Days of Infamy

III

JIM PETERSON HADN’T thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the Enterprise tell him what a damn fool he’d been, but he didn’t think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.

And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the Enterprise. They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he’d interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don’t care what I’m in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”

They wouldn’t listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn’t have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.

“You see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren’t the only one who wants another shot at the Japs-but you’re gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”

“Jesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The Enterprise had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“Beats me,” the captain answered.

“They kicked us in the nuts, and we weren’t even looking!”

“Sure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it’s not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there-literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn’t just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”

“Up in smoke is right,” Peterson said. Little by little, the sheer scale of the disaster began penetrating even his stubborn soul. “For God’s sake, if you can’t do anything else, give me a rifle and a helmet and let me shoot at ’em.”

For the first time, the Marine officer looked at him with something approaching approval, not barely concealed annoyance. “That, now, that may be arranged-if it turns out there’s anybody to shoot at.”

Peterson stared at him. “If they’ve done this much, you think they won’t follow it up with an invasion? They’d have to be crazy not to.” He was a born zealot; his views swung from one extreme to the other with the greatest of ease.

Supper was an oddly carefree meal, featuring some of the best lamb chops Peterson had ever eaten. Supper also featured hot and cold running booze. Admiral Halsey sometimes winked at the rules against shipboard alcohol, but Peterson had been mostly dry for a while now. The whiskey and rum and gin and Irish coffee added something to the rumors coming in from around the island. Some of the Marines believed everything, no matter how gloomy. Some refused to believe anything.

“Only stands to reason,” one of them insisted. “If the Japs plastered us and Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t have had much left over to do anything else.”

“Bullshit,” said the captain who’d shown Peterson around. “If they did that much down here, they aren’t going to forget about Schofield and Wheeler and Kaneohe. They’ll hit everything.”

Reports seemed to bear him out. With the radio off the air, though, Peterson found it hard to be sure of anything. He supposed the big wheels here knew what was really going on. He hoped they did, anyhow. They should have-phones were still working, even if the radio had been yanked. But whatever they knew, they weren’t talking. That by itself seemed to say the news wasn’t good.

Peterson got a cot in a tent that night, and counted himself lucky. When reveille sounded, he thought for a moment he was back aboard the Enterprise. Then memory returned. He was swearing as he bounced to his feet. A Marine climbing out of another cot a few feet away nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, Navy, it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said.

“A bitch and a half,” Peterson answered. “What the hell do we do now?”

“Might as well have breakfast,” the Marine said practically. “Soon as the brass wants anything from us, I figure they’ll let us know.”

Breakfast was bacon and eggs and hash browns, not much different from what Peterson would have eaten on the Enterprise — she hadn’t been at sea long enough to switch from fresh to powdered eggs. But the walk to the mess hall reminded him where he was and what had happened. The west was light, but in the east the sun couldn’t penetrate the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t even slowed down the fires there during the night. How much fuel was burning?

He’d just got a second cup of coffee when air-raid sirens began to howl. He sprang up and followed the Marines as they ran for shelter. Most of them made for a nearly finished swimming pool not far away. “First time I ever jumped into one of these when it was dry,” he said.

He got a laugh. Minutes later, though, bombs started whistling down. Being on the receiving end and unable to hit back was anything but funny. A few antiaircraft guns banged away, but the enemy airplanes were high in the sky. Peterson didn’t think any of them got hit. No U.S. planes rose to challenge them. No U.S. planes at Ewa could.

“This isn’t how it was yesterday morning,” said one of the Marines in the pool. “Then they came in with fighters, right over the rooftops. We shot back with Springfields,45s, anything we could get our hands on. Didn’t do a hell of a lot of good, not as far as I could see.”

The bombers didn’t linger very long. After ten or fifteen minutes, they droned away. The Marines and Peterson emerged from their makeshift shelter. A bomb had knocked over the old Navy airship mooring mast the Marines used for a control tower. Another had hit the enlisted men’s barracks, which the Zeros had shot up the day before. One end had fallen down, and what was still standing was on fire. And that second cup of coffee never got finished, because the mess hall had taken a direct hit.

Bombs had hit the asphalt X of the runways, too. If Ewa had had any flyable planes, they wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground till the craters were repaired. “Son of a bitch!” Peterson said, looking around at the devastation. “Son of a bitch!”

“That’s about the size of it,” agreed the captain who’d taken charge of him the day before. He hadn’t been in the pool, and Peterson hadn’t seen him at breakfast, either. By his drawn features, he hadn’t had any sack time the night before. He went on, “You were talking about drawing a helmet and a rifle and making like a soldier. Were you serious about that?”

“Hell, yes,” Peterson answered without hesitation. But then he thought to ask, “How come?”

“About what you’d expect,” the Marine officer answered. “The Japs are on the island.”

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO didn’t much care for flying combat air patrol above the Japanese task force. As far as he was concerned, that was a job for the float planes from the battleships and cruisers that had accompanied the aircraft carriers to Hawaii. But Admiral Nagumo had ordered differently, and so Shindo buzzed along with his engine throttled back to be as miserly with fuel as he could.

He would rather have been strafing the American soldiers on Oahu and finishing the job of knocking out the U.S. aircraft on the island. But he was not the sort of man to protest orders. When Commander Genda told him to take charge of the patrol, he’d just nodded and saluted and said, “Aye aye, sir.”

In a way, he could see the need. They’d sunk one carrier. But they thought three or even four had been based at Pearl Harbor. If planes from any of those showed up at the wrong moment… well, life could get more interesting than Shindo really wanted. He preferred things to go according to plan.

His eyes darted now right, now left, now center. He kept flicking them here and there. If anything was in the sky to see, he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss it. Stare straight ahead all the time, and even important things wouldn’t register.

He’d been flying for a couple of hours, and almost dismissed the float plane off to the west as one of his countrymen. But the lines weren’t quite right. Neither was the color-Japan seldom painted her aircraft that oceanic blue.

“That’s an American plane!” The words crackled in his earphones. One of the other pilots had spotted it too, then. “It’s seen us. I’ll shoot it down!”

“No!” Shindo said sharply. “No one is to shoot at that airplane until I do. The rest of you, continue on your normal patrol.”

Had another man given orders like that, the fliers under him would have thought him out for glory, out to run up his own score. With Lieutenant Shindo, that was unimaginable. He gunned his Zero toward the American plane.

The enemy pilot took awhile to spot him. No doubt the Americans were paying more attention to the ships spread out ahead of them. That was their duty, after all. Not until just before Shindo fired a machine-gun burst at him did they realize they had company. Only after the burst did the pilot turn toward the west and try to escape. The radioman, who also had charge of the rear-facing machine gun, shot back at the Zero.

Shindo pulled back out of range, as if afraid. Then he made a couple of feckless lunges at the float plane. He fired each time, but his bursts went wide. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” one of the other fliers demanded. “For heaven’s sake, finish him. Do you want him to get away?”

“No,” Shindo said, and said no more for a little while. Then he radioed the carriers: “Enemy aircraft’s bearing is 280. I say again, 280. Along that bearing, we will find American ships, and we may also find planes on the way to attack us.”

He got no acknowledgment. He’d expected none. Even if the enemy had spotted them, the carriers needed to maintain radio silence, especially if a U.S. carrier had launched against them.

Now that he had the bearing, he could end the little farce he’d been playing out. He felt proud he’d been the one to get it here as well as from the Wildcats near Pearl Harbor the day before. He climbed and then dove. The enemy gunner couldn’t fire at him without shooting off his own tail. Shindo put several cannon shells into the float plane’s belly. This held no sport. It was simply killing: a part of war. The American plane tilted in the air. Smoke poured from it. The pilot fought for control-fought and lost. Down toward the water he fell. He and his gunner had both been brave and skillful. Flying a scout plane against the best carrier-based fighter in the world, that hadn’t helped them a bit.

The next question was twofold. What could the task force throw at the U.S. ships off to the west? And what were the Americans throwing at them?

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA counted himself lucky. If his Nakajima B5N1 hadn’t come back to the Akagi to refuel at just the right time, he wouldn’t have been able to join in the search for the newly suspected American ships. The Japanese air commander shook his head. Somewhere off to the west, there were American ships; they weren’t just suspected. That float plane hadn’t come from nowhere. How many ships and of what sort remained to be seen, but they were there.

As soon as the deck officer gave him the signal, he gunned the bomber toward the Akagi ’s bow. There was, as usual, that sickening dip when the bomber went off the flight deck, that moment of wondering whether it would splash into the sea instead of rising. But rise it did. Fuchida took it up to join the rest of the scratch attack force Admiral Nagumo and Commander Genda were throwing together.

B5N1s loaded with bombs, B5N2s with torpedoes slung beneath their fuselages, Aichi dive bombers, and Zeros to shepherd them along all mustered together. Fuchida was glad the Zeros had longer range than most fighters; they’d probably be able to protect the attack aircraft all the way to the target. If the American plane had found the Japanese fleet, surely the Japanese would be able to return the favor.

Fuchida waited impatiently for planes to fly off the six Japanese carriers and join the attacking force. He was never one to like loitering-he wanted to go out there and hit the enemy. And the Americans would not be idle. If one or more of their carriers was with that force, they would have launched as soon as they got word their scout had located the fleet that was punishing Oahu.

After half an hour, he radioed, “I am commencing the search,” and flew off to the west with the planes already in the air. A timely attack with fewer aircraft was better than a great swarm that came too late. Somewhere north and west of Kauai, the enemy waited.

Forty-five minutes went by. Then one of the pilots with him exclaimed, “Airplanes! Airplanes almost dead ahead!”

Almost dead ahead they were: a little north of the course on which the Japanese were flying. As they got nearer, Fuchida saw they were about the same sort of force as the one he led: torpedo planes and dive bombers with fighters flying cover. Those fat, stubby fighters weren’t Wildcats. They had to be Brewster Buffaloes, the U.S. Navy’s other carrier-based fighter planes.

Wildcats had proved themselves no match for Zeros. What about Buffaloes? We’ll find out, Fuchida thought. “Odd-numbered Zeros, attack the U.S. planes,” he ordered. “Even-numbered Zeros, stay with our force.” As nine or ten Zeros peeled off, the sun shone brightly on the Rising Suns on their wings and fuselages. Some of the stumpy Buffaloes turned to meet them. Fuchida sent a message back to the task force: “From size of enemy force, estimate it comes from one carrier. Repeat, from one carrier.”

American fighters began tumbling in flames. The Buffaloes couldn’t climb and dive with the Zeros. They couldn’t turn as tightly, either. Fuchida smiled. He knew white men thought Japan built junk. But whose planes survived and whose spun helplessly toward the Pacific? Junk, was it?

Then the Zeros were in among the American attack aircraft. The U.S. torpedo bombers were simply sitting ducks: too slow to run away and too poorly armed to fight back. His own B5N2s far outdid them. Zeros hacked down several in swift succession. The dive bombers were better at both evading and defending themselves. Fuchida couldn’t fault the American pilots’ courage. He’d seen that from the beginning. But courage went only so far. Without skill and an adequate airplane under you, courage was only likely to get you killed.

A handful of the Brewster Buffaloes tried to come after the Japanese bombers and torpedo planes. Again, the covering Zeros had no trouble driving them off or shooting them down, though they did damage one Aichi dive bomber enough to make it turn back.

Commander Fuchida swung his planes a few degrees north of their previous course. He also ordered them to spread out more widely, to give themselves the best chance of finding the American ships. They droned on. Somewhere out here, in this vast ocean…

FROM THE AKAGI ’S bridge, Commander Minoru Genda swept the western sky with field glasses. Fuchida’s planes had crossed paths with the American attack force about forty-five minutes after flying west. That had been about forty-five minutes before, which meant the Americans should find the Japanese task force… now, more or less.

Beside Genda, Admiral Nagumo looked thoroughly grim-but then, Nagumo usually looked that way. “This could prove very expensive,” he said.

Genda shrugged. “Yes, sir,” he said; he couldn’t openly disagree with his superior. But he went on, “We are as ready for the attack as we can be. We have fighters overhead. All the antiaircraft guns are manned. The ships are tightly buttoned up. We can give a good account of ourselves. We have been very lucky so far. When we war-gamed this attack, we thought we might well lose a couple of carriers. As long as Operation Hawaii succeeds, it will be worth it.”

The twin lines between Nagumo’s eyes got deeper. “Easy for you to speak so lightly of losses, Commander. This is not your task force.” Genda looked down at his shoes for a moment, accepting the rebuke.

A yeoman rushed onto the bridge. “Destroyer Tanikaze and combat air patrol report enemy aircraft in sight!” he exclaimed.

Tanikaze, right now, was the westernmost of the destroyers screening the task force. She would have sent the signal by blinker unless her captain disobeyed orders. The planes had to use radio. Could the Americans pick them up?

Too late to worry about it now-no sooner had the yeoman spoken than black puffs of antiaircraft fire started filling the western sky. “Now the Anglo-Saxons will see what we can do,” Genda said.

“Hai.” Chuichi Nagumo nodded heavily. “And we will also see what they can do.”

“So far, they haven’t done much. We can stop them,” Genda said confidently.

The first glimpse he got of American planes was of the smoke and fire trailing from one as it splashed into the Pacific. All at once, the Akagi started maneuvering like a destroyer, to make herself as difficult a target as she could. The deck beneath Genda’s feet thrummed as the big ship’s engines went up to full power.

Akagi ’s antiaircraft guns started firing. Genda couldn’t see what they were shooting at, but their crews had a much broader view of the action than he did. He hoped they shot well.

All five other carriers were dodging, too, as were the supporting ships in the task force. As far as Genda was concerned, the Americans were welcome to go after destroyers or cruisers or even the two battleships that had sailed from Hitokappu Bay. In the new calculus of naval warfare, carriers were all that mattered.

Bombs splashed down around one of those carriers-Genda thought it was the Kaga, but he wasn’t sure. Then, amidst the tall columns of white water the near misses threw up, he saw a swelling cloud of black smoke. The ship was hit, how badly he had no way to guess. A dive bomber streaked off toward the west, a Zero hot on its tail. That was an uneven contest. The dive bomber did a flat roll and splashed into the sea. But its crew had hurt their foes before falling. Commander Genda nodded a salute to brave men.

Somebody on the bridge screamed, “Torpedo plane!” and pointed to starboard. Automatically, Genda’s head whipped that way. The U.S. aircraft was plainly on its attack run, zooming straight toward the Akagi. Antiaircraft fire converged on it. A Zero dove towards it. Its pilot ignored all distractions. He needed to be perfectly aligned to drop his torpedo, and perfectly aligned he was.

Genda watched the fish fall from the plane, watched it dive into the Pacific. The Japanese had had to expend a lot of sweat and engineering on their torpedoes to make sure they didn’t go too deep and bury themselves in the mud under the lochs of Pearl Harbor. Here on the open ocean, that mattered not a bit. The American torpedo could dive as it pleased. It would come up soon enough to strike.

Not fifteen seconds after the torpedo plane launched its missile, the Zero shot it down. That was, of course, fifteen seconds too late. The Akagi turned sharply to starboard, to try to present the smallest possible surface to the torpedo. Some men on the bridge prayed. Others cursed. Some did both at once.

Neither would do any good now. Everything depended on that American pilot’s aim. Genda gritted his teeth. He feared the enemy flier had known exactly what he was doing, and had done it well. He’d thrown his life away like a ten-sen coin to make sure he had the proper line. Which meant…

Thump! The impact echoed through the carrier. But it was only a thump, not the boom Genda had tried to brace himself against.

“A dud!” Half a dozen men said it at once. Smiles of glad relief filled the bridge. Minoru Genda laughed at himself. Maybe prayer had more to do with how things went than he’d thought.

“Some kami watched over us there,” Admiral Nagumo said, which amounted to the same thing.

Another yeoman rushed onto the bridge. Bowing to Nagumo, he said, “Sir, Kaga signals bomb damage from two hits toward the stern. It would have been much worse, her captain says, if the hangar deck hadn’t been empty of planes.”

Nagumo and Genda and everyone else who heard that nodded. Planes waiting to take off were fires waiting to happen. And, like the rest of the carriers, the Kaga had already used up a lot of the munitions she’d brought to Hawaii. That helped make her less inflammable, too. Nagumo asked, “Does she still have power? What speed can she make?”

Genda added, “Can she land planes?” Nagumo, a big-gun admiral down to his toes, would not think of a question like that.

But Nagumo was the task-force commander, and the yeoman answered him first: “Sir, the engine room has taken some damage, but she can make fifteen knots. The engineers are doing all they can with repairs.” Having said that, the rating turned and bowed to Genda. “There is damage on the flight deck, sir. Right now, the ship cannot land planes. Again, the crew does hope to make repairs and keep her battleworthy.”

“Tell them to do all they can. Until we seize airstrips on Oahu, we have to have our flight decks clear,” Genda said. Saluting, the yeoman hurried back to the blinker.

The action seemed over. A few escort vessels were still firing, but Genda couldn’t see that they had any targets. The American planes that had attacked the task force had either gone down or fled.

Admiral Nagumo spoke in wondering tones: “All this fighting, and we have yet to set eyes on an enemy ship.”

“True, sir.” Genda nodded. He could hardly blame Nagumo for his surprise; there had never been a naval battle fought beyond gunnery range before, not in all the history of the world. After a moment, he went on, “The Americans haven’t seen our ships, either. That doesn’t mean we can’t hurt them.”

“Hai. That’s true, too.” Nagumo still sounded surprised.

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA stared out across the Pacific. More than anything else, he wanted to be the man who spotted the Americans’ flotilla. So he thought, anyway, till another flier shouted out that he saw ships. Then Fuchida discovered that he’d been wrong. Discovering the enemy was all very well. Destroying him was more important.

“Look for the carrier-or maybe carriers,” he radioed to the pilots in the bombers and dive bombers and torpedo planes. “Worry about other ships only after you’ve wrecked the carrier force. Bombers, line up behind your leaders.”

In training for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had discovered that most of their high-altitude bombardiers were not very accurate. They had not had the time to train them all up to the same standard. Instead, they’d assigned the best crews as leaders, and had the others follow them precisely and bomb just where they had. That had dramatically improved their percentage of hits. Now they would try it again.

“There!” A pilot’s voice cracked with excitement. “That ship is launching planes!”

For a moment, Fuchida didn’t see them. Then the glint of sun off metal or glass drew his eye toward the enemy planes, tiny in the distance. Yes, the ship that was launching them had a flight deck, but she also had smooth, almost rakish lines that showed the hull had originally been intended for a battleship or battle cruiser. The Akagi and the Kaga were the same sort of conversion. The Americans, if Fuchida remembered rightly, had started the Lexington and the Saratoga as battlewagons before changing their minds.

Which one was that, down below? He shrugged. It hardly mattered. Now that the Japanese had spotted her, they had to hit her.

He and his comrades had been spotted, too. The ships around the carrier started throwing up antiaircraft fire. Most of them began taking evasive action. The carrier stayed headed into the wind so she could go on sending up planes. That made her easier to pick out from the others.

“Each group-attack the target,” Fuchida ordered. “Fighters, accompany the torpedo planes.” They were the ones that had to fly low and straight. They most needed fighter protection. Fuchida went on, “Lead bombers-line up on the enemy carrier.”

He was a lead bomber himself. He used the voice tube to ask his bombardier how he should set the bomber’s course. “Five degrees to the left, sir,” the man said at once, and then, half a minute later, “Another five degrees.”

Fuchida obeyed with machinelike precision. For the time being, he was not his own man, only an extension of the bombardier’s will. Tracers climbed from the ships below, reaching for his plane. Flak burst in black clouds. Some of the explosions came close enough to shake the bomber, making it rise and dip in the air. He was flying straight and level, which gave the gunners a splendid target. He kept on even so. The mission was all that mattered.

Then the B5N1 leaped again. “Bombs gone!” the bombardier cried exultantly.

The bombardiers flying behind Fuchida would do their best to launch their bomb loads from the same spot as he had. Now the bomber was his again. He could speed up, slow down, jink, dive, or climb to evade the ferocious antiaircraft fire coming up from the Pacific.

And he could pay attention to the rest of the attack on the carrier. Down tumbled the bombs, till they disappeared against the background of the ocean. Zeros and Buffaloes were dueling at lower altitude. Several planes aimed straight for the carriers. Those would be the B5N2s with their torpedoes. One of them caught fire and crashed, then another-shot down, no doubt, by American fighters. The rest bored in on the enemy ship.

Bombs began bursting around the carrier. Was that a hit? Commander Fuchida couldn’t be sure. The big ship dodged desperately. She didn’t seem to be slowing down. If any of the bombs had struck home, they hadn’t done much damage. Fuchida’s curses made his disappointment echo in the cockpit.

Where were the Aichi D3A1s? The dive bombers shouldn’t miss, especially when the enemy fighters were pulled down toward the sea battling Zeros and attacking torpedo planes. That gave the Aichis a free run at the target.

Just about all the bombs from the high-altitude bombers had fallen now. Fuchida had thought some of them hit. The splashes couldn’t have come closer to the carrier. But she emerged from those columns of water still twisting and dodging at top speed. Hitting a moving target from four kilometers up wasn’t easy. We should have done it, though. Fuchida bit his lip in mortification.

Without warning, the carrier staggered, as a man might after an unexpected blow to the face. A plume of water rose from her port side. “Hit!” Fuchida screamed, unable to hold in his delight. “That’s a torpedo hit!”

The American carrier slowed to a crawl. The Aichis chose that moment to dive on her. The pilots in those planes were the best Japan had. They’d been training for months. When they struck, they didn’t miss. Bombs burst all around the carrier-and on her flight deck, too.

“Banzai! ” The fiercely joyous cry burst from Mitsuo Fuchida. “Banzai! Banzai! ” A moment later, he remembered his duty, and radioed back to the Japanese task force: “Enemy carrier heavily damaged. Black smoke rising. I can see flame through it. She is listing to port, more and more as I watch. She lies almost dead in the water now…” He switched to the frequency the fliers used: “Anyone who still has bombs, use them against the American battleships or cruisers.”

Only a few bombs fell. He’d expected nothing different. The carrier was the main target, and the Japanese had devoted most of their effort to wrecking her. Schwerpunkt, the Germans called the point of concentration. The fliers had done what they had to do. Fuchida circled over the carrier like a vulture over a dying ox. The list stabilized; some alert engineer must have begun counterflooding. But that only meant she sank on an even keel instead of rolling over. No more than half an hour went by from the first torpedo hit to the moment she slid beneath the waves.

One of the battleships or cruisers down there was on fire. The Japanese might not have had much to throw at the carrier’s escorts, but they’d done damage. Fuchida radioed the news to his carriers. He eyed the fuel gauge. It was getting low. No-it had got low. Where his was low, some of the others’ would be lower. Time to head back to the task force. Yes, they’d done what needed doing.

LIEUTENANT FLETCHER ARMITAGE supposed he was lucky to be alive. That was about as much luck as he could find in the situation. He shook his head wearily. One hand scrabbled through his pockets, looking for a pack of cigarettes. He found it. He still had his gun, too. Compared to what a lot of his fellow artillerymen had gone through, he was a lucky fellow.

He pulled out the Chesterfields. He couldn’t come up with a Zippo or matches, but that didn’t matter. He sprawled in front of a little fire somewhere not far south of Haleiwa. He got the cigarette going from that and sucked harsh smoke into his lungs.

“Can I scrounge one of those off you, Lieutenant?” asked a sergeant who sounded every bit as exhausted as Fletch felt.

“Why the hell not?” Fletch held out the pack.

“Thanks.” The sergeant lit his cigarette, too. In the red, flickering firelight, he looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. That was impossible, as he proceeded to prove: “Was it just yesterday morning when the Japs started jumping on us?”

“Yeah.” Out of somewhere deep inside him, Fletch dredged up a raspy chuckle. “Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?”

“Boy, no kidding.” The sergeant took another drag and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I never figured we’d get up to Waimea Bay, and then I never figured we’d get off the goddamn beach, either.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Armitage agreed. “Nobody ever said anything about what a high old time you have when the other bastard’s got air support and you don’t.”

The Japs had strafed the detachment twice more on the way up to Waimea Bay. By the time they were done, hardly any trucks would still move. That reduced the Army to going on foot or commandeering cars from motorists coming up Kamehameha Highway, motorists who had no idea there was a war on till they drove straight into it. Some of them hadn’t been very happy about giving up their automobiles. Rifles and bayonets, though, turned out to be mighty good persuaders. Pack as many soldiers into a car as it would hold-and then a couple of more-and tie a cannon to the rear bumper and you could go. The car’s motor and transmission and suspension might not be worth much afterwards, but who gave a damn?

Of course, bomb craters and the wrecks of shot-up cars in the road north hadn’t made things any easier. And they were coming up past the Dole plantation, where the pineapples grew right to the side of the road. Getting by on the shoulder wasn’t easy, because most places there wasn’t any shoulder to speak of.

Some of the workers in the fields were Filipinos. Fletch hadn’t worried about them. They were on his side. But what about the Japs who stared impassively at the Army men from under their broad-brimmed straw hats? What were they thinking? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was, he didn’t want to turn his back on them. Maybe that was foolishness. Maybe they were as American as hot dogs and apple pie. And maybe he didn’t feel like taking chances, just in case they weren’t.

Nobody’d counted on having to do part of the way from Schofield Barracks to Waimea Bay in the dark. Now that Armitage looked back on it, nobody’d counted on quite a few things. Almost all the drills he’d been through had made the unconscious assumption that everything would go pretty much according to plan. When things turned out not to go that way, a lot of people had no idea what to do next.

Fletch smoked his Chesterfield down to a tiny little butt, then crushed it out. He laughed, not that there was anything much to laugh about. Things were going according to plan, all right. The only trouble was, the plan had been drawn up in Tokyo, not Honolulu or Washington.

Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun fired off a burst. It wasn’t an American machine gun; it sounded different. Of its own accord, Fletch’s hand started for the.45 on his right hip. “It ain’t so bad, sir, when you hear shit going off ahead of you,” the sergeant said. “When it’s on your flank, that’s when you’ve got to look out for your ass.”

Armitage considered that. After a moment, he nodded. “Makes sense.” He laughed again, this time with something approaching genuine amusement. “Remember those two goddamn beach bums, stuck in the water between us and the Japs?”

“I’m not likely to forget ’em,” the sergeant answered. “Poor sons of bitches didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

Caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea was what Fletch had been thinking, but it boiled down to the same thing. And the surf-riders had been on the deep blue sea. With the Americans and the Japs both shooting at them and past them at each other, he didn’t know how they’d missed getting chopped into hamburger, but they had. They’d even managed to disappear in their jalopy. There were plenty of times over the past day when Fletch wished he could have done the same.

He supposed the main reason the beach bums were still breathing was that Japanese planes had come overhead just then. Getting bombed and strafed had distracted the Americans from the surf-riders-and, rather more to the point, from the barges full of Japs wallowing toward shore just then.

Had all the Americans been in position as planned, and had the Japs not been plastering them from the skies, they would have massacred the invaders before the barges ever got to the beaches. As things were…

As things were, they’d done their best. They’d hurt the Japs. Fletch had planted a shell right on a barge carrying a field gun and watched it turn turtle. But a Japanese bomb had upended the gun right next to his and blown its whole crew to red rags, while a strafing fighter coming in at treetop height had put more artillerymen out of action.

And then the Japanese soldiers had got onto the beach. That wasn’t supposed to happen. In all the drills, the invaders were repelled. Whoever’d worked out those drills had been an optimist. The Japs got on the beach, and then they were running up off the beach, shooting rifles and light machine guns and whatever else they had with them.

They’d even had a tank or two clatter down off a big barge. Their tanks didn’t look very impressive-they weren’t a patch on the M3s the Forty-first Tank Company at Schofield Barracks had. But they were where they needed to be, and the M3s weren’t. Machine-gun bullets bounced off them. Their cannons were popguns, but they could take care of machine-gun nests and shell unprotected field guns. And Fletch had discovered it was damned hard to hit a moving target with a 105mm gun.

He lit another Chesterfield. God only knew where he’d get more after the pack was empty, but he’d worry about that later. Now he needed the smoke. “We did everything we could,” he said. “I really think we did.” He sounded dazed and disbelieving even to himself.

“Yeah.” The sergeant nodded. “I guess maybe we did. It wasn’t enough, though. Those fuckers are on the island now. How the hell we gonna kick ’em off?”

“Beats me.” Armitage yawned. “All I know is, I’m falling asleep sitting up.”

“Go ahead, Lieutenant. I’ll shake you in a couple of hours so I can get some shuteye, too,” the noncom said. “Or maybe I’ll shake you sooner, in case we gotta fall back again.”

He didn’t say anything about shaking Fletch if the Americans started advancing. Plainly, he didn’t think they would. Fletch knew he should have reproved him. But he didn’t think the Americans would start advancing in the middle of the night, either. They hadn’t quite come to pieces when the Japs got ashore, but some of them had sure retreated at a pace faster than a walk.

Yawning again, Fletch finished the cigarette and stretched out by the fire. Back on the mainland, it would be cold. A lot of places, it would be snowing. He didn’t even worry about a blanket here. He closed his eyes and let sleep club him over the head.

He didn’t know how much he’d had when a hard hand on his shoulder prodded him back to consciousness. He did know it wasn’t nearly enough. “What the hell?” he asked muzzily. He felt slow and stupid, almost drunk.

“Sorry, sir.” The sergeant didn’t sound very sorry. “There’s shit going on off to our left. If the Japs turn our flank and get on the road behind us-”

“We’re screwed,” Fletch finished for him. The sergeant nodded. The fire had died down to crimson embers: barely enough to let Fletch make out the other man’s face. If the Japs got on the road behind them, they might escape through the fields. Their precious gun, though, would be lost. Right now, Fletch wouldn’t have parted with that gun for all the gold in Fort Knox. He didn’t know how many others were left. He didn’t know for sure if any others around here were left. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll pull back.”

What they had to pull back with was a 1935 De Soto, taken at gunpoint from a Japanese family out for a drive. Compared to the snorting truck that had hauled the gun partway north, it was ridiculously underpowered. But compared to a horse or a dozen poor bloody infantrymen, it was a miracle of rare device.

The miracle’s engine coughed into life when Fletch turned the key. He wondered if the noise would bring a volley of gunfire his way, but it didn’t. Shells as long as a man’s arm clattered and clanked on the floorboards. The car couldn’t pull the gun and the limber both. Artillerymen put their feet on the ammo. As Fletch put the De Soto in gear, he tried not to think about what would happen if a Jap fieldpiece hit the car. Boom! Right to the moon! was what occurred to him.

He reached for the light switch, then jerked his hand away as if the switch were red-hot. Now that would have been Phi Beta Kappa! “The Japs are trying to kill you, Fletcher my boy,” he muttered. “You don’t have to try and kill yourself, too.”

He couldn’t go faster than about ten miles an hour, not if he wanted to stay on the road. Of course, even ten miles an hour would have taken him all the way down to the south coast in a little more than two hours. He didn’t get that far, or anywhere close. After ten minutes or so, he came to a roadblock manned by some nervous infantrymen. They seemed glad to see he had the gun-and even gladder that he wasn’t a Jap.

Fletch was pretty goddamn glad they weren’t Japs, too, only he did his best not to let on. He and his men piled out of the De Soto and added the gun to the roadblock’s strength. By sunup, if not sooner, he figured he’d be in action again.

MARTIAL LAW! SHOUTED posters all over Honolulu. Jiro Takahashi didn’t read English. His sons made sure he understood. “It means the Army’s in charge,” Kenzo said at breakfast Monday morning. “It means you have to do whatever soldiers tell you to do.”

“It means we’re going to land in trouble for being Japanese,” Hiroshi added.

“When have we not been in trouble for being Japanese?” Jiro asked. If his son was bitter, so was he.

“They attacked the United States. They hit us when we weren’t even looking.” Kenzo sounded furiously angry at Japan.

Jiro felt furiously angry at his younger son. Kenzo had everything backwards. As far as Jiro was concerned, Japan was we and the Americans were they. Jiro looked to his wife for support. He didn’t have to look far for Reiko. The tiny kitchen of their cramped apartment barely held the four of them. Reiko just said, “Eat your noodles, all of you. Drink your tea. Whether it’s war or whether it’s peace, work doesn’t stop. You’ve got to go to the sampan.”

She was right. Her refusal to come right out and take Jiro’s side left him punctured anyway. She’d been born in Oshima County, just as he had; her home village was only about fifteen miles from his. Surely she felt as Japanese as he did. What difference did it make that they’d lived in Hawaii for decades and probably never would go back to the old country? None-not as far as he could see. But Reiko didn’t want to quarrel with the boys, no matter how foolishly they behaved.

Hashi flying, Jiro finished the soba noodles. He’d been surprised to discover there were Americans who ate buckwheat groats, but he didn’t know of any who made them into noodles. He drank some of the hot water in which the noodles were boiled; it was supposed to be very healthy. And he gulped his tea. Then he jumped to his feet. He barked at his sons: “Come on! We haven’t got all day!”

To his dismay, they got done no more than a few seconds after he did. When they rose, they loomed over him. How could he feel he was in charge when he had to look up at them to tell them anything? But all Hiroshi said was, “We’re ready, Father.”

Down to the street they went. When they got there, Jiro coughed as if he’d smoked a pack of Camels all at once. Horrible, choking black smoke swirled through the air. For all he could see, it might as well have been nighttime. The smoke made his eyes burn and sting, too. It left greasy soot everywhere it touched.

His sons made almost identical disgusted noises. They pulled bandannas out of their pockets-Hiroshi’s red, Kenzo’s blue-and tied them over their mouths. That struck Jiro as a good idea. All he had was a dirty white handkerchief. He used it. Everything would be dirty in short order. Maybe the hankie kept some of the nasty smoke out of his lungs. He could hope so, anyhow.

The streets were crowded. It was Monday morning, after all. But people moved as if in slow motion. In the black, stinking murk, you had to. Otherwise, you’d get run into on the sidewalk or run over in the street. Cars had their lights on, but the beams didn’t pierce more than a few feet of haze.

“Go to hell, you goddamn Japs!” somebody yelled in English. Jiro understood the sentiment well enough. He squared his shoulders and kept walking. Above the bandannas, his sons’ eyes blazed. He wasn’t even sure the curses had been aimed at them. They were far from the only Japanese on the streets.

A lot of intersections had policemen posted to keep traffic moving. Honolulu’s cops sprang from every group in the islands: haoles, Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans (which Jiro found revolting, but Koreans weren’t subject to Japanese authority here). Normally, the police got obeyed because they were the police. Now people who weren’t Japanese swore at the Japanese cops-and sometimes, if they were ignorant, at the Chinese and Koreans, too. When the cursers guessed wrong, the policemen angrily shouted back. Stoic as samurai, the officers who were Japanese ignored whatever came their way.

Some of the intersections that didn’t have cops had soldiers. They wore helmets and carried bayoneted rifles, and looked nervous enough to shoot or skewer anybody who rubbed them the wrong way. They were cursing Japanese as loudly as any civilians. Jiro pretended not to hear; arguing with armed men struck him as suicidal madness. His sons muttered to themselves, but not loud enough to draw notice.

The Aala Market was half deserted. That shook Jiro. He hadn’t thought anything could keep the dealers away. Only the smell of fish lingered at full strength.

He and Hiroshi and Kenzo went on to Kewalo Basin. But more soldiers waited, along with a few fishermen who’d arrived ahead of the Takahashis. Some of them, the younger ones, were talking with the soldiers in English. Jiro’s sons joined the discussion. After a little while, Hiroshi’s voice rose in anger. One of the soldiers aimed a rifle at his chest. Jiro sprang forward to push his son out of harm’s way. But Hiroshi took a step back on his own, and the soldier lowered the Springfield. He and Hiroshi went on speaking English, not quite so furiously.

“What’s going on?” Jiro asked. The soldier scowled at him, probably for speaking Japanese. He ignored the man. It was the only language he could speak, and he needed to know.

“We can’t go out.” Hiroshi’s voice was hard and flat.

“What? Why not?” Jiro exclaimed. “How are we supposed to make a living if we can’t go out? Are the Americans crazy?” As he always did, he used the word to label other people. It didn’t apply to him or, as far as he was concerned, to his family.

“We can’t go out because the Army doesn’t trust us,” Hiroshi answered. “It doesn’t trust any Japanese. Didn’t you see that yesterday, when the airplane shot up that other sampan? It could have been us just as easily. The soldiers are afraid we’ll go out and tell the Japanese Navy what’s going on here, or maybe that we’ll go out and bring back Japanese soldiers.”

“That’s…” Jiro’s voice trailed away. He couldn’t say it was mad or impossible, for it was neither. He hadn’t thought about actually helping Japan against the United States, but the idea didn’t disgust him. Maybe some other fishermen had thought about it. How could he know? If they had, they would have kept their mouths shut. That was only common sense.

And some sampans, bigger than the Oshima Maru, could range out five hundred miles, maybe even more. They could surely find the Imperial Navy. They could bring back soldiers, too, if their skippers were so inclined. If a boat could carry tons of fish, it could also carry tons of men, and each ton was ten or twelve fully equipped soldiers.

“That’s an insult, that’s what it is,” Kenzo said. “I’m loyal, you’re loyal, we’re all loyal.” He raised his voice: “We’re all loyal! ” Then he spoke in English, probably repeating the same thing.

The fishermen nodded. Some of them said, “Hai! ” Others said, “Yes!” More protests in English followed.

For all the good those protests did, the Japanese men might have been talking to a bunch of stones. The American soldiers glared at them and shook their heads. One, an older man with stripes on his sleeve, made pushing noises with both hands. Go away, he was saying. Even Jiro had no trouble understanding that.

Fishermen who spoke English kept arguing. Jiro started to turn away. He saw they could argue till they turned blue in the face without persuading the men in uniform. Then another soldier ran up shouting something in English. Jiro could make out Japs, but nothing more. All the soldiers exclaimed, some of them hotly. So did the fishermen.

“What does he say?” Jiro asked. Most of the time, not knowing English didn’t bother him. Every once in a while, he felt the lack.

Grimly, Kenzo answered, “He says Japanese soldiers have landed on the northern beaches. We’ve been invaded.”

“Oh.” Jiro took the news in stride. “It’s part of war, neh? If America could, she would invade Japan, wouldn’t she?” But, as he knew very well, America couldn’t. If that didn’t show which country was mightier…

His sons didn’t seem to see it like that. They both turned away from him. Hiroshi said, “I’m not going to translate that for the soldiers, Father. And you’re lucky I’m not, too, or we’d all end up in trouble.”

Kenzo added, “This is our country. We were born here. We like it here. We don’t want anything to do with Japan now that she’s at war with us.”

Another fisherman, a weathered fellow of Jiro’s generation named Tetsuo Yuge, shouted angrily at the two younger Takahashis: “How dare you talk to your father like that? If my boys were that rude, I’d be ashamed of myself-and of them.”

Jiro wondered what the other fisherman’s sons would say if they were here. One of them worked at a gas station; the other was a bank clerk. They thought of themselves as Americans, too; Tetsuo had complained about it. Jiro said, “War makes everybody crazy for a while. Sooner or later, things will straighten out.”

Several of the tall American soldiers put their heads together. When they separated, the man with stripes on his sleeves shouted in English. Some of the younger men, the ones who understood what he was telling them, started to walk off. Kenzo translated: “He says we have to leave. He says this place is off-limits for civilians. That’s Army talk-it means we’re not allowed here.”

“Can he do that?” Jiro asked doubtfully. He didn’t like the idea of leaving the Oshima Maru tied up where soldiers who hated Japanese could do whatever they wanted to her.

But both his sons nodded. Hiroshi said, “It’s martial law. If the soldiers say we have to do it, we have to do it. The only ones who can change things now are other soldiers.”

“This would never have happened if Japan hadn’t jumped on us,” Kenzo said.

“What are we going to do without a day’s catch? What are we going to do without a day’s pay?” Jiro asked. “And how long will the soldiers”-he almost said the American soldiers, but judged that would cause more trouble than it was worth-“keep us from going to sea? What will we do for money if it’s a long time?”

Those were good questions, important questions. Jiro knew that. Neither of his sons had any answers. He didn’t see what else they could do but go back home. Reiko would have a lot of questions for them then. Jiro didn’t have any answers, either.

JANE ARMITAGE WAS glad they’d called off school for the day in Wahiawa. Half the kids in her third-grade class were Japs. They were bright and eager. They were respectful, and they mostly worked harder than haoles. But she didn’t think she could stand the sight of so many slanty-eyed faces right now.

She’d had a devil of a time getting used to what people in Hawaii looked like when she came over with Fletch. Columbus, Ohio, wasn’t like this at all. In Columbus, the Negroes mostly stayed in Bronzeville on the east side of town. Elsewhere, even Italians were out of the ordinary. Her own blond, blue-eyed good looks were as normal as sunshine. Not here. Hawaii was different. Coarse black hair and swarthy skin were the expected; she was the one who stood out.

When she caught herself wondering how Fletch was doing, she grimaced. Without the war, she wouldn’t have given a damn. Without the war, she would have just waved bye-bye if he jumped off a cliff. But she didn’t want the Japs blowing him up. Even for her, that went too far.

She wondered if he was sober. If he wasn’t, he’d be sorry. If he was… he’d be in the war, and he might be sorry anyway. “Shit,” Jane said crisply. Inside the apartment she no longer shared with him, who’d hear her swear?

Bright sunlight streamed in through the window. It would be another warm day-not hot, for it probably wouldn’t get to eighty, but warm. Tonight, it would drop into the sixties, which was as cold as it ever got. Columbus might have snow on the ground. Jane hadn’t needed any time at all to get used to the weather.

The window was open. Why not, when the air was the sweetest in the world? But along with the smells of flowers that bloomed all year around, the stink of smoke came in today. The Japs had jumped on Wheeler Field and then on Schofield Barracks with both feet. By what the breeze said, some of those fires were still burning.

And what the Japs had done to Pearl Harbor! The smoke in the south blotted out a big part of the sky. It reached up toward the sun, and looked so very thick and menacing, it might bring down night at noon if it climbed high enough to blot out the source of light and warmth.

After lighting a cigarette, Jane turned on the radio, a fancy set Fletch had bought with money that could have been better spent elsewhere. So Jane had thought at the time, anyhow. Now she did some more swearing when the ordinary bands brought in nothing but silence and static. The Hawaiian stations were still off the air, then. She switched to the short-wave tuner. She’d never dreamt how desperately she could crave news from the outside world.

As she turned the dial, she got more static in snarling bursts, and then a man speaking a language she didn’t understand-Italian, she thought, or possibly Spanish. Whoever he was, he sounded full of himself, and also full of hot air. Jane spun the dial some more.

She got a squawky, singsong Oriental language next, and then a program of dance music that could have come from almost anywhere on the planet. Music wasn’t what she was after now, though. The next station she found featured somebody-Hitler? — bellowing in German. She understood some German; she’d studied it at Ohio State. But this fellow used a dialect she had trouble following, and he was going a mile a minute. All she could do was pick up a word here and there. She gave the dial another twist.

English at last! A strong, New York-accented voice said, “-Twelve-thirty this afternoon, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan. He called December seventh, the date of the Japs’ unprovoked attack against Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’ ”

Jane looked at a clock on the mantel. It was half past eight here. Washington was five and a half hours ahead of Hawaii time, so the President had spoken about an hour and a half before.

“Swift Congressional approval of the request is expected,” the announcer went on. “There are rumors that the Japs are trying to land soldiers in the Hawaiian Islands, but these are so far unconfirmed. If they prove correct, it is expected that the soldiers of the Hawaiian Department will drive the invaders into the sea.”

“They’d better!” Jane exclaimed. She thought about her not former enough husband and his friends, all of whom drank too much. She thought about the stories they told of their ignorant, inept enlisted men. She thought about how they always complained the government didn’t spend enough money on paper clips, let alone on important things. And she thought about how they were going to be the ones who threw the Japs back into the sea.

She started worrying in earnest then.

“Outrage continues pouring in around the country at the dastardly Japanese deed,” the newscaster said. Jane had never heard anyone actually use the word dastardly before. It sounded like bastardly, which sure as hell fit the situation.

The newsman went on yammering about Japanese attacks in the Philippines and other places she couldn’t have found without a big Rand McNally to give her a hand. Then he talked about what the Germans were doing in Russia. It sounded as if the Russians were trying to counterattack, but it had sounded like that before, and Hitler’s troops were in the suburbs of Moscow.

Jane turned off the radio and did the breakfast dishes. There weren’t many; she’d had cornflakes and a glass of apple juice. Even so, she paused with the Bon Ami-soaked dishrag. The cereal and the juice both came from the mainland. If the Japs really were trying to invade Oahu, how would ships from the States get here? How much food did Hawaii have on its own? How much could it grow if it had to?

She laughed. “How much pineapple and sugarcane can we eat?” That wasn’t a joke. Hawaii grew more pineapple than any other place in the world, and lots and lots of sugarcane. But because the Territory grew so much cane and pineapple, it didn’t grow a whole lot of anything else.

Off to the west, antiaircraft guns started booming. Jane’s mouth twisted into a sour grimace. That she could tell they were antiaircraft guns proved she’d spent too much time with Fletch Armitage. Field guns had a different report-deeper and more prolonged-and didn’t fire so quickly.

What could Fletch tell about anything that mattered to her? Not a thing, not as far as she could tell. All that mattered to him were guns and booze and the bedroom-and he hadn’t been nearly so good there as he thought he had.

Muttering to herself, she finished the dishes. The thought that had come to her while she was washing the cereal bowl wouldn’t go away. Maybe a trip to the grocery would be smart, to stock up on things just in case. She wished Wahiawa had a Piggly Wiggly, the way Honolulu did. You could do all your shopping in one trip at the supermarket. With a corner grocery, you were never sure ahead of time what they’d have and what they wouldn’t.

And Japs ran most of them. She’d learned not to give that a second thought. Now she was going to have to unlearn it again. Things had changed. Exactly how they’d changed… well, she’d just have to wait and see.

A quarter to nine was too early to go to the store. There was another reason to wish for a Piggly Wiggly. Stores like that opened earlier and stayed open later than little family businesses.

She spent an hour or so cleaning the apartment. That was all it needed. Keeping it clean was a lot easier with Fletch gone. The Army was supposed to have made him neat, but it had fallen down on the job. Or maybe it was just that, while he lived with her, he expected her to do all the work, and he didn’t care how much it was. Whatever it was, she was glad to be out from under it.

When she did come out trundling a little metal folding grocery cart behind her, she found the streets of Wahiawa full of soldiers. Since the town was right next door to two divisions of Army men, that wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. But they usually came here to get drunk or get laid or pawn something for the cash they needed to get drunk or get laid.

These weren’t men on leave out for a good time. They wore the steel derbies that made them look like British soldiers from the Great War and carried rifles with fixed bayonets. And they had the air of men who knew damn well they were doing something important and something that might be dangerous.

Jane was glad she’d chosen to walk. The soldiers were setting up roadblocks and barricades in the streets, which snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Horns blared. “What the hell are you doing?” a fat, middle-aged man shouted from behind the wheel of his Ford.

A sergeant who usually dealt with a swarm of privates had no trouble putting one mouthy civilian in his place. “What are we doing?” he echoed. “We’re making sure you don’t get your stupid ass shot off, that’s what. And this is the thanks we get? The horse you rode in on, too, buddy.” He spat in magnificent contempt.

The fat man deflated like a leaky balloon. Jane had all she could do not to giggle. Years as an Army wife had acquainted her with the talents of sergeants. This one turned back to his men. They hadn’t missed a beat. As soon as they had their barricade finished, they hauled a cannon up behind it. It wasn’t one of the bigger guns Fletch dealt with, but an antitank weapon. Seeing its snout pointing north gave Jane pause.

When she got to the grocery store, she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d had the same idea. The line stretched out the door. Some of the women in it were haoles, others Japanese or Chinese or Filipino, though there were just a couple of the latter. Most of the Filipinos on Oahu were men brought in to work in the fields. They sometimes brawled because they didn’t have enough women to go around-or got into knife fights over the ones there were, or over fighting cocks, or over nothing in particular. Jane didn’t have much use for Filipinos.

Two Japanese women right in front of her chattered in their own language. She’d heard Japanese almost every day since coming to Hawaii. She took it as much for granted as the perfect weather or the funny birds or the palm trees. She had taken it for granted, anyhow. Now she eyed the women suspiciously. What were they saying? What were they thinking? If the Japs got this far-almost inconceivable, but for the soldiers in the streets-what would they do?

The white housewife who came out of the store was loaded down with so many groceries, she could hardly walk. She gave the Japanese women a hard stare. “Goddamn lousy Japs,” she said, and trudged on.

They plainly understood English. They stared after her, their flat, narrow-eyed faces unreadable, at least to Jane. For close to a minute, neither of them said anything in any language. Then they started speaking again-in Japanese. Jane didn’t know whether to want to applaud them or kick them in the teeth.

By the time she got into the grocery store, it looked as if a swarm of locusts had been there ahead of her. And so they have, she thought, and I’m another one. She bought canned vegetables and Spam and yams and potatoes and crackers-everything she could think of that would keep for a while. Well, almost everything: try as she would, she couldn’t make herself get a sack of rice. Other haoles weren’t so fussy. Jane shrugged. She liked potatoes better anyhow. She bought toilet paper and Kleenex and soap, too.

She brought her cart up to Mr. Hasegawa. He totaled everything up, not on a cash register but with a pencil on the back of an old envelope. “Twenty dallah, fo’ty-t’ree cent,” he said at the end of his calculations.

On impulse, she asked him, “What do you think of all this?”

His face closed down, the same way those of the Japanese women outside the store had. “Very bad,” he said at last. “We have war, where get more groceries?”

That undoubtedly wasn’t a tenth of what was on his mind, but it wasn’t far removed from what Jane and the other panic shoppers were thinking, either. She set a twenty and a one on the counter. The storekeeper gave her a half-dollar, a nickel, and two pennies. She bumped her little cart out of the grocery store and headed home.

One of the soldiers manning the antitank gun sent a wolf whistle after her. She ignored him, which only made him laugh. Getting mad at them-letting them see you were mad at them-just encouraged them. Fletch had been right about that.

What else had Fletch been right about? Jane angrily shook her head. No matter how much her in-the-process-of-becoming-ex-husband had known about soldiers and artillery pieces, he hadn’t known a goddamn thing about being a husband. If he’d been married to anything, it was the Army, not her.

She looked back at the soldiers. She looked south at the appalling black smoke rising from Pearl Harbor-and west at the smaller smoke clouds from Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks. All she’d done to Fletch was throw him out of the apartment when she couldn’t stand living with him another minute. Being married to the Army was liable to get him killed.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE STUCK a fresh five-round clip in his Springfield and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He wanted something that would hit from farther away than he could throw a rock. He still had the officer’s.45 on his hip, but he hadn’t used it for a day or two. The soldier who’d been issued the rifle wouldn’t miss it; a Japanese shell had cut him in half.

The roadblock south of Haleiwa to which he’d added his gun hadn’t held the Japanese for long. They hadn’t come straight at it. He could have slaughtered a million of them if they had. Instead, they’d gone around, through the cane and pineapple fields. The bastards were like water or mercury; they flowed through the tiniest gaps in the American line-and came out shooting on the other side.

He still had the 105mm gun. He still had the De Soto that hauled it, too. The windshield had been shot out of it. A bullet hole went through both rear doors. The round hadn’t gone through any of the men in the back seat. Fletch didn’t know why it hadn’t. Maybe God was on his side after all. But if He was, why had He turned so many Japs loose on Oahu?

A bullet from off to the left cracked past his head and ricocheted off the barrel of the field gun. He ducked, automatically and much too late. He had no idea whether the bullet was American or Japanese. If many more came from that direction, though, he’d have to pull up stakes and fall back again… if he could. If he couldn’t, he’d fall back without it, and take along the breech block so the Japs couldn’t turn the piece around and start shooting it at his side.

More shooting did come from off to the left, but most of it came from two American machine guns. They fired noticeably faster than their Japanese counterparts. Maybe the Japs, instead of flowing through a hole, had walked into a buzz saw this time. Fletch’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Jesus, he hoped so!

And so it seemed, for the shooting moved farther north. “My God,” one of the artillerymen said wearily. “I didn’t think them slanty-eyed fuckers knew how to back up.”

“I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think we’re doing it to them. There’s a difference,” Fletch said. The artilleryman paused in the act of lighting up a cigarette long enough to nod.

A wild-eyed foot soldier burst out of the cane to the left of the Kamehameha Highway. Half a dozen men around the gun swung their rifles toward him. He didn’t seem to notice how close a brush with death he’d just had. All he did seem to notice was the single silver bar on each of Fletcher Armitage’s shoulders. “Thank God!” he said. “An officer!”

“What the hell?” Fletch said. Most of the time, enlisted men wanted nothing to do with officers. They hoped their superiors would leave them alone. When a PFC actually came looking for a first lieutenant, something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

“Sir, come with me, please.” The PFC sounded close to tears. “There’s something you need to see.”

“What is it?” Fletch asked.

The soldier shook his head. “You got to see it, sir. Christ almighty!” He gulped as if fighting his stomach.

Fletch had already seen much more than he ever wanted to. War was nothing like the sanitized version the Army had got ready for in the drills on the mainland and around Schofield Barracks. People didn’t just get killed. They got blown to pieces. They got chopped to shreds. They got holes punched through them-not neat, tidy holes but ones that poured-often gushed-blood. Fletch had smelled shit and burnt meat, sometimes from the same wounded man. He’d heard shrieks that would haunt him as long as he lived-which didn’t look like being long.

By the PFC’s grime and the stubble on his chin, he’d been fighting from the very beginning of this mess. How could he not have seen and smelled and heard the same kinds of things as Fletch had? How could he not be getting hardened to what war did? What he’d seen just now, though, had shaken him to the core.

Which meant that either he was shell-shocked or that it was going to shake Fletch to the core, too. For his own sake, Fletch rooted for shell shock. But he went into the cane field with the soldier. Stalks rustled. Bugs chirped. One of them lit on him. He brushed it away, trying to walk as softly as he could.

“Eddie?” the PFC called, cradling his Springfield. “You there, Eddie?”

“Wish to hell I wasn’t,” another soldier answered from not far ahead. “You find an officer, Bill?”

“A lieutenant,” the PFC-Bill-said, damning with faint praise.

“Bring him on.” Eddie didn’t seem inclined to be fussy. “I’m with poor goddamn Wilbur. Ain’t no Japs around-now.”

Following Bill, Fletch pushed the last little way through the cane. Eddie was a stocky, swarthy private who looked straight out of Hell’s Kitchen or some other equally charming slum. He stood guard over a corpse. The dead man’s hands were tied behind his back, which Fletch saw first. Bill said, “Jap bastards caught poor Wilbur alive. Go on around, sir. Take a look at what they done to him.”

I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this went through Fletch’s mind eight or ten thousand times as he took the four or five steps that let him see what the Japanese had done to the American soldier they’d captured. And he was right. He was righter even than he’d imagined. “Fuck,” he said softly, the most reverent, prayerful obscenity he’d ever heard.

They’d bayoneted Wilbur again and again, in the chest and in the belly-but not in the left side of the chest, because that might have pierced his heart and killed him faster than they wanted to. And after he was dead (Fletch hoped like hell it was after he was dead) they’d yanked down his trousers, cut off his penis, and stuffed it into his mouth. And they must have been proud of their handiwork, too, because they’d stuck a piece of cardboard by his head. On it, one of them had written, in English, HE TAKE LONG TIME DIE.

“Fuck,” Fletch said again. “What do you need me for?”

“What do we do with him, sir?” Eddie sounded like a lost kid, not at all like a tough guy.

“Bury him,” Fletch answered at once, his mouth running ahead of his brain. His wits caught up a moment later: “Bury him, and for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody just what happened to him. But spread the word: you really don’t want the Japs to take you alive.”

Eddie and Bill both nodded. “Yes, sir,” they said together, seeming relieved somebody was telling them what to do. Then Bill asked, “What about the Geneva Convention, sir?”

“I don’t know. What about it?” Fletch pointed to the mutilated, degraded remnant of what had been a man. “How much do you think the Japs care about it? Why don’t you ask Wilbur here?”

They both flinched. “What do we do if we catch one of them?” That was Eddie.

Fletch looked down at the dead American soldier again. He knew what he was supposed to say. What came out of his mouth was, “Whatever you do, don’t come asking an officer beforehand, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir! ” Where nothing else had, that got Bill and Eddie’s enthusiastic approval.