End of the Beginning

X

PLATOON SERGEANT LES DILLON SPENT AS MUCH TIME AS HE COULD ON THE Valdosta Liberty’s deck. It was cooler and less cramped there than down below. He went below to eat in the galley-the rule was that no food left it-and to use the heads. He slept down there, too, and played poker. Other than that, no. Besides, when he was below he couldn’t see what was going on.

His troopship had been zigzagging west and south ever since sailing from San Diego. Other converted freighters and liners-and the destroyers escorting them-filled the Pacific as far as his eye could see. He thought this was a bigger fleet than the one that had sailed and then turned tail the year before. He couldn’t prove it, but it looked that way.

He was sure the course changes were quicker and more precise than they had been the last time around. When he remarked on that, Dutch Wenzel nodded. “I guess even the swabbies can learn something if you give ’em enough time,” the other platoon sergeant said.

“Looks like you’re right. Who would’ve believed it?” Les said. They stood only a few feet away from a couple of the Valdosta Liberty’s sailors. The sailors pretended not to hear. If they’d felt like brawling, Les was ready. What would Captain Bradford do to him? Make him miss the invasion? Not likely! The worst they could do to him was to send him in no matter what he did on the way.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before the troopship’s loudspeakers crackled to life. “Now hear this!” an exultant voice said. “Now hear this! Our ships have whipped the Japanese Navy, and so we are good to proceed to our destination. Beautiful, romantic Hawaii coming up!”

The deck exploded in cheers. Sailors and Marines all yelled as if it were going out of style. Les joined in as enthusiastically as anybody else. So did his buddy. People around them were still shouting and screeching when he suddenly sobered. “What are we jumping up and down about?” he said. “We just won the chance to get our heads blown off. Aren’t you glad about that?”

“Fuckin’-A I am,” Dutch answered. “And so are you, you sandbagging son of a bitch. Otherwise we’d both be gunnies by now.”

“Well, shit. When you’re right, you’re right,” Les said. He and Wenzel had both turned down the chance for a third rocker under their sergeant’s stripes so they could go along on the failed attack the year before instead of training boots at Camp Pendleton. Then they’d ended up at Pendleton anyhow, still at their old grade. Life was a bitch sometimes.

The racket from the Valdosta Liberty’s engines got louder. The ship sped up. So did all the others in the invasion fleet. Wenzel grunted. “They don’t want to waste another minute, do they?”

“Would you?” Les answered. “They’ve wasted a year and a half already, and then some. About time we took Hawaii back. It’s not right for Hotel Street to belong to somebody else, goddammit.”

“There you go!” Dutch Wenzel laughed. “Now I know what I’m fighting for: cheap pussy and overpriced booze.”

“Suits me fine,” Dillon said, and Dutch didn’t contradict him.

As Dillon always did when he was up on deck, he looked out into the ocean to see if he could spot a periscope. The odds were long. In this miserable tub, the odds of being able to dodge if a Jap sub did fire a torpedo were even longer. He knew all that. He looked anyhow. It was like snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away: it couldn’t hurt.

“Wonder how far from Hawaii we are,” Dutch said.

“Beats me,” Les answered. “Ain’t a hell of a lot of street signs in this part of the Pacific. We’ll get there when we get there, that’s all.”

They got there three days later. They must have sailed past the battle between the American and Japanese carrier forces, but not a sign of it remained. The ocean kept its own secrets, kept them and buried them deep.

As the troopships approached the north coast of Oahu, the battlewagons and cruisers and destroyers that had accompanied and escorted the U.S. carriers were giving the landing beaches hell. The boom of the big guns echoed across the water. When the shells roared in, they rearranged the landscape pretty drastically.

Les watched with enthusiastic approval. “The more they knock the snot out of the Japs, the easier the time we’ll have,” he said.

Dive bombers took off from the carriers and pummeled what Les presumed to be Japanese positions, too. Their bombs kicked up even more dust and dirt than all that high-caliber artillery. It was, more and more, an aviator’s world. What does that make me? Les wondered when the thought occurred to him. A minute later, he shrugged. It makes me necessary, that’s what. They can blow Hawaii to kingdom come, but I’m the poor, sorry son of a bitch who lands there with a bayonet on the end of his rifle and takes it away from the Japs. Boy, am I lucky!

He couldn’t even blame his draft board, not when he, like every other Marine, had volunteered. The Army was the place for draftees, and welcome to them.

In spite of everything U.S. aircraft had done to the island, a few Japanese planes did get off the ground and attacked the fleet. The Hellcats and Wildcats overhead went after them like dogs after marauding wolves, but they made hits, too: here a cruiser, there a troopship. When flames and smoke burst from that other ship full of Marines or dogfaces, Les swore horribly: those were his countrymen getting hurt.

Here and there along the beach, Japanese field guns fired at the fleet. Shells splashed into the water around the warships. They returned fire. The Japs might have been wiser to stay quiet. When they drew notice to themselves, bigger U.S. guns did their damnedest to smash them flat.

Somehow, Dutch looked away from the astonishing spectacle ahead. He nudged Les. “Here come the LVIs.”

That made Les glance back over his shoulder, too. Sure enough, the landing craft-Landing Vehicles, Infantry, in official alphabetese-were coming alongside the Valdosta Liberty, as they were alongside the rest of the troopships, including the one that was on fire. Maybe that was a way to get the men off as fast as possible. Maybe it was more on the order of routine gone mad.

Whatever it was, Les didn’t have time to worry about it. He nodded to the men with whom he’d be going into battle: mostly kids not old enough to vote, some of them hardly old enough to shave, leavened by a sprinkling of the old breed, veterans like himself. He’d been wondering what to tell them when the moment finally came. Now it was here. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Just like the book, and everything’ll be jake. Right?”

Their helmeted heads bobbed up and down. Despite the most realistic training the Corps could give, most of them had no idea what being under fire was like. Their big eyes, tight lips, and somber faces said their imaginations were working overtime. Les remembered how scared he’d been when he got up to the line in France. He soon discovered everybody else was just as scared, including the Germans.

Were the Japs on the beach-and there were bound to be Japs on the beach-scared, too? They were supposed to make the Hun look like a Sunday-school teacher. Could they be scared? Les hoped so, but he wouldn’t have bet anything above a dime on it.

“My company!” Captain Bradford shouted. “Take to the boats!”

Marines climbed over the rail and scrambled down nets stretched over the side of the Valdosta Liberty. Men had been moving from ships to boats like that as long as there’d been ships and boats. As far as Les was concerned, there had to be a better way. You could get smashed between ship and boat, you could fall into the water and drown, or you could fall into the boat and break your ankle. None of those helped the country one goddamn bit.

A couple of men already in the LVI steadied Dillon as he swung down from the net into the landing craft.

“We got you, Sarge,” one of them said.

“Thanks,” Les told him-he was a long way from too proud to be glad for the help. As soon as his own feet were steady on the steel deck plates, he reached up to help other descending Marines. They got everybody into the LVI without seeing anyone hurt. Les hoped that was a good omen. He also knew damn well the record wouldn’t last once they hit the beach.

Diesel engine belching and farting, the LVI pulled away from the troopship. Another one chugged up to take its place. Along with countless more, it wallowed towards Oahu. Les couldn’t see out; the sides of the boat were too high. All he could see besides those steel walls were other Marines in green dungarees and jackets and camouflage helmet covers like his-and, for variety, the sailors running the LVI, who wore helmets painted battleship gray along with blue dungarees and shirts.

Even if he couldn’t see out, he knew when the landing craft got close to shore. The American naval barrage fell silent, to keep short rounds from coming down on the LVIs. As soon as the warships’ guns ceased fire, the Japs on shore opened up with everything they had. They’d kept a lot of their weapons quiet after all. Shells and mortar bombs started splashing down among the oncoming boats.

One burst close to Les’ LVI. Fragments clattered off the boat’s side, but none got through. “Thank you, Jesus,” said a Marine behind the sergeant. Les found himself nodding. He’d never been a churchgoing man, but he wouldn’t turn down anything he could get right now.

Every now and then, enemy rounds didn’t come down among the American landing craft but on one or another of them. Then it wasn’t splash-blam! but clang-blam! Les winced every time he heard that, the way he would have winced at hearing a drill in a dentist’s office. And the drill might be for him next, depending on what the dentist had to say. And one of those clang-blam!s might be for him next, too, depending on Lord only knew what.

“Come on, goddammit. Get to the beach, goddammit,” somebody was saying, over and over again. After a bit, Les realized the words were coming out of his own mouth. He wasn’t saying anything everybody else wasn’t thinking.

The LVI’s bottom grated on sand. It rumbled forward anyway. It wasn’t so amphibious as an amtrac, one of the tractors really designed to work on both land and water, but it could get around a bit when out of its proper element. A couple of swabbies undogged the loading gate. It kicked up a splash when it fell open; the LVI hadn’t quite made it to the tide line.

“Out! Out! Out!” Captain Bradford screamed. “Spread out and get off the beach as fast as you can! Move!”

Marines poured from the landing craft. Mortar rounds were bursting on the beach, too, throwing up plumes of golden sand. Machine guns stuttered out death from the undergrowth not nearly far enough away. Japanese tracers were blue-white, not red like their American counterparts. Bullets from those machine guns and enemy rifles kicked up sand spurts, too.

Men went down. Some of them and their buddies shouted, “Doc! Hey, Doc!” for the Navy corpsmen who served the Marines. Others lay where they had fallen. No medic would help a man blown to hamburger by a mortar bomb. Neither would anything else, not till Judgment Day.

Les charged past a Japanese soldier sprawled on the ground all bloody with his long-bayoneted rifle beside him. He thought the man was dead-till a shot rang out behind him. He whirled. The round had come from an American rifle. A Marine said, “The son of a bitch was playing possum. I saw him grab for his piece, and I let him have it.”

“Thanks,” Les said. Had the Jap got a shot off, it would have gone into his back. One of those Japanese blue-white tracers snapped past his head. He threw himself down into a shell hole and fired back, muttering, “Welcome to fucking Hawaii!”

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU THOUGHT HE’D KNOWN EVERYTHING war could do. The bombardment from the U.S. Navy ships gathered off the northern beaches of Oahu showed him he was wrong. Just getting to the beaches had been a nightmare. The air attacks his regiment suffered bled it white before it ever reached its positions. And when it did…

If this wasn’t the end of the world, you could see it from here. Shells roared in on the Japanese positions. They sounded like freight trains rumbling across the sky till they got close, when they began to scream. The guns from the destroyers and cruisers were bad enough. When the battleships opened up, you could see the huge shells coming. The earth shuddered when they hit. Fragments screamed and howled. Blast picked you up, flung you around, and slammed you down like a 250-kilo sumo wrestler on a mean drunk.

As the bombardment went on, men started screaming. Shimizu didn’t blame them. He did some screaming himself, as he had when the bombers came over his barracks. Here and there, soldiers broke and ran away from the beach. Sometimes their own comrades shot them. Sometimes enemy shells took care of it before the Japanese could.

To add insult to injury, dive bombers roared down and dropped bombs on whatever the shells happened to miss. We did this to the Americans. They fought afterwards, Shimizu thought. We have to do the same. But how? He didn’t dare stick his head up out of the hole where he huddled. Looking at the enemy was asking to be destroyed. Just huddling here was asking to be destroyed.

When the shelling and bombing paused, Shimizu was too shaken to respond for a moment, or maybe longer than a moment. More slowly than it should have, duty reasserted itself. “My squad!” he sang out.

“Are you alive?” He supposed he should have put that better, but it was how he felt.

“Here, Corporal!” Shiro Wakuzawa called from a nearby foxhole.

“And me!” Yasuo Furusawa said. A few other men also let Shimizu know they were there. And someone not far away groaned from a wound-a bad one, if the noises he made meant anything.

That was too bad, but Shimizu had bigger worries on his mind. After things stayed quiet for a little while, he did look out toward the Pacific through the leaves and branches camouflaging his position.

“Zakennayo!” he exclaimed.

The sea was full of ships and boats. Warships lay not far offshore. Japanese guns were still shooting, and a few vessels were on fire, but only a few. Shimizu noted the warships, yes, but they didn’t hold his attention for long. Slowly wallowing toward the beaches through the waves-a much milder sea than the Japanese had faced in their winter assault-were landing craft of a variety and profusion he had never imagined. These left the trusty Daihatsu barges on which he and his comrades had come ashore far, far behind.

Some were veritable ships, big enough to hold almost anything. Shimizu didn’t know what they carried, and wasn’t anxious to find out. Others, smaller, pretty plainly brought soldiers to the beach. Even those were an improvement on their Japanese opposite numbers. On a Daihatsu barge, a steel shield protected the man at the wheel and the machine-gun or light-cannon crew. The soldiers the barge carried were vulnerable to enemy fire all the way in.

Not here. These landing boats had real steel sides and front, protecting the men in them. Shimizu stared in honest envy. He wished his own country could have made landing craft like them.

A few Japanese airplanes swooped low to attack the boats. They did some damage, but fearsome American fighters like the ones that had shot up Shimizu’s regiment hacked several of them out of the sky. Shimizu groaned to see a beautiful Zero reduced to nothing but a slick of gasoline burning on the surface of the sea.

“Be ready!” the noncom called to whoever could hear him. “They’re getting close.”

Behind him, somebody with an officer’s authority in his voice shouted, “The enemy must not get off the beach! We will drive him back into the Pacific! Banzai! for the Emperor! May he live ten thousand years!”

“Banzai!” Shimizu joined in the cry. It heartened him. If he thought about the Emperor, that enormous fleet out there and all the accompanying air power didn’t seem-quite-so terrifying.

An artillery shell scored a hit on one of the landing ships. A column of smoke rose from the big vessel, but it managed to reach the beach. The doors at the bow opened. Out rumbled a tank, a snorting monster bigger and fiercer-looking than anything Japan built. On it came, sand flying up from its churning tracks.

The smaller landing boats were coming ashore, too. The men who scrambled out of them wore green uniforms, not the khaki the Americans had used before. Their helmets were also new: domed like the Japanese model rather than British-style steel derbies.

“Forward!” that officer yelled. “We must throw the invaders into the sea! I will lead you!”

Forward was the last direction Takeo Shimizu wanted to go. But I will lead you! was hard to ignore, and the habit of obedience to orders was as strong in him as in any other Japanese soldier. When the officer ran by, katana in hand, Shimizu scrambled out of his foxhole and ran after him.

Mortar bombs and artillery shells burst among the Americans on the beach. Men fell, men flew, men were torn to pieces. Machine-gun and rifle fire ripped into the Yankees, too. Not all of them went down, worse luck. A bullet cracked past Shimizu’s head. He threw himself down behind a boulder. Another bullet spanged off the front of it.

He had to make himself get up and run on. Combat got no easier because he’d been away from it for a while. If anything, it felt harder. The fear came back faster. It felt worse than it had when the Japanese invaded Hawaii, much worse than it had when he fought in China.

A mortar bomb hissed down not nearly far enough away. That wasn’t a Japanese round; Shimizu remembered the sound of the burst from the last time he’d fought Americans. One of his comrades started screaming. Fragments must have done their bloody work. American machine guns started stitching the air with death, too. Those big men in the unfamiliar uniforms wouldn’t be easy to throw back.

Shimizu looked around him. You always wanted to see that you weren’t going forward all alone. Some of his men were still with him. Good. Other Japanese farther away were advancing, too. Yes, very good.

The officer was looking around, too, when a burst from a Yankee machine gun caught him in the chest. The katana flew from his hand. The blade flashed in the sun as it fell to the ground. The officer twisted, staggered, and fell. He kept thrashing on the ground, but he was a dead man. At least two, maybe three, rounds had torn out through his back. As always, exit wounds were ever so much larger and bloodier than the holes bullets made going in. If one of those rounds hadn’t found his heart, he would still bleed to death in short order.

Was anybody else of higher rank still up and fighting? Shimizu didn’t see anyone. That wasn’t a good sign, but he didn’t have time to brood about it. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can do it!” Could they? They had to try.

Even though he ran forward in a crouch, a bullet caught him in the side. At first, he felt only the impact. His legs didn’t want to carry him any more. He held on to his rifle as he sprawled on the ground. The pain hit then. His mouth filled with blood when he howled. He tried not to thrash like a dog hit by a truck. If he lay still, maybe he could take out one more enemy soldier.

An American in that new green uniform eyed him. Shimizu looked back, his own eyes mere slits. The American brought up his rifle to make sure of him. Shimizu tried to shoot first, but found he lacked the strength to raise the heavy Springfield. He saw the muzzle flash. Then darkness crashed down. SABURO SHINDO SHOT DOWN HIS SECOND AMERICAN FIGHTER in the space of a few minutes. It was luck as much as anything else: he put a cannon shell through the enemy’s canopy, and probably through the pilot, too. The plane, out of control, spiraled down to the Pacific.

Much good it does me, Shindo thought. Smash one ant, and the rest would still steal the picnic. The Yankees were ashore. It was the Army’s fight now. The Navy had done everything it could-and failed. Shindo hated failure. He knew that none of what had happened was his fault. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, or that what sprang from it wouldn’t be bad.

American landing craft littered the beaches like children’s toys at the edge of a bathtub. Those ingenious boats, the great fleet of warships offshore, and the stifling enemy air umbrella overhead spoke of an industrial power and of a determination far greater than he’d imagined. He’d scorned the Americans in 1941. He didn’t enjoy that luxury any more.

Tracers zipped past his Zero. He couldn’t outdive or outclimb the U.S. fighter on his tail. He could outturn it, and he did, throwing his aircraft hard to the right. The American tried to stay with him, but couldn’t. Only a Japanese Army Hayabusa could turn with a Zero, but a Hayabusa couldn’t stay up with one if it did.

And Shindo and his Zero couldn’t stay up with the American. He fired a burst at the enemy fighter, but it did no harm. Then the other plane sped away from his as if he were wearing heavy boots. He’d seen that before, too. It infuriated and humiliated him. None of what he felt showed on his face or in his demeanor. It seldom did.

An antiaircraft shell from one of the ships below burst too close for comfort. It didn’t harm the Zero, but staggered it, as if it had rolled into a pothole in the air. He swung through some quick turns and speed changes to throw off the gunners, all the while wondering what to do next.

He couldn’t harm the enemy carriers, not now. Strafing the other warships wouldn’t do a thing to their big guns. He couldn’t do much to the landing craft, either, and what he could do wouldn’t matter; the Americans were on the beaches. I have to hit them there, then, he decided.

He came in low, machine guns hammering. His bullets sent something up in flames. Enemy soldiers scrambled for cover and flopped down when they found it. Not all of them ran. Some stood their ground and blazed away at him with small arms. They’d done the same thing during the first day of the Japanese attack on Hawaii. Anyone who thought the Americans weren’t brave was a fool. They were soft, and they let themselves be captured so their enemies could make sport of them, but in action they showed plenty of courage.

Machine guns also opened up on Shindo. They put enough lead in the air to be nuisances, or worse than nuisances. A bullet clanged home, somewhere behind the cockpit. Shindo eyed his instruments. No damage showed. His controls still worked. He climbed, spun back, and made another run along the beach.

More fire answered him this time. The Americans were ready to the point of being trigger-happy. They missed him, though, missed him again and again. He watched his own bullets chew up sand, and hoped they chewed up men as well.

After one more pass along the beach, he saw he was low on gas. Time to go back and refuel. He’d got out of Haleiwa by bouncing along the grass near the damaged airstrip: if he could take off from a rolling, pitching carrier deck, he could also manage that. But he pulled up instead of trying to land where he’d got airborne. The U.S. naval bombardment had cratered the fields near the runway. He would surely flip his Zero if he tried to put it down.

If he couldn’t land there, though, where could he? The next closest runway was at Wheeler Field, near the center of the island. He knew the Americans had worked Wheeler over, too, but they would have done that from the air alone. Some of the bigger naval guns might have reached it, but surely they would be concentrating on targets closer to shore. Shindo would have, were he mounting an invasion. He had to assume the Americans would do the same.

Wheeler was only a couple of minutes away. He realized at once that the runways would not serve. They’d been pounded hard, and the bulldozers that might have fixed them in a hurry had been pounded even harder. He saw several burnt-out hulks. One of them had been flipped onto its back, no mean feat with a machine so massive.

Bombs had fallen on the grass around Wheeler Field, but it wasn’t-Shindo was betting his life it wasn’t-an impossible landing surface. He came in as slow as he could, just above stalling speed. Down went his landing gear. He brought the fighter’s nose up and the tail down, as if he were out to snag an arrester cable on a carrier deck.

He bounced to a stop. It wasn’t a landing to be proud of, but he got down. For the moment, nothing else mattered. He undogged the canopy, pushed it back, and stood up in the cockpit. Groundcrew men ran toward him. “What do you need?” they shouted.

“Everything,” Shindo answered. “Gas. Oil. Ammunition. A place to piss.”

One of the men pointed back into the bushes. “Do it there. The Yankees won’t spot you that way. And do it fast, before their planes come over again, see you, and shoot you up.”

They weren’t just talking about him, of course. The Americans were much more likely to spy his Zero. As Shindo went into the bushes and undid his flying suit so he could ease himself, he heard the buzz of engines overhead. But that was the familiar buzz of his own country’s airplanes; the Zero and the Hayabusa used the same powerplant. Keeping a few planes in the air to protect what was left of Wheeler Field struck him as a good idea, though he pitied the Army pilots in their Peregrine Falcons. The fearsome new American fighters would chew them up and spit them out. Higher speed and the wing cannon gave Zeros at least some kind of chance against the enemy.

When he came out of the undergrowth, he didn’t see any armorers working on those wing cannon.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

A man reloading one of his machine guns said, “So sorry, Pilot-san, but this has been an Army field for a while. Because Hayabusas don’t carry cannon, I don’t think we’ve got any 20mm ammunition.”

“Zakennayo!” Shindo exclaimed. He thought hard. “Wait a minute. You fly Donryus out of here, neh?” The Ki-49-its name meant Dragon Swallower-was the Army’s counterpart to the Navy’s G4M bomber. It was faster, but had a much shorter range. Like the G4M, it mounted a 20mm cannon for defensive armament.

“I’m an idiot!” the armorer exclaimed. He clapped a hand to his forehead, then bowed. “Please excuse me, sir. We store ammunition for bombers separately from what fighters use.”

“I don’t care if you stow it up your back passage,” Shindo said. “Just get me some, and hurry about it.”

The armorer screamed at his colleagues. One of them dashed away. He came back fast enough to satisfy even the unhappy Shindo. No enemy airplanes had shown up, which was all to the good. Shindo wondered if he’d be able to take off again without nosing down into a hole in the ground. The run was bumpy, but he got airborne.

He would take off and land on highways if he had to. All he wanted to do was hit the Americans as hard as he could for as long as he could. But how would he get refueled if he had to land on a highway? How would the armorers reload his guns? He shrugged. For now, he had fuel and ammunition-and plenty of Americans to hit. He roared back toward the landing beaches.

JIRO TAKAHASHI STARED AT THE SCRIPT in front of him in dismay. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked up to Osami Murata in even greater dismay. “So sorry, Murata-san, but I can’t say this!”

“Why not?” the radio correspondent from Tokyo asked calmly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jiro echoed. He hoped Murata was joking, but feared he wasn’t. “It isn’t true, that’s what! How can you say-how can you have me say-all the Japanese in Hawaii support the Emperor against the USA?” Not all the Japanese in his own family supported the Emperor against the USA, as he knew too painfully well. He kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “Captain Iwabuchi has put up signs all over Honolulu that anyone who causes trouble will be shot. He’s put them up in English and Korean and Tagalog and Chinese and Japanese. He wouldn’t do that if he thought all the Japanese here were loyal.”

“Captain Iwabuchi has to fight.” Murata was patience personified. “That’s not your job. Your job is to persuade people to support the Emperor and Japan. You’ve been good at it, Takahashi-san. Now you have to keep on doing it. We need you more than ever, in fact.”

“Do you?” Jiro tried to keep the worry out of his voice. He probably ended up sounding like a machine. He knew why they needed him more than ever. The Americans were ashore on the north coast of Oahu. They hadn’t come very far yet, but they plainly ruled the air here. Japan had used that edge to win after her invasion. Couldn’t the United States do the same? He feared it could.

“Yes, we do.” Beneath his calm, beneath his good nature, Murata showed steel. “Are you sure you’re a loyal Japanese citizen yourself, Takahashi-san?”

“I should hope I am!” Jiro said.

“Well, I should hope you are, too,” the radio man said. “But if you are, you’re going to have to prove it.” He tapped the script with an elegantly manicured fingernail. “With this!”

“Jesus Christ! Give me something I can read without wanting to go out and cut my throat afterwards!” Jiro said. “Hawaii isn’t better off under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere than it was before. Not all Japanese here love the Emperor. I wish they did, but they don’t. I don’t know what the Koreans are doing, but I don’t think they’re ‘flocking to volunteer along with their Japanese co-imperials.’ ” Koreans didn’t like being part of the Japanese Empire. The Koreans in Hawaii had made no secret of being glad they weren’t part of the Empire any more-except now they were again.

Murata waved Jiro’s complaints aside as if they came from a little boy. “We all have to do what we can, Takahashi-san,” he said. “We’re fighting a war. It’s come here again. We didn’t want that to happen, but it did. We have to use every weapon we can get our hands on. Building morale, here and in the home islands, is one of the weapons we need. You’re scheduled to go on the air in a few minutes. Are you going to read what you’re supposed to read, or not? Reading it will help the Empire. If that doesn’t matter to you…”

He didn’t say what would happen then. By not saying, he let pictures form in Jiro’s mind. Jiro didn’t like any of those pictures. They started with bad things happening to him and went on to bad things happening to his sons and friends. None of those bad things would be hard to arrange, not at all. He played the last trump in his hand: “I’m going to complain to Chancellor Morimura.” If he reminded Murata who his friends were, maybe the man would back off.

Instead, Murata laughed uproariously. “Go ahead, Takahashi-san. Go right ahead. Who do you think wrote that script, anyway?”

“Not Chancellor Morimura?” Jiro said in something not far from horror.

With more than a little malicious glee, the broadcaster from Tokyo nodded. “The very same. Now, Takahashi-san, enough of this nonsense. Get on with it, and no more backtalk.”

Miserably, Jiro obeyed. He wondered how he could get through the program, but he’d done enough of them that he had no trouble reading the words set out before him. He thought his performance left something to be desired, but the engineer in the room next to the studio gave him a thumbs-up through the window that let the man see in.

When it was over, sweat drenched Jiro. He stumbled out of the studio. Murata waited in the hallway, all solicitude now that he’d got what he wanted. “Very good!” he said. “You see? That wasn’t so hard.”

“Whatever you say,” Jiro answered dully.

“Yes, whatever I say.” Murata had that elegant accent. He wore a fancy suit. And he had all the arrogance the Japanese conquerors had brought with them from the home islands.

Jiro had admired that arrogance when it was aimed at the local haoles. When it was pointed at him and fired like a gun… It felt different then. Amazing how different it felt. “Please excuse me, Murata-san. I’m going home.”

“So long,” Murata said, as if he and Jiro were still on friendly terms. As if we were ever on friendly terms, Jiro thought. Murata had used him, the way a man would use any tool that came in handy. I was too dumb to see it. I see it now, though. He didn’t intend to say anything about it. If he did, Hiroshi and Kenzo would only laugh at him. Hearing I told you so from his sons was the last thing he wanted.

The thick, nasty, greasy smell of burning fuel oil filled the air. He’d got used to that after the Japanese bombed the Pearl Harbor tank farms. Then, once the tanks finally burned dry, the stink went away. Now it was back. It wasn’t so strong this time, probably because Japan didn’t stow nearly so much fuel here as the USA had. But the Americans had hit what there was.

Men from the special naval landing forces and civilians worked together to build barricades and machine-gun nests at street corners. The civilians hadn’t volunteered for the duty, which didn’t mean they could get out of it. When a haole man didn’t move fast enough to suit one of the Navy men, he got the stock of an Arisaka rifle in the side of the head. Blood running down his cheek and jaw, the white man threw another chunk of rubble on the growing barricade, and then another.

A soldier gestured with his rifle at Takahashi. “Hey, you! Hai, you there! Get over here and give the Emperor a hand!”

“Please excuse me, but I just did,” Jiro answered. “I just finished broadcasting for Murata-san.”

“Now tell me one I’ll believe,” the Navy man said scornfully.

But one of his pals said, “Hang on-I know this guy’s voice. You’re the one they call the Fisherman, aren’t you? I listen to you whenever I can.”

“That’s me,” Jiro said. A few minutes before, he’d hated his connection to the Japanese radio. Now he used it, even if he did hate it. He shook his head. Life was stranger and more complicated than anyone could imagine till he’d put a good many miles under his keel.

“Let him go,” the second soldier urged the first. “He’s done his bit, and we’ve got plenty of warm bodies here.”

“All right. All right. Have it your way.” The first man from the special naval landing forces sounded disgusted, but he didn’t argue any more. “Go on, you,” he told Jiro. “You better keep your nose clean.”

“Domo arigato. I will, thank you.” Jiro got out of there in a hurry.

The Americans hadn’t fought much inside Honolulu. They’d surrendered when driven back to the city’s outskirts. That spared the civilian population. But surrender wasn’t in the Japanese soldier’s vocabulary. The special naval landing forces looked to be getting ready to battle it out house to house. Would anything be left standing by the time the battle was through? More to the point, did anybody on either side care?

JOE CROSETTI GULPED COFFEE IN THE BUNKER HILL’S WARDROOM. If not for java, he didn’t know how the hell he would keep going. He’d heard the pharmacist’s mates were giving out benzedrine tablets to pilots who asked for them. He hadn’t tried to find out, not yet. He didn’t think he needed that big a kick in the pants. It had occurred to him, though.

In the seat next to his, Orson Sharp slurped from a bottle of Coke. He was serious about staying away from the “hot drinks” that were forbidden to him, but he needed a jolt, too. A couple of empties sat by his feet.

“You’re gonna be pissing like a racehorse,” Joe said. “What do you do if you’re up in your Hellcat and you gotta whizz?”

Sharp smiled what looked like a very secular smile. “Ever hear of a streetcar driver’s friend?” he asked. When Joe shook his head, his buddy explained the gadget. “Son of a bitch!” Joe said. “That’s a great idea. But what if it comes loose when you’re pulling a lot of g’s? You’ll have piss all over the inside of your flight suit, maybe all over the inside of the cockpit.”

“Hasn’t happened yet,” Sharp answered, “and I’ve flown that plane every which way but inside out. I’m thinking of writing a testimonial for the company.”

“Jeez Louise, I don’t blame you,” Joe said. “But what about your John Henry? How does it like the ‘friend’ when you weigh four times as much as you’re supposed to?”

“Everything hurts then,” Orson Sharp said matter-of-factly, which was true enough. “He’s not bruised or anything-I’ll tell you that.”

“Okay. I wish I’d thought of it myself,” Joe said. “Can you get ’em on the ship, or did you bring it aboard?”

“I brought mine, so I don’t know if you can get them or not. You’d probably do best asking the toughest-looking CPO you can find. If he can’t tell you, nobody can.”

“Makes sense. CPOs know everything-or if they don’t, they sure think they do,” Joe said. That had been a revelation to him since boarding the carrier. When he was in flight training, almost all his instructors were officers. He’d dealt with petty officers only when navigating the maze of Navy bureaucracy. Now he saw the senior ratings were the men who held things together. They might be able to run the ship better without officers than officers could without them.

A plane roared in and landed, up above their heads. The ship shook a little, but only a little. An Essex — class carrier displaced upwards of 27,000 tons; a few tons of airplane weren’t much next to that. Joe and Orson Sharp both said, “Dauntless,” at the same time. Engine noise was a dead giveaway-if you knew what you were listening for. By now, they both did.

“How does it feel, being a veteran?” Sharp asked.

Joe considered. A yawn interrupted his consideration. “Tired,” he said.

His friend nodded. “That’s the truth.” He took another swig from the wasp-waisted green glass bottle, then burped softly. “Excuse me.” His politeness was automatic; he’d been a gentleman before he became an officer. After one more swig, he went on, “We’re doing what we’ve got to do, though.”

“Oh, hell, yes.” Joe nodded vigorously. The Marines and Army men were on the ground in Oahu, and fighting their way south from the invasion beaches. It wasn’t easy or cheap-quit didn’t seem to be in the Japs’ vocabulary-but they were doing it. Some Japanese submarines still prowled around, but the enemy’s surface fleet in these waters had taken a KO. And enemy air power was on its last legs. Japan had proved naval air could beat the land-based variety. Now the USA was extending the lesson.

“Some of their pilots are awful good,” Sharp said. “I ran into this guy in an Oscar the other day. He could make that little plane sit up and beg and darn near”-he might have been the only man on the carrier who would have said darn near-“wag its tail. I had two more Hellcats with me, and we couldn’t touch him. He got out of stuff you couldn’t get out of. We never laid a glove on him-and I landed with a hole in my prop.”

“They can leave you talking to yourself, all right,” Joe agreed. “With those two little machine guns, though, they have a devil of a time hurting you, and you can get away from ’em easy as pie. As long as you don’t dogfight ’em, you’re okay.” He paused. “Did they patch you up or put a new propeller blade on?”

“New blade,” Sharp told him. “I could’ve flown without the repair if I had to-it’s only a.30-caliber hole-but why take chances? We’ve got the spares, and that’s what they’re here for.”

“Better believe it,” Joe said. “And pretty soon the Japs won’t have any planes left, or anywhere to fly them out of if they do. I don’t care how sweet a pilot you are. If you can’t get off the ground, you might as well pick up a rifle and go fight with the infantry.”

Before answering, Orson Sharp finished the Coke and set the bottle down by the other dead soldiers.

“That’s probably what happened to some of our guys after December 7.” His voice was grim.

“Yeah, it probably is.” Joe didn’t like to think about what had happened to American servicemen of any sort since Hawaii fell, but that would have been an extra humiliation on top of all the others. Not to be able to fight the way you’d trained so hard to do… “Time to pay ’em back.”

An hour later, he was in the cockpit again, buzzing towards Oahu. Orson Sharp was up there with him. Their orders were looser than they had been at the very start of the land campaign. They were supposed to shoot up anything that moved on the ground, knock down any planes that came up against them, and especially make sure the enemy didn’t have the chance to repair his airfields.

One of those fields, the one at Haleiwa, had already fallen into U.S. hands. As Joe flew above it, he saw bulldozers and steamrollers swarming over the strip to put it back in commission. He also saw artillery coming down nearby. The field wasn’t ready to use, not by a long shot. He preferred flying off a carrier deck to shellfire. Hellcats were well-protected planes, but nothing on God’s green earth would save you if you stopped a 75mm round.

As if to remind him of that, puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft shells burst all around him. The Japs put up as much flak as they could. This wasn’t nearly so heavy as it had been when he flew over the Japanese carriers and their escorts, though. That had been almost thick enough to walk on. It had scared him, too. Now he had its measure. You jinked a little. You sped up and slowed down. You tried not to give them a straight shot at you. Once you’d done that, you went on with your mission. Every so often, somebody got shot down. You just hoped your number wasn’t up that particular day.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind when a Hellcat, trailing smoke, fell out of the sky and crashed into a rice paddy down below. No way the pilot could have got out-it happened too fast. “Oh, you poor, unlucky son of a bitch,” Joe said. The flak must have murdered his engine-or murdered him, so he had no chance to pull up or bail out.

A machine gun turned its winking eye Joe’s way. Those coldly frightful ice-blue Japanese tracers zipped past the Hellcat. Joe’s thumb stabbed the firing button. Red American tracers jumped out ahead of the fighter. He had six machine guns, all of them firing heavier slugs than the Jap’s weapon. Joe wouldn’t have wanted to catch a.50-caliber round. If the wound didn’t kill you, the sheer shock of getting hit was liable to.

Only a handful of Oscars and Zeros rose against the Hellcats. So did one sharp-nosed fighter of a type he hadn’t seen before. That had to be a Tony, an Army machine with an engine based on the Messerschmitt-109’s liquid-cooled in-line powerplant and not the radial engine that powered both other Japanese fighters. Tonys were supposed to be fast and well-armed. This one, beset by half a dozen Hellcats, didn’t last long enough for Joe to tell much, though it survived more battle damage before going down than other enemy planes Joe had met.

If there were more of those, they could be a royal pain, he thought. The Tony looked a hell of a lot like an Me-109. Part of that, no doubt, was the engine, which dictated the shape of the plane’s front end. But he still wondered whether some German engineers had stepped in and given the Japs a hand.

That wasn’t his worry. He and the other Hellcat pilots took turns shooting up Hickam Field, down by Pearl Harbor. Watching Japs sprint for cover was fun. Watching some of them not make it was even more fun. It didn’t feel as if he’d just shot men, any more than it had when he downed enemy airplanes. They were just… targets, and he was glad he’d hit them.

Someone else had set a bulldozer on fire. Joe admired the column of smoke that rose from it. As long as the Hellcats kept coming back, the Japs could only repair the runways at night. And early-morning visits by Dauntlesses made sure they’d have new damage to fix the next night.

You didn’t see Japanese soldiers marching along highways by regiments any more. To Joe, that was a damn shame. They’d been awful easy to shoot up then. But they weren’t fools. They’d learned better in a hurry. These days, they traveled by squads and platoons, and they stayed off the roads whenever they could. That did make it harder to strafe them. Of course, it also made it harder for them to move and to fight, which helped the gyrenes and dogfaces on the ground.

Joe looked for gun emplacements. Strafing artillery pieces was always worth doing. People said shellfire killed and wounded a lot more men than all the rounds from rifles and machine guns put together. Joe didn’t know if that was true, but he’d heard it more than once.

A lot of the Japs’ gun pits were in the jungle-covered mountains, and camouflaged with fastidious attention to detail. He spotted one gun only because he saw the muzzle flash. If not for that, he never would have known where it was. How they’d manhandled it up there was beyond him.

When he ran low on ammo, he flew back toward the Bunker Hill. One by one, his fellow pilots were breaking off, too. He laughed a little. He’d had all this training in formation flying, and here he was on his own. The Japs didn’t have enough planes in the air to make neat formations necessary any more.

A destroyer was on fire, a few miles off the coast of Oahu. Some enemy pilot had managed to get through the CAP overhead. The Japs were still giving it everything they had. They didn’t seem to realize they were fighting out of their weight-or else they just didn’t give a damn.

Destroyers and their bigger buddies needed to stay close to shore so they could pound enemy positions with their guns. The carriers cruised farther north-with luck, farther out of harm’s way. Joe didn’t see any of them in trouble, and was glad not to.

He found his own ship and lined up on her stern. After that, he did exactly what the landing officer told him to do. Not making his own decisions never failed to rattle him. That was what he was supposed to do when he was in the air. But he had to obey here. He’d seen that ever since he first tried putting down on the placid old Wolverine on Lake Erie. He believed it. He just didn’t like it.

The landing officer straightened him up, got his approach angle a little gentler, and then dropped the wigwag flags. Joe shove the stick forward. The Hellcat dove for the carrier’s deck. The tailhook missed the first arrester wire, but caught the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Joe scrambled out. The deck crew got the plane out of the way so the next Hellcat in line could land.

“Anything special she needs, sir?” one of the ratings asked.

“Ammo’s run dry,” Joe answered. “Fuel’s still okay. Engine’s behaving.” The petty officer waved and grinned and nodded.

Joe trotted across the planking to the island, and then down to the wardroom for debriefing. He looked around. Most of the fliers who’d gone out were back, but… “Where’s Sharp?” he asked.

“Didn’t you see?” somebody said. “He took a flak hit and went down. Nobody spotted a chute, so he bought the farm for sure, poor sucker.”

“Oh… That was him?” It felt like a blow in the belly.

“You okay, man?” the other flier asked. “You look a little green.”

Numbly, Joe shook his head. He tried to put some of what he felt into words: “We were roomies at the start of training. We were buddies all the way through. He was always better in class than I was. He was always better in a plane than I was, too. And now I’m here and he’s… gone?” He wouldn’t saydead, dammit. He shook his head again, and stared down at the deck so the other pilot wouldn’t see tears in his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

“That’s tough.” The other man-a guy Joe hardly knew, not the way he knew Orson Sharp (had he known anybody but his kid brother the way he knew Sharp?)-spoke with rough sympathy. “We’ve all lost friends. Fuckin’ war’s a fuckin’ mess. But what can you do? You gotta pick it up. You gotta suck it up. If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit.”

“Yeah.” Every word of that was true. None of it helped. Joe felt even more empty than he had when the Japs bombed Uncle Tony’s house. He’d got that news secondhand, after it happened. This? Hell, he’d seen Sharp go down. He hadn’t known who it was, though. Knowing would have been even worse, because it wasn’t as if he could have done anything about it.

“Just bad luck,” the other pilot said. “We’ll pay ’em back, though. We’ll pay ’em back, and then some.”

“Sure.” Joe stared down at the deck again. He imagined a house in Salt Lake City (in his imagination, it looked a lot like his house, though he knew it probably wouldn’t for real). He imagined a Western Union messenger getting off a bike or out of a car-probably off a bike, with gasoline so hard to come by these days-and going to the door with a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. And he imagined the lives of his buddy’s parents and brothers and sisters-he had a big family-turned upside down and inside out.

Christ! They wouldn’t even get to bury him. There probably wasn’t enough left to bury.

If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit. There was the war, in one profane sentence. But with Orson Sharp dead, another thought filled Joe’s mind. Even if they did kick the Nips’ yellow asses, did any of this mean shit?

KENZO TAKAHASHI APPROACHED THE BARRICADE with more than a little trepidation. Seeing a machine gun aimed at your belly button would do that. “Who are you?” demanded one of the men behind the gun. “Why should we let you by?” Like most of the soldiers from the special naval landing force, he was both meaner and jumpier than the Army men they’d supplanted in and around Honolulu.

After giving his name, Kenzo added, “I’m Jiro Takahashi’s son. Do you listen to him?”

And that did the trick, and not for the first time, either. The scowling soldier at the machine gun suddenly grinned-and all of a sudden he was a friendly kid, no older than Kenzo. “You’re the Fisherman’s son? You must be all right, then. Come ahead.” He even gave Kenzo a hand to help him scramble up over the barricade.

It made Kenzo want to laugh and cry at the same time. He wasn’t all right, not the way the soldier meant. He was rooting for the USA, not for Japan. He hated trading on his father’s celebrity among the occupiers. However much he hated it, he did it, because it worked. He felt as if he were getting away with passing counterfeit money every time.

On he went. The soldiers at the next barricade, seeing that he’d passed the one before, didn’t give him any trouble. That was a relief. Everybody in Honolulu, locals and occupiers alike, was nervous these days. With American planes in the air, with American troops ashore, plenty of people who’d sucked up to the Japanese were trying to figure out how to explain what they’d been up to since December 7, 1941.

The occupiers knew that perfectly well. They might be bastards, but they weren’t fools. They trusted next to nobody now, and often showed mistrust by opening fire. And the way they treated locals showed no signs of getting better-if anything, it was getting worse.

Kenzo talked his way past two more barricades before he made it to Elsie Sundberg’s neighborhood. No soldiers were on her street, which relieved him. Nobody else was out and about, either. That struck him as smart. This was the haole part of town, and the Japanese trusted whites even less than they trusted anybody else. Farther west, the occupiers had plastered up propaganda posters saying things like ASIANS TOGETHER AGAINST IMPERIALISM! in several languages. They didn’t bother here. The haoles lay low and hoped neglect wouldn’t turn to massacre.

Elsie opened the door even before Kenzo knocked. “Come in, honey,” she said. “Come in quick!” He did. She shut the door behind him. The Venetian blinds were closed; nobody could see in from the street.

“Are you okay?” she asked, giving him a hug.

“Me? Yeah, sure. I’m fine.” Kenzo didn’t say anything about running the machine-gun gauntlet on the way over here. He just clung to her.

“Hello, Ken.” Mrs. Sundberg came out from the kitchen. Before he’d got Elsie away from the soldiers in the park-and before what happened afterwards-her arrival would have made him let go of her daughter as if Elsie had become red-hot. Not now. He kept on holding her, and Mrs. Sundberg didn’t say boo. She just went on with the rituals of hospitality: “Would you like some lemonade?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Kenzo said. She did make good lemonade. As she went back to the kitchen to get some, he asked Elsie, “You folks have enough to eat?”

She shrugged. “We’re all right. We’re not great, but we’re all right.” She was a lot skinnier than she had been when they went to school together. He was thinner, too, but not to the same degree; there were advantages to being a fisherman in hard times.

“How are things out in the city?” Mrs. Sundberg asked, returning with lemonade for Kenzo and for Elsie.

“We, ah, don’t get out much these days.”

“You’re smart not to,” Kenzo answered. “If you weren’t staying close to home, I sure would tell you to.” He talked about the barricades, and about how the occupation troops were getting antsier by the hour. “I think they’re liable to make a big fight right here in town, and to… heck with civilians. It looks that way, anyhow.”

“That’s not good,” Elsie said, which was a pretty fair understatement.

“Not even a little bit,” Kenzo agreed. “It’s one of the reasons I came over here-to ask if you people have any kind of hiding place you can duck into if things get really bad.” He didn’t go into detail about what really bad might mean, or how bad it might be. He had the idea he didn’t know in any detail himself, and that that might be just as well for his own peace of mind.

Elsie’s mother sniffed. “These houses aren’t like the one in Connecticut where I grew up. They don’t have a proper basement.” By the way she sounded, that might have been Kenzo’s fault.

By the way Elsie said, “Oh, Mom!” she must have thought the same thing.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Sundberg said. “And you know how much harder it made things when your father dug that hidey-hole under the walk-in closet during the… first round of unpleasantness.” She didn’t like talking-or thinking-about the Japanese invasion. Kenzo had seen that before. She would if she had to-she wasn’t far enough out in left field not to believe in it or anything-but she didn’t like it. It had turned her world upside down, and it meant she wasn’t on top of the world any more.

When the USA finished the job here, she would be again. How would she feel about Kenzo then?

That was a worry for another day. “Hidey-hole?” Kenzo echoed.

“See for yourself.” Mrs. Sundberg led him into the bedroom she shared with her husband. He’d never been in there before. The closet made him want to laugh, or to scream. All by itself, it seemed half the size of his family’s apartment. Why would anybody need all that stuff ?

The trap door in the floor, though, had to be of recent vintage. It lay under a throw rug, and was hard to spot in the gloom even with the rug off. Elsie’s mom made an oddly courteous gesture of invitation. Kenzo bent and lifted up the trap door. The hinges worked without a sound. The scent of damp earth rose from below into the closet.

As Mrs. Sundberg said, the house had no basement, only a crawl space. Her husband had dug out a hole under the trap door, and had heaped the dirt he’d dug out around it to help protect it from gunfire and shell fragments. It wouldn’t do much if a bomb fell on the house. For anything short of that…

“Wow!” Kenzo said, lowering the trap again. “That’s swell!”

Mrs. Sundberg neatly replaced the rug. “Ralph was in France in 1918,” she said. “He knows something about entrenching.”

“He never talks about what he did in the war,” Elsie said. From the times Kenzo had met him, Mr. Sundberg rarely talked about anything. He made money for the family; his wife and daughter did the talking. They all seemed content with the arrangement. Elsie went on, “This was the first time he ever did anything that showed he really had been in the fighting.”

What horrors had her father seen Over There? What had he done? He probably had reasons to keep quiet. Having got a glimpse of what war looked like when the Japanese pounded Honolulu, a glimpse and a pounding that cost him his mother, Kenzo had some idea how lucky he was not to know more. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than antiaircraft guns started hammering much too close by.

“Look, if there’s any sign of trouble, you use that hole, you hear?” he said. “Don’t wait. It’s… pretty bad.”

“We will.” Elsie and her mother spoke at the same time.

“Okay. I better go, then. That’s what I wanted to make sure about.” What he really wanted was to take Elsie back to her bedroom and close the door. He couldn’t say that or do anything about it, not with Mrs. Sundberg standing right there. He just dipped his head awkwardly. “Be careful.”

Elsie wasn’t as shy as he was. She hugged him and gave him a kiss that made him want to take her back there more than ever. And she whispered in his ear: “My time of the month came, so that’s okay.”

“Good,” he whispered back. Worrying about a girlfriend was hard enough. Worrying about a girlfriend who was expecting would have been twice as bad, or maybe four times. After a moment, Kenzo kissed Elsie. Mrs. Sundberg was still standing right there, and she didn’t say a word.

MAJOR GENERAL YAMASHITA HAD MOVED HIS HEADQUARTERS out of Iolani Palace and over to Pearl City. Minoru Genda wished the commanding general hadn’t. For one thing, it gave him fewer excuses to visit Queen Cynthia. For another, it put the defense of Honolulu in the hands of Captain Iwabuchi and the special naval landing forces. Iwabuchi was a samurai of the old go-down-fighting school. He could not have cared less if he took all the civilians and the whole city down with him.

“We still have a lot of sailors at Pearl Harbor,” Genda said. “The Americans put men like that in the line against us. If you want to do the same, sir, they are ready and willing to fight alongside your soldiers.”

“They’ll probably have to.” Yamashita’s voice was gloomy. “The American soldiers who tried fighting as infantry got slaughtered. The same will likely happen to our men.” He glowered at the map spread out on a table in front of him. Blue-headed pins and pencil marks showed the American advance between the Waianae and Koolau Ranges. Despite desperate Japanese counterattacks, U.S. forces ground forward day by day. Yamashita went on, “We don’t really need sailors fighting on land. We need carriers and planes.”

“Yes, sir.” Genda knew too well that all the carriers Japan had left, put together, couldn’t launch half as many planes as the U.S. armada off the north coast of Oahu. He also knew that the planes the Japanese could launch were nowhere near a match for their American opponents. “We have requested reinforcements,” he said. “So far, Tokyo has not seen fit to send them out.”

Admiral Yamamoto was too smart to waste resources like that. Genda hoped he was, anyhow. There would be other battles to fight later, battles where Japan wouldn’t be at such an overwhelming disadvantage. The soldiers and sailors already here could go right on delaying U.S. forces. That was what they were good for now: the land equivalent of a fleet in being. How long they could stay in being was the last important question.

General Yamashita didn’t see things that way. Genda could hardly blame him. “Zakennayo!” Yamashita burst out. “They’re playing games with my men’s lives back in the home islands. I want to fight with some chance of victory. Gallant defeats make fine poetry, but the people the poems talk about don’t get the chance to hear them, neh?”

“Hai. Honto,” Genda said, and it was true. He shrugged. “We’re at the end of a very long supply line, sir.”

“No.” Yamashita shook his big head, as angry and frustrated as a baited bear. “We were on the end of a long supply line. Now the Americans have cut it off. When we took Hawaii, they couldn’t bring anything in. Now we can’t. This is not a good omen.”

“No, sir, it’s not.” Genda could hardly disagree with that. “We have to hang on as long as we can.” Yamashita made a disgusted noise. “If this were some other part of the world, I’d pull back into the mountains and harass the enemy for months, maybe for years. But this is a terrible jungle to fight a war in, because you can’t live in it. There’s next to no game and next to no fruit.”

“For a long time, we were the ones who took advantage of that, sir,” Genda said. “Escaped prisoners of war can’t live off the countryside, the way they can in Malaya or the Philippines.”

“Prisoners.” Major General Yamashita fairly spat the word. “If we lose here, there are liable to be prisoners. Japan would lose face because of that.” With a scowl, he went on, “I assure you, though, Commander, I will not be one of those prisoners. If you are with me at the final moments, perhaps you would honor me by acting as my second.”

“Of course, sir. It would be my privilege.” Japanese officers, soldiers, and sailors were trained to commit suicide rather than letting themselves be captured. Ritual seppuku was a survival from samurai days.

Back then, a second had used his sword to take off his companion’s head after the latter began the act of slitting his belly. These days, a pistol was more common. Both weapons quickly and cleanly took the victim out of his pain. Genda felt he had to add, “I hope that day does not come.”

“So do I-which doesn’t mean it won’t,” Yamashita said.

Genda bit his lip and nodded. The time might also come when he needed a second-or, if he was rushed or in danger of falling into enemy hands, the inelegance of a pistol or a grenade might have to do. Trying to shove worry aside, he pointed at the map and said, “We may be able to hold them at the narrowest stretch between the mountain ranges.”

“Maybe.” But the commanding general didn’t sound as if he believed it. “Hard to hold in the face of that much air power. And the Americans’ tanks are very good-even better than the Russian machines we fought in Mongolia in 1939.”

Those also had to be new models, because that certainly hadn’t been true of the handful of tanks the Yankees used here in 1941. Japan did not have many tanks-and the ones she did have didn’t match up well against those of the other great powers. The Soviet Union had painfully proved that in the border war just before the fighting in Europe broke out.

A country needed a strong automotive industry to build good tanks in quantity. Japan didn’t have one. We would have, in a few more years, Genda thought. His country had done so much so fast to hurl itself from feudalism headlong into the modern age. Japanese ships and warplanes and infantry weapons measured up to any in the world. But she hadn’t been able to do everything at once. Now the question was, how much would that cost her?

“No more carriers, eh? No more airplanes?” Major General Yamashita said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Please excuse me, sir, but I have to tell you it doesn’t seem likely,” Genda said.

“Too bad. They could let us make a real fight of it.” Yamashita shook his head. “Now… Now I have a hard time holding on to hope. With the enemy in control of the air, with the enemy in control of the sea, all we can hope to do is delay the inevitable.”

“I understand, sir,” Genda said. “Even that can be valuable. It wins the Empire more time to ready itself for the battles that lie ahead.”

“Hai. A small consolation, but a consolation.” Yamashita did not sound consoled. He had to see he would die on Oahu. Genda foresaw the same fate for himself. When there was no escape, all you could do was fight. But he feared for the Empire in those coming battles. If the Americans could bring a force like this to bear wherever they chose, how could Japan hope to withstand them? And American factories and shipyards were still working at full tilt. How long before the United States could muster two such forces, or three?

How long before Japan could muster even one? That, he feared, would take much longer.

Admiral Yamamoto had foreseen all this. Even back when they were first beginning to plan the Pearl Harbor operation and the assault on Hawaii, Yamamoto had feared these blows wouldn’t be enough. Their success had bought Japan almost two years to conquer and consolidate. Genda hoped his country had done enough in that time to ready itself for the blows that lay ahead.

He hoped so, yes, but he doubted he would be around to see one way or the other. “Karma, neh?” he said to Yamashita. “Shigata ga nai.” He was here because of a plan he’d offered to Admiral Yamamoto. Without it, the Japanese fleet would have struck at Oahu and then withdrawn. Genda shook his head. Bad as this was, that would have been worse. The Americans would have kept this excellent base. They would have caused Japan trouble far sooner than they were able to here in the real world.

“Things do not always happen as we wish they would,” Yamashita said. “Our troubles here, the difficulties Germany is having in Russia…”

“Yes,” Genda said. And there was another irony. Japan and the USSR were neutral. Soviet freighters could and did travel across the Pacific from Vladivostok to the U.S. West Coast and pick up arms and munitions to use against Japan’s European allies. No one interfered with them in any way. War and diplomacy were curious businesses.

Antiaircraft guns started booming. Genda didn’t hear American fighters roaring in at treetop height to shoot up anything that moved. Instead, the rumble of engines was deeper and quieter at the same time: the planes making the racket were flying high. To Genda’s embarrassment, Yamashita realized what was going on before he did: “Their damned bombers are back!”

He moved not a muscle. When he didn’t seek shelter, Genda could hardly do so, however much he wanted to. While they could still get planes off the ground, the Japanese had sent bombers of their own to Kauai to strike back at the planes that had dealt their airfields such a devastating blow. The pilots had reported wrecking a lot of them. Plainly, they hadn’t wrecked enough.

Just as plainly, the American logistical push was even more impressive than Genda had thought. Those U.S. heavy bombers must have got to Kauai as near dry as made no difference. The Americans had brought along enough fuel to get a lot of them airborne again, along with bombs for them to carry.

Maybe we should have put bigger garrisons on the other islands, Genda thought. But Oahu was the one that really counted. Either Japan would have had to pull men from here or brought in more troops overall, which meant more mouths to feed. It hadn’t seemed worthwhile.

The ground shook under Genda as bombs burst only a few hundred meters away. Yamashita sat, impassive, in front of the map. Maybe he’d already resigned himself to death, now or before too long. Genda supposed he ought to do the same. A warrior had to, after all. But achieving that indifference, he found, came harder than it should have.