Pacific Glory

PROLOGUE

My son who wasn’t really my son steered the boat around the western edge of Ford Island, bringing into view the distant naval shipyard, its dock cranes festooned in blinking red aircraft-warning lights.

He was such a handsome young man, both hands on the wheel, big, tall, and spread-legged at the console, every inch the successful lawyer, husband, and father, confidently enjoying yet another of Oahu’s perpetually perfect evenings.

“Anywhere along here,” I called up to him from the drinking deck.

He put the thirty-six-footer into neutral, then reverse, and let her idle down to a stop about two hundred yards off the rusting, gull-splattered battleship moorings. A moment later, as she gathered bare sternway, he hit the button to drop the anchor, then shut down the engines. He went forward, checked the anchor, and joined me back aft. He topped up my Scotch and then his.

“I gave her full scope,” he said. “Deep here.”

“Good idea,” I said. “People forget — Pearl Harbor’s a drowned crater.”

He sat back in his deck chair, tipped his glass in a casual salud, and enjoyed my single malt. I tipped my claw in his direction and did the same. He frowned at my stainless steel appendage.

“They make such good prostheses these days,” he said. “I can’t believe you want to keep that thing.”

I smiled in the growing darkness. “Koa wood peg leg, surgical steel claw? Aa-a-r-r, matey. All I need is an eye patch, an insolent parrot, and a bit more hair. Make all the pretty girls shiver their timbers — and other things.”

He laughed. “Used to make us kids shiver, too,” he said, “but for different reasons.” He sipped some more Scotch, then put down his glass.

“So,” he said. “You’ve flown all the way out from the East Coast. Great to see you, as always, but what’s the occasion?”

“I need to give you some news and tell you a story,” I said.

He frowned again. Being a lawyer, he probably did that a lot. People rarely brought good news to a lawyer. “You’re okay?” he asked. “Mom? Health issues?”

“We’re fine,” I said. “Nothing like that. No, this goes back to the war, and even a few years before. First the news.”

“Okay,” he said expectantly.

I took a deep breath. “I need to make a confession of sorts, and to tell you a very personal story.”

“A confession?” he asked, frowning. He was a corporate law guy, and for just a second, he’d dropped back into professional character.

“Yeah,” I said, “but not about a crime. Like I said, this goes back to the war.”

He looked away for a moment, staring off across the dark reaches of the harbor, toward the reed swamps of the Waipio Peninsula and the baleful sodium vapor lights of the naval ammunition depot.

“Am I going to like this story?”

“You need to hear it. I’ll let you decide how you feel about it. Is there more of that Scotch in the locker?”

“The world’s supply,” he said, settling into his chair.

The world’s supply, I thought. His father used to say that.