End of the Beginning

V

IF YOU PAID ENOUGH OR HAD CLOUT, YOU COULD STILL EAT WELL IN HONOLULU. If you had enough clout, you didn’t have to pay through the nose. Commander Mitsuo Fuchida fell into that category. When he had Commander Genda along with him, the proprietor of the Mochizuki Tea House bowed himself almost double and escorted them to a private room.

“Thank you for coming here, gentlemen. You honor my humble establishment, which does not deserve the presence of such brave officers.” He laid the ceremonial on with a trowel, bowing again and again. Fuchida had to work to keep a smile off his face. No matter how formal the man acted, his accent was that of an ignorant peasant from the south. The impulse to smile faded after a moment. Starting as a peasant, the fellow would have had trouble rising this high had he stayed in Japan.

Kimonoed waitresses fluttered over Fuchida and Genda as the two of them sat cross-legged at the low, Japanese-style table. “Sake?” one of the girls asked. “Yes, please,” Fuchida said. She hurried away. He eyed the menu. “We can get anything we want-as long as we want fish.”

Genda shrugged. “I’ve heard this place used to have fine sukiyaki. But beef…” He shrugged again.

“Karma, neh?”

“Shigata ga nai,” Fuchida answered, which was self-evidently true: it couldn’t be helped. “The sushi and the sashimi here are good-and look. They’ve got lobster tempura. If we’re going to be honored guests, we ought to make the most of it.”

“What’s that saying the Americans use? ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow-’ ” Genda didn’t finish it, but Fuchida nodded. He knew what his friend was talking about.

Back came the girl with the sake. That was brewed from rice, and there was, finally, just about enough rice to go around in Oahu-and on the other islands of Hawaii, though they mattered much less to the Japanese. Fuchida and Genda both slurped noisily from their cups. The stuff wasn’t bad, though it wasn’t up to the best back in the home islands.

After the food came, the waitresses knew enough to withdraw and let the Japanese officers talk in peace. Fuchida spoke without preamble: “We’re going to have to fight the Americans again.”

“Yes, it seems so.” Genda dipped a piece of tuna into shoyu heated with wasabi. He sounded as calm as if they were talking about the weather.

“Can we?” Fuchida was still blunt.

“I don’t expect them to come after us right away-they’re busy in North Africa for the time being,” Genda answered. Fuchida nodded and sipped at his sake again. The USA had shipped an enormous army around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Egypt. Along with Montgomery’s British force, they’d smashed Rommel at El Alamein and were driving him west across the desert.

Fuchida ate some sushi. He smiled. Barbecued eel had always been one of his favorites. But, again, the smile would not stay. “Did you notice one thing about that attack, Genda-san?”

“I’ve noticed several things about it-none of them good for us,” Genda replied. “Which do you have in mind?”

“That it didn’t use any American carriers,” Fuchida answered. “What the Yankees have left, they’re saving-for us.”

“I’m not worried about what they’re saving,” Genda said. “I’m worried about what they’re building. Admiral Yamamoto was right about that.” He invoked Yamamoto’s name as a bishop might invoke the Pope-and with just as much reverence.

“We’ve given them lumps twice now. We can do it again-if they don’t cut us off from supplies,” Fuchida said.

“You sound like you’ve been listening to General Yamashita,” Genda said sourly. “I got an earful of that at Iolani Palace not long ago.”

“I have no more use for the Army than you do. Those people are crazy,” Fuchida said with a distinct shudder. “But even crazy people can be right some of the time.”

“What worries me is, we can beat the Americans two or three more times, beat them as badly as we did in the last big fight, and what will it do for us? Buy us more time till the next battle, that’s all,” Genda said.

“They’ll just go back to building, and we can’t do much to stop them. But if they beat us even once… If that happens, we’re in trouble.” He drained his little sake cup and poured it full again.

“They have a margin for error, and we don’t-that’s what you’re saying,” Fuchida said.

Genda nodded vigorously. “Hai! That’s exactly what I’m saying, except you said it better than I did.”

“We’d better not make any errors, then,” Fuchida said. “We haven’t yet.”

“Not big ones, anyhow,” Genda agreed. “And the Americans have made plenty. But we’re already doing about as well as we can. The Americans aren’t, not yet. They’re still learning, and they’re getting better.”

Fuchida went bottoms-up with his sake cup. “We’re in Hawaii, and they aren’t. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and that’s how it’s going to keep on working.” He hoped he sounded determined and not just drunk; he’d poured down quite a bit. He wondered if he would have a headache in the morning. He wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Well, there were still plenty of aspirins.

Genda said, “There’s a legend from the West, where every time the hero cuts off a dragon’s head, two more heads grow back. That’s what worries me in this fight.”

The image fit the war against America much too well-so well, in fact, that Mitsuo Fuchida got drunk enough to have no doubts whatsoever he’d regret it in the morning.

AFTER PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION, the Naval Training Station outside Buffalo jolted Joe Crosetti in lots of ways. First and foremost was the weather. The chilly wind of Lake Erie was like nothing he’d ever known. It was only autumn, too; winter would be worse.

Orson Sharp, who’d switched stations and squadrons along with him, took it in stride. “Can’t be too much nastier than what I’m used to,” he said.

It was already a lot nastier than San Francisco ever got. Joe had hardly ever worn a topcoat; a windbreaker was usually all you needed where he grew up. He was glad of his topcoat here. He had long johns, too, and expected to wear them.

Flying out over the lake felt strange. He was used to large expanses of water. The Pacific and then the Gulf of Mexico were both magnificent, each in its own way. But the idea of being up over water as far as the eye could see and knowing it was fresh water… for a Californian, that seemed as alien as Mars.

Then there was the USS Wolverine. She’d started life as a coal-burning sidewheeling excursion steamer, but she’d been decked over to give aspiring carrier pilots somewhere to do endless takeoffs and landings without impeding the war effort by tying up a ship that could actually go into combat. She wasn’t pretty, but she got the job done.

The same held true for the Grumman F3Fs the cadets were flying. Zeros would have slaughtered them, but they were a lot hotter than Texans. And, to Joe’s amazement, Lake Erie could grow some perfectly respectable waves. That meant the Wolverine pitched and rolled, just the way a real carrier would out in the Pacific. It also meant the apprentice pilots had to obey the landing officer as if he were God.

One of the instructors had said, “Following the landing officer’s directions is the most important thing you can do-the most important. Have you got that? You’d better have it, gentlemen. If you don’t, you’ll kill yourselves and you’ll cost the country thirty-one grand for a Wildcat-twice that and then some for one of the new Hellcats, if you happen to draw them-and that’s not even adding in the five cents you’re worth. When you fly up to the stern of your carrier, you are a machine. He is the man in charge of the machine. You are under his control. He can see your approach much better than you can. He can correct it much better than you can. If you trust your own judgment instead of his, you’ll be sorry-but not for long.”

Some guys knew better. Some guys always knew better. You didn’t get to be a pilot training for carrier operations if you didn’t think pretty well of your own judgment. So far, this squadron had had one guy crash on the Wolverine’s wooden flight deck, one guy slam head-on into the training carrier’s stern, and one guy fly his F3F into Lake Erie because they did what they wanted to do and not what the landing officer told them to do. Two of them were dead. The fellow they’d fished out of the drink was still training with the rest of the cadets. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whether he’d make some different mistake… Well, at least he had the chance to find out.

Joe lined his biplane fighter up on the carrier’s stern. They’d even built a little island on the port side, to give her smoke-belching stacks somewhere to go and to make her seem more like the warships she was impersonating. And-also portside-they’d built the little platform at the stern from which the landing officer directed traffic.

Another F3F was in front of Joe. The obsolescent fighter touched down on the flight deck, tires smoking for a moment, then taxied along to the far end and roared up into the sky again. Getting everybody as many repetitions as possible was the point of the exercise.

Seeing that spurt of smoke made Joe check his own landing gear again. Yes, he’d lowered it. The landing officer would have waved him off if he’d tried anything dumb like landing with it up. He knew that. Even so… “It’s my neck,” he muttered.

There were the wigwag flags-for him this time. The landing officer dipped the flags to the left. Joe straightened out the F3F. The landing officer straightened, too, and held out both flags level with his shoulders. Joe was going the way the other man wanted him to.

I am a machine, the naval air cadet told himself. The landing officer runs me. I do what he says. It wasn’t easy. He wanted to fly the way he wanted to fly. He’d spent all this time learning to do that. Now he had to suppress a lot of the trained reflexes he’d acquired in the past months.

The wigwag flags moved in tiny circles in the landing officer’s hands: speed up. Joe obediently gave the Grumman biplane a little more throttle. Those circles stopped. The landing officer urged him up a little. The F3F’s stick went back; its nose rose.

Then, suddenly, the flags dropped. Joe dove for the Wolverine’s deck. Any carrier landing was a controlled crash. The trick was making controlled the key word, not crash. The F3F’s tires hit the timbers of the flight deck. On a real carrier, a working carrier, the plane’s tailhook would have snagged a wire and brought it to a halt.

Here, Joe bounced down the deck and then off again. He gunned the engine and rose into the sky yet once more. Officers on the training carrier would be grading his performance. He thought he’d done pretty well that time. They didn’t always agree with him.

After three more landings and takeoffs, he got orders to return to the land base. Regretfully, he obeyed. He thought-he hoped-he improved every time. He wanted as much practice as he could get-this was as close as he could come to the real McCoy.

Finding his way across the gray waters of Lake Erie also proved… interesting. TheWolverine steamed well out of sight of land. He needed to use some of what he’d learned in navigation before he found New York again. He hoped it was New York, anyway. If he’d fouled up, it might be Pennsylvania or Ontario. Ending up not just in the wrong state but the wrong country would have damaged his career. It probably would have meant he didn’t have one.

But no-he hadn’t screwed the pooch this time. That was the shoreline south of Buffalo, where he belonged. He breathed a sigh of relief. He also tried to suppress the little stab of worry that went through him whenever he did this. Out in the Pacific, he wouldn’t have a shoreline to recognize. If he was going to find the enemy and find his way back to his own carrier again, he’d have to be able to use the navigation they were trying to pound into his head.

Can I? he wondered. He hoped so. He thought so-as long as he had a little while to think while he was doing it. “The Japs may not give you that kind of time, Joe,” he said in the cockpit. “Are you sure you want to go on with this?”

But that had only one possible answer. He nodded. He didn’t need to speak. He’d been doing this for most of a year now. He’d torn his life to pieces to do this. He wasn’t about to back away from it now.

And if that meant he had to take a few chances once he got up there… He shrugged. Then it did, that was all. His commissioning wasn’t very far away. He didn’t give a damn about becoming an officer for the sake of becoming an officer-though that would have his immigrant parents walking on air.

What he gave a damn about was that becoming an officer, becoming a pilot, would give him the chance to fly off a real carrier and take the war to the Japs. He’d been waiting for that chance ever since Pearl Harbor. It was so close these days, he could taste it. He wanted it bad.

By now, coming down on dry land seemed routine. Instructors had talked to the cadets about stuff like that, warning them against overconfidence. Joe had heard about guys who flew their planes into the ground just out of carelessness. He watched what he was doing, but he had to make himself watch it. That probably wasn’t so good.

No landing officer with wigwag flags here-just him and the F3F and the runway. He landed smoothly enough and taxied to a stop. As he killed the engine, he laughed at himself. Three years earlier, this plane had been on a carrier. If war had broken out then, say over the sinking of the Panay, it would have been in the front line against the Japs. Nowadays… Nowadays, it was good enough to train in.

Of course, Japan probably hadn’t had Zeros three years earlier, either. Things happened in a hurry nowadays, and that was that.

Another Grumman biplane came in and taxied up right behind Joe’s. Orson Sharp climbed out of it.

“Way to go, roomie,” he said. “You made those circuits and bumps look mighty good.”

“Yeah?” Joe still sometimes had trouble believing his roommate was pulling for him as hard as he seemed to.

But Sharp nodded. “Oh, yeah. We do ’em here, we can do ’em anywhere.” He didn’t ask about his own performance. Part of that was because Joe had been in front of him in the queue and couldn’t have seen him. And the other part was that the Mormon kid, unlike Joe, was confident about everything he did up there. He wasn’t a showoff or anything, but he was good, and he knew it.

Groundcrew men took charge of the fighters. Joe and Sharp walked side by side to the administration building next to the field. By now, Joe was used to having his roommate tower over him. Once you got up in the air, size didn’t matter any more anyway.

When they got inside, instructors separated them. Joe’s raked him over the coals for not following the landing officer’s signals fast enough. The gimlet-eyed men aboard the Wolverine had wasted no time radioing their complaints back to the base. They never did.

Joe took the heat and tried not to show how it stung. Actually, he thought he’d done pretty well. He’d done his damnedest-he knew that. If it wasn’t good enough… He’d just have to try to improve. You couldn’t argue. You had no excuses for anything less than perfection. A couple of cadets had complained and alibied when instructors criticized them. Joe didn’t know where they were these days. He did know they weren’t cadets any more.

When his own reaming was done, his instructor barked, “Any questions?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe replied.

The instructor’s eyebrows rose. More often than not-much more often than not-that was the wrong answer. But the instructor couldn’t presume ahead of time. “Go ahead,” he said, his voice chilly as the weather.

“Sir, we’ve lost a lot of carriers in the Pacific,” Joe said. “My question is, when do we start getting replacements?”

“Ah.” The instructor relaxed. Joe had found a question he could safely ask: it wasn’t one about his own performance. Something approaching warmth entered the older man’s voice as he replied, “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you have to understand I don’t know a whole lot more than you do here-not officially, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said eagerly. “I do follow that. But you’re hooked into the grapevine, and I’m just a dumb cadet. I don’t get the time of day, let alone the juicy stuff.”

The instructor’s face crinkled into a wide smile. Joe hadn’t been sure it had room for that much amusement, but it did. The officer said, “We’re not talking weeks, but we’re not talking years, either.”

He caught himself. “I take it back. From what I hear, the first one is only weeks away. But we’re looking at next summer before we have enough hulls in the water to go back and take another shot at the Japs.”

“Next summer.” Joe weighed that. Normally, seen with the impatience of youth, it would have seemed a million miles away. But when he looked ahead at everything he still had to do to win a place on one of those carriers… “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HAD ALWAYS SLEPT LIGHTLY. Lately, he’d been dozing and catnapping more than really sleeping. He didn’t like that at all. Air raids came every few nights now, and he expected them even on nights when they didn’t come. Worry kept him awake when sirens didn’t.

Tonight, though, the alarm was real. “Zakennayo!” he snarled as he ran for a shelter trench. “What good is it to have this fancy electronic warning if we can’t shoot down the enemy airplane once we spot it?”

As if to mock him, a couple of antiaircraft guns near the Haleiwa airstrip started barking. Wasting ammunition, he thought scornfully: they had about as much chance of hitting that stinking flying boat as he did if he stood up and threw rocks at it.

Through the guns’ racket, he caught the steady purr of the floatplane’s engines. The Americans made good motors; by comparison, a lot of Japanese aircraft sounded like flying washing machines.

Crump! Crump! Bombs fell, not too far away. Yankee raiders hadn’t hit Haleiwa for a few nights. This was the least of the airstrips on Oahu, as it had been when the Americans held Hawaii. Maybe they thought they would catch us napping. Maybe they were right, too.

A few more explosions, these more distant. Shindo wanted to hop in his Zero and go after the enemy seaplane. But night fighting was a risky business only now beginning to get specialists even in Europe, where there’d been more of it than anywhere else.

If he took off here, he’d be flying blind. He wouldn’t have radar technicians who could guide him to his target, the way English and German night-fighter pilots did. He wouldn’t have a swarm of targets to go after, either: just one seaplane on a nuisance raid. And he’d have a devil of a time getting down again, too, with all the fields on Oahu blacked out at night.

No, he had to stay where he was and do a slow burn. That, no doubt, was what the Americans had in mind. They knew how to get what they wanted, damn them.

More bombs fell, somewhere far off in the distance. Schofield Barracks? Wheeler Field? Even Honolulu? But for those distant explosions, the night was eerily silent, as most Oahu nights were. Sound could carry a long, long way.

The all-clear sounded. Shindo went back to his tent. He was too angry and too disgusted to sleep. He thought he might have had a chance to doze off-but before he could, he thought about what the Army officers stationed in Haleiwa would say. He could hear them laughing behind their hands as they asked why the Navy couldn’t keep the Yankees away from Hawaii.

He’d heard those questions before. He knew what the answer was: the Pacific was too big to let anybody keep an eye on every square kilometer of it. The Americans had found that out in the biggest possible way almost a year earlier. Now they were impressing the same lesson on the Japanese.

Shindo shrugged. The Americans could be nuisances. They were nuisances. But they weren’t going to catch Japan napping with a major attack on Hawaii. That wouldn’t and couldn’t happen. By now, the Japanese had picket boats out facing the Panama Canal as well as the U.S. mainland. If the Americans wanted another crack at these islands, they would have to take it against defenders who were alert and ready.

But even that knowledge didn’t soothe Shindo enough to let him sleep. He fumed about tonight’s raid and tossed and turned till morning painted the eastern horizon golden. Then he went to the mess and got rice with bits of salt fish in it and a cup of tea. Like tobacco, tea was a precious import. Even Japanese military personnel below officer’s rank had trouble getting their hands on any.

Some of them had taken to coffee instead. That was locally grown, though not in large amounts. Shindo thought it was nasty. But it packed the same jolt as tea, or even more, so it had its uses.

A telephone call came in from Honolulu just after Shindo finished that early breakfast. Since he was expecting it, he sounded properly subordinate to Commander Fuchida. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We will make a sweep to the north… Oh, yes, sir. If we spot anything, we’ll do our best to shoot it down or sink it.”

“Good,” Fuchida said. “It would be excellent if we could show that we are making the Americans pay.”

“I understand, sir.” What Shindo understood was that Fuchida’s superiors were breathing down his neck. But Shindo, like any fighter pilot, did want to be up in the air going after the enemy.

He told the armorers to load a 250kg bomb on the rack he’d had installed under his Zero’s belly. If he met a submarine, he wanted to be able to punish it. The bomb wouldn’t handicap him against the lumbering American flying boats he was likely to meet in these waters. It would have against Wildcats, but he didn’t expect to run into Wildcats. Wildcats meant carriers close by, and there were no American carriers close by.

Away he went, up into the sky. Certain officers-not Fuchida, to his credit-complained about how much gas searches used up. They didn’t think enough about the cost of not searching.

As Shindo flew in a widening spiral over the Pacific, he breathed in oxygenated air with the taste of rubber. That taste and flying would always be linked in his mind. For some men, it was the smell of gasoline; for others, the throbbing roar of the engine. Not to Shindo. For him, that taste said it all.

He wanted to spot the enemy. He wanted to kill the enemy. If he saw a flying boat, he wanted to shoot it down. If he saw a submarine, he wanted to sink it. He’d flown too many searches where nothing turned up.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind when he spied motion in the air out of the corner of his eye. He started to swing his Zero in that direction, then stopped, laughing and swearing at the same time. That wasn’t an enemy flying boat-that was another Japanese fighter plane, on a search spiral of its own. No one except the Americans would have been happy with him had he gone after it and shot it down.

That the other pilot might have shot him down instead never crossed his mind. He respected the ability of every man he faced. Not taking your opponent lightly was the best way to live to a ripe old age. But, without false modesty, Shindo expected to win every aerial combat he entered. So did any good fighter pilot. Without that touch of arrogance, you couldn’t do your job well.

He felt like a peregrine falcon on the prowl for pigeons. But there were no pigeons. He kept one eye on the fuel gauge. If he had to go home hungry-again-he wouldn’t be a happy man.

There! What was that, four kilometers below, down on the surface of the Pacific? It wasn’t a pigeon, but it might be a duck. It was somebody’s submarine, sliding along on the surface as if it didn’t have a care in the world.

Somebody’s, yes-but whose? Japan had subs in these waters, too, to go after American warships if the Yankees tried to invade Hawaii again. But if the submarine was American… Saburo Shindo didn’t want clodhoppers from the Army looking down their noses at his service. Sinking an American sub would be a good way to shut them up for a while.

He put himself between the sun and the boat and went down lower for a closer look. Anyone in the conning tower would have to look up into that glare, and would have a hard time spotting him. Attacking out of the sun worked against other airplanes. It ought to be just as good against a submarine.

If he attacked… Shooting down his own side’s plane would be bad. Bombing his own side’s sub would be disastrously worse. But he knew the lines of Japanese submarines very well. He had to. This one looked different. In these waters, anything not Japanese had to be American.

Shindo didn’t dither. Dithering was in his nature even less than in most fighter pilots’. As soon as he was sure that boat belonged to the enemy, he dove on it. He’d never trained as a bomber pilot. His Zero didn’t have dive brakes on the wings, the way Aichi dive bombers did; the design team that made the fighter hadn’t figured it would need those big slotted flaps. He couldn’t dive as steeply as an Aichi pilot could, either; his plane wasn’t built to handle the stress of pulling out of a dive like that. He did the best he could with what he had.

The submarine swelled enormously. Shindo saw someone on the conning tower-and then, all at once, he didn’t. The boat started to slide beneath the waves. They’d spotted him! But acceleration wasn’t the only thing pulling his lips back from his teeth in a predatory grin. Too late! They were much too late!

He worked the bomb-release button. That was as much a makeshift as the rack under the Zero’s belly; it wasn’t an original part of the instrument panel. It did what it was supposed to do, though. The bomb dropped free. Shindo pulled back on the stick, wrestling the Zero’s nose up before it went into the Pacific, too. The fighter’s airframe groaned. No, it wasn’t made for this kind of work.

But the nose did lift. Shindo swung the Zero into a tight turn so he could see what he’d done. When he did, he pounded a leather-gloved hand down on his thigh. The bomb had hit maybe ten meters aft of the conning tower. Men were swarming out of the sub, which was trailing smoke and sinking fast.

Shindo went around for another pass. By then, the American sailors had got into several inflatable life rafts. His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. The Zero’s machine guns chattered. Back when the fight for Hawaii was new, Shindo had let an American pilot he’d shot down parachute safely to earth. Thinking back on it, he had no idea why he’d been so soft. He shrugged, there inside the cockpit. He tried not to make the same mistake twice.

A couple of sailors in the rafts fired pistols at his plane. Had he been down there, he would have done the same thing. But he was up here instead, and so he shot up the rafts till they sank, till blood turned the Pacific red. This was why he’d come out here. If an American flying boat rescued those sailors, they would make more trouble for Japan. And if they managed to reach Oahu or another island, anti-Japanese locals, of whom there were too many, were likely to take them in. Nobody would have to worry about either of those unfortunate developments now.

Quietly pleased with himself, Shindo flew back towards Oahu.

A LONG COLUMN OF BOOTS marched through the mud in a driving rainstorm of the sort southern California Chambers of Commerce pretended this part of the country didn’t get. Lester Dillon had spent enough time at Camp Elliott to know better. The youngsters who wanted to be Marines looked thoroughly miserable.

Dillon was miserable, too, but he didn’t show it. As far as they were concerned, he was immune to vagaries like weather. If rain hit him and ran down the back of his neck, if his boots squelched in the mud-well, so what? He was a platoon sergeant. At the moment, he was a platoon sergeant who craved coffee with brandy in it, but these puppies didn’t need to know that.

“I can’t hear you!” he shouted, pitching his voice to carry even through the downpour.

The boots had been singing a marching song. Understandably, the downpour dampened their zeal. Dillon understood that, all right, but he wasn’t about to put up with it. They weren’t supposed to let anything dampen their zeal. That was part of what being a Marine was all about. If rain could do it, coming under fire would be infinitely worse. Coming under fire was infinitely worse, but they had to act as if it weren’t. They roared out the song through the rain:

“I still can’t hear you!” Dillon shouted, but not so angrily: they were loud enough to wake the dead now. And they were getting tougher. When they started training, this tramp through the rain and muck would have prostrated them. Now they took it in stride. Few physical challenges fazed them any more. That too was part of what made them what they ought to be. But it was the easy part. A lot of them-farm boys and factory workers-had been in good shape before they started training. But being in good shape, while necessary to make a Marine, wasn’t enough.

Would they stick together? Would they think of their buddies, their unit, as more important than themselves? Would they throw away their lives to save their buddies if they had to, knowing those buddies would do the same for them? Would they go forward where staying safe required hanging back?

If they managed that-if they managed it without fussing about it, without even thinking much about it-they’d be proper leathernecks.

Dillon couldn’t remember how he’d absorbed the lessons he needed to have. He knew damn well they’d been in place before he ever went Over There. What he saw in France, what he did there, only confirmed what he’d already had.

“Sergeant?” one of the boots said.

“Yeah?” Dillon growled-he wanted them to think he was God, and an angry God at that.

“This is fun!” the youngster said.

That flummoxed Dillon. In all his years in the Corps, he didn’t think he’d ever heard the like. “It’s not supposed to be fun, goddammit,” he said after that momentary amazement. “This isn’t a picnic. It isn’t a lark. Those Nip assholes are gonna fuckin’ kill you if they get half a chance. They’re good at it. That means we gotta be even better. You hear me, maggot?”

“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot bellowed. You hear me? had to be answered at top volume, lest worse befall. Worse would bloody well befall here any which way. “Drop down and give me fifty pushups,” Dillon growled. “Fun, my ass!”

“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot shouted again. He was a big, blond, wide-faced kid named Kowalski. Fifty pushups in the rain, in the mud, with a heavy pack on his back, were no joke. He was filthy and damn near dead by the time he finished them. Dillon wasn’t sure he could have done them himself. Kowalski, though, plainly would sooner have died for real than failed. That was a Marine’s way of thinking, too. He bounced to his feet after the last one, panting and scarlet but ready to go on with the march.

“Still having fun?” Dillon asked him.

By his expression, the kid wanted to say yes. But he wasn’t-quite-that dumb. “No, Sergeant!” he said loudly.

“Okay,” Dillon said. “Get it in gear.”

After a hot shower and a clean uniform, he told the story that evening over a beer in the NCOs’ club. Dutch Wenzel shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Fun?” he said. “What the fuck is the world coming to?”

“Beats me,” Dillon answered. “How much fun will he think it is when his pal gets shot in the guts? How much fun will he think it is when he does? It’s a job, for Chrissake. We gotta do it, and we gotta do it right, but fun? For crying out loud, Dutch!”

“Easy, man-easy.” Wenzel raised a placating hand. “You’re preaching to the choir here.”

“Okay, okay. It rocked me, though, I tell you.” Les shook his head, too. He still couldn’t get over it.

“Fun!”

“Don’t blame you,” Dutch said. “Even for a boot, that’s pushing it. Hey-I heard something pretty good, though.”

“Tell me,” Dillon urged. “Maybe it’ll help me get the taste of this out of my mouth.”

“I hear we launched a new carrier,” Dutch told him. “Gotta start making up for what the Japs nailed last summer.”

Les nodded. “That’s a fact-and you’re right; that is good news. What are they calling this one?”

“Essex,” Wenzel answered. “There are supposed to be more in the pipeline, too.”

“There’d better be,” Dillon said. “You gotta figure we’re going to lose some on the way in. We need to smash whatever they’ve got and have enough left over to handle their land-based air. If we don’t, we shouldn’t even start.”

“Yeah, well, you know that, and I know that, but do they know it back in Washington?” Wenzel said.

“Beats me,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though-we’re gonna find out.”

JANE ARMITAGE FOUND IT HARD to believe 1943 was more than a month old. Christmas and New Year’s had passed quietly. What was there to celebrate? And one day, one month, here was a lot like another. Oh, it was a little warmer in the summer, a little rainier in the winter, but, both times, only a little. She remembered Ohio. You didn’t have any trouble telling summer from winter in Columbus. In Wahiawa, you could lose track without a calendar.

Flowers bloomed. Butterflies danced and bees buzzed. Snow? When the school was open, she’d had to teach special lessons about snow. The third-graders couldn’t have understood half the Christmas carols if she hadn’t.

Downtown Wahiawa, such as it was, had suffered since the Japanese took over. All the stores that sold new clothes, new dishes, new furniture-new anything, when you got right down to it-had gone belly-up. New stuff had come from the mainland, and nothing came to Hawaii from the mainland any more except the occasional airplane full of bombs. Much as Jane approved of those, she didn’t want to buy one and take it back to the apartment.

Secondhand places, now… Those flourished. If you wanted a toaster or a dress or something to read, you got it secondhand. Used goods, if not abundant, were at least available. Jane sometimes felt like a ghoul when she sorted through them, for a lot of them came from the households of people who’d died in the fighting. But what could you do? Those luckless souls had no further use for their goods, and the people who were still alive desperately needed them.

When Jane saw a copy of Murder Must Advertise in the secondhand-book shop, she had all she could do not to jump for joy. She liked mysteries in general and Dorothy Sayers in particular, and she’d never read that one. Showing eagerness, though, would have run up the price. Nothing was fixed these days; everything depended on how much the seller thought he-or, in this case, she-thought the buyer would part with.

Jane picked up a cookbook she didn’t particularly want. Cookbooks made good cover; everyone was obsessed with food these days. She poked around through the store before casually adding the mystery to the cookbook. “How much for these two, Louise?” she asked.

Louise’s jaw worked. She might have been chewing gum, except there was no gum to chew. “Fifteen dollars,” she said after making whatever arcane calculations she made. Those calculations worked. She wasn’t as skinny as most people in Wahiawa.

“Fifteen?” Jane squeaked. “That’s outrageous!” And it was. She hadn’t expected Louise to say more than ten.

The bookstore owner shrugged. She chewed on the gum that wasn’t there. “Twelve, then,” she said reluctantly, “and you won’t jew me down another dime.”

“I’m not made out of money,” Jane protested. Louise shrugged again. Jane asked, “How much for each of them?” That boiled down to, how well had she hidden her reaction when she saw Murder Must Advertise? If Louise thought she was mostly after the cookbook, she won. If the other woman knew she wanted the mystery, she didn’t.

Still more jaw-working followed. Louise was calculating what the traffic would bear. “Eight for this one, four for the other,” she said at last.

She wanted more for the cookbook. Jane didn’t cheer, even if she felt like it. Instead, she looked disappointed. “That’s too much,” she said, sending a longing glance toward the book full of recipes for Chinese chicken wings and Polynesian pork chops and bananas on the half shell and fish with pineapple sauce and suffering bastards.

“Take it or leave it.” Louise had the business manners of a snapping turtle.

Sighing, Jane put the cookbook back on the table where she’d found it. “I guess I can afford this one,” she said, tapping the mystery. “I sure wish you’d done it the other way, though.”

Louise looked smug. Jane gave her a five-dollar bill and got back two halves in change. She left the store in a hurry, before Louise figured out she was really ready to jump for joy.

The Japs had confiscated radios. A bomb had fallen on the local movie house. Making time go by was one of the hardest things you could do these days. A good book would kill several hours. If it was good enough, you could read it more than once, too. Jane could hardly wait to get back to her place, open up the novel, and be transported from Oahu to a larger, cooler, foggier isle.

But she hadn’t slipped the surly bonds of reality yet. Up the street came a work gang of American POWs herded along by Japanese guards with bayoneted rifles. She eyed them with horrified fascination. As always, they reminded her how things could have been worse.

She was thin. They were emaciated. Her clothes were worn. They still had on the tattered remnants of whatever they’d been wearing when they surrendered. She made do with cold-water showers without soap. By the way they looked-and smelled-they hadn’t bathed for more than a year. Some of them stood defiantly erect, and marched as if on parade at Schofield Barracks. Others, plainly, were on their last legs, and could barely stagger along.

One of them fell down in the middle of the street. Two Japanese guards stood over him, screaming what had to be curses. When he didn’t get up, they started kicking him. They paused after a minute or so to see if he would rise. He tried, but couldn’t get past his knees. They kicked him some more and paused again. When he still didn’t get up, two of them bayoneted him. He groaned and thrashed and bled.

Jane’s nails were short these days-whose weren’t? — but they bit into her palms anyhow. The Japs didn’t put the POW out of his misery. They left him there to die slowly. Then, laughing, they got the rest of the prisoners moving again.

It wasn’t Fletch, Jane thought as she willed her hands to uncurl. Whenever prisoners of war went through Wahiawa, she couldn’t help scanning their faces to see if she spotted her ex-husband. As decrepit and shaggy as the POWs were these days, he might have stumbled past her without her even recognizing him. She wondered why she bothered. She had no idea whether he was alive. She didn’t love him any more. Even if she did, what could she do for him? Nothing. Less than nothing. And if the Japs here found out she was an officer’s wife-even if she and Fletch had been getting a divorce-they might make things unpleasant for her. More unpleasant, she thought with a shiver.

But she couldn’t help looking. Getting a divorce wasn’t as final as lawyers made it out to be. She wished it were.

By the time the guards were out of sight, the prisoner they’d butchered had stopped moving. Sooner or later, someone would drag the body out of the street. Jane looked away from it as she scurried back to her apartment. What worried her was how little the atrocity upset her. She’d already seen too many others.

MARCHING UP THE KAMEHAMEHA HIGHWAY was more fun than paving it or building gun emplacements for the Japs. That was how Fletcher Armitage measured his life these days. He wasn’t quite so exhausted when he marched as when he worked. He didn’t starve quite so quickly, either. These were things to treasure, though he wouldn’t have thought so before December 7, 1941.

He understood Einstein better than he’d ever dreamt of doing. There was bad, and then there was worse. What would have looked like the worst thing in the world to him before the Japs overran Oahu now didn’t seem bad at all. If that wasn’t relativity, what the hell was it?

When the POWs worked, the guards pushed them hard. Why not? The Japs didn’t do any road work or digging themselves. But when they marched, the pace stayed bearable. If the Japs made the prisoners doubletime, they would have to doubletime themselves, and they wouldn’t have cared for that one bit. A few of them were actually plump.

Fletch’s standards about what constituted a proper human form had changed radically since the surrender-so radically, he didn’t altogether realize it himself. The Americans with whom he labored seemed normal to him. They were, after all, the people he saw every minute of every day. He forgot how scrawny they were because they surrounded him.

But they made the Japs, some of whom were prewar average and a handful even heavier than that, seem grotesquely obese by comparison. Why didn’t they fall over dead from carting that extra weight around all the time?

Intellectually, Fletch knew he’d had that much flesh himself once upon a time. Emotionally, he didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. If everyone who mattered to him seemed made of sticks and twigs, then anyone who didn’t had to have something wrong with him.

“Wahiawa ahead,” somebody said.

“Hot damn.” That wasn’t Fletch; it was a Texan named Virgil Street. He added, “Who gives a damn, anyways? We went through this lousy place fallin’ back when we still had guns in our hands. Goin’ through it forwards doesn’t mean anything, on account of the Japs got the guns now.”

Fletch kept his mouth shut. Wahiawa meant something to him. He wondered if he’d see Jane. He also wondered if she’d care if she saw him. Not likely, he feared. He never had figured out why she dumped him. He hadn’t seen it coming. (That he hadn’t seen it coming said a good deal about him, but one of the things it said was that he wouldn’t understand what it said.) He still loved her, as much as he had before. If only…

He laughed. He had a picture of the Jap sergeant who bossed the work gang letting him fall out for a heart-to-heart with his ex. It was right next to his pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

And even if the sergeant did, would Jane listen to him? That was another fat chance. She hadn’t wanted to hear a word he said, not after she threw him out of the apartment. Suddenly and powerfully, he wanted a drink. Thinking of Jane made him think of bourbon. He’d done a hell of a lot of drinking after she dumped him. What with forcibly separating him from hooch, the Japanese invasion might have saved him from turning into a lush.

“Shit,” he muttered. Without even thinking, he could have named a dozen pretty damn good officers, all the way up to bird colonel, who drank like fish. If that wasn’t a great Army tradition, he didn’t know what was. He would sooner have sacrificed his liver for his country than what he was going through now.

As the POWs came into Wahiawa, the guards strung themselves out along either side of the slow-moving column. When they were out in the country, the guards mostly relaxed. Prisoners couldn’t very well run, and couldn’t disappear for long. Here, though, there were side streets to duck down, houses and apartments to break into, all sorts of places to hide. The Japs weren’t dummies. They could figure that out as well as white men could.

They could do all kinds of things as well as white men could, and maybe better. Back before the shooting started, Fletch wouldn’t have believed it, any more than any other U.S. Army officer would have. To him, Japs had been little bucktoothed monkeys who could turn out cheap copies of just about anything, but who flew planes made from tin cans and didn’t have the balls to fight a real war.

He knew better now. He laughed again, bitterly. One whole hell of a lot knowing did him!

“One run, nine die!” shouted a corporal who spoke English of a sort. Everybody in each shooting squad automatically looked around to see where the other men whose fate was tied to his were and what they were doing. Each squad had one or two guys reckoned less reliable than the others. You wanted to be sure they couldn’t light out for the tall timber.

Fletch caught Street’s eye. They nodded to each other. Everything seemed under control. If anybody held their shooting squad together, they were the ones. Fletch had an idea about how to lead, having been an officer. Street was a man who commanded respect regardless of rank. There were soldiers like that. Fletch was glad the two of them got along.

Into Wahiawa they came. Civilians on the street bowed to the approaching Japanese. That was ingrained into everybody by now: local Japs, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinamen, haoles. You had to show respect. The world hadn’t shown Japan respect before, and everybody was paying for it now.

Wahiawa looked poor. It looked like a mainland town where the factory had closed down and everybody’d been out of work for a long time. Everybody wore shabby clothes-not so bad as the rags the prisoners had on, but shabby. People looked fearful, too, as if expecting something worse would happen if they weren’t careful. They were bound to be right, too.

“You move!” the corporal yelled, hustling them along.

Move Fletch did. If he didn’t move, they would bayonet him on the street and laugh while they did it. His legs and especially his feet hurt. He kept telling himself it was only because he’d done too much work for too long on too little food. He kept telling himself that, yes, but he had more and more trouble making himself believe it. He was starting to get beriberi. Not only weren’t they feeding him enough, they were feeding him the wrong kind of not enough.

A blond woman on the sidewalk bowed to the Jap soldiers. Was that Jane? Excitement, then dejection-it wasn’t. This gal was older and tougher-looking. He’d seen worse, though. He laughed at himself. His interest in women right now had to be purely theoretical. He didn’t think he could get it up if he had a crane to help.

He laughed again. “What’s funny?” Virgil Street asked. Anything that made a day go by a trifle better was to be cherished. Fletch explained. The other POW snorted. “Hell, buddy, way we are now, a clapped-out fifty-cent whore’d turn up her nose at us even if we could get it up.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Fletch looked down at himself. He doubted he weighed a hundred twenty pounds, and at least ten pounds of that were dirt. Along with everybody else in this sorry outfit, he smelled like the monkey house in the zoo. He would have killed for a sirloin, a baked potato, and pie a la mode. Hedy Lamarr dancing the dance of love in the altogether? Forget about it.

And then he did see Jane, and he stumbled and almost fell on his face. He recognized the sun dress she had on; she’d bought it on a shopping trip down to Honolulu, and crowed about the price for days. She was very tan. Her hands looked like hell; they were almost as battered as his own.

She saw him, too. Her jaw dropped. Her mouth shaped an O. Her eyes widened. She didn’t say a thing, though. He started to scream her name-he started to, but caught himself before anything more than a gurgle escaped his lips. If he showed he knew who she was, what would happen to her? She’d catch it from the Japs, odds were.

She’s alive, anyway, and she doesn’t look too bad. Maybe she’d started to call him, too. If she had, she also had too much sense to finish. I love you, he mouthed, and wondered if she could read lips.

He must have slowed down. A guard whacked him across the shoulder blades with a length of bamboo. He staggered, but kept his feet. The bastard would have kicked him if he’d gone down. Could he have got up after a couple of good licks? He hoped so, anyhow. If he couldn’t… Well, that would have given Jane something to watch, wouldn’t it?

“You move!” the Jap corporal yelled again.

On he went; he had no choice. Ships passing in the night, he thought. Jane stared after him; he looked back over his shoulder once to see. But their ship had taken a torpedo and sunk back before the war started. Whatever he saw now, wasn’t it just debris floating on the surface?

Two tears ran down his face. He wiped them away with his skinny, filthy, sunburned forearm. When he looked back over his shoulder, Jane was gone. Had she ever really been there? He knew damn well she had. Whatever the Japs had done to him, they’d never been able to make him cry.

ALL ALONE IN THE APARTMENT she’d shared with Fletch once upon a time, Jane Armitage lay on the bed they’d also shared once upon a time. Her shoulders shook. She sobbed into the pillow. He was alive. She supposed she should have been glad. She was glad-and then again, she wasn’t. Wouldn’t he have been better off dead?

She’d seen plenty of POWs. She’d imagined seeing Fletch that way. That only went to show the difference between imagination and reality. A bright-eyed skeleton with a ginger beard…

And he’d seen her, too. For that little stretch of time, it had been as if he’d never got drunk, as if she’d never talked to a lawyer. If he could have broken out of that sorry pack, she would have… She didn’t know what she would have done. Whatever he wanted, probably.

He was either still lurching along or at hard labor somewhere only a couple of miles away right now. In the movies, she would have figured out a way to go to him and comfort him and feed him and get him away from the people who were making his life a hell on earth. It would have been easy as pie, and the Japs wouldn’t have caught on, at least not till too late. Then they would have been left gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists as she and Fletch rode off into the sunset together.

Real life, unfortunately, didn’t usually come with a Hollywood ending. The Japs were a lot tougher and smarter than the villains in the movies. She didn’t have the faintest idea how she could spirit Fletch away from the work gang he was in, or even how she could get him any food. If she did get Fletch away, what could she do with him? Stash him here in the apartment? Then he could never go out, and she could never have anybody in. Anyone who spotted him could blackmail her forever. And a ration that wasn’t adequate for one wouldn’t come close to feeding two. They’d both starve. And he’d probably-no, certainly-want to sleep with her again, and, that moment of surprise on the sidewalk aside, she didn’t want to sleep with him. Oh, maybe once out of pity, but no more than that, for God’s sake. And trying to get him out and failing would lead not to one horrible death but two.

“Shit!” she said, all at once understanding why Hollywood endings were so popular. They were a hell of a lot better than the way things went when the cameras weren’t rolling.

BEFORE THE JAPANESE OCCUPIED HAWAII, Jiro Takahashi had never been a man of any great consequence here. Oh, he did his work and he paid his bills and he had some friends who thought he was a pretty good fellow, but that was about it. He could go anywhere without having anyone pay special attention to him.

It wasn’t like that any more. He’d been on the radio several times. He’d had his words and opinions featured in Hawaii’s Japanese-language press. And he’d even had his picture and his translated words show up in Honolulu’s English-language papers.

Now his fellow Japanese said, “Hello, Takahashi-san!” and bowed when he went by. Or they called him “the Fisherman,” like the sentries at the consulate. They asked his advice for their problems. They did favors for him, and tried to have him get favors for them from the consul and his henchmen. They treated him like an important person, like a doctor or lawyer-not like a real fisherman.

He loved every minute of it.

He’d had haoles bow to him as if he were a senior Japanese officer. They probably wanted him to do them favors, too, the only trouble being that he had no English and hardly any haoles spoke Japanese. But getting respect from people who’d looked down their noses not just at him but at all Japanese before things changed was as heady as strong sake.

The only people who seemed unimpressed-to put it mildly-with his rise in the world were his sons. Hiroshi and Kenzo did their best to act as if nothing had changed, or to wish things hadn’t. Once, when they were out in the Oshima Maru and no one else could hear, Kenzo asked, “Why couldn’t you just keep your head down like most people, Father?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jiro answered his own question before Kenzo could: “It means you’re still full of sour grapes, that’s what.”

“You think the Americans are gone for good,” Kenzo said. “You think you can call them all the names you want. But they haven’t gone away. They’re sinking more and more ships these days. Their planes come over more and more often. What will you do when they take Oahu back? You’ll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, that’s what.”

“They’re back on the mainland.” To Jiro, the U.S. mainland was as far away as the moon. “How can they come back here? Do you think I’m afraid of the bogeyman? You’d better think twice.”

“They aren’t the bogeyman, Father.” Hiroshi backed Kenzo. “They’re real.” He spoke with a somber conviction Jiro couldn’t dismiss, however much he wanted to.

“Oh, yes!” He still tried to laugh it off. “And I suppose you’ve talked to them, and they told you just what they’re going to do.”

Neither of his sons said anything. They only looked at each other. The breeze shifted. With automatic attention, Jiro turned to the rigging. Every bit as automatically, Hiroshi swung the rudder a few degrees to port. He and Kenzo had become good sailors, even if they liked the United States too well.

They proved right about one thing: the Americans weren’t going away. Jiro had thought they would. After the beatings Japan gave them, wouldn’t they see they didn’t have a chance and give up? Evidently not. U.S. seaplanes buzzed over Honolulu or Pearl Harbor, dropped bombs, and flew away under cover of darkness. Or a submarine surfaced, fired a few rounds with its deck gun, and disappeared under the sea again. Or a sub didn’t surface, but put a torpedo into a Japanese freighter-and, again, disappeared.

A couple of times, the Japanese had sunk a marauding U.S. submarine. The papers and the radio trumpeted those triumphs to the skies. Hiroshi’s sardonic comment was that they wouldn’t get so excited about it if it happened more often. That hadn’t occurred to Jiro, and he wished it hadn’t occurred to his son, either; it made an uncomfortable amount of sense.

Was there a kami in charge of bad timing? If there was, the spirit had its eye on the Oshima Maru right that minute. No sooner had Jiro worried about how Japan was really doing than Kenzo said, “It sounds like the Russians are still giving Hitler a hard time.”

The Japanese-language papers that were the only ones Jiro could read had done their best to talk around that, but they couldn’t get around the brute fact that Germany had got into Stalingrad, had fought a terrible battle there, and had lost it. Jiro did his best to shrug it off, and even to counterpunch: “Hitler has his war, and we have ours. Did you see how our bombers hit Australia again? More haoles getting what they deserve.”

“Our bombers?” Kenzo shook his head. “They weren’t mine, Father, please excuse me.”

“You’re Japanese, too,” Jiro said angrily.

“I look like you. I speak Japanese, yes,” his younger son answered. “But I speak English, too. I was born in America. I’m glad I was born in America.”

“That silly girl you’re going with has you all confused,” Jiro said.

Kenzo glowered at him. “Elsie’s not silly. She’s about the least silly girl I ever met.”

“I’m not seeing any haole girl, and I feel the same way Kenzo does,” Hiroshi said.

Jiro went back to tending the sails. His sons just wouldn’t listen to reason. One thing growing up in America had done to them: it had taught them not to respect their parents the way they would have in Japan. He and his wife had done everything they knew how to do, but America corroded good moral order-that was all there was to it.

“You don’t know how lucky we are that we’ve come under the Emperor’s rule,” Jiro said.

That got squawks from both his sons. The squawks took some little will to turn into words. Kenzo got there before Hiroshi: “Some luck! If we didn’t catch most of our own food, we’d be as skinny as the rest of the poor so-and-sos in Honolulu.”

The ration ordinary people got was less than extravagant. “The Americans are sinking the ships that bring in rice,” Jiro said. “Chancellor Morimura told me so himself. And besides, we don’t have white men telling us what to do any more. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“We have Japanese soldiers and Japanese sailors telling us what to do instead,” Hiroshi said. “If we don’t do it, they shoot us. The Americans never did anything like that.”

“You haven’t got the right attitude,” Jiro scolded. His boys-now men with minds of their own-both nodded. He didn’t know what to do about them. He feared he couldn’t do anything.

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA BOWED TO HIS OPPOSITE NUMBER from the Army.

“Good to see you again,” he said.

Lieutenant Colonel Murakami bowed back in precisely the same way; their ranks were equivalent. “And you,” he said, slyly adding, “Kingmaker.” Fuchida laughed; along with Commander Genda and one of Murakami’s colleagues, they’d chosen Stanley Laanui to head the restored-on paper, anyhow-Kingdom of Hawaii.

That, though, probably wasn’t why Murakami had come to the Akagi-had actually set foot on a Navy ship-now. Fuchida waved him to a chair in his cramped cabin. There was no other kind on the carrier; even Captain Kaku was pinched for room. “What can I do for you?” Fuchida asked.

Before answering, Murakami looked to the closed watertight door that gave them privacy. “How long have we got before the Americans attack Hawaii again?” he asked.

“Why ask me?” Fuchida replied. “The Americans are the ones who know. You can ring up President Roosevelt and get the answer straight from him.”

Instead of laughing, Murakami grimaced. “That’s not as funny as it sounds, Fuchida-san. There was a telephone operator who passed on information to the Americans by calling California in the middle of the night when no one was paying attention to what she did. She will not call California any more-or anywhere else, either.” He spoke with a grim certainty.

“I never heard anything about that,” Fuchida exclaimed.

“You wouldn’t. It’s not something we’re proud of. But I’m telling you-in confidence, I hope.” Murakami waited.

Fuchida’s “Hai” was, Yes, I understand, not, Yes, I agree. He recognized Murakami’s ploy. The Army officer was telling him something he didn’t know. Now Murakami hoped to hear something he didn’t know. Bargains often went along routes like that.

When Fuchida said no more than Hai, Murakami sighed. “We do need this information,” he said reasonably. “We have to defend this island, too-with our airplanes, and with our soldiers if the Americans manage to land.”

That was polite. What he meant was, If the Americans smash our carriers. Since he was aboard one of them, he couldn’t very well come out and say so. Commander Fuchida also sighed. “When they build enough so they think they can beat us-then they will come.”

“Domo arigato.” Murakami’s thanks were a small masterpiece of sarcasm. “And when will that be?”

“They have commissioned-we think they have commissioned-two new fleet carriers, as well as some light carriers,” Fuchida answered. That was pay-back for Murakami’s bit of news; up till now, the Navy had held the information close to its chest.

By the way the Army officer’s eyes widened, it was certainly news to him. “Two?” he said. “I knew of one, but…” He in turn surprised Fuchida, but not so much. The Yankees hadn’t kept quiet about Essex. Maybe they wanted their own people to know they were building ships so they could retaliate. They’d been much more secretive about the other big carrier, and the smaller ones.

“I think our intelligence is reliable here,” Fuchida said.

“Zakennayo!” Murakami muttered. “Two! And light carriers! How soon will they have more?” That wasn’t quite fearful anticipation in his voice, but it came close.

“There I cannot tell you, not for certain.” Fuchida did his best not to remember Admiral Yamamoto’s worries over how fast the Americans could build things once they got fully geared up. Most experts in Japan thought Yamamoto an alarmist, but he knew the USA well-and he was Yamamoto. One disagreed with him at one’s peril.

“What is your best estimate? What is the Navy’s best estimate?” Murakami was nothing if not persistent.

“Summer.” Fuchida spread his hands. “Don’t ask me for anything closer than that, Murakami-san, because I can’t give it.”

The Army officer looked discontented. “General Yamashita is already assuming summer. I was hoping you could tell me more.” He didn’t say, I was hoping to win points for myself if you did tell me more, but it hovered behind his words.

“Please excuse me, but I am not a bonz, to lay out the future for you,” Fuchida said, hoping he hid his irritation.

“Will the Navy be ready?” Murakami asked.

That did it. Fuchida was a patient man, but even patience had its limits. “No, of course not,” he snapped.

“We’re going to go out against the Americans in a couple of rusty old tubs, and they’ll sink us just like that. ” He snapped his fingers.

Lieutenant Colonel Murakami turned red. He had brains enough to know when he’d been given the glove. His colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Minami, was all too likely to have taken Fuchida literally. “All right. All right. I know you’ll do your best,” Murakami said. “But will your best be good enough?”

“It always has been so far.” Pride rang in Fuchida’s voice; he was still affronted. “Anyone who doesn’t think it will should transfer out of this kingdom-which wouldn’t be a kingdom if the Navy didn’t know what it was doing.”

Murakami blushed again. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, though Fuchida had been careful not to challenge his personal courage. When the Navy officer didn’t push it any further, Murakami went on, “Speaking of being stationed in a kingdom, here’s something that may amuse you: King Stanley has asked for some airplanes, so Hawaii can have an air force as well as an army.”

“You’re joking,” Fuchida said. Lieutenant Colonel Murakami shook his head. And, thinking about it, Fuchida wasn’t all that surprised. King Stanley was vain. He would be the sort to want a toy air force to go with his toy Army. Fuchida asked, “What did General Yamashita say to that?” Yamashita, from everything he’d seen, had a short fuse.

But Murakami surprised him, answering, “Yamashita-san consulted with the Foreign Ministry, and they said to keep the Hawaiian happy if he could do it without causing us trouble. So King Stanley is getting half a dozen of our most decrepit Hayabusas.”

“The Hawaiian Air Force.” Fuchida had to smile at that. He would have screamed bloody murder, though, if King Stanley had demanded Zeros. As far as he was concerned, the Hawaiians were welcome to Hayabusas. The Peregrine Falcon was the Army’s chief fighter plane. It was even lighter and more maneuverable than the Zero, but armed with nothing more than a pair of rifle-caliber machine guns. A Sopwith Camel rising to fight the Red Baron in 1917 had had just as much firepower. Handled well, a Hayabusa gave good service. Even so… He didn’t want to criticize the plane to Murakami, who was not an aviator, but he would almost rather have gone up in a Sopwith Camel.

Murakami was smiling, too, for reasons of his own. “Do you know what the King’s biggest challenge is?”

“Tell me,” Fuchida urged. “I’m all ears.”

“Finding pilots small enough to be comfortable in the cockpit.”

Fuchida did laugh then. Hawaiians were bigger than Japanese, as the two sets of guards at Iolani Palace proved. The naval officer said, “A good thing he’s sticking to Hawaiians and not using whites-although local Japanese would solve his problem for him.”

“General Yamashita suggested that,” Murakami said. “The King was polite about turning it down, but he did. He wants Hawaiian pilots flying for him. He has his pride, too, no matter how foolish it is.”

“I suppose he does,” Fuchida agreed. Much good pride would do the puppet king of Hawaii. With or without a few fighter planes to call his own, he would go on doing what Japan told him to. If he didn’t… If he didn’t, the Kingdom of Hawaii would suddenly need a new sovereign.