead of on the beach. Booms up ahead said the cruisers and destroyers doing the firing were rearranging the landscape pretty drastically.

Suddenly, the landing craft’s bottom grated on sand. The swabbies who were in charge of the ship as long as it was on the water unhooked the landing ramp at the bow. It thudded down, kicking up quite a splash as it did.

Captain Bradford was hitting the beach in this landing craft, too. “Come on, y’all!” he yelled, swarming forward. “Let’s go!”

“Move! Move! Move!” Dillon added, even louder. “The longer you hang around with your thumbs up your asses, the better the chance the Japs have of dropping one on a whole bunch of you.”

Marines raced out of the boat. Their boots thudded on the steel ramp. Clutching his rifle, Dillon ran for the beach, too. As soon as he got off the ramp, he went into the water more than halfway up to his knees. It was cold water, too. He swore as he splashed shoreward.

As soon as he got up onto the beach, he threw himself flat and aimed his Springfield, looking for targets. “Keep moving, men!” Braxton Bradford shouted. “Can’t let ’em pin us down here!”

Landing craft by the dozen were vomiting Marines onto the beach. All the officers and noncoms were screaming the same kinds of things. As Platoon Sergeant Dillon ran inland, he looked back over his shoulder. The destroyers and cruisers had ceased fire, but they were still out there, ready to drop shells on anybody who gave the leathernecks trouble.

Dillon caught up with the company commander. “How are we doing, sir?”

Bradford sprawled behind a bush going brown from lack of rain. “Well,” he drawled, “it’s a hell of a lot easier when they don’t shoot back.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” Dillon agreed. “This doesn’t look a hell of a lot like a Hawaii beach, either. Ocean’s sorta green, sorta gray, not blue like it’s supposed to be.”

“Damn near froze my feet when I went in, too,” Bradford said. “I remember the first time I went into the Pacific in California. Hell, it was a hot day, and there I was at the goddamn beach, so I charged right on into the water. A minute later, I charged right on out again, too. Damn near-damn near-froze my nuts off.”

“I believe it,” Dillon said. “Like you say, the weather can get hot, but the ocean never warms up.”

Bradford looked up to the sky. “Other thing is, we don’t have any of those goddamn Zeros strafing our asses here. If we can’t get air superiority-”

“Sir, if we can’t get air superiority, we’ll never make it to the beach, let alone off it,” Dillon said.

“Uh-huh.” The company commander nodded. Dillon had seen more optimistic nods. Hell, he’d felt more optimism himself. Zeros had proved much more effective than anything anybody had dreamt the Japs owned. From Pearl Harbor to Australia to Ceylon, they’d chewed up Wildcats and Buffaloes and Warhawks and Spitfires. Allied planes hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of chewing back, either.

“Up to the flyboys,” Dillon said.

“Yeah.” Captain Bradford nodded again. “They reckon they can do it-and we get to go along for the ride and find out if they’re right.”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Dillon agreed. If the Japs kept control of the air over Hawaii… Well, Pearl Harbor had shown what air superiority was worth. And if it hadn’t, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the disaster in the Philippines would have. It wasn’t a battleship world, not any more-carriers had more clout.

The Marines continued their advance inland. Dillon kept shouting to his men to be careful. He kept warning them that it wouldn’t be so easy when the real thing started. He kept reminding them that the Japs would shoot back, and nobody was doing any of that here. And he kept seeing that all his warnings were going in one ear and out the other. More than half the Marines he led hadn’t been born when that machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg in 1918. They didn’t know what being under fire was like. Live-fire exercises made them think they did, but those weren’t the real thing. Nobody shot to kill in live-fire exercises. The Japs, on the other hand, would be playing for keeps.

Dillon wasn’t worried that his Marines would turn tail when they came under fire. He wasn’t even worried that they would freeze up and not shoot back. He had absolute confidence in their courage. He did fear that too many of them would stop bullets because they leaped before they looked, or because they didn’t know what to look for before they leaped. A few hours-sometimes a few minutes-of real combat would teach a lot of those lessons. Sadly, he didn’t know anything else that would. Some of his Marines would get killed before they could learn, and that pained him.

Unlike a real amphibious assault, this one ended with a bus ride back down to Camp Elliott. Some of the men pointed to Camp Pendleton, where bulldozers and steam shovels and carpenters and masons swarmed. The big new base was going up lickety-split. Les Dillon remained glad he had nothing to do with it. The men on this bus with him-they were the ones who’d go into action first, and that was what he wanted to do himself.

Some of them were looking out across the Pacific instead of at the construction on land. His own eyes kept sliding west and south, too. A little more than two thousand miles away: that was where he wanted to be.

In a low voice, he asked Captain Bradford, “We really gonna ship out soon, sir? Is that the McCoy, or is it just the usual bullshit?”

“Well, you never can tell for sure,” Bradford answered, just as quietly, “but I’d sure as hell be ready to sling a duffel over my shoulder and haul ass in a hurry if I was you.”

“Right.” Excitement flared through Dillon. He sometimes wondered why. He did know what combat was like-and he wanted to go back to it? But, crazy or not, he did. “I’ll have the men ready, too,” he promised.

“Reckoned you would,” the company commander said, and not another word after those three. Dillon was proud.

He let his Marines know what was what without making a big fuss about it. He didn’t want them too excited, in case the rumor turned out to be just a rumor after all. The next day, Dutch Wenzel tipped him a wink. The other platoon sergeant thought it would happen, too, then.

And it did happen. Four days later, they were ordered onto buses again, this time to the port of San Diego. They climbed aboard the B. F. Irvine, a converted freighter. By everything Dillon could see, the conversion was hasty and incomplete. The accommodations he and his men got were better than the railroad cars he’d used in France. Of course, those had been marked 36 MEN OR 8 HORSES. These weren’t a hell of a lot better, either.

Seeing the narrow, gloomy, airless space in which he’d make the journey to Hawaii, a Marine said, “I ought to complain to the Red Cross.”

“Fuck that,” his buddy answered. “They’re treating us like dogs, so complain to the goddamn SPCA.”

They had their first abandon-ship drill a little more than an hour after leaving port. Part of Les approved; they were doing what they needed to do in case of disaster. The rest of him worried. Did they have so little confidence that they could evade Japanese subs? If they did, how much trouble was the invasion fleet liable to be in?

He shrugged, down there in the bowels of the troopship. He couldn’t do anything about it, one way or the other.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU felt every gram in the pack on his back. He and his men had spent too long in Honolulu, and hadn’t done enough while they were there. Now they were marching again, and he could feel that they hadn’t done it for too long. He could also feel that it was summertime. Oahu didn’t get cold in the winter or hot in the summer, but it was warmer now than it had been when he fought his way south across the island. As the sweat streamed down his face, he felt every degree, too.

“Come on, keep it up!” he called to his men. “You’ve got soft! You’ve got fat! You’ve got lazy!” He’d got soft and fat and lazy himself, but he wasn’t about to admit it to the soldiers in his squad. He would march till he fell over dead before he showed weakness. Noncoms had to act that way. If they didn’t, if they let their men get the edge on them, they couldn’t hope to do their job.

The very landscape had changed since he last came this way. It wasn’t that he was heading north instead of south, either. What had been fields full of sugarcane and pineapple were now rice paddies. That gave the countryside a much more familiar feel. The men who had grown the other crops were now hard at work to feed the island. Some of them looked up from the fields as the regiment marched by. Others just kept on with what they were doing.

“I wonder if they’d rather be doing this or the work they had before,” Senior Private Furusawa said. He’d always had an inquiring turn of mind.

“They’d rather eat,” Shimizu said. “You can’t live on that other stuff, even if it’s nice once in a while. Rice, now…” He didn’t go on, or need to. To him, to all of them, rice was food. Everything else added variety.

All the blown bridges on the north-south highway had been repaired. All the damage from mines and shells had been fixed, too. Cars and trucks and tanks could travel without any trouble. So could soldiers.

Shiro Wakuzawa asked, “Are the Americans really going to attack us? Didn’t we teach them enough of a lesson when we took Hawaii away from them?”

“Who knows for sure?” Shimizu answered. “That’s not for us to worry about. If they try to land on Oahu, what we’ve got to worry about is throwing them back. We can do it-if we’re in the right place when they try to land. If we’re there and they don’t have the nerve to try anything, that’s all right. But if we aren’t and they do, then we’ve got a problem.”

Mynah birds scolded the Japanese soldiers as the men marched north. Corporal Shimizu did his best to ignore them. They were noisy and pushy and had no manners. They might as well be Americans, he thought.

When he said that out loud, the men in his squad laughed. Of course, any joke a noncom made was automatically funny to the men he commanded. Corporals and sergeants had too many ways to avenge themselves on soldiers who didn’t think so-or, more to the point, who acted as if they didn’t think so.

Shimizu remembered the other birds he’d seen when he first came to Oahu: the pigeons and the little blue-faced doves. They’d got thin on the ground in Honolulu, and there weren’t many of them left in the countryside, either. He had no trouble figuring out why: they were good to eat, and food had got scarce. When supplies came regularly from the U.S. mainland, nobody’d bothered the birds. Nowadays, though, they were nothing but meat.

More slowly than they should have, the Japanese soldiers reached the cross road that led west to Schofield Barracks. A gang of American prisoners was repairing it, as the POWs had already done on the north-south road. The prisoners were a sorry-looking lot: skinny and dirty and dressed in the tattered remnants of the uniforms they’d worn before giving up.

“See what happens when you surrender?” Shimizu said, pointing their way. “That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve. Better to die fighting. Better to hug a grenade to your chest and get everything over with at once. Then, at least, you don’t disgrace your family. Honto? ”

“Honto! ” his squad chorused. No hesitation, no disagreement. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace. How could you hope to go back to your home village after falling into the enemy’s hands? You couldn’t. You’d bring dishonor with you, and all your kin would lose face. Yes, better by far to tap a grenade against your helmet and then hold it tight. Everything would be over in a hurry, and your spirit would go to the Yasukuni Shrine.

After the turnoff for Schofield Barracks came the town of Wahiawa, more of it to the east of the road than to the west. Locals on the street bowed, but didn’t pay much attention to the regiment passing through. By now, they were bound to be used to Japanese soldiers coming and going. They were thin, too, though not so scrawny as the American prisoners. Shimizu thought most of them were skinnier than the civilians in Honolulu. He wondered how much of the fish the sampans caught came this far inland. Not much, unless he missed his guess.

No matter how skinny they were, some of the white women wore scandalously little: nothing but shorts that came more than halfway up their thighs and tops that covered their breasts but not much else. A yellow-haired woman perhaps a few years older than Shimizu walked along the sidewalk with her back very straight, doing her best to pretend the Japanese soldiers in the street didn’t exist.

“They look like whores,” somebody behind Shimizu said.

Soldiers nodded, though he wondered why. No whore in Japan would show herself in public wearing so little; it would shame her. From what he’d seen in the brothels in Honolulu, the same held true here. None of the women in Wahiawa seemed the least bit ashamed.

The women did seem cool and comfortable in the warm weather. Shimizu’s feet were sore. Sweat dampened his uniform. He could smell the men he marched with. They didn’t have the sour, beefy reek a like number of Americans would have, but he knew they were there. He sighed, wishing he were marching with almost-naked women instead of his squadmates. That would sure liven up the day.

Not far beyond Wahiawa, the regiment took a ten-minute break. “Leave your boots on,” Shimizu warned his men. “If you take them off, your feet will swell up and you won’t be able to get them back on again. You wouldn’t like that.” Anyone who couldn’t get his boots back on would have to finish the march barefoot. No, the men wouldn’t like that a bit.

When the sun went down, the regiment was short of Haleiwa and had to camp by the side of the road. The officers muttered and fumed at that, which meant Shimizu and the other noncoms were obliged to mutter and fume, too. He didn’t know about anybody else, but he growled at his squad more for form’s sake than from conviction. If he’d had to march another hundred meters, he was sure he would have fallen over dead.

Cooks who’d brought their field kitchens on horse-drawn carts fixed rice for the men. Some of the soldiers had fallen asleep and couldn’t be shaken awake even to eat. “More for the rest of us,” Senior Private Furusawa said.

“Yes, why not?” Shimizu agreed. “For them, sleep is more important. As for me, I wouldn’t be sorry if the cooks slaughtered the horses and fed them to us, too.” Hashi flashing in the firelight, he emptied his bowl amazingly fast-but he wasn’t the first man done. The soldiers who were hungrier than they were sleepy were hungry.

Shimizu told off soldiers to stand watches through the night. One of the benefits of his none too exalted rank was that he got to assign such duties instead of enduring them. He cocooned himself in his blanket and fell asleep. Though he’d been able to eat, exhaustion made the ground seem softer than the mattress on his cot back in the Honolulu barracks.

He wasn’t so happy when he woke up a little before dawn the next morning. He felt stiff and sore. Grunting, he stretched and twisted, trying to work out the kinks. Then he undid his fly and pissed into a rice paddy. Men lined up along the paddy’s muddy edge to do the same.

After more rice for breakfast, the regiment set out again. For the first little while, Shimizu felt like his own grandfather-except that his grandfather had fought in the Sino-Japanese War and always went on about how soft the modern generation was. Then his muscles loosened up and he just felt tired. Tired wasn’t so bad; after yesterday’s march, he’d earned the right to be tired.

“The sea! The sea!” Someone pointed north, toward the Pacific.

“It’s the same sea that washes up against Japan,” Yasuo Furusawa said. He was right, of course. Corporal Shimizu knew that. Like everyone else in the regiment, he’d sailed across every centimeter of it in the Nagata Maru. There hadn’t been any place where he’d had to get out and walk. But it didn’t always feel like the same sea. It was so much warmer, so much bluer, and-except on north-facing beaches in wintertime-so much calmer.

“Remember the waves we rode going up onto the beach?” Shimizu said. “Didn’t that make your bottom pucker up? And it could have been worse. It could have been too nasty to let us land at all. I don’t know what we would have done then.” He had a pretty good idea, though. Ready or not, they would have tried to land. They hadn’t come all that way to sit in the troopships.

“If the Yankees try to land now, the waves won’t throw them around,” Corporal Aiso said. “It’s calm and peaceful during the summer. So it’ll be up to us to shoot them on the beaches if they get that far.”

“If the Navy’s doing its job, they won’t,” Shimizu said.

“If the Navy was doing its job, the Americans wouldn’t have bombed us here,” Aiso said. “If the Navy was doing its job, American subs wouldn’t be shelling us and sinking our ships and spying on us.”

“Well, that’s the Navy,” Shimizu said, and everyone who caught his tone of voice nodded. What can you do about such people? he might have asked. Of course, a sailor would have said, Well, that’s the Army, and sounded exactly the same-half exasperated, half amused. Neither service thought the other had the faintest idea what it was doing.

When the regiment got up to Haleiwa, near the north coast of Oahu, Shimizu expected to turn right and march east. He’d come ashore near Waimea, and the march up from Honolulu had felt a little like running the film of the invasion in reverse. He was taken aback when the column turned left instead. But the beaches past which the soldiers marched were broad and friendly, the country behind them flat and inviting for an invader-flatter and more inviting than where he’d landed. Mountains rose to the south and west, yes, but behind a good stretch of plain now converted to rice paddies.

Fighters with the Rising Sun on flanks and wings rose from an airstrip not far inland. Shimizu smiled to see them as they roared overhead. The handful of planes the Americans managed to put in the air had done damage out of proportion to their numbers till Zeros dealt with them. Unlike the Americans, Japan wouldn’t be caught sleeping. The planes zooming out helped guarantee that.

Grass and ferns had grown over the works the Yankees had dug near the beaches to try to hold back the Japanese Army. The plants and the rain had softened their outlines, as well as those of the bomb craters and shell holes from the Japanese bombardment that had forced the enemy soldiers away from their hastily dug holes.

Lieutenant Horino led his platoon to some of the battered, abandoned American works. “We are going to restore these, men,” he said, by which he meant, You are going to restore these — he wasn’t about to pick up a shovel himself. “We are going to restore these, and meet the enemy on the beach if the Navy screws up and lets him land. If he does, his bones will bleach on the sand. Honto? ”

“Hai! ” the soldiers shouted, Takeo Shimizu loud among them.

“Not one American will set foot on the grass. Honto? ”

“Hai! ”

“Then get to work.”

A corporal wasn’t above digging in with an entrenching tool, even if a lieutenant was. As Shimizu cleared trenches and built breastworks, he looked out to sea. The Americans had sited this position well. If not for destruction rained on them by airplanes and warships, they might have held it. We will hold it, Shimizu thought, and added more dirt to the breastwork.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA stood by the edge of the Wheeler Field runway. Right on schedule, two Mitsubishi G4M bombers flew in from the northwest and landed on the runway. The G4M had proved very useful. It was almost as fast as a fighter, and it had extraordinary range, which meant the Japanese Navy sometimes, as now, ferried important passengers across long stretches of ocean in G4Ms.

But the bomber wasn’t perfect. Everything came with a price. The Mitsubishi plane burned like a torch if it got hit.

No danger here, though; there were no hostile aircraft within fifteen hundred kilometers of Hawaii. The G4Ms taxied to a stop, one behind the other. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki got out of the first plane: a short man with a face so round, it was almost wider than it was long. From the second G4M descended the officer for whom Ugaki served as chief of staff: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto had a firm rule that he and his chief aide should not travel in the same aircraft, lest one disaster overwhelm them both.

Yamamoto looked around as Genda hurried across the tarmac toward him and Ugaki. “So this is Oahu,” said the commander of the Combined Fleet.

“Yes, sir,” Genda said, saluting. “Have you never been here before?”

“I’ve seen Honolulu on my way to and from the United States,” Yamamoto answered. “I never got back into the countryside, though. How about you, Ugaki-san?”

“This is my first time here, sir,” Ugaki said. “Pretty. The weather’s nice, neh?”

“Hai,” Genda said. “If the weather were all we had to worry about, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about, if you know what I mean.”

Yamamoto smiled. As always, Genda was struck by the sheer physical presence of the man. Yamamoto was short-though not quite so short as either Genda or Ugaki-but energy blazed from him. He said, “Well, we didn’t come here to take on the weather.”

“No, sir,” Genda agreed. “We are honored that you have come to take personal charge of the defenses of Hawaii.” He bowed, thinking, And you and Ugaki both outrank General Yamashita. About time the Navy was in charge of things again.

Shrugging broad shoulders, Yamamoto answered, “The highest-ranking officer should be in charge at the most important point, neh? Nothing is more important for the Empire than holding Hawaii. You were the one who first pointed that out: here we have the great shield behind which the rest of our conquests have proceeded. The Americans are not blind to this. In their hands, Hawaii is a shield no more, but a dagger aimed at our heart.”

Commander Genda bowed. “You are too generous, sir.”

“I don’t think so,” Yamamoto said. “I’ll want to get out to sea as fast as I can. The Yankees are on their way, eh?”

“So it seems, sir,” Genda replied. “They appear to have slipped by our submarines at night, but flying boats report that large numbers of Navy ships and transports are no longer in West Coast harbors.”

“Why haven’t the famous flying boats found the enemy fleet at sea, then?” Vice Admiral Ugaki asked irritably.

“My guess is, the Americans are trying something sneaky,” Yamamoto said before Genda could reply. “They’ll come down on us out of the north, or maybe even from the northwest, instead of making a straight run from their Pacific coast. And the straight route is the one the flying boats and the subs will be patrolling most. What do you think, Genda-san?”

“That’s how it looks to me, too, sir,” Genda said. “They’ll assemble somewhere up in the north, hope they can defeat our carrier force, and try to land if they do.”

“Good enough,” Yamamoto said. “Well, the sooner we get out to Akagi and go after them, the better off we’ll be. We have better planes and better pilots, and I aim to take advantage of it.”

“Yes, sir,” Genda said, and then, “You’ll want to spend the night here on Oahu, won’t you, and fly out in the morning? You’ve been traveling for a long time.”

By the look on Vice Admiral Ugaki’s face, he would have liked nothing better. But Yamamoto shook his head. “I’ll rest when I get there,” he said. “I want to make sure I’m in place when the fighting starts. If I wait, it may start without me. You do have aircraft here that can land on a carrier?” His bulldog expression said somebody-probably Genda-would catch it if he had to wait while planes came back to Oahu from the Akagi.

But Genda pointed to a pair of Aichi dive bombers. “They are at your service, sir.”

“Good.” There was never anything halfway about Yamamoto. If he was unhappy, he was very unhappy. If he wasn’t, everything was rosy. He walked over to the edge of the runway, undid his fly, and eased himself on the grass. When he came back, he was smiling. “That’s a lot better than trying to piss in a tin can while an airplane’s bouncing all over the sky. Go on, Ugaki-san, while you’ve got the chance. You won’t make a mess here.”

“I didn’t make a mess,” Ugaki said with dignity, but he walked off the runway and turned his back, too.

Admiral Yamamoto threw back his head and laughed. Now that he saw he’d got what he wanted, he was in a good mood. He cocked his head to one side and studied Genda. “Are you feeling well, Commander? You look a little peaked.”

Genda bit down on his lower lip in embarrassment. He hadn’t realized it showed. “I’m… all right, sir.” He gave himself the lie, for he started coughing and wheezing and had trouble stopping. “I’ve had a little trouble with my lungs lately; nothing too bad, though.”

“You ought to see a physician,” Yamamoto said.

“I intend to, sir-after we beat the Americans.”

“All right, as long as you’re well enough to help us fight them. You won’t do the Empire any good if you’re flat on your back.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that. I’ll get through the fight.” Genda knew he was trying to convince himself as well as Admiral Yamamoto. There’d been a couple of times when he almost did go to the doctor in spite of the action looming ahead. But whatever was troubling his chest had eased back, and here he was.

Here came the officer in charge of Wheeler Field: a lieutenant colonel. He bowed to Yamamoto and Ugaki in turn. “Honored to have you here, sir,” he told the commander of the Combined Fleet. “I trust you’ll do me the honor of dining with me tonight?”

“I’m afraid not,” Yamamoto said, and the Army officer’s face fell. Yamamoto did take the time to make sure the man understood it was nothing personal: “My chief of staff and I are going straight out to our flagship, as soon as you can put pilots into those Aichis. The Americans won’t wait.”

In the face of such formidable devotion to duty, the lieutenant colonel said the only thing he could: “Yes, sir.”

Genda knew a certain amount of relief. At least Yamamoto didn’t propose flying out to the Akagi himself. He had his wings, yes, but Genda didn’t think he’d ever made a landing on the deck of a flattop. Yamamoto caught his eye and raised one eyebrow slightly. Genda gave back an almost imperceptible nod. Yamamoto said, “And make sure you have a plane for Commander Genda as well. His assistance is bound to prove invaluable.”

“I’ll take care of it, sir,” the Army man promised. His eyes raked Genda. Who the devil are you? he might have asked. Genda didn’t enlighten him.

Inside half an hour, Admiral Yamamoto and Vice Admiral Ugaki were winging their way north. A little later, the lieutenant colonel scraped up another Aichi D3A1 and a pilot to ferry Genda out to the Akagi. He still didn’t know who Genda was or what he’d done to deserve singling out by name by the most famous officer in all the Japanese armed forces. That suited Genda-who cared for results much more than for renown-just fine.

The flight didn’t suit him so well. The longer it went on, the less happy his chest got. He tried willing the congestion away, as he had before, but didn’t have much luck. He huddled in the dive bomber’s rear seat, doing his best not to move. When the plane came down in the controlled crash that was a carrier landing, he had to bite back a groan.

Getting out of the Aichi after the pilot opened the canopy took all his strength. He dragged himself down to the flight deck and stood there swaying. Captain Kaku, who’d come out of the island onto the deck to greet him, took one look at him and snapped, “Go to the dispensary.”

“I’m all right, sir,” Genda protested feebly.

“Go to the dispensary. That’s an order, Commander.” Kaku’s voice had not a gram of give in it. Genda gave back a miserable salute and obeyed.

A doctor with round-lensed spectacles like Prime Minister Tojo’s listened to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope. “I’m very sorry, Commander, but you have pneumonia,” he announced. “It’s a good thing you came to see me. You need a spell of bed rest.”

“But I can’t!” Genda said.

“You have to,” the doctor said firmly. “Dying gloriously for the Emperor is one thing. Dying because you don’t pay attention to what germs are doing to you is something else again. You’ll be fine if you take it easy now. If you don’t, you won’t-and you won’t do your country any good, either.”

“But-” Commander Genda felt too rotten to work up a good argument. He supposed that went a long way toward proving the doctor’s point. They put him in sick bay. He lay on an iron-framed cot staring up at the gray-painted steel ceiling not far enough overhead. For this he had come out to Akagi?

JIM PETERSON LOOKED down at his hands. By now, the blisters he’d got when he started road work had healed into hard yellow calluses. No, his hands didn’t bother him any more. A steady diet of pick-and-shovel work had cured that.

Trouble was was, the work was the only steady diet he had. No matter what the Japs promised, they didn’t feed road gangs much better than they had the prisoners back at the camp near Opana. If the American POWs starved-so what? That was their attitude.

And getting enough to eat wasn’t even Peterson’s chief worry. If that wasn’t a son of a bitch, he didn’t know what would be. Making sure nobody in his shooting squad-and most especially not Walter London-headed for the tall timber took pride of place, if that was the right name for it. The man didn’t give a damn about anything or anybody but himself. Everybody knew it.

“He’s gonna get us all killed, you know that?” Gordy Braddon said as they dumped dirt and gravel into a hole in the road near Schofield Barracks. “He’s gonna get us all killed, and that ain’t the worst of it. You know what the worst of it is?”

“Depends,” Peterson said judiciously. “Maybe you mean he’ll do something stupid and get himself caught and shot, too. Or maybe you mean he won’t just get us killed-he’ll laugh about it, too.”

The PFC stared at him. “Shit, Corporal-you readin’ my mind or what?”

“Hell, anybody with eyes can see what that London item is like,” Peterson said. “He’d take money out of a blind man’s cup-and then, if he thought somebody was watching, he’d toss back a nickel so he’d look good.” Quietly, out of the side of his mouth, he added, “Careful. He’s liable to be listening.”

Gordy Braddon looked around. “Sorry. Don’t reckon he heard me, though.”

“Okay.” Peterson checked, too, a lot more subtly. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Can’t blame me for being jumpy, though.”

“Only thing you can blame anybody for these days is letting his pals down. You don’t do that, by Jesus,” Braddon said. Two dive bombers blazoned with Rising Suns flew north over their heads, not too high. Braddon watched them till they were out of sight. “I think the Japs are jumpy, too. They’ve been doing a lot more flying lately than they had for quite a while. Wonder what the hell it means.”

“Just one thing I can think of.” Peterson had watched the dive bombers, too, watched them with hatred in his eyes. Planes like that had done horrible things at Pearl Harbor-and, he gathered, against the Enterprise, too. Scowling still, he went on, “They must figure we’re going to try to take the islands back.”

“Christ!” Braddon said reverently. “Hope to God you’re right. You think we can do it?”

Before Peterson could answer, the Japanese sergeant who did duty as straw boss for the work gang pointed at the two of them and said, “Isogi! ” That meant something like, Make it snappy! As slave drivers went, he was a fair man. He warned you before he turned the goons loose on you. If you didn’t get the message, it was your own damn fault. Peterson found it a good idea to busy himself with his shovel for a while. Braddon worked beside him.

After a while, the Jap found someone else to yell at. It never took real long. For one thing, the American POWs were doing work they hated, work any idiot could see would help Japan against their own countrymen. No wonder they didn’t give it their finest effort. And even if they’d shown the best will in the world, they were still too weak and too hungry to work as hard as the Japs wanted them to.

“I’m with you. I hope we can do it,” Peterson said when he judged the coast was clear. The Japanese sergeant didn’t come down on him. Neither did any of the other guards. He kept busy filling in shell holes and potholes just the same. “I’m afraid of what happens if we don’t send enough out to do what needs doing. Yeah, that’s what scares me. Back on the mainland, have they figured out how tough the goddamn Japs really are?”

“If they haven’t, they sure ain’t been paying attention,” Gordy Braddon said. Like Peterson, he went on talking while he worked now. “They beat the shit out of us here. They did the same thing in the Philippines. They bombed San Francisco, for cryin’ out loud. What more does the mainland need?”

“Maybe they’ve got the message over there. I hope so. But I don’t know. I remember how things were before the shooting started,” Peterson said. “Hardly anybody thought they’d have the nerve to pick a fight with us, and everybody thought they’d get their heads handed to them if they tried. After all, they were just using a bunch of junk made out of our old tin cans, right?”

His laugh had a bitter edge. The Japs had used a lot of U.S. scrap metal till FDR stopped selling it to them. But they hadn’t built junk out of it. He’d never got a nastier surprise in his life than when he tried dogfighting a Zero with his Wildcat. The Jap in that fighter had taken him to school, chewed him up, and spit out the pieces.

From what he’d heard since, he’d been damn lucky not to get shot while he was parachuting down to the ground, too. Plenty of pilots had been. The Japanese didn’t respect the chivalry of the air. As far as he could see, they didn’t respect anything but strength. If they had it and you didn’t, they walked all over you. If you had it and they didn’t… maybe they’d kowtow. Maybe. How could anybody know for sure? Nobody’d managed to make ’em say uncle yet.

Walter London laid down his pick in the middle of the road. “I’ve got to take a whizz,” he announced, as if the bulletin were as important as one from the Russian front.

To Peterson and the other men in the shooting squad, it was a lot more important than that. He looked at his comrades in mistrust. Was it his turn? He thought it was. He let his shovel fall. “Me, too,” he said.

London scowled at him. “I can’t even piss without somebody looking over my shoulder.”

“It’s not while you piss that really scares me,” Peterson answered. “But if you take off afterwards, I get shot.”

“I won’t do that,” London whined.

“Not while I’m watching you, you won’t,” Peterson said.

London went off behind a bush. Peterson stood behind another one no more than ten feet away. He didn’t need to piss. He was sweating so hard, most of his water leaked out that way. London did a fine job of watering the grass. “See?” he said to Peterson as he set his clothes to rights.

“Hot damn,” Peterson said. He almost added, Only goes to show what a pissant you are. Almost, but not quite. If he came down on London too hard, he’d give the SOB reason to run and hope everybody else in the shooting squad, or at least one Jim Peterson, got an Arisaka round right between the eyes.

Peterson sighed as they both headed back to the roadway. Maybe having to make calculations like that was the worst part of being a POW. He went back to work while another northbound dive bomber roared by overhead. As soon as he got another hole halfway filled, he was forcibly reminded that exhaustion and starvation came in a long way ahead of calculation after all.

WHEN MITSUO FUCHIDA went down to the Akagi ’s sick bay to see how his friend Genda was doing, a pharmacist’s mate wearing a gauze mask over mouth and nose-a masuku, they called it in Japanese-chased him away. “Gomen nasai, Commander-san,” the petty officer said, not sounding sorry at all, “but Commander Genda is contagious. We don’t want anyone else coming down with his sickness.”

“I just wanted to say hello and ask how he’s doing,” Fuchida protested.

“I will pass on your greetings, sir.” The pharmacist’s mate stood in the doorway like a dragon. “Commander Genda is doing as well as can be expected.”

That could mean anything or nothing. “About how long do you think he’ll be laid up?” Fuchida asked.

“Until he is well enough and strong enough to resume his duties,” the pharmacist’s mate said. Fuchida wanted to hit him. Petty officers slapped seamen around all the time, the same way Army noncoms did with common soldiers. Officers needed good reasons for belting noncoms, though, and a refusal-or maybe just an inability-to communicate wasn’t enough, not when the pharmacist’s mate was odds-on to be obeying the doctor’s orders by keeping Genda isolated.

Thwarted, Fuchida turned away and went up to the officers’ wardroom. The food there was better than what he’d been eating in Honolulu. Captain Kaku was also there, eating a bowl of pickled plums and sipping tea. “Any sign of the Americans, sir?” Fuchida asked.

The skipper shook his head. “Not yet, Commander. Believe me, you’ll be the first to know.” His voice was dry. Fuchida looked down at his own snack so Kaku wouldn’t see him flush. When the Yankees were spotted, he would lead the strike against them, as he’d led the first strike against Pearl Harbor and then the attack on the Lexington. Of course he would know as soon as anyone else did.

He found another question: “How are our engineers doing on electronic ranging gear like the Americans have?”

“I’d hoped Zuikaku and Shokaku would have it,” Captain Kaku answered. “No such luck, though. I think we understand the principles. Now the problem is getting it into production, installing it aboard ship, and training men to use it.” He shrugged. “We have our picket sampans out there, and we have H8Ks patrolling beyond them, and we have the cruisers’ float planes for close-in reconnaissance. Wherever the enemy comes from, he won’t take us by surprise.”

“That’s what counts, sir,” Fuchida agreed. “As long as we meet the Americans on anything like equal terms, we’ll beat them.”

“I see it the same way,” Kaku said. “Admiral Yamamoto is less hopeful. He fears the United States will outproduce us no matter what we do.”

“Let the Americans try,” Fuchida said. “If we keep sinking their ships, it doesn’t matter how many they build. And we’ll be building, too.”

“Hai.” The captain of the Akagi nodded. “This is also how it seems to me, Fuchidasan. You’re a sound man, very sound.” What Kaku no doubt meant was that he and Fuchida held the same opinion. He went on, “The admiral has a different view. He says we have no idea of how much materiel the United States can produce once all its factories start going full tilt.”

“And the Americans, who have so much, begrudge us the chance of getting our fair share,” Fuchida said angrily. “They think they should be the only big power in the Pacific. We’ve taught them a thing or two, and if they want another lesson here, I’d say we’re ready to give them one.”

As if his words were the cue in a play, a yeoman from the radio shack stuck his head into the wardroom. “Ah, here you are, Captain-san!” Excitement crackled in his voice. He waved a sheet of flimsy paper. “We have a report from one of the flying boats. They’ve spotted the American ships, sir! The pilot reports three enemy carriers, sir, with the usual supporting ships. Range about eight hundred kilometers, bearing 017.”

Three against three, Fuchida thought. Equal terms-just what I asked for. Now to make the most of it.

“Domo arigato,” Kaku breathed. After thanking the yeoman, he went on, “Any sign of transports-of an invasion fleet?”

“Sir, I have no report of them,” the radioman answered.

“If they are there, sir, they may be hanging back, waiting for their carriers to dispose of ours,” Fuchida said. “I wouldn’t want to expose troopships to air strikes.”

“Hai. Honto. Neither would I.” Captain Kaku turned back to the yeoman. “You’ve informed Admiral Yamamoto?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the man said. “He nodded to me and he said, ‘Now it begins.’ He spoke to me, sir!” He seemed immensely proud of himself. A Christian to whom Jesus had spoken might have sounded the same way.

Kaku got to his feet. “I’m going to sound general quarters,” he said to Fuchida. “They’re still out of range, but now we know where they are.” To the yeoman again: “Do the Americans know that flying boat has spotted them?”

“Sir, if they do, the message didn’t say,” the yeoman told him. Fuchida nodded to himself, liking the response. The man wasn’t trying to read anything into what he’d got from the H8K. Many radiomen might have.

“Let’s tend to business, Commander,” Kaku said. “You’ll want to get your men ready for what’s ahead of them, I’m sure. And we’re all going to be busy before very long.”

“Yes, sir,” Fuchida said. He and Kaku both hurried out of the wardroom. The skipper of the Akagi headed for the bridge. Fuchida made for the pilots’ briefing room on the hangar deck, right under the flight deck. Hardly knowing he was doing it, he rubbed at his belly as he hurried along. If he had a bellyache, he would just have to ignore it. More important things were going on. General quarters sounded before he was even halfway to the briefing room. He nodded to himself. This was why he’d gone to the Naval Academy at Eta Jima, to the naval aircraft training center at Kasumigaura, to war against the United States in the first place. One more strong blow…

Sailors and officers ran every which way, hurrying to their battle stations. Fuchida ducked into the briefing room as the mechanics and other members of the maintenance crew began making sure the level bombers, torpedo planes, dive bombers, and fighters were as ready for action as they could be.

One of the dive-bomber pilots made it to the briefing room less than fifteen seconds behind Fuchida. The man grinned and said, “I might have known you’d be here first, Commander-san.”

“I’m not that fast,” Fuchida said. “I happened to be in the wardroom with the captain when the news came in. I was on my way over here before the alert sounded.”

“News? What sort of news?” the pilot asked eagerly. “The sort we’ve been waiting for?”

“Patience. Patience,” Fuchida answered with a smile of his own. “That way I’ll only have to tell the story once.”

“Yes, sir.” The dive-bomber pilot didn’t sound patient. He sounded like a small boy reluctantly awaiting permission to open a present sitting there on a mat in front of him.

More pilots swarmed into the briefing room, along with radiomen and bombardiers for the Nakajimas and Aichis. They were all chattering excitedly; they knew what the call to general quarters was likely to mean. They kept flinging questions at Fuchida, too, as he stood there in front of the map.

When the room was full, he held up his hand. The fliers were in such a state, they needed a little while to realize he was calling for quiet. Slowly, a centimeter at a time, they gave it to him. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said when he could make himself heard through the din. “Thank you. The news I have is the news we’ve all been waiting for. We have found the Americans.”

That started everyone talking at once again. He’d known it would. “Where are they?” “When do we take off?” The questions rained down on him.

“We don’t take off yet-they aren’t in range,” Fuchida answered. “They’re about-here.” He pointed on the map. “One of our H8Ks picked them up way out there.”

“Banzai! for the flying boats!” somebody shouted, and a cheer filled the briefing room. How can we lose with men like these? Fuchida thought proudly. Another pilot called, “What are we going to do about them, sir?”

“I don’t know yet, not officially,” Fuchida replied. “Admiral Yamamoto and Captain Kaku haven’t given the orders. But I’ll tell you this-we didn’t come out here to invite the Yankees to a cha-no-yu.”

The officers and ratings laughed. As if the round-eyed barbarians could appreciate a tea ceremony anyway! “We’ll make them drink salty tea!” a pilot yelled.

“That’s the spirit,” Fuchida said. “Be ready. I expect we’ll close with the enemy and attack. Banzai! for the Emperor!”

“Banzai! Banzai! ” The shout filled the briefing room.

OUT ON THE Pacific, Platoon Sergeant Les Dillon was playing poker with four other noncoms when the B. F. Irvine ’s engine fell silent, leaving the troopship bobbing in the water. “What the fuck?” He and two other sergeants said the same thing at the same time.

“It’s your bet, Les,” Dutch Wenzel said.

Dillon shoved money into the pot. “I’ll bump it up a couple of bucks,” he said. He had two pair, and nobody’d shown much strength. But the change in the background noise worried him. “What the hell are they doing? They break down? We’re sitting ducks for a goddamn Jap sub if we just park here.”

“Thank you, Admiral Nimitz,” said Vince Monahan, who sat to Les’ left. He tossed in folding money of his own. “Call.”

“I’m out.” Wenzel threw in his hand. So did the last two sergeants.

“Here’s mine.” Dillon laid down his queens and nines. Monahan said something unpleasant. He’d had jacks and fives. Dillon raked in the pot. “Whose deal is it?” he asked.

“Maybe we ought to find out what’s going on,” Monahan said. “We were steaming around in the North Pacific marking time, and then we started heading south like we were really going somewhere-”

“Yeah. Somewhere,” Dillon said drily. The other men in the poker game grunted. A couple of them chuckled. They’d been heading for Oahu and whatever happened when they hit the beach. Now… Now they weren’t going anywhere.

A few minutes later, the engines started up again. So did the poker game, which had stalled. The troopship swung through a turn. Dillon’s inner ear told him they were heading east now, more or less, not south. The game went on. The B. F. Irvine went through what felt like a one-eighty half an hour later, and then another one half an hour after that.

“Jesus Christ!” Wenzel said. “Why the fuck don’t they make up their minds? They send us all the way out here to march in place, for crying out loud?”

“I know what it could be,” Dillon said.

“Yeah?” Wenzel and Monahan and the other two men in the game all spoke together.

“Yeah,” he replied. “The Navy’s got to be up ahead of us somewhere. If they don’t clear the Japs out of this part of the Pacific, we aren’t gonna make it to Oahu to land. If they’ve bumped into ’em…”

After some thought, Dutch Wenzel nodded. “Makes sense,” he allowed. “They wouldn’t want us bumping into carrier air.” He made a horrible face. “That could ruin your whole day, matter of fact.” One more brief pause. “Whose deal is it?”

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO prided himself on never getting too excited about anything. Tomorrow morning, battle would come: Japan’s most important fight since the opening blows of the war against the USA. Some people were jumping up and down about that-and making a devil of a racket doing it. Shindo ignored them. He sprawled dozing in a chair in the briefing room. He wore his flying togs. He could be inside his Zero and airborne in a matter of minutes.

Every so often, the noise around him got too loud to stand, and he’d wake up for a little while. When he did, he thought about what he would have to do. This would be no surprise attack. The Americans knew they’d been spotted. They’d sent up fighters to chase off or shoot down the first H8K that found their fleet. They’d done it, too, though the flying boat had taken out a Wildcat before going into the Pacific. By the time it went down, others were in the neighborhood.

The Yankees might try to get away under cover of darkness-try to scurry back to the West Coast of the United States. Some of the Japanese pilots thought they would. Saburo Shindo didn’t believe it. Running now would be cowardly. The Americans hadn’t fought very well on Oahu, but they’d fought bravely. They wouldn’t run away.

If they weren’t running, what would they be doing? Shindo fell asleep again after he asked himself the question and before he answered it. He realized as much only when his eyes came open some time later and he noticed half the people who had been around him were gone, replaced by others. He started chewing on things once more, just as if he hadn’t stopped. What would the Americans do?

Stay where they were and wait to be attacked? He wouldn’t do anything that foolish. He would storm forward, launch his own search planes as soon as it got light, and strike with everything he had the instant he found the Japanese fleet. If he could see that, wouldn’t the Yankees be able to see it, too? He expected they would.

They had three carriers. The Japanese also had three, including two of the newest, largest, and fastest in the Navy. The Americans had who knows what for pilots. The Japanese had men who’d smashed everything they came up against from Hawaii to Ceylon. The Americans used Wildcats for fighters. The Japanese used Zeros. Shindo yawned and smiled at the same time. A Wildcat could take more punishment than a Zero. It could, yes-and it needed to. He dozed off one more time, laughing a little as he did.

When he woke again, it was with someone’s hand on his shoulder. Full alertness returned instantly. “Is it time?” he asked.

“Not quite yet, sir.” The man standing beside him was one of the wardroom stewards. “We’re serving out a combat meal before the fliers go up.” He held out a bowl full of nigirimeshi — rice balls wrapped in bamboo shoots, with plums at their centers.

“Arigato.” Shindo took one and bit into it. The stewards had served the same meal before the fliers set off for Pearl Harbor. Another man carried a tray with cups of green tea. Shindo washed down his breakfast with it.

Akagi ’s three elevators were lifting planes from the hangar deck to the flight deck, getting them ready to go into action. Flight-crew men wrestled the bombers and fighters into position one after another. As soon as each elevator went up and came down, another plane went on. Up above, more men from the flight crew would be fueling the planes and making sure their engines and control surfaces and instruments were in good working order. Armorers would be loading bombs and torpedoes, machine-gun bullets and cannon shells. When the time came…

Before it came, though, Shindo gathered up the fighter pilots he would be leading. “Some of you were stuck on Oahu with me when the American bombers raided us,” he said. “They fooled us, and they hit us, and they made us lose face. Now is our chance to get revenge. Are we going to let it slip through our fingers?”

“Iye! ” the fliers answered loudly. Not all of them had been stuck on the island, but every one had been embarrassed. Of course they would say no.

“Good,” Shindo told them. “Very good. They want a lesson. It’s up to us to give them one. By the time we’re through with them, they won’t want to come anywhere near Hawaii for the next hundred years. Let’s give the Emperor a Banzai! and then go out there and serve him.”

“Banzai! ” the fighter pilots shouted. They hurried up to the flight deck.

Shindo climbed into his Zero. Morning twilight stained the eastern sky with gray. Somewhere out there, the enemy waited. As Shindo went through his checks, he was pretty sure he knew where. Any which way, he would get a signal from the bombers, whose radios were more fully hooked into the reconnaissance network.

Planes began roaring off the flight deck. He fired up his engine. It roared to smooth, powerful life. His turn came soon. The air officer swung his green lantern in a circle. Shindo’s Zero sped along, dipped as it went off the end of the deck, and soared into the sky.