End of the Beginning

II

THE OSHIMA MARU RAN SOUTH BEFORE THE WIND THAT BLEW DOWN FROM Oahu’s hills. The island rapidly receded behind the fishing sampan. Jiro Takahashi tended the sails with more pleasure than he’d ever taken in riding herd on a diesel engine. Up till Hawaii changed hands, the boat, like all the sampans that set out from Kewalo Basin, had had a motor. When fuel dried up, they’d had to make other arrangements.

“I used to do this on the Inner Sea with my father when I was a boy,” Jiro said. “You had to sail then-nobody could afford an engine.”

His two sons, Hiroshi and Kenzo, only nodded. Neither said anything. Jiro realized he might have mentioned his time on Japan’s Inner Sea a time or two-dozen-before. But that wasn’t the only thing that made his sons surly. They’d both been born here on Oahu. Their Japanese was all right-Jiro had made sure of that with after-school lessons-but they both preferred English, a language in which he’d learned only a few swear words and other common phrases. They liked hamburgers and hot dogs better than rice and raw fish. Kenzo was seeing a blond girl named Elsie Sundberg. They were, in short, Americans.

Because they were Americans, they hated the Japanese conquest of Hawaii. They hardly bothered making a secret of it. They hadn’t got in trouble for it, but they’d had endless rows with their father.

Jiro Takahashi had been born near Hiroshima. He’d come to Hawaii when he was still in his teens, before the First World War, to work in the cane fields, make himself some money, and go home. He’d made himself some money: enough to get out of the fields and go back to fishing, which was what he knew best. But he’d never returned to Japan. He’d married Reiko, settled down in Honolulu, and raised his family.

A sigh escaped him. “What is it, Father?” asked Hiroshi, who was standing by the rudder.

“I was just thinking of your mother,” Jiro answered.

“Ah. I’m sorry,” his older son said, and looked downcast. So did Kenzo. Their mother had died in the closing days of the fighting, when the Japanese bombarded Honolulu. The two of them and Jiro had been at sea. When they came ashore, that whole district was nothing but wreckage and fire. No one ever found Reiko Takahashi’s body.

Even there, Jiro and his sons differed. The boys blamed Japan for bombing and shelling a defenseless city. Jiro blamed the Americans for not giving up when their cause was plainly hopeless.

He remained proud to be Japanese. He’d waved a Rising Sun flag when the Japanese Army held its triumphal parade through Honolulu after the Americans finally did surrender. Along with everyone else along the parade route, he’d gaped at the dirty, ragged, glum American prisoners herded along by Japanese soldiers with well-pressed uniforms and gleaming bayonets. The big, hulking Americans weren’t cocks o’ the walk any more. He still made a point of delivering fancy fish to the Japanese consulate on Nuuanu Avenue. He was, in short, Japanese to the core, and glad about what his countrymen had done.

And, being a father whose sons had ideas of their own (and what other kind of father was there?), he wasted no chance to show the younger generation it wasn’t as smart as it thought it was. “These islands are going to stay in the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” he said. “You saw what happened when the Americans tried to take them back. They couldn’t do it.”

“They’ll try again,” Kenzo said. “You can bet your bottom dollar on it.”

“I’d rather bet a yen-that’s real money,” Jiro said.

Before Kenzo could answer, Hiroshi spoke rapidly in English. Kenzo’s reply in the same language sounded hot. Hiroshi said something else. Jiro’s sons went back and forth like that whenever they didn’t want him to know what was going on. Finally, Hiroshi returned to Japanese: “Father-san, can we please leave politics ashore? There’s not much room to get away from each other here, and we all have to work together to bring in the fish.”

Perhaps a bit grudgingly, Jiro nodded. “All right. We’ll let it go,” he said. Hiroshi had been polite enough that he couldn’t very well refuse without seeming churlish even to himself. He spoke an obvious truth:

“The fish do come first.”

Now both his sons nodded, plainly in relief. The truth Jiro had spoken was truer than usual these days. Cut off from supplies from the U.S. mainland, Oahu was a hungry place. Without all the sampans setting out from Kewalo Basin, it would have been hungrier yet.

Sampans weren’t the only fishing contraptions on the water nowadays, either. The Oshima Maru glided past a surfboard with a sail mounted on it to take it farther out to sea than the blond, sun-bronzed haole on it could have gone by paddling alone. He waved to the sampan as it went by. Jiro’s sons waved back.

“Foolishness,” Jiro said. That wasn’t fair, and he knew it: the sailboard wasn’t foolish, but it sure was funny-looking.

“I think that haole is the fellow we saw coming out of Eizo Doi’s shop one time,” Kenzo said. “I bet Doi put the mast and sail on his surfboard, the same as he did for the Oshima Maru.”

“Could be.” Jiro was inclined to think a little better of the white man on the surfboard if he’d visited a Japanese handyman. Before the war, a lot of the haoles on Oahu had tried to pretend the Japanese didn’t exist… and had done their best to hold them down, not letting them compete on even terms. Well, that was over and done with now.

“We’ve got a good wind behind us,” Hiroshi said.

“Hai.” Jiro nodded. He liked the Oshima Maru better as a sailboat than he had when she was motorized. She was silent now except for the thrum of the wind in the rigging and the slap of waves against her beamy hull. No diesel roar, not now. No diesel vibration felt through the soles of the feet, either-just the undulating motion of the sampan over the chop. And no stinking diesel exhaust; Jiro didn’t miss that at all.

The one drawback to traveling with the wind was the obvious one: she’d been faster with the diesel. Kenzo said, “We’re liable to be out two or three days finding a decent place to fish.”

Jiro only grunted, not because his younger son was wrong but because he was right. “It’s not just that we’re slower, either,” Hiroshi said. “Fewer fish close to Oahu these days, I think.” Jiro grunted again; he suspected that was also true. There was a lot more fishing now than there had been before Hawaii changed hands. With American supplies cut off and with people desperate for any kind of food, they took whatever they could get from the sea. Before the war, he and his sons had thrown trash fish back into the Pacific. There were no trash fish, not any more.

Half a dozen flying fish sprang out of the water and glided through the air for a little ways before splashing into the sea once more. They did that to escape the bigger fish that were trying to catch them. The bigger fish-aku and ahi and mahi-mahi and even barracuda and sharks-were what the Takahashis wanted most. Kenzo dropped a hook into the water. Jiro didn’t stop the sampan. They weren’t far enough out to make this a really good place. But if his son wanted to see if he could snag a fish or two-well, why not?

And Kenzo did, too. The line jerked. He pulled in the fish. “Ahi!” he said happily, and then, in English, “Albacore.” His gutting knife flashed. He tossed the entrails into the Pacific. The knife flashed again. He cut strips of flesh from the fish’s side and handed them to Jiro and Hiroshi. Then he cut one for himself. They all ate. The flesh was nearly as rich as beef.

“Not American food, raw fish,” Jiro jeered gently.

“Still good,” Hiroshi said.

Kenzo nodded. Jiro couldn’t tease them too hard about that. Even if they’d preferred burgers and fries when they could get them, they’d always eaten sashimi, too. Kenzo said, “And it’s an awful lot better than what we’d get ashore.” That might have been the understatement of the year. Rice and greens and not enough of either… No, Jiro couldn’t argue there. Kenzo went on, “And sashimi’s always better the fresher it is, and it just doesn’t get any fresher than this.”

“People who aren’t fishermen don’t know what really fresh fish tastes like,” Hiroshi said. “Cut me some more, please.”

“And me,” Jiro said.

Kenzo did. He cut another strip for himself, too. Before long, there wasn’t much left of the ahi. All three of the Takahashis were smiling. Jiro nodded to his older son. Hiroshi had hit the nail on the head. People who didn’t put to sea had no idea how good fish really could be.

WAIKIKI BEACH STRAIGHT AHEAD. Oscar van der Kirk decided to put on a show. He had a stringbag full of fish at his feet. He made sure it was closed and tied to a peg he’d set into his sailboard. The peg was new, something he’d thought of only a little while before. Quite a few surf-riders were taking sailboards out to sea these days. Oscar had been first, though. He didn’t begrudge anyone else the use of the idea, even if he might have made a nice chunk of change from it in peacetime. War and hunger had laws of their own, laws sterner and less forgiving than the usual sort.

For that matter, Oscar seldom begrudged anybody anything. He was a big, good-natured fellow at the very end of his twenties. The sun and the ocean had bleached his already blond hair somewhere between the color of straw and snow. His hide, by contrast, had tanned such a dark brown that a lot of people wondered if he was part Hawaiian in spite of that blond hair.

He could hear the waves crashing on the shore now. Soon they would lift the board-and him. They would slam him down in the Pacific and make him look like a prize chump if he wasn’t careful, too. But he commonly was careful, and skillful to boot. He’d scratched out a living as a surf-riding instructor-a surf-riding show-off, if you like-for years before the Japs came, and even for a while afterwards.

The wave he rode, as tall as a man, started to lean toward the beach ahead. He stood atop the sailboard like a Hawaiian god, one hand on the mast, the other arm outflung for balance. Speed built as he skimmed along the crest. Wind in his face, shifting water under the shifting board… There was no sensation in the world like this. Nothing else even came close.

He knew quite a bit about other sensations, too. He’d given surf-riding lessons to a lot of wahines over from the mainland who were trying to recover from a broken heart or just looking for a romance that would be fun but wouldn’t mean anything once they sailed away. His good looks, his strength, and his aw-shucks attitude meant he’d also given a lot of them lessons in things besides surf-riding.

Here came the beach. The wave was played out, mastered. The surfboard scraped against sand. Some of the men fishing in the surf clapped their hands. One of them tossed Oscar a shiny silver coin, as if he were a trained seal getting a sardine. He dug the coin out of the soft white sand. It was a half-dollar. That was real money. “Thanks, pal,” he said as he stuck it in the small pocket on his swim trunks.

He took down the sailboard’s mast and boom and rolled up the small sail that propelled it. Farther from the sea than the surf fishermen, a couple of Japanese Army officers watched him. Oscar muttered to himself. He wouldn’t have come in so spectacularly had he known he was under their cold stare. He felt like a rabbit hopping around while hawks soared overhead.

Then one of them tossed him a coin. The one-yen silverpiece was about the size of a quarter, and worth about as much. When he picked it up, he had to remember to bow to the Jap. The officer returned the bow, much more elegantly than he’d given it. “Ichi-ban,” the Jap said. “Wakarimasu-ka?”

Oscar nodded to show he did understand. Ichi-ban was part of the local pidgin a kamaaina-an old-timer in Hawaii-picked up. It meant A number one, or something like that.

“Thanks,” Oscar said, as politely as he could. You never knew when one of these monkeys turned out to speak English. “Thanks very much.”

And sure as hell, this one answered, “You are welcome.” If he hadn’t gone to school in the States, Oscar would have been surprised. They might even have been at Stanford at the same time; they weren’t far apart in age.

Oscar carried the surfboard, mast, and rigging under one arm and the stringbag full of fish in his other hand. He hoped these Japs wouldn’t give him a hard time about that. Just about all food was supposed to go into community kitchens, share and share alike. They allowed sampan fishermen enough for what they called “personal use”; the rest of the catch they bought at a fixed price, so much per pound regardless of what kind of fish it was. So far, the Japs hadn’t harried the men who fished from sailboards-they didn’t catch enough to make a fuss over. But the occupiers could harass them if they wanted to. They could do almost anything they wanted to.

To his relief, this pair just nodded to him as he walked by. Maybe they admired the show he’d put on, and didn’t bother him because of that. Maybe… Who the hell knew for sure with Japs? All he knew for sure was, they weren’t going to worry about his fish. That was all he needed to know, too.

He had an apartment not far from Waikiki Beach-a perfect place for a fellow who made his living surf-riding. The man who owned the building was a local Japanese who lived on the ground floor. Oscar knocked on his door. When the man answered, Oscar presented him with a couple of fat mackerel.

“Here you go, Mr. Fukumoto,” he said. “Another week, eh?”

His landlord examined the fish. “Okay. Another week,” he said in accented English. Oscar went upstairs to his own place. He would have bet more business got done by barter than with cash these days. Money, very often, couldn’t buy food.

Once back in his apartment, Oscar put some of the fish in the little icebox in the cramped kitchenette. That would feed him and his lady friend for a bit. The rest of the catch stayed in the stringbag. Out he went, bound for Honolulu, and especially for the Oriental district there, the section west of Nuuanu Avenue.

The markets in that part of town were fluctuating things, popping up now here, now there. They were, at best, marginally legal. Oscar suspected-no, he was sure-some Japanese palms got greased to make sure some Japanese eyes looked the other way. People who caught things and people who grew things traded and sold what they had. Money could buy food there, all right-if you had enough of it.

With fish in hand, Oscar could almost name his own price for it. But he wasn’t out for cash, or not primarily. He traded some of his catch for tomatoes, some for potatoes, some for string beans, and some for a small, squat jug. What he had left after that… well, greenbacks would do.

He could have got a ride back to Waikiki, but rickshaws and pedicabs stuck in his craw. Just because you paid a man to act like a beast of burden, that didn’t mean he ought to be one. While there’d been gasoline-and diesel fuel for buses-such contraptions hadn’t existed in Honolulu. They did now. His own Chevy was long since hors de combat.

But Oscar didn’t mind shank’s mare. He got back to the apartment a little before Susie Higgins came in. Susie was a cute strawberry blonde, a divorcee from Pittsburgh. Oscar had taught her to ride the surf. She’d taught him a few things, too. She had both a temper and an eye for the main chance. They’d quarreled, broken up, and come back together a few weeks before.

Her eyes, as blue as a Siamese cat’s, lit up when she saw the potatoes. “Spuds! Oscar, I could kiss you!” she said, and she did. “I’m so goddamn sick of rice, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Rice is a lot better than empty,” Oscar observed.

“My boss says the same thing,” Susie answered. Though just a tourist, she’d landed a secretary’s job after she and Oscar parted the first time. She’d done it with talent, too, not with her fair tanned body. As if to prove as much, she added, “Of course, his wife’s Chinese, so he’s used to the stuff.”

“Long as my belly doesn’t growl too loud, I’m not fussy,” Oscar said. “I don’t mind rice. As many Japanese and Chinese places as I’ve been to, I’d better not.”

“It’s not American,” Susie said. “Once in a while is okay, I guess, but all the time?” She shook her head.

“I feel like my eyes are getting slanty.”

“Forget it, babe,” Oscar told her. “You can eat rice till everything turns blue, and you still won’t look like a Jap.”

“Oh, Oscar, you say the sweetest things.” Was that sarcasm? With Susie, it was sometimes hard to tell. These days, she and Oscar cooked on a hot plate. He’d got that before the fighting ended, and it was one of the smarter things he’d done. You couldn’t lay your hands on one for love or money these days. Gas was as kaput as gasoline or diesel fuel, but Honolulu still had electricity. A hot plate wasn’t the ideal cooking tool-far from it-but it beat the hell out of a stove that didn’t work.

“Now for another exciting evening,” Susie said after she washed the dishes and he dried them. “We can’t go out dancing because there’s a curfew. We can’t listen to the radio because the Japs confiscated all the sets. So what does that leave? Cribbage?” She made a face.

There was, of course, another possibility, but Oscar didn’t name it. Susie was, or could be, a holy terror between the sheets, but she always liked to think it was her idea, not that she was being pushed into it. But then Oscar snapped his fingers. “Almost forgot!” he said, and showed off the jug he’d got that afternoon.

“What’s that?” Susie suddenly sounded hopeful.

“It’s okolehao,” Oscar answered.

“Holy cow?” Susie frowned in confusion.

Oscar laughed, but maybe she wasn’t so far wrong. “It’s Hawaii hooch, Maui moonshine. They make the genuine article from ti root, and it’ll put hair on anybody’s chest.” Hair would not have improved Susie’s, but he didn’t feel like editing himself. Instead, he went on, “God only knows how good this batch is, but it’s booze. Want a slug?”

“You bet I do,” she said. He poured her a knock, and one for himself, too. They clinked mismatched glasses, then sipped. Susie’s eyes got enormous. She coughed a couple of times. “Holy cow!” she wheezed, and looked respectfully at the glass. “I don’t think it’s very good, but it’s sure as hell strong.”

“Yeah.” Oscar was also wheezing a little, or more than a little. A Territorial Senator from Maui had once said that proper okolehao burned with a clear blue flame. Oscar didn’t know about that. He did know this stuff burned all the way down. He took another sip. Maybe the first one had numbed him, because it hurt a lot less this time.

Susie Higgins drank some more, too. “Wow!” she said, and then, “How do you really say it?” Oscar gave her the name again. “Okolehao,” she repeated, and nodded to herself. “Well, you’re right-that beats the dickens out of cribbage.”

He poured himself some more, then held out the jug and raised a questioning eyebrow. Susie nodded again. “Here you go,” he said, and gave her a hefty dose.

“If I drink all that, I’ll go, all right-I’ll go out like a light,” she said, which didn’t keep her from attacking the stuff. She smiled at Oscar-a slightly slack-lipped smile. “Doesn’t taste so bad once you get used to it, does it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think maybe the first knock put my tongue to sleep.”

Susie waggled a finger at him. “Oh, it better not have, sweetheart, or I’m gonna be real disappointed in you.” She exploded into gales of laughter. Oscar grinned back. He gave himself a mental pat on the back. Yeah, Susie could be as raunchy as all get-out… as long asshe was doing the leading. If he’d said something like that to her, it would have chilled her faster than a cold shower.

Oscar’s bed was crowded for two, but not too crowded, as long as they were friendly. His tongue, he discovered in due course, still worked fine. So did Susie’s. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, happy and more than a little sloshed.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE WAS AN OFFICER and a gentleman. That’s what they told him when he graduated from West Point. He’d gone right on believing it when he got assigned to the Twenty-fourth Division’s Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion, based at Schofield Barracks. Of course, officers in Hawaii were something like sahibs in British India, with plenty of natives to do the scutwork for them. If a gentleman was someone who seldom got his hands dirty, Fletch had qualified.

Even before the fighting started, things hadn’t been perfect for him. He’d been sleeping in the base BOQ; Jane had the apartment they’d shared in Wahiawa. The divorce hadn’t been final when the Japs hit. He didn’t suppose it had gone forward since the occupation, but so what? He wasn’t married any more, and he knew it.

So what was he, then? Another slowly starving POW, that was all. He wasn’t too far from Wahiawa himself right now. Some of the men in his gun crew had tried disappearing when the order to surrender went out. Fletch didn’t know what had happened to them. Maybe they’d blended in among the civilians. Maybe the Japs had caught them and shot them. Either way, they were liable to be better off than he was.

“Work!” a Japanese sergeant shouted, one of the handful of English words the man knew. The POWs under his eye moved a little faster. They were digging tank traps and antitank ditches. Putting prisoners to work on war-related projects like that violated the Geneva Convention. Putting officers to work at all without their agreement also violated the Convention.

Fletch laughed, not that it was funny. The Japs hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention, and didn’t give two whoops in hell about it. They figured the USA might try to invade Oahu again, and they were damn well going to be ready if the Americans did. They’d had God only knew how many thousands of POWs sitting around in Kapiolani Park at the edge of Waikiki, and they’d sent out an order-work or don’t eat. Nobody’d been eating much, but nobody had any doubts the Japs would be as good, or as bad, as their word.

Up went the pickaxe. Fletch had learned to let gravity do most of the work as it fell. He still wore the shirt and trousers in which he’d surrendered. They hadn’t been in good shape then, and they were rags now. He hung on to them even so. A lot of the Americans in the gang worked stripped to the waist. He didn’t want to do that; with his red hair and fair skin, he burned and burned, and hardly tanned at all.

Raise the pick. Let it fall. Raise the pick. Let it fall. A scrawny PFC with a shovel cleared the dirt Fletch loosened. Neither of them moved any faster than he had to. Slaves in the South must have found a pace like this: just enough to satisfy the overseer, and not a bit more.

Every so often, of course, the slaves would have slacked off too much. Then Simon Legree would have cracked his bullwhip, and things would have picked up again-till he turned his back, anyhow. The Jap sergeant didn’t have a bullwhip. He had a four-foot length of bamboo instead. He would swing it like a baseball bat whenever he felt the need. It left welts at least as bad as a bullwhip’s, and could knock a man off his feet.

About twenty feet away from Fletch, an American keeled over without having been walloped. “Man down!” Three or four POWs sang out at the same time. If somebody went down and they didn’t sing out, they’d catch it-the Japs would figure they were colluding in his laziness.

Two guards strolled over to the fallen man. One of them stirred him with his foot. The prisoner-one more bag of bones among so many-lay there unmoving. The other Jap kicked him in the ribs. He didn’t even curl up to protect himself. The Jap kicked him once more, harder. He still didn’t move. Maybe he was dead already. If he wasn’t, the guards took care of it. They bayoneted him, again and again.

“Too fucking cheap to waste ammo on him,” the PFC with the shovel said out of the side of his mouth.

“Hey, it’s more fun to stab the poor bastard,” Fletch said, also sotto voce . He wasn’t kidding; he’d seen the gusto with which the guards wielded their bayonets. This POW was too far gone to give them much sport. When they were satisfied they’d killed him, they thrust their bayonets into the dirt to get the blood off them. Tidy SOBs, Fletch thought disgustedly.

“Work!” the sergeant shouted again. Fletch worked-again, as slowly as he could get away with. His eyes kept going toward the dead man, who still lay in the hole the Americans were excavating. What did hard work get you here? What the luckless prisoner had got, nothing else. Of course, what did work that wasn’t so hard get you? The same damn thing, only a little slower.

FROM THE COCKPIT OF HIS NAKAJIMA B5N1, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida spotted an oil slick on the surface of the Pacific northwest of Oahu. Excitement shot through him, but only for a moment. That wasn’t the sign of a Yankee submarine, however much he wished it were. It was only fuel bubbling up from the Sumiyoshi Maru. An American sub had sunk her.

Now that Fuchida had found where she’d gone down, he flew his carrier-based bomber in a search spiral, looking for the boat that had done the deed. The Sumiyoshi Maru wasn’t the first Japanese freighter on the way to Oahu the Americans had sent to the bottom. She was, in fact, the second ship they’d got in the past two weeks. Japanese forces in Hawaii couldn’t well afford such losses. They needed food. They needed fuel. They needed aircraft to replace the ones they’d lost in the fight at the end of June. They needed munitions of every sort.

As long as everything went smoothly, the Japanese could just about keep themselves supplied. The locals had had a lean time of it-literally. Now, though, the islands were growing enough food on their own to keep people from starving. That was a relief. The American subs operating against Japanese shipping, though, were anything but.

Things would have been worse than they were if a couple of American torpedoes that squarely struck freighters hadn’t been duds. When planes from the Lexington attacked the Japanese task force north of Oahu just after the fighting started, a torpedo that hit Akagi had been a dud, too. Fuchida didn’t know what was wrong with the U.S. ordnance, but something clearly was.

For now, he kept scanning the Pacific. He’d been in overall charge of air operations for both the invasion of Hawaii and the defense against the U.S. counterattack. A lot of men with such exalted responsibilities wouldn’t have gone out on ordinary search missions themselves. Fuchida liked to keep his hand in any way he could.

He called to his bombardier on the intercom: “See anything?”

“No, Commander-san,” the rating answered. “Please excuse me, but I don’t. How about you?”

“I wish I did,” Fuchida told him. “That sub is probably fifty meters down and waiting for nightfall to surface and get away.”

“I’d do the same thing,” the bombardier said. “Why stick your neck out when you don’t have to?”

“We’ll search a while longer,” Fuchida said. “The sub skipper may not think the freighter got a radio message off before she went down. If he doesn’t, he might figure he’s home free and head back to the U.S. mainland on the surface.”

“Maybe.” The bombardier didn’t sound as if he believed it-which was fair enough, because Fuchida didn’t believe it, either. It was possible, but not likely. The bombardier added, “Hard work!”

That implied the work was not only hard but pointless. “Can’t be helped,” Fuchida said. “I’d love to bomb a U.S. submarine. If I have any kind of chance, I will. Maybe it will persuade the Yankees to keep their boats away from Hawaii.”

“Fat chance!” That wasn’t the bombardier. It was the radioman, First Flying Petty Officer Tokonobu Mizuki. He’d been listening in from the rear of the cockpit, where he faced the way the plane had come. He and Fuchida went back a long way together, long enough to let him speak his mind to his superior: rare in any military, and especially in the obsessively hierarchical Japanese Navy.

Fuchida saw nothing but a little light chop on the surface of the Pacific. No trace of a wake, no trace of exhaust-not that a sub’s diesel engine gave off much.

He eyed the fuel gauge. He still had plenty left. He intended to search as long as he could. He’d gone into battle with appendicitis, and kept doing what he had to do till he landed aboard Akagi. If illness hadn’t stopped him, nothing less would.

There was a wake! But that was no submarine. It was a Japanese destroyer, also searching for the enemy boat. Fuchida waggled his wings to his countrymen down on the Pacific. He couldn’t tell if they saw him-they weren’t going to send up a flare or anything like that.

The spiral got wider and wider. Still no sign of the submarine. Fuchida muttered to himself, there in the cockpit. He hadn’t really expected anything different. Subs’ elusiveness was a big part of what made them so dangerous. So no, he hadn’t expected anything different. But he had hoped…

“Sir?” Petty Officer Mizuki said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“I’ll listen,” Fuchida said.

“When night comes, we ought to send some of those big H8K flying boats along the course from here to the American mainland,” the radioman said. “The submarine will be on the surface then. If one of our pilots spots it, he can make a good bombing run.”

Fuchida scratched at his closely trimmed mustache. Slowly, he nodded to himself. “That’s not a bad notion,” he said. “Someone else may have had it already, but it’s not a bad notion at all. Radio it back to Oahu. If we send out the flying boats tonight, the sub will still be close to the islands, and we’ll have a better chance of finding it.”

“Commander-san, I’ll do it, but what are the odds the brass hats will pay any attention to a lousy rating?” Mizuki spoke without bitterness, but with an acute knowledge of how things worked. How frankly he spoke told how much he trusted his superior, who was, after all, a brass hat himself.

“Do this,” Fuchida said after a little more thought. “Radio it back to Oahu. Do it in my name. Tell them I want it done. If nothing happens, if the flying boats don’t find a sub, we’ll leave it there. Failure on something like that won’t hurt my reputation. But if it works, if one of them nails the enemy, I’ll see that you get the credit.”

“Domo arigato,” Mizuki said. Some officers stole credit when the men who served under them came up with good ideas. Fuchida wasn’t one of that sort, and the radioman knew it. “They acknowledge, sir,” Mizuki told him a few minutes later. “They promise they’ll tend to it.”

“Good,” Fuchida said. “How does it feel to be a brass hat yourself?”

“I like it,” Mizuki answered at once. “And I like it even better because I’m doing it under an assumed name.” He and Fuchida both laughed.

Inexorably, the bomber’s fuel ran down. Fuchida hadn’t seen any sign of the American submarine. With a regretful sigh, he turned the Nakajima B5N1 back towards Oahu.

With the Akagi anchored in the calm waters of Pearl Harbor, landing aboard her was almost as easy as coming in on an ordinary runway. She wasn’t rolling and pitching, the way she would out on the open sea. It required precision, but flying always required precision. Fuchida obeyed the landing officer’s wigwag signals as if the man on the flight deck were piloting the bomber. The first arrester wire snagged the bomber’s tailhook, and the plane jerked to a stop.

Fuchida slid back the cockpit canopy and climbed out of the Nakajima. So did Mizuki. The bombardier emerged a little later; he had to scramble up from his prone bombing position in the plane’s belly.

Captain Kaku came across the flight deck toward Fuchida. “A good thought about the flying boats,” the Akagi’s skipper said. “No guarantees, of course, but it’s worth a try.”

“That’s what I thought when Mizuki here proposed it.” Fuchida set a hand on his radioman’s shoulder.

Kaku’s eyes narrowed. “The signal came in under your name.”

“Yes, sir,” Fuchida agreed. “My idea was that no one would take a suggestion from a petty officer seriously. With my name attached to it, it might have a better chance of going forward.”

“Irregular,” Tomeo Kaku rumbled. Then, almost in spite of himself, he smiled. “Irregular, but probably effective.” He nodded to the rating. “Mizuki, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” The radioman saluted.

“Well, Mizuki, I think this will go into your promotion jacket,” the Akagi’s skipper said.

Mizuki saluted again. “Thank you very much, sir!”

“You earned it,” Kaku said, and he strolled off.

The petty officer turned to Fuchida. “And thank you very much, sir!”

“I’m glad to help, Mizuki, but I didn’t do it for you,” Fuchida answered. “Anything that will twist the Americans’ tails-anything at all-I’m for it.”

“Good. That’s good,” Mizuki said. “It doesn’t look like they’re going away, does it?”

Fuchida turned toward the north and east. He’d made that motion a good many times before. The U.S. mainland drew him the way magnetic north drew a compass needle. He sighed and shook his head. “No. I wish they were, but they aren’t.”

“DILLON, LESTER A.” The supply sergeant behind the counter checked Les Dillon’s name off a list.

“Here you are. You have now been issued an M1 helmet.” He handed Dillon the new helmet, and a fiber liner that went inside it.

“What the hell was wrong with my old tin hat?” Dillon grumbled. He’d worn the British-style wide-brimmed helmet since he joined the Marine Corps during the First World War. He stared suspiciously at the replacement, which was much deeper. “Looks like a damn pot, or maybe a footbath.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” the supply sergeant said. By his craggy, weathered features, he’d been a Marine at least as long as Dillon. “For one thing, the new model covers more of your head than the old one did. For another thing, orders are that we get rid of the old ones and wear these. You don’t like it, don’t cry to me. Talk to your Congressman.”

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Dillon said. As well as being about the same age, they held the same grade. “I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”

“Go on.” The supply sergeant jerked a thumb toward the door. “Make like a drum and beat it.” Carrying the new helmet and the liner, Dillon did. Outside, Dutch Wenzel had put on his helmet. “What do I look like, Les?”

“You look like hell, if you want to know what I think,” Dillon answered. “The new helmet doesn’t have anything to do with it, though.”

“You’re my buddy, all right.” Wenzel gave him the finger. Then he pulled out a pack of Luckies, stuck one in his mouth, and offered Dillon the pack.

“Thanks.” Dillon took a Zippo out of his pocket and lit both cigarettes. He sucked in smoke and then said, “What I want to know is, how come they’re giving me a new helmet when I’m a couple of thousand miles away from anybody who’s gonna shoot at me?”

“Beats me. Maybe they think it makes you look cute.” Wenzel shook his head. “Nah, there’s gotta be a reason that makes sense.”

“You oughta go on the radio,” Dillon said. “You’d run Benny and Fred Allen right off the air.” He looked at the new helmet-the M1, the supply sergeant had called it. “Maybe they think they’re changing our luck or something. I don’t know why, though, honest to God. We’ve used the old one for twenty-five years, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it.” Like a lot of Marines, he was conservative, almost reactionary, about his equipment.

But Wenzel went on cracking wise. “That’s what they said about this broad on Hotel Street.”

“Can’t make that joke on the radio,” Dillon said. They both laughed. Dillon went on, “If we can get off the base this afternoon, you want to go see a Padre game?”

Wenzel nodded. “Why not? Who’s in town?”

“The Solons. They’re in second place,” Dillon said. The closest big-league teams, the Cardinals and (stretching a point) the Browns, played just on this side of the Mississippi, and the Mississippi was a hell of a long way from San Diego. Pacific Coast League ball was pretty good, though. A lot of the players had put in time in the majors. A good many who hadn’t, the younger ones, would sooner or later. And some of the ones who wouldn’t lived on the West Coast, enjoyed playing here, and didn’t give a damn if they ever went back East.

Lane Field lay right across Harbor Drive from the beach. The Pacific was right behind the third-base stands. If you looked out past the left-field fence, you could see the Santa Fe railroad yard. It was a long look; it was 390 down the line in left and 500 to dead center. Outfielders who played in that park had to be able to run like the devil. Catchers, on the other hand…

Dillon and Wenzel armed themselves with hot dogs and popcorn and beer. Les pointed to the backstop.

“That’s the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen in any ballpark anywhere, and I’ve been in a bunch of ’em.”

After a swig of beer, his pal nodded. “Whoever laid out this place musta had himself a snootful.” Nothing was wrong with the backstop as a backstop. That didn’t mean nothing was wrong with it: it stood only about twelve feet back of the plate. Dutch Wenzel raised the bottle to his lips again. “Not a hell of a lot of wild pitches or passed balls in this park.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Dillon said.

The Padres took the field. The organist played the National Anthem. Boots Poffenberger loosened up on the mound for the Padres. He’d had two or three years in the big leagues, and hadn’t particularly distinguished himself. He got the Solons out in the first. Tony Freitas, another big-league retread, took the hill for Sacramento. He gave up a leadoff single, but the Padre runner was out trying to steal.

When he argued, the Padres’ manager came out to yell at the ump, too. He waved his arms and shouted and carried on, even though he had to know he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting the umpire to change his mind. “Who is that guy?” Wenzel asked. “He’s having a fit out there.”

“That’s Cedric Durst,” Dillon answered. “He played for the Browns and the Yankees back in the Twenties.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember him-sort of,” Dutch Wenzel said. “He’s gonna get his ass thrown out if he doesn’t shut up.”

“Watch your language, buddy,” a man behind them said. “I’ve got my daughter here.”

Dillon and Wenzel looked at each other. They both shrugged. A ballpark was no place for a brawl. They let it go. The man in back of them never knew how lucky he was. The Solons’ first baseman ambled over to the argument to put in his two cents’ worth. Pepper Martin could do that, because the veteran of the Gas House Gang also managed Sacramento.

Durst finally retreated to the third-base dugout, and the game resumed. Poffenberger was sharp, but Freitas was sharper. He hadn’t done much in the majors, but he’d won twenty or more for Sacramento five years in a row, and was well on his way to doing it a sixth straight time. The Solons beat the Padres 3 to 1.

Lane Field wasn’t far from the base. As Dillon and Wenzel waited with some other Marines for the bus that would take them back, Les said, “That wasn’t bad.”

“Nope-not half,” Wenzel agreed. “Sorta reminds you what we’re fighting for, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the goddamn Japs like baseball, too,” Les said. “When I was in Peking-this was before they took it over-their soldiers had a team, and they’d play against us. They’d beat us some of the time, too, the bastards. They had a pitcher with the nastiest curve you ever saw. It just fell off the table.”

“Fuck ’em. Lousy cocksucking monkeys,” Wenzel said. None of the Marines standing around waiting for the bus told him to watch his language. A couple of them, including a captain, nodded emphatic agreement. The bus wheezed up, belching black smoke. Les and the rest of the leathernecks climbed aboard. With a clash of gears, it got rolling again and took them back to Camp Elliott.

AS ALWAYS, KENZO TAKAHASHI was glad to escape the tent where he and Hiroshi and their father slept when they weren’t aboard the Oshima Maru. Living and sleeping under canvas reminded him that their apartment was only ashes and charcoal, and that his mother had died in it.

And living under canvas with his father reminded him how different they were. He laughed a sour laugh. Before the war came to Hawaii, he and Hiroshi had desperately tried to get accepted as Americans. To the haoles who’d run things here, they were just a couple of Japs. Dad never understood why they wanted to be as American as the blond, blue-eyed kids they went to school with. He was always Japanese first.

Well, now things had gone topsy-turvy. The Japanese were on top. They’d thrown the haoles out of the saddle. Dad was as proud as if he’d commanded the army that fought its way across Oahu. And Kenzo… still wanted to be an American.

He laughed again, even more bitterly than before. He seemed doomed to swim against the current. The black-suited white executives who ran the Big Five, the companies that controlled Hawaii, hadn’t wanted or known what to do with Japanese who acted American. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy didn’t want them or know what to do with them, either. The two sides probably had more sympathy for each other than they did for people like Kenzo.

Several Japanese soldiers-a patrol-came up the street toward him. He bowed, holding the canvas sack he carried under his left arm. The soldiers didn’t acknowledge him, though they might have beaten him up if he hadn’t bowed. They chattered among themselves in Hiroshima dialect much like the Japanese his father spoke. His and Hiroshi’s were a little purer, because they’d studied with a sensei from Tokyo after American school was done.

Kenzo went past a couple of informal and not quite legal markets in the Oriental part of Honolulu. When the official ration meant hunger and a slow slide toward starvation, people with extra money or things to trade supplemented it when and as they could. Japanese soldiers and sailors sometimes traded in the markets, too. They got better food than civilians, but not a whole lot better. And their higher-ups no doubt got paid under the table to look the other way.

Once Kenzo got some little distance east of Nuuanu Avenue, there were no more markets. Chinese and Koreans and Japanese ran them. Haoles went to them, but didn’t set up any in their own part of town. Kenzo didn’t understand that, but he’d seen it was true.

Haoles in Honolulu mostly did their best to pretend nothing had changed since December 7. Houses were still well tended; the white clapboard ones, and the churches built in the same style, seemed more likely to belong to a New England small town than to the tropical Pacific. Lawns were bright green and for the most part short and neat.

Here and there, vacant lots reminded a passerby that war had touched this place. Almost all the houses that had stood on those lots were gone, scavenged for wood and anything else people thought they could use. More often than not, neighbors to either side kept grass and shrubbery from running wild.

Mynah birds eyed Kenzo suspiciously as he turned up a curving street not much different from others in the neighborhood. Before December 7, zebra doves would have puttered along the sidewalk, but people were eating them even faster than they bred. Mynahs, at least, had the sense to be suspicious.

Kenzo walked up a neatly kept entryway to a clapboard house much like its neighbors-a palace compared to the cramped flat where he’d grown up. He knocked on the door. A middle-aged blond woman opened it. “Hello, Mrs. Sundberg,” he said.

She smiled at him-a slightly nervous smile, but a smile even so. “Hello, Ken,” she answered. “Come on in.” Everyone in school had called him Ken. All haoles everywhere did. His older brother was Hank to them, not Hiroshi. Most Hawaii-born Japanese had an American name to go with the one they’d been given at birth. Except when he was with his father, Kenzo still thought of himself as Ken more often than not. Some local Japanese, though, had dropped those American names like live grenades after Hawaii changed hands.

When Kenzo did walk inside, the New England feel only got stronger. The overstuffed furniture, the Currier and Ives prints on the walls, and the bricabrac everywhere didn’t go with the palm trees and balmy breezes outside. He handed Mrs. Sundberg the sack. “I brought you this,” he said, as casually as he could.

She hefted it, then looked inside. Plainly, she didn’t want to, not right there in front of him. Just as plainly, she couldn’t help herself. She was smiling even before she closed the sack. “Thank you very much, Ken,” she said. “That’s one of the nicest dolphins I’ve seen in a long time.”

Kenzo thought the name a lot of haoles used for mahi-mahi was dumb. It confused the fish with porpoises’ cousins. Telling that to Mrs. Sundberg would have been wasting his breath. He just said, “I hope you like it when you cook it up.”

“I’m sure we will.” Mrs. Sundberg sounded as if she meant every word of that. No wonder-people who weren’t fishermen or didn’t know fishermen never got fish like that, not these days. She went on, “Let me go put it in the icebox. Elsie will be out in a minute.”

“Sure,” Kenzo said, and he didn’t smile till Mrs. Sundberg had turned her back. Bringing a good-sized fish every time he came to call on Elsie wasn’t quite a bribe, but it did go a long way toward making her folks happier to see him. The way to their hearts is through their stomachs, he thought. It was no joke, either, not when so many stomachs in Hawaii were growling so loud these days.

Mrs. Sundberg came out with a glass it her hand. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

“Sure,” Ken said again. “Thanks.” He sipped. It was good. Lemonade persisted where so many things had vanished. Hawaii still grew sugar, even if a lot of the cane fields had been turned into rice paddies since the occupation. And the Sundbergs had a lemon tree in their back yard. What else could you do with lemons but fix lemonade?

“Hi, Ken.” Elsie walked into the living room from the back of the house.

“Hi.” He could feel his face lighting up when he smiled. He’d known Elsie since they were in elementary school together. They’d been friends and helped each other with homework in high school. She was a nice-looking blonde-not gorgeous, but nice. (She looked a lot like her mother, in fact, though Kenzo never noticed that.) Before the war, she’d been a tiny bit plump. Hardly anybody was plump any more. A double chin now marked not just a collaborator but an important collaborator.

“I’ll be right back,” Elsie’s mom said. And she was, too, before Kenzo and Elsie could do anything more than smile at each other. “Here you are, sweetie.” She gave Elsie a glass of lemonade, too.

The longer Elsie and Kenzo stood around drinking lemonade and gabbing with Mrs. Sundberg, the less time they would have by themselves. Elsie’s mother didn’t say that was what she had in mind, but she didn’t have to. Calling her on it would have been rude. Instead, Kenzo and Elsie just drank fast. Elsie handed back her empty glass in nothing flat. “We’ll be off now, Mom.”

“Have a nice time,” Mrs. Sundberg said gamely.

Elsie didn’t giggle till they were out of the house. She reached for Kenzo’s hand before he would have reached for hers, before they’d even got to the sidewalk. “My mother,” she said, exasperation and affection mingling in her voice.

“She’s very nice.” Kenzo knew better than to criticize Mrs. Sundberg. That was Elsie’s job. If he did it, he might make Elsie stick up for her, which was the last thing he wanted. He picked something safer to say: “How have you been?”

“We’re… getting along, one day at a time.” Elsie disappointed him by taking that as a question about her whole family, but he couldn’t do anything except squeeze her hand a little. She went on, “We trade lemons and avocados for whatever we can get to add to the ration. Mom’s always glad when you bring a fish.”

“I knew that. It’s not like she doesn’t show it,” Kenzo said. Yes, for him praise was safer than blame. If he didn’t bring something good whenever he called on Elsie, how would Mrs. Sundberg look at him? As nothing but a damn Jap? That was his bet.

They walked to the park at the corner of Wilder and Keeaumoku. It hadn’t been maintained the way most of the lawns had. The grass was tall and shaggy. Weeds and shrubs sprouted here and there. The seat had come off one of the swings; only slightly rusty chains hung down from the bar.

But it was peaceful and quiet, and a place where Japanese soldiers were unlikely to come. Elsie didn’t like being around them, and Kenzo didn’t see how he could blame her. Some of the things he’d heard… He didn’t want to think about that, or about not being able to protect her if trouble started.

White paint was starting to peel off the benches in the park. In peacetime, somebody would have fixed that up quick as you please. These days, the Honolulu city government, or what was left of it, had more urgent things to worry about. Most of them revolved around trying to persuade the occupiers to be a little less savage, a little less ruthless, than they might have been otherwise.

A bench creaked when Kenzo and Elsie sat down on it. That wouldn’t have been allowed to happen in better times, either. One of these days, if things didn’t get better, somebody would sit down on it and fall right through when rotting wood gave way. It might not take that long, either. Hawaii was tropical. If things weren’t tended, they went to pieces pretty damn quick.

“How are you?” Kenzo asked again, this time bearing down on the last word.

“I don’t even know any more,” Elsie answered. “I was so disappointed when we lost those carriers, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“You don’t need to. So was I,” Kenzo said.

“I know. But…” Elsie paused, figuring out how to say what she wanted to say without getting him mad. She was considerate enough to do that, which was one of the reasons he liked her. Finally, she said, “Nobody can tell by looking that you don’t like the people who’re in charge now. With me, it’s different.” She patted her short blond hair.

Kenzo’s laugh was as sour as the lemonade would have been without sugar. “Anybody who looks like me would have said the same thing before December 7.”

“I didn’t really understand it then. Now I do.” Elsie’s smile only lifted one corner of her mouth. “Nothing like wearing the shoe to show how much it pinches, I guess.”

“No.” Now Kenzo hesitated for a moment before he decided to add, “There are haole collaborators, too, you know.”

“Oh, sure. They’re worse than the Japanese ones, if you ask me.” Elsie didn’t even try to hide her venom. “At least people who were born in Japan can think it’s their own country in charge now.” That covered people like Kenzo’s father. It didn’t cover the Hawaii-born Japanese who also backed the occupiers. There were some. But Elsie didn’t mention them, instead returning to whites who kowtowed to the Japanese authorities: “Haoles who suck up like that are just a bunch of traitors. When the Americans do come back, they ought to string ’em up.”

Such talk might have been easier before the war. Now Kenzo asked, “You’ve seen dead people, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” She nodded and shuddered. Few people on Oahu hadn’t, these days. “Even so, though. They deserve it.”

“I guess so.” Kenzo wondered how he’d got to talking about killing people with a pretty girl. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he called on Elsie.

A white-haired lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat against the sun walked slowly through the shabby park. She looked at Elsie and Kenzo, sniffed, and stuck her nose in the air as she walked on.

“Sour old biddy,” Elsie said.

“You know her?” Kenzo asked.

“I’ve seen her. She doesn’t live too far from us.” Elsie’s sniff was a nasty imitation of the old woman’s.

“The next thing she likes after the turn of the century will be the first.”

“Oh. One of those. There are lots of older Japanese people like that, too,” Kenzo said.

Elsie started to say something. He thought he could guess what it was: that even old Japanese in Hawaii could like the way the war had gone. He would have had a hard time disagreeing with her, too. But she didn’t say it. Instead, very quietly, she started to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said. Kenzo wondered what she meant by it. Everything, probably. “It wasn’t!”

“I know,” he said. “Hey, I know.” He slipped an arm around her. She clung to him as if he were a life preserver and sobbed into the hollow of his shoulder. “Hey,” Kenzo repeated. “Hey.” It wasn’t really a word, just a noise to show he was there.

After a while, Elsie gulped a couple of times and raised her head. Her eyes were red. The tears had made her mascara run and scored lines through the powder and rouge on her cheeks. She stared at Kenzo from a distance of about six inches. “Oh, hell,” she said. It was, as far as he could remember, the first time he’d ever heard her swear. She went on, “I must look like a raccoon.”

He’d only seen pictures of raccoons, and he didn’t care about them one way or the other. “You always look good to me,” he said seriously.

It was easy enough to say. To say seriously… That was something else. She noticed, too-he could tell. Her eyes widened. Then, careless of smeared makeup and runny mascara, she let her eyelids fall.

“Ken…” she whispered.

He kissed her. They’d kissed before, but never like this. Her arms were still around him. Now she squeezed him, too. Her lips tasted of salt. That only made them seem sweeter to him. Somewhere up in a tree, a Chinese thrush was singing. For a moment, Kenzo thought it was his own heart.

The kiss went on and on. Elsie made a little noise, half a purr, half a growl, down deep in her throat. Kenzo opened his eyes. The old haole lady was gone. Nobody seemed to be in the park but the two of them. Emboldened, he squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her sun dress. She made that noise again, louder this time. Her hand came down on his, not to pull it away but to press him to her.

He set his other hand on her knee, just below the hem of her dress. Her legs drifted apart. But when he started to slide up the warm smoothness of her inner thigh, she gasped and twisted away. “No,” she said.

“I mean, we shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” Kenzo panted. “Who’s gonna know?”

“Somebody might nine months from now,” Elsie said. Kenzo didn’t worry about nine months from now. He didn’t worry about nine minutes from now, except about his chances of getting her down on the long grass. But she shook her head. “No,” she repeated. “It wouldn’t be right, and you wouldn’t respect me afterwards.”

“Sure I would.” Kenzo heard the whine in his own voice. How many men had said the same thing to women over the years? Millions-it had to be millions. How many had meant it? Maybe a few. Do I? he wondered. He wasn’t sure.

Elsie must have seen as much on his face. Tartly, she said, “If that’s all you want, you can probably get it for a fish down on Hotel Street.”

Kenzo’s ears heated. “It’s not all I want,” he mumbled, though he couldn’t deny he did want it. If he’d tried, the bulge in his trousers would have given him away.

He saw her eyeing the bulge, which only made his ears hotter still. But she let him down easy, saying, “Okay, Ken. I believe you. You’re a good friend, too.”

Too? he wondered. What was that supposed to mean? Did she mostly care about him as a friend? Or, besides caring for him as a friend, did part of her want to lie down on the grass with him? There was a lot of difference between the two-all the difference in the world. And he couldn’t ask. If you had to ask, the answer was always the one you least wanted to hear.

There were ways to find out besides asking, though. He kissed her again, and she didn’t pull away. But the kiss, while sweet, didn’t feel like bombs going off inside his head. “I wish-” he said, and then stopped.

“What?” Elsie asked.

“I wish none of this stuff had happened, but we were going together anyhow,” Kenzo said.

“That would be pretty good,” Elsie agreed.

Kenzo wondered if her folks would have let her go out with him if the Japanese hadn’t occupied Hawaii. But he had to admit to himself that maybe he wasn’t being fair. Elsie’s mom and dad had never had any trouble about the two of them studying together. On the other hand, studying and dating were two different things.

Now he was the one who kissed her with something close to desperation. Elsie gave back what he needed. It wasn’t fire, or not quite. It was fun, but it was reassuring, too.

He looked at her. “You’re something, you know that?” he said, and then, “I’m glad we’re friends, too.”

Her face lit up. At least half by accident, he’d said the right thing. “You’re all right, Ken,” she told him.

“Am I?” he said. But, coming from her, he believed it. From anybody else, he wouldn’t have. He knew that. He grinned-grinned like a fool, probably. “This is an awful nice park, you know that?” he blurted. Elsie nodded, much more seriously than the foolish thought deserved. Then they looked at each other and both started to laugh.

MINORU GENDA HAD HAD A COT INSTALLED in his office, not far from Iolani Palace. Before he took it over, it had belonged to a U.S. Navy officer. In Japan, it would have been large and luxurious even for a man of flag rank. Genda believed the previous occupant was a USN lieutenant. That spoke volumes about the wealth each country enjoyed.

The cot was U.S. issue, and considerably more comfortable than anything the Japanese military used. Genda smiled to himself. Quite a few Japanese recruits had never slept in a bed with legs till they joined the Army or Navy. He’d come from a good family. He hadn’t had that embarrassment, anyway.

Thanks to the cot, and to food he had sent in, he didn’t have to go back to his quarters nearly so often as he would have otherwise. That meant he could use the time he would have spent going back and forth for work. If he woke up in the middle of the night-and he often did-he didn’t have to lie there uselessly staring up at the ceiling. He could turn on a lamp and attack the paperwork that never stopped piling up or pore over a map, wondering how the Americans would try to be difficult next.

At the moment, the Yankees were doing what they could with submarines. They seemed to have stolen an idea from the U-boats that harried shipping in the Atlantic. If they could cut Hawaii off from resupply from Japan, the islands would be much easier to take back.

They weren’t as good at the job as the Germans. They didn’t have enough boats to send out wolf packs, and their torpedoes left a lot to be desired. But they were doing what they could, and it was plenty to pinch if not to strangle. Sending a few of their subs to the bottom would work wonders for Japanese morale.

It would-if anyone could figure out how to do it. So far, the Navy hadn’t had much luck, and the Army was starting to grumble. Petty Officer Mizuki’s idea of sending H8Ks up the track of an escaping enemy sub had produced an attack, but no oil slick or wreckage on the surface the next morning. Either the enemy boat got away clean or the anxious pilot had attacked something that wasn’t there. The Americans usually talked too much about their losses, but they weren’t admitting they’d had any lately.

Genda had been puzzling till nearly midnight over what Japan could do to protect her ships. When he lay down, he looked forward to getting up before sunrise and getting right back to work. No one had ever accused him of not doing everything in his power, and no one ever would.

As things worked out, he woke up long before he expected to. At half past one, air-raid sirens started howling. Genda did his best to work them into a dream about an attack on the Akagi, but after a few seconds his eyes opened. Staring up into the darkness, he needed another moment to remember where he was, and why. Then he swore and jumped out of the cot.

The sirens kept wailing. Orders were to shelter in a cellar till the all-clear sounded. Genda was not about to obey orders like that. He threw on his trousers, rushed downstairs, and hurried out into the quiet streets to find out what was going on.

“Careful, sir,” said a sentry outside the building.

“Where are the enemy airplanes?” Genda demanded.

Before the sentry could answer, antiaircraft guns around Pearl Harbor opened up. A fireworks display of traces and bursting shells lit up the western sky. Half a minute later, the crump! of bursting bombs added to the din.

“Zakennayo!” Genda exclaimed in dismay. “They’re going after Akagi!”

American flying boats didn’t have the astounding range of H8Ks. They would need refueling from a submarine to reach Hawaii from the U.S. mainland, and probably another refueling to make it home again. As long as the enemy flying boat found the submarine in the vastness of the Pacific, though, that wasn’t an insurmountable problem.

The Yankees must have decided the same thing. Yes, they were doing their best to make nuisances of themselves.

Commander Fuchida had laughed when he told of suddenly appearing over San Francisco harbor in an H8K and bombing U.S. warships there. Now the shoe was on the other foot-and Genda didn’t like the way it felt.

Long after the American raiders must have disappeared, antiaircraft fire kept throwing up shells over Pearl Harbor. Shrapnel clattered down on Honolulu streets and rooftops. A chunk of steel falling from a few thousand meters would kill a man as dead as any rifle bullet.

Realizing he couldn’t do anything useful where he was, Genda went back into the office building and climbed the stairs as fast as he’d descended them. He flipped on the light in his office. Blackout curtains kept it from leaking out into the street. Right this minute, that probably didn’t matter. Having struck once, the Americans wouldn’t be back tonight.

Genda picked up the telephone. “Get me Pearl Harbor!” he snapped when an operator came on the line.

“Who is this?” The operator sounded rattled. “Are you authorized to be telephoning during an emergency?”

“This is Commander Genda,” Genda said coldly. “Put me through at once, before I ask who you are.”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Now the operator sounded terrified. Genda wanted him to sound that way.

“Pearl Harbor-Ensign Yasutake here.” The youngster who picked up the phone at Pearl Harbor, by contrast, almost squeaked with excitement.

After giving his name again, Genda asked, “What’s going on over there? Is the carrier all right?”

“Uh, yes, sir. A couple of near misses, but no hits,” Yasutake said, and Genda breathed a sigh of relief. The ensign went on, “Uh, sir, how did you know the Americans would attack Akagi?”

“Because she’s the most valuable target there. Why come all that way if you’re not going to attack the most valuable target?” Genda said. “And the Yankees are bound to know she’s there, too.” He was sure Oahu-and, indeed, all the Hawaiian Islands-crawled with American spies. A hidden wireless set in the mountains, a few quick code groups, and… trouble. “I don’t suppose we managed to knock down the American flying boat, did we?”

“No, sir. Or at least we didn’t see any sign of it,” Ensign Yasutake answered.

Genda sighed. “Too bad. Still, it could be worse. They didn’t hurt us badly, either.” Even if they did scare us out of a year’s growth. “You’re sure Akagi is all right?”

“Oh, yes, sir. No new damage,” Yasutake said. Genda hung up. For the next little while, people would be running around like chickens that had just met the chopper. One of the things the Army would be screaming about was that the U.S. flying boat managed to catch the Navy napping. And the Army would have more of a point than Genda wished it did.

His own phone rang. In the after-midnight quiet, the jangle made him jump. He picked up the telephone right as the second ring started. “Genda here.”

“This is Fuchida.”

“Good to hear your voice. I’m glad you’re all right. I’m glad Akagi’s all right.”

Commander Fuchida laughed. “I might have known you’d already know. But we were lucky, Genda-san — no more than lucky. If the Americans had aimed better, they could have done a lot of harm. We have to get some of those electronic range-finding sets out here from the home islands. Then we won’t be blind to attacks till they’re on top of us.”

That marched well with Genda’s thoughts. “I’ll do what I can,” he promised. “I’ll send a message to Admiral Yamamoto. If anybody can get some of those sets out here, he’s the man. I wish the Americans weren’t ahead of us there-they’re already running, while we’ve just started to walk.”

“Walking is one thing,” Fuchida said. “Thinking we can stand around is something else again.”

To that, Genda said the only thing he could: “Hai.”