Days of Infamy

VI

THE GARDENER WHO spoke for Major Hirabayashi in Wahiawa was named Tsuyoshi Nakayama. Some people called him Yosh. Till this mess started, Jane Armitage hadn’t called him anything. She’d never had anything to do with him. What she and a few other haoles were calling him these days was Quisling. They were careful about where, when, and to whom they said it, though. Let the wrong ears hear and… Jane didn’t know what would happen then. She didn’t want to find out, either.

To give Nakayama his due, he didn’t seem to relish being the occupiers’ mouthpiece. He didn’t shrink from the job, though. What the Japs told him to do and say, he did and said. They’d confiscated guns and food just after they took the town. Radios lasted only a couple of days longer. If Jane had had a little one, she might have tried to hide it. She didn’t have a prayer with the big, bulky shortwave set. When a Japanese soldier carried it away, she felt as if he were stealing the world from her.

She soon discovered she was lucky she hadn’t tried anything cute. Mr. Murphy, the principal at the elementary school, had had two radios. He’d given the Japanese one and secretly hung on to the other. Not secretly enough-somebody ratted on him.

Through Yosh Nakayama, Major Hirabayashi called the people of Wahiawa into the streets. Mr. Murphy, hands tied behind his back, stood in front of Hirabayashi. The officer spoke in Japanese. Nakayama translated: “This man disobeyed an order of the Imperial Japanese Army. The punishment for disobeying an order is death. He will receive the punishment. Watch, and think about him so this does not happen to you.”

Two soldiers forced Mr. Murphy down to his knees. The principal looked astonished, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He didn’t seem afraid, which also argued that he didn’t believe it. Surely the Japs would call it off once they’d taught him his lesson.

Major Hirabayashi drew his sword. Jane had seen it there on his hip before. She hadn’t thought about it; it seemed about as useful in modern war as a buggy whip. Now, all at once, she noticed that the major had lovingly kept it sharp. The blade was slightly curved. The edge glittered in the sun.

Hirabayashi raised the sword above his head. With a sudden, wordless shout, he swung it in a gleaming arc of death. It bit into-bit through-Mr. Murphy’s neck. The principal’s head leaped from his shoulders. Blood fountained, amazingly red. Some of it splashed the soldiers who’d held the American. Mr. Murphy’s body convulsed. The spasms went on for a couple of minutes. His head lay in the street. It blinked once before the features slackened into death’s blankness.

Somehow, that blink sickened Jane worse than all the gore and the flopping. Had he known what had happened to him, even if just for a few seconds?

Some people in the crowd-women and men both-screamed. Several threw up. Some made the sign of the cross. A hulking six-footer who ran a hardware store keeled over in a faint. His wife, who barely came up to his chin, kept him from smashing his face on the asphalt.

Hirabayashi wiped his bloody blade on Mr. Murphy’s trousers, then slid it back into the scabbard. He shouted something angry-sounding in Japanese. “You will obey,” Yosh Nakayama translated. “If you do not obey, you will be sorry. Do you understand?” No one said anything. Hirabayashi shouted again, even louder. Nakayama said, “He wants to know if you understand.”

A ragged chorus of yeses rose from the crowd. Some of the people who’d crossed themselves did it again. Major Hirabayashi grunted again and turned his back. Nakayama gestured to the locals: it was over.

Singly and in small groups, they straggled back to their homes. Jane was alone-and had never felt more alone in her life. She’d seen Mr. Murphy every day since getting her teaching job here. He wasn’t the most exciting human being ever born-what principal was? — but he was solid, competent, plenty likable if you didn’t happen to be a fourth-grader in trouble.

Now he was dead. For a radio, he was dead.

Hardly anyone talked about the-murder? execution? — as the crowd drained away. Part of that, no doubt, was shock. And part of it probably had to do with fear over who might be listening. Somebody you’d lived across the street from for the last twenty years might sell you down the river to the Japs. How could you know, till too late? Why would you take the chance?

People in Russia and Nazi Germany and the countries Hitler had overrun had to make calculations like that. Americans? Even a month earlier, Jane never would have believed it. But if you didn’t make those calculations, or if you got them wrong… you might be the next Mr. Murphy.

And it wasn’t just the local Japanese you had to look out for. Jane had seen more than one haole sucking up to the occupiers. Some people had to be on the ins with whoever was in charge. If it was the usual authorities, fine. If it was a bunch of bastards with guns-and with swords; oh, yes, with swords-well, that was fine, too. There was one more thing Jane wouldn’t have believed till she saw it with her own eyes.

She locked the door behind her when she got to the apartment. She hadn’t been in the habit of doing that till the Japs came. It wouldn’t help her a hell of a lot now, either. The rational part of her mind knew that. She locked the door anyway, because she wasn’t feeling any too rational these days.

She wished she could fix herself a good stiff drink. But Fletch had taken most of the booze when he left (she’d been glad to see it go, too-then), and the rest had been confiscated along with the food. She was stuck with her own thoughts, no matter how much she hated them. The thunk of the sword as it slammed into Mr. Murphy’s neck… That last blink after he was-after he had to be-dead…

“Oh, Jesus,” she moaned: as close to a prayer as had passed her lips in years.

The worst of it was, she’d have to go out again for supper. The communal meals had started off bad, and were getting worse as stocks of this and that began to run out. She was damned if she knew what they would do in a few months.

“Damned is right,” Jane muttered. And damnation might not wait for months. It might be only weeks away. She wondered how much food other people had given up, and how much the Japs had taken from groceries. How long would it last? How long could it last? “We’ll find out.”

She also wondered whether the occupiers gave a damn. Wouldn’t they be just as happy if everybody on Oahu except maybe their few special friends starved to death? Then they wouldn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on them any more.

With that cheery thought echoing in her head, she went to supper. It was rice and noodles and local vegetables and a small chunk of cheese that was starting to be past it. Before the Japs came, the food would have appalled her. Now all she cared about was that it filled her belly. Quantity had routed quality.

People had chatted over meals. No one said much this evening. Mr. Murphy’s death hung over Wahiawa the way that cloud of black smoke had hung over Pearl Harbor for so long. Jane went straight home when she finished eating. She’d been on dishwashing detail the week before. All the women in town took turns at it. Not for the first time, Jane wondered why nobody had included the men. Who was going to suggest it to Major Hirabayashi, though? That… chopped the head off that idea. Stop it! she told herself fiercely. But she couldn’t.

Two days later, somebody knocked at the door. Fear shot through her. These days, a knock on the door was likely to mean trouble, not a neighbor wanting to borrow a stick of butter. The knock came again: loud, insistent. Jane trembled as she went to open the door. She’d started taking in another lesson Americans should never have had to learn.

Tsuyoshi Nakayama stood there, with two younger local Japanese behind him. “You are Mrs. Jane Armitage?” he said. Jane nodded. He made a check-mark on a list. “Where is your husband, Mrs. Armitage?”

“I don’t know. We were getting a divorce when-when the war started,” Jane answered. That was true. No one could say it wasn’t. She didn’t want to tell him she’d been married to a soldier. Who could guess what he or Hirabayashi might do if she did? He could find out if he poked around. But even if he did, she hadn’t lied.

The gardener just shrugged now. “You live here alone, then?” he asked. Jane’s head went up and down again. Yosh Nakayama nodded, too. He wrote something else on the list. What was it? Jane couldn’t tell. Not knowing alarmed her. Nakayama looked up. “We may run short of food,” he said.

This time, Jane nodded eagerly. If he wanted to talk about food, he didn’t want to talk about Fletch. Everybody had to worry about eating. Not everybody had to worry about a husband in the Army.

“I am going to give you turnip seeds and pieces of potatoes with eyes,” Nakayama said. “You will plant them. You will grow them. You will take care of them. We hope we can start growing things to eat soon enough to keep from getting too hungry.”

“Plant them where? How?” Jane asked. She didn’t know the first thing about farming. But it looks like I’m going to find out.

“You have been assigned a plot,” Yosh Nakayama told her. “I have tools for you.” The young men behind him carried a spade, a hoe, a rake, and a trowel. They thrust them at Jane now. Nakayama went on, “Plenty of people here know what to do. Ask them. They will be in the fields, too. And the seeds come with instructions. Follow them. Follow them with care.”

“Turnips?” Jane couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a turnip. Back in Ohio, they fed hogs more often than people.

Nakayama shrugged. “They grow fast. You can eat the root and the greens. We have to do whatever we can. We will all be hungry soon. Other people will raise beans and corn and squash and whatever else we have. We need to work hard. Otherwise, we will be worse than hungry.”

What about the Jap soldiers? Will they help us farm? But Jane didn’t have the nerve to ask the question. She accepted the seeds and the quartered potatoes. All she did ask was, “Where will my, uh, plot be?”

“I will show you. Come on.” He led her downstairs and out to the street. A whole stretch of lawn had been divided into sections with stakes and twine. Yosh Nakayama pointed to one of those sections. “This is yours. You will clear it and plant it.”

“Clear it?” Jane echoed. The gardener just nodded impatiently. Jane looked down at her hands. They were nice and soft. The only callus she had was a small one on the middle finger of her right hand: a writer’s callus. That was going to change if she had to dig out all that grass and plant vegetables. She sighed, not too loud. “What about bugs and things?”

“It is a problem,” Nakayama admitted. Hawaii was chock full of all kinds of bugs. You couldn’t ship local fruit to the mainland for fear of turning them loose there. He went on, “We do have to try, though. If we don’t try, we try starving instead. Which would you rather do?”

Jane had no answer to that, none at all.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE STARED in dismay at the De Soto that had hauled his 105 down from the north coast of Oahu to not far from the outskirts of Honolulu. The De Soto sat on the grass, sad and lopsided. Fletch was glad the burst of Japanese machine-gun fire had missed him and his crew. And so it had, but there were fresh holes in the car, and three of its tires were flat.

One of the infantrymen he’d collared into serving the gun came up beside him and said, “Sir, if it was a horse, I’d shoot it.”

“Yeah.” Fletch had fixed flats before, but he saw no way in hell to do it this time. Two of those inner tubes didn’t just have holes in them. They’d been chewed to pieces. Then he brightened. “Tell you what, Clancy. There’s houses around here. If you and your buddies bring me back wheels with fresh tires on ’em, I won’t care where they came from.”

He’d started breaking rules when he commandeered the De Soto in the first place. He was ready to keep right on doing it if that meant he could go on hitting back at the Japs. Maybe somebody would make him go stand in a corner later on. He’d worry about that then, if there was a then.

“I’ll see what we can do, Lieutenant,” Clancy said with a grin. “Hey, Dave! Arnie! Come on!” He appreciated larceny. By now, he and his pals made pretty fair artillerymen, too. Baptism by total immersion, Fletch thought.

The soldiers grabbed their rifles and hurried off. If some civilian didn’t fancy watching the wheels from his car walk with Jesus, a Springfield was a terrific persuader. Fletch hoped the men found a Jap to rob, not a haole. That wasn’t fair, but he didn’t give a damn. Every time he saw an Oriental face, he suspected its owner was on the enemy’s side.

Airplanes droned by, high overhead. He gave the Japanese bombers the finger. That was all he could give them. Even as he did it, he knew a certain amount of relief: they weren’t going to drop anything on him. If not for the Japs’ air power, he thought the Army would have held them. Yeah, and if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.

As things were, the Americans were losing hope. He could feel it. They’d thought they could stop the Japs in front of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa. Then those enemy soldiers appeared in their rear-and they hadn’t been the same since. He had to admire the Japs who’d got over the Waianae Range. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to kill them all, but he knew they’d pulled off something astonishing. After its hasty retreat from a line that was just coming together, the U.S. Army simply hadn’t been the same.

If it got shoved off the hills here, the next stops were Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Fletch wondered if he’d have to aim his 105 up Hotel Street at the advancing Japanese. Soldiers and sailors would fight like madmen to hang on to the red-light district… wouldn’t they?

He heard more airplane engines. These weren’t droning-they were screaming. Fletch dove for a hole in the ground. He hadn’t been on the receiving end of a dive-bomber attack for a while. He could have done without the honor now, too. The Japs cared for his opinion as much as they usually did.

One of the planes shot by overhead almost low enough for him to reach up and snag the fixed landing gear. The bomb went off much too close. It slammed his face down into the dirt. He spat mud, and tasted blood when he did it. That didn’t surprise him. He was probably also bleeding from the nose and ears. He counted himself lucky: he was still breathing.

And, with luck, he still had his gun crew. Clancy and Dave and Arnie were off scrounging tires. Fletch climbed out of the hole. His dive left him even filthier than he had been a minute before. They said it couldn’t be done, he thought vaguely. He felt vague, all right, as if he’d just taken a Joe Louis right to the jaw. Blast could do that to you.

Then, looking around, he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. The bomb had flipped the commandeered De Soto over on its back like a turtle, except turtles didn’t catch fire when that happened to them. With or without new tires or wheels, it wasn’t going anywhere ever again. That was almost funny.

But the bomb had also knocked his gun over on its side. The 105 weighed almost two and a half tons on its carriage. That hadn’t been enough to keep it upright. One wheel still spun lazily. Fletch wanted to kick the piece. He couldn’t fire it. He couldn’t move it.

“I can’t do shit,” he said, and heard himself as if from very far away.

Then he remembered the De Soto had been carrying ammunition. He yelped, sprang back into the hole in the ground, and flattened himself out again. Sure as hell, the shells started cooking off one after another as the flames got to them. That probably made for a spectacular fireworks display, but you wouldn’t have wanted to watch from too close. Fletch, hugging the ground as shell fragments screeched past overhead, was much too close.

When the booming stopped, he cautiously looked up from the hole. He might have been a groundhog, curious about his shadow. What he was curious about was the De Soto, and whether any pieces of it bigger than a bobby pin were left. As far as he could tell, the answer was no.

Ten minutes later, the men from the gun crew came back, each of them rolling along a wheel with tire and inner tube on it. They stared at the overturned gun and at what was left of the car that had drawn it. “Fuck, Lieutenant,” Clancy said, “why didn’t you tell us to bring back a whole automobile?”

“Please accept my apologies, gentlemen,” Fletch said with what he thought was commendable dignity. “If you can get one, please do. Some rope would be nice, too. Maybe we can get the gun back on its wheels.” He thought he would need to do that pretty damn quick if he was going to do it at all. It wasn’t just that he wanted to keep shooting at the Japs, though he did. But it looked as if the Army was going to retreat again, and he wanted to hang on to the gun if he possibly could. He’d brought it this far, after all.

What went through his head was, Yeah, and a hell of a lot of good it’s done me. What had he accomplished with the 105? Oh, he’d blown up a tank. And he’d probably killed or maimed a bunch of Japanese soldiers he’d never seen. But so what? If he’d done anything really worth bragging about, would the U.S. Army have been down here on the outskirts of Honolulu? If everybody’d done something really worth bragging about…

If that had happened, some scout plane would have spotted the Japanese carriers and the invasion force before they plastered Oahu. The carriers would have been attacked and driven off or sunk. If the landing force had managed to hit the beach, it would have been slaughtered right there. As soon as the Japs wrecked the fleet and, worse, wrecked the local U.S. air power, that was the ballgame right there.

Clancy and Dave and Arnie didn’t worry about such things-or if they did, they didn’t show it. “We’ll find you a ride, Lieutenant,” Dave said. “Ain’t nothin’ to get all hot and bothered about.” He nudged his pals. “Come on, guys. Let’s get it done.” Off they went, with as much swagger as if they were still fighting at Waimea.

Fletch wearily shook his head. He wished he could keep his pecker up like that. Japanese artillery started pounding the positions in front of him. The Jap guns were poorly sited; he could see their muzzle flashes. If he’d had anything to shoot back with, he would have made them sorry. But all he could do right now was watch. Few of their shells came back far enough to get close to him. None came close enough to make him dive for cover. He would have for some of them when the war got started. Misses that would have terrified him then he took for granted now.

What he didn’t take for granted were men straggling away from the line the Japs were shelling. They looked as if they’d had themselves a bellyful of war and didn’t want any more. “Get back to your positions!” he shouted at them. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Some of them just kept walking. They weren’t running, but they weren’t going to fight any more, either. One man said, “It don’t make no fuckin’ difference now. Shit, we’re licked.” Two or three others nodded.

“Get back to your positions,” Fletch snapped. “That’s an order, goddammit.”

They ignored him. He didn’t know what to do. If he picked up his rifle and tried giving that order again… Quite a few of them had rifles, too. They might not want to use them against the Japs any more, but he didn’t think they’d be shy about turning them on him.

What was an army when soldiers stopped obeying officers? It wasn’t an army any more, that was for damn sure. It was just a mob. That had happened to the Russians and the Germans at the end of the last war. Now Fletch saw it here.

The soldiers trudged past him. More followed in their wake. The Americans had done everything they could here. Now some of them-a lot of them-were deciding they couldn’t do any more, and might as well save their own skins.

Was anybody still at the front? Would the Japs be along in another ten minutes? Fletch didn’t want to meet them by himself. Unlike a lot of his countrymen, though, he didn’t want to run away from them, either. He stood irresolute, peering north and west.

A shiny maroon Ford convertible drove up against the tide of retreating men. Clancy waved to Fletch. “Ain’t this some snazzy hot rod?” he yelled from behind the wheel.

“It’ll do,” Fletch said, grateful his merry men hadn’t got the hell out of there in that snazzy hot rod. “You have rope?”

Dave and Arnie hopped out of the Ford. Dave displayed a coil. He and Fletch fixed it to the gun, while Arnie tied the other end to the car’s front bumper. Fletch waved to Clancy, who put it in reverse. The rope came taut. The tires spun, kicking up dust. Fletch figured either nothing would happen or the dead weight would pull the Ford’s bumper off. But when the 105 stirred a little, hope also stirred in him.

He rushed to the gun and started pushing with all his might. “Come on, goddammit!” he yelled to Arnie and Dave. They joined him, grunting and straining. “We can do it!” Maybe we can do it. “Put your backs into it!”

“Give us a hand, you lazy bastards,” Arnie growled at three retreating soldiers. For a wonder, they did. For an even bigger wonder, the gun thumped over into its wheels.

Sweat ran down Fletch’s face. He’d pulled something in the small of his back. He didn’t give a damn. “That’s the way,” he panted. “Let’s get her hitched up and…” He stopped. After that, what else could he do but retreat, too?

THIS IS THE way the world ends, Jim Peterson thought. T. S. Eliot hadn’t known a thing about it. When the British surrendered to the American colonists at Yorktown, their band had played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Peterson’s world was turning upside down under his feet. The little yellow men from Tokyo were walloping the tar out of their American foes. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. But it was real, real as the stink that rose from him because he hadn’t bathed in he couldn’t remember how long.

Pearl City lay just north of Pearl Harbor. It housed sailors who’d been stationed there and civilians who’d worked there. It had been a pleasant little town. Now it was on the front line. Palm trees and Norfolk Island pines lay in the streets, uprooted by bombs and shells. What had been nice little homes were now smoldering, bullet-pocked rubble. As far as fighting went, rubble wasn’t so bad. It gave better cover than it would have before it got smashed.

“Hey, Peterson,” said the sergeant who’d given him his stripes. The man’s name was Bill McKinley, and he answered to Prez.

Peterson just grunted. They crouched in a wrecked kitchen, peering out through the glassless window toward the north. A hole in the roof about the size of a cow let in sun and rain-sometimes both at once.

McKinley went on, “You take any money or any other shit off a dead Jap?”

“Nope.” Peterson shook his head. “How come?”

“On account of if you did, I was gonna tell you to ditch it,” the sergeant answered. “The Japs catch you with any of that stuff, they figured you killed one of their boys. They’re even worse on you then than they are any other time.”

“Not me.” Motion up ahead made Peterson’s finger tense on the trigger. Then he relaxed. It was just a mynah bird, hopping across a lawn looking for worms and bugs. The birds had no idea what war was all about. Peterson wished he didn’t. He shot McKinley a sidelong glance. “You figure the Japs are going to catch us?”

“Don’t get me wrong-I’m still fighting,” McKinley said hastily. “But I don’t see the cavalry riding over the hill in the last reel. Do you?”

Before Peterson could say anything, a gunshot made him flinch. He hated doing that, but couldn’t help it. His only consolation was that almost everybody else did it, too. He said, “Looking at where we’re at, I’d say we could use the goddamn cavalry right about now.”

“Bet your ass,” Sergeant McKinley said. “But if we ain’t got it…”

That motion behind a hibiscus bush wasn’t a mynah. Peterson brought up his rifle, fired, and ducked away from the window, all in one smooth motion. He worked the bolt to chamber a fresh round. The brass cartridge from the last one clinked on the linoleum at his feet.

“You’re getting pretty good at this shit, Navy,” McKinley said. By now, he knew about Peterson’s disreputable origins.

“Up yours, Prez,” Peterson said mildly. “You can’t say I haven’t had practice.”

“You’re still breathing, so you musta done something right.” The sergeant laughed. “If you were in your right uniform, you’d be tellin’ me what to do instead of the other way round.”

“Damn near makes it worth my while,” Peterson said, and McKinley laughed again. An American machine gun a couple of houses over fired a short burst, then a longer one. Very cautiously, Peterson went to the window and peered out. If the Japs were up to something, he wanted to find out what it was. Some men in the dark khaki that they wore were moving a few hundred yards to the north, but he didn’t have a clear shot at them. He ducked away again.

“Well?” McKinley asked.

“Nothing much, I don’t think,” he answered. “I wish to hell this kitchen had two windows so we could look out from more than one place. Way things are, if a Jap sniper draws a bead on that one, he’s liable to punch our tickets for us.”

“You want to move? It’s okay by me,” McKinley said.

Before Peterson could answer, he heard freight-train noises in the air. He threw himself flat before the first shells started bursting. Japanese artillery was probably after that machine gun, but that meant it was coming down on his head, too. He was glad McKinley hadn’t spoken sooner. If there was anything worse than being upright and out in the open when shellfire started coming in, he didn’t know offhand what it might be.

“Just their lousy three-inch popguns,” McKinley shouted through the din.

“Yeah, I know,” Peterson answered. “But where’s our artillery?” Most of it had been wrecked, and most U.S. artillerymen were likely dead. Jap fighters and dive bombers had gone after the American guns with everything they had. It made sense. Rifles and machine guns were just nuisances on the battlefield. Artillery killed.

Artillery also pinned down U.S. infantry so Japanese foot soldiers could advance. If you rose up to shoot at the Japs, you asked to get flayed by flying fragments. If you didn’t, you had the enemy sliding around your flank.

Peterson and McKinley both rose up. You could take your chances with shellfire. Sometimes you had to. But if the Japs flanked them out of this position, where would they go? Into the Pacific, that was where. They had next to no place left to retreat.

And, sure enough, the Japs were coming. Both Americans fired. The Japanese soldiers went down. Some of them shot back. Others dashed past them, running all crouched over. Then they dove for cover and the ones in the rear advanced.

“Fire and move,” McKinley said, slapping in a fresh clip. “It’s pretty when you do it well, and those bastards know how.”

“Terrific.” Peterson snapped off another shot. This was one of the intricacies of ground combat he’d never imagined when he was flying fighter planes. The sailors coming up into the line from Pearl Harbor hadn’t, either. Maybe some of them did now. A lot of them had got shot before they could learn.

A shell slammed into the house with a rending crash. The walls shook. Part of the roof that hadn’t fallen in did now. A bullet came in through the window and clanged off a pot hanging on the far wall. Peterson waited for the American machine gun to start slaughtering the oncoming Japs. When it stayed silent, he glanced over to Sergeant McKinley. If Prez said this was the place to make a stand, he’d do it. This was part of what he’d signed up for.

But McKinley said, “We’d better fall back a couple of houses. We don’t want ’em to go sliding around behind us and cutting us off. That’s how you get captured.” He made a horrible face.

“Right,” Peterson said tightly, and made another one. They did fall back, and fell in with more Americans. It was only a tiny retreat. Now the Japs would have a tougher time breaking through. So Peterson told himself, over and over again. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.

BY THE TIME the train pulled into the station at Durham, North Carolina, Joe Crosetti, who’d never been out of California before, had stared out the window in fascination all the way across the country. Going over the Rockies had been something. Going across the Great Plains had been something, too-miles and miles and miles as flat as if somebody’d ironed them, half the time under a blanket of snow. Seeing all that white was pretty amazing by itself. It had snowed in San Francisco only two or three times in Crosetti’s life, and never since he was a kid. But there it was, white and silent and beautiful.

Joe thought so, anyway. Sitting next to him was a guy named Orson Sharp, who’d got on the train in Salt Lake City. “It’s just snow, for heaven’s sake,” he said. He was blond and pink-cheeked and earnest, with the start of a double chin. Aside from that, there was nothing soft about him; he was on the chunky side, that was all, the sort who would have played the line in football.

“Maybe it’s just snow to you, but it’s snow to me,” Joe answered. Orson Sharp only shrugged. Joe got the feeling he thought that was funny to the point of being ridiculous, but was too polite to say so. Most fellows his age would have razzed Joe unmercifully if they thought something like that. Crosetti eyed Sharp with something approaching suspicion, wondering what his angle was.

As the train got farther east, it rolled past-sometimes rolled through-forests full of bare-branched trees. That bemused Joe, too. Some of the trees in San Francisco lost their leaves: some, yeah, but not all. These looked like a horde of skeletons with their arms held high.

Streams and ponds had ice on them-not all, but the smaller ones. That was something else Joe hardly ever saw back home. San Francisco never got very hot, and it never got very cold, either. As far as he was concerned, that was the way things were supposed to work.

When he said so, Orson Sharp did laugh. “Maybe where you come from,” he said. “In Salt Lake, it can get up over a hundred and down below zero, too. Having the same weather all the time must get boring.”

“It’s not the same all the time,” Joe said. He didn’t think so, anyway. Maybe things looked different if you came from somewhere like Utah.

He hadn’t needed long to decide Orson Sharp was a strange breed of cat. Trainees bound for Chapel Hill filled the car. Blue language filled the air. Most guys, among themselves, used profanity for emphasis, almost for punctuation. Joe did, and he’d never thought of himself as particularly foulmouthed. But as far as he could tell, Sharp didn’t swear at all.

He didn’t drink coffee, either. When they went to the dining car, Joe guzzled the stuff. “Gotta get my heart started some kind of way,” he said.

He wondered if Sharp would give him an argument, the way temperance people did if you had anything good to say about the demon rum. But the would-be flier from Salt Lake just nodded and said, “Whatever you think is right for yourself.”

“How come you don’t think it’s right for you?” Joe asked, quickly adding, “Don’t answer if you think I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.” He didn’t want to get Sharp mad. Strange breed of cat or not, he seemed a pretty good guy.

And he smiled now. “That’s okay. I don’t mind. My religion teaches that we shouldn’t smoke or drink alcohol or coffee or tea.”

“Your religion?” Joe scratched his head. He knew some Jews, and knew they didn’t eat pork or, if they were strict enough, shrimp or lobsters or clams, either. But they drank-and they drank coffee, too. And they smoked. Then, probably slower than it should have, a light went on in his head. “You’re one of those Mormons, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.” Orson Sharp laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?”

“Probably-San Francisco’s a big city. But not that I ever knew of.” Joe gave Sharp a curious look. Did he have three wives back home? Did his father have three wives, or thirty-three? That was what you heard about Mormons.

He suddenly realized Sharp knew just what he was thinking. “Well?” the other young man said. “No fangs, no horns, no tail.”

Joe’s ears got hot. He suspected he turned red. To keep from showing it, he raised his coffee cup to his lips. Then he lowered it. Even something as ordinary as drinking coffee all at once felt funny. “Heck with it,” he said. “I’m a Catholic. There’s people who don’t like us, either. But we’re all Americans first, right?”

Instead of coffee, Orson Sharp had a glass of apple juice by his plate of bacon and eggs and hash browns. He lifted it as if making a toast. “We’re all Americans first. That’s just right. And we’re not America First, either.”

“Damn straight!” Joe exclaimed. “Those damn fools helped the Japs catch us with our pants down in Hawaii. You listen to them, nothing could ever happen to us, so we didn’t have to worry about the war. Shows how much they knew, doesn’t it?”

“Most of them have wised up since then,” Sharp said, and Joe nodded. Pearl Harbor and the invasion had knocked the bottom out of isolationism. Just about everyone who’d believed in it had come to his senses since. The handful who hadn’t were crackpots and chowderheads and pro-fascists: nobody worth paying any attention to.

“Listen,” Joe said. “If we get a chance to pick roomies when we get where we’re going, you want to stick together?”

“Sure,” Sharp said. “Why not?” He stuck out his hand. In the clasp, it almost swallowed up Joe’s.

Young Navy officers-ensigns and lieutenants, junior grade-met the train at the Durham station. They divided the newly arrived flying cadets into groups of fifty or so. The ensign in charge of Joe’s group was a tall, green-eyed fellow named Don Ward. “I am your mother,” he announced in an accent not far removed from where they were. Several people snickered. Ward waited till they were through, then repeated himself: “I am your mother. That’s what they call my duty. I am supposed to shepherd you all through this here training course, and I aim to do it. I am also supposed to keep you out of mischief, and I aim to do that, too.”

He got his charges aboard a bus that barely held them and their luggage. With much grinding of gears, the bus chugged toward Chapel Hill, about twelve miles away. The town proved tiny, the business block hardly more than a block long. Homes seemed pleasant enough, often separated from one another by ivy-covered walls. Except for the cedars, all the trees that would have given shade in the summertime were naked now. Without their leaves on them, Joe couldn’t tell one kind from another.

The University of North Carolina dominated Chapel Hill. The bus wheezed to a stop in front of a three-story brick building. A native Californian, Joe didn’t like brick buildings; they fell down in earthquakes. He laughed at himself, wondering when North Carolina had last had an earthquake. That would be okay.

“This is Old East,” Ensign Ward told his charges. “It’s almost a hundred and fifty years old-the oldest state college building in the country.”

Maybe he thought people would be impressed to hear that. Joe was impressed, all right, but probably not the way Dillon had in mind. Wonderful, he thought. They’re sticking us in a goddamn ruin.

“Old East will be your home while you’re here. You will be four to a room.” Ward waited out the groans, then went on, “This is not the worst introduction to Navy life. If you can’t get the hang of living in each other’s pockets, you probably don’t belong here. Ships are crowded places. You need to get used to the idea. If you’ve already started pairing off, that’s okay. We’ll try to accommodate you.”

Joe caught Orson Sharp’s eye. The cadet from Utah nodded. In a voiceless whisper, Joe asked, “Got anybody else in mind?”

Sharp shook his head. “Not yet. How about you?” he answered, just as quietly.

“Nope,” Joe said. “Want to trust to luck? Or do you see anybody you especially want to snag?”

“Luck will do,” Sharp said. “This looks like a pretty good bunch of guys. How can we go wrong?” He and Joe were about the same age, but Joe felt ten years older. Somehow, the cadet from Utah had missed out on his share of cynicism. How can we go wrong? Joe thought. Just wait and see. You’ll find out how we can. But Orson Sharp expected things to go right, not wrong. Joe didn’t know whether to call him a Pollyanna or to envy him his confidence.

They got joined up with Bill Frank, who was from Oakland, and Otis Davis, who’d got on the train in St. Louis. Frank and Davis seemed to be a pair, too. That made Joe feel a little better-at least they weren’t guys nobody else wanted anything to do with.

The room… wasn’t as bad as Joe had expected. That was about as much as he could say for it. It wasn’t big enough to swing a cat, but he hadn’t looked for anything different there. The iron-framed bunk beds also came as no surprise. It did boast electricity and running water, even if you could tell they were add-ons. The people who’d built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things.

Whoever built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things as human beings in it, either. That was how it seemed to Joe, anyhow. The window was tiny and set high in the wall, so it let in only a little light and gave a lousy view. And the place had a peculiar kind of airlessness to it. It felt stuffy with the door open and got downright stifling with the door closed.

Otis Davis said, “I’m glad we’ll be out of there before the hot weather comes. This place’d be a bake oven like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Gevalt! ” Bill Frank said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Only goes to show you’re from the West Coast,” Davis said. “If you came from a place where it gets hot and muggy, you’d know the signs.”

“This is a pretty crazy town, not even big enough for a train station,” Joe said.

Don Ward stuck his head into the room. “Supper at 1800,” he announced. “That’s an hour and a half from now. Lights out at 2130. Reveille tomorrow-and every day-at 0530. Tomorrow you’ll draw your clothes and do another pile of paperwork. And after that, gentlemen”-his grin went hard and ruthless-“we put you to work.”

Joe was still slow at translating military time into what he was used to. He said, “Lights out at half past nine, sir? Is that right?” He hadn’t gone to bed that early since he was thirteen years old.

But Ward only nodded. “That is correct, Mr. Crosetti.” People didn’t have any trouble remembering Joe’s last name once they heard it. Accurately interpreting the expression on his face, Ward added, “You’ll find enough to do to tire yourself out by then. Trust me, Mr. Crosetti-you will.” And, leaving that promise behind, he went down the hall to pass the word to the next dorm room.

“SO SORRY, JIRO-SAN,” Tomatsu Okamoto said nervously. “So sorry, but I haven’t got any more fuel to sell you. I’m all out.”

Flanked by his sons, Jiro Takahashi glowered at the man from whom he’d been buying diesel fuel for years. He’d known this day was coming, but he hadn’t expected it so soon. “You had plenty day before yesterday,” he growled. “Where did it go? Did you drink it?”

Okamoto laughed nervously. “Not me,” he said. “The Army confiscated everything I had left. They said they had to keep their trucks running as long as they could.”

“Does anybody else have any?” Jiro asked. “Do you know?”

“I don’t know, not for a fact, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Okamoto answered. “I’m not a big operator, not even close. If they’re down to taking away my stock, they’ve already sucked the others dry.”

Jiro nodded. That made more sense than he wished it did. “What am I going to do now?” he asked, not so much of old man Okamoto as of the whole uncaring world around him. “How am I supposed to take the Oshima Maru out if I can’t get fuel for her?”

“Weren’t you talking about knowing somebody who could fit her out with a mast and sail, Father?” Hiroshi said. “It’s about time.”

“Yes, I was talking about that,” Jiro said. “But I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know how much it will cost. Jesus Christ!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “I don’t even know if that Doi fellow is still alive.”

“If he isn’t, it’ll take longer,” Kenzo said.

Hiroshi laughed. Even old man Okamoto laughed. Jiro glared at his younger son. What kind of a joke was that? An American joke, that was what. Jiro didn’t think it was funny (though he might have if Okamoto had told it). It was just annoying to him.

“Eizo Doi, the handyman fellow?” Okamoto asked. Jiro nodded. Okamoto said, “He’s still around-at least, I saw him three or four days ago. You think he can put a sail on a sampan?”

“I don’t know for sure. He’s talked about it,” Jiro answered. “If he can, I’m still in business, whatever business there is. If he can’t…” The fisherman spat on the sidewalk. “If he can’t, I have to find something else to do.”

“Like what?” Okamoto asked with interest. Jiro only shrugged. Except for his stint in the fields, he’d been a fisherman all his life. He didn’t know anything else. He didn’t want to know anything else.

“What are we going to do if we can’t put to sea today?” Hiroshi asked.

Jiro shrugged again. Again, he had no idea. Reiko would be surprised to see him and their sons home so early. Whether she’d be happy to see them… That was liable to be another story.

Hiroshi and Kenzo and he had just started back from old man Okamoto’s when Japanese bombers appeared overhead. The air-raid sirens didn’t begin to wail until after antiaircraft guns opened fire and bombs started whistling down. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed in dismay. His sons both swore in English.

He wasn’t so frightened as he might have been. The Japanese planes had been in the habit of dropping most of their bombs farther east, on the haole part of town. The ones that had hit around here had seemed like accidents-to everyone except the people they landed on, of course.

But things were different this morning. This morning, bombs rained down all over Honolulu. When one burst a couple of hundred yards ahead, it sounded like the end of the world. If it had burst any closer than that…

Kenzo grabbed him by the arm. “We’ve got to find some cover, Father!”

He was right. Jiro could see that. But where? Farther east, where things were more open, they’d dug air-raid trenches. Not many of those here, not with concrete and asphalt covering so much of the ground. Not many cellars to huddle in, either; hardly any buildings in Honolulu had them.

His younger son pointed to a deep doorway. That would have to do. It would, unless a bomb burst right in front of them-or unless the building came down on top of them. Jiro did his best not to think of such things.

More and more people crowded into the doorway. Women screamed when bombs burst close by. So did several men. Others cursed in a variety of languages. So did several women. Neither the men’s screams nor the women’s curses affronted Jiro the way they would have under different circumstances. He was almost frightened enough to piss himself. Why should anyone else be different?

Hiroshi pointed up into the sky. “One of them’s coming down!” he shouted in Japanese. Then he said what was probably the same thing in English.

Sure enough, a Japanese bomber trailing smoke and fire plummeted out of the sky, swelling enormously as it did. Jiro wondered about the men inside. Were they dead? If they weren’t, what were they thinking as they plunged to their deaths? Could they keep the Emperor in their minds? Or did bright panic swallow everything else?

Panic swallowed everything else in the voice of a woman by Jiro as she shrieked, “It’s coming down on us!”

Jiro wanted to call her a stupid idiot. He wished he could. But she was right. He started to scream himself when he thought the doomed bomber would smash into the building in whose doorway he huddled. It didn’t. It crashed into a laundry half a block away. A fireball erupted-the plane must have had almost a full load of fuel on board. Blazing fragments pinwheeled off and went flying along the street.

“Come on!” Now Jiro grabbed his sons instead of the other way around. “We can’t stay here. That fire will burn this whole block.”

They had to fight their way out of the doorway. Some people couldn’t think of anything but the moment’s shelter. But what good was staying in the roasting pan if it was about to go into the oven?

Bombs kept screaming down. The Takahashis weren’t safe in the street, either. But they had to get away from the spreading fire-if they could. “This whole part of town is liable to burn!” Kenzo shouted.

“We’d better get Mother out, if we can,” Hiroshi said. “I wish she’d been willing to get on the sampan with us.”

“So do I,” Jiro said. Fear for Reiko rose like a choking cloud within him. Some of it turned to fury. “And I wish the Americans had surrendered a long time ago. They can’t win. They can’t hope to win. They’re the ones who are making Japan do this to Honolulu.”

His sons looked at each other. Their shoulders went up and down in identical shrugs. Those could have said, He may be right. Jiro didn’t think they did. He thought they meant, He’s crazy, but what can you do? That only made him angrier. Before he could say anything more, though, Hiroshi said, “We can worry about that another time, Father. For now, let’s see if we can get back to the apartment and make sure Mother’s all right.”

Inside Jiro, the rage collapsed. The fear didn’t-it kept growing. He nodded brusquely. “Yes. Let’s do that.”

Kenzo had been right. The burning bomber hadn’t started the only fire in the Asian part of Honolulu. Streets and alleys were crowded here. People packed together far more tightly than they did on the haole east side. That didn’t bother Jiro; to him, it was water to a fish. If anything, Honolulu was less crowded than he remembered cities in Japan being. But once fires got going here, they had no trouble spreading. And the narrow streets and the rubble choking them made it hard for fire engines to come to the rescue.

Bombs kept on falling, too. Jiro ignored them. Some people, like his sons and him, were trying to push deeper into the city to find their loved ones. Others were fleeing toward the Pacific. There, if anywhere, they’d be safe from the spreading flames.

And some people simply lay where they had fallen, struck down by blast or flying fragments of bomb casing or falling debris. In a handful of horrible minutes, Jiro saw more ways the human body could be mangled than he’d ever imagined. He had to step over bodies and pieces of bodies. He had to step over writhing, howling, bleeding people who weren’t dead yet, too. Part of him wanted to help them, but he didn’t think he could do much for most. And if he’d tried, he never would have got back to the apartment. There were too many wounded, and they would have taken too much time.

He and his sons were getting close, but the flames and smoke up ahead were getting thicker. Somebody coming the other way shouted in Japanese: “Go back! You can’t go any farther. It’s all fire up ahead. You’ll just kill yourselves.”

Jiro and Hiroshi and Kenzo looked at one another. None of them said anything, or needed to. They plunged ahead with no more hesitation than that. Jiro knew a moment of somber satisfaction. The boys might not be everything he would have hoped for, but they were no cowards.

Courage, here, helped not at all. The shouting Japanese man proved right. Fire and smoke blocked the way forward. Jiro coughed and hacked as if he’d smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. Hiroshi and Kenzo were coughing, too. But their faces remained grim and determined. They were going to go forward even if it killed them.

And it was liable to. Jiro realized his sons would retreat only if he spoke first. He also realized he had to. “We can’t get through this way. Can we go back around and try from the side?”

“I think we’d better, Father.” Soot stained Kenzo’s face. Sweat streaked it. He didn’t seem to know he had a burn on his cheek. “We’d have more of a chance.”

They had no chance pushing straight ahead. Jiro could see that. He led the way. His sons followed. He went west, not east. The Japanese overhead were still bombing more heavily toward the east. That was where the haoles lived, where their enemies lived.

Or some of their enemies, anyway. A round-faced man with Oriental features sitting in the street cradled a dead woman in his arms. Tears ran down his face as he howled curses to the uncaring sky in singsong Chinese. He didn’t seem to notice when the Takahashis ran by, which might have been just as well.

The Chinese man would have hated Jiro just then. Jiro didn’t hate him. He felt a horrid sympathy for him and with him, in fact. That could be me, holding Reiko. He muttered to himself, trying to repel the evil omen.

Panting, he went around a corner-and dug in his heels to stop as fast as he could. Burning cars up ahead made the street an inferno. Heat blasted into his face. He went up another block, only to find another fire.

People were running away, not going toward the flames. Jiro scanned faces, hoping to see Reiko’s. He didn’t, which only made his fear worse. “Come away, baka yaro! ” someone yelled at him. “You can’t do anything here!”

He looked to his sons. “What do you think?”

“We’ll get trapped if we stay much longer,” Hiroshi said. “But I’ll go on if you want to.” Kenzo nodded.

No, they weren’t cowards, even if they were… Americans. And Jiro’s older son had thrown the choice back on his shoulders. He’d hoped one of the boys would make it for him. No such luck. He ground his teeth. “We can’t go there,” he said. They didn’t argue with him. He wished they would have. Because they didn’t, he had to spell everything out himself: “If we can’t get there, we can’t do your mother any good. We have to hope the place isn’t burning, and that she got out, and we just haven’t seen her.”

His sons nodded. Kenzo cursed in English. He was cursing Japan, but Jiro didn’t try to stop him. It wouldn’t change anything anyhow.

Neither Kenzo nor Hiroshi made the slightest move to withdraw from the advancing flames. Jiro realized they were leaving that to him, too. Part of him wanted to rush forward, into the fire, and embrace oblivion. But Reiko might be all right-and, in any case, the boys needed someone to keep an eye on them and make sure they stayed out of trouble.

“We’d better get away, then,” he said. Only when he started back down toward the ocean did Hiroshi and Kenzo move. He reached up to put an arm around each of their shoulders. They weren’t everything he’d wanted in sons, but he could have done worse as well as better.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE SET a hand on the barrel of his 105. He felt like a cowboy saying good-bye to his favorite horse. He was out of ammunition for the gun. He had no idea where to get more, or how soon it might come up if by some miracle he found out.

After more than a month of fighting as hard as it could, the American Army was visibly starting to come to pieces now. It had done as much as flesh and blood could do-and that hadn’t turned out to be enough. Small-arms fire rattled in front of Fletch’s position, and off to the left flank, too. The end hadn’t come yet, but it was getting closer.

He glanced over to the shiny Ford his infantrymen-turned-gun-bunnies had shanghaied. The car had three flats, the same as the De Soto had had a few days earlier. It wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe his merry men could commandeer another one. What point, when the gun had no shells?

If he’d had a horse and needed to deny it to pursuing Indians, he would have shot it. Instead, he took the breech block out of the 105. A stream ran down from the mountains not far from where the gun rested. He carried the heavy steel casting to the bank and threw it in the water. He’d picked a place where the flow was turbulent. As he’d hoped, bubbles and foam hid the breech block from prying eyes. The Japs might get their hands on that 105, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.

Wearily, he trudged back to what was now a Quaker cannon. His makeshift crew stood by the gun, waiting to see what happened next. Fletch wished he knew. He said, “Well, boys, I made artillerymen out of you for a while. Now it looks like I’ve joined the infantry.”

Clancy and Arnie and Dave looked at one another. Clancy talked more than either of the other two. “No offense, Lieutenant, but you picked a shitty time to go slumming.”

In spite of everything, Fletch laughed. “They say timing’s everything.” He reached up and touched the Springfield slung on his shoulder. “I haven’t quit fighting. I don’t intend to, either.”

As if to mock him, the rattle of gunfire from the left got louder. It also moved farther south, down toward the sea-makai, they said here, without seeming to know that wasn’t really an English word. The Japanese were pushing forward, the Americans falling back. That was how it had gone since the beginning. But the Americans couldn’t fall back any more, not if they were going to have any real chance of holding on.

They were falling back anyhow. No doubt that said they had no real chance. Fletch scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. He said, “We’d better move back toward Honolulu. Things are still holding together there, or they were the last I heard.”

“We’d better move back somewhere, that’s for damn sure,” Clancy said.

The other two enlisted men nodded. Arnie said, “If we don’t, the Japs are liable to cut us off.”

He stopped right there. He didn’t need to say another word. If advancing Japanese soldiers cut them off, they were liable to capture them. Nobody in his right mind cared to chance that.

“Come on,” Fletch said harshly. “Let’s get going.”

Off they went, retreating to the south and east. They weren’t the only ones-far from it. Singly and in small groups like theirs, other soldiers tramped along the side of the road or out in the middle of it. Clouds drifted overhead. A spatter of rain fell, though the sun never disappeared. The landscape was one of almost unearthly beauty: jungle-clad hills to the north, palm trees and blossoming hibiscus close at hand, mynahs and bluish-faced zebra doves pecking for whatever they could find, the sapphire sea visible to the south.

Where beauty failed, it failed because of man rather than nature. Ahead, Honolulu lay mired in smoke after the latest Japanese bombing attack. If Fletch turned his head to look west, he could see more ruin in Pearl Harbor. He didn’t. He was too stubborn.

But when he looked around, he saw the ugliness in his comrades and himself. They were scrawny and filthy and unshaven. They smelled bad. At least half of them had minor wounds. They all had the hangdog air of beaten men.

That was one more thing Fletch had no idea how to cure. He was sure he had that same hangdog air himself. Oahu was going to fall. It would fall sooner, not later, too. And what would the Japs do with all the soldiers they captured then? What would they do to them? Whatever they want to, Fletch thought, and shuddered.

Somewhere not far away, an officer was shouting frantically, trying to get men to form a defensive line. “Come on, you sorry bastards!” he howled. “We’ve still got a chance as long as we don’t quit!”

Fletch gathered up his erstwhile gun team by eye. “Let’s go,” he said.

They didn’t argue with him. They showed no great enthusiasm, but they went along. Maybe they were also wondering what would happen if and when they had to lay down their arms. That one gnawed at Fletch.

Because it gnawed at him, he shoved it to the back of his mind. He found the loud officer-a captain-behind a bougainvillea hedge. “What do you need, sir?” he asked.

“Fucking everything!” the captain exclaimed. Then he amplified that. Pointing north toward the hills overlooking Honolulu, he said, “We’ve got to stop the advancing enemy.”

“But, sir-” Fletch pointed west, the direction from which he’d come. “The Japs are over there.”

“I know that, goddammit,” the captain said impatiently. “But they’re sneaking down through the hills, too, to get on our flank and rear.”

Fletch didn’t know why he was surprised. If the Japs could get men over the Waianae Range, these lower, less rugged hills would prove no great challenge to them. But he couldn’t help asking, “Why didn’t we have men up there to stop them?”

“In that jungle? Who would have figured they could get through it?” the captain said, proving some people had trouble learning even from experience. It wasn’t the captain’s fault alone, of course. His superiors had to have the same attitude. Ostriches eventually pulled their heads out of the sand and ran, didn’t they? That only proved they were one up on the top brass in the Hawaiian Department.

“Uh, sir?” Fletch gestured for the captain to step aside with him for a moment. The other officer did. In a low voice, Fletch said, “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but if they’re coming at us from the north and from the west, we are really and truly screwed.”

The captain nodded. “Yes, I realize that. And so, Lieutenant? Have you heard an order to surrender?”

“No, sir,” Fletch said.

“Neither have I. That being so, we had better keep fighting, don’t you think?” As if to underscore the captain’s words, mortar bombs started whistling down not nearly far enough away. The captain and Fletch both threw themselves flat on the ground before the first one burst. Jagged fragments of steel hissed and whistled through the air. A soldier cried out, sounding startled and hurt at the same time. The captain started shouting again without raising his head more than a couple of inches: “Stay ready, men! They may try to follow this up with foot soldiers!”

“Christ!” Fletch said. “Are they down this far already?”

Before the captain could answer, Japanese rifle fire did it for him. The Arisaka rifle the Japs used sounded less robust than the Springfield. It was only.256 caliber, and didn’t have quite the stopping power of the bigger, heavier American round. The Arisaka had proved plenty good enough, though.

Men began slipping away from the captain’s makeshift line. He cursed them with weary hopelessness. Fletch understood that. It was exactly the way he felt himself.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU hadn’t known what to expect from Honolulu. It sprawled ahead of him now, hard by the Pacific. The buildings were large and solid, in the Western style. All the same, it couldn’t have held much more than half as many people as Hiroshima, the Japanese city closest to his farm.

Here and there, in little stubborn knots, the Americans still fought hard. But now that resistance began to feel like the last spasms of some dying thing. The Japanese could bypass the men who did keep battling, because in a lot of places there weren’t any. That let them surround the pockets of diehards and dispose of them at their leisure.

When Shimizu sent young Shiro Wakuzawa out to scrounge supplies for the squad as the sun sank in the west, the first-year soldier went off with a sigh. His squadmates murmured, “Hard work!” in sympathy. Shimizu didn’t care. Somebody had to do it. He’d done it himself often enough in China, before he got promoted.

Wakuzawa came back with a big burlap sack slung over his shoulder and an enormous smile on his face. “You look like the monkey who found the apple tree,” Shimizu said. “What have you got in there?”

“Wait till you see, Corporal-san.” Wakuzawa let the sack down on the grass by the fire the Japanese had started. The fire was purely force of habit; Hawaiian nights didn’t come close to requiring one. As the youngster reached into the sack, he went on, “I came across a grocery store that hadn’t been looted empty.”

“Ahhh!” the whole squad said as one man. They said it again when Wakuzawa took out three cartons of mild, flavorful American cigarettes. Boxes of crackers followed, and then Wakuzawa’s triumph: can after can of meat, its pink glory displayed against a dark blue painted background. Big yellow letters told what it was, but Shimizu couldn’t read the Roman alphabet.

“Does anyone know what it says?” he asked.

“It’s called ‘Spam,’ Corporal,” Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa answered.

He’d always struck Shimizu as a bookish type. “How do you know?” the corporal asked.

“My father is a druggist in Hiroshima,” Furusawa said. “I was learning the trade till I got drafted. Some of the medicines he got came from the West, so I had to learn the characters the gaijin use.”

The Spam cans opened with keys conveniently soldered to them. The meat inside them looked just like the tempting illustration. The soldiers hacked it into rough slices with their bayonets and ate it on crackers. Some of them toasted the Spam over the fire first; others didn’t bother. Shimizu didn’t-he was too hungry to care. He wolfed down the meat.

“That’s one of the most delicious things I ever ate,” Senior Private Furusawa said with a sigh of pleasure.

“Hai. Honto,” Shimizu agreed; he’d been thinking the same thing. “Even better than sashimi, if you ask me. Why don’t we have things like this in Japan?” He took a pack from one of the cartons, opened it, and began to smoke. “This is better tobacco than we get at home, too. We’ve already found that out.”

“It’s ours now, by right of conquest,” somebody said.

“Banzai! for Wakuzawa, who conquered it for us,” somebody else added. A soft chorus of “Banzai! ”s rang out. Shiro Wakuzawa blushed like a schoolgirl. Corporal Shimizu hid a smile. Wakuzawa might be only a lowly first-year soldier, but he was the hero of the moment.

“I don’t remember the last time I felt so full,” Furusawa said. “I want to go to sleep right where I’m sitting.”

Several soldiers incautiously nodded. “You’d better not,” Shimizu said. “We’ll have sentries out through the night. Never can tell what the Americans might do if they catch us all snoring here. Furusawa, you’ll take the first watch.”

“Yes, Corporal,” the senior private said. That was work, but not too bad. At least he wouldn’t have his sleep interrupted, the way the men who came later would.

“And then tomorrow,” Shimizu went on, “tomorrow, I think, we push on into Honolulu at last.” He wondered how hard the Americans would fight for the city. Clearing them out one house at a time, one block at a time, would be expensive and leave the place in worse ruins than it was already. He shrugged. It would be as it was; he couldn’t do anything about it any which way. He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep.

He slept through the night-one of the privileges of his rank was that he didn’t have to stand sentry. He woke just before sunrise. Hawaii’s unfamiliar birds were calling. He got up and stretched, then went behind a tree to ease himself. Spatters of gunfire came from the east, but only spatters. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. He tried to make himself believe it.

Smoking one of those smooth American cigarettes helped. And then, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Shiro Wakuzawa produced three more cans of Spam. They made as fine a breakfast as they had a supper. The other privates in the squad pounded Wakuzawa on the back and told him what a fine fellow he was.

Such displays were beneath a corporal’s dignity. But Shimizu was glad to have something good in his stomach, too. He told himself he’d go a little easier-only a little, mind-on Wakuzawa for a while. The kid had earned some respect.

Cautiously, the squad moved forward. Shimizu preferred the fields where they had been fighting to the houses that surrounded him now. Who could say how many big, fierce American soldiers they were hiding?

Things stayed fairly quiet. A machine gun in a brick building made its presence known too soon. If the gunner had held off a little longer, he could have slaughtered the Japanese as they came forward across the grass in front of the building. As things were, they got the chance to take cover.

The gunner seemed to have all the ammunition in the world, and to enjoy hosing it around. Shimizu crouched behind some rubble. He wasn’t going to stick his nose out unless ordered. Sooner or later, soldiers to the north or south would outflank that machine gun. Till they did, going straight at it was a recipe for suicide.

About halfway through the morning, the machine gun fell silent. Shimizu sat tight. Maybe the American had run out of ammo after all. Or maybe-and more likely-he was just waiting for his foes to think he had.

But then Senior Private Furusawa called, “Corporal! There’s an American soldier coming forward with a white flag!”

That made Shimizu stick his head up. Sure enough, a tall Yankee with a flag of truce strode toward him. A nervous-looking local Japanese man stuck close to the soldier’s side. “What do you want?” Shimizu called.

The American spoke in English. Without a word of the language, Shimizu could hear how bitter he sounded. The translator said, “Captain Trexler wishes to seek surrender terms for U.S. forces on Oahu.” He spoke old-fashioned Hiroshima dialect. Had he been one of the men fooling Japanese soldiers? If he had, he would pay.

Next to the other, though, that was a small thing. If the Americans were surrendering… If they’re surrendering, I won’t get shot, Shimizu thought happily. “I will take the captain back through our lines,” he said aloud. The local Japanese spoke in English. With a curt nod, the American came on.