End of the Beginning

III

JIRO TAKAHASHI CARRIED A PLUMP AHI UP NUUANU AVENUE TOWARD THE JAPANESE consulate. The Rising Sun had always flown above the consulate, reminding him of the land he’d left when he was younger than Hiroshi and Kenzo were now. These days, the Rising Sun waved above Iolani Palace and all over Hawaii. That made Jiro proud, even if it appalled his sons.

Even before the war started, Jiro had brought fine fish to the consulate. The men who served Japan deserved the best, and talking with them had given the fisherman a taste of home, so he’d been glad to do it. Since the war started, things were different. Jiro was pleased that his fish helped keep Consul Kita and Chancellor Morimura from going hungry.

Japanese soldiers in their dark khaki uniforms stood guard outside the consulate. Along with the palace and the leading warship in Hawaiian waters, it was one of the places where policy for the islands got hammered out. A sentry pointed toward Jiro. “Here comes the Fisherman!” he exclaimed.

By the way he said it, it might have been Takahashi’s name. All the sentries called Jiro the Fisherman. They bowed as he drew near. “Konichiwa, Fisherman-sama,” one of them said.

That was laying it on thick. The Fisherman or Fisherman-san-Mr. Fisherman-was fine. Fisherman- sama… As Jiro bowed back, he said, “You boys must be hungry if you start calling me Lord Fisherman.”

The sentries laughed. “We’re always hungry, Fisherman-sama,” said the one who’d used the name before.

They probably were, too. Japanese soldiers got better rations than local civilians, but still ate lots of rice and not much of anything else. The sentries came from the same class as Jiro, and from the Hiroshima area, too. When he could, he brought them something. Today, though, he bowed again, apologetically.

“Please excuse me, friends. Next time for you, if I get the chance. Maybe the men inside will share this ahi with you.” He held up the fish.

“Fat chance!” two soldiers said at the same time. One of them added, “Those stingy bastards don’t know how lucky they are to have you for a friend.”

“No, I think I’m the lucky one,” Jiro said. The sentries only jeered. But he meant it. “These are important people from the home islands, and they’re glad to see me. Of course I’m lucky.”

“They’re glad to see your fish, anyhow,” a sentry said.

“We’re not going to convince him,” another one said. “Let’s just let him through. He’ll find out for himself sooner or later.” They stood aside. Jiro walked past them and into the consular compound.

A clerk greeted him: “Good day, Takahashi-san. How are you?”

“Pretty well, thanks. I’d like to see Consul Kita, if I may.” Jiro held up the ahi again to explain why.

“I’m so sorry, but the consul isn’t here right now,” the clerk said. “He’s still out on the golf course. He won’t be back till this evening.”

“The golf course,” Jiro muttered. He knew Kita was fond of the Western game, but he’d never understood why. Whacking a ball with a stick till it fell into a hole? What was the point, besides giving you an excuse to waste time whenever you felt like it?

“Chancellor Morimura is in, though,” the clerk said helpfully. “I’m sure he’d be glad to help you.” He was looking at the ahi, not at Jiro. Maybe the sentries knew what they were talking about after all.

Tadashi Morimura was studying a map of Pearl Harbor when the clerk led Jiro into his office. Morimura was tall and handsome, with a long face and an aristocrat’s cheekbones and eyebrows. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. “Good to see you, Takahashi-san,” he said, rising and bowing. “That’s a handsome fish you have there. Do you want me to take charge of it till the consul comes back?”

“Yes, please,” Jiro said.

Morimura didn’t take it in his own hands (interesting hands, for his left index finger was missing the first joint). He called a clerk, who carried it off to the refrigerator. Had he dismissed Jiro right after that, the fisherman might have decided the consular staff did value him for his fish alone. But the chancellor-who held a title that sounded impressive but could have meant anything-said, “Please sit down, Takahashi- san. I’m glad to see you. I was thinking about you earlier today, as a matter of fact.”

“About me?” Jiro said in surprise as he sank into a chair.

“Hai-about you.” Morimura nodded. “Do you know Osami Murata?”

Jiro shook his head. “Gomen nasai, but I’m afraid I don’t. Could you tell me who he is?”

“He’s a broadcaster, a radio man,” Morimura said. “He usually works out of Tokyo, where he lives, but he’s here in Hawaii now. He’s doing some shows about the islands since we took them away from the Americans. You would be a good man for him to interview. You could tell him-you could tell all of Japan-what things are like.”

“They would hear me back in Japan?” Jiro said.

“That’s right.” Morimura smiled and nodded. His smile was exceptionally charming; it made his big eyes light up. “They’d hear you all over the world, in fact. That’s how short-wave radio works.”

“All over the world? Me?” Jiro laughed at that. “I can’t even get my boys to pay attention to me half the time.”

“Didn’t they pay attention when you were in the Nippon jiji?” Morimura asked slyly.

“Well… some.” Takahashi didn’t want to say what kind of attention he’d got from Hiroshi and Kenzo after they saw his interview in the Japanese-language newspaper. They’d warned him against being a collaborator. How can I be a collaborator? Japan is my country, he thought. But his sons didn’t see it that way.

“We’ll set up an interview,” Tadashi Morimura said. “Are you free tomorrow afternoon, Takahashi-san ?”

“I ought to be out catching fish,” Jiro said uncertainly.

Morimura winked at him. Jiro blinked. Had he really seen that? The chancellor said, “Can’t you send your sons out on the Oshima Maru by themselves for one day?”

Jiro was flattered that the consular official remembered the name of his sampan-flattered almost to the point of blushing and coughing and stammering like a schoolboy. “I suppose I could,” he said, and knew that he would. Hiroshi and Kenzo would be astonished when he didn’t want to put to sea with them; he’d never been a man to shirk work, and, say what they would about him, they couldn’t claim he had. But they were no happier with his company than he was with theirs. Their hearts wouldn’t break to make a fishing run without him. If they brought in a good catch, they wouldn’t let him forget it, either.

He shrugged broad shoulders. He’d survived worse things than that. “What time would you want me here, Morimura-san?” he asked.

“Come at two o’ clock,” Morimura answered. “But not here. Go to the KGMB studio. That’s where he will want to do the interview. Have you got the address?”

“I’m sorry, but no.” Not speaking English and not caring for the music KGMB played, Jiro had no idea where the station was. Morimura gave him the address. It wasn’t too far from the consulate. “I’ll be there,” he promised.

And he was. His sons both stared at him when he told them to take the Oshima Maru out on their own. But they didn’t argue very hard or ask very many questions. That saddened Jiro without much surprising him.

Nobody could stay sad for long around Osami Murata. “What, no fish for me?” he exclaimed when Morimura introduced Jiro to him. “I’m so insulted, I’m going to commit seppuku.” He mimed slitting his belly, then laughed uproariously. “Now, Takahashi-san, let’s figure out what we’re going to talk about when we get you in front of the mike.”

He was a whirlwind of jokes and energy. Jiro could no more help being swept along than his sampan could have in a gale. He wasn’t even nervous when Murata plopped him down in a chair in front of a mike in a room whose likes he’d never seen before. The ceiling, three of the walls, and even the inside of the door were covered by what looked like cardboard egg cartons.

Noticing his stare, Murata said, “Stuff deadens sound.” He pointed to the fourth wall, which was of glass and let Jiro see into the adjoining room. “Those are the engineers in there. If they’re very, very good, maybe we’ll let them out again once the show is over.”

Did he mean it? He might-some of them were haoles, and had surely been doing their jobs here before the Japanese came. Or he might be fooling again, trying to put Jiro at ease.

“Nervous?” Murata asked. When Jiro nodded, the broadcaster poked him in the ribs and made funny faces. Haoles were often boisterous and foolish. Jiro didn’t know what to make of a Japanese who acted like that. Murata scribbled some notes, then pointed to a light bulb that wasn’t shining just then.

“When that comes on, we’ll start. All right?”

“Hai.” Jiro didn’t know whether it was all right or not. He didn’t know which end was up just then.

The bulb lit up. It was red. “This is Osami Murata, your man on the go,” Murata said glibly, leaning toward the microphone. “I’ve gone a long way today-here I am in Honolulu, in the Kingdom of Hawaii. I’m talking with Jiro Takahashi, who’s been here a lot longer than I have. Say hello to the people back in the home islands, Takahashi-san.”

“Hello,” Jiro said weakly. Here in Hawaii, his old-fashioned Hiroshima accent was nothing out of the ordinary. Most Japanese who’d come here started out from that part of the country. Murata’s elegant tones, though, told the world he hailed from Tokyo. They made Jiro acutely self-conscious.

Murata winked at him again. It didn’t help much. The broadcaster said, “Why did you move to Hawaii all those years ago?”

“To work in the fields here,” Jiro answered. “The money was better than I could get back home, so I thought I’d try it.”

“And how did you like it?”

“Hard work!” Jiro exclaimed, and Murata laughed in surprise. Takahashi went on, “As soon as I could, I got away from cane and pineapple. I rented a fishing boat till I could finally afford to buy one. Put everything together and I’ve done all right for myself.”

“A man who works hard will do all right for himself wherever he is,” Murata said. Jiro found himself nodding. The younger man asked him, “Did you ever think about going back to Japan?”

“I thought about it, yes, but by then I’d married and settled down and had a couple of boys,” Jiro answered with a shrug. “Looks like I’m here for good. Karma, neh?”

“Hai,” Murata said. “But Japan has reached out to you, and you’re under the Rising Sun again. What do you think about that?”

He’d mentioned the Kingdom of Hawaii, but now he didn’t bother pretending the islands were under anything but Japanese control. “I’m glad,” Jiro said simply. “Japan is my country. I want her to do well.”

“That’s good. That’s what we like to hear,” Murata said effusively. “And your family thinks the same way?”

“I lost my wife in the fighting, but I know she would have agreed with me,” Jiro said. And that was true. Reiko was also from the old country, and from his generation. Of course she would have been happy to see Japan take over from the United States.

“I’m so sorry to hear of your loss, Takahashi-san.” Osami Murata sounded as if he meant it. “And what about your sons?”

Jiro might have known he would ask that. Jiro had known he would ask it. Answering it wasn’t easy, though. Carefully, Takahashi said, “I always tried to raise them as good Japanese. They went to Japanese school every day after American school was over. They learned to read and write, and they speak with a better accent than the sorry one I’ve got.”

“You’re just fine the way you are, Takahashi-san,” Murata said easily. If he noticed that Jiro hadn’t really said how his sons felt about the Japanese occupation of Hawaii, he didn’t let on. One of the men on the other side of the glass gave him a signal. He nodded to show he’d got it, then turned back to Jiro.

“Do you have anything to say to the folks back home?”

“Only Banzai! for the Emperor, and that I’m proud to be a Japanese subject again,” Jiro answered.

“Thank you, Jiro Takahashi!” Murata said. The red light went out. The broadcaster leaned back. “There. That’s done. I think it went well. Arigato.”

“You’re welcome,” Jiro said automatically. “They really heard me in Japan?”

“They really did, unless the atmospherics are just horrendous-and they’ve been good lately,” Murata said. “I’m glad Chancellor Morimura arranged for you to meet me. You’re exactly what we needed.”

Nobody had ever said anything like that to Jiro before. “The way I talk-” he began.

Murata waved that away. “Don’t worry about it. Not everybody comes from Tokyo. This is better. It will remind people the whole country is together here.”

The whole country… A slow smile spread over Jiro’s face. “Being part of Japan again feels good.” Osami Murata smiled, too. “It ought to,” he said, and set a hand on Takahashi’s shoulder. “You don’t want to be an American, do you?”

“I should hope not,” Jiro said quickly. Hiroshi and Kenzo had other ideas, but at least he hadn’t had to come out and say so on the radio.

WHEN JIM PETERSON LOOKED AT THE JUNGLE-COVERED Koolau Range from a distance, he’d always thought how lush the mountains seemed. Now, up at the end of the Kalihi Valley to drive a tunnel through them, he had a different view of the jungle.

Green hell.

When he thought of a jungle, he thought of trees full of tasty fruit, of animals making a racket and common enough to be easily caught. What he thought of and what he got in the Kalihi Valley were two different things. Nobody had done much with the valley till the Japs decided to drive a road up through it and to tunnel through the mountains. Almost all of the trees in the valley were Oahu natives, and they didn’t have much in the way of fruit.

As for the animals, he’d seen a few mongooses-mongeese? — skulking through the ferns. Every now and then, he spotted a bird up in the trees. And that seemed to be it. He and his companions in misery had little chance to supplement the tiny rice ration the guards doled out. It was live on that or die.

Actually, it was live on that and die. A man couldn’t possibly do hard physical labor on what the Japanese fed him, not if he was going to last very long. Of course, if a man didn’t do hard physical labor on what they fed him, they’d kill him on the spot. That put the POWs in the Kalihi Valley in an interesting position.

Green hell, again.

It rained a lot of the time up in the mountains. When it didn’t rain, water dripped from the trees. Peterson’s clothes started to rot and fall apart even faster than they had when he was in a less muggy part of the island. Some of the men he worked with, men who’d been in the valley longer, were next to naked. Odds of getting anything from the Japs? Two chances-slim and none.

The prisoners slept in bamboo huts thatched with whatever leaves and branches they could throw on top. It was about as wet inside the huts as outside. The bunks were better than lying in the mud, but only a little. “Jesus!” Peterson said, looking down at his hands as light leached out of the sky. They’d been battered and callused before he got here. They were worse now. The Japs here pushed POWs harder than they had anywhere else. This was punishment work, what prisoners did if the occupiers decided not to shoot them. Whether that was a mercy was an open question.

Somebody got up and shambled off toward the latrine trench. Most of the men who’d been here for a while had dysentery. Some of the new fish had already come down with it. Peterson hadn’t yet, but figured it was only a matter of time.

“Jesus!” he said again, and then, “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”

“Amen,” said Gordy Braddon, who came from his shooting squad. “And if that son of a bitch was in hell screaming for water, I’d give him gasoline to drink. Ethyl, no less.”

“Yeah,” Peterson said savagely. “Wasn’t for him, we’d be…” His voice trailed away. Even without London’s escape, their predicament wouldn’t have been anything wonderful. But it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.

He’d had that thought before. He’d had it several times since the surrender, in fact. Every damn one of them, he’d been wrong. If he turned out to be wrong again…I’m a dead man, he thought.

He might easily end up a dead man even if there was nothing worse than this. He knew that, too. And when he flopped back onto the bunk and closed his eyes, he sure as hell slept like a dead man.

A Jap banging a shell casing with a hammer made him pry his eyes open the next morning. Groans rose in the hut from those with the energy to give them. Not everybody sat up despite the racket of iron smashing against brass. The Japs came in and started kicking people. That got most of the POWs up and moving. One scrawny fellow just lay there. The guard who’d been shouting at him and booting him gave him a yank. He fell on the ground-plop.

The guard felt of him, then straightened up. “Shinde iru,” he said, and jerked a thumb toward the door, as if to add, Get rid of the carrion.

“Poor Jonesy,” said somebody behind Peterson. “He wasn’t a bad guy.”

Although the dead Jonesy couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, four POWs carried him out. Peterson was one of them. They were all just shadows of their former selves, and fading shadows at that. The graveyard didn’t have individual graves, just big trenches. Flies buzzed around them, even though the Japs did put down quicklime after a fresh corpse went in.

Thump! In fell the dead Jones. They tried not to put him on top of anybody else, but the trenches were filling up. Despite the lime, the stench was bad. “Could be one of us next,” a bearer said.

Stubbornly, Jim Peterson shook his head. “As long as we’re strong enough to carry, we won’t die right away. I aim to last till the US of A comes back.”

“How long do you figure that’ll be?” the other man asked him. He didn’t say, Ever? — which was something.

Peterson shrugged. “Damfino. I’m gonna stick it out, that’s all. The Japs are putting us in graves, but I’m gonna spit on one of theirs, by God.”

Even saying that was taking a chance. If one of the other three corpse-haulers ratted on him to the Japs, they might kill him out of hand. But they probably wouldn’t. He couldn’t do anything to them, no matter what he said. Odds were they’d just beat him up and put him back to work till he couldn’t work any more.

“We better get back,” he said. “If we aren’t at the lineup, they won’t feed us.”

That got his companions in misery moving. Losing out on food was the worst thing that could happen to you here, worse even than a beating. Food kept your motor turning over. Assuming you wanted to go on living, that was good. As Peterson and the other three walked back, men from another hut came past them with a dead body even skinnier than Jonesy’s had been. Peterson heard the final thud as it went in.

He didn’t look back.

The count for his hut was fouled up, as it often was when somebody died. The Japs always got all hot and bothered when they saw fewer men than they expected. They knew Jonesy was dead, but that somehow didn’t seem to matter. They had to fuss and fume and gabble and wave their hands till they remembered that so many live guys minus one dead guy equaled the number of guys swaying in front of the hut.

Rain started coming down when the POWs finally trudged off to get their morning rice. This wasn’t “liquid sunshine.” Up here in the mountains, when it rained it rained like a son of a bitch. Peterson’s shoes squelched in the mud. It leaked in through growing gaps between uppers and soles. Pretty soon, those shoes were just going to fall apart. He didn’t know what he’d do then. No, actually he did know: he’d damn well go barefoot.

For the first few minutes after food hit his stomach, he felt almost like a human being. He headed for the tunnel site.

Gangs who’d got there before him had built the road up to the mountains. It wasn’t paved, but it was heavily graveled-usable in all weather, without a doubt. If the tunnel ever went through, the Japs would have a shortcut between Honolulu and Kaneohe on the east coast of Oahu.

Did they care? Were the POWs working on the tunnel for its sake or just to work on something till they dropped? Some of each, was Peterson’s guess. From his point of view, it hardly mattered. Whether the Japs cared about the tunnel or not, the POWs were going to work till they dropped.

Guards didn’t carry picks and shovels. They carried rifles and, sometimes, axe handles. If they didn’t like the way a POW was moving, they’d whack him with one or the other, or sometimes haul off and kick him. A prisoner couldn’t strike back. If he did, the guards would bayonet him and let him die slowly. They knew which wounds would kill in a hurry, and avoided those.

There weren’t that many guards. Peterson sometimes thought a concerted rising here might succeed. If it did, though, so what? The prisoners would still be stuck at the ass end of the Kalihi Valley, and the Japs could easily seal off the outlet… whereupon everybody here would starve, since living off the land was impossible. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, he thought.

They did-and they were damned. Peterson grabbed a pick and shouldered it like a Springfield. Torches and candles threw the only light once Peterson and his gang got into the tunnel. Shadows swooped and leaped as men trudged past the flickering flames. Roman slaves sent to the mines must have looked on scenes like this. Peterson wondered whether anyone since had.

The sound of picks biting into volcanic rock drew him onward. Shovelers loaded the chunks the pickmen loosened into wicker baskets. Haulers lugged the spoil out of the tunnel, one basketload. The POWs argued about which job was worst. Because they argued, they switched off every so often.

There was the face of the excavation. Peterson swung up his pick and brought it forward. When he pulled it loose, basalt or granite or whatever the hell this stuff was came with it. A shoveler used his spade to get the stuff away from Peterson’s feet. Peterson swung up the pick again.

As it did on a road gang, work had a pace here. Prisoners growled at anybody who worked too fast. They had reason to growl: if one guy did it, the Japs would expect everybody else to. Why give the slant-eyed monkeys the satisfaction of busting your balls for their lousy tunnel? Besides, a lot of POWs couldn’t do anything more than they were doing. If the Japs made them work harder, they’d die sooner than they would have otherwise.

Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward. Thunk!… After a while, the work, like a lot of work, developed its own rhythm. Peterson fell into the almost mindless state any endlessly repetitive labor can bring on. Not thinking was better. If time just went by, he didn’t dwell on how tired or how hungry or how filthy he was.

And then he brought himself up short, so suddenly that he almost slammed the pick down on his own foot. Aside from the self-inflicted wound, that would have earned him a thumping from the guards. To them, anybody who hurt himself was trying to shirk, and they made would-be shirkers sorry.

But if they were serious about wanting this tunnel to Kaneohe, wouldn’t they be using a lot more dynamite and maybe jackhammers and a lot less of this hand labor out of ancient days? Of course they would. Anybody with an ounce of sense would. The Japs didn’t have a lot of their own bulldozers, but they sure used the ones they’d captured here to fix up airstrips and to dig out field fortifications. They were bastards, yeah, but they weren’t stupid bastards.

Which meant the tunnel was-had to be-designed first and foremost to work POWs to death. That made perfect sense, and nothing else did, and if he hadn’t been so weary and starved he would have seen it right away.

It also made no damn difference, not in what he had to do. The air stank of sour sweat and rock dust and burning fat. The rubble on the tunnel floor poked and gouged his feet through the soles of his shoes. What would happen when the shoes gave up the ghost? Things would get even nastier, that was all.

Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward…

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO LOOKED OUT across the airstrip at Haleiwa. It was beautiful, no doubt about that: green grass, a creamy beach, and then the blue, blue Pacific. What worried him were the things the blue, blue Pacific hid.

He forgot about the view and glowered at the mechanics he’d summoned. “Don’t tell me it isn’t an authorized modification,” he snapped. “I want a bomb rack on my Zero, and I want a bomb rack on every Zero at this airstrip. Wakarimasu-ka?”

“Yes, of course we understand, Lieutenant-san,” one of the mechanics answered. “But think of the drawbacks. What happens if you get into a dogfight with an American plane? Think how much the weight and drag of a bomb would hurt you.”

“If I run into an American, I can dump the bomb,” Shindo said. “But I need something to let me go after submarines-or surface ships, if the Yankees stick their noses into these waters again. You’re not going to tell me the bomb rack will slow me down much by itself, are you?” His glare warned that they’d better not tell him any such thing.

And the chief mechanic shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. But what about a malfunction? How could you land on a carrier with an unreleased bomb?”

“Carefully, I suspect.” Shindo’s voice was dry.

Had the mechanic been an officer, he would have had plenty to say. His face made that very plain. Since he was only a rating, “Sir, that’s not funny” had to suffice.

“I didn’t say it was,” Shindo answered. “What other way would you expect me to land after those conditions? And after I get down-because I will get down-the first thing I will do is come after the thumb-fingered idiots who mounted a malfunctioning piece of equipment on my plane. So it had better work, the first time and every single time after the first. Do you understand that ?”

The mouthy mechanic bowed. So did all his friends. They had to know Shindo wasn’t kidding. If something went wrong with the bomb rack, he would come after them, probably with his sword. And no Japanese military court was likely to convict an officer for anything he did to ratings.

“Good.” Shindo nodded coldly to them. “You can’t tell me there’s no scrap metal to do the job, either. Hawaii has more scrap metal than a dog has fleas.”

They bowed again. Their faces showed nothing, nothing at all. Shindo knew what that meant. They hated his guts, but discipline kept them from showing it. For a moment, that tickled him-but only for a moment. A mechanic who didn’t like a pilot had a million ways to take his revenge. Planes broke down a million ways. If an accident wasn’t quite an accident… who’d know? Yes, who’d know, especially if the evidence, if there was any evidence, lay at the bottom of the Pacific?

Shindo bowed back. It went against his grain, but he did it. The mechanics flicked glances at one another. “Domo arigato,” he said. Their eyebrows sprang up like startled stags. Superiors were not in the habit of thanking inferiors so warmly. He went on, “We all serve the Empire of Japan, and we should always do everything we can to help her.”

“Hai.” Several of the stolid men in coveralls spoke up. The word could have been no more than acknowledgment, but he thought it was also agreement. They did love the Empire, no matter what they thought of him. And they had to know he felt the same way about his country.

“Good,” he told them. “Very good. Take care of it. We never can tell when the Americans will come sneaking around again.”

They did what he told them. If they did it more for Japan than for him, he didn’t mind. If anything, that made it better. If they did it for Japan, they were likelier to forget their anger at him.

A couple of days later, though, he did get a telephone call from Commander Fuchida. “What’s this I hear about fitting bomb racks to your fighters up there?” Fuchida asked.

Shindo slowly nodded to himself. I might have known, he thought. Mechanics had more ways than sabotage to make their displeasure felt. Gossip could be just as dangerous. “It’s true, sir,” Shindo told the senior air officer. “I want to be in a position to kill a submarine if I spot one. I can’t dive like an Aichi, but I’ll get the job done.”

He waited. If Fuchida said no, to whom could he appeal? Commander Genda? Not likely, not when Genda and Fuchida were two fingers of the same hand. Captain Toda? Would he overturn a ruling his air experts had made? Again, not likely. Admiral Yamamoto? Shindo was not the least bold of men, but he quailed at that. Besides, Yamamoto was back in Japan, and would surely defer to his men on the spot.

But Fuchida said, “All right, Shindo-san, go ahead and do it. The more versatility we can give our aircraft here, the better off we’ll be.”

“Thank you, sir!” Shindo said in glad surprise. “I had the same thought myself.” He hadn’t, not really; his own ideas centered on finding new ways to strike the enemy. Keeping a superior sweet never hurt, though, especially when he’d just given you what you wanted.

“I’ve been sub-hunting myself, but I haven’t had any luck. Nobody’s had a whole lot of luck hunting subs, and the Army isn’t very happy with us on account of that,” Fuchida said. “Anything that gives a plane that spots a sub a chance to sink it sounds good in my book.”

“We agree completely.” This time, Shindo was telling the truth. He and Fuchida talked a little while longer before the senior officer broke the connection.

A smile of satisfaction on his face, Shindo hung up, too. He started to get up and throw the news in the mechanics’ faces. So they thought they could go behind his back, did they? Well, they had another think coming!

After a couple of steps, Shindo checked himself. He laughed an unpleasant laugh. Better if he kept his mouth shut. Let the mechanics find out for themselves that Fuchida had come down on his side. They would, soon enough. Then they would spend some time worrying about whether he knew what they’d done. He laughed again. Yes, letting them stew was better.

He could tell when they learned what Fuchida had said. They’d worked on the bomb racks before that, but in slow motion. All at once, they got serious about the project. Things that shouldn’t have taken very long suddenly didn’t take very long. Only a few days later than they would have if they’d worked flat-out from the start, they had the racks on every Zero at Haleiwa.

Shindo was the first man to test one. He didn’t want any of the people he led doing something he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself. He had the armorers load a light practice bomb into the rack and took his Zero up. It did feel a little sluggish with the bomb attached; the mechanics were right about that. The problem wasn’t bad, though.

He picked a target not far from the airstrip; a boulder poking up through the grass did duty for a surfaced submarine. He thumbed the new button the mechanics had installed on the instrument panel. The bomb fell free.

He didn’t hit the boulder, but he frightened it. A sub made a much bigger target, and he would have been carrying a much bigger bomb. If he’d put that bomb so close to a submarine, he was sure he would have hurt it.

Back to the airstrip he went; there wasn’t a lot of fuel for practice. Groundcrew men guided his plane back to its camouflaged revetment. In spite of the fuel shortage, he told his pilots, “I want all of you to get as much practice as you can. This is important. The better you get when it doesn’t count, the better you’ll do when it does.”

The pilots nodded, almost in unison. Most of them were veterans of the Pearl Harbor strikes that had opened the war in the Pacific. They knew what meticulous planning and preparation were worth.

Let me find a submarine, Shindo thought. Let me find one, and I’ll give it a nasty surprise.

WERE THOSE THE CRATERS of the moon down there? Joe Crosetti knew better, but the bombing range had sure as hell taken a beating. He held the Texan in a dive, watching height peel off the altimeter. When he got down to 2,500 feet, he released the bomb that hung beneath the trainer.

The Texan wasn’t a dive bomber, any more than it was a fighter. But it could impersonate either. Joe pulled back hard on the stick to bring the plane’s nose up and get it out of the dive. When you were down to half a mile off the ground, you didn’t have much margin for error, even in a plane a lot more sedate than one you would take into combat.

“Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said-about as much praise as he ever gave. “Take her back to the base and land her.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Joe had to look around to figure out where he was and in which direction Pensacola Naval Air Station lay. That didn’t matter much here-he had plenty of landmarks to guide him back. With only ocean between his plane and a carrier, it might not be so good.

Some guys seemed to have a compass between their ears. They always knew right where they were and how to get where they were going without fuss, muss, bother, or visible calculation. Joe suspected Orson Sharp was like that. His roomie was a strange bird, but a damn capable one. He wished he could find home as automatically as he reached into his pocket for a half-dollar. But navigation didn’t come easy for him.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t navigate, only that doing it was hard work. He put the Texan down in a landing he was proud of. If he’d been that neat when he soloed in it… But he had more experience now. The more experience he got, the more he realized how much it mattered.

“I know you want to be a fighter jockey,” the instructor said as they climbed out of the Texan.

“Yes, sir,” Joe agreed.

“That’s fine,” the older man told him. “But if you don’t get what you want, you can strike at the enemy in a dive bomber, too. If anything, you can strike harder. Fighters fight other airplanes. Dive bombers fight the ships that carry airplanes.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said again. It wasn’t that the other officer was wrong-he wasn’t. But Joe had had his heart set on flying a fighter since before he volunteered for the naval aviation program. Oh, sure, a Dauntless could make a Jap battlewagon or carrier very unhappy-but it was such a lumbering pig in the air next to a Wildcat!

“Okay.” The instructor sounded wryly amused. No doubt he knew just what Joe was thinking. Fighter pilots got the glory, and glory could look mighty good to a kid getting close to finishing flight school.

Joe hustled back to his dorm room to work on trig problems he’d have to turn in that afternoon. No, navigation wasn’t easy for him. That just meant he had to sweat it out the hard way.

The door flew open. In burst Orson Sharp. Joe stared at him. Joe, in fact, dropped his pencil. His roommate looked excited, and Sharp was usually cool as a cucumber. “What’s up?” Joe asked.

“You haven’t heard?” Sharp demanded.

“Nope.” Joe shook his head. “If I had, would I be asking you?”

“No, I guess not.” The kid from Utah nodded to himself. “Word is, we’re going to have one of the pilots off the Yorktown talk to us this afternoon.”

“Wow!” Joe forgot all about trigonometry. This was bigger news than any navigation problem. The Yorktown lay at the bottom of the Pacific, somewhere north of Hawaii. The Japs had sunk her in the failed U.S. attack against the islands. “Not many of those guys left.”

Orson Sharp nodded. “I should say not. They had to ditch in the ocean and hope a destroyer would pick them up.” That wasn’t the only reason there weren’t many Yorktown pilots left. Japanese fliers had taken a savage toll on them. Sharp didn’t mention that, and Joe didn’t dwell on it.

Cadets weren’t in the habit of ditching classes anyhow, but the hall where the pilot would speak was packed tighter than a cable car with a tourist convention in town. The navigation instructor, whose class the pilot was taking, was a dour lieutenant commander named Otis Jones. He’d pulled every string he knew how to pull to get sea duty, but he was still here. That no doubt helped make him dour. All the same, Joe was convinced he’d been born with a lemon in his mouth.

Now he said, “Gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you Lieutenant Jack Hadley, formerly of the USS Yorktown, soon to return to one of the carriers now building. Lieutenant Hadley!”

Hadley came out and saluted Jones. The cadets gave the fighter pilot a standing ovation. He eyed them with an aw-shucks grin. He wasn’t much older than they were; some of them might have been older than he was.

“Thanks, guys,” he said. Like his clean-cut blond good looks, his flat vowels said he came from somewhere in the Midwest. Being around cadets from all over the country had made Joe way better at placing accents than he’d ever needed to be back in San Francisco. Hadley went on, “Why don’t all of you sit down again? And if you don’t mind too much, I’m gonna do the same thing.”

No matter what Lieutenant Commander Jones said, Hadley wasn’t going back to sea right away. He walked with a pronounced limp and carried a cane. A nasty burn scar showed below his left shirt cuff; Joe wondered how far up his arm it went, and what other wounds his summer whites concealed. When Jones brought him a chair, he sank into it rather stiffly, and sat with his left leg, the bad one, out straight in front of him.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Jones, who nodded brusquely and sat down himself at a front-row desk he’d saved with a homemade RESERVED sign. Jack Hadley looked out at the crowded room again. “You’ve got to remember, gentlemen: I don’t have a whole lot of experience against the Japs myself. But what I’ve got is more than most Americans have, so here’s how it looks to me.

“First thing you need to remember is, the Japs aren’t a joke. Forgetting that is the fastest way I know to get yourselves killed. All the jokes we made up till last year about them being little bucktoothed guys with funny glasses flying planes made out of tinfoil and scrap iron-all that stuff’s a bunch of hooey. They’re lousy back-stabbing so-and-sos, yeah, but they’re awful good at what they do. They flew rings around us out there.”

He paused, a look of intense recollection on his face. Joe wondered exactly what his mind’s eye was seeing. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem pleasant. Hadley’s left arm twitched a little. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. The injured pilot was the only one who knew for sure.

After a silence that lasted a few seconds too long for comfort, Hadley went on, “The Japs are no joke, and their planes are no joke, either. You’ve probably heard a thing or two about what the Zero can do.” He paused again, this time waiting for nods. When he got them, he resumed: “Well, everything you’ve heard is true. That’s one hell of an airplane. It’s faster than a Wildcat, it climbs better, and it can turn inside you like you wouldn’t believe-and a Wildcat’s pretty maneuverable all by itself. If you try and dogfight a Zero, you are fitting yourself for a coffin. Don’t do it. You won’t do it more than once.”

Again, he seemed to look at something only he could see. This time, he explained what it was: “They told me the same thing I’m telling you. I didn’t want to listen. I figured no Jap in the world had my number. Shows what I know.”

He gathered himself. “Don’t dogfight them,” he repeated. “If you’re taking notes, write that down. If you’re not taking notes, write it down anyway.” He tried the aw-shucks grin again. It came out strained.

“You’ve got two edges, and only two. A Wildcat can outdive a Zero. You can make a firing run from above and behind. Or, if you’re in a lot of trouble, you can dive out of there, and most of the time you’ll get away.”

Joe waited to hear what the other edge was. While he waited, he underlined what he’d written about not dogfighting. But Hadley seemed to have dried up. Lieutenant Commander Jones had to prompt him:

“Lieutenant…?”

“Huh?” Jack Hadley came back to himself from wherever he’d gone. “Oh. Sorry, sir. I was thinking about… battle damage, you might say. Yeah. Battle damage.” Was he talking about what had happened to himself, to his airplane, or to the whole fleet the USA sent against Hawaii?

Did it matter?

Hadley gathered himself again: “There’s one other thing you can do to at least help keep those monkeys off you. A pilot named Jimmy Thach thought it up, and the Thach Weave does some good, anyway.” He briefly described the system, explaining how a threatened plane’s sharp turn away from the enemy would alert the other pair in a four-plane element to turn towards it and give them a good shot. “This isn’t perfect, not even close,” he finished. “It takes really tight teamwork and a lot of practice to work well. But it does give us some kind of chance against a superior airplane, and we hardly had any before.”

He took questions then. Several people, Joe among them, asked about the Thach Weave. Hadley painfully levered himself to his feet and drew diagrams on the blackboard. They helped; Joe hadn’t been able to visualize the tactic well from words alone. The circles and arrows helped him see what needed doing. Whether he could do it, and do it in coordination with other pilots-well, that might be a different question. But he was practicing formation flying, too, so he figured he’d get the hang of it.

Then Orson Sharp said, “Sir, would you tell us about your ditching?”

Before Hadley said anything, he sat down again. Again, his bad leg stuck out in front of him. He reached out and touched that stiff knee. “I’d already got this by then. Damn bullet came in from the side. The armor in the seat is good; the stuff in the cockpit’s not so hot. Tell you the truth, that damn Jap filled the plane full of holes. My engine was starting to cook. Thank God those radials are air-cooled, though. A liquid-cooled engine would’ve lost its coolant and frozen up on me long before, and I’d’ve gone into the drink too far from home.

“As it was, I nursed her back toward where our ships were at. I was hoping we still had a working carrier, but no such luck. Every time the flames got going in the cockpit, I’d use the extinguisher to put’em out-mostly.” He looked down at his burned arm. Joe couldn’t tell if he knew he was doing it.

“I put her in the water as slow and smooth as I could,” Hadley said. “Then I pushed back the cockpit-that still worked great, in spite of all the damage I’d taken-dragged myself out, and managed to inflate my life raft. A destroyer picked me up-and here I am.”

He gave them that farmboy grin one more time. He made it sound easy. How much fear and pain hid behind the smiling facade? Enough so that even somebody like Joe Crosetti, who’d never seen combat, could tell they were there. But, since Jack Hadley pretended they weren’t, everybody else had to do the same thing.

Could I do that? Joe wondered. He hoped so, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had no idea.

JANE ARMITAGE STOOD in line to get what the community kitchen in Wahiawa dished out for supper. As usual, what plopped onto her plate would have been the butt of a Catskills comic’s joke. The food here is lousy-and such small portions. She got a boiled potato bigger than a ping-pong ball but smaller than a tennis ball, some greens that might have been turnip tops or might have been weeds, and, unusually, a chunk of fish a little larger than a book of matches.

By the way the fish smelled, it hadn’t been caught yesterday-or the day before, either. Jane didn’t complain. Wahiawa was as near in the middle of Oahu as made no difference. It wasn’t very far from the Pacific-nothing on the island was-but fish of any sort seldom got away from the coast. Too many hungry mouths, especially in Honolulu.

Other people were as glad to see the treat as she was. “Isn’t that something?” was what she heard most often. She sat down at one of the tables scattered around the elementary-school playground and dug in.

The fish had an undertaste of ammonia that went with the way it smelled. If she’d got it in a restaurant before the occupation, she would have angrily sent it back. Now she ate every crumb, all of the nondescript and rather nasty greens, and every bit of potato. She didn’t lick the plate when she was through, but some people around her did.

Haoles mostly sat together. So did local Japanese. So did Chinese. So did Filipinos. So did Wahiawa’s handful of Koreans-as far away from the local Japanese as they could. Not all the local Japs collaborated with Major Hirabayashi and the occupiers-far from it-but enough did that people from other groups were leery about having too much to do with them.

Jane sat and listened to the chatter around her-in English and otherwise. Blaming the local Japanese for all the troubles in Wahiawa wasn’t fair. Some of them really did see Japan as their country, more than they saw the USA that way. How could you blame them, when a lot of haoles had gone out of their way to make it plain they didn’t think Japs were as good as they were?

And besides, the local Japanese weren’t the only collaborators. Sitting one table away from Jane was Smiling Sammy Little, who’d sold jalopies to servicemen from Schofield Barracks before the invasion. He hadn’t quite been a loan shark, but his interest rates were as high as the law allowed, and a lot of his cars were lemons. He was still smiling these days. With next to no gas on the island, he didn’t sell cars any more. But the Japs were glad to buy what he had for them.

Jane hated him much more than she did someone like Yosh Nakayama. Smiling Sammy didn’t remember or care that he was supposed to be an American. If the Russians or the Ethiopians or the Argentines had invaded Hawaii, he would have sucked up to them, too.

“… Egypt…” “… outside of Alexandria…” “… Montgomery…” Jane got tantalizing bits of conversation from the table on the other side of her. She tried to listen without paying obvious attention.

Somebody over there either had an outlawed radio or knew someone else who had one. News that wasn’t Japanese propaganda did circulate in spite of everything the occupiers could do to stop it.

She swore under her breath. They were talking in low voices, and she couldn’t hear as much as she wanted. What was going on outside of Alexandria? Had the Germans broken through at last? Or had Montgomery somehow held them? She couldn’t make it out.

She looked back toward the pans and kettles where the cooks had fixed the evening slop. She hoped for dessert, even though she knew what it would be. If this nightmare ever ended, she’d taken a savage oath never to touch rice pudding again for the rest of her life. Hawaii still had sugar, and it had some rice. Boil them together till they were something close to glue, and there was a treat that counted as one only because there were no others.

Jane looked down at her arms. Every time she did, she thought she was a little skinnier than before. How long could that go on before nothing was left of her, or of anyone else? Not forever, and she knew it too well. And so she didn’t despise even the sweetish library paste that went by the name of rice pudding. Calories were calories, wherever they came from.

But the cooks gave no sign of having any dessert at all to dish out today. She swore again, not quite so softly. She was so tired of being hungry all the time. And she was just so tired…

Had it been less than a year ago that she’d walked into a restaurant and ordered a T-bone too big to finish? She hadn’t thought anything of it. She hadn’t even asked for a bag to take home the leftovers. Christ, what a fool I was! Had she eaten beef since the Japs occupied Wahiawa? She didn’t think so.

She carried her plate and silverware to the dishwashers. Everyone took turns at that. One of the women was saying something to another one when she walked over to them. They both clammed up before she could hear what it was. They started again when she walked off and got too far away to make out what they were saying.

Her stomach knotted, and for once it wasn’t the wretched food. Were they gossiping about her? About somebody she knew, somebody they knew she knew? About whatever was happening outside of Alexandria?

Whatever it was, she’d never know. They didn’t trust her enough to let her in on it. Before the war, she’d talked with her third-graders about the difference between freedom and dictatorship. She’d talked about it, yeah, but she hadn’t understood it. The difference lay in what people said to one another, and in what they didn’t say when other people might hear. It lay in trust.

And trust, in Wahiawa, was as dead as comfortable American rule over Hawaii. If the United States came back, if the Stars and Stripes once again flew over the school and the post office and Schofield Barracks, would that trust return? How could it, once it was so badly broken?

But if it didn’t, would the islands ever really be free again?

FLETCH ARMITAGE WAS SICK OF DIGGING. He would have been sick of digging even if he weren’t doing it on starvation rations. He looked like a skeleton with callused hands. The Japs didn’t care. If he got too weak to dig, they wouldn’t put him in the infirmary till his strength came back. They’d just knock him over the head, the way you would with a dog that got hit by a car. Then they’d give his shovel to somebody else, and use that poor, miserable bastard up, too.

And why not? As far as they were concerned, prisoners were fair game. They had tens of thousands of them. If they worked POWs to death, they wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about plots and escape attempts. Skeletons with callused hands didn’t have the energy or the strength to try anything drastic. All the energy they had was focused on staying alive, and they had to put all their strength into the work. If they didn’t, the Japanese noncoms who lorded it over them made them pay.

This was going to be a gun emplacement. It was nicely sited: on the south side of a low hill, to make it harder to spot from the north-the probable direction of any invasion-but there’d be an observer at the top of the hill to guide the firing. He’d be hard to spot, too, especially once they got done camouflaging his position; running a phone line between the one place and the other would be easy as pie. Fletch had a thoroughly professional appreciation of what the Japs were doing right here.

He didn’t appreciate having to work on it. Making him do that went dead against the Geneva Convention. The Japs were proud that they hadn’t signed it. Anybody who complained on that particular score caught hell-or even more hell than anybody else caught.

Odds were the phone line the Japs used to link the top of the hill and the gun emplacement would be captured American equipment. They were using as much of what they’d grabbed here as they could.

And they were fortifying Oahu to a fare-thee-well. The United States had put a lot of men, a lot of equipment, and a lot of ships in Hawaii. Having done that, the Americans smugly decided no one would have the nerve to attack them here. And look what that got us, Fletch thought, turning another shovelful of earth.

The Japs labored under no such illusions. They knew the USA wanted Hawaii back. If the Americans managed to land, they would have to fight their way south an inch at a time, through works their own countrymen had made. Every time Fletch stuck his shovel in the ground, he gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

He didn’t like feeling like a traitor. He didn’t know what he could do about it, though. If he didn’t do what the Japs told him to, they would kill him. It wouldn’t be as neat or quick as knocking him over the head, either. They would make him suffer so nobody else got frisky ideas.

“Isogi!” the closest Jap noncom shouted. Like everybody else who heard him, Fletch worked faster for a while. He didn’t look back to see if the bandy-legged bugger was yelling at him in particular, he just sped up. Looking back suggested to the Japs that you had a guilty conscience. It gave them an excuse to wallop you, as if they needed much in the way of excuses.

Ten minutes later, Fletch did look back over his shoulder. The Jap was standing there spraddle-legged, his back to the POWs, taking a leak. Fletch promptly eased off. He wasn’t the only one who did.

One of the fellows in his shooting squad was a tall, sandy-haired guy from Mississippi named Clyde Newcomb. “Lord almighty,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with his filthy sleeve. “Now I know what bein’ a nigger in the cotton fields feels like.”

Fletch dug out another shovelful of dirt and flung it aside. “I do believe I’d sell my soul to be a nigger in a cotton field right now,” he said, “as long as it was a cotton field on the mainland.”

“Well, yeah, far as the work goes, I would, too,” Newcomb said. “I wouldn’t ask more’n about a dime for it, neither. But that’s not what I meant. Nobody ever treated me like a goddamn nigger till I stacked my Springfield and surrendered. We ain’t nothin’ but dirt to the Japs, an’ low-grade dirt at that.”

“So you Southern guys treated niggers like dirt?” Fletch didn’t care much one way or the other, but anything you could talk about helped make time go by, and that was all to the good.

“You’re agitatin’ me.” Newcomb spoke without heat. “But seriously, you gotta let the niggers know who’s boss. You don’t, and pretty soon they’ll start thinkin’ they’re just as good as white folks.”

“You mean like the Japs here in Hawaii started thinking they were just as good as haoles?” Fletch asked. Whites here hadn’t lynched local Japanese, the way whites lynched Negroes in Mississippi. They’d found other, not quite so brutal, ways to keep them in their place. Even so, they were paying now for what they’d done then. If the Japs here had been treated better, there would be fewer collaborators these days.

Clyde Newcomb gave him a funny look. “Yeah, kind of-only niggers really are down lower than we are.”

Fletch took it no further. What was the point? Newcomb was so blind to some things, he didn’t even know he couldn’t see them. And we’re supposed to win this war? God help us! Did the Japs have clodhoppers like Newcomb running around loose? Maybe they did. Some of these guards sure acted as if a rifle was far and away the most complicated thing they’d ever had to worry about. Fletch hoped so. If the other side’s yahoos didn’t cancel out ours, we were in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Another load of dirt flew from Fletch’s shovel, and another, and another. Every so often, a noncom would yell at the POWs to hurry up again. And they would… for a little while, or till he turned his back. Even if Newcomb didn’t know his ass from third base, it was the rhythm of a cotton field, but of a cotton field back in slavery days before the Civil War. Nobody here worked any harder than he absolutely had to.

The overseers knew it as well as the slaves. They made an example out of somebody who moved too slowly to suit them-or maybe somebody chosen at random-almost every day. And they were more savage than the overseers of the American South. Negro slaves had been expensive pieces of property; overseers back then could get in trouble for damaging them. None of the Japs cared what happened to POWs here. The more of them who dropped dead, the happier they seemed.

A whistle blew when the sun went down. The work gang lined up for the little lumps of rice and greens that wouldn’t have been enough to keep men alive if they’d lain around doing nothing. Then they slept. Exhaustion made bare ground a perfect mattress. Fletch closed his eyes and he was gone.

When he dreamt, he dreamt of Jane. That hadn’t happened in a while. But he didn’t dream of her naked and lively in the bedroom, the way he had after they first broke up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dreamt of Jane-or even of a Hotel Street hooker-that way.

This dream was even more excruciatingly sensual, and filled him with an even more desolate sense of loss. He dreamt of Jane naked and lively… in the kitchen. She was fixing him the breakfast to end all breakfasts. Half a dozen eggs fried over medium-just the way he liked them-in butter. A dozen thick slices of smoke-rich bacon, hot fat glistening on them. A foot-high pile of golden flapjacks slathered in more butter, yellow as tigers, and real Vermont maple syrup. Wheat toast with homemade strawberry preserves. Coffee, as much as he could drink. Cream. Sugar.

“Oh, God!” He made enough noise to wake himself up. He looked down to see if he’d come in his pants. He hadn’t. He was damned if he knew why not.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU LED HIS SQUAD on patrol down King Street. The Japanese soldiers marched in the middle of the street; there was no wheeled traffic to interfere with them except for rickshaws, pedicabs, and the occasional horse-drawn carriage or wagon. It was another perfect Honolulu day, not too hot, not too muggy, just right.

Shiro Wakuzawa’s eyes swung to the right. “I still say that’s the funniest-looking thing I ever saw,” he remarked.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Shimizu asked. The rest of the squad laughed at Wakuzawa. But it wasn’t cruel laughter, as it would have been in a lot of units. Shimizu hadn’t said it intending to wound. He’d just made a joke, and the soldiers he led took it that way.

And Wakuzawa wasn’t far wrong. The water tower decked out with painted sheet metal to look like an enormous pineapple was one of the funniest-looking things Shimizu had ever seen, too. Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa, who had a thoughtful turn of mind, said, “What’s even funnier is that it stood up through all the fighting.”

He wasn’t wrong, either. After bombing Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes had also pounded Honolulu’s harbor district. The Aloha Tower, down right by the Pacific, was only a ruin. But the water tower, which had to be one of the ugliest things ever made, still stood.

On the patrol went. Japanese soldiers and sailors on leave scrambled to get out of their way. Since Shimizu was on patrol, he could have asked them for their papers if he felt officious. Some of them probably didn’t have valid papers. If he wanted to make his superiors smile on him, catching such miscreants was a good way to do it. But Shimizu was a long way from officious, and didn’t like sucking up to his superiors. He enjoyed a good time himself; why shouldn’t others feel the same way?

Civilians bowed. Shimizu marched his men through one of the unofficial markets that dotted this part of Honolulu. They were technically illegal. He could have caused trouble for the locals by hauling in buyers and sellers. But, again-why? You had to go along to get along, and he didn’t see how a trade in fish and rice and coconuts did anybody any harm.

Besides, this market was within sight of Iolani Palace. If the guards didn’t like it, they could close it down. Shimizu snickered. The Japanese soldiers and naval landing troops at Iolani Palace were just as much a ceremonial force as the Hawaiian unit with whom they now shared their duty. They probably weren’t good for much that involved actual work.

“Corporal-san, do those Hawaiian soldiers have live ammunition in their rifles?” Private Wakuzawa asked.

“They didn’t used to, but I hear they finally do,” Shimizu said. “We’re pretending they’re a real kingdom, so it would be an insult if they didn’t, neh?”

“I suppose so,” Wakuzawa said. “Are they reliable, though?”

Senior Private Furusawa answered that before Shimizu could: “As long as we outnumber them, they’re reliable.”

Everybody in the squad laughed, Shimizu included. It looked that way to him, too. “This is like Manchukuo, only more so,” he said. The soldiers nodded at that; they all understood it. Manchukuo had a real army and a real air arm, not the toy force the King of Hawaii boasted. But the soldiers and fliers obeyed the Japanese officers on the spot, not the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo. And if they ever decided not to, Japan had more than enough men in Manchukuo to squash them flat.

The Hawaiians were impressive-looking men. Many of them were more than a head taller than their Japanese counterparts. But the American defenders of Oahu had been bigger than Shimizu and his comrades. And much good it did them, he thought.

On marched Shimizu’s squad. Every so often, he looked back over his shoulder to make sure his men were parading properly. He didn’t catch them doing anything they shouldn’t. They always pointed their faces straight ahead, and kept them impassive. If their eyes slid to the right or the left every now and then to look at a pretty girl in a skimpy sun dress or a halter top-well, so did Shimizu’s. No woman back in Japan would have let herself be seen dressed-or undressed-like that.

A Japanese captain stepped out from a side street. “Salute!” Shimizu exclaimed, and smartly brought up his own right arm.

If anyone saluted poorly or in a sloppy way, the officer could land the whole squad in trouble. If Shimizu hadn’t seen him, and the men marched past without saluting… He didn’t care to think about what would have happened then. Aside from the beating he and his men would have got, his company commander probably would have busted him back to private. How could he have lived with the disgrace?

Well, it hadn’t happened. The captain saw the salutes. He must have found them acceptable, for he went on about his business without ordering Shimizu’s men to halt.

“Keep your eyes open,” Shimizu warned. “Later we’ll be going through Hotel Street. There will be plenty of officers there, outside the bars and the fancy brothels. A lot of them won’t care that they’re on leave.

If you don’t spot them, if you don’t salute, they’ll make you sorry. Wakarimasu-ka?”

“Hai!” the soldiers chorused. It was a rhetorical question; by now they’d had plenty of time to learn to understand the vagaries, the vanity, and the touchy tempers of the officers under whom they served. And since those officers had essentially absolute power over them, mere understanding wasn’t enough. They had to placate and propitiate those officers like any other angry gods.

They got their own back by coming down hard on the people over whom they ruled. Furusawa pointed to a haole man in his twenties. “He didn’t bow, Corporal!”

“No, eh?” Shimizu said. “Well, he’ll be sorry.” He raised his voice to a shout: “You!” He also pointed at the white man.

The fellow froze. He looked as if he wanted to bolt, but he feared the Japanese would do something dreadful to him if he tried. He was absolutely right about that. He also realized what he hadn’t done. He did bow now, and spoke with desperate urgency-in English, since he knew no Japanese.

That wouldn’t save him. Shimizu tramped up to him and barked, “Your papers!” He spoke in Japanese, of course: it was the only language he knew. His tone and his outthrust hand got his meaning across. The local man pulled out his wallet and showed Shimizu his driver’s license. It had his photograph on it.

Shimizu gave him a stony glare even so. The white man reached into the wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Shimizu made it disappear fast as lightning-it was more than the Army paid him in two months. Despite the bribe, he slapped the man in the face, the way he might have slapped one of his own soldiers who’d done something stupid. The white man gasped in surprise and pain, but after that he took it as well as a soldier might have. Satisfied, Shimizu nodded coldly and went back to his men.

“Come on,” he told them. “Get moving.” Down the street they went. He looked back over his shoulder once. The white man was staring after them, eyes enormous in a cloud-pale face.

Hotel Street was as raucous and lascivious a place as ever. Shimizu wished he were visiting it on leave and not on patrol. Music blared from the open doorways of half a dozen dives. Some of it was Japanese, the rest the syrupy-sweet tunes of the West. Shimizu had heard that Americans found Japanese music peculiar. He knew he thought Western music was strange.

Harried-looking military policemen tried to keep some kind of order. Drunk soldiers and sailors wanted no part of it. Every so often, the military policemen knocked a couple of heads together. Even that accomplished less than it would have anywhere else.

“The Americans are foolish to attack our ships,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “If they dropped bombs on Hotel Street, they could wipe out all our forces.” Everybody in Shimizu’s squad laughed, for it was funny, but the laughter quickly stopped, for it also held too much truth.

“Here! You!” A military policeman pointed at Shimizu. “Come take charge of this man.” He shook a sozzled sailor, who giggled foolishly.

“So sorry, Sergeant-san, but we’re on patrol and we still have a lot of ground to cover. Please excuse me,” Shimizu said. Because he and his men were on duty of their own, the military policeman had no choice but to nod. Shimizu didn’t smile till the fellow couldn’t see him any more. Saying no-being able to say no-to one of the hated military police felt wonderful. “Forward!” he called, and the patrol went on.