Days of Infamy

VIII

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO strode along the runway at Wheeler Field. His boots clumped on concrete. The wreckage of American warplanes caught on the ground had been bulldozed off to the grass alongside the runways. Japanese technicians attacked the wrecks with pliers and wrenches and screwdrivers and wire-cutters, salvaging what they could. A lot of Japanese flight instruments were based on their American equivalents. In a pinch, the American ones might do. And spare parts, wherever they came from, were always welcome.

Turning to Commander Fuchida, Shindo said, “The Americans had so much here!”

“Hai.” Fuchida nodded. “We knew that before we started this.”

“We knew it, yes, but did we know it?” Shindo said. “Did we feel it in our bellies? I don’t think so. If we had known how much they had, would we have had the nerve to try what we tried?”

This time, Fuchida shrugged. “What you have is one thing. What you do with it is something else. And we had the advantage of surprise.” He waved to the shattered hulks of airplanes. “Once we caught them on the ground, they never had the chance to recover.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo said. “That was the point of the exercise, all right.”

Fuchida turned away, toward the northeast. “Now we make them come to us. If they want to fight a war in the Pacific from their own West Coast, they’re welcome to try.” He paused, then resumed: “Commander Genda was right. If we’d struck the fleet and gone away, they would have used this for their advance base, not San Francisco, and who knows what they might have interfered with? But Hawaii shields everything we’re doing farther west.”

“Oh, yes. We make good progress in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, they say.” Shindo paused, for the first time really hearing something. “Commander Genda, sir?”

“That’s right,” Fuchida answered, a small smile on his face.

“But I thought the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor came from Admiral Yamamoto,” Shindo said.

“And if you ask Genda-san about it, you’ll go right on thinking the same thing,” Fuchida told him. “I sometimes think Genda is much too modest for his own good. But I happen to know he was the one who persuaded Yamamoto to follow up the air strike with an invasion. He’ll say Yamamoto was the one who persuaded the Army, and that was what counted. But he gave Yamamoto the idea.”

“I had no idea,” Shindo murmured. “Genda has said not a word of this.”

“He wouldn’t. It’s not his style,” Fuchida said.

From what Shindo knew of Genda, that was true. To Genda, the operation counted for more than anything else, including who proposed it. Shindo suddenly snapped his fingers: an unusual display for him. “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you, sir-have the technicians made any more sense of the wreckage we found at that Opana place?”

“Not so much as I’d like,” Fuchida answered. “Whatever it was, the Americans didn’t want us to know anything about it. They did a good, thorough job of destroying it after we landed.”

“I can make a guess,” Shindo said. Fuchida gestured for him to go on. He did: “When we attacked the first American carrier-the one that turned out to be the Enterprise — she had fighters up and waiting for us before we got there. We didn’t see any American patrol planes as we flew toward her. I don’t think there were any. I think the Americans have instruments that let them spot planes at some very long distance.”

Fuchida frowned thoughtfully. “And you think the Opana installation is one of these?”

“Opana is a logical place for one,” Shindo replied. “It’s as far north as you can go on Oahu, near enough. Any attack was likeliest to come from the north. And the Yankees would do a good job of destroying something that important.”

“If they had that kind of device there, why didn’t it find our first attack wave?” Fuchida asked. “It didn’t, you know. Our surprise was complete.”

Lieutenant Shindo shrugged this time. “Maybe something went wrong with it. Maybe the Americans just didn’t pay any attention to it. They were like those big birds that stick their heads in the sand.”

“Ostriches,” Fuchida supplied. “They don’t really do that, you know.”

“So what?” Shindo shrugged once more. “The Americans did, and that’s what counts.”

“Yes.” Fuchida turned toward the northeast once more. “They did a bad job of scouting, and it cost them. We’d better not imitate them, or it will cost us, too. We’ll need long-range patrols to make sure they don’t try to cause trouble.”

“Can we afford the fuel to do a proper job of it?” Shindo asked.

“The cost of using up the fuel is one thing. The cost of not using it up is liable to be something else again,” Fuchida said. “Or do you think I’m wrong? If you do, don’t be shy.”

Lieutenant Shindo was seldom shy. He was, if anything, unusually forthright for a Japanese. Because he didn’t ruffle easily, he didn’t think anyone else should, either. But he shook his head now. “No, sir, you’re not wrong. It’s just one of the things we’ve got to think about.”

“Oh, yes.” Fuchida mimed letting his shoulders sag, as if the weight of the world lay heavy upon them. But then he gestured, not just at the technicians stripping U.S. airplanes but at all of Wheeler Field. “So many things to think about. And this would be much harder if not for everything we’ve captured from the Americans.”

“I’ve thought the same thing ever since I saw the bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment we used to fix the airstrip up at Haleiwa,” Shindo said.

“And that was just civilian stuff: what the local builders used,” Fuchida said. “The military gear is even better, though a lot of it got ruined in the fighting and the Americans sabotaged what they could of the rest.”

“By what I’ve seen, they might have done a better job with that,” Shindo said.

Now Commander Fuchida shrugged again. “They’re rich,” he said, and said no more. Lieutenant Shindo inclined his head in silent agreement. He understood exactly what his superior meant. Because the Yankees had so much, they didn’t seem to realize how valuable even their scraps and leavings were to the Japanese. Along with the earth-moving machinery, they’d left plenty of automobiles behind as they fell back from the northern part of Oahu, and they hadn’t torched all the filling stations, either. The Japanese had made good use of both the cars and the precious gasoline.

The same held true elsewhere. Hawaii had an astonishing telephone network: there was a phone for every ten people in the islands. In Japan, the figure was more like one for every sixty people; outside of Tokyo, it wasn’t far from one for every hundred people. You could talk to anyone here, or any place on the islands, almost instantly. The Americans took that so much for granted, they hadn’t bothered to destroy the phone lines or the switching system. That would make it much easier for Japan to defend its conquests. Japanese soldiers slept in U.S. barracks that hadn’t been blown up to deny them to the invaders. They lived softer than they would have at home. The list went on and on.

Fuchida kept looking toward the American mainland. “Sooner or later, they will try to come back,” he predicted.

“Let them try,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them a set of lumps for their troubles, and then they can try again.” He and Fuchida smiled at each other. The sun shone down brightly. It was a perfect morning. But then, what morning wasn’t perfect in Hawaii?

ONCE UPON A time, in the dim and vanished days before the war came to Oahu, Kapiolani Park had been a place where tourists and locals could get away from the frenzy of Waikiki for a little while. Lying by the road out to Diamond Head, the expanse of grass and trees had featured, among other things, a fancy band shell where the Royal Hawaiian Band played on Sunday afternoons.

Now, barbed wire and machine-gun towers ringed Kapiolani Park. Japanese soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In the park itself, tents sprouted like a swarm of toadstools. This was what being a prisoner of war meant.

A mynah hopped along the grass between the tents, head cocked to one side as it studied the ground for worms and grubs. Fletcher Armitage studied the mynah the same way the bird studied the ground, and with the same hunger. He had a rock in his hand.

He also watched his fellow captives. If he knocked the bird over, could one of them grab it before he did?

That was an important question. Everybody on Oahu was going to get hungry by and by. Fletch had seen as much before the surrender. For POWs, though, by and by was already here. The Japanese fed them a little rice or noodles every day. Sometimes green leaves of one sort or another were mixed in with the mess. More rarely, so were bits of fish. Even when they were, the day’s ration wouldn’t have kept a four-year-old healthy, let along a grown man.

“Come a little closer, you stupid bird,” Fletch murmured. Mynahs took people pretty much for granted. Why not? People had always let them alone. People had… till they started getting hungry.

Fletch’s belly growled at the thought of mynah meat. He’d never been fat. He was getting skinnier by the day. He’d traded his belt for a length of rope and half a dozen cigarettes. He’d smoked all the cigarettes the day he got them. The rope would go on holding up his pants after he got too skinny for the belt to do him any good.

Closer came the mynah, and closer still, till it got within about six feet of him. Then it paused, tilting its head to one side and watching him with a beady black eye. It was fairly tame, yes, but not suicidally so like a zebra dove.

“Come on,” Fletch crooned. “Come on, baby.” The mynah bird kept on casing him. It came no closer. He crooned curses when he decided it wasn’t going to. He’d just have to take his best shot.

He let fly with the rock. The motion of his arm startled the bird. It was already on the wing and squawking when the rock thudded down somewhere close to where it had been. Would he have hit it if it hadn’t taken off? Maybe. Maybe not, too.

Coming out with some curses that weren’t crooned at all, Fletch turned away in disgust. “Too bad, buddy,” said a soldier in a tent across the narrow track. “Woulda been good, I bet.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said. “It would’ve been.” The rest of the day looked black and gloomy. If he’d made the kill, he could have had a few bites of real meat, even if mynahs weren’t anything to make you forget fried chicken. Now he’d have to get by on rations alone. The only trouble with that was, a man couldn’t possibly do it.

He went over and picked up the rock before somebody else got hold of it. It was a good size for clouting birds. Some time before too long, he’d get another chance. Don’t blow it, he told himself sternly.

How smart were birds? How long would they take to figure out that they’d suddenly become fair game? How long before they started staying away from Kapiolani Park? If they did, that would be very bad.

The Japs didn’t bother bringing drinking water into the park. They just left the drinking fountains in place. Generous of them, Fletch thought sourly. If a man had to stand in line for an hour just to wet his whistle… well, so what? That was no skin off the Japs’ noses.

Anyone who wanted to wash had to do it at the drinking fountains, too. That meant anything resembling real washing was impossible. Fletch noticed the stink less than he’d thought he would. When everybody smelled, nobody smelled. And everybody sure smelled here.

Rank had no privileges in line. As far as Fletch could see, rank had no privileges anywhere in the camp any more. If enlisted men obeyed officers, it was because they respected them or liked them, not because they thought they had to. And if they didn’t, what could the officers do about it? Not much. The Japs wouldn’t back them up. The Japs didn’t care what happened here.

Slowly, slowly, the line snaked forward. Fletch sighed. He was thirsty. He was tired. And he was hungry. Anyone who was hungry enough to want to eat a mynah bird was hungry, all right. Unless he caught a mynah or a dove, he’d stay hungry till he got supper. He shook his head. He’d stay hungry after he got supper, too, because it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

His turn at the water fountain finally came. He drank and drank and drank. If he drank enough, he could trick his belly into thinking he was full, at least for a little while. He splashed water on his face and hands, too.

“Come on, buddy. Shake a leg,” the soldier behind him growled. Reluctantly, Fletch moved away from the fountain. The breeze off the ocean a few hundred yards away dried the water on his face. As usual, the weather was perfect: not too hot, not too cold, moist but not too humid. Diamond Head towered in the middle distance. The inside of the dead volcano was supposed to be honeycombed with tunnels, fortified beyond belief. When the rest of Oahu was hostage to the Japs, though, that hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot.

A bunch of things everybody had thought would be important hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot. The innate superiority of the white man to the Oriental was one that occurred to Fletch. Here in this POW camp, he didn’t feel very goddamn superior.

The Japs went out of their way to rub it in that he wasn’t, too. A squad of guards strode through the camp, bayonets glittering on their rifles. Americans scrambled to get out of the soldiers’ way. Along with everybody else, Fletch bowed when the guards passed him. Everyone had learned that lesson in a hurry. The Japanese set on and savagely beat anybody who forgot. A couple of Americans were supposed to have died from their mistreatment. Fletch didn’t know if that was true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Japs didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Americans lived or died.

Fletch sat down in front of his tent. There wasn’t much else to do. In fact, there wasn’t anything else to do. Hunger left him slow and lethargic. A fly landed on his arm. Slowly and lethargically, he brushed it away. There seemed to be more flies in the POW camp every day. That only made sense; the latrines got fouler every day. Fletch didn’t know how many thousands of prisoners were jammed in here. Enough so that their wastes overwhelmed the lime chloride the Japs deigned to sprinkle into the latrine trenches.

How long before they ran out of lime chloride altogether? How long before they ran out of chlorine for treating the drinking water? Probably not long-like damn near everything else, the chemicals came, or had come, from the mainland. What would happen when they did run out? Dysentery was the word that came to mind.

After half an hour or so, Fletch heaved himself to his feet. The one drawback to filling yourself full of water was that you didn’t stay full. It worked its way through. He trudged off toward the slit trenches. He might as well have been moving in slow motion. He didn’t have the energy to hurry.

He stood at the edge of a trench, unfastened his fly, and eased himself. Out beyond the barbed wire, Japanese soldiers kept an eye on him and on the other Americans using the slit trenches. Fletch caught a guard’s eye as he put himself back in his pants. Yeah, you son of a bitch, I’ve got a bigger one than you do, he thought. He turned away.

Such games were dangerous. If he got too obvious, the Japs were liable to understand exactly what he meant. Then there’d be hell to pay. He ambled off. The guard didn’t start yelling or open fire, so he’d got away with it.

“Fletch! Is that you? I thought sure you were dead!”

“Gordy! I’ll be goddamned. I thought you were, too.” Fletch pumped Gordon Douglas’ hand. Then both men seemed to decide at the same instant that that wasn’t good enough. They clung to each other as if each were drowning and the other a life preserver. Douglas was dirty, and thinner than Fletch ever remembered seeing him. Seeing him at all was great, though. “How the hell did you end up in one piece?”

The other artillery lieutenant shrugged. “Half the time I ask myself the same thing. They started shooting us up when we were just going out of Schofield Barracks.”

“Yeah, us, too,” Fletch broke in. “You would have been in the truck convoy right in front of mine, or maybe right behind it.”

“Behind it, I think.” Douglas rubbed at a nasty, half-healed scar on his arm. “But Jesus God, Fletch, you can’t do shit when the other guy’s got planes in the air and you don’t. You’re dead as what comes out of a Spam can.”

“I found that out, too,” Armitage said. “We didn’t get to our position till the Japs were already hitting the beaches, and that was too late.”

“Shit, you did better than we did,” Douglas said. “We never made it to Haleiwa at all. It can’t be more than fifteen fucking miles, but we never fucking got there. Air attacks, traffic on the road coming south, wrecks to try and go around-except sometimes you couldn’t go around them. You had to clear ’em-by hand-and that took forever.”

“Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. “Our truck got shot up. We commandeered a civilian car. You should’ve heard the Nips in it howl when we threw ’em the hell out. Try towing a 105 with one of those babies if you want a fun time.”

“You kept your piece? You don’t know how lucky you are,” Douglas said. “We had a bomb burst right under ours early that second morning. Took out most of my crew. I was farther away-that’s when I got this.” He rubbed the scar again. “They slapped a bandage on it, but after that I was an infantryman, and a piss-poor infantryman, too, let me be the first to tell you.”

“I had all ground-pounders on the gun except for me by the time we folded up,” Fletch said. “They learned the ropes pretty good.”

“When it’s root, hog, or die you learn or you go under.” Douglas shrugged. “I learned, too, or learned enough. I must’ve-I’m still here.”

Fletch didn’t say anything to that. From what he’d seen, who lived and who died when bombs and bullets started flying was often-not always, but often-a matter of luck. Instead, he waved at what had been the charming Kapiolani Park and was now the anything but charming POW camp. “Yeah, we’re here, all right, and ain’t it a garden spot?”

Gordon Douglas only shrugged again. “The goddamn monkeys didn’t murder us all after we surrendered. Far as I’m concerned, that’s a step up from what they could’ve done. Step up from what I figured they’d do, too. Some of the shit I saw-” He spat, but didn’t go into detail.

All Fletch did was nod and say, “Yeah.” He scratched at himself. He was itching more and more as time went by. Fleas? Lice? Bedbugs? All of the above? Probably all of the above. Then he waved at the camp again. “They didn’t need to murder us all at once. Looks like they’re gonna do it by inches instead.” He poked Douglas in the belly. The other man had always had trouble keeping the pounds off. He didn’t any more. “You’re skinnier than you used to be. So am I.”

“Don’t remind me,” Douglas said. “They give us this horrible slop, and they don’t give us enough of it, and it’s the most delicious stuff in the world when you get it, on account of then you feel a little less empty for a little while.”

“I know. I know. Oh, God, do I know.” Fletch looked toward the kitchen tents. He knew how long it was till supper, too-knew to the minute even without a watch. Too long. Too goddamn long.

WHEN OSCAR VAN der Kirk and Charlie Kaapu got their surfboards from the Outrigger Club, Charlie asked, “You giving lessons today?”

“This afternoon, yeah. Not now,” Oscar answered. “How about you?”

His hapa — Hawaiian buddy only shrugged. “Not now.”

Oscar always thought of himself as a happy-go-lucky guy. Next to most of the population of Hawaii, much less the mainland, he was. Next to Charlie Kaapu, he might have been a Rockefeller or a du Pont. “Charlie, what the hell do you do for money?” he asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Never have much. Never worry much. Too much worry, too much huhu, waste time.” He slapped his rock-hard belly. “I don’t starve yet.”

“Yeah.” Oscar’s voice rang a little hollow. Before the Japs took over, that would have been a joke. It wasn’t so funny now. People were short of everything from pasta and tomatoes to toilet paper. That wouldn’t get better, only worse. Every once in a while, even though she’d walked out on him, he wondered how Susie Higgins was doing and where her next meal was coming from. He didn’t waste a whole lot of grief on her, though. She was the kind who’d always land on her feet-or, if she had to, on her back.

His toes dug into the sand as he and Charlie walked down to the Pacific. Waikiki Beach was crowded this morning-not with tourists, the way it usually was, but with fishermen. Swarms of people with a rod and reel, and quite a few people with just a rod and a length of line and a hook, were out trying their luck.

A man in a straw hat, a loud floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts hauled a silvery fish out of the water. It wasn’t very big, but all his neighbors stared jealously. He stashed the fish in a creel he kept between his feet. Nobody was going to take his prize away from him.

“Excuse us. ’Scuse us,” Oscar said over and over, pushing past the fishermen to get into the sea. Charlie was more direct. He used his surfboard’s nose to clear a path for himself. A couple of fishermen gave him nasty looks. He looked right back at them. They muttered to themselves, but that was all they did. Charlie hardly ever got into fights. That was mostly because nobody was crazy enough to want to take him on.

A hook splashed into the water right by Oscar’s shoulder as he paddled out to sea. That wouldn’t have been any fun if it had bitten into him. He scowled back toward the beach, but he couldn’t even tell which would-be Izaak Walton had launched it.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he and Charlie got out of range of such missiles. “Well, they won’t catch us instead of their minnows,” he said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, and then, “That one guy got a real fish. Don’t see that all the time, not off Waikiki Beach.”

“These days, you take whatever you get,” Oscar said. Along with their surfboards, he and Charlie had hand nets and canvas sacks to hold whatever they caught. They could get a lot farther out to sea than the optimists who fished from the water’s edge. Or maybe they weren’t optimists. Maybe they were just hungry men doing what they could. Anything was better than nothing.

Were he giving a lesson, Oscar would have turned back toward shore long since. But he wasn’t. Oahu receded behind him. The breeze came off the land. He wrinkled his nose. At just about the same time, Charlie said, “What’s that stink?”

“It’s got to be the prisoners’ camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. “I can’t think of anything else it could be.”

Charlie Kaapu grunted. “That’s a nasty business.”

“Everything that’s happened since the Japs landed is a nasty business,” Oscar said. Charlie grunted again. He didn’t say anything more, so Oscar took it for a grunt of agreement.

Off in the distance, a couple of fishing sampans headed out to sea. The light breeze filled their sails. More and more sampans were abandoning engines for the wind. Without fuel, what good were engines? Without fuel, what good was anything? Oscar’s Chevy sat on the street. It wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he could get gas for it, the battery was sure to be dead by now.

He was jealous of the sampans for the same reason the surf fishermen were bound to be jealous of him. As he could get fish the men on the beach couldn’t, so the sampans could find fish he’d never see. “Hey, Charlie!” he called.

Charlie Kaapu looked up from his paddling. “What you want?”

“You think we could rig a little mast and sail on a surfboard? That would let us get a lot farther out to sea than we can like this.”

Charlie thought it over, then shook his head. “Waste time,” he said. Oscar shrugged. His friend might well be right.

Something nibbled his finger. He looked into the water. A minnow darted away. Oscar laughed. His hands and feet were the bait he fished with. Even as he laughed, though, he also scanned the sea. Fish he wanted to catch weren’t the only sort out there. The Pacific also held fish that wanted to catch him. Sharks big enough to be dangerous were rare. Some people on the mainland imagined surf-riders devoured every day. That was a bunch of hooey. But a man who ignored the risk was a fool, too. It was like not watching the road when you got behind the wheel.

“What do you think?” he asked Charlie after a while. “We out far enough?”

Charlie looked back toward the shore. “I guess maybe. We don’t get anything, we can paddle some more.”

“Okay.” Oscar stopped paddling and let his arm trail in the water. He fluttered his fingers. Now he wanted fish to come up to him. Here, isn’t this an interesting piece of seaweed? That was what he wanted to put across to the fish. I should be writing radio spots, he thought.

A fish came up to see what he was selling. He had the net in his other hand. He didn’t advertise the net. He made a swipe with it-and the fish got away. “Oh, shit,” he said without too much heat. Such mishaps happened all the time.

Charlie made a swipe of his own. He hauled something silvery out of the sea. As he stuffed it into his sack, he sent Oscar a sly smile. Oscar took his hand out of the water and flipped Charlie off. They both laughed. No mystical native talent had let Charlie catch a fish where Oscar failed. Before long, Oscar would be smiling and Charlie cussing. They both knew it. There wasn’t any point in getting excited. If you weren’t patient, you’d never make it as a fisherman.

After a while, Oscar caught a little ray. Before he came to Hawaii, he would have thrown the bat-winged fish back. A few visits to Chinese and Japanese restaurants, though, had convinced him ray and even shark could be pretty tasty if you did them right. And he couldn’t be too choosy these days anyhow.

A swarm of minnows flashed by, like shooting stars under the surface of the sea. Oscar and Charlie looked up, the same hopeful expression on both their faces. Minnows wouldn’t swim that way unless something was after them. And whatever was after them might really be worth catching.

Oscar swiped with his net. He let out a whoop-his catch almost tore the handle out of his grasp. He hauled a mackerel up onto his surfboard. A few seconds later, Charlie caught one, too. They both stuffed the fish into their sacks and thrust the nets into the sea again. If there were more, they wanted them. And there were. Oscar got another one in nothing flat. I eat today, he thought.

Lots of people in Honolulu had such worries these days. Unlike most of those people, Oscar had had them before. He’d spent a lot of time living from hand to mouth. There was a difference, though. When he’d worried about going hungry before, it was because he’d been short of money. Now he was short of food, and so was everybody else.

He went on fishing even after he caught the second mackerel. What he didn’t eat today could go into the little icebox in his room for tomorrow. Or he could trade it for other food, or sell it to get the money he needed to pay the rent. He wondered if his landlord would take fish for the rent in place of cash. Before the war started, the idea would have been ridiculous. Not any more.

“Well, shall we head back?” he asked at last, after a long dry stretch.

“Why not?” Charlie Kaapu said. “Plenty for today.” He worried about tomorrow even less than Oscar did.

They turned their surfboards toward the shore and began to paddle again. That was work: familiar work, but work. Oscar thought some more about putting a sail on the surfboard. It wouldn’t be pretty, but he was damned if he could see why it wouldn’t work. You did what you had to do. If you were making your living as a surf-rider, that was one thing. If you were using your surfboard mostly as a fishing boat, that was something else again.

Waikiki Beach neared. The fishermen still cast their lines upon the water. Oscar glanced over to Charlie. “Shall we give ’em a show?” he said.

“What else we got to do?” Charlie answered.

They rode the breakers back to the beach. Oscar was used to standing up on a surfboard supporting a skittish tourist. Doing the same thing with a net in one hand and his sack of fish in the other was no huhu. Beside him, Charlie Kaapu might have been the incarnation of Kuula, the Hawaiian god of fishermen. You got the feeling nothing could make him come off his surfboard. That feeling might be wrong; Charlie could take a tumble like anybody else. But Oscar didn’t think he would, not this time.

And he didn’t. Neither did Oscar. They glided smoothly up onto the sand. The fishermen gave them a smattering of applause. Somebody reached into his pocket and tossed Oscar a quarter. Oscar caught it out of the air with his net. That won him some more cheers. He would have got more still if he could have balanced the coin on the end of his nose.

He shrugged as he walked back to his apartment. He was a performer when he got on a surfboard. If he got paid for being a performer, what was wrong with that?

A JAPANESE OFFICER shouted in his own language. Along with the rest of the prisoners in the Pearl City camp, Jim Peterson waited for the English translation. He didn’t have to wait long. As usual, a Hawaiian-born Jap about his own age stood next to the officer. The local wore a sharp sharkskin suit. He seemed happy as a clam to serve his new bosses.

“You will be moved,” he said. “You will go to the north and central part of the island. Some of you will work in the fields. You will be well fed and well treated.”

Peterson turned his head ever so slightly toward Prez McKinley, who stood beside him. “Yeah, and the check is in the mail,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

McKinley snickered. He didn’t do it very loud, though. Guards watched the POWs. If you got out of line, they beat you. They stomped you, too, and hit you with sticks. They’d already killed at least one American. Nobody wanted to give them any excuse to go to work.

And there were probably prisoners who couldn’t be trusted. Peterson didn’t like thinking so, but it was the way to bet. Some people were out for themselves, first, last, and always. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If you can’t lick ’em, lick their boots.

The Jap with the sword on his hip shouted some more. The quisling in the sharkskin suit translated: “This move will begin in one hour. All able-bodied prisoners must go. It is an order from the Japanese Imperial Army.” The way he said it, God might have handed it to Moses on a tablet of stone.

“What about the wounded? What about the sick?” somebody called.

Questions-the mere idea that there could be questions-seemed to surprise both the translator and the officer. The officer growled something. If it didn’t mean, What the devil was that? Peterson would have eaten his hat. The local Jap spoke nervously in Japanese. The officer said something else. The translator returned to English: “They will come when they are fit. Until then, they stay here.”

“They could put most of ’em on trucks and bring ’em along,” McKinley said as the gathering broke up.

“They could, yeah, but why would they?” Peterson answered. “They can’t have a whole lot of fuel here. You think they’re going to waste it on Americans? You think they’re going to waste it on American prisoners, for crying out loud?”

“For crying out loud is right,” McKinley said. “Don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I musta been outa my tree.”

“For Japs, they’re being damn nice to give us an hour to get ready,” Peterson said. “It’s not like I’ve got a lot to pack. Outside of the clothes on my back, what I’ve got is a canteen and a deck of cards.”

“Take ’em,” Prez McKinley said. “You can kill a lot of time with cards. And fill up the canteen before you start. God knows whether those monkeys’ll give us anything, no matter what they say.”

That made more sense than Peterson wished it did. Rations had been anything but abundant here. And the Japanese didn’t bother to hide their contempt for the men who’d surrendered. Any American who gave them even the slightest excuse got beaten up. As far as the Japs were concerned, they were on top, the prisoners were on the bottom, and anybody who didn’t remember that was how things were supposed to work was asking for it.

He had to stand in line to fill the canteen. He had to stand in line for everything in the prison camp. Might as well be in the service or something, he thought wryly. The one faucet the POWs were allowed to use was at the back of what had been a park building. Two Japs in a sandbagged machine-gun nest kept an eye on the queue.

McKinley had a canteen, too. He rubbed his chin, which was sporting a pretty fair crop of grizzled whiskers. “Christ, what I wouldn’t do for some shaving soap and a razor,” he said.

Peterson nodded. “Oh, yeah. We’re all going to look like we play for the House of David before too long.”

They set out when the Japanese officer blew a whistle. It felt like about an hour to Peterson. He didn’t know for sure, having been relieved of his watch. The Jap had one on his wrist. Peterson wondered if he’d worn it when he got here, or if he’d stolen it since. He sure didn’t want to know badly enough to ask, though.

The Japanese soldiers nervously eyed the prisoners as they came out of the barbed-wire enclosure the Japs had thrown up around the park. The soldiers gestured with their rifles: this way. Every one of the rifles had a bayonet fixed to it. The long blades gleamed in the sun. They weren’t worth much in combat, but for sticking a prisoner who couldn’t fight back they’d do just fine.

Along with the other men, Peterson started to walk. The journey north was like running a newsreel backwards: the farther he went, the more distant in time the remains of the fighting were. Things seemed to go in waves that hadn’t been apparent while he crouched on the landscape with a rifle in his hand. A stretch of ground would look as if a giant had been stamping on it with hobnailed boots. That would be a place where the Americans had tried to make a stand. Then he would go forward through a few hundred yards of relatively unchewed terrain. After that would come another battered stretch of ground that would in fact have been the previous U.S. line.

Once they got out of Pearl City and onto Kamehameha Highway, there were places where the retreating Americans had blown up the road to keep Jap-run vehicles from moving forward along it. Not all the holes had been repaired. Some of them were ten feet deep and thirty feet across. The prisoners, naturally, tried to go into the fields on either side to get around them.

The guards shook their heads and gestured with their rifles. “Kinjiru! ” they shouted.

Kinjiru! meant something like, You can’t do that! It was one of the bits of Japanese Peterson had started picking up, however little he wanted any. “What do they want us to do, Prez?” he asked Sergeant McKinley. “Go through the goddamn hole? That’s nuts.”

Nuts or not, it was what the Japs had in mind. “You make,” said one of them who knew a few words of English. “You go in.”

Plainly, none of the prisoners wanted to do that. They piled up at the edge of the crater. The guards did some more yelling. Some of the gestures they used were pretty explicit. If you don’t go in, you’re going to get it. Not a POW went forward, though.

“They can’t shoot all of us,” somebody said. Jim Peterson wished he were sure of that. For the moment, though, it seemed to be true.

One of the guards went pelting off toward the rear. “The most junior man,” McKinley remarked.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Peterson said. By now, he’d got the hang of reading Jap Army rank badges. The more gold and the less red in the background, the higher the grade. Within each grade, the more stars, the higher the rank.

For most of an hour, the standoff continued. Then that poor miserable private, his tunic now all sweaty, returned with the Japanese officer who’d started the parade and his interpreter. He looked things over, then spoke in his own language. The interpreter said, “He says you have to the count of five to obey the order you have been given. After that, the guards will begin to shoot. They will not stop shooting until you obey.”

“Ichi,” the officer said. The interpreter held up one finger. “Ni.” Two fingers. “San.” Three… The guards raised their rifles to their shoulders and stared down the barrels.

Peterson didn’t find out how to say four or five in Japanese. With almost identical frightened moans, half a dozen prisoners in the front ranks plunged down into the crater. They floundered over to the other side and started scrambling up toward the asphalt once more. Other men followed them. As soon as a couple made it up onto the highway again, they reached into the hole in the ground to help their buddies climb out.

Along with everybody else, Peterson went through the hole. He was filthy and weary by the time he made it to the other side. Going around would have saved time. It would have been ever so much easier. But it wasn’t what the Japs wanted.

“You know what they’re doing?” he said as the march north resumed.

“Lording it over us, you mean?” Prez McKinley said, trying without much luck to get the dirt off his tunic.

“Yeah, that, too,” Peterson answered. “But they’re breaking us, taming us, like you’d break a mustang or something.”

McKinley muttered to himself. It sounded like, “Try and break me, will they?” And maybe he had a point. But maybe not, too. If the Japs could get the Americans to do what they wanted without making a fuss for fear something worse would happen if they didn’t, wouldn’t that be enough to keep them happy? What more could they want, egg in their beer?

Plenty of people were out in the fields, cutting down sugarcane and pulling up pineapple plants. The Big Five, the companies that had run Hawaii ever since the annexation, were probably having heart attacks. What the Big Five thought was the least of Jim Peterson’s worries. What he saw here actually made some sense. If Hawaii couldn’t import what it needed from the mainland, it would have to grow its own food. People were taking the first steps in that direction, anyhow.

Yes, but can they grow enough soon enough? he wondered. All he could do was give a mental shrug. He didn’t know. At least they were trying.

On went the POWs. A few people in the fields waved to them. That took guts, with Japanese soldiers watching the prisoners and others watching the laborers. Peterson wanted to wave back. He didn’t, though; it might have drawn the Japs’ notice to people who weren’t afraid to show they didn’t like the occupiers.

They were nearing the turnoff for Wheeler Field when a soldier who’d been visibly dragging for a while went over to the side of the road and sat down on his haunches. “Can’t-go on-for a while,” he panted. “Get my breath-catch up later.” His face was gray with fatigue. Peterson wondered if he’d been hiding a wound.

Two guards rushed over to him. “Kinjiru! ” they shouted. One of them made a motion with his rifle: get up.

“So sorry, soldier-san,” the American soldier said, shaking his head. “Can’t do it. Too damn tired. Let me rest-a little. Then I’ll come.”

“Kinjiru! ” the guards yelled once more. The one who’d gestured did it again. When the American didn’t get up, they both kicked him. He howled and rolled over onto his side. They waited a moment, then kicked him again. He groaned. With an effort, he made it to his hands and knees. They waited a minute or so. When he didn’t get to his feet, they kicked him some more. Plainly, they were ready to kick him to death if he didn’t straighten up and fly right.

He must have figured that out at about the same time Peterson did. With another groan, he heaved himself up onto his pins. He stood swaying like a cypress in a hurricane, but he didn’t fall down. One of the guards shoved him back into the pack. Two POWs caught him and held him upright; otherwise, he would have fallen on his face. The other guard used his rifle to urge the whole gang of prisoners forward again.

The exhausted soldier had a devil of a time going forward. The guards watched him like wolves eyeing a sickly elk that couldn’t keep up with the herd. If he fell again, he was theirs.

He saw it, too. “You better get away from me, boys,” he croaked. “If they decide to shoot me, they might hit one of you by mistake.”

Rage kindled in Peterson. “Fuck ’em all,” he said. “We’ll get you there, goddammit.” He draped the flagging man’s arm around his shoulder. “We’ll take turns.”

“I’ve got him next,” Prez McKinley said. Other men clamored to volunteer. The Japs didn’t make a fuss. As long as everybody kept up, they didn’t care how. Peterson strode ahead, taking his weight and a good part of the other man’s till Prez cut in on him, almost as if at a dance.

This’ll work as long as most of us are sound enough to help the ones who aren’t, he thought. Good thing Oahu’s a small island. They can’t take us too far. This might turn into a death march if they could.

As the sun sank down toward the Waianae Range, a couple of trucks forced their way through the column of prisoners. They were U.S. Army vehicles, the white star on the driver’s-side door hastily painted over with a Japanese meatball. “Goddamn guards didn’t want to shoot them for going around the holes in the road,” Peterson whispered to Prez McKinley.

“Oh, hell, no,” McKinley whispered back. “They got Japs driving ’em. You suppose they’ve brought rations for us?”

“That’d be nice,” Peterson said. In spite of the Japanese officer’s promise, the prisoners had got no food as they tramped up Kamehameha Highway. Peterson’s stomach was growling like an angry bear.

But instead of rations, the trucks disgorged machine-gun teams, who deployed onto high ground from which they could rake the throng of prisoners. A Buick came up a few minutes later. In it were the Japanese officer and his local stooge. The officer spoke in his own tongue. The translator turned it into English: “If anyone tries to escape, we will open fire on all of you. You are responsible for one another. See to it.”

“Where’s our food?” The question came from half a dozen places in the crowd.

The local obviously didn’t want to translate it into Japanese. But the officer nudged him, just as obviously asking what was going on. The local Jap spoke. So did the officer. The fellow in the sharkskin suit said, “You disgraced yourselves with disobedience at the first hole in the road. Going hungry is the price you pay. You should be thankful it is no worse.”

Jim Peterson was anything but thankful. With all those machine guns staring down at him, though, he couldn’t do a thing about the way he really felt.

JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his sons looked over the Oshima Maru. As she bobbed in the light chop in Kewalo Basin, she hardly seemed like the same sampan. A tall mast and a gaff rig changed her into something much more graceful than she had been with a diesel stuck on her stern. That she was also much slower than she had been and dependent on the breezes seemed almost an afterthought.

“She’s ready,” Eizo Doi said. The handyman cracked his knuckles, producing a noise alarmingly like a machine-gun burst. “You sure you know what you’re doing with her, Takahashi-san? If you don’t, you should only take her out a little ways the first few times, till you get the hang of it.”

“I’ll manage,” Jiro said. “I helped my father man a boat on the Inland Sea. How to place the sail and which line to pull, they’ll come back to me soon enough. What I really need to do is show the boys how everything works.”

Kenzo said something to Hiroshi in English. Jiro caught the words Moby Dick. Was that some sort of strange obscenity he’d never heard before? He knew what a dick was, but the moby part went right over his head.

“Please yourself,” Doi said. “Just don’t get in trouble before you finish bringing me my fish.” The way things were these days, most people were happier to get paid in food than in cash. As supplies got tighter, mere money bought less and less. Nimble as a mongoose, Doi hopped up onto the wharf. “Good luck,” he told Jiro, and bowed. The fisherman returned it.

Half a beat slower than they should have, so did his sons. No, they aren’t properly Japanese at all, Jiro thought with yet another mental sigh. Eizo Doi was polite enough to pretend he hadn’t noticed they were slow. He ambled off towards another sampan. Jiro wondered if he was doing anything these days besides putting masts and sails on boats that couldn’t use their engines any more.

Jiro stepped down into the Oshima Maru. Hiroshi and Kenzo followed a little more slowly. They couldn’t act as if they knew it all here, because they damn well didn’t. “Okay, Father. What do we do?” Hiroshi asked. The first word was English, but Jiro got it.

“Here-you go to the rudder for now. You know what to do with that, neh?” Jiro said, and his elder son nodded. Jiro turned to Kenzo. “All right, you come with me.”

“I’m here,” Kenzo said.

“Good. First we find which way the wind is blowing,” Jiro said. For the moment, that was easy: it came off the hills in back of Honolulu, and would waft the Oshima Maru out to sea. Once the sampan sailed out onto the Pacific, though, things would get more complicated. “Next thing to remember is, mind the booms. They can swing and knock you right into the water.”

“Hai,” Kenzo said. Jiro looked back toward the stern. Yes, Hiroshi was listening. Good. He would need to know, too.

Jiro went on, “We set the foresail to one side of the mast and the jib on the other.” He did that, then tied the booms to the belaying pins Doi had mounted on the rail. “Now we cast off, and we’re ready to go.” He brought in the rope that bound the Oshima Maru to the wharf.

Light as a feather, the sampan glided out of Kewalo Basin. Hiroshi steered well enough-he did know how to do that. Even so, a look of surprise and delight spread over his face. “She feels so different!” he exclaimed.

And she did. Before, with the motor pushing her forward, she’d been a creature of straight lines. If the small waves were moving at an angle to her path, she’d just chopped through them. Not any more. Kenzo noted another essential difference: “She’s so quiet, too!”

Jiro had got used to the relentless pounding and throbbing of the diesel. Without it, the Oshima Maru might have been a ghost of her former self. All he heard were the waves and the distant squawks of sea birds and the breeze thrumming in the lines and bellying out the sails. The sampan also felt different underfoot. He’d always got the engine’s vibration through the soles of his feet. They’d told him as much about how it was running as his ears did. Now all he felt was the boat’s pure motion. He smiled. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m younger than you are,” he told his sons. “I’m with my father on the Inland Sea.”

Kenzo and Hiroshi looked at each other. They probably thought he was crazy. They often did. He didn’t care. He could see the rising sun on those crowded waters, the headlands that looked so different from the jungled slopes of Oahu, sometimes a flight of long-necked cranes overhead… He hadn’t thought about cranes in years, or realized how much he missed them.

He ran straight before the wind for a while, and talked his sons through adjusting the sails to compensate as it shifted slightly. He showed them how, if you wanted to swing to port, you had to swing the mainsail to starboard. It seemed backward, but they soon saw it was what needed doing.

“There’s a lot more to think about now,” Hiroshi said.

“Oh, yes,” Jiro agreed. “Of course, you are thinking about it now, and that makes it seem harder. After you’ve done it for a while, you won’t need to wonder what to do. You’ll just do it.” He wasn’t doing things automatically himself-no, not even close. Part of him might have been that fourteen-year-old out on the Inland Sea with his father. The rest was a middle-aged man trying to remember what went where, and why. His father’s boat had been rigged differently. He knew the principles here, but none of the details were the same. He didn’t want his sons seeing that.

Kenzo asked, “If the wind is still off the mountains when we come back to the basin, how do we get there?”

“We tack,” Jiro answered. “It means we slide in at an angle. You can’t sail straight against the wind, but you can go against it. I’ll show you.”

“All right.” Kenzo’s voice was uncommonly subdued. Jiro almost laughed in his son’s face. Yes, the old man still knew a few things the young one hadn’t imagined. That always came as a painful surprise to the younger generation.

A tern soared down and perched at the very tip of the mast. It stared at the Takahashis out of big black eyes that seemed all the bigger because the rest of it was so perfectly white. “That never would have happened when we had the diesel,” Hiroshi said.

“Of course not. There wouldn’t have been any place for it to land then,” Jiro said. Hiroshi stirred as if that wasn’t exactly what he’d meant, but he didn’t try to explain himself. As far as Jiro was concerned, that was fine.

Jiro had his sons practice setting the sails with the wind astern and at either quarter. They got the hang of it pretty fast. They knew the Oshima Maru and how she had handled; that helped them now. What Jiro didn’t let on was that he was learning almost as much as they were. No, he hadn’t handled sails in a lot of years himself.

But he did remember enough to send the sampan on two long, gliding reaches into the wind. “You see how we beat back toward the shore?” he said. Hiroshi and Kenzo both nodded. They seemed impressed. Jiro was impressed that he’d remembered enough to manage to do that, too. He had more sense than to show it, though.

However serene the sampan was under sail, she wasn’t swift. Jiro had come to take the noisy, smelly diesel for granted. It got him where he needed to go, and got him there pretty quick. Now she took a lot longer to reach likely fishing grounds. “We’ll probably have to spend the night in the boat,” Hiroshi said.

“Well, so what?” Kenzo answered. “It’s not like we’ve got anything much to come home to.” Jiro and Hiroshi both grimaced, not because he was wrong but because he was right.

They spilled minnows into the Pacific. They had fewer than usual. The boats that had caught the nehus were diesel-powered, too. All three Takahashis had netted these themselves, using chopped-up bits of rice from their own rations as bait. Then the fishing lines with their big, silvery hooks went into the sea. Jiro hoped for a good catch, to make up for the rice they’d lost.

“One more problem with the new sail,” Kenzo said. “People can see us for a long way.”

He was also right about that. Like most sampans, the Oshima Maru was painted a blue somewhere between sea and sky, not least because the color made it hard for competitors to find her. But what good did the camouflage do when the mast and sail stuck up there like a Christmas tree? It did work both ways. If three or four other boats could spy the sampan, Jiro could see them, too.

What he wanted to see was what he’d caught. He felt like shouting when the first few hooks yielded aku and ahi both. He and his sons worked like men inhabited by demons. They gutted fish and chucked them into storage one after another. Jiro noted that Hiroshi and Kenzo set aside a prime ahi, as he did. When they’d finished the lines, they all gorged on strip after strip of flavorful tuna. It was always delicious, and all the more so after days of the horrible slop the soup kitchens served.

Hiroshi and Kenzo ate with every bit as much gusto as Jiro. They might prefer hamburgers to sashimi, but anybody in his right mind would prefer sashimi to the bowls of rice and noodles and beans, all overcooked together, they’d been getting. That kind of food might keep you alive, but it made you wonder why you went on living. This… This was worth eating.

“Ahhh!” Jiro smiled and smacked his belly. “I’ve missed that.”

Kenzo nodded. Hiroshi was still chewing. “Me, too,” he said with his mouth full.

“We’ll use the guts and things for bait this time,” Jiro said. “That’ll draw more sharks, but nobody these days will turn up his nose at shark meat. We don’t sell just the fins now.”

“Food is food,” Hiroshi agreed. “Even the haoles aren’t so fussy now. Maybe they’ll call it something like ‘sea steak’ ”-he said the words in English, then translated them into Japanese-“so they don’t have to think about what they’re really eating, but they’ll eat it.”

When they drew in the lines this time, they did catch some sharks, but they also got one of the nicest ahi Jiro had ever seen, even better than the one he’d feasted on before. He started to cut more sashimi from it, but paused with his knife poised above its still-glittering side. “Go ahead, Father,” Kenzo said. “You took it off the hook, so it’s yours. It’ll be good.” He smacked his lips. He was eating more raw fish.

Jiro shook his head. “I’ll choose another. This one I think I’ll save for Kita-san.”

His sons looked at each other, the way they often did when he said something they didn’t like. He waited for them to start shouting at him for having anything to do with the Japanese consul. To his surprise, they kept quiet. He supposed it was because he’d sometimes brought fish to the consulate before the war started. They couldn’t say he was doing it to curry favor with Kita now.

Kenzo did sigh, but all he said was, “Have it your way. You will anyhow.”

“Arigato goziemasu.” Jiro made the thank-you as sarcastic as he could. Then he cut strips of tender, deep pink flesh from another ahi. Maybe that fish wasn’t quite so perfect as the one he’d set aside for the consul, but it was plenty good enough for him.

He and his sons threw the offal from the second run into the sea as bait for a third. They didn’t do so well this time; they already taken most of what that stretch of the Pacific had to offer. After they’d stowed what fish they had caught, Jiro turned the Oshima Maru ’s bow toward the shore-actually, toward the northeast rather than due north. He’d have to tack all the way home unless the wind shifted.

“Will we need to spend the night on the ocean?” Hiroshi asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know yet. It all depends on the wind,” Jiro answered. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. It also depended on how tired he was. If he decided he had to roll himself in a blanket before the sampan got back to Kewalo Basin, well, then, they wouldn’t come in till morning.

But the wind stayed steady, and the Oshima Maru handled better than Jiro remembered his father’s boat doing back when he was a boy. Sampans weren’t pretty-which was, if anything, an understatement-but they were seaworthy. He steered the boat into Kewalo Basin a little past nine o’clock. Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter shone in the night sky, Mars farthest west, Jupiter almost straight overhead. The moon, nearly full, glowed in the east and had done its share to help him home.

Japanese soldiers waited by the wharfs, where armed Americans had stood before. They weighed the Takahashis’ fish and gave them their price based on that weight, not on quality. To Jiro’s relief, they didn’t quarrel when he and his sons took some fish off the Oshima Maru. “Personal use?” a sergeant asked.

“For us, hai, and to pay the man who added the mast and sails to the sampan, and a fine tuna for Kita-san, the Japanese consul,” Jiro answered.

“Ah, so desu.” The sergeant bowed. “I am sure he will be glad to have it. Kind of you to think of him.” He waved Jiro and Hiroshi and Kenzo on into Honolulu. Jiro thought about pointing out to his sons how useful that ahi had proved, but he didn’t. They wouldn’t pay any attention.

Eizo Doi was glad to get thirty pounds of fish when the Takahashis knocked on his door, but had his own worries: “Where am I going to freeze all of it? It’s more than my freezer will hold.”

That wasn’t Jiro’s problem. After he and his sons left Doi’s house, Hiroshi and Kenzo went back to their tent in the botanical garden. They wanted nothing to do with Kita or the Japanese consulate. Jiro kept walking north up Nuuanu Avenue to the corner of Kuakini Street. The Japanese consular compound there had become one of the nerve centers of the imperial occupation of Hawaii; Iolani Palace was the other.

Like the rest of Honolulu, the consular compound remained blacked out. Jiro didn’t understand why. No American plane could hope to bomb the city and return to the mainland. He wasn’t even sure a U.S. plane could carry bombs all the way from the mainland to Hawaii. But the Japanese military could be just as unreasonable as its American counterpart.

“Halt!” a sentry called from out of the darkness. “State your name and business.” When Jiro did, the sentry said, “Ah. Go on in. You’ll be very welcome, especially after the torpedoing.”

“Torpedoing?” Jiro said. “What’s this? I’ve been out on the ocean all day without a radio.”

“A damned American submarine sank the Bordeaux Maru this afternoon,” the soldier told him. “She was bringing supplies to the island, but… Karma, neh? The Americans want everyone here to starve. That’s why I said Kita-san would be so glad to get your tuna.”

He opened the door for Jiro, who took the ahi inside. Nagao Kita, the consul, was a short, stocky, round-faced man. He was in animated conversation with three or four Army and Navy officers, but broke off when he saw Jiro. “Takahashi-san!” he said, and the fisherman was proud this important personage had remembered his name. A broad smile spread across the consul’s face. “What have you got there, my friend? Doesn’t that look beautiful?”

“It’s for you, sir,” Jiro said, “and maybe for these gentlemen, if you feel like sharing.”

“Yes, if I do,” Kita said, and laughed. The officers were ogling the splendid ahi, too. A Navy captain licked his lips, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Kita stepped up and took the fish from Jiro. The consul gave him a more than polite bow. “Very kind of you to think of me, Takahashi-san, very kind. I won’t forget it, believe me. When I have the chance, you can bet I’ll think of you.”

Delighted, Jiro returned the bow. “I’m sure that’s not necessary, sir.”

“I think it is.” Having received the tuna with his own hands, Kita called for one of his aides to take charge of it. He turned back to Jiro. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now. We have to figure out what to do about the miserable business this afternoon.”

He didn’t say what the business was. Jiro didn’t show he knew. That might have landed the sentry in hot water. He just nodded and said, “Of course, sir,” and turned to go.

“I won’t forget you,” Kita promised. “You’re a reliable man.” As Jiro pushed through the blackout curtains that kept light from escaping when the door opened, he felt ready to burst with pride. The consul thought he was reliable! The Emperor might have just pinned the Order of the Rising Sun on his chest.

JOE CROSETTI’S INSTRUCTOR in essentials of naval service was a graying lieutenant named Larry Moore. He had a face as long as a basset hound’s, and normally about as doleful, too. When he came into the classroom wreathed in smiles one morning, Joe figured something was up.

And he was right. Lieutenant Moore said, “Gentlemen, yesterday the Grunion sent a Jap freighter to the bottom off the north coast of Kauai. We are starting to hit back at those slanty-eyed so-and-sos.”

A savage cheer-almost a growl-rose from the throats of the flying cadets. Joe joined in. Several young men clapped their hands. Orson Sharp raised his. When Moore pointed to him, he said, “Sir, are the Japs making any effort to bring in supplies for the civilians in Hawaii, or is everything they’re shipping in for their garrison?”

“That’s… not entirely obvious,” Moore said after a brief pause. “But that ship could have been carrying munitions or aircraft as readily as rice for soldiers or civilians.”

“Yes, sir.” As usual, Sharp was punctiliously polite. “Were there secondary explosions after the torpedo hit?”

“I don’t know one way or the other, so I can’t tell you,” the instructor answered. “If you’d be so kind, though, you might tell me why you’re wasting grief on a bunch of damn Japs.”

Most cadets, if challenged that way, would have lost their temper or backed down. Orson Sharp did neither. “Sir, I’ll wave bye-bye to all the Japs we send to the bottom. But there are an awful lot of hungry people in the Hawaiian Islands. If they’re going to get hungrier, I am sorry about that.”

Lieutenant Moore studied him. Sharp hadn’t been disrespectful or insubordinate in any way. He had an opinion, and he’d come out with it. If it wasn’t one the instructor happened to share… Well, was this still a free country or not? No, Joe realized, that wasn’t the right question. The country was still free. How freely anyone in the Navy could speak up was a whole different ballgame.

At last, Moore said, “Well, we’ll let it go this time, then.” He sounded like a governor pardoning a prisoner who probably didn’t deserve it. After another moment or two, Moore went on, “Where were we? Oh, yes. We were going to talk about yesterday’s quiz. About half of you didn’t know that a chief bosun can’t be tried by summary court-martial. Well, gentlemen, he can’t. A chief bosun is a warrant officer, which means the rules for ratings don’t apply to him.”

Bill Frank, who was sitting to Joe’s left while Sharp sat to his right, whispered, “Did you get that one?”

Joe nodded infinitesimally. “Yeah,” he whispered back. “How about you?”

“I think I blew it.” His roomie put a world of pathos into five almost inaudible words.

Lieutenant Moore went over the quiz item by item, concentrating on the ones a lot of cadets had missed. Along with courts and boards, essentials of naval service covered ranks and their duties, naval customs and usages, and all the endless formalities that let officers and ratings work together smoothly. Joe had seen a commander tromp all over a j.g. for something dumb the junior officer did one morning, then play bridge with him that night as if nothing had happened.

He didn’t fully understand how that worked. If anybody had been so bitingly rude to him, he would have wanted to brain the son of a bitch with a tire iron, not play cards with him. But the career Navy men seemed able to build a wall between what happened on duty and what happened off. Of course, they’d had years of practice. That kind of discipline didn’t come naturally. Without it, though, a lot of guys would have grabbed tire irons.

The instructor might have been reading his thoughts. “A ship is a very crowded place,” Moore said. “The sooner you start thinking like Navy men, the better you’ll fit in when you go to sea. We have round holes, gentlemen. People who insist on being square pegs don’t have an easy time of it.” He was looking at Orson Sharp as he said that.

When they got out of essentials of naval service, they had to hustle to make it to introductory navigation. Joe liked that least of the three academic courses in the program; it showed him he hadn’t paid enough attention in geometry and trig. But plenty of other cadets were struggling harder than he was.

“I hope you didn’t get Moore mad at you,” he said to Sharp as they hurried from one building to another.

“So do I, but I won’t lose any sleep over it,” the cadet from Utah replied. “I had a legitimate question.”

“I guess so,” Joe said.

Sharp’s eyes said Joe had just flunked a test. “Don’t you care what happens to the civilians in Hawaii? They’ve got a tough row to hoe.”

“Well, yeah,” Joe admitted. “But isn’t kicking the Japs out the best thing we can do for them? Odds are, whatever that freighter was carrying was going to the Jap Army or Navy, not to civilians.”

“Maybe. I suppose we have to hope so.” Sharp sounded no more convinced than Joe had a minute earlier. “They can’t let everybody starve, though.”

“Who says they can’t?” Joe retorted. “Look what the Nazis are doing in Russia.” Sharp winced but didn’t carry the argument any further, from which Joe concluded he’d won the point.

Any pride in his prowess disappeared in introduction to navigation. He butchered a problem-and he did it on the blackboard so everyone could see. “I’m afraid that answer is just exactly 180 degrees off, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said. “In other words, you couldn’t be wronger if you tried. Take your seat.” Ears blazing, Joe did. The instructor looked around. “Who sees where Mr. Crosetti went astray here?” Several people raised a hand. The instructor pointed. “Mr. Sharp.”

Orson Sharp solved the problem with what looked like offhand ease. He wasn’t having any trouble in the class. When he sat down, he didn’t act as if he’d just shown Joe up. Maybe he didn’t even feel that way. Joe knew he would have were their positions reversed. That made him resent his roomie even if Sharp didn’t resent him.

After the lecture, the instructor gave out more problems, these for pencil and paper. Joe thought he did pretty well on them. You probably did, but so what? he jeered at himself. Everybody already watched you show what a jerk you could be.

He breathed the heady-and chilly-air of freedom again when he got out of class. As far as he could tell, he’d never make it back to his carrier if he took off from one. But when he said that out loud, Orson Sharp shook his head. “I saw what you did. You took the tangent instead of the sine-just a little goof. You won’t do it with your neck on the line.”

“I hope not,” Joe said. Sharp perplexed him almost as much as his mangled navigation. Maybe the other cadet really wasn’t mad at him after all. Did that mark almost inhuman restraint or a genuinely good person?

The cadets’ other academic class was identification and recognition: how to tell bombers from fighters, cruisers from battleships, and Allied planes and ships from the ones that belonged to the Axis. They’d already had to learn the silhouettes of some new German and Japanese planes that hadn’t been known when they started the course.

Joe eyed blown-up photos and drawings with something less than his usual attention. He kept thinking about the question he’d asked himself between classes. How do you identify and recognize a genuinely good person? It wasn’t as if that were something he had to worry about every day. He knew too well that he didn’t fill the bill. Orson Sharp might.

Despite absentmindedness, he got out of the class without embarrassing himself again. Along with the other cadets, he trooped over to the cafeteria-now styled the galley in deference to the influx of Navy fliers-for lunch. The choice was between chicken a la king (which the cadets universally called chicken a la thing) and creamed chipped beef on toast (which had an older and earthier nickname). Joe chose the chicken. Sharp filled his plate with the beef.

At every table, some wit tapped out dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, the Morse for SOS. People snorted. Orson Sharp looked puzzled. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Pointing to Sharp’s plate, Joe said, “You know what they call that stuff.”

“No. What?” The kid from Utah seemed more confused than ever.

As the pseudo-distress calls went on and on, Joe fought not to roll his eyes. Sharp really had led a sheltered life. Patiently, Joe spelled it out for him: “Shit on a shingle. S-O-S.”

“Oh.” A light went on in Sharp’s eyes. “No, I didn’t know that. Well, at least it makes sense now.” He dug in. “I don’t care what they call it. I think it’s good.” As usual, he didn’t let being different from the other cadets faze him. He had his own standards, they suited him, and he stuck to them.

After lunch came athletics. Orson Sharp knocked people into next week on the football field. Joe played offensive end and defensive back. Bigger guys tried to run over him. He tried not to let them. Along with everybody else, they both got knocked around by the dirty-fighting instructors. Swimming felt strange to Joe. He already had a pretty good crawl, but they wanted him to use a modified breaststroke because it kept his head out of the water better. He did his best to learn it. He’d gained five pounds since coming to Chapel Hill, all of it muscle.

And when the lights went out at half past nine, he fell asleep as if he’d been clubbed.