End of the Beginning

IX

JANE ARMITAGE WAITED FOR NIGHTFALL WISHING SHE WERE DEAD, THE WAY SHE did every day. A couple of the women who’d been dragooned into the Japs’ military brothel had found ways to kill themselves. Part of her envied them, but she didn’t have the nerve to follow in their footsteps. She told herself she wanted to stay alive to see the USA avenge itself on Japan. That was true, but most of what held her back was simple fear.

She looked out through the barred window of her room. Another perfect late afternoon in Wahiawa. Not too hot, not too cold, not too muggy, not too dry. Blue sky. A few white clouds. Bright sunshine. This hell of a place was all the more hellish for sitting in the middle of paradise.

Japanese soldiers hurried by. Wherever they were going, they didn’t have time to pause for a fast fuck. Some of them acted antsy, jabbering away in their incomprehensible language, sometimes even shouting at one another. She hoped they had plenty to be antsy about.

A knock on the door. That wasn’t a horny Jap. Soon, yes, but not yet. That was supper. She opened the door. A tiny, gray-haired Chinese woman handed her a tray. She didn’t speak any English. The Japs made sure of such things. How much practice had they had running brothels like this? Plenty, plainly.

Supper was better and there was more of it than if she’d still been working her little vegetable plot. She didn’t care. The rice and fish and cabbage tasted like ashes in her mouth. She wasn’t getting close to enough to eat for her sake. Oh, no. The Japs just didn’t want her to be too skinny to please her… customers.

The Chinese woman came back in a bit to take the tray to the kitchen. She held up her hand with fingers and thumb outspread. Jane nodded dully. Next Jap soldier or sailor in five minutes.

She took off the men’s pajamas that were all they let her wear and lay down on the bed naked. Some days she couldn’t stand it and she fought, knowing fighting was hopeless. The Japs beat her up and then did what they wanted anyway. Today she didn’t have it in her to fight. If she did her best to believe it wasn’t happening, she could get through till they let her quit. Then she could go to sleep… and have another day just like this one to look forward to.

Another knock on the door, this one peremptory. Jane didn’t say anything. She just lay there. The door opened anyhow, of course. In came a Jap. He smiled at her nakedness. She pretended he wasn’t there, and kept on pretending even when he dropped his pants and got on top of her.

He did what he did. His weight was heavy on her, his breath sour in her face. He squeezed her breasts, but not quite painfully hard. It could have been worse. It had been worse, plenty of times. A slightly better than average rape. Oh, joy. He grunted and jerked and then pulled out and got off her, a stupid grin on his face. Up came his trousers. Out the door he went, without a backwards glance.

Half a minute later, another one of those here-I-come knocks. She hadn’t even had time to douche, not that that would have done much against either disease or getting knocked up. In came the next one: an older man, a sergeant. She flinched inside, and hoped it didn’t show. The older guys were more likely to be mean. They fed off fear, too.

This one let his trousers fall around his ankles in the middle of the little room and motioned for Jane to get down on her knees in front of him. She tried not to let him know she understood. She particularly hated that. She had to do it, not let it be done to her. She wanted to bite down hard every single time, too. Only the fear of what they’d do to her if she did held her back.

When she kept acting stupid, the sergeant yanked her out of bed and put her where he wanted her. He was shorter than she was, but strong as an ox. He motioned that he’d slap her into the middle of next week if she didn’t get down to business. Hating him, hating herself more, she did. At least he wasn’t very big. She gagged less that way. She wished she had enough Japanese to tell him what a little prick he was.

She hadn’t got very far when he suddenly pushed her away. That was out of the ordinary. He waddled the three or four steps to the window, pants still at half mast, and stared out. That was when Jane realized the deep bass rumble she felt as much as heard was real, was outside herself, not the product of her own mind grinding itself to pieces.

The Jap twitched as if he’d stuck his finger into an electric socket. He said something that should have set the peeling wallpaper on fire. Then, still cussing a blue streak, he pulled up his pants and dashed out of the room.

Jane jumped to her feet and ran to the window. Anything that would make him give up on a blowjob halfway through was something she had to see.

And she did. The sky was full of planes flying in from the northwest. They were a long way up, but they didn’t look like any she’d ever seen before. That and the Jap’s reaction made a sudden wild hope spring to life in her. Are they American? she thought. Please, God, let them be American. I stopped believing in You when You did this to me, but I’ll start again if they’re American. I swear I will.

Antiaircraft guns in and around Wahiawa started banging away. The racket sounded like the end of the world, but it was the sweetest music Jane had ever heard.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t just a nuisance raid like the one the year before. There were dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of planes up there. Nobody could have sent so many without meaning business.

Jane blinked. From what she knew about the state of the art-which, as an officer’s more or less ex-wife, was a fair amount-nobody could have sent that many planes from the mainland at all. B-17s that flew into Hawaii did so unarmed, with no bomb load, and arrived almost dry just the same. Or they had… in 1941. This was 1943. The state of the art must have changed while she wasn’t looking.

And it had, by God-by the God she began believing in again with all her heart and all her soul and all her might. The bombers started unloading on Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks, just the other side of the Kamehameha Highway from Wahiawa.

The brothel shook. The window glass rattled. A not very badly aimed bomb would turn that glass into shrapnel-and might turn her into hamburger. She backed away from the window, tears streaming down her face. All at once, she wanted to live. And if that wasn’t a miracle, what would be?

Screams and cheers from other rooms said she wasn’t the only one, either. Then she heard another kind of scream: one of pain, not joy. One of the women trapped there must have started celebrating even with a Jap in her room. That was foolish, which didn’t mean Jane wouldn’t have done the same damn thing.

More bombs burst, and still more. It sounded as if the Americans were really giving it to the airport and the barracks. “Kill ’em all!” Jane yelled. “Come on, damn you! Kill ’em all!”

KENZO AND HIROSHI TAKAHASHI HAD THE OSHIMA MARU to themselves. Kenzo didn’t know exactly where his father was: at the Japanese consulate, the radio studio, maybe even Iolani Palace. His old man was in tight with the occupying authorities-and in hog heaven. The less Kenzo heard about it, the better he liked it.

Hiroshi was at the rudder, Kenzo minding the sampan’s sails-or rather, not minding them very well.

“Pay attention, goddammit!” Hiroshi barked. “Stop mooning about your girlfriend-she isn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Kenzo said. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Elsie. Going to bed with a girl would do that. He wasn’t likely to forget the set of lumps those Japanese soldiers had given him, either. If that had turned out even a little different, they would have kicked him to death.

He’d hoped his old man could do something about that-find out who the soldiers were, get them in trouble, something. No such luck. The way his father looked at things, the beating was his own damn fault. If he hadn’t got the soldiers mad at him, they would have left him alone. That they’d wanted to gang-rape his girlfriend had nothing to do with anything.

“Pay attention,” Hiroshi said again. “We’re not just running before the wind this time.”

“I know. I know.” Kenzo couldn’t very well help knowing. They had the wind to starboard. They were sailing west to try their luck in the Kaieiewaho Channel, between Oahu and Kauai. They hadn’t caught much sailing south lately; those waters were getting fished out. Not so many sampans headed this way: that was what Hiroshi had concluded after listening to a good deal of fishermen’s gossip. Kenzo hoped his brother turned out to be right.

“What’s going on there?” Hiroshi pointed north, towards Oahu.

“Huh?” Kenzo had been thinking about Elsie again. His eyes followed Hiroshi’s forefinger. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

A swarm of Japanese planes was rising from what had been Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor. As the two Takahashi brothers watched, they shook themselves out into formation and flew north.

“Some kind of drill?” Kenzo hazarded.

“Maybe.” Hiroshi didn’t sound convinced. “They’re always grousing about how they don’t have a hell of a lot of gasoline, though. That’s a lot of planes to send up on an exercise.”

“Yeah. But what else could it be?” Kenzo answered his own question before his brother could: “Maybe the good guys are getting frisky again.” The good guys. He’d thought of the USA that way even before the Japanese soldiers literally jumped on him with both feet, of course. Now his feelings for the country in which he was born had doubled and redoubled. So had his fear that he wouldn’t get credit for those feelings no matter what. If the Americans came back to Hawaii-no, when they came back-what would he be? Just another Jap, and one whose father was a collaborator.

For now, he needed to remember he was a fisherman first and foremost. The winds got tricky as the Oshima Maru rounded Barbers Point, at the southwestern corner of Oahu, and even trickier once they passed Kaena Point, the island’s westernmost extremity. By then it was late afternoon.

“Don’t you think we ought to get more out into the middle of the channel before we drop our lines?” Kenzo asked.

Hiroshi shook his head. “That’s what everybody else does.”

As far as Kenzo could see, everybody else did it for a perfectly good reason, too: the fish were most likely to be there. But he didn’t argue with his brother. He’d argued with too many people over too many things lately. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Have it your way.” They were sure to catch enough to keep themselves eating. If they didn’t catch more than that, Hiroshi would have to go out into the middle of the channel… wouldn’t he?

He dumped bait-minnows and offal-into the Pacific. He and Kenzo lowered the lines into the blue, blue water. “Now we wait,” Hiroshi said, a sentence that could have passed from one fisherman to another anywhere in the world since the beginning of time.

A mackerel leaping out of the water not far from the sampan told Kenzo catchable fish swam nearby. It told Hiroshi the same thing; he looked as smug as their father did when Japan figured out some new way to make things tough on the USA. Kenzo damn near told him so, but that would have started an argument, too.

When they hauled up the lines, they brought in ahi and aku and mahi-mahi-and some sharks with them. The next little while was the frantic part of the operation. They gutted fish and got them in the storage hold as fast as they could. One of the sharks, about a three-footer, almost bit Kenzo and kept flopping and thrashing even after he’d torn out its insides.

“Damn things really don’t die till after sundown,” he said.

“You’d better believe it. They-” Hiroshi broke off. He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”

“I don’t hear anything.” Kenzo paused-he’d just made a liar of himself. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I do. Sounds like thunder.”

Hiroshi snorted, and with reason: the day was fine and clear, with hardly a cloud in the sky. “Pick something that makes sense, why don’t you?”

“Okay. Maybe it’s bombs.” Kenzo said the first thing that popped into his mind. Once he’d said it, though, he realized how much sense it made. The low rumbles were coming from the direction of Oahu, sure as hell. Hope tingled through him. “Maybe the Americans are really paying a call.”

“It’d be a big one if they are,” Hiroshi said, which was true, for the noise went on and on. Since neither one of them could do anything about it, they both went back to gutting fish.

A few minutes later, Kenzo looked east again. When he didn’t return to work right away, Hiroshi looked that way, too. They whistled softly at the same time. Thick columns of black, greasy-looking smoke were climbing up over the Waianae Range. “That is an air raid, a damn big one,” Kenzo said. After gauging the position of the smoke plumes, he added, “Looks like they’re pounding the crap out of Schofield and Wheeler.”

“Looks like you’re right,” Hiroshi said once he’d made the same calculations. “They’ve got to be hitting other places, too, only we can’t see those from where we’re at.”

“Yeah.” Kenzo hadn’t thought of that, but his brother was bound to be right. Wheeler Field was one of the most important airstrips on Oahu. If the Americans hit that one, they’d hit Hickam and Ewa and Kaneohe and the others, too. And if they were hitting airstrips like that… “Maybe the invasion’s really on!”

“Maybe. Jesus Christ, I hope so,” Hiroshi said. “About time, if it is.”

The intermittent thunder of explosions ceased. But the rumble from the east didn’t. If anything, it got louder. Kenzo suddenly pointed. “Will you look at that?”

“Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, this time in tones approaching real reverence. The sky was full of planes, streams of them, and they were flying west, from Oahu toward Kauai. That took a lot of them right over the Oshima Maru.

Kenzo and Hiroshi stared up in open-mouthed awe. Kenzo had seen pictures of B-17s before the war started. Some of the big four-engined bombers matched what he remembered of those pictures. Others were a new breed, with longer, narrower wings and tails with twin rudders. The roar of the engines overhead seemed to make the sampan vibrate.

“Where are they going to land?” Hiroshi whispered.

“Beats me,” Kenzo answered. He hadn’t known Kauai had an airstrip long enough to land planes that big. Maybe the Japanese had built one, although he thought they’d done as little as they could on all the islands except Oahu. Still, he didn’t figure that swarm of bombers would have headed for Kauai if they didn’t have somewhere to put down.

“We’ll tell our grandchildren about this day,” Hiroshi said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “Let’s just hope we live to have ’em.”

WHEN CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU HEARD THE AIR-RAID sirens go off, he didn’t worry much. Another American nuisance raid, he thought. The Americans sent seaplanes over Hawaii the way Japan sent them over the U.S. West Coast. They’d drop a few bombs, and then they’d either get shot down or go away.

But orders were orders. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Out of the barracks and into the trenches. Put the cards and the go boards away. You can pick up the games when you come back.”

Grumbling, the soldiers followed him outside. Grumbling even more, they scrambled down into the trenches they’d dug in the lawn in front of the stucco building. People who stained their uniforms swore. Sure as sure, they’d get gigged for dirty clothes at roll call tomorrow morning.

When Shimizu heard aircraft engines overhead, he was relieved at first. “Hear how many there are?” he said. “Those must be our bombers coming back from the practice run they were on.”

“I don’t think so, sir, please excuse me,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “This is a deeper noise. Our engines have a higher pitch.”

Shimizu listened a little longer. The noise did seem different. Still… “Sounds like a lot of planes to me, not the ones and twos the Yankees send. They don’t usually come by daylight, either. Are you saying-?”

Before he could finish, antiaircraft guns started banging. The gunners didn’t think the planes overhead were Japanese. And Shimizu heard the flat, harsh crump! crump! crump! of bursting bombs. He heard more of those explosions than he ever had when the Japanese were conquering Hawaii.

He looked up into the sky. His jaw dropped. Those weren’t American seaplanes. He’d grown familiar with their big-bellied lines. Those were bombers, monster bombers, swarms of them. Most flew to the west, in the direction of Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor. But some came right over Honolulu. And the likeliest reason they came right over Honolulu was…

Bombs fell from their bellies. He could see them, tumbling down through the air. And they all seemed to be falling straight toward him. “Duck!” he shouted, and threw himself facedown in the dirt. All of a sudden, he had more important things to worry about than getting dirt on his uniform.

The bombs’ rising whistling scream made him want to scream, too. Then they hit, and he did scream. It didn’t matter. Nobody could hear him through that thunder. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake. He’d been through some bad quakes in Japan. This was worse than any of them. When things rained down on him, he wasn’t sure if he’d be buried alive.

While you were on the receiving end of a bombardment, it seemed to go on forever. At last, after what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of real time, the bombs stopped falling. At least they did close by-he could still hear explosions off to the west. They were just paying us a social call, Shimizu thought dazedly. They really wanted to visit the airstrip and the harbor.

Like a ground squirrel looking to see if the fox had really gone, he stuck his head out of his hole. The barracks had been shelled before. They’d been leveled this time. Craters were strewn over the ground around the building. So were bodies, and pieces of bodies. Other buildings nearby were smoking ruins.

Yasuo Furusawa came up beside him. The druggist’s son looked around with the same horror on his face as Shimizu felt. “Oh,” Furusawa said softly, and then again, “Oh.” It didn’t seem enough, but what else was there to say?

“Help the wounded!” officers screamed. “Get ready to move! Get ready to fight!” Shimizu didn’t know how he was supposed to do all those things at once. He didn’t know how he was supposed to get ready to fight at all. His rifle was in the barracks, which had started to burn. Looking down the trench, he didn’t see anyone else who had a rifle with him, either.

He could do something for injured men, but not much. He bandaged wounds. He helped get people out of the trenches, and helped lift rubble so others could move them. The doctor who showed up after a few minutes quickly looked overwhelmed.

A fire engine screeched to a stop in front of the barracks. The crew-locals-started playing water on what was left of the building. That wouldn’t do the rifles in there any good. It might keep the ammunition with them from cooking off, though, which would save some casualties.

Private Shiro Wakuzawa pointed west. “Look!” he said.

Shimizu did. Smoke was rising from the direction of the airfield, and from Pearl Harbor just beyond it. The American bombers had indeed hit that area harder than they’d hit Honolulu. A lieutenant started shouting at the firemen: “Don’t worry about this place! Go there! There, do you hear me?” He pointed west, as Wakuzawa had.

The firemen answered him-in English. A couple of them looked Japanese, but nobody admitted to knowing the language. The officer jumped up and down, getting madder and madder. That did him no good at all. He pulled his katana from its sheath. The firemen backed away from him. Almost apoplectic by then, he put it back. He could kill the locals, but he couldn’t get them to understand what he was talking about, and that was what he needed to do.

Other officers started screaming then. “Zakennayo! The rifles!” one of them howled. “How are we supposed to fight the Americans if our rifles are in there?” He pointed at the smoldering, dripping wreckage of the barracks.

Just when all the men with more gold than red on their collar tabs seemed to have lost their heads, a major said, “We have plenty of captured American rifles and ammunition at armories here in Honolulu. We can use them if there aren’t any Arisakas handy. They have better stopping power than our rifles anyway.”

Someone else who’d kept his wits about him added, “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. Night is coming, and that will make things harder. Plainly, the Yankees are going to try to invade. We’ll need to be ready to march first thing in the morning.”

That was how Shimizu and his squad found themselves the not too proud possessors of American Springfields. He didn’t much care for his. It was larger and heavier than the Arisaka he was used to: plainly a weapon made for a bigger soldier than the average Japanese.

Yasuo Furusawa worked the bolt on his Springfield a few times. “Smooth-it’s well made,” he said grudgingly.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu said. “It will kick like a donkey, though.”

“Shigata ga nai, Corporal-san,” Furusawa said, and Shimizu had to nod.

Not getting supper couldn’t be helped, either. The officers had worried about weapons first and everything else only afterwards. Shimizu was sure the regiment would start marching for its position in the northern part of Oahu as soon as it grew light, too. He wondered if he and his men would get breakfast before they set out.

As it happened, they did: rice cooked somewhere else and brought in by horse-drawn wagon. And then, some of the regiment with Arisakas and others with Springfields, all of the men in dirty, often bloodstained, uniforms, they started marching toward the positions prepared for them before the last attempted enemy invasion.

“We should have trucks,” Senior Private Furusawa grumbled. “We could get there in an hour or two if we had trucks.”

But they didn’t-or rather, they had no fuel for them. That fire engine had been the first motorized vehicle-except for airplanes-Shimizu had seen in operation in weeks. And so… they marched.

To get to the Kamehameha Highway, they had to tramp past Hickam Field. A lot of airplanes remained unharmed in their revetments. The only trouble was, at the moment that did them no good at all. The American bombers had plastered the runways for all they were worth. Snorting bulldozers and swarms of men with picks and shovels-POWs, locals forced into labor gangs, and even Japanese-were doing their best to make the field usable again. Their best wasn’t good enough yet.

Shimizu didn’t like what he saw. How were the Japanese going to attack American ships if their planes couldn’t get off the ground? For a moment, fear made his strides light. Then he remembered the aircraft carriers that had let his country conquer Hawaii in the first place. They would take care of the Yankees.

He marched on, feeling better.

JIM PETERSON WAS DEEP in the bowels of the Koolau Range when he heard explosions outside the tunnel mouth. He leaned on his pick for a moment, trying to catch his breath. Any excuse to pause for a little while was a good one. Every time he lifted the pick and bit into the mountainside with it, he wondered if he could do it again. The question was altogether serious. Men quietly fell over and died every day. He’d helped carry Gordy Braddon to a grave-after his usual shift was over, of course. If your knees were bigger around than your thighs, as Gordy’s had been for quite a while, you weren’t a prime physical specimen. By now, there were damn few prisoners in the Kalihi Valley of whom that wasn’t true. It was sure as hell true of him.

The Japanese cared less about the tunnel than they did about working the POWs to death-or beating them to death or shooting them at the slightest excuse or just for the fun of it. The only way they might have got rid of the prisoners faster was by building a railroad through the jungle. Unlike the tunnel, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere, but that might not have stopped them.

More explosions. “What the hell?” Charlie Kaapu said. He stood out in the mob of tunnel rats, because he was twice as strong as most of them. He hadn’t been there long enough to deteriorate badly. And he’d been a civilian before, not a POW, so he’d just gone hungry; he hadn’t been on a starvation diet.

“Sounds like bombs,” Peterson said.

“Lots of bombs, if that’s what it is,” Charlie said, and Peterson had a hard time disagreeing. U.S. raids on Hawaii hadn’t amounted to anything but annoyances up till now. Still more distant booms came echoing up the shaft. Whatever they were, they were too big to be just an annoyance.

The same thought occurred to somebody else. “Can’t be bombs,” a weary but authoritative voice said.

“Wish it could, but there’s too damn many of ’em. How could the USA get that many bombers over Oahu? No way, nohow. Gotta be the Japs blowing something up.”

“They can blow themselves up-or just blow themselves. Don’t make no difference to me,” somebody else chipped in.

When the men with picks paused, the men with shovels couldn’t load rubble for the men with baskets to carry out of the tunnel: there wasn’t any rubble to load. And when the men with baskets didn’t come staggering out of the tunnel at intervals short enough to suit the Japanese, guards came in to find out what the hell was going on. A POW near the tunnel mouth called, “Heads up!” to warn the men at the end of the shaft.

With a groan, Peterson lifted the pick. It seemed to weigh sixteen tons. He swung it back and brought it forward. It bit into the volcanic rock. Grunting, he pulled it free and swung it again.

Moments later, he heard the Japs yelling as they approached. They sounded mad as hell. They often did, but this was worse than usual. And their progress up the shaft could be noted by cries of pain from the prisoners they passed. That meant they were swinging their damn bamboo swagger sticks at whoever was unlucky enough to get within range.

They hadn’t done that much for a while, not inside the tunnel. What were they so jumpy about? Peterson got a crack across the back that sent him staggering into the rough rock wall. That gave him more scrapes and lumps.

Charlie Kaapu got whacked, too. He took it with a grin, which made the guard hit him again. He kept grinning, and hefted his pick. It wasn’t a threat, or didn’t have to be one, for he slammed the pick into the rock a moment later. But that guard found something else to do pretty damn quick.

As soon as the Jap was out of earshot, Charlie said, “I bet the USA is doing something. These little cocksuckers wouldn’t be so jumpy if we weren’t.”

Is that hope I feel? Jim Peterson wondered. He’d gone without so long, he had trouble recognizing it. He’d had grim determination to survive, but not hope. Hope was different. And yes, this was a dose of that fragile, precious feeling, by God.

Everybody worked harder, not because the guards were beating on people but because hope, in spite of that POW with the authoritative voice, was contagious. Men wanted to believe the Americans were on their way back, and thinking they might be made even dying prisoners stronger… for a little while.

When the shift ended, Peterson trudged out of the tunnel with as much spring in his step as a starving man with beriberi could have. He wolfed down his rice and nasty leaves with good appetite. But then, he was always hungry. By the time he ate, he knew the Americans had returned. Men too sick to labor-men who would die soon, in other words-had watched smoke rise in the southwest, from the direction of Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. Some of them had seen the bombers. Peterson couldn’t see anything; it had got dark. He hardly cared. His mind’s eye was in excellent working order.

The guards acted nervous at evening roll call, too. Naturally, they screwed up the count. Just as naturally, they took it out on the POWs. Peterson thought they killed a man when they knocked him down and kicked him, but he wasn’t sure.

Even sleep, normally a man’s most precious asset after food, went by the wayside tonight. Prisoners talked in low, excited voices, falling silent whenever a Jap stalked by. Their longings after an American victory came down to two things: steak and french fries. A few men talked about pussy, but only a few; most were too far gone to worry much about women one way or the other. Fantasies about food were much more immediately gratifying.

“Pussy’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Charlie Kaapu opined. That surprised Peterson; Charlie, of all people here, was in good enough shape to do a woman justice-or maybe even injustice, if he saw the chance.

“It’s trouble I’d like to have,” somebody else said wistfully.

The big, burly-by camp standards, anyhow-hapa-Hawaiian shook his head. “Why you think I ended up in this goddamn place, except for pussy?”

“Tell us the story again, Charlie,” Peterson said. It was better than most of the ones the prisoners told, and he hadn’t heard it so often, either.

Charlie Kaapu looked disgusted with himself. “This Jap major have a blond girlfriend.” He used some of the rhythms of the local pidgin without quite falling into it. Leering, he went on, “Blond girlfriend have good-looking boyfriend.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. But then his face fell. “You go after nooky, you get stupid. I got stupid. I quarrel with the silly bitch, and she squeal on me. They grab me, they ship my ass up here. Ain’t you boys lucky they do that?”

He got jeered, as he must have known he would have. As poor Gordy had said, Peterson wished he’d had that much fun before getting sent to the Kalihi Valley. But the news of the day left him all the more determined to outlast the Japanese.

As he and everyone else in the camp discovered much too early the next morning, the news of the day left the guards all the more determined to make sure none of the prisoners there lived through it.

JOE CROSETTI LISTENED TO THE BRIEFING OFFICER. “All right, gentlemen,” the man said, and paused to swig at his milk. “We’ve given the Japs a left to the jaw and a right to the belly. We’ve sunk their carriers and we’ve walloped the rest of their surface ships and we’ve plastered their airfields on Oahu. They’re on the ropes and they’re wobbly, but they’re still on their feet. Now we go for the KO.”

Several fliers near Joe said, “Yeah!” A few others growled deep in their throats, a low animal noise he didn’t think they knew they were making. He had to listen to be sure he wasn’t making it himself.

“Our own losses were in the expected range,” the briefing officer continued. “One light carrier sunk, an escort carrier and a fleet carrier damaged. The fleet carrier can still launch planes, and we are still in business.”

More growls rose, and even a couple of whoops. This time, Joe didn’t feel like joining them. The way he looked at it, the Japs had shown just how good they were. Badly outnumbered, mauled going in, they’d still managed to do real damage to the American task force. Well, those dive-bomber and torpedo-plane pilots were out of the game now, most of them for good. The ones whose planes hadn’t got shot down would have had to ditch in the ocean. There couldn’t have been many pickups.

“You’ll know we hit their air bases on Oahu yesterday with B-17s and B-24s,” the briefing officer said.

“They made it all the way from the West Coast with their bombs, but they couldn’t hope to get home again. That’s why they headed for Kauai once the raid was done. How we got an airstrip long enough to land bombers built there under the Japs’ noses is a story they’ll write books about after the war. You can bet your life on that.”

Of course, the bombers would still be sitting there at the end of the strip. If the Japs wanted to smash them up, they could. It must have been a one-way mission from the start. Talk about balls-out, Joe thought.

“Our assets on Oahu say we did a good job hitting the enemy bases, but the Japs are attempting to get them into usable shape again,” the briefing officer said. “We don’t want them doing that.” A few grim chuckles accompanied the statement. A wry smile on his own face, the lieutenant commander went on, “Bringing carriers-to say nothing of the troopships behind us-into range of land-based air is liable to be hazardous to everybody’s health.” A few more chuckles, for all the world as if he were joking. “What you boys are going to do is, you’re going to make damn sure that doesn’t happen. Our ship’s bombers are going to hit Wheeler Field again, to keep the Japs from flying off it. You fighter pilots-knock down anything that gets into the air and shoot up as much as you can on the ground. Shoot up enemy planes wherever you spot ’em, and shoot up the earth-moving machinery that lets the Japs make fast repairs. We’ll hit them hard, and we’ll keep hitting them till they can’t hit back any more. Questions?”

“Yes, sir.” A pilot raised his hand. “When do the Marines go in?”

“Day after tomorrow, if everything works the way it’s supposed to,” the briefing officer said. “You can make that happen. You will make it happen. Now go man your planes!”

As Joe hurried up to the flight deck, he fell into stride with Orson Sharp. “Day after tomorrow! We really are gonna take it back from them.”

“Well, sure.” Sharp looked at him. “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

“Of course not!” Joe made himself sound indignant. If he’d had doubts, he didn’t want to admit them even to himself, let alone to his buddy.

Hellcats buzzed overhead as he climbed into his cockpit. The combat air patrol was heavy. They were already in range of land-based air, though none had appeared yet after the naval battle. That too argued the bombers had done a good job of putting the runways on Oahu out of action for the time being.

Joe’s Hellcat was gassed up and brim full of ammo. The plane had a few bullet holes that hadn’t been there twenty-four hours earlier, but nothing vital had taken any damage. The engine came to life at once. Joe methodically ran through his checks-they’d drilled that into him before they let him into a Yellow Peril. Everything looked green.

Not quite so many pilots took off as had the day before. Bill Frank, who’d roomed with Joe and Orson Sharp and another guy at ground school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was one of the missing. Nobody’d seen his plane go down, but he hadn’t landed, either. Joe tried not to think about losses. It’s a job, he told himself. You’ve got to do it. Sometimes things happen, that’s all. But they won’t happen to you.

As planes began to leap into the air, Joe thought about what he would be doing. Wheeler Field. The center of the island. Between the mountain ranges. By now, after so much study, he could have drawn the map of Oahu in his sleep. Schofield Barracks and the town on the other side of the highway-Wahiawa-would guide him in if he had trouble finding the place. With the arrogance of youth, he didn’t figure he would. The island wasn’t very big to begin with.

And then he got the checkered flag. The Hellcat sprinted down the flight deck. There was that momentary lurch as it tried to fall into the Pacific. Joe yanked the stick back. The nose went up. The fighter zoomed away to find its fellows. Was any feeling in the world better than this? Well, maybe one.

He kept an eye peeled for ships down below. Not quite all the escorts from the Jap task force were accounted for. He figured the U.S. battlewagons and cruisers and destroyers could handle whatever was left, but why take chances? He didn’t spot any major warships. They’d either gone back to the bottom or scooted back to Oahu. He did see several fishing boats. At first, he just accepted that-he was, after all, a fisherman’s son. But then he remembered the Japs used those boats as pickets. They would have radios aboard. The attack from the U.S. fleet wouldn’t be a surprise. If the enemy could put planes in the air, he would.

He could. And he did. Joe had just spotted Oahu, green in the distance, when a warning dinned in his earphones: “Bandits! Bandits at ten o’ clock!”

Some distance back of the lead planes, Joe peered southeast till he spotted the Japanese planes. Their pilots were sly. They’d swung around toward the sun so they could come out of it and be harder to spot. Joe wished his Hellcat carried radar. Then the enemy wouldn’t be able to play tricks like that. Well, they hadn’t worked this time.

He glanced over at his wingman. He led an element now, instead of following in one. Survival of the fittest-or luckiest-worked in the air just the way it had in his biology textbook. The other pilot, a big blond guy from South Dakota named Dave Andersen, waved in the cockpit to show he was paying attention. Joe waved back.

Here came the Japs. Some of the fighters were Zeros. Maybe they’d made it back to Oahu after their carriers went down. Maybe they’d been based there-the Japs sure did that with their Navy planes in the South Pacific. Others were shorter, trimmer, with a smaller cockpit canopy. Silhouette recognition paid off. Those were Jap Army fighters-Oscars, in U.S. code.

Oscars were slower than Zeros. They didn’t carry cannon, either, only two rifle-caliber machine guns. But they were supposed to be even more nimble and maneuverable than the Navy fighters. Having watched pilots in Zeros pull off some mind-boggling loops and turns and spins, Joe was from Missouri on that; he wouldn’t believe it till he saw it for himself.

Which he did, in short order. Hellcats could outclimb and outdive Oscars with ease. But an enemy pilot who knew what he was doing could damn near fly his plane back around under itself. Hellcats flew like flycatchers. Oscars dodged like butterflies.

They couldn’t hit much harder than butterflies, though. Canvas-and-wire biplanes in the last war had had just as much firepower. And Hellcats were built to take it. Oscars weren’t. They were several hundred pounds lighter even than Zeros, and correspondingly flimsier. All that maneuverability came at a price. If an Oscar got in the way of a burst from a Hellcat’s six.50-caliber guns, as often as not it would break up in midair.

That couldn’t have been good for morale, but the Japs who flew the Army fighters had guts. They bored in on the Dauntlesses the Hellcats escorted. So did their Navy buddies in Zeros. They got a few, too, but they paid, and paid high. The Hellcats badly outnumbered them. Joe wondered how many Oscars and Zeros-and Jap bombers, too-were stuck on the ground because they couldn’t take off. Lots, he hoped.

He took a shot at an Oscar. His tracers went wide. He tried to keep his nose aimed at the Jap fighter, but he couldn’t. It was that much more agile in the air. In a hop and a skip, it was on his tail, those two popguns it carried blazing away. One round hit the Hellcat. Joe glanced anxiously at his gauges as he gave his plane the gun and ran away from the Oscar. No fire. No leaks. No problems. Yeah, a Hellcat could take it. And Hellcats could dish it out, too. That Jap pilot was a pro, but he’d be a dead pro in short order if he tangled with very many of the big, muscular American fighters.

There was the Koolau Range to the east, and the Waianae Range to the west. Japanese antiaircraft guns near the beach started throwing up flak. Joe swerved back and forth, just a little, to keep the gunners from being quite sure where he was going. Dave Andersen stuck with him.

Sure enough, Oahu was little. Only three or four minutes after he saw waves breaking on the beach, he was over the target. Dauntlesses screamed down out of the sky to blast the runways of Wheeler Field. Funny to think how, less than two years earlier, Japanese Vals had done the same damn thing. What goes around comes around, you bastards, Joe thought. Your turn now.

Back in December of ’41, American planes had been parked on the runways wingtip to wingtip. The people in charge then worried about sabotage. They hadn’t figured they’d get sucker-punched. Joe was damned if he knew why not, but they hadn’t.

The Japs, unfortunately, weren’t as dumb or as trusting as the Americans had been. They knew enough to build revetments, and they knew enough to camouflage them, too. But they hadn’t painted a civilian bulldozer in camouflage colors-they’d left it school-bus yellow. Joe couldn’t have found a juicier target in a month of Sundays. His thumb came down on the firing button. Tracers leaped ahead of the Hellcat.

A fireball spouted from the ’dozer. Joe pulled up to make sure he didn’t get caught in it. He swung around for another pass at Wheeler. Shooting up what had been an American facility was fun. All the same, part of him kept imagining he’d get a bill for destroying government property.

This stuff belongs to the Japanese government now. Let them send me a bill. And let them hold their breath till I pay it!

Flak around Wheeler was heavier than it had been by the shore. The Japs knew the Americans would try to come back, and they’d done what they could to get ready. “And it’s not gonna be enough, goddammit!” Joe said.

Muzzle flashes let him spot a gun’s upthrust snout. Shoot at me, will you? Shoot at my buddies? See how you like being on the other end! The gun crew scattered as Joe opened up on them. He roared by before he could see what his bullets did to them. Maybe that was just as well. Those.50-caliber rounds were designed to pierce things like engine blocks and armor plate. What they’d do to flesh and bones hardly bore thinking about.

Several plumes of greasy black smoke fouled the blue sky. Some were from burning Jap planes caught in their revetments. Others, Joe feared, came from downed Hellcats and Dauntlesses. You couldn’t do this for free, however much you wished you could.

As he climbed to make another strafing run, he got a good look at the craters pocking the runways. Even as he watched, another Hellcat shot up a bulldozer. One more cloud of smoke billowed up. Joe slammed his left fist into his thigh. One more ’dozer that wouldn’t make repairs. If the Japs had to fix this mess with picks and shovels, they’d need weeks, not days.

They’d need ’em, but they wouldn’t have ’em. The Marines and the Army were on the way.

“Boys, we have done what we came to do. Let’s go home and gas up and do it some more.” The exultant order kept Joe from heeling his fighter into another dive. He didn’t complain. They had indeed done what they’d come to do.

As he flew out over the north coast, bound for the Bunker Hill, he spotted another well-plastered airstrip down below. Haleiwa, he thought. That’s what the name of that one is. He grinned, there in the cockpit. Yeah, he knew the map, all right.

CARELESS OF-INDEED, OBLIVIOUS TO-his own safety, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo manned a machine gun near the edge of the Haleiwa airstrip. He blazed away at the American dive bombers attacking the strip-and at the fighters attacking anything around it that might make a target.

The machine gun, a Japanese weapon modeled after the French Hotchkiss, used metal strips of ammunition, not the more common belts. The loader was a Japanese groundcrew man who’d protested his unfamiliarity with the process. Shindo’s pistol, aimed at his forehead, proved amazingly persuasive. Whenever the machine gun ran dry, in went another strip of cartridges. Only the groundcrew man’s chattering teeth suggested he might want to be somewhere else.

One of the new American fighters-the same planes that had worked such fearful slaughter on Japan’s beloved Zeros-must have spotted Shindo’s tracers. On it came, straight at him, the machine guns in its wings winking balefully. He fired back, shoving down hard on the triggers till his gun unexpectedly fell silent.

“Give me another strip, you stinking son of a back-passage whore!” Lieutenant Shindo shouted.

The groundcrew man neither obeyed nor answered. Shindo glanced over to him. Bullets from the American plane’s machine guns chewed up the grass and dirt all around the machine gun. One of them had caught the unwilling loader in the face. The unfortunate man no longer had a face. Not much was left of the back of his head, either. His brains and scalp spattered Shindo’s coveralls.

Shoving the dead man aside, Shindo began feeding ammunition into the gun himself. That cut down his rate of fire. He did what he could, though, till the last American planes abandoned Haleiwa and headed out to sea.

Then he ran for the revetment that sheltered his Zero. Two planes nearby were burning, but his survived. He glanced back toward the runway. His mouth twisted. It was as cratered as the surface of the moon. The bulldozer that could have set things right in a hurry burned beside the runway. No one had thought to move it. Not even me, Shindo thought bitterly. And yet a bulldozer was, or should have been, as much a weapon of war as an airplane.

With or without the big, brutal machine, though, they had to get the airstrip ready as fast as they could.

“Prisoners!” he shouted. “Have we got a gang of prisoners anywhere close by?”

TAKEO SHIMIZU HAD RAPIDLY grown to hate the American rifle he carried. It wasn’t just that the Springfield was too long and too heavy for comfort. But he’d got used to all the places where his old Arisaka bumped his back when he carried it along. The Springfield hit none of them. It had its own places, and they drove him crazy-especially the one just above his kidney.

All the soldiers in his squad groused about their Springfields. He let them. If anything, he encouraged them. It gave them something to do as the northbound kilometers went by. People working in the rice paddies that had replaced sugarcane and pineapple fields paused to stare as the Japanese soldiers tramped by. The laborers-Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, whites-had to know what the big bombing attack meant, but no one had the nerve to do anything but stare. An open jeer, here, might have touched off a massacre.

Shimizu’s squad-and the rest of the regiment of which it was a part-were north of Wahiawa when he heard aircraft engines. His head came up like that of a hunting dog taking a scent. So did Senior Private Furusawa’s. “Now,” Shimizu said, “are those our planes or the enemy’s?”

Furusawa nodded. A moment later, he said, “The enemy’s! The roar is deeper than ours!”

They came out of the north. From the sea, of course, Shimizu thought. One second, they were tiny in the distance. The next… Shimizu just had time to shout, “Take cover!” before the big, blunt-nosed fighters opened up on the column of marching men.

There wasn’t much cover to take. Shimizu threw himself flat by the side of the road and hoped for the best. Bullets rattled off asphalt, thudded into the ground… and made wet, splashy noises when they struck flesh. When a couple of them struck flesh too close to the noncom, he decided any cover was better than none. He jumped into the closest rice paddy.

Even as he crouched in the water, he unslung the Springfield and held it up to keep the muddy water from fouling the rifle. Considering how much he disliked it, that proved how thoroughly orders about maintaining a clean weapon at all times had been beaten into him.

He was far from the only soldier who went into the paddies. Not all the men were as fastidious about their rifles as he was. Some even ducked their heads under the water as planes flew by at treetop height, guns blazing. Shimizu understood that, but he wouldn’t have wanted to do it himself. He assumed they fertilized the paddies here with night soil, the way they did in Japan and China.

Combat always seemed to last forever, even if in truth it was usually over in a hurry. This was hardly combat at all. Shimizu admired the handful of men who stood there and fired at the American planes. He admired them, yes, but without wanting to imitate them. The enemy here had things all his own way-and then he was gone, off to make misery somewhere else on Oahu.

Dripping and filthy, Shimizu dragged himself out of the rice paddy. Soldiers who’d flattened out and lived were getting to their feet, many of them with dazed expressions on their faces. Not all the men on the highway and by it were getting up again, though. Too many never would. The iron smell of fresh blood and the latrine stench of punctured bowels fouled the tropical air. Wounded men moaned. Bodies and pieces of bodies sprawled in ungainly postures. What had the Americans been firing? When one of those bullets hit a man, it tore him to pieces. The regimental physicians, those of them left alive, ran from one writhing soldier to another, doing what they could. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be enough.

“Forward!” called Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander. “We have to move forward! Are we going to defend this island against the American invaders or not?”

“Hai!” It was a ragged, shaken chorus, but a chorus nonetheless. Takeo Shimizu tried to ignore the wobble in his own voice when he joined it.

The American fighters strafed them again half an hour later, this time from behind. The Americans had to be flying home, back to the carriers that had brought them so close to Oahu. Where are our carriers? Shimizu wondered again. What’s happened to them? The enemy planes roared off to the north, leaving many more dead and maimed behind them. Wasn’t that answer enough?

Shimizu had come ashore on a north-facing beach, not two years earlier. Now he would have to keep the Yankees from doing the same. He didn’t think he would have to wait for them very long, either.

AFTER THE YUKIKAZE GOT INTO PEARL HARBOR, Commander Minoru Genda demanded a car to take him to Iolani Palace. The officers there laughed in his face. American bombers had left the harbor a shambles. If there were any running motorcars, they were reserved for people more important than a mere commander off a sunken ship.

He’d had to pull strings to get his hands on a bicycle. Pedaling hurt, but the ankle wasn’t broken. The Yukikaze’s doctor had assured him of that much, anyhow. With it tightly wrapped, he could manage. As he rolled east, he saw what the American bombers had done to Hickam Field. Many of the airplanes flying off it still survived, but the runways themselves were cratered wastelands that reminded him of the worst photos he’d seen of First World War battlefields. How soon before Japan could get those planes flying again? Soon enough to attack the enemy invasion fleet that was bound to come? He dared hope so, anyhow.

Hope, at the moment, was as much as he could do. Admiral Yamamoto had warned about this kind of U.S. response all along. The summer before, the Americans had tried to do it on the cheap, and they’d paid. And, all too plainly, they’d learned, and they’d worked. Had any of their factories and shipyards stood idle for even a moment from that day to this? Genda feared-yes, feared-not.

Honolulu itself hadn’t been hit so hard. Genda pedaled past a battered barracks hall, but the bombers hadn’t tried to knock the city flat. Had they wanted to, they could have done it. They’d spent their bombs more wisely, though-and then they’d flown off to Kauai! Somehow, somewhere, the Americans had managed to carve out a landing strip on the island right under Japan’s nose. With Oahu secured, the Japanese hadn’t worried much about the other main Hawaiian islands. That turned out to have been a mistake.

We can’t afford mistakes against the Americans, Genda thought unhappily. They’re liable to beat us even if we don’t make any. He didn’t think Rear Admiral Kaku had made any mistakes in the naval battle just past. That hadn’t kept Akagi and Shokaku from going down. Overwhelming numbers and munitions could defeat even the finest tactics. If we’d had twice as many carriers-Genda broke off. He knew the answer to that. We would have hurt the enemy more and lost all our ships anyhow.

Maybe-probably-the fundamental mistake had been going to war against the USA in the first place. But what else could Japan have done? Let FDR dictate what she could and couldn’t do in China? For a proud and touchy empire, that would have been impossible. He sighed. Sometimes a problem had only bad solutions.

Soldiers drilled on the Iolani Palace grounds. Some were King Stanley Laanui’s Hawaiians. Genda eyed them with more than a little worry. Would they really fight against the Americans? If they didn’t, they might prove dangerous. Maybe giving the puppet King of Hawaii even a toy army hadn’t been such a good idea.

Most of the men on the smooth green grass were Japanese, though. They weren’t Army men; they belonged to the special naval landing forces, and wore greenish uniforms rather than khaki and black leather rather than brown. “What will we do to the Americans?” shouted the Navy captain leading their exercises.

“Slaughter them!” the soldiers yelled back.

“Do our lives matter?” the officer asked.

“No, Captain Iwabuchi!” the men replied. “Our lives mean nothing! Dying gloriously for the sacred Emperor means everything!”

Genda was relieved to pull up in front of the entrance and let down the bike’s kickstand. It wasn’t that Captain Iwabuchi and his men were wrong-far from it. But Genda had more subtlety in him than the man in charge of the special landing forces. He sighed. Much good that subtlety had done him.

The Hawaiian guards at the bottom of the stairs and the Japanese at the top saluted him as he slowly and painfully ascended. “I must see General Yamashita and the king,” he told the Army lieutenant in charge of his countrymen. “At once.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant had seen him before, and knew who he was. He sent one of his men into the palace. The soldier returned a moment later. He nodded. So did the lieutenant. “Go on up to the general’s office, then.”

“Arigato gozaimasu.” After thanking the junior officer, Genda climbed the koa-wood staircase to the second story. He limped into the Yellow Room, where Tomoyuki Yamashita supervised the Japanese occupation of Hawaii.

Yamashita looked up from his paperwork. “Welcome, Genda-san,” he said. “Sit down-I can see you’re hurting. Tell me how bad it is.”

Genda gratefully sank into a chair. He gave the general a straight answer: “Sir, I don’t see how it could be any worse. We lost both carriers we sent against the enemy, and most of the supporting ships. The Americans will invade. The Army-and the special naval landing forces-will have to defeat him on the ground.” The cries of the special naval landing forces floated in through the open window. The soldiers sounded ferocious. What difference, if any, that would make…

Yamashita grimaced. “What went wrong, Commander? We won a great victory the last time the Yankees appeared in these waters.”

“Yes, sir-and we had one more carrier, and they had many fewer.” The sheer size of the aerial strike force that sank Akagi and Shokaku still stunned Genda. What it said about the fleet that sent it forth was even more intimidating. And the troopships behind that …

“Very well, Commander. We will do what we can to hold this island,” Yamashita said. “I am sure your Navy forces will help us. Captain Iwabuchi is nothing if not, ah, intrepid.” More shouts rang out from the special landing forces.

As far as Genda could tell, Iwabuchi was a bloodthirsty fanatic. Of course, even if he was, that wasn’t necessarily a drawback in a fighting man. “Between us, sir, can we beat back the Americans?”

“I don’t know. I intend to try,” Yamashita answered calmly. “Whatever we do, we buy time for our positions farther west to strengthen themselves. That was the whole point of this campaign in the first place, neh?”

“Yes, sir,” Genda said. “I’m afraid this won’t be as easy as fighting the Americans was the first time around.”

“We may fail,” Yamashita said. “Success or failure is karma. But no one will ever say we did not do everything we could to succeed.”

Genda didn’t see what he could say to that. He struggled to his feet and saluted. “Yes, sir. I had better go across the hall and brief his Majesty.” He spoke without audible irony; King Stanley might have someone who understood Japanese listening. You never could tell. Genda did ask, “How is morale among the Hawaiian troops?”

“It seems all right so far,” Yamashita replied. “We will use them in ways that appear most expedient.” Genda understood what that meant, though a listening snoop might not have. Yamashita planned to throw the Hawaiians into the meat grinder, to use them in place of Japanese soldiers where things were hottest. That would let the Japanese last longer and stretch further. Reinforcements from the home islands were, to put it in the most optimistic terms, unlikely.

King Stanley Laanui used King David Kalakaua’s library as his office. Now he sat behind the dreadnought of a desk that Genda had used with Mitsuo Fuchida and two Army officers to pick a sovereign to revive the Kingdom of Hawaii. (So far as Genda knew, none of the Japanese support ships had rescued Fuchida. He was gone, lost. He had to be. The certainty of it ate at Genda.).

The King of Hawaii looked up from whatever papers he’d been shuffling-or pretending to shuffle. Stanley Laanui was far from the most diligent administrator in the world. His eyes had always had heavy, dark pouches of flesh under them. Now they were bleary and tracked with red. When he said, “Hello, Commander Genda,” his breath was sweet-sour with the reek of the fruit spirit people here insisted on calling gin.

“Good day, your Majesty.” Speaking English, Genda had to be formal. He gave King Stanley a stiff, precise bow, refusing to show that the ankle troubled him.

“How bad is it?” the king asked. “It can’t be good, by God. You look like a cement mixer just ran over your puppy.”

“It… could be better, your Majesty.” Genda tried to hide how shocked he was. He’d willed his face and eyes to reveal nothing. That he’d failed so badly said how much he’d been through-and probably also said the King of Hawaii was shrewder than he looked. For a man having an affair with the king’s wife, that was less than welcome news.

King Stanley barked bitter laughter now. “If you say it could be better, it’s even worse than I thought. When are the Americans landing?”

“In the next few days, I think. So sorry.” One shock after another for Genda. If the king hadn’t taken him by surprise, he wouldn’t have answered so frankly.

“Christ!” Stanley Laanui burst out. “I thought I was kidding!” Those bloodshot eyes flicked back and forth like a hunted animal’s. “Can you beat them? Uh-can we beat them?”

“All we can do, we will do,” Genda said-a reply that sounded more promising than it was.

King Stanley, unfortunately, understood as much. “Jesus! What’ll they do if they catch me?” He put a fist by his neck and jerked it upward, turning his head to the side as if hanged.

Genda did his best to look on the bright side of things: “No American soldiers are here yet. Maybe we will beat back the landing. Maybe we will beat them on the ground here. Japanese soldiers are very brave.”

“Yeah, sure, Commander. I know that,” King Stanley said. Under his breath, he muttered something that sounded like, If pigs had wings… If that was a proverb, it wasn’t one Genda knew. The king gathered himself. “All right. We’ll do what we can to give you a hand. After all, it’s our necks, too, if the USA comes back.”

“Thank you, your Majesty. I knew you would stand by us.” Genda bowed his way out of the office. The really worrisome thing was that he was grateful for the sen’s worth of support the King of Hawaii had to give. Any port in a storm. That was an English proverb Genda did know.

As he stood in the hallway, a tiny Chinese cleaning woman, easily ten centimeters shorter than he was, slipped a little piece of paper into his hand. She was smooth as a stage magician; she didn’t even break stride as she walked past him. He opened it as he limped down the stairs. It had a number, nothing more. He folded it up and stuck it in a trouser pocket.

He got on the bicycle he’d managed to lay his hands on and rode around to the back of Iolani Palace. The guards at the stairs that led up and down there also saluted him. He absently returned the gesture as he went down into the basement.

The door that matched the number on the slip had a window set with wire-strengthened glass. Genda sighed to himself. Queen Cynthia wasn’t going to take any chances today. He didn’t suppose he could blame her, but he wished she would have. At least he would be able to speak freely behind the closed door. That too was release of a sort, though not the kind he craved.

Cynthia Laanui was more conscientious than her husband as well as more decorative. All the charities that moved food and medical supplies from hither to yon and tried to extract more ran through her. She really had done good work-and here she was, doing more. But she closed her fountain pen when Genda walked into her little office. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, she exclaimed, “I was afraid you weren’t coming back!”

So was I. But that was not a thought Genda would have shared with any woman-or with any man, unless he got drunk with a friend who’d gone through the same thing. “Here I am,” he said, bowing.

“Yes-here you are… and you came here in a destroyer.” Like any proper queen, Cynthia obviously had her spies. “Where is the Akagi?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes things go your way. Sometimes they go the enemy’s way.”

“What will you do?” she asked.

He couldn’t tell whether she meant him alone or the Japanese as a whole. The answer was the same either way: “Fight.”

Queen Cynthia’s gingery eyebrows leaped. “Can you win?” If they couldn’t win, she would face whatever the Americans chose to dish out to her husband and her. Whatever that was, Genda didn’t think it would be pretty. King Stanley could at least claim he was a Hawaiian trying to regain his country’s independence after half a century of U.S. occupation. It wouldn’t help, but he could claim it.

His wife, pure haole, couldn’t even offer that excuse. If the Americans won, they would probably reckon her a traitor to her race.

“We will do our best. We have won before,” Genda said: almost exactly what he’d told her husband.

“You’d better,” she said fiercely. If she led the little Hawaiian Army, it might well fight harder than it would under King Stanley.

Genda shrugged again. “Karma, neh?” After that, he found only one thing left to say: “Karma too that we fell in love, neh?”

“Yes,” Cynthia Laanui answered, and looked down at the desk. Was she remembering she was an American? She’d been willing, even eager, to forget when things were going better for Japan. Now… She looked up again. “What are we going to do? What can we do?”

He shrugged. “I do not know. Everything we can.” His own chances of living through the fighting ahead were anything but good. He didn’t tell her that-what was the point? No doubt she could see it for herself anyway. If he didn’t live, her chances were better if no one knew she’d been sleeping with the enemy. Of course, as queen to the Japanese puppet King of Hawaii, she faced long odds, too. He got to his feet to go, and bowed once more. “Good luck.”

“Same to you,” she said. “I used to have it, but it seems to be gone now.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He’d just got back on his bicycle when air-raid sirens began to wail. When he saw the swarms of American planes tearing up Hickam Field again, he feared Japanese luck in Hawaii was gone now, too.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE WAS DIGGING an antitank ditch north of Wahiawa when American planes roared by overhead. He wanted to laugh in the face of the worried-looking Jap guard who rode herd on him and his fellow POWs. He wanted to scream, All right, motherfucker! You had it your way for a while. Now see how you like taking it for a change!

He wanted to, but he didn’t. He didn’t get out of line at all, in fact. The Japs had been jumpy even before those planes came over. Fletch hadn’t known why, but their wind was up. They started beating people up for no reason. If you gave them trouble on purpose, you’d be lucky if they just shot you. They’d probably bayonet you and leave you to die slowly under the hot sun.

And yet… There were a hell of a lot of prisoners and not very many guards. Before, it hadn’t seemed to matter so much. The Japs were top dogs, and they knew it and so did the men they guarded. But if all of a sudden they weren’t guaranteed top dogs any more, an awful lot of Americans owed them plenty-and wanted to pay it back, with interest.

More fighters and bombers flew by. The noise of explosions not too far away said something-probably Wheeler Field-was catching hell again. Unlike the big, heavy bombers the day before, these planes were coming in low. “Son of a bitch,” Fletch said, staring up. “Son of a bitch.”

“What is it?” another POW asked.

“They changed the wing emblem on our planes,” Fletch answered. “They took out the red ball in the middle of the star. When did that happen?” What else had his country done while he wasn’t looking-couldn’t look? All at once, he felt like Robinson Crusoe, trapped on a desert island while the rest of the world went on about its business.

“No talk!” the closest Jap guard shouted. “Work!”

Like any POW, Fletch worked no harder than he had to. He doubted he weighed even 110 pounds. He had little strength and less stamina. The Japs didn’t care. A lot of the work they’d had the POWs do was designed more to wear out and destroy men than for serious military reasons.

No more. Fletch could see how this ditch would slow an armored attack. The mud of the rice paddies wouldn’t help tanks, either. The U.S. Army had done its best to fight when the Japanese invaded. Now the Japs were getting ready to do the same.

And they’re making me help them, the sons of bitches! Fletch wanted to scream it. Under the Geneva Convention, they weren’t supposed to make him do work like this. Since he was an officer, under the Geneva Convention he wasn’t required to work at all. Did the Japs care? Not even slightly.

“Work!” the guard yelled again, and bashed somebody in the side of the head with the butt end of his Arisaka. The luckless POW staggered and fell to his hands and knees. The guard kicked him in the ribs, and went on kicking him till he lurched upright once more. Blood running down his cheek, the prisoner dug out another spadeful of earth. He didn’t say a word. Complaining only got you deeper in Dutch. Keeping your head down as much as you could was a hell of a lot smarter.

It was most of the time, anyhow. Though Fletch obediently dug, he kept looking at that Jap guard out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t the only POW doing that, either-oh, no. Up till now, it had looked as if the Japanese would hang on to Hawaii indefinitely. That being so, you had to go along-at least some-to get along. But if this place would be under new management (or rather, the old management again) pretty soon…

Yeah, you slanty-eyed son of a bitch, I’ll remember your face in my nightmares for the rest of my days. Do you have nightmares now, you bastard? If you don’t, I bet you will pretty soon. Serves you right, too.

Along with glancing at the guard, Fletch also looked south toward Wahiawa. Jane was still okay. He’d seen her. He knew. Maybe they could patch things up again. If Hawaii returned to the old management, why not? Anything might be possible then, anything at all.