End of the Beginning

IV

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK AND CHARLIE KAAPU SAT IN A WAIKIKI SALOON DRINKING what the bartender alleged to be Primo beer. Hawaii’s native suds had never been a brew to make anybody forget fancy German beer-or, for that matter, even Schlitz. This stuff tasted more like bathwater after the University of Hawaii football team got clean in it.

Charlie had a different opinion. “So,” he asked the man behind the bar, “how sick was the horse when he pissed in your bottles?”

“Funny,” the barkeep said. “Funny like a crutch. You try getting fucking barley these days. For beer brewed from rice, this ain’t half bad.”

“Beer brewed from rice is sake, isn’t it?” Oscar said.

“Sort of. I have some of that, in case any Japanese officers wander in,” the bartender said. By the way he said Japanese officers, he meant Japs. But he wouldn’t say that, not around people he didn’t completely trust. Oscar knew he and Charlie weren’t informers, but the barkeep didn’t. Fiddling with his black bow tie, he went on, “There are some real hops in this, though. It’s doing its best to be beer, honest.”

“That’s not very good,” Charlie said, and then, incongruously, “Give me another one, will you?”

“Me, too,” Oscar said as he emptied his glass. “Primo’s closer to real beer than what they call gin or okolehao is to the real McCoy these days.”

“You got that right, brother.” Charlie Kaapu made a horrible face.

“Yeah, well, you don’t want to know some of the shit that goes into them.” The bartender set up two more beers. “Four bits,” he said. Oscar slid a half-dollar across the bar. The bartender scooped it up.

Oscar raised his glass. “Mud in your eye,” he said to Charlie.

“Same to you,” the half-Hawaiian surf rider replied. They both drank. They both sighed. This Primo wasn’t good, even if it wasn’t so bad as it might have been. Charlie sighed again. “We ought to do something different,” he said.

“Like what?” Oscar asked. “Just getting along is hard enough.”

“That’s the point,” Charlie said. “That’s why we ought to do something different.”

Back when Oscar was at Stanford, his philosophy prof would have called that a non sequitur.

Somehow, he didn’t think Charlie would appreciate philosophy. “What have you got in mind?” he asked.

“We ought to go back to the north shore,” Charlie said. “We haven’t been up there in a hell of a long time.”

Oscar stared at him. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he exclaimed. “The last time we did go up there, we damn near got killed.” Just thinking about it brought back gut-wrenching, bladder-squeezing raw terror.

“Yeah, I know.” His hapa-Hawaiian buddy looked vaguely embarrassed. Maybe he was remembering fear, too. But he went on, “That’s another reason to go back. It’s like when you fall off a horse-you get back on again, right?”

“I guess.” Oscar was vague about horses. His father’s construction business had been completely motorized by the time he was born. Dad went on about a competitor who’d thought trucks were only a passing fad, and stuck with horse-drawn wagons. He’d gone broke in short order.

“Sure you do.” If Charlie Kaapu had any doubts, he hid them very well. “Besides, the surf down here is rotten. I want something I can get my teeth into.”

“Get your face into, you mean, if you mess up,” Oscar said. Charlie gave him the finger. They both laughed. Oscar took another sip of more-or-less Primo. “Besides, we’re not just surf-riders, you know. We’re fishermen, too.”

Charlie grimaced. “Waste time,” he muttered, a handy phrase that could apply to anything you didn’t like. He too took a pull at his miserable excuse for a beer. “Nobody shooting at us up there nowadays.”

“You hope,” Oscar said. “God only knows what the Japanese are doing up there these days, though.” He didn’t say Japs in front of the barkeep, either.

“Hey, come on. Don’t you want to get away from all this for a while? Or are you married to that gal of yours?” Charlie laced his voice with scorn.

It struck home, too; Oscar’s ears heated. “You know I’m not,” he said. He and Susie were getting along pretty well, which was nice, but it wasn’t married. He jabbed a forefinger in Charlie’s direction. “If we go up to the north shore, how are we gonna get there? Even if we could find gas, my Chevy’s got a dead battery and four flats. Hell, it probably doesn’t even have flats any more, the way the… Japanese”-almost slipped there-“are stripping the rubber off cars these days.”

Charlie clucked reproachfully. “And here I thought you were such a big, smart haole.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were the guy who thought up sailboards,” Charlie said. “We can go on them, catch fish”-he evidently didn’t mind when he was doing it for himself-“sleep on the beach, have a hell of a time. No huhu.”

He made it sound so easy-probably a lot easier than it really would be. And he tempted Oscar, and Oscar knew damn well he was tempted. He gave back the strongest argument against the trip he could think of: “What do you want to bet the surf will stink?”

“Bet it won’t,” Charlie retorted. “It’s October by now, man. You can get some good sets up there.”

He wasn’t wrong. The waves hadn’t been that high last December, which had disappointed Oscar and Charlie but no doubt relieved the Japanese invaders. Oscar wouldn’t have wanted to try to get a landing craft over thirty-foot breakers, and no doubt the Japs hadn’t wanted to, either. Storms could start up in the Gulf of Alaska this early, and waves from those storms had a straight shot over the Pacific, all the way down to Waimea Bay.

Charlie Kaapu gave him a slightly sloshed grin. “Come on, Oscar. Don’t be a grouch. We pull this off, we talk about it forever. You want to be a fisherman all the goddamn time? Go ride a sampan if you do.” Maybe Oscar would have said no if he hadn’t had some beer himself. But he had, and he didn’t like coming back to Waikiki every day any better than Charlie did. “I’ll do it!” he said. “Let’s leave tomorrow.”

“Now you’re talking! Now you’re cooking with gas!” Charlie’s grin got wider and more gleeful. “Can’t change our minds if we go right away.”

Oscar wasn’t so sure. He would have to tell Susie. When he did, she was liable to change his mind for him. Charlie didn’t begin to get that. Oscar didn’t think Charlie had ever stayed with a girl more than a couple of weeks. Charlie no more understood settling down than a butterfly understood staying with one flower all the time. That wasn’t in a butterfly’s makeup, and it wasn’t in Charlie Kaapu’s, either.

How much of it was in Susie’s nature? There was an interesting question. Oscar told her that evening, over steaks she’d cut from a tuna he’d caught and tomatoes he’d acquired for another, smaller, fish.

He stumbled and stammered more than he wanted to. She looked at him for a while, just looked at him with those eyes that always reminded him of a Siamese cat’s. The mind behind the eyes was often as self-centered as a cat’s, too. But all she said-all she said at first, anyway-was, “Have fun.”

He let out an elated sigh of relief. “Thanks, babe,” he breathed.

“Have fun,” Susie repeated. “And if I’m still here when you get back, we’ll pick it up again. And if I’m not-well, this was fun, too. Mostly, anyhow.” And if that wasn’t praising with faint damn, Oscar had never run into anything that so perfectly fit the bill.

He wondered if he ought to tell her to stay. She’d laugh at him. She was no damn good at doing what anybody told her to. He also wondered if he should can the whole thing with Charlie. The trouble with that was, he didn’t want to. And if he did can it, Susie would get the idea she could run roughshod over him. Whatever else that would be, it wouldn’t be fun.

“I hope you’re still around,” he said after that calculation, all of which took maybe a second and a half. He wondered if he ought to add anything, and decided not to. It said what needed saying.

Susie cocked her head to one side. “I kind of hope I am, too,” she said. “But you never can tell.”

She didn’t yell, I look out for Number One first, last, and always, but she might as well have. It wasn’t anything Oscar didn’t know. Drop Susie anywhere and she’d land on her feet. That was one more way she was like a cat.

She did the dishes as well as she could with cold water and without soap. Neither she nor Oscar had come down with anything noxious, so it was good enough. He dried. He’d become domesticated enough for that. As she handed him the last plate, she asked, “You want one for the road?”

“Sure,” he said eagerly, and she laughed-she’d known he would. They always got on well in bed. This time seemed special even for them. Only afterwards, while he wished for a cigarette, did Oscar figure out why. This was, or might have been, the last time.

Susie leaned over in the narrow bed and kissed him. “Trying to make me want to stick around, are you?” she said, so he didn’t have to worry about Was it good for you, too? tonight. Not that he was going to worry about much right then anyhow. He rolled over and fell asleep.

When he got up the next morning, she was already out the door, heading for her secretarial job in Honolulu. No good-bye kiss, then, and no early morning quickie, either. But a note-Good luck! XOXOXO-made him hope she’d still be here when he came back from the north shore.

Breakfast was cold rice with a little sugar sprinkled on it. It wasn’t corn flakes-and it sure as hell wasn’t bacon and eggs-but it would have to do. He’d just finished when Charlie Kaapu banged on his door.

“Ready?” the hapa-Hawaiian demanded.

“Yeah!” Oscar said. They grinned at each other, then hurried down to Waikiki Beach.

As usual since the occupation, surf fishermen were already casting their bait upon the waters. They moved aside to give Charlie and Oscar room enough to get their sailboards into the Pacific. For a wonder, they also stopped casting till the two boards were out of range.

“How many times have you just missed getting hooked by the ear when you went out?” Oscar asked.

“Missed? This big haole reeled me in once. Bastard was all set to gut me for a marlin till he saw my beak wasn’t big enough,” Charlie Kaapu said.

Oscar snorted. “Waste time, fool!” They both laughed.

Once they got out past the breakers, they set their sails. Oscar was used to sailing out a lot farther than that, to get to a stretch of the Pacific that hadn’t been fished to death. Instead of running with the wind today, he swung the sail at a forty-five degree angle to the wind and skimmed along parallel to the southern coast of Oahu. Charlie’s sailboard glided beside his.

“You want to talk about waste time, talk about fishing,” Charlie said.

“Since when don’t you like to eat?” Oscar said.

“Eating is fine. Fishing is work. Would be worse if I didn’t get to surf-ride there and back again.” That qualifier was as far as Charlie would go. Oscar knew the native Hawaiians had fished with nets and spears. If that hadn’t taken the patience of Job, he didn’t know what would. But Charlie, like too many Hawaiians and hapa-Hawaiians these days, was willing to work only on what he enjoyed, and was convinced haoles would run rings around him everywhere else.

They sailed past Diamond Head. These days, an enormous Rising Sun floated from the dead volcano. So much for the Kingdom of Hawaii, Oscar thought. He didn’t say anything about that. Charlie Kaapu had no use at all for King Stanley Laanui, though he thought the redheaded Queen Cynthia was a knockout. From the pictures Oscar had seen of her, he did, too.

The empty road struck Oscar like a blow. There was still traffic in Honolulu, even if it was foot traffic instead of automobiles. Here, there was just-nobody. No tourists heading up to see the Mormon temple near Laie. No Japanese dentist off to visit his mom and dad at the little general store they ran. No nothing, not hardly.

Charlie saw the same thing. “Whole island seems dead,” he said, and spat into the Pacific.

“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. The otherworldly pace at which things happened when you were under sail only added to the impression. The landscape changed only very slowly. The emptiness didn’t seem to change at all. And then it did: Oscar and Charlie passed a long column of Japanese troops marching east. They passed them slowly, too, for the Japs marched almost as fast as they sailed. A couple of Japs pointed out to sea as the sailboards went by. Oscar said, “I’m almost even glad to see those guys, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” Charlie said. “I ain’t glad to see them any which way. We’re lucky the bastards aren’t shooting at us.”

Oscar’s head whipped back toward the coast. If he saw Japs dropping to one knee or even raising their rifles, he was going to jump in the water. They’d been known to kill people for the fun of it. But the soldiers in the funny-colored khaki uniforms just kept trudging along. After another moment, Oscar figured out what made the Japanese uniforms seem funny: they were of a shade different from the U.S.

Army khaki he was used to. That was all.

Slowly-but not slowly enough after Charlie’s comment-the soldiers fell astern of the sailboards. “We don’t want to go ashore where they can catch up with us,” Charlie said, and Oscar nodded once more.

When they rounded Makapu Point, Oscar saw that the lighthouse there had been bombed. That pained him. The light had been welcoming and warning ships for a long time. To see it ruined… was another sign of how things had changed.

Oahu itself changed on the windward coast. Oscar and Charlie got spatters of rain almost at once, and then more than spatters. It rained all the time here. The air felt thick and hot and wet, the way it did back East on the mainland. The sea began heaving erratically, like a restless beast.

Everything he could see on the shore was lush and green. The Koolau Range rose steeply from the sea. The volcanic rocks would have been jagged, but jungle softened their outlines; they might almost have been covered in emerald velvet. Remembering a paleontology class, he pointed to the mountains and said, “They look like giant teeth from an Iguanodon.”

Charlie Kaapu looked not at the Koolau Range but at him. “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” he asked. Oscar decided the world could live without his similes.

He quickly rediscovered why they called this the Windward Coast: the wind kept trying to blow him and Charlie ashore. Long stretches of the coastline were rocky, not sandy. He had to keep fighting to claw his way out to sea.

Kaneohe Peninsula was the last obstacle he and Charlie got by before putting in for the evening. They barely got by it, too. If they had to put in there, they could have, at least as far as the beach went. But what had been a Marine base was manned these days by Japanese soldiers. Oscar had no desire to get to know them better.

Wrecked American flying boats still lay along the beach like so many unburied bodies. None of them had engines on their wings. Various other bits were missing from this machine or that one. As the Japs had all over Hawaii, they’d taken whatever they could use.

Light was fading when Charlie pointed to a small stretch of sand beyond Kaneohe. Oscar nodded. They both guided their sailboards up onto the beach. “Whew!” Oscar said, sprawling on the sand. “I’m whipped.”

“Hard work,” Charlie agreed; the phrase, translated literally from the Japanese, had become part of the local language. “Don’t have much in the way of fish, either.”

Before, he’d grumbled about the indignities of fishing. Oscar saw no point in reminding him of that. He just said, “We won’t starve.” He checked his match safe. “Matches are still dry. We can make a fire and cook what we’ve got.”

They gathered driftwood for fuel. The rain had stopped, which made things easier. Charlie Kaapu walked along the edge of the beach. Every so often, he would bend down. He came back with some clams. “Here,” he said. “We do these, too.”

The clams weren’t very big-only a bite or so apiece-but anything was better than nothing. After that, Oscar and Charlie lay down on the sand. That would have been comfortable enough if it hadn’t rained several times. Whenever it did, it woke Oscar up. He thought about taking shelter, but there was no shelter to take. The night seemed endless.

“Some fun,” Charlie Kaapu said as they put their sailboards back into the water.

Oscar couldn’t help rising to that. “Whose idea was this?” he inquired sweetly. Charlie sent him a dirty look.

They spent all day beating their way northwest along the beautiful but often forbidding coast. But they didn’t worry about food for long: Charlie caught a big ahi less than an hour after they raised their sails.

“How hungry are you?” he asked Oscar.

“What do you mean?”

“Want some raw, the way the Japs eat it?”

“Sure. Why not? I’ve done that a few times.” Carefully, because the water was still rough, Oscar guided his sailboard alongside Charlie’s. The hapa-Hawaiian passed him a good-sized chunk of pink flesh. He haggled bite-sized pieces off with a knife. They weren’t neat and elegant, the way they would have been in a fancy Japanese restaurant. He didn’t care. The flesh was firm and rich and hardly fishy at all. “Might almost be beef,” he remarked.

“It’s okay, but it ain’t that good,” Charlie said. The Hawaiian side of his family would never have seen a cow till whites brought them to the islands some time in the nineteenth century. Charlie no doubt didn’t worry about that one bit. He just knew what he liked. Locally born Japanese often preferred hamburgers and steaks to raw fish, too. Nowadays, a lot of them were probably pretending to a love of sushi and sashimi they didn’t really have.

Because the surfers had to tack so much, they made slow progress. They needed two and a half days to round Kahuku Point near Opana, Oahu’s northernmost projection. Oscar whooped when they finally did. “All downhill from here!” he said. And so it was, as far as the wind went. But getting back to the shore to sleep that night was an adventure all by itself. Big waves pounded the beaches. Oscar and Charlie took down their masts and sails before surf-riding in. Oscar would have liked to go in with the sail up, but if something went wrong it would have cost him his rigging in surf like that. He would have been stuck with no way to get back to Waikiki but lugging his surfboard down the Kamehameha Highway-a distinctly unappetizing prospect.

Charlie Kaapu did the same thing, so Oscar didn’t feel too bad. Charlie was more reckless than he was. They ate fish and clams on the beach. Charlie-reckless again-pried some sea urchins off the nearby rocks, too. He cracked them with a stone to get at the orange flesh inside. “Japs eat this stuff,” he said. Oscar never had, but he was hungry enough not to be fussy. The meat proved better than he expected. It wasn’t like anything he’d tasted before; the iodine tang reminded him of the sea. “What we ought to do is see if we can get some of those plovers”-he pointed to the shorebirds walking along the beach-“and cook them.”

“I wish they were doves instead,” Charlie said. “Doves are too dumb for anybody to miss ’em.”

The plovers weren’t. They flew off before Oscar and Charlie could get close enough to throw rocks at them. “Oh, well,” Oscar said. “Worth a try.”

He and Charlie got to Waimea Bay the next day. Again, they took down their rigging before going ashore the first time. Oscar looked back over his shoulder as he rode toward the beach. No Jap invasion fleet this time. No Americans with machine guns in the jungle back of the beach, either.

Once up on the golden sand, they left their masts and sails there. As they went back into the Pacific, they solemnly shook hands. “Made it,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded.

And then they paddled out again. The waves weren’t the three-story-building monsters they were when the north shore was at its finest. They were one-and-a-half- or two-story monsters-suitable for all ordinary purposes and quite a few extraordinary ones. Skimming along at the curl of the wave, or under the curl in a roaring tube of green and white, was as much fun as you could have out of bed, and not so far removed in its growing excitement and intensity from the fun you had in bed.

“This is why we’re here,” Charlie said after one amazing run. Oscar didn’t know whether he meant this was why they’d come to the north shore or why they’d been born. Either way, he wasn’t inclined to quarrel.

Part of the excitement was knowing what happened when things went wrong. Oscar was catfooted on his surfboard-but even cats slip once in a while. Then they try to pretend they haven’t done it. Oscar didn’t have that chance. He went one way, the surf board went another, and the wave rolled over him. He had time for one startled yip before he had to fight to keep from drowning.

It was like getting stuck in God’s cement mixer. For a few seconds, he literally didn’t know which end was up. He got slammed into the seabottom, hard enough to scrape hide off his flank. It could have been his face; he’d done that before, too. The roaring and churning dinned in his ears-dinned all through him. He struggled toward the surface. The ocean didn’t want to let him up.

His lungs hadn’t quite reached the bursting point when he managed to grab a breath, but they weren’t far away, either. Then another mountain of water fell on him. No half-drowned pup was ever more draggled than he was when he staggered up onto blessedly dry land.

Charlie Kaapu was trotting down the beach to capture his truant surfboard. “Some wipeout, buddy,” Charlie called. “You crashed and burned.”

“Tell me about it,” Oscar said feelingly. He looked down at himself. “Man, I’m chewed up.”

“Wanna quit?” Charlie asked.

Oscar shook his head. “You nuts? This is part of what we came for, too. Thanks for snagging my board.”

“Any time,” Charlie said. “Not like you haven’t done it for me. Not like maybe you won’t very next wave.” He came up and slapped Oscar on the back, being careful to pick an unabraded spot. “You’re okay, ace. You’re a number-one surf-rider.”

“Waste time,” Oscar said, trying to disguise how proud he was. “Let’s go.”

The Pacific stung his hide when he went out again, as if to remind him what it could do. He didn’t care. He was doing what he wanted to do-Charlie was right about that. They rode the waves till they got too hungry to stand it, then went into Waimea. The little siamin place where they’d eaten on December 7 was still open. The local Jap who ran it spoke no more English than he had then. The soup had changed a bit. The noodles were rice noodles now, and the siamin was loaded with fish instead of pork. It was still hot and filling and cheap and good.

Once they’d eaten, they went back out to the ocean. They rode the surf till sundown, then went back for more siamin. Three days passed like that. Then, not without regret, Oscar said, “I better head back.”

He waited for Charlie to tell him how pussy-whipped he was. But his friend just pointed west and said, “Let’s sail all the way around. We can ride the surf other places, too.”

“Deal,” Oscar said gratefully. Not only was it a deal-it sounded like fun. And he hadn’t looked forward to beating his way back along the windward coast, anyhow.

Kaena Point, in the far west, had been the only part of Oahu where roads didn’t reach, though the island’s narrow-gauge railroad did round the point. As Oscar and Charlie sailboarded by, they watched POWs slowly and laboriously building a highway there. “Poor bastards,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded. They were doing it all with hand tools. That had to be killing labor.

Oscar wasn’t sorry to leave the prisoners behind. They reminded him how bad things really were in Hawaii these days. Being able to catch his own food, being out on the ocean so much, had shielded him from the worst of it. So had having a girlfriend at least as self-reliant as he was.

He and Charlie had made it down the coast almost as far as Waianae when they got another reminder of the war-this one, to Oscar’s surprise, by sea instead of by land. A convoy of several nondescript, even ugly, Marus shepherded along by two destroyers chugged past them well out in the Pacific, plainly bound for Honolulu.

Those dumpy freighters might have been carrying anything: rice, ammunition, spare parts, gasoline. For all Oscar knew, they might have been crowded with soldiers. They were too far away for him to tell. He watched them for a while. So did Charlie. Neither said anything. What could you say? Those ships showed how times had changed.

And then times changed again. One of the freighters blew up-a deep, flat crump! that carried across the water. A great cloud of black smoke sprang up from the stricken Maru. Perhaps half a minute later, another ship got hit. Smoke also rose from that one, though not so much.

“Did you see that?” “Holy Jesus!” “There’s a sub out there-there must be!” “Eeeyow!” Oscar and Charlie were both making excited noises so fast, Oscar didn’t know which of them was saying what. The Japanese destroyers went nuts. They had been sheep dogs. Now they were wolves, on the prowl for a snake in-or rather, under-the grass. They darted this way and that. One of them fired a gun-at nothing that Oscar could see.

Both torpedoed freighters settled in the water, one quickly, the other more sedately. Planes with meatballs on the wings and fuselage buzzed off Oahu and around the convoy, also searching for the American submarine. They had no better luck than the warships did.

“That freighter’s still burning,” Oscar said after a while.

“Oil or gas,” Charlie said. “Oil, I bet-gas and it would really have gone sky-high. That’s no skin off my nose. The Japs would’ve kept it all themselves anyway.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Nice to see the United States hasn’t given up. I mean, we know that, but it’s nice to see.”

Charlie nodded. “I want to see ’em blow King Stanley”-he laced the title with contempt-“out of one of his own guns. Serve him right.”

A Zero buzzed low over the two of them. The pilot could have shot them up if he wanted to, either because he thought they had something to do with the torpedoed freighters or simply for the hell of it. But he didn’t. He just kept going. Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. He and Charlie kept going, too, though much more slowly, on toward Honolulu.

PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON looked around with a distinctly jaundiced eye. “Well, here I am at this goddamn Camp Pendleton place, and I didn’t make gunny to get here,” he said.

Dutch Wenzel nodded gloomily. “Me, too, and I got the same beef. You know what happened, Les? We got screwed, and we didn’t even get kissed.”

“Damn straight we didn’t,” Dillon said. “ ’Course, the whole Navy got screwed. Wasn’t just us.”

A second look around the enormous new Marine base did little to improve it in his eyes. Camp Elliott had been crowded as a sack full of cats, no doubt about it. But Camp Elliott had been right down in San Diego, not far from the ballpark, not far from the movie theaters, not far from the ginmills, not far from the whorehouses. Once you got off the base, you could have yourself a good time.

“What are we going to do for fun around here?” Les asked mournfully.

“Beats me,” Dutch said. “Got a butt on you? I’m out of White Owls.”

“Sure.” Dillon handed him the pack, then stuck a Camel in his own mouth. Tobacco smoke soothed, but not enough. The powers that be had carved Camp Pendleton out of the northwesternmost part of San Diego County. Another name for what they’d carved it out of was the middle of nowhere. San Clemente lay a little way up the coast, Oceanside a little way down the coast. Neither could have held more than a couple of thousand people; both were towns where they rolled up the sidewalks at six o’ clock. After blowing a sorrowful smoke ring, Dillon asked, “How many divisions of Marines they gonna put in here?”

“Who you think I am, FDR?” Dutch said. “They don’t tell me shit like that any more’n they tell you.” Having established his lack of credentials, he got down to seriously guessing: “Sure looks like it’s big enough for three easy, don’t it?”

Les nodded. “About what I was thinking.” He tried to imagine somewhere between forty and fifty thousand horny young men with greenbacks burning a hole in their pocket descending on San Clemente and Oceanside. The picture refused to form. There was a limerick about a little green lizard that bust. That was what would happen to those quiet seaside towns. He laughed, not that the locals would think it was funny. “The Japs invaded Hawaii, and now we’ve invaded California.”

“Heh,” Wenzel said. “Well, if the guys who grow flowers and the little old ladies with the blue hair don’t like us, tough beans. Let ’em go clean out those slanty-eyed bastards by themselves.”

A flying boat sailed past, out over the Pacific. Les Dillon took a long look to make sure it was an American flying boat. The Japs had paid the West Coast a few unwelcome calls. But he recognized the silhouette. Nothing to get excited about… this time.

“This whole campaign is a bastard,” he said, grinding out his cigarette under the heel of his boot.

“How come? Just ’cause we’ve gotta go a couple thousand miles before we can get hold of Hirohito’s finest?” Dutch said.

“Good start,” Les agreed. “But even getting there isn’t enough. We’ve got to find some kind of way to beat down their air power. Otherwise, we’re screwed again. We can’t even land if we don’t-or I wouldn’t want to try it if they’ve got planes and we don’t.”

“Fuck, neither would I,” Wenzel agreed. “That’d be a mess, wouldn’t it? They’d make waddayacallit-sukiyaki-out of us.”

“Yeah.” Dillon watched a car roll south down Pacific Coast Highway. Idly, he wondered who had the clout to get gasoline. The highway was pretty quiet these days. He looked past it to the beach and the ocean. “How many times you figure we’re gonna invade this goddamn place?”

“Till we get it right,” his buddy answered, which drew a grunt and a laugh and a nod from Dillon. Wenzel added, “Thing is, when we do it for real, we only get the one chance.”

That wasn’t strictly true. If a U.S. landing on Oahu failed, the Americans could always lick their wounds and try again. The country could, yeah. But the Marines who got ashore in that failed effort would never try anything again afterwards. Les didn’t want to think such gloomy thoughts. To keep from thinking them, he said, “Let’s go over to the NCOs’ club and have a beer.”

“Twist my arm.” Dutch Wenzel held it out. Les gave it a yank. Dutch writhed in wrestling-ring agony.

“Son of a bitch-you talked me into it.”

All the buildings here had the sharp-edged look of brand new construction. Most of them still had the fresh, almost foresty smell of wood newly exposed to the air, too. Not the NCOs’ club, not any more. It smelled the way it was supposed to: of beer and whiskey and sweat and, mostly, of tobacco. Cigarette smoke predominated, but pipes and cigars had their places, too. The blue haze in the air was also comforting and infinitely familiar.

Noncoms sat at the bar and at tables and talked about the things that had been on noncoms’ minds since the days of Julius Caesar, if not since those of Sennacherib: how their families were doing, where they were going next and how tough it was likely to be, what idiots the brass were (those last two not entirely unrelated), and how new recruits were obviously the missing link between apes and men that Darwin had sought in vain.

A gunny whose fruit salad went all the way back to the blue, yellow, and green ribbon commemorating the Mexican campaign and the occupation of Veracruz was expatiating on the latter topic. “Sweet Jesus Christ, boots nowadays don’t know enough to grab their ass with both hands,” he said, gesturing with a highball glass in which ice cubes clinked. “I swear to God, the Army wouldn’t want some of these pissweeds. And we’re supposed to turn ’em into Marines?”

He didn’t bother keeping his voice low. Heads bobbed up and down all over the club, Les’ among them. Nobody except another gunnery sergeant of equally exalted status could have presumed to disagree with him. Dillon, who came close both in rank and in years, wouldn’t have thought of it for a moment. As far as he was concerned, the gunny was only speaking gospel truth.

But another veteran noncom said, “Gonna need to put a lot of Marines on the beach if we’re gonna do the job. Up to us to make these damnfool boots into the kind of Marines they need to be.”

“Some of them won’t make the grade, though,” said the gunny who’d been around since dirt. “Some of them can’t make the grade.”

“We’ll run them off. There won’t be that many,” the other man said. “The rest’ll do the job. Even as is, we’re gonna have the damn Army landing right behind us, or maybe even with us.”

Everyone bristled at that, though it was too likely to be true. From what Les had heard, the Japs had four or five divisions in Hawaii. Defenders needed fewer men than invaders. He’d seen that for himself when he bumped up against the krauts in the Great War. There just wouldn’t be enough Marines to go around.

“So much for Germany first,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t care what FDR says-I think the Japs screwed that one the first time they bombed San Francisco.”

Les was inclined to agree with him. By the nods and the grim silence that followed, so was everybody else in the NCOs’ club. No matter what the President might want, it was personal now between the USA and Japan. Hitting Hawaii was one thing, and bad enough. But killing people on the mainland-no overseas enemy had done that since the War of 1812. Everybody was hot and bothered about it. Not even a President as powerful as Franklin Delano Roosevelt could afford to ignore 130,000,000 Americans screaming their heads off.

“If those Navy pukes can just get us to Hawaii this time, we’ll do the rest of the job,” Les said. “Put us on the beach, and we’ll take it from there.”

Nobody argued with him, either.

SAILBOARD UNDER HIS ARM, Oscar van der Kirk let himself back into his own apartment. He didn’t yell, “Honey, I’m home!” It was half past three in the afternoon; Susie would be at her secretarial job. The only question was whether she still lived here.

Oscar looked in the closet. Her clothes still hung there. He nodded to himself-that was good. But then he realized it wasn’t the only question after all. When she came back, would she bring anybody with her? She wouldn’t know he was here. That could prove… interesting.

“Hell with it,” Oscar said. If he’d been the sort to borrow trouble, he wouldn’t have spent most of his time since graduating from college as a beach bum. Whatever happened would happen, and he’d figure out what to do about it when it did, if it did.

Instead of borrowing trouble, he hopped in the shower. He had more salt on him than an order of cheap french fries. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had an order of fries, cheap or not. They were growing potatoes-he knew that. Salt was not a problem-one of the few things that weren’t. But he didn’t want to think about what they might use for grease these days.

The water was cold. He didn’t care. He’d got used to that. It just meant he didn’t dawdle, the way he would have back when things were easy. He hopped in, sluiced himself off, and got out.

Putting on clothes he hadn’t worn too often lately felt good, too. He sat back on the edge of the bed to wait for Susie.

He didn’t remember going from sitting to lying. He didn’t hear her key in the lock. Next thing he knew, she was shaking him. “Hey,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in. So you made it back, did you?”

“Yeah.” He yawned, then gave her a kiss. Her lips were red, and tasted of lipstick. Somehow, she kept getting her hands on the stuff.

“Did you and Charlie have a good time?” She sounded amused. She might have been a mother talking to an eight-year-old boy.

Oscar nodded anyway. After another yawn-he hadn’t realized how tired he was-he said, “Yeah,” again. This time, he added, “The best part was off the west coast, on the way back. We got to watch an American sub blow two Jap freighters to hell and gone.”

Susie’s eyes lit up. “That is good,” she said. “It didn’t make the papers here-why am I not surprised?” She wrinkled her nose and looked like a kid-a happy kid. “Hasn’t even made the rumor mill yet,” she went on, “and that’s a little more surprising.”

“How have you been?” Oscar asked. “It’s damn good to see you again.”

“I’m okay,” she answered. “I missed you.” She wrinkled her nose again, in a subtly different way this time, as if annoyed at herself. “I missed you more than I thought I would-and what kind of jerk am I for telling you something like that?”

“I missed you, too,” Oscar admitted. “Must be love.” He said the word lightly; he didn’t want to leave himself open for one of the snippy comebacks she was so good at. Lightly or not, it was the first time either one of them had said that word.

Susie looked. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Must be.” She leaned toward him. This time, the kiss went on and on.

Some time a good deal later, Oscar remarked, “This is how we said good-bye, and now it’s how we say hello. Good thing it doesn’t get boring.”

Susie poked him in the ribs. “It better not, Buster.” And, not too long after that, he showed her it hadn’t. EVEN THOUGH HAWAII WAS NOMINALLY an independent kingdom once more, General Tomoyuki Yamashita hadn’t given up his office in Iolani Palace. If King Stanley Laanui didn’t care for that-well, too bad. That was Yamashita’s attitude, anyhow.

The commanding general could not only outface the King of Hawaii, he could also summon a mere Navy commander like Minoru Genda whenever he pleased. Both the Hawaiian palace guards and their Japanese opposite numbers came to attention and saluted as Genda went up the front stairs and into the palace. He outranked them, anyhow.

General Yamashita was working in the Gold Room in the second floor. Not even he had had the crust to keep for himself either the library or the royal bedchambers once King Stanley and Queen Cynthia got settled into the palace. The Gold Room, which looked over the front entrance, had been the palace music room. Whatever instruments had been in there were long gone, replaced by utilitarian office furniture that seemed dreadfully out of place in such a splendid setting.

Yamashita’s scowl seemed out of place in that sunny room, too. As soon as Genda came in, the general growled, “Those stinking Yankee submarines are starting to pinch us. This time they cost us oil and rice. And what is the Navy doing about them? Not a stinking thing, not that I can see.”

“We are doing everything we can, sir,” Genda replied. “We are doing everything we know how to do. If hunting submarines were easy, they wouldn’t be such dangerous weapons.”

That only made Yamashita more unhappy still. “How are we supposed to defend those islands if we can’t supply them?” he exclaimed.

“Sir, the Americans aren’t doing exactly what we expected them to.” Genda didn’t sound happy, either.

“We looked for them to go after our principal warships. Instead, as you say, they’re trying to hurt us economically, the way the Germans are trying to strangle England.”

Yamashita had dark, heavy eyebrows that gave him a fearsome frown. “All right, that’s what they’re trying. How in blazes do you stop them?”

“I have some good news, sir,” replied Genda, who’d saved it as a miser saved gold.

“Oh? What’s that?” General Yamashita sounded deeply skeptical.

“One of our H8Ks on patrol northeast of the islands spotted a U.S. submarine cruising on the surface. The seaplane attacked with bombs and cannon and sank it. No possible doubt, the pilot reports.”

Yamashita grunted. “All right, there’s one,” he admitted. “Even one is good news-I won’t try to tell you any different. But how many submarines have the Americans got in these waters? How many more are they building? And how many have we sunk?”

Minoru Genda needed a distinct effort of will to hold his face steady. Those were all very good questions. He didn’t have precise answers for any of them. He knew what the approximate answers were, though: too many, too many, and not enough, respectively. “We are doing everything we can, sir,” he repeated. “Before long, we’ll have some of that fancy electronic rangefinding gear in the H8Ks. That should help our searches.”

“While the enemy is on the surface, maybe,” Yamashita said. “What about when he’s submerged? How will you find him then? That’s when he does his damage, neh?”

“Hai,” Genda said. “But subs are slow while submerged, and have only limited range on their batteries. They do most of their traveling surfaced.”

“If the Americans come back here, how do we beat them back with no fuel for tanks or airplanes?” Yamashita demanded. “By the Emperor, how do we beat them back with no fuel for ships? Answer me that.”

“Sir, we are making our best effort.” Genda said the only thing he could. “If we had not made our best effort here, we would be fighting the war now in the western Pacific, not between Hawaii and the American mainland.”

All that got him was another grunt from the general. “I suppose the Army had nothing to do with the conquest of Hawaii,” Yamashita said with heavy sarcasm.

The way Genda remembered things, the Army hadn’t wanted much to do with Hawaii. The Army was worried about Russia, and about keeping as many men as it could in the endless China adventure. Admiral Yamamoto had had to threaten to resign before the stubborn generals would change their minds. The benefits of their change of mind were obvious-now. And now, of course, they found new things to complain about.

Genda knew only too well that he couldn’t explain that to General Yamashita. The other man not only outranked him but belonged to the service he would be maligning. What he did say once more was, “Sir we are doing everything we can do, everything we know how to do. If you can suggest other things we should be doing, we will be grateful to you.”

That made Yamashita no happier. “Zakennayo!” he burst out. “You’re supposed to know what to do about submarines. If you ask me about tanks or artillery, I can give you a sensible answer. All I want to know is, why are you having a harder time now than you were against the American aircraft carriers?”

“Aircraft carriers are easier to find than submarines, sir,” Genda answered. “And once we find them, we sink them. We’re better than the Americans are.”

“Aren’t we better with submarines, too?” Yamashita asked pointedly.

“With them? Probably,” Genda replied, though he wasn’t altogether sure of that. “At detecting them? At hunting them? Please excuse me, sir, but there the answer is less clear. The Americans have had more combat experience in those areas than we have, both in the last war and in this one.”

“Faugh!” Yamashita said-more a disgusted noise than a word. “We’re getting the experience, all right-getting it the hard way. All I have to tell you, Commander, is that we’d better put it to good use.”

“Yes, sir.” Recognizing dismissal when he heard it, Genda got to his feet and saluted. Yamashita sent him out of the Gold Room with an impatient wave.

With more than a little relief, Genda left. Yamashita hadn’t really called him in to confer; he’d called him in to rake him over the coals. And, from the Army commandant’s point of view, he had every right to do so. The Navy was supposed to protect the supply line between Hawaii and the rest of the Empire of Japan. If it didn’t, if it couldn’t…Then we have a problem, a serious problem, here, Genda thought unhappily.

He was heading for the koa-wood stairs to make his escape when someone said, “Commander Genda, isn’t it?”-in English.

He stopped and bowed. “Yes, your Majesty,” he answered in the same language.

“Why are you here today?” Queen Cynthia Laanui asked.

“Military matters, your Majesty,” Genda said, which was true but uninformative.

The redheaded Queen knew as much, too. She gave him an exasperated sniff. “Thank you so much,” she said, her sarcasm more flaying than Yamashita’s because it came from a prettier face in a softer voice.

“Let me put it another way, Commander-what’s gone wrong this time? You never come to the palace when things are going well, do you?”

“I should not discuss this,” Genda said.

“Why not?” Now the Queen’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Why shouldn’t I know what’s going on? Isn’t Hawaii allied to Japan? If anybody ought to be kept informed, don’t you think my husband and I should?”

“You-” Genda stopped. He couldn’t just come out and say, You’re an American. She was, of course: a fine, healthy specimen of an American, too. But if she was playing the role of Queen of Hawaii to the hilt…

“I am the Queen. I could order you sent to the dungeons.” That dangerous flash again. Then, half a second later, Cynthia Laanui’s eyes flashed again, in an altogether different way. It happened so fast, Genda wasn’t sure the two flashes weren’t really one-wasn’t sure, in fact, that he hadn’t imagined both of them. Except he hadn’t. She repeated, “I could order you sent to the dungeons…” Her nose wrinkled, and her laugh rang sweet as frangipani. “I could-except we haven’t got any dungeons, and nobody would follow the order if I was dumb enough to give it. Details, details.” She laughed again, on a slightly wrier note.

Genda laughed, too, and surprised himself when he did it. He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, and meant it more than he ever had before with either of the Hawaiian puppet monarchs. He surprised himself again by telling her about the freighters that had gone down in the channel between Kauai and Oahu.

“Oh, that, ” Queen Cynthia said, and he could not doubt she already knew about it. As if to confirm as much, she went on, “That story’s all over Honolulu-probably all over Oahu-by now. You couldn’t keep it a secret if you tried, not when people on the island could see the smoke.” She leaned forward a little, not to be provocative-she was provocative enough just standing there-but as a friend would in conversation with another friend. “Or is the secret part that it bothers you more than you want to let on?”

“Hai,” Genda said before he realized he should have answered, That’s none of your business.

Then-realization piled on realization-he saw that wouldn’t have helped, either. Only an immediate, convincing denial would have done him any good, and he couldn’t give her one.

“Is it so very bad?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. He wanted to shake himself, like a dog shaking off cold water. “No, not so very bad,” he answered, and searched for words-not because his English was bad, but because he wanted to be most precise. “Things are not quite so good as we would like, your Majesty. This is honto-it is true. But we fight a war. Things in a war go exactly how we want almost never. Do you see?”

“Oh, yes. I’m not a child, Commander.”

Genda bowed once more, not trusting himself to speak. Cynthia Laanui might be a great many things, but a child she definitely was not. The flowered sun dress she wore left no possible doubt of that.

Just as he straightened, her nose wrinkled in amusement again. Only after that did her face politely go almost expressionless. She knows what I’m thinking. That alarmed Genda, who did not want his Japanese colleagues-let alone a gaijin woman-able to read him like that.

He occasionally visited officers’ brothels on and near Hotel Street. Like most of his countrymen, he was much more matter-of-fact about that than Americans were. What else was he supposed to do, here so far from home? But lying down with a whore was one thing. Lying down with a woman who might be interested in you for your own sake-that was something else again.

And what would lying down with a Queen be like?

Foolishness. Moonshine, he thought. Queen Cynthia Laanui hadn’t been much more than polite. If she was a friendly person, that didn’t mean she wanted to do anything but make conversation with him… did it?

She said, “Thanks for leveling with me.” She paused for a moment to make sure he understood, then went on, “Do please let me know what’s going on from here on out. Things will work out better for everybody if you do.”

“Do you think so?” Genda couldn’t have sounded more glum, more dubious, if he’d tried for a week. Queen Cynthia laughed once more, which only made his question seem gloomier than it had. “I’m not Mata Hari, Commander,” she said. “I’m not going to seduce your secrets out of you.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or should I?”

How am I supposed to answer that? Genda wondered frantically. He bowed again. That was safe, it was polite (almost reflexively so for him), and it bought him time to think. Having bought it, he knew he had better use it wisely. “Whatever your Majesty wishes, of course,” he murmured.

This time, Cynthia Laanui threw back her head and chortled. “Well, Commander, that proves one thing for sure,” she said, and her voice suddenly held no mirth at all. “You’ve never been a queen, or a king, either.”

“No, your Majesty, I never have,” he said, and fled Iolani Palace faster than the American fleet had fled before the triumphant Japanese earlier in the year.

KENZO AND HIROSHI TAKAHASHI took the Oshima Maru out of Kewalo Basin by themselves. Their father had another radio talk scheduled. His words would go back to Japan and all over the world. Kenzo wished more than anything else in the world that he would just keep quiet.

Whatever Kenzo wished, he wasn’t going to get it. “Dad likes being a celebrity,” he said bitterly. He was at the rudder, Hiroshi trimming the sails. They would trade off later. By now, dealing with the sampan’s rigging and the way she went under sail was second nature to both of them, though neither had known anything about handling a sailboat before Oahu ran out of diesel fuel even for fishermen. Baptism by total immersion, Kenzo thought: not an idea that would have occurred to him had his father stayed in Yamaguchi Prefecture instead of coming to Hawaii.

His brother only shrugged. “Dad’s made his choices. We’ve made ours. Right this minute, I have to say his look better.”

Another measure of the choices he and Kenzo had made was that they both used English. Some men even of their father’s generation had become fluent in it, but Jiro Takahashi remained at home only in Japanese. In English, he understood yes and no and thank you and most obscenities. Except for throwing in an occasional Oh, Jesus Christ! and the like, he didn’t speak any, though.

“We’re getting away,” Kenzo said. “Only thing is, I wish to God we didn’t have to come back again.”

Hiroshi chuckled. “Can’t very well sail to San Francisco from here.”

“I know.” Kenzo sounded as mournful as he felt. “I’ve thought about it. We might be able to catch enough fish to keep us going-we probably could. But she wouldn’t carry enough water to get us there.”

Now Hiroshi stared at him. “You have thought about it.”

“I said so, didn’t I?” Kenzo looked back over his shoulder. The faster Oahu receded behind him, the better he liked it. “I even went to the library to dope out which way the winds blow between here and there. But I’ll tell you what really put the kibosh on things for me.”

“Yeah?” his brother said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “You know what they’re doing with the Japanese on the mainland, right? They’re throwing ’em into camps.” How Imperial Japanese propaganda here in Hawaii thundered about that! At first, Kenzo had thought it was a lie. By now, he was only too sure it was true. “The U.S. Navy would probably sink us the minute they spotted us-we’re Japs, right? The Japanese don’t want Japs who think they’re Americans, and neither do the Americans.”

A fairy tern, white as snow with big black eyes, glided along with the Oshima Maru. After a while, the bird perched at the top of the mast. “Damn hitch-hiker,” Hiroshi said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo left it there. Hiroshi hadn’t tried to tell him he was crazy or to say the Navy would treat them fine if it found them sailing northeast. Kenzo wished his brother would have. In that case, he might have been wrong. The way things were, he knew damn well he was right.

Land slowly slid under the horizon. When you traveled under sail, nothing happened in a hurry. But for the slap of waves against the hull and the sound of the wind in the sails and the lines, the Oshima Maru was ghost-quiet. It was as if time itself had been yanked back to some earlier, more patient century-and which one mattered very little. Men had been sailing like this for three thousand years, probably longer.

The tern flew away. A frigatebird-by comparison, almost as big as a light plane-soared by overhead. Its red throat sac was small now, not full of air and big as a kid’s balloon: the bird was looking for lunch instead of a mate. Frigatebirds were pirates. If they had their druthers, they let other birds do the hard work of diving into the sea, then robbed them of their catch.

Hiroshi’s head followed the frigatebird across the sky. “Thought for a second it was an airplane,” he said sheepishly.

“Uh-huh.” Kenzo had made that same mistake himself a time or two. He almost let it go there. But he asked what he wanted to ask: “Whose?”

“If it was a plane, I figured it would be Japanese and hoped it wouldn’t,” his brother replied. “You?”

“Same thing. Not this time, though, ’cause I knew from the start it was just a bird.”

Talk of planes brought Kenzo back into the middle of the twentieth century, but not for long. There were no planes overhead, so he forgot about them. All he saw now, but for the sea and the occasional bird, were a few masts from other sampans with rigs as new as the Oshima Maru’s-and as old as time.

On he went, farther from Oahu than he would have needed to go before the war turned everything upside down. Back then, fish had been part of what Oahu ate. Now they were a vital part of what the island ate, and the sampans skimmed every fish they could from the Pacific. Even the ocean couldn’t keep up with that kind of fishing forever.

What happens when we have to go so far out to sea that travel time really cuts into how much we can bring back? Kenzo wondered, not for the first time. As usual, only one answer occurred to him. We get even hungrier, that’s what.

As his father had taught him-something he preferred not to remember-he looked for lots of boobies and other birds diving into the sea. That would tell him where the fish were likely to be. If that frigatebird was still anywhere in the neighborhood, no doubt it was doing the same damn thing.

Hiroshi suddenly pointed to starboard. “What’s that?”

“Huh?” Kenzo’s head had been in the clouds-except there were no clouds. He looked to the right himself. Something floated on the Pacific there. Gauging distance wasn’t easy-nor was telling how big that thing was. “Just looks like a piece of junk to me,” he said doubtfully.

“I don’t think so.” Hiroshi shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Steer over that way, will you?”

“Okay.” Kenzo did. The breeze, which had been remarkably strong and steady ever since they set out, didn’t fail now. He’d half expected it would, just from the innate perversity of the world. Hiroshi swung the boom to catch it to best advantage.

The approach didn’t happen in a hurry anyway. It was close to ten minutes later before Hiroshi said, “See?”

“Yeah,” Kenzo answered.

“That’s a life raft, or I’m a haole,” his brother said.

“Yeah,” Kenzo repeated. He waited till they’d sailed a little closer, then cupped his hands in front of his mouth and yelled, “Ahoy, the raft! Anybody there?” God only knew how long it had floated, or where it had started out. It might hold a sun-shrunken corpse-or no one at all.

He felt like cheering when a head popped up into sight. It was, he saw, a blond head. An American head, he thought, excitement tingling through him. “Who’re you?” the fellow croaked.

“Fishermen out of Honolulu,” Kenzo answered. “We’ll do whatever we can for you.” He waited to see if Hiroshi would say anything different. Hiroshi said not a thing.

The American flier-he couldn’t be anything else-said, “Thank God.” He had several days’ growth of beard; the stubble glinted red-gold in the sunshine. As the Oshima Maru skimmed closer, Kenzo saw his eyes get wider and more avid. And then they widened again, in a different way. The man ducked back down into the raft. This time, he came up holding a.45. “You’re Japs!” he yelled.

“You stupid fucking asshole!” Kenzo screamed back. His brother stared at him in horror. At the time, he wondered why. Later, he realized cussing out a guy with a gun wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa. But, furious still, he went on, “We’re Americans, God damn you, or we will be if you fucking let us!”

By then, they were within easy range even of a pistol. The man in the raft lowered the gun. “I think maybe you mean it,” he called across the narrowing stretch of water. “You couldn’t sound that pissed off if you didn’t.”

“Right,” Kenzo said tightly. If he’d had a pistol, he wasn’t sure he could have kept himself from shooting the flier-he was that angry.

He and Hiroshi helped the man into the sampan. The flier was more battered than he’d seemed from a distance. His coveralls were tattered and torn and bloody. He gulped water as if he’d thought he would never see it again. Maybe he had. When he spoke again, his voice had changed timbre. “Jesus!” he said, and then, “Thanks, guys. If there’s anything Burt Burleson can do for you, you got it.” He paused. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Ken,” Kenzo answered. “This is my brother, Hank.” He thought their Japanese names were best buried at the moment. “What happened to you?”

Burleson also shrugged. “About what you’d figure. Recon in a PBY. We got bounced and shot up four, five days ago. Managed to break away into some clouds, but we were on fire pretty good by then. Pilot tried to put her in the water. It wasn’t pretty. I was tail gunner. I think I was the only guy who got out.” His face closed in on itself. “Till the two of you saw me, I wasn’t sure I had the clean end of the stick, either.”

“We’ll do what we can for you,” Kenzo said again. “Get you ashore some kind of way without anybody seeing.”

“Have any food?” Burleson asked. “I managed to catch a mackerel with the line they gave me, but raw fish ain’t my idea of fun.”

Kenzo and Hiroshi both broke up then. Kenzo didn’t know about his brother, but he felt on the ragged edge of hysteria. The flier stared from one of them to the other, wondering if they’d gone off their rockers. Maybe they had, at least a little. Carefully, Kenzo said, “Next to what you’ll get on Oahu, raw fish is pretty good.”

“We are Japanese,” Hiroshi added. “We grew up eating the stuff. We don’t mind it so much. And it’s a hell of a lot better than going hungry.”

Burleson contemplated that. He didn’t need much contemplation before he nodded. “Yeah. No argument. Took me a while before I caught anything.”

“We’re gonna finish our run, too,” Kenzo said. “We can’t go back to Kewalo Basin without a catch. People will wonder why if we do.”

“I was hoping you would think of that,” Hiroshi said. Neither of them had used a word of Japanese since Burleson came aboard. They hadn’t been speaking Japanese before, either, but now things had changed.

It was a language they could share if they had to. It was also dangerous, because the flier still had the.45 on his hip.

He seemed tractable enough now. “Do what you need to do, sure,” he said. “I’ll help, best I can. I know how to gut fish. Everybody goes fishing in Minnesota.”

“Minnesota.” All Kenzo knew about the place was that it bumped up against Canada and it was cold as hell in the wintertime. “You’re a long way from home.”

“You better believe it,” Burleson said. “I was thinking that when I was in the raft there. Well, I got another chance now. Thanks, guys.”

He couldn’t have put it any better than that. And, even though he was a long way from at his best, he did help with the gutting when the Takahashi brothers brought in their catch. Kenzo offered him a strip of prime ahi flesh. “Here-try this. It’s a lot better than mackerel.”

Burleson tasted warily, then ate with real enthusiasm. “Damned if you’re not right, Ken. It’s not so-fishy-like. But it’s still fish. That’s pretty funny, eh?”

“Steak and lamb chops don’t taste the same,” Kenzo said, and then wished he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had either. But Burleson nodded, so he supposed he’d made his point.

After a while, the American flier said, “You’re not throwing anything back, are you?”

“Not these days,” Hiroshi answered. “We used to, sure, but now it gets eaten as long as it’s not poisonous. Like we said before, nobody’s fussy.”

“If there were any fussy people, they starved a long time ago,” Kenzo added.

“What are you going to do about me?” Burleson asked.

“Drop you on a beach somewhere and say good luck,” Kenzo told him. “What else can we do? We’ll take you to Kewalo Basin if you want to surrender to the Japanese. They’ll have soldiers there to take charge of the catch.”

Burt Burleson shuddered. “No, thanks. I’ve heard about how they treat prisoners. You guys know anything about that?”

“We’ve seen labor gangs. The POWs in ’em are pretty skinny. I don’t think they get fed much,” Kenzo said. “The soldiers who run ’em can act pretty mean, too.” All that was true. If he told Burleson how big an understatement it was, the flier might not believe him.

What he did say seemed plenty. “Okay, I’ll take my chances on the beach,” Burleson said, and then, “Um-can you pick one close to a place with lots of white people so I blend in better?”

So they won’t turn me in, he meant. But Kenzo and Hiroshi both nodded. It was a legitimate point. Hiroshi said, “Don’t trust a haole too far just because he’s a haole. There are more Japanese collaborators, yeah, but there are white ones and Chinese and Filipinos, too.”

“Terrific,” Burleson said bleakly. “Sounds like we’re gonna need to clean up this joint-clean out this joint-once we get it back.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Kenzo said, and tried not to think about his father.

For somebody who’d sneered at raw fish, Burt Burleson put away a hell of a lot of it. Kenzo didn’t begrudge him. Floating on the Pacific wondering whether you’d live or die and sure your buddies were already dead couldn’t have been much fun.

Kenzo waited till sundown to start the Oshima Maru back towards Oahu. He wanted to get there in the wee small hours, when people were least likely to see Burleson splashing ashore. He steered by the stars. He and Hiroshi had both got pretty good at that.

Burleson stayed awake, which surprised Kenzo a little. When he asked about it, the flier laughed and said, “I slept as much as I could in that goddamn raft-what else did I have to do? I can stay awake for this. Besides”-another laugh-“now I can see where I’m going, not where I’ve been like in the PBY.”

The moon crawled across the sky. Oahu came up over the northwestern horizon, pretty much where Kenzo had expected it to be. He steered for Ewa. There were Japanese everywhere on Oahu, of course. With the population a third Japanese, there wouldn’t be many places without them. He wondered if Burleson realized that. But he would do what he could for the flier.

He almost ran the Oshima Maru aground doing it. That wouldn’t have been so good, which was putting it mildly. But Burt Burleson went over the side with a muttered, “God bless you guys.” He struck out for the beach, which wasn’t very far. Kenzo steered away from the coast to give himself some sea room.

Dawn was staining the sky with salmon-belly pink when the sampan came into Kewalo Basin. Nobody got excited about that; sampans went in and came out all the time. As usual, Japanese soldiers took charge of the catch. They paid Kenzo and Hiroshi by weight, and winked at the fish the brothers carried off “for personal use.” The noncoms in charge of the details got fish from the Takahashis and other fishermen to make sure they didn’t fuss about things like that. One hand washed the other.

“Everything good out at sea? Spot anything unusual?” this sergeant asked.

“What could we spot? It’s just lots of water.” Kenzo sounded as casual as he could.

“Hai. Lots of water.” The sergeant drew the kanji for ocean in the air. It combined the characters for water and mother. “You understand?”

“Oh, yes,” Kenzo said. “A mother of a lot of water.” The sergeant laughed at that. Kenzo added, “But nothing else.” The Japanese soldier asked no more questions.