Days of Infamy

XII

FLETCH ARMITAGE LOOKED longingly past the barbed wire surrounding Kapiolani Park. Waikiki was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Honolulu wasn’t much farther. If I could get past the wire…

Escape was a POW’s duty. He’d had that drilled into him. But even the Geneva Convention let garrisons that recaptured escaped prisoners punish them. And the Japs cared as much about the Geneva Convention’s rules as a bunch of drunks in a barroom brawl cared about the Marquis of Queensberry’s. They’d already made that very, very clear.

And so… Fletch looked. A mynah flew over the barbed wire. The scrounging was bound to be better on the other side. Fletch had never dreamt he could be so jealous of a stupid, noisy bird.

After a little while, he turned away. Contemplating freedom just hurt too much. He laughed, not that there was much to laugh about. In one sense of the word, there was no such thing as freedom anywhere in the Territory of Hawaii, and there hadn’t been since the surrender. In another sense… Fletch would gladly have traded places with anybody outside the camp. He didn’t think anybody out beyond the wire would gladly have traded with him.

He mooched back toward his tent. A slow Brownian motion was always on display in the camp. Some prisoners who had nothing else to do would drift toward the wire to get a glimpse of what things were like out beyond it. Others, having seen as much as they could stand, sadly drifted into the interior once more. You never could tell where any one man would be, but the traffic pattern hardly ever changed.

Here and there, POWs bent over a card game or a makeshift checkerboard or a race between two or three crawling bugs-anything to make the time go by. Most of the captives, though, just sat around letting it go by as it would. A lot of them were too hungry to have the energy for anything unessential. They came fully alive twice a day, at breakfast and supper, and banked their fires the rest of the time.

I’m not far from that myself. Fletch contemplated his own hand. He ignored the filth; nobody here could get as clean as he wanted. What he noticed were the bones and tendons thrusting up against the skin. The flesh that had softened his outlines melted off him day by day, leaving only the basics behind.

He saw the same thing on other men’s faces, which displayed more and more of the hard uplands of nose and cheekbones and chin as time went by. No doubt the same was true of his own mug, but he didn’t get to see that very often. Not seeing himself was a small mercy: in a place singularly lacking larger ones, something to cherish.

Ducking into the tent was another small mercy. If he stayed outside for very long, he burned. Oahu never got too hot, but sunlight here was fiercer than it was anywhere on the mainland because it was more nearly vertical. Back before the fighting started, he’d gone through a lot of zinc-oxide ointment. It hadn’t helped much, but nothing else had helped at all. Since then, he hadn’t had much choice. Some guys tanned almost native-Hawaiian brown. Fletch just scorched, over and over again.

He didn’t have to wait till after sundown to emerge, though thoughts of Bela Lugosi crossed his mind every now and then. The sun was sinking toward Waikiki as he came out to line up for supper. That was funny if you looked at it the right way; people in Honolulu often used Waikiki as a synonym for east, the same as they used Ewa for west. But now he’d moved far enough Waikiki of Honolulu that Waikiki was Ewa of him.

POWs gossiped in the chow line, almost as they would have back at Schofield Barracks. What energy they had came out now. They were hungry, but they knew they’d soon be… less hungry for a little while, anyway.

Somebody behind Fletch said, “Do the Japs really feed you better if you go out on a work detail?” Fletch pricked up his ears. He’d heard the Japs did that, too. They’d damn near have to. They couldn’t expect to get much work out of people who ate only the horrible slop they dished out here.

Another prisoner answered, “Yeah, they do, but only if you meet their work norms. And they set those fuckers so high, you do more shit to meet ’em than they give you extra food.”

“Sounds like the Japs,” the first man said.

Fletch found himself nodding. It sure as hell did. The Russians had a name for workers who went over their norms. Some of the left-wingers at Schofield Barracks had used it now and again. What the hell was it? Fletch scowled, trying to remember. Sta-something… He snapped his fingers. Stakhanovites, that was it!

Feeling smart was almost as good as feeling full. After supper, Fletch shook his head. Feeling full would have been better. But feeling smart was almost as good as feeling not quite so empty, which was the most camp rations could achieve.

After the morning count, a local Japanese came into camp and, speaking good English, did indeed call for volunteers for work details. He got them, more than he could use. Lots of men figured things were so bad here, they had to be better somewhere else.

Fletch wasn’t convinced. Here he ate next to nothing, but he also did next to nothing. If he ate a little more but did a lot more, wouldn’t he just waste away all the faster? That was how it looked to him.

The Japs had boasted about their victories in the Philippines and New Guinea. Taking Hawaii had let them run wild farther west, and had kept the United States from doing one damn thing about it. Fletch could see that very clearly. But the USA hadn’t given up. The B-25s that had visited Honolulu were proof of that. Sooner or later, he was convinced, the Americans would try to retake Hawaii. He wanted to be around when they did.

If that meant sitting around on his can doing very little and eating very little, then it did, that was all. He’d been in more than enough poker games to know that bucking the odds was the fastest way to lose. From where he sat, going out on a work detail looked to be bucking the odds. How many of those who went would come back? Ma Armitage hadn’t raised her boy to be a fool. Fletch hoped she hadn’t, anyway.

CORPORAL AISO WAGGED a finger in Takeo Shimizu’s face. “Be careful when you go out on patrol,” the veteran warned. “Something’s in the air. Don’t trust any of the locals. Don’t even trust the local Japanese. Some of them are like bananas.”

“Bananas?” Shimizu scratched his head.

Kiyoshi Aiso nodded. “Hai. Bananas. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. They may look like us, but they think like Americans.”

“Ah, so desu! Now I understand. Bananas!” Shimizu wondered who’d come up with that. It was pretty funny.

Aiso might have been reading his mind. “You may laugh now, but you won’t if you run into trouble. And don’t go wandering off by yourself or let your men do anything dumb like that. Somebody knocked a soldier over the head and stole his rifle the other day.”

“My men and I will be careful,” Shimizu promised. “Why did the Americans want a Japanese rifle? Even after all the sweeps we’ve done, I think this little island has more small arms on it than all of Japan put together.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aiso said. “Whoever slugged the soldier was probably after him first and took the rifle as an afterthought.”

Shimizu nodded. That made sense. He warned his squad the same way the older corporal had warned him. The men all looked attentive. He looked like that whenever a superior addressed him, too. He knew it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Half the time he’d been thinking about something else, no matter what his face said. Half the squad was likely to be thinking about something else now.

“Let’s go,” Shimizu barked, and off they went.

They made a fine martial spectacle, backs straight, helmets all just so, bayonets gleaming in the sun. Locals scrambled to get out of their way and bowed as they tramped past. People of Japanese blood did it right. The others? They obeyed the requirement, but they still didn’t really understand what they were doing.

Back and forth went Shimizu’s gaze. Trouble might come from anywhere, Aiso had said. If somebody’d been brave-or foolhardy-enough to take on a fully armed Japanese soldier, the other noncom was right, too. Shimizu wondered whether the attacker had killed the soldier. Shimizu hoped so, as much for the man’s sake as for any other reason. Anyone who suffered a disgrace like that was better off dead.

A policeman escorted a fisherman with a string of silvery fish along the street. Otherwise, he would have been a real candidate for getting clobbered. The policeman was white, the fisherman Japanese. Because of his job, the policeman retained the pistol he’d worn before Honolulu changed hands. But, like anyone else here, he bowed when the Japanese soldiers marched by.

Senior Private Furusawa said, “I still don’t like seeing Americans walking around with guns.”

“Policemen don’t worry me too much,” Shimizu said. “They’re watchdogs, not wolves. They’ll do what the people in charge of them tell them to do-and we’re the people in charge of them now.”

“Hai,” Furusawa said. That wasn’t agreement; it was only acknowledgment that he heard the corporal. Shimizu knew as much. He shrugged, ever so slightly. Furusawa didn’t have to agree with him. The senior private did have to stay polite, and he had.

Cars sat next to the curb, quite a few of them on flat tires. Hardly any rolled down the street these days; fuel was too short for that. Even seeing them immobilized, though, reminded Shimizu of how different Hawaii was from Japan. Honolulu wasn’t anywhere near as big as Hiroshima, but it boasted far more automobiles. They were perhaps the most prominent mark of American wealth.

The corporal shrugged again. Who cares how rich the Yankees were? We beat them anyway. They were easier to beat because they were rich. It made them soft. Men set above Shimizu had said that a great many times. They’d said it so often, they undoubtedly believed it. He wasn’t so sure. The Americans he’d fought hadn’t shown any signs of softness. They’d lost, but nobody could say they hadn’t fought hard.

Everything seemed quiet this morning. That was the idea behind patrolling. Marching through Honolulu, making the Japanese presence felt, was the best way to stop trouble before it started. Remind the locals that the Army was keeping an eye on them and they wouldn’t get gay. Leave them alone, and who could say what might happen?

A pretty woman with yellow hair bowed as the soldiers went by. The light cotton dress she wore covered much less of her than would have been proper back in Japan. Several of Shimizu’s men gave her a thorough inspection. He looked her over himself. If they decided to drag her into a building and enjoy her one after another, who could stop them? Nobody. The fright on her face as she bowed said she knew it, too.

“Keep going, you lugs,” Shimizu said. “Maybe another time.” A couple of the soldiers sighed, but they obeyed. Honolulu hadn’t been treated as roughly as Chinese towns were when they fell… and Shimizu, a good-natured man, preferred his women willing.

It was midafternoon when they headed back toward the barracks. Nothing much had happened on patrol, which didn’t break Shimizu’s heart. He approved of routine while he was prowling the streets. Anything that wasn’t routine was too likely to be messy and dangerous.

Getting back in the company of lots of Japanese soldiers felt good. It meant he didn’t have to look over his shoulder and wonder whether all hell would break loose when he rounded the next corner.

So he thought, anyway, till a freight-train noise in the air made him throw himself flat. His body recognized that sound before his mind did-and before the incoming shell burst less than a hundred meters away. Most of his men hit the dirt, too. Few who’d met artillery forgot it in a hurry.

Another shell crashed down by the barracks, and another, and another. Only after the third or fourth burst did Shimizu wonder where they were coming from. Out of the south, by the sound, but what lay south of Honolulu? The Pacific, nothing else.

“Submarine!” someone shouted, his voice half heard through the crashing impacts and the screams of wounded men.

Submarine! Shimizu swore. I should have thought of that myself. A sub could sneak close to shore, surface, use its deck gun against whatever it felt like shooting up, and then disappear under the sea again.

That had hardly crossed Shimizu’s mind before the shelling stopped. He cautiously raised his head, ready to flatten out again in a hurry if more rounds roared in. But the bombardment did seem to be over. He looked around. The men in his own squad were scrambling to their feet. None of them seemed more than scratched.

Not all the Japanese by the barracks were so lucky. Injured soldiers went on shrieking their pain up to the uncaring tropical sky. And others weren’t men at all any more, but disjointed chunks of meat. Someone’s foot lay only a couple of meters from Shimizu. The body from which the foot had come was nowhere to be seen. Men who hadn’t been hurt started bandaging their comrades and tying off bleeding wounds with tourniquets to try to keep people alive till doctors could see to them.

The barracks had taken a beating, too. Windows were shattered. Walls had holes in them. The building didn’t seem to be burning. Shimizu wondered why. Dumb luck was the only thing that occurred to him.

He looked out toward the ocean. He saw no submarine, but it wouldn’t have surfaced for a second longer than it had to. It was bound to be underwater now, crawling away after striking its blow.

A few minutes later, airplanes started buzzing over the ocean south of Honolulu. One of them dropped a stick of bombs-or would they be depth charges? Even distant explosions set Shimizu’s nerves on edge. He wondered whether that pilot had really seen something or was blowing things up just to be blowing them up. Either way, he’d never know.

Shiro Wakuzawa came up to him. Sounding surprisingly cheerful, the youngster said, “One good thing, Corporal-san.”

“What?” Shimizu asked. “What could be good about a mess like this?”

“Simple, Corporal: it’s not our fault,” Wakuzawa answered. “Whatever they do, they can’t blame this on us poor soldiers. The Navy? Hai. Us? Iye.” He shook his head. “If they can’t blame it on us, they can’t make us wallop each other on account of it.”

“You hope they can’t, anyway. If they want to bad enough, they can do whatever they please,” Shimizu said. Private Wakuzawa looked alarmed-and had reason to. Shimizu went on, “But I think you’re right. This one’s the Navy’s fault. I’m glad I’m in khaki right now.”

WHEN GENERAL YAMASHITA summoned Captain Tomeo Kaku to Iolani Palace to confer with him, Captain Hasegawa’s replacement asked-ordered, really-Minoru Genda to accompany him. Genda understood that. He sympathized with it. His superior was brand-new here, and naturally wanted someone along who sympathized with his side of things, to say nothing of someone famous for having facts at his fingertips.

All the same, Commander Genda could have done without the honor.

Had the Navy sunk the American submarine, things wouldn’t have been so bad. The enemy would have paid for his daring. But there was no sign that the Yankees had paid even a sen. That one flier had bombed what he thought was a sub. Afterwards, though, there’d been no oil slick and no floating debris. Odds were he’d attacked a figment of his excited imagination.

Up the stairs to the palace entrance trudged Captain Kaku. He was a stumpy man with bulldog features, less friendly and casual than Hasegawa. One pace to the rear, one pace to the left, Commander Genda followed him. The guards-Army men-at the top of the stairs gave grudging, halfhearted salutes. They weren’t quite insolent enough to be called on it, but their attitude still stung. They might as well have shouted that Navy men deserved no better.

Kaku affected not to notice. Because he chose to do that, Genda had to match his self-control. It wasn’t easy. Despite his slight stature, Genda was a fiercely proud man.

“What can we do?” Kaku murmured as they walked into the entry hall. “We deserve to be mocked. First those bombers, and now this!” He let out a long, sad sigh. He’d taken over for Captain Hasegawa only the day before the submarine raid, but plainly saw it as his fault.

They went up the koa-wood staircase to King Kauakala’s Library. The last time Genda was in the room, he and Mitsuo and Fuchida and a couple of Army officers had asked Princess Abigail Kawananakoa if she wanted to become Queen of Hawaii. As far as Genda knew, plans for reviving the monarchy hadn’t gone any further after she said no. Someone needed to keep working on that. Other potential sovereigns were out there.

But the monarchy could wait. Now Major General Tomoyuki Yamashita sat behind King Kauakala’s ponderous desk. Yamashita was a ponderous man himself, and only looked more massive looming over that formidable piece of furniture. He had set one chair in front of the desk, intending to leave Captain Kaku out there alone and vulnerable to take whatever he felt like dishing out.

The general shot Genda a baleful glance. Genda wondered whether Yamashita would order him out or make him stand. By Yamashita’s scowl, he was thinking about one or the other. But he must have decided either would have been too raw. Grudgingly, he pointed to another of the leather-backed chairs against the wall. Genda set it beside the one meant for Captain Kaku. The two Navy officers sat down together.

“Well?” Yamashita growled. “What do you bunglers have to say for yourselves?”

“If it weren’t for our ‘bungling,’ sir, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are right now,” Genda said.

Now Yamashita looked at him as if he were a bug in the rice bowl. “If that submarine had decided to aim for this building, I could have been killed sitting where I am right now.”

“I am very sorry about that, General,” Captain Kaku said. “Submarines are hard to detect and hard to hunt. That makes them good for nuisance raids like the one the other day. I am glad the boat did not turn its gun this way.”

Genda wouldn’t have missed General Yamashita. He didn’t think Kaku would have, either. The forms had to be observed, though. Too much truth was destructive of discipline.

“How do you propose to make sure this sort of outrage doesn’t happen again?” Yamashita demanded. “Aside from the damage it does, look at the propaganda it hands the Americans.”

“So sorry, General,” Kaku repeated. The Americans had handed Yamashita a stick, and he was using it to beat the Navy.

“We are increasing patrols, sir,” Genda put in. “The new Kawanishi H8K flying boats will help. They have much longer range and greater endurance than the H6Ks they’re replacing. We’re flying them out of the Pearl City base that the Yankees set up for their Pan American Clipper planes.”

“There are no guarantees, sir,” Kaku added, “but they do have a better chance than anything else we’ve got.”

“They’re heavily armed, too,” Genda said. “If they spot a sub, they also have a good chance of sinking it.” He paused for some quick mental calculations, then nodded to himself. “They might even be able to reach the U.S. mainland from here. That would pay the Yankees back for what they did to us. If we could drop bombs on San Francisco, say…”

He’d captured Yamashita’s imagination. He’d hoped he could. “Could they get there and back?” the general asked.

“It would be right on the edge of their range if they took off from here,” Genda answered. “They could do it more easily if we had a submarine out in the Pacific to refuel them.”

“Could you arrange that with Tokyo?” Yamashita asked, suddenly eager.

Genda and Kaku looked at each other. Neither one smiled. “Possibly,” Kaku said. “It might take some persuading, but possibly. If you would add your voice, Yamashita-san, that would be bound to help.” Genda still didn’t smile, though how he didn’t he couldn’t have said. After what the Americans had done here, Tokyo would leap at the chance to strike back. He was sure of that. Regaining lost face would appeal to the Navy and Army both.

Major General Yamashita nodded. “You may be sure that I will.”

Once Captain Kaku and Genda were out on the lawn outside the palace, the new skipper of the Akagi did smile, in relief. “That went better than I hoped it would,” he said. “Thank you very much, Commander.”

“My pleasure, sir,” Genda answered with a polite bow.

JIM PETERSON DIDN’T need long after volunteering for an outside work detail to realize he’d made a mistake. He’d thought nothing could be worse than the POW camp by Opana. That only proved he’d been sadly lacking in imagination.

He and his fellow suckers were set to work repairing a stretch of the Kamehameha Highway. The Japs had graders and bulldozers. If they hadn’t brought their own, they had the ones they’d captured here. They didn’t want to use them. Maybe they were short on fuel. Maybe they just wanted to find a new way to give their prisoners hell. The whys didn’t really matter. The what did.

The POWs had picks and shovels and hods and mattocks and other hand tools. They broke rock. They carried rock. They flattened chunks of rock till they had a roadway. At first, they’d all been eager to show the Japs what they could do. That hadn’t lasted long. Soon sense prevailed, and they started doing as little as they could get away with.

That didn’t mean they didn’t work. Oh, no-far from it. The Jap guards were harder on them than the whip-cracking overseers in Gone with the Wind were on the slaves. Peterson had no trouble figuring out why, either. If a slave died, his owner was out a considerable investment. If a POW died here… well, so what? Plenty more where he came from.

There was more food at the start and end of each day. Nobody could have done hard physical labor on what the Japs fed POWs in camp. Trouble was, there wasn’t enough more food to make up for the labor the men on the work detail did. Every day, Peterson’s ribs seemed to stand out more distinctly.

And he had to keep an eye on everybody else in his shooting squad. The Jap who’d come up with that scheme had to be a devil who got up and sharpened his horns every morning the way ordinary men shaved. If anybody took off for the tall timber, the whole squad bought the farm. You couldn’t believe the Japs were kidding, either. They’d shoot nine guys because one had run. Hell, they’d laugh while they were doing it, too.

Peterson particularly worried about a fellow named Walter London. London had been skinny the first time Peterson set eyes on him back in the camp. Unlike most POWs, he hadn’t got any skinnier. He was an operator, a guy who could come up with things like cigarettes or aspirins… for a price, always for a price. He looked out for number one-and there was no number two in his book. That made him dangerous. He wouldn’t care what happened to the rest of the shooting squad, not if he’d disappeared over the horizon before anybody knew he was gone.

Everybody watched him. Everybody watched everybody else, but everybody especially watched him. He noticed, of course. Only a fool wouldn’t have. Walt London might have been-probably was-a slimy son of a bitch, but he was nobody’s fool. One morning, he asked, “How come I can’t even take a dump by myself without somebody handing me some leaves to wipe my ass?”

The other members of the shooting squad looked at one another. For a few seconds, nobody seemed to want to take the bull by the horns. Then Peterson did: “That way, we know we’ll have the pleasure of your company after you pull up your pants, Walter.”

London donned a look of injured innocence. He might have practiced in front of a mirror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Now Peterson’s voice went cold and flat. “You lie like a wet rag. Anybody with two brain cells to rub together would know what I’m talking about. You may be a bastard, but you’re not a jerk. If you start pretending you are, is it any wonder nobody trusts you?”

“I’m not gonna bail out on you guys,” London protested.

“See? You did know what I was talking about after all. How about that?” Peterson’s sarcasm flayed. Walter London turned red. Peterson didn’t care. He drove his point home: “But you’re right. You’re not gonna bail out, because we’re not gonna let you. If you get away, you kill all nine of us. But if you try and get away and we catch you, you don’t need to worry about the Japs. We’ll goddamn well kill you ourselves. Isn’t that right, boys?”

He got nods from the rest of the shooting squad. He wore only the corporal’s stripes he’d earned not long before the American defense on Oahu collapsed. But he still talked like an officer. He knew how to lead. The others responded to that, even if they didn’t quite know what they were responding to.

Hate blazed from Walter London’s eyes. Peterson looked back at him with nothing at all in his own. London wilted-under the hate lay fear. “Honest to God, I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

Push him too hard now, Peterson judged, and he might bolt for the sake of getting everybody else shot. With a broad, insincere smile of his own, Peterson said, “Okay. Sure thing.”

Later, one of the other men in the shooting squad, a PFC named Gordy Braddon, sidled up to him and said, “That asshole still wants to cut out on us.”

“Yeah, I know,” Peterson said. “We’ll watch him. If he does try and disappear, we’ll nab him, too. I’m not about to let a punk like that put me in my grave.”

Braddon had tawny hair, a long-jawed face, and an accent that said he came from Kentucky or Tennessee. His chuckle sounded distinctly cadaverous. “You bet you won’t, on account of the Japs won’t bother throwin’ you in one if they shoot you ’cause London goes south.”

“All the more reason not to let him, then,” Peterson said. Braddon chuckled again and slipped away.

Nights were bad. The rest of the shooting squad had to keep watch on Walter London. That meant giving up part of their own sleep when they were desperately weary. London proved how shrewd he was. If he’d kept complaining and kicking up a fuss, the other men would have been sure they were doing the right thing. He didn’t. He didn’t say boo, in fact. He just slept like a baby himself. He might have been saying, If you want to waste your time, fine. Go ahead. I don’t intend to waste mine. That was a damned effective way to take revenge.

Fighting to keep his own eyes open, watching the other POWs snoring away in the middle of the night, Peterson hated him right back. If London were square, he wouldn’t have needed to waste his time like this. Yeah, and if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.

He felt the exhaustion less in the nighttime than he did the next day. One morning when he was particularly frazzled, Braddon handed him three or four small, greenish fruits-they couldn’t have been much above the size of his thumbnail-and said, “Here. Chew on these.”

Peterson did. They were bitter enough to make his face pucker up. “What the hell are they?” he asked, wondering if the other man was playing a nasty practical joke on him.

“Coffee beans,” Braddon answered. “Stuff grows wild here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Peterson let the juice run down his throat. Sure as hell, his heart started beating faster and his eyes opened up. Admiringly, he asked, “How the devil did you recognize ’em?”

“My ma kept tryin’ to grow ’em in Memphis,” Braddon said. “Didn’t work. Winters are mild, but they aren’t that mild. Every time we got a hard frost, it’d kill ’em off. But she kept after it, Ma did. Hell, for all I know, she’s still tryin’.”

“Damn,” Peterson said reverently. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had coffee. Not too long after December 7-he was sure of that. Since he’d gone so long without, the stuff kicked him hard now, almost like Benzedrine. He felt like a new man, and the new man felt ready to go out there and bust his ass. It wouldn’t last-he was sure of that-but he’d make the most of it while it was there.

FLYING ABOARD ONE of the three Kawanishi H8Ks that droned east and north through the darkness awed Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. Part of his excitement was over the mission. The Americans had dared to strike at Hawaii from the air. Now Japan would pay the same kind of visit to the U.S. mainland.

Some good kami must have taken hold of Minoru Genda’s tongue when he proposed the raid to General Yamashita. It was the perfect way to pay the Yankees back for their insolence. As soon as Fuchida heard about it, he knew he had to come along. And here he was, heading straight for North America.

The rest of the awe was devoted to the plane in whose copilot’s seat he flew. The H8K was, quite simply, the best flying boat in the world, and nothing else came close. The airplane was about three-quarters the size of one of the China Clippers that had traveled from the U.S. West Coast to Hong Kong and Macao, but it was half again as fast as they were. It cruised at better than 320 kilometers an hour, and could get up over 460 at top speed.

It packed a wallop, too. Along with the bombs waiting in the bomb bay, it carried five 20mm cannon and five more machine guns. Any U.S. fighter that jumped an H8K was liable to get a very nasty surprise. Not only that, the flying boat, unlike a lot of Japanese planes, was well protected, with self-sealing fuel tanks in the hull and a good fire-extinguishing system. As far as Fuchida could see, the designers had thought of everything.

He said as much to the pilot, who sat to his left. Lieutenant Kinsuke Muto grinned a crooked grin. “Oh, they did, Fuchida-san,” Muto said. “The only trouble was, it took them a while, or the plane would have been in service a long time ago.”

“I heard something about this last year, but not too much,” Fuchida said. “I was busy training for the Hawaii operation. Tell me more, please.”

“Busy? I’ll bet you were, sir-just a little.” Muto laughed out loud, then went on, “Well, you know we wanted something better than the H6K: faster, with longer range, and a plane that wouldn’t catch fire the first time a bullet came anywhere near it.” He laughed again, not that it was funny; attacks against the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea had shown that the H6K turned into a torch when the enemy started shooting at it.

Fuchida leaned forward in his seat to lay a gentle hand on the instrument panel in front of him. “We have what we wanted, too.”

“Hai. We do-now.” Lieutenant Muto stressed the last word. “But it wasn’t easy. The first flight tests showed the beast was unstable at takeoff and a disaster on the water generally. They had to do a total redesign on the lower hull, and it set them back for months.”

“Ah, is that what the trouble was?” Fuchida said. “I knew there was a delay, but I don’t think I ever heard why. It was worth waiting for, though-the plane handles beautifully on the water now. I saw that when we took off from Pearl City.”

Muto snorted. “Hardly a tough test, sir. The water inside Pearl Harbor is going to be calm, no matter what. But wait till you see this baby out on the open ocean. It’s just as good there.”

“You know best,” Fuchida said. He had a hasty familiarization with the H8K. He’d been bound and determined to come on this mission, but he hadn’t wanted to be dead weight while he was along.

The radioman brought tea to Fuchida and Muto. He hesitated for a moment, wondering which man to serve first: Fuchida had the higher rank, but Muto sat in the pilot’s chair. The two of them pointed to each other. They both laughed.

“Give it to Muto-san,” Fuchida said. “He’s the captain of this ship. I’m just excess baggage.”

Muto took a cup of tea. A moment later, Fuchida had one, too. He looked out the window. There was nothing much to see: only black ocean below and dark blue sky above. He couldn’t spot the other two flying boats. He was in the leader, while they trailed his plane to either side.

After sipping, Fuchida asked, “How long till we reach the mainland?”

“Another couple of hours,” Lieutenant Muto answered. “Long before then, though, we’ll use the Yankees’ radio stations to home in on our target.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Fuchida nodded. “I did the same thing with the Honolulu stations when we hit Pearl Harbor. They even told me the weather was good.”

“That must have been handy. You speak English, then?” Muto said.

“I speak some, yes,” Fuchida told him. “And it was very handy. I’d been wondering how to find out what sort of cloud cover they had down there. It would have made a difference in how high we flew. I’d been wondering-and the Americans went and told me.”

“I hope they do it again. San Francisco can be a foggy town, I hear,” Muto said. “I don’t want to have to drop my bombs any old place. I want to hit something worthwhile in the harbor there.”

“Don’t worry. The Americans will be chattering away,” Fuchida promised. “They don’t have anything that can reach Hawaii from the mainland and get back, so of course they won’t think we have anything that can reach the mainland from Hawaii.”

Lieutenant Muto grinned at him. “Surprise!”

“Hai.” Mitsuo Fuchida grinned back.

On they went. The throbbing of the four Mitsubishi fourteen-cylinder radial engines seemed to penetrate Fuchida’s bones. He flew the plane for a couple of minutes when Muto got up to answer a call of nature. He knew he’d be doing more on the way back. Even in a speedy H8K, San Francisco was ten hours from Honolulu. He held course and altitude. That he could do, and do well enough. He wouldn’t have wanted to be at the controls if American fighters attacked the flying boat, or if he had to put it down at sea.

Muto returned and took over again. Fuchida leaned back in his chair. He could doze if he wanted to. He did for a while, to stay fresh for the return flight. Then the radioman hurried up with something written on a scrap of paper. The number had to be the new course for San Francisco. Muto glanced down at it, nodded, murmured, “Arigato,” and swung the plane’s nose a little to the north.

“Our navigation was pretty good,” Fuchida said, seeing how small a correction he made.

“Not bad,” Muto agreed. He pointed out through the forward window. “Demons take me if that’s not the California coast.”

Sleepiness fell from Fuchida like a discarded cloak. He leaned out and peered into darkness. Sure enough, those lights ahead marked the edge of land-the edge of a continent dreaming it was immune from war. He laughed softly. “This is what the Americans call blackout.”

“They’ll get better at it once we’ve been here and gone, I expect.” Muto laughed, too. “Of course, that will be a little too late.”

Fuchida had heard that German submarines were having a field day sinking freighters silhouetted against the bright lights of the U.S. East Coast. He hadn’t known whether to believe it. He did now.

A few minutes later, the flying boats approached San Francisco from the south. An English phrase occurred to Fuchida: lit up like a Christmas tree. The city probably wasn’t so bright as it would have been in peacetime, but it was plenty bright enough. Fuchida said, “The harbor is on the eastern side of the city, on the bay, not here by the ocean.”

“Yes, I know,” Muto answered, and then spoke over the intercom to the bombardier: “Are you ready? We are going into the bombing run.”

“Ready, yes, sir.” The reply sounded in Fuchida’s earphones as well as Muto’s.

Nobody on the ground paid any attention to the three flying boats. No searchlights tried to spear them. No antiaircraft fire came up at them. If anyone had any idea at all that they were there, he had to assume they belonged to the USA. A street that ran diagonally through the heart of San Francisco guided them straight to the harbor.

Not even the piers with warships tied up alongside them were properly blacked out. Fuchida grinned. We’ve caught them napping again, he thought. But then the grin slipped. Two could play at this game-the Yankee B-25s and the U.S. submarine had surprised the Japanese in Hawaii.

“Bombs free!” the bombardier exclaimed. The H8K grew livelier as it got lighter, but to a much smaller degree than Fuchida’s B5N1 had over Pearl Harbor. The flying boat was a far heavier plane. Fuchida hoped the other two Japanese aircraft were also bombing. He couldn’t tell. He had a good forward view, but not to the side or behind.

Lieutenant Muto swung the flying boat in a sharp turn back toward Hawaii. “I think, Fuchida-san, we’ve just worn out our welcome,” he said.

“Hai. Honto,” Fuchida agreed gravely.

“Hits! We have hits!” That wasn’t the bombardier-it was the rear gunner, who manned the 20mm cannon in the tail turret. Of all the crew, he had the best view of what was going on behind the H8K. A moment later, he added, “The other two planes still have bombs left. They’re unloading them on the city.”

“Good. Very good,” Muto said. “The Americans think they’re immune from war. They need to learn they’re not.”

After the flying boats dropped their bombs, a few antiaircraft guns did start shooting. None of the bursts came anywhere near the Japanese planes. Lieutenant Muto whooped exultantly. So did the radioman. As the California coast vanished behind the H8Ks, he said, “The Yankees will never catch us now!”

Mitsuo Fuchida was less sure of that than his comrades. They didn’t know about the interrogations of the U.S. soldiers from the strange installation near Opana. The USA had a way to track planes through the air electronically. Fuchida gathered his own country was also working on such devices, but Japan didn’t have them up and running yet. If one was operating anywhere near San Francisco, it might guide fighters after the flying boats.

He shrugged. If that happened, it happened. Even if it did, fighters wouldn’t have an easy time finding the H8Ks in the darkness. And the Japanese planes, though slower and less maneuverable than U.S. fighters, were armed well enough to give a good account of themselves.

The danger of pursuit shrank with each passing minute. Fighters had only limited range. If they wanted to get home again, they couldn’t go too far out to sea. The flying boats, on the other hand…

Muto leaned back in his seat. “Copilot, would you like to hold this course for a few hours and let me grab a little sleep?”

“Of course. My pleasure.” Fuchida admired the smooth way Muto gave orders to a superior officer.

“Good. Domo arigato,” Muto said. “Wake me at once if there’s any trouble, of course, or when the radioman picks up the signal from the I-25.”

“I’ll do that,” Fuchida promised, most sincerely. Yes, indeed, trying to land the flying boat on the Pacific was the last thing he wanted to do. Muto closed his eyes. He started snoring inside a few minutes. Fuchida admired him again, this time for his coolness.

Fuchida kept an eye on the compass and the airspeed indicator and the altimeter. He held the course Muto had given him. Every minute put San Francisco five and a half kilometers farther behind the flying boat, Honolulu five and a half kilometers closer. Too bad so many kilometers lay between them.

He was proud that their navigation to the U.S. mainland had worked out so well. The flight wouldn’t have been easy by daylight, let alone with most of it at night. Fuchida laughed. Three Japanese flying boats would have got a rather warmer reception if they’d appeared over San Francisco with the sun still in the sky.

In any case, the round trip between Honolulu and San Francisco was about twenty hours. Without a layover-again, unlikely! — much of it had to be by night.

After about three and a half hours, Lieutenant Muto yawned and stretched and opened his eyes. He looked over at Fuchida and asked, “How is everything?”

“Fine,” Fuchida answered. “We were going on to the Panama Canal from San Francisco, weren’t we?”

“The Panama Canal?” Muto’s eyes flashed to the compass. Only after he made sure of the course did he laugh. “You know how to wake a fellow up in a hurry, don’t you, Commander?”

“I try,” Fuchida said. Lieutenant Muto clucked in mock reproach and shook his head. Though Fuchida had been joking, he couldn’t help looking back toward the southeast. The Panama Canal lay in that direction. If Japan could put it out of action, that would be a tremendous blow to the USA. If the Americans had to ship everything around South America…

Regretfully, he shook his head. The Panama Canal was more than twice as far from Honolulu as San Francisco was: out of range even for an H8K. The Canal would be well defended, too, and the Americans would move heaven and earth to repair whatever damage it suffered. Attacking it was nice to think about. So was making love to a beautiful movie actress. In real life, neither was likely to be practical.

Little by little, the sky began to grow light. They were flying away from the sunrise, which slowed it, but it came anyway. Even when dawn did arrive, though, there was nothing to see but sky above and an endless expanse of ocean below. Fuchida checked the fuel gauge. They’d filled every tank to overflowing before takeoff. Even so, they didn’t have enough left to get back to Honolulu.

Half an hour later, the radioman’s voice sounded in Muto’s earphones, and in Fuchida’s: “I have the signal from the I-25! ”

“Ichi-ban! ” Muto exclaimed. The relief in his voice said he must have been watching the needle drop toward empty, too. “What is the bearing?”

“Sir, we’re going to need to swing south about five degrees,” the radioman replied. “We’ll all keep our eyes peeled after that. By the strength of the signal, I don’t think we’re very far away.”

“Pass the word to the other planes on the low-power circuit,” Muto said. “No one’s likely to pick it up here, and no one’s likely to be able to do anything about it even if he does.”

“Hai,” the radioman said.

A crewman on one of the other flying boats first spotted the surfaced submarine. His radioman passed the word to Fuchida’s H8K and the third one. Then Fuchida and Muto both pointed out the window at the same time. Muto brought the flying boat down to the water. Spray kicked up from the hull as it landed. Suddenly, its motion took on a new character. For a plane, it had an excellent hull. For a boat… Fuchida gulped. I am a good sailor, he told himself sternly.

Muto taxied up alongside the I-25. Sailors on the sub’s deck waved to the flying boat. “How did it go?” somebody shouted. Muto and Fuchida waved and grinned. The sailors clapped their hands. They yelled, “Banzai! ”

Then they got down to business. The I-25 carried fuel for the last leg of the flying boats’ return to Honolulu. Two sailors in a boat ran a hose from the submarine to the H8K. Fuchida listened to fuel flowing into the tanks. When the plane had enough to get back to Honolulu, the sailors disconnected the hose.

Muto taxied out of the way. The other two flying boats refueled in turn. When all three had got what they needed, the submarine sailed away. Fuchida breathed a silent sigh of relief when the H8Ks got airborne once more after long takeoff runs that put him in mind of geese sprinting along the surface of a lake before they could get airborne. The flying boats had been hideously vulnerable as they bobbed on the surface of the Pacific. Now they were in their proper element again, and could take care of themselves.

They came back to the Pan American Clipper base about four in the afternoon. Japanese officers waited for them as if they really were tourists coming to Hawaii from the West Coast of the USA. Applause and shouts of, “Banzai! ” greeted them as they got out of the planes.

“Radio in the United States is going mad!” a signals officer yelled. “The Yankees are saying this was as big an embarrassment as Pearl Harbor!”

Fuchida and Muto bowed to each other. Then they both yawned. Together, they started to laugh.

COMPASSIONATE LEAVE WAS the last thing Joe Crosetti wanted. But here he was, tearing across the country on the fastest trains he could get. Most of the bombs the Japs had dropped on San Francisco came down on the harbor or near it. As they were leaving, though, they’d emptied their racks-and one of those afterthoughts had landed on the house where Uncle Tony and Aunt Maria and their four kids lived. One of the kids was still alive, though he’d lost a leg. He’d been blown into a tree across the street, which doubtless saved his life. The rest of the family? Gone.

In the harbor, the Japs had damaged a cruiser, a destroyer, and two freighters, and they’d sent another freighter to the bottom. Nobody’d laid a glove on them, not so far as anyone could tell. They’d come out of the night, done their dirty work, and then disappeared again.

To Joe, the ships mattered much less than his family. Had his aunt and uncle’s house not been hit, he might have given the enemy grudging credit for a nice piece of work. Not now. Now the war was personal. He did want to string up the San Francisco civil-defense authorities, who must have been asleep at the switch when the Japs came in. Had they had their radar on? Had they watched it if they had? Not likely, not by what had happened.

No one paid any special attention to him as he rolled west across the country. Men in uniform were a dime a dozen. More were soldiers than sailors, and more sailors were ratings than officers, but Joe wasn’t unusual enough to draw notice. That suited him fine. He preferred being alone with his thoughts.

His own family lived only a few blocks from what had been Uncle Tony’s house. The bomb could have blown up his mom and dad as easily as his aunt and uncle. He couldn’t see anything but dumb luck that had kept it from doing just that-and there was a thought he would rather not have had.

His train got into the Southern Pacific station at First and Broadway in Oakland at two in the morning on the day of the funeral. His father waited on the platform for him. Dad was in his usual fisherman’s dungarees; he wouldn’t change to a suit till later.

They embraced. Dad hadn’t shrunk, exactly, but he seemed frailer than he had before Joe started flight training. Joe didn’t stop and think how much more muscle he’d added since then; he wasn’t built like a middle infielder any more.

His father kissed him on the cheek, saying, “Good to see you, boy. I wish it wasn’t for something like this.”

“Jesus, so do I!” Joe said. “Those dirty, stinking bastards. I-”

“You go pay ’em back, that’s all,” his father said. “Those other pilots, they can yell, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’ when they give the Japs what-for. You, you yell, ‘Remember Tony and Maria and Lou and Tina and Gina!’-and Paul, too, dammit!”

“I will,” Joe said. “I’ve got a picture of ’em in my wallet. Whenever I go up, it goes up with me.” He wished he were flying planes hotter than the sedate trainers at Pensacola. You had to crawl before you could walk and walk before you could run, but he wanted to run like Jesse Owens-run right at the Japs and run right over them.

“Okay, Joey.” His father set a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, then. I’ll take you back to the house. That all your stuff?”

“Yeah.” Joe slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. “They teach us to travel light.” He yawned. “I’d like to sleep for about a week when I get home.”

“Funeral’s at ten,” Dad warned.

“I know. I’ll want to take a bath, too.” After so long on the train, Joe felt grubby all over. “Be nice to get in the tub for a change. I haven’t had anything but showers since I went back East.”

At that hour, the parking lot was almost empty. Next to no traffic was on the roads. They went back to San Francisco on the Bay Bridge. Joe remembered the hoopla with which it had opened in 1936. It was a hell of a lot more convenient than the ferry that had linked San Francisco and the East Bay. It would have been, anyhow, if they could have gone faster than the crawl the new, strict blackout regulations imposed.

Something else occurred to Joe. “You all right for gas, Dad?” He hadn’t paid much attention to gas rationing since becoming a cadet. He didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t his worry.

His father shrugged. “It’ll be okay. And this-this is more important than crap like that.” Joe bit his lip and nodded.

He was damned if he could figure out how his old man navigated in the pitch blackness. Masking tape covered all but the narrowest strip of headlights. What was left didn’t let you see far enough to spit. Dad managed, though. He didn’t clip any of the other cars groping their way through the night, and he got back to the house with no wrong turns anywhere.

After months of bunks and cots, Joe’s bed seemed ridiculously soft. Lying down on it made him feel like a kid, as if he’d shed years. He wondered if the ticking of the alarm clock on the nightstand would bother him. It did-for ninety seconds, maybe even two minutes. After that, he heard nothing.

When the alarm clock went off, he had to figure out what it was and how to turn it off. Reveille had been rousting him since he joined the Navy. He realized he didn’t have to change out of his pajamas before he went to breakfast. Now there was luxury.

His mother burst into tears when she saw him. His brother Carl was sixteen, and stared at him in awe. His sister Angie was twelve. She just seemed glad to have him back. He shoveled down breakfast with the single-minded determination he would have shown back in Pensacola. Carl gaped. Dad grinned. His mother brought him seconds. In Pensacola, he would have overloaded his plate the first time around.

With all the talk at the breakfast table, he didn’t have time for a bath after all. He zipped through the shower and put on his dress uniform. When he came downstairs again, his mother started crying for a second time. Carl’s eyes damn near bugged out of his head. His brother and father wore almost identical black suits. Joe ignored the faint smell of mothballs.

They all piled into the car to go to church. When they got there, they found reporters waiting outside. Joe hadn’t expected that. Goddamn vultures, he thought. Along with the rest of his family, he pushed past them without a word.

Relatives and friends and neighbors packed the church. Joe solemnly shook hands again and again. Dominic Scalzi set a hand on his shoulder. “Garage ain’t the same without you, kid,” the mechanic said. “Guy who’s filling your slot ain’t half as good. But what you’re doing, it’s important. You make all of us proud.” His suit gave off that chemical tang, too.

“Thanks, Mr. Scalzi.” Joe’s mind was only half on what his ex-boss was saying. “Excuse me, please.” He went over and sat down with his folks. There were the coffins, looking dreadfully final-and all the more so because they were closed. He knew what that meant: the mortician hadn’t been able to clean up the bodies enough to let anybody look at them.

Even in the wool dress uniform, he shivered. He’d seen more than one Yellow Peril crash, and he’d seen what happened afterwards. The first time, he’d thrown up right on his shoes. To imagine something like that happening to his aunt and uncle and his cousins… His hands slammed shut into fists. He felt as if he’d let them down.

That was ridiculous. The logical part of his mind knew as much. A funeral, though, wasn’t made for the logical part of the mind.

The Mass helped steady him. The genuflections and the sonorous Latin were made, not to drive grief away, but to put it in channels made for its flow. The dry tastelessness of the Communion wafer on his tongue brought the ritual to a close. When the priest intoned, “Ite, Missa est,” at the end, he did feel better.

But then came the funeral procession and the burial itself. He was a pallbearer, of course. He was young and strong and healthy, and he’d been twenty-five hundred miles away from where he could do anybody any good. Watching and hearing dirt thud down on the coffins made him bury his face in his hands.

“It’s okay,” his father whispered in a ravaged voice. “This once, it’s okay.”

Joe shook his head. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t going to be okay. If it were okay, he would still have been back at Pensacola, and his relatives would have been going on about their business. Instead, he was here, five of them lay in holes in the ground, and the sixth wouldn’t get out of the hospital for at least another two weeks. Tears dripped out between his fingers and fell on the green graveyard grass.

After the burial, everybody went back to his folks’ house. People packed it to overflowing. The war was supposed to have made things hard to come by. The food his mother set out and the booze his father set out made a mockery of that. He wondered how big a hole they’d dug for themselves with such a big spread and with the cost of five funerals. As soon as he did, he shrugged the thought away. At a time like this, you didn’t stint.

Everybody kept pressing drinks on him. If he’d drunk all of them, they would have had to carry him aboard the eastbound train on a stretcher. He poured down enough to put a thick glass canopy-like that of a fighter plane-between himself and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then he walked around with a half-filled glass in his hand, which kept most people from offering him a new full one.

They kept telling him-sometimes in alarmingly explicit detail-what to do to the Japs when he got the chance. He would nod and try to move on. He wanted to do all those things to them. But nobody here seemed to have the slightest idea that the Japs were liable to shoot back.

With everything from Hawaii to Burma lost, with Japanese troops and planes at Port Moresby looking across the Coral Sea towards Australia, Joe didn’t see how people could be so blind, but they were. Civilians, he thought. He hadn’t had much to do with civilians the past five months. He had been one of them. No more. He wasn’t a naval officer yet-he wasn’t what he was going to be-but he sure wasn’t what he had been, either.

Late that night, his father drove him back across the Bay to Oakland. Dad had put away a lot of booze, too, but not even the craziest drunk-which he wasn’t-could do anything too drastic at the speeds blackout permitted. “Take care of yourself, Joey,” Dad said on the platform. “Take care of yourself, but pay those bastards back.”

“I will,” Joe said. I hope I will.

He had no trouble sleeping sitting up, not that night he didn’t. When he woke, the sun was hitting him in the face. His head felt as if someone were dancing on it with a jackhammer. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. Slowly, the ache receded. Coffee helped, too.

After so much time cooped up in a seat, Joe felt like an arthritic orangutan when the train pulled into the Pensacola station again. He had trouble straightening up to grab his duffel bag from the rack above the seat. All his joints creaked and popped.

When he got out, he found Orson Sharp waiting for him on the platform. “Hey, you didn’t have to do that,” Joe said, touched. “I was gonna flag a cab.”

Sharp looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Japanese. “We’re on the same team.” He might have been talking to a moron. “I borrowed Mike Williams’ De Soto. Big deal. If you don’t help the guys on your team, why should they help you?”

Joe didn’t see anything he could say to that, so he just nodded. By the time they’d left the station and gone out into the potent Pensacola sun, he found a couple of words: “Thanks, buddy.” He’d left family behind in San Francisco. Now he realized he’d come back to family, too.

PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER Dillon had been a Marine for twenty-five years. He’d seen a hell of a lot in that span. He’d gone over the top half a dozen times in France in 1918 in the desperate fight that hurled the Kaiser’s men back from their final drive on Paris and toward their own border once more. The last time, a German machine gun took a bite out of his left leg. He’d celebrated the Armistice flat on his back in a military hospital.

Since then, he’d been in Haiti and in Nicaragua and at the American legation in Peking. He’d served aboard two destroyers and two cruisers. If he hadn’t joined the Corps, he didn’t know what he would have done with his life. Ended up in trouble, probably. He was a big sandy-haired guy with cold blue eyes in a long, sun-weathered face, and he’d never been inclined to take guff from anybody. If he’d stayed a civilian, he might have knocked somebody’s block off and done a stretch-or maybe more than one stretch-in the pokey.

Now he sat in San Diego twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the rest of the country to get off the dime. He was ready to hit the beach on Oahu tomorrow. The Navy wasn’t ready to get him there yet, though, or to make sure that the Japs didn’t strafe him or drop bombs on his head or otherwise make life difficult for him.

But things were starting to move. Camp Elliott held so many Marines, it was bursting at the seams. The Navy had bought an enormous rancho up the coast from San Diego. What would be Camp Pendleton would have enough room to train troops even on the scale this war would require. But Pendleton wasn’t ready yet. The contractors swore up and down that it would be come September, which did nobody any good right this minute.

He sat in the enlisted men’s club nursing a Burgie and smoking a Camel. Across the table from him sat Dutch Wenzel. The other platoon sergeant had almost as much fruit salad on his chest as Dillon did. He was three or four years younger than Les, a little too young to have seen France, but he’d done plenty of bouncing around since. He took a pull at his bourbon and soda. A White Owl sent a thin plume of fragrant smoke up from the ashtray in front of him.

“It’s a bastard,” Dillon said. “We could tear the Japs a new asshole if we could just get at ’em.”

Benny Goodman lilted out of the radio. Wenzel paused to savor the clarinet solo and to blow a smoke ring. “Army didn’t,” he observed.

“Yeah, well, that’s the Army for you.” Like any Marine worth his salt, Les Dillon looked down his nose at the larger service.

“Little yellow bastards aren’t bad.” Wenzel liked playing devil’s advocate.

“Fuck ’em. You were in China, too, right?” Dillon didn’t need to wait for the other man to nod. The Yangtze service ribbon was blue in the center, with red, yellow, and blue stripes on either side. “Okay, you saw the Japs in action, didn’t you? They’re brave, yeah, okay, but no way in hell they can stand up to us. Besides, their tanks are a bunch of junk.”

“Six months ago, people said the same thing about their planes,” Wenzel remarked.

“That’s different,” Dillon said. “With their tanks, it’s really true.”

“They’re liable to have better ones by the time we can get over there,” Wenzel said.

Dillon grimaced. That was a cheery thought. He sipped at his beer. After a moment, he brightened. “Well, so will we. The Army just had Stuarts in Hawaii, and they didn’t have very many of ’em. A Lee’ll make a Stuart say uncle any day, and a Sherman…!” With reasonable armor and a 75mm gun in a proper turret, a Sherman was a very impressive piece of machinery.

Dutch Wenzel nodded. “Okay. I’ll give you that one,” he said. “But the Japs won’t be sound asleep when we hit the beach, the way the Army was when they landed.”

Now he admitted the Army hadn’t done everything it might have to defend Oahu. The Navy hadn’t, either. If Dillon could have got his hands on General Short and Admiral Kimmel, he would have given them worse what-for than the Japs were, and scuttlebutt said the Japs were hard as hell on prisoners. For that matter, the Marines at Ewa and Kaneohe hadn’t done enough to stop the enemy, either. You get caught with your pants down, that’s what happens to you, Dillon thought unhappily.

“I just wish we could get at them,” he said, and finished the Burgermeister. Sucking foam off his upper lip, he went on, “Sooner or later, we will. And when we do, I want to be the first guy off the boat.”

“First guy to get his ass shot off, you mean,” Wenzel said. Dillon lazily flipped the other noncom the bird. He knew Wenzel was as eager to get within rifle range of the Japs as he was.

Two days later, his company commander summoned him to his office. Captain Braxton Bradford was as Southern as his name; he had a Georgia drawl thick enough to slice. “How would you like to make gunnery sergeant, Dillon?” he asked, stretching Les’ surname out into three syllables.

“What do I have to do, sir?” Dillon asked eagerly. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than a second stripe on the rocker under the sergeant’s three.

“Hoped that might get your attention.” Captain Bradford pointed north. “We’re gonna need us a hell of a lot of new Marines. All of those boots are gonna need somebody to show ’em how to be Marines. That there’s one of the things a gunny is for.”

“Oh.” Les thought for a moment, but only for a moment. “Thank you very much, sir, but I’ll pass.”

Bradford’s eyebrows came down and together. His nostrils pinched. His lips narrowed. He would have scared a boot out of ten years’ growth. Dillon already had all his growth. After machine-gun fire, nothing a captain did or said could be more than mildly annoying. Bradford kept on trying his level best to intimidate: “Suppose you tell me why, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Dillon said stolidly. “They’re going to throw the old breed at the Japs in Hawaii. If I’m up there at that Camp Pendleton place, I won’t get to go. If I stay where I’m at, I will.” He threw away the promotion without the least regret. He wanted some things more than that second stripe on the rocker after all.

It was Captain Bradford’s turn to say, “Oh.” He did his best to hold on to his glower, but his best wasn’t good enough. “Goddammit, I can’t even get angry at an answer like that.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Dillon, who wasn’t sorry one bit.

Bradford’s sour smile showed a gold front tooth. “Now tell me one I haven’t heard. You think of anybody who’d take a promotion to go on up to this new place, or maybe to Parris Island or Quantico?”

“Nobody I know, sir,” Dillon answered. “You can always ask, though.”

“Officers all over Camp Elliott are asking-other places, too, for all I know,” Bradford said. “Lots of good people turning ’em down. You aren’t the only one. In a way, that’s good. We want our first team on the field against the Japs. But we want first-raters showing the boots the ropes, too. If mediocre people show ’em what being a Marine’s all about, they’re liable to make mediocre Marines.”

“Yes, sir.” Dillon said no more. With officers, the less you said, the better off you were. He didn’t disagree with Captain Bradford. He knew what was important to him, though-knew very plainly, if he’d turned down a promotion to keep it. And he had.

Bradford studied him. “Nothing I can do to make you change your mind, Sergeant?”

“No, sir.” Les almost added another, Sorry, sir. But that would have been laying it on too thick.

The company commander made a disgruntled noise down deep in his throat. “All right. Go on. Get the hell out of here.”

Dillon thought about asking Bradford if he felt like going to Camp Pendleton. He didn’t do that, either, though. He just saluted with machinelike precision, did an about-face, and left the captain’s office.

As usual, the sun was shining. As usual, it wasn’t all that warm even so. It would get up into the low seventies today, and that was it. San Diego had a milder climate than Los Angeles did, even if it was more than a hundred miles down the coast from the bigger city. Mission Bay and the ocean currents and the prevailing winds all had something to do with it. Les didn’t know the wherefores, or worry about them. He just knew it stayed mild almost the whole year around.

He was stripping a BAR that afternoon when Dutch Wenzel came up to him. “So,” Wenzel said, “you a gunny?”

“Fuck, no,” Les answered. “You?”

“Nah.” Wenzel shook his head. “Somebody else is gonna have to whip them boots into shape.”

“That’s what I told Bradford, too.” Les set down the oily rag he was using and wiped his hands on a cleaner one. “We’re the ones who’re gonna have to take those islands away from the Nips. This is what I signed up for, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna miss it.”

“I’m with you.” Wenzel turned and looked southwest. “Matter of fact, I figure I will be with you. You hit the beach, I’ll either be in the same landing craft or the next one over.”

“Gluttons for punishment, that’s us,” Dillon said. The other platoon sergeant laughed, for all the world as if he’d been joking. Dillon went on, “Hell, you haven’t even got shot up. You really want a Purple Heart that bad?”

“Look who’s talking,” Wenzel retorted. “You got it once, and you’re dumb enough to come back for more?”

“Damn straight I am,” Dillon told him. Wenzel nodded in perfect understanding. They were both Marines.