Days of Infamy

I

ON A GRAY, drizzly morning in the first week of March 1941, an automobile pulled up in front of the great iron gates of the Imperial Naval Staff College in Tokyo. The young commander who got out was short even by Japanese standards-he couldn’t have been more than five feet three-and so slim he barely topped the hundred-pound mark. All the same, the two leading seamen on sentry duty at the gates (both of whom overtopped him by half a head) stiffened to attention at his approach.

“Your papers, sir, if you please.” The senior sentry slung his rifle so he could take them in his right hand.

The sentry studied them, nodded, and handed them back. “Thank you, sir. All in order.” He turned to his comrade. “Open the gates for Commander Genda.”

“Hai,” the second seaman said, and did.

Genda hurried to the eastern wing of the staff college. He hurried everywhere he went; he fairly burned with energy. He nearly slipped once on the wet pavement, but caught himself. The drizzle was not enough to wash the city soot from the red bricks of the building. Nothing short of sandblasting would have been.

Just inside the door to the east wing sat a petty officer with a logbook. Genda presented his papers again. The petty officer scanned them. Commander Genda to see Admiral Yamamoto, he wrote in the log, and, after a glance at the clock on the wall opposite him, the time. “Please sign in, Commander,” he said, offering Genda the pen.

“Yes, yes.” Genda was always impatient with formality and paperwork. He scrawled his name, then almost trotted down the hall till he came to the stairway. Despite his small size, he took the stairs to the third floor two at a time. He wasn’t breathing hard when he came out; he might be little, but he was fit.

A captain on the telephone looked at him curiously as he went past the officer’s open door. Genda didn’t meet the other man’s eyes, or even notice his gaze. All the commander’s energy focused on the meeting that lay ahead.

He knocked on the door. “Come in.” Admiral Yamamoto’s voice was deep and gruff.

Heart pounding, Genda did. He saluted the commander-in-chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet. Isoroku Yamamoto returned the courtesy. He was no taller than Genda, but there the physical resemblance between the two men ended. Yamamoto was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested: a wrestler’s body, made for grappling with the foe. His gray hair was closely cropped above his broad, hard face. He had lost the first two fingers of his left hand in battle against the Russians at Tsushima in 1905, the year after Genda was born.

After waving Genda to a chair, he asked, “Well, Commander, what’s on your mind?” He was no more a time-waster than Genda himself.

Genda licked his lips. Yamamoto could be-often strove to be-intimidating. But the younger man asked the question he had come to ask: “Sir, if war against the United States comes, what do you think of our chances?”

Yamamoto did not hesitate. “I hope this war does not come. If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year. I hope we can endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war.”

“You say this in spite of the blow we have planned against Pearl Harbor?” Genda asked. He had been involved in preparing that blow from the beginning.

Admiral Yamamoto nodded heavily. “I do. If we succeed there, the attack buys us time. Maybe it will buy us enough to take the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and form a defensive perimeter so we can hold what we have conquered. Maybe. I do not believe it myself, but maybe.”

“If the United States can still use the forward base in Hawaii, matters become more difficult for us,” Genda observed. His thick, expressive eyebrows quirked upward as he spoke.

“Much more difficult,” Yamamoto agreed.

“Well, then,” Genda said, “why do we limit ourselves to an air strike on Pearl Harbor? The Americans will rebuild, and then they will strike back at us.”

Yamamoto nodded again. “Every word of this is true. It is one of the arguments I used against the operation. Should hostilities break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. I wonder if our politicians have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

That went further than Commander Genda wanted. He said, “May we return to discussing the Hawaii problem?” Yamamoto’s smile was almost indulgent. He waved for Genda to go on. The younger man did: “We should follow up on our strike at Pearl Harbor with a landing. If Hawaii is occupied, America will lose her best base. If we make this attack at all, we had better make it decisive.”

Yamamoto sat and considered. His face showed nothing. He was an outstanding bridge and poker player. Genda could see why. “Well, Commander, no one will ever accuse you of thinking small,” Yamamoto said at last. “Tell me-have you discussed this proposal with Rear Admiral Onishi?”

That was exactly the question Genda wished he would not have asked. “Yes, sir, I have,” he answered unhappily.

“And his view is…?”

“His view is that, with our present strength, we cannot take the offensive in both the eastern and southern areas,” Genda said, more unhappily still.

“Rear Admiral Onishi is an airman’s officer,” Yamamoto said. “He is also a very hard-driving, determined man. If he does not believe this can be done, his opinion carries considerable weight. How do you respond to his objections?”

“By saying that half measures will not do against the United States, sir,” Genda replied. “If we strike a blow that merely infuriates the enemy, what good is it? Less than none, in my opinion. If we strike, we must drive the sword home all the way to the hilt. Let the Americans worry about defending their West Coast. If they lose Hawaii, they cannot possibly think about striking us.”

Again, Admiral Yamamoto showed nothing of what he was thinking. He asked, “How many men do you suppose we would need to subdue Hawaii after the air strike?”

“If all goes well, they should be flat on their backs by then,” Genda said. “One division should be plenty-ten or fifteen thousand men.”

“No.” Now Yamamoto shook his head. His eyes flashed angrily. Genda realized he’d overlooked something. Yamamoto spelled it out for him: “The Americans keep two divisions of infantry on Oahu. Even with air superiority, one of ours would not be enough to root them out. If this enterprise is to be attempted, it must not fail. You are absolutely right about that.”

Genda didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or apprehensive. The Navy could have pulled together a division’s worth of men from its own resources. For a force the size Yamamoto was talking about… “Will the Army cooperate with us, sir? Their eyes are on China, and on the south-the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. And they never like to think of anything new.” He spoke with a lifelong Navy man’s scorn for the ground-pounders.

“They might like to think about not having to fight the USA so soon,” Yamamoto said. “They might. And they might like to think of fighting the Americans from a position of much greater advantage. The advance in the south may be slower if we take this course. But I do believe you are right, Commander. When we hit the Americans, we can hold nothing back. Nothing! The reward for victory in the east could be victory everywhere, and where else have we any hope of finding that?”

Genda could hardly hide his jubilation. He’d been far from sure he could persuade the older man that this was a needful course. Rear Admiral Onishi hadn’t been able to see it. But Yamamoto, as his mutilated hand showed, was of the generation that had fought the Russo-Japanese War, the war that had begun with a surprise Japanese attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur. He was alive to the advantages of getting in the first punch and making it count.

Yamamoto was. Were others? Anxiously, Commander Genda asked, “Are you sure you can persuade the Army to play its part in this plan?” Without Army cooperation, it wouldn’t work. Yamamoto had rubbed Genda’s nose in that. He hated the knowledge. That those Army blockheads might hold Japan back from its best-its only, he was convinced-chance to fight the USA and have some hope of winning was intolerable.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto leaned forward a few inches. He was not a big man, and it was not a large motion. Nevertheless, it made him seem to take up the entire room and to look down on Genda from a considerable height when in fact their eyes were level. “You may leave that to me, Commander,” Yamamoto said in a voice that might have come from a kami ’s throat rather than a man’s. Genda hastened to salute. When Yamamoto spoke like that, who could doubt him? No one. No one at all.

COAL SMOKE BELCHING from its stack, the locomotive pulled into the railroad yard at Esashi, in northernmost Hokkaido. Behind it, the troop train rattled and clattered to a halt. Corporal Takeo Shimizu looked out the window and shook his head. “It’s not much like home, is it?”

All the privates in his squad hastened to shake their heads. “Oh, no,” they chorused. Shimizu had every right to thump them if they gave him any trouble. He took less advantage of the privilege than some underofficers did. A round-faced farmer’s son, he hadn’t been promoted to corporal as soon as he might have because his superiors wondered if he was too easygoing for his own good.

One of the soldiers, a skinny little fellow named Shiro Wakuzawa, said, “I’d sure rather be back in Hiroshima right now. It’s hundreds of kilometers south of here, and we wouldn’t be shivering in our seats.” The rest of the squad nodded again. A coal-fired stove at the front of the passenger car did next to nothing to hold the chill outside at bay.

“No grumbling,” Shimizu said. “We will uphold the honor of the Fifth Division.” His squad was only a tiny part of the division, but he did not want to let the larger unit down in any way. That was especially true because he didn’t want to lose face before friends, neighbors, and relatives. The whole division came from the Hiroshima region.

Wakuzawa, who had an aisle seat, leaned forward so he could look out the window, too. He stared this way and that, then shook his head in obvious disappointment.

“What were you looking for?” Shimizu asked, curious in spite of himself.

“Hairy Ainu,” Wakuzawa answered. “They’re supposed to live on Hokkaido, aren’t they? They have beards up to here”-he touched his face just below his eyes-“and down to here.” He tapped himself in the middle of the chest.

Corporal Shimizu rolled his eyes. “And you expect to find them in the middle of a railroad yard? What do you use for brains? If they work here, they’ve got to shave so they look like everybody else. I’m hairy, too”-he was proud of his thick beard-“but I shave.”

The other soldiers jeered at Wakuzawa. The corporal had, so they joined in. He looked properly abashed. That was smart of him. He was just a first-year conscript, with no rights and no privileges. If he got out of line, they’d give him lumps. They might give him lumps anyhow, on general principles.

Lieutenant Osami Yonehara, who commanded the platoon of which Corporal Shimizu’s squad was a part, got up and called, “Everybody out! Get your gear! Form column of fours by the car. Move, move, move!” He was shouting by the time he was done. His officer’s sword banged against his hip. He was an educated man as well as an officer, which made the gulf between him and the men he led twice as wide. Shimizu didn’t worry about it. Officers gave orders and men obeyed. That was how things worked.

A nasty cold breeze blew down from the north. It felt as if it hadn’t touched a thing since it started up in Siberia. Corporal Shimizu’s teeth started to chatter. Somebody behind him said, “Why didn’t they give us winter uniforms? My balls are crawling up into my belly.”

“Silence in the ranks!” Shimizu shouted, to show he was on the job in case one of his superiors heard the grumbler.

“Forward-march!” The command came from Lieutenant Colonel Mitsuo Fujikawa, the regimental commander. March the soldiers did. Shimizu hadn’t the faintest idea where he was going. He didn’t worry about it. Somebody set above him would know. All he had to do was follow the man in front of him.

Through the streets of Esashi they tramped. Women on their way to shops and workmen gaped at them as they strode past. Some of the workmen had on Western-style overalls and cloth caps. Most of the women wore kimonos, not dresses. Shimizu thought more people back home used Western clothes than was true up here. His slung rifle thumped his shoulderblade at every step. That always annoyed him, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

Around the railroad yard, the buildings were Western style: square, boring structures of brick and concrete. Then the Eleventh Regiment went through an older part of town. Roofs curved and arched. Wood and paper replaced brick. To Shimizu, that made pretty good sense. In an earthquake, brickwork came down on your head. And the purely Japanese buildings looked a lot more interesting than the ones built on Western lines.

When they got to the harbor, Western buildings predominated again. They went with machinery, as they did in the railroad yards. They seemed more solid and sturdy than their Japanese equivalents. And the machinery, or the ideas behind the machinery, came from the West, too. Perhaps it was more at home in familiar structures.

Gulls wheeled and mewed overhead. They descended on fishing boats in vast skrawking clouds, hoping for a handout or a theft. The salt tang of the sea-slightly sullied by sewage-filled Shimizu’s nostrils.

He trudged up a pier toward a big merchant ship. Her name-Nagata Maru — was painted in hiragana and in Roman letters on her stern. Up the gangplank he went. His boots clanged on the iron plates of the deck. Sailors stared at him as if he were nothing but a monkey. He glared back, but only to show he wasn’t intimidated. On land, he knew what he was doing. But this was the sailors’ world. Maybe he wasn’t a monkey to them. Maybe he was just… cargo.

“This way,” Lieutenant Yonehara called, and led them down a hatch into the hold. The Nagata Maru had been a freight hauler. Now the freight she would haul was men. Double racks of rough, unsanded wood had been run up in the hold. Each one held a straw mat. They had numbers painted on them. Yonehara checked them. “My platoon goes here.” He raised his voice to make himself heard over the clatter of more soldiers marching with their hobnailed boots on the steel deck not far enough overhead.

Two of his squads got upper racks, two lowers. Corporal Shimizu and his men were assigned to uppers. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. They were right under the deck and could bang their heads if they sat up carelessly, but nobody was spilling anything on them from above.

The hold filled and filled and filled. The mats on the racks were very close together. If a man rolled over, he was liable to bump into the fellow next to him. “Packing us in like sardines,” Corporal Shimizu said.

Most of his men just nodded. They sprawled on the mats. Three or four of them had started a card game. But a young soldier named Hideo Furuta said, “It could be worse, Corporal.”

“How?” Shimizu demanded-he thought it was already pretty bad.

Furuta realized he’d blundered. Anger at his own stupidity filled his broad, acne-scarred face. But he had to answer: “If it were hot, the deck right above us would be like an oven.”

He was right. That would have been worse. Being right did you little good, though, when you were only a first-year conscript. Shimizu said, “Why don’t you bring us a pot of tea?” He’d seen a big kettle in the improvised kitchen up on deck.

“Yes, Corporal!” Thankful Shimizu hadn’t hit him, Furuta got down from his mat and hurried up the narrow aisle toward the ladder that led to the deck. He had to go belly-to-belly with newly arriving soldiers coming the other way.

“Hard work!” somebody called after him. That could mean several things: that the work really was hard, or that the man calling sympathized with the one stuck with the job, or simply that the luckless one was stuck with it. Tone of voice and context counted for more than the words themselves.

After what seemed a very long time, Furuta came back with a pot of tea. Shimizu thought about bawling him out for dawdling, but decided not to bother. Given the crowd, the kid had done the best he could. By the way the men in the squad praised the tea, they thought the same thing.

Before long, all the soldiers packed into the hold made it hot and stuffy in there even without the summer sun beating down on the metal deck above. There were no portholes-who would have bothered adding them on a freighter? The only fresh air came down the hatch by which the men had entered.

Lieutenant Yonehara didn’t stay with the platoon. Officers had cabins of their own. Things were crowded even for them; junior officers like the platoon commander had to double up. Corporal Shimizu didn’t particularly resent their better fortune. Shigata ga nai, he thought-it can’t be helped.

At last, soldiers stopped coming. Had they crammed the whole regiment into the Nagata Maru? Shimizu wouldn’t have been surprised. The engine began to thump. The ship began to throb. The deck above Shimizu’s head thrummed. Army dentists had given him several fillings. They seemed to vibrate in sympathy with the freighter.

As soon as the Nagata Maru pulled away from the pier, the rolling and pitching started. So did the cries for buckets. The sharp stink of vomit filled the hold along with the other odors of too many men packed too close together. Green-faced soldiers raced up the ladder so they could spew over the rail.

Rather to his surprise, Corporal Shimizu’s stomach didn’t trouble him. He’d never been in seas this rough before. He didn’t enjoy the journey, but it wasn’t a misery for him, either.

No one had told him where the ship was going. When the authorities wanted him to know something, they would take care of it. Till then, he worried about keeping his squad in good order. The men who could eat went through the rations they’d carried aboard the Nagata Maru: rice and canned seaweed and beans, along with pickled plums and radishes and whatever else the soldiers happened to have on them.

Every morning, Lieutenant Yonehara led the men topside for physical training. It wasn’t easy on the pitching deck, but orders were orders. The gray, heaving waters of the Sea of Okhotsk and the even grayer skies spoke of how far from home Shimizu was.

When not exercising, the soldiers mostly stayed on their mats. They had no room to move around. Some were too sick to do anything but lie there and moan. Others gambled or sang songs or simply slept like hibernating animals, all in the effort to make time go faster.

The Kuril Islands seemed like an afterthought to Japan: rocky lumps spattered across the Pacific, heading up toward Kamchatka. Etorofu was as windswept and foggy and desolate as any of the others. When the Nagata Maru anchored in Hitokappu Bay, Shimizu was unimpressed. He just hoped to get away as fast as he could. He wouldn’t even have known where he was if the platoon commander hadn’t told him.

He had hoped to be able to get off the freighter and stretch his legs. But no one was allowed off the ship for any reason. No one was allowed to send mail. No one, in fact, was allowed to do much of anything except go up on deck and exercise. Every time Corporal Shimizu did, more ships crowded the bay. They weren’t just transports, either. Ships bristling with big guns joined the fleet. So did flat-topped aircraft carriers, one after another.

Something big was building. When the men went back down into the hold, they tried to guess what it would be. Not a one of them turned out to be right.

YOU CAN BE unhappy in Hawaii as easily as anywhere else. People who cruise over from the mainland often have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. The sea voyage from San Francisco or Los Angeles takes five days. They set the clocks back half an hour a day aboard ship, so that each outbound day lasts twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. By the time you get there, you’re two and a half hours behind the West Coast, five and a half behind the East.

And then, after Diamond Head and the Aloha Tower come up over the horizon, you commonly stay in a fine hotel. You eat splendid food. You drink… oh, a little too much. You don’t get drunk, mind. You get… happy. You admire the turquoise sky and the sapphire sea and the emerald land. Strange tropical birds call in the trees. You savor the perfect weather. Never too hot, never too cold. If it rains, so what? The sun will come out again in a little while. You want to be a beachcomber and spend the rest of your days there. If you find a slightly brown-skinned but beautiful and willing wahine to spend them there with you, so much the better.

Hawaii is what God made after he’d done Paradise for practice. How could anyone be unhappy in a place like that?

First Lieutenant Fletcher Armitage had no trouble at all.

For one thing, Armitage-called Fletch by his friends-was a green-eyed redhead with a face full of freckles. In between the freckles, his skin was white as milk. He hated the tropical sun. He didn’t tan. He burned.

For another, his wife had left him three weeks before. He didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure Jane understood why. He didn’t think there was somebody else. Jane hadn’t said anything about anybody else. She’d said she felt stifled in their little Wahiawa apartment. She’d said he didn’t give her enough of his time.

That had frosted his pumpkin-not that frost had anything to do with anything on Oahu. “For Christ’s sake, I give you every minute I’ve got when I’m not with my guns!” he’d howled. He served with the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion-the Lucky Thirteenth, they called themselves-in the Twenty-fourth Division. “You knew you were marrying an officer when you said ‘I do.’ ”

She’d only shrugged. She was small and blond and stubborn. “It’s not enough,” she’d said. Now she had the apartment, and presumably felt much less stifled without him in it. She was talking with a lawyer. How she’d pay him on a schoolteacher’s salary was beyond Fletch, but odds were she’d figure out a way. She usually did.

What Armitage had, on the other hand, was a hard cot at Schofield Barracks BOQ and a bar tab that was liable to outdo Jane’s legal fees. He had the sympathy of some of the officers and men who knew what had happened to him. Others suddenly didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. Almost all of those were married men themselves. They might have feared he had something catching. And so he did: life in the military. If anything could grind a marriage to powder, that’d do it.

He sat on a bar stool soaking up whiskey sours with Gordon Douglas, another lieutenant in the battalion. “She knew I was an officer, goddammit,” he said-slurred, rather, since he’d already soaked up quite a few. “She knew, all right. Knew I had to take care of… this stuff.” He gestured vaguely. Just what he had to do wasn’t the clearest thing in his mind right then.

Douglas gave back a solemn nod. He looked like the high-school fullback he’d been ten years earlier. He was from Nebraska: corn-fed and husky. “You know, it could be worse,” he said slowly-he’d matched Armitage drink for drink.

“How?” Fletch demanded with alcohol-fueled indignation. “How the hell could it be worse?”

“Well…” The other man looked sorry he’d spoken. But he’d drunk enough to have a hard time keeping his mouth shut, and so he went on, “It could be worse if we spent more time in the field. Then she would’ve seen even less of you, and all this would’ve come on sooner.”

“Oh, yeah. If.” But that only flicked Fletch on another gripe of his, one older than his trouble with his wife (or older than his knowledge of his trouble with his wife, which was not the same thing). “Don’t hold your breath, though.”

“We do the best we can.” Gordon Douglas sounded uncomfortable, partly because he knew he was liable to touch off a rant.

And he did. Fletch exploded. “Do we? Do we? Sure doesn’t look that way to me. This is a hell of a parade-ground army, no bout adout it.” He paused, listened to what he’d just said, and tried again. “No… doubt… about it.” There. That was better. He could roll on: “Hell of a parade-ground army. But what if we really have to go out there and fight? What will we do then, when we’re not on parade?”

“We’d do all right.” Douglas still sounded uncomfortable. But then he rallied, saying, “Besides, who the hell would we fight? Nobody in his right mind would mess with Hawaii, and you know it.”

Down the hatch went Armitage’s latest whiskey sour. He gestured to the Filipino bartender for another one. Even before it arrived, he went on, “All this shit with the Japs doesn’t sound good. They didn’t like it for beans when we turned the oil off on ’em.”

“Now I know you’re smashed,” his friend said. “Those little fuckers try anything, we’ll knock ’em into the middle of next week. I dare you to tell me any different.”

“Oh, hell, yes, we’d lick ’em.” No matter how drunk Fletch was, he knew how strong Hawaii’s defenses were. Two divisions based at Schofield Barracks, the Coast Artillery Command with its headquarters at Fort DeRussy right next to Waikiki Beach, the flyboys at Wheeler right by the barracks complex here, and, just for icing on the cake, the Pacific Fleet… “They’d have to be crazy to screw with us.”

“Bet your ass,” Douglas said. “So how come you’ve got ants in your pants?”

Armitage shrugged. “I just wish…” His voice trailed away. He wished for a lot of things that mattered more to him right now than just how prepared the men at Schofield Barracks were to turn back an attack unlikely ever to come. And those weren’t ants in his pants. He and Jane had been married for five years. He was used to getting it regularly. These past three weeks had been a hard time in more ways than one. He sipped at the drink. “Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?”

“Plenty of people in it are bastards, that’s for goddamn sure,” Gordon Douglas agreed. “You keep the hell away from ’em if you can, you salute ’em and go, ‘Yes, sir,’ if you can’t. That’s the way things work, buddy.” He spoke with great earnestness.

“Yeah. I guess.” Fletch’s head bobbed up and down. He didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like crying. He’d done that only once, the night he moved out of the apartment and into BOQ. He’d been a lot drunker then than he was now. Of course, he could still take care of that. The whiskey sour vanished. He signaled for a refill.

“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow morning,” Douglas said, also putting his drink out of its misery. “If they have live-fire practice, you’ll wish your head would fall off.” That bit of good advice didn’t keep him from reloading, too.

Armitage shrugged. “That’s tomorrow morning. This is now. If I’m drunk, I don’t have to worry about… anything.”

“Look on the bright side,” his friend suggested. “If we were back home, there might be snow on the ground already.”

“If you were back home, there might be snow on the ground,” Fletch said. “That’s your worry. I’m from San Diego. I don’t know any more about it than the Hawaiians do.”

“You grew up in a Navy town,” Douglas said. “You’re here where they’ve got more goddamn sailors than anywhere else in the world. So what the hell are you doing in the Army?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Armitage said. If he had one more whiskey sour, he was going to start wondering about his own name, too. The only thing getting drunk didn’t make him wonder about was Jane. She was gone, and he wouldn’t get her back. That was why he was drinking in the first place. It didn’t seem fair. He turned his blurry focus back to the question. “What the hell am I doing in the Army? Best I can right now. How about you?”

Gordon Douglas didn’t answer. He’d put his head down on the bar and started to snore. Fletch shook him awake, which wasn’t easy because he kept wanting to yawn, too. They lurched back to BOQ together. Patrolling sentries just kept patrolling; it wasn’t as if they’d never seen a drunken officer before, or even two.

The next morning, aspirins and most of a gallon of black coffee put only the faintest of dents in Fletch’s hangover. He managed to choke down some dry toast with the coffee. In his stomach, it felt as if it were all corners. Douglas looked as decrepit as he felt, a very faint consolation indeed.

And they did go through live-fire exercises. Having a 105mm gun go off by his head did nothing to speed Fletch’s recovery. He gulped more aspirins and wished he were dead.

JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his two sons carried tubs full of nehus onto the Oshima Maru as the sampan lay tied up in Kewalo Basin, a little west of Honolulu. Takahashi, a short, muscular, sun-browned man of fifty-five, had named the fishing boat for the Japanese county he’d left around the turn of the century. He watched the minnows dash back and forth in the galvanized iron tubs. They knew they weren’t coming along for a holiday cruise.

He wondered if his sons knew the same. “Pick up your feet! Get moving!” he called to them in Japanese, the only language he spoke.

Hiroshi and Kenzo both smiled at him. He didn’t see that they moved any faster. They should have. They were less than half his age, and both of them were three or four inches taller than he was. They should have been stronger than he was, too. If they were, he hadn’t seen it. They didn’t have the fire in their bellies, the passion for work, that he did. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to give it to them.

Hiroshi said something in English as he set his tub down on the deck. His younger brother answered in the same language. They’d both been educated in American schools on Oahu. They used English as readily as Japanese, even though Jiro had sent them to Japanese schools after the regular schools ended. They went by Hank and Ken as often as by the names he’d given them.

They both laughed-loud, boisterous, American laughs. Jiro shot them a suspicious glance. Were they laughing at him? They sometimes used English to keep him from knowing what they were saying.

All over Kewalo Basin, big diesel engines were growling to life. Blue-painted sampans glided out of the basin and into the wide Pacific. The blue paint was camouflage. The fishermen hoped it fooled the tuna they caught. They knew good and well it fooled other fishermen who might try to poach in fine fishing spots.

Back when Jiro first came to Hawaii, sampans had been sail-powered. Diesels let them range much farther asea. Takahashi muttered to himself as he started the Oshima Maru ’s engine. He liked to be one of the first boats out of the basin. Not today, not when he’d had to drag his boys out of bed. Did they think the tuna were going to sleep late, too?

Up at the bow, the two of them were tossing a hollow glass globe as big as their heads back and forth. The net float had drifted here all the way from Japan. A lot of sampans carried one or two of them, sometimes more. They showed up around Kauai more often than anywhere else: some trick of the currents, no doubt.

Jiro hauled in the mooring line and got the Oshima Maru going. His sons went right on tossing the float back and forth. He finally lost patience with them. “Will you two knock off that foolishness?” he shouted.

“Sorry, Father,” Hiroshi said. He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. He had a silly grin on his face.

Grimly, Jiro steered the Oshima Maru south and west. “Careful, Father,” Kenzo said. “You don’t want to end up in the defensive sea area.”

The last three words were in English, but Jiro understood them. Kenzo meant the three-mile-square region south of the Pearl Harbor outlet that the Navy had declared off-limits to sampans. The Navy patrolled aggressively to make sure the fishing boats stayed out of it, too. If you got caught in the defensive sea area, you were sure to get a warning and an escort out; you’d probably also draw a fine.

“You think I’m going to give the Navy my money?” Jiro asked his younger son. “Am I that dumb?”

“No, Father,” Kenzo answered. “But accidents can happen.”

“Accidents. Oh, yes. They can happen,” Jiro Takahashi said. “They can, but they’d better not.” Straying into the defensive sea area wouldn’t be an accident, though. It would be a piece of stupidity Jiro had no intention of allowing. His boat went where it was supposed to.

A seaplane buzzed by overhead. A Navy man with a radio was probably reporting the Oshima Maru ’s position. Well, let him, Jiro thought. I’m not in their restricted area, and they can’t say I am.

On went the fishing boat. Pearl Harbor and Honolulu sank below the horizon. Jiro and his sons ate rice and pork his wife, Reiko, had packed for them. They drank tea. Hiroshi and Kenzo also drank Coca-Cola. Jiro had tried the American drink, but didn’t think much of it. Too sweet, too fizzy.

It was the middle of the afternoon before they got to a spot Jiro judged likely. He couldn’t have said why he thought it would be good. It felt right, that was all. Some combination of wind and waves and water color told him the tuna were likely to be here. When he was a boy, he’d gone out with his father to fish the Inland Sea of Japan. His father had seemed able to smell a good catch. When Jiro asked him how he did it, he’d just laughed. “If you know fish, you know where they go,” he’d said. “You’ll figure it out.”

And Jiro had. He glanced over to his strapping sons. Would they? He didn’t want to bet on it. Too many things distracted them. He could get them to fish with him, and even to do a good enough job while they were here. But he could have trained a couple of Portuguese cowboys from a cattle ranch on the Big Island to do that. It wouldn’t have made them fishermen, and it didn’t make Hiroshi and Kenzo fishermen, either. To them, this was only a job, and not such a good one. To Jiro, it was a way of life.

He cut the motor. The Oshima Maru drifted silently on the light chop. Not far away, a booby plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak. That was a good sign. The booby wasn’t big enough to catch a tuna, of course, but it caught the sort of fish on which tuna fed. If they were here, the tuna probably would be, too.

Nodding to his sons, he said, “Throw in the bait.”

Hiroshi tipped one of the tubs of minnows over the side. The little silvery fish, still very much alive, made a cloud in the water. Hiroshi and Kenzo and Jiro dropped their long lines into the Pacific, lines full of gleaming barbless hooks that a hungry tuna might mistake for a minnow. Greed killed. Jiro understood that. The tuna didn’t, which let him make a living. He wondered if his sons did. Compared to him, they’d had things easy. How much good had that done them? Jiro only shrugged.

Hiroshi and Kenzo went back and forth, mostly in English, now and then in Japanese. Jiro caught names: Roosevelt, Hull, Kurusu. He hoped the Japanese special envoy would find a way to persuade America to start selling oil to Japan again. Cutting it off seemed monstrously unfair to him. He didn’t say that to his sons. They saw everything from the U.S. point of view. Arguing over politics was usually more trouble than it was worth.

What Jiro did say was, “Now!” He and his sons hauled the lines back aboard the Oshima Maru. A lot of them had small Hawaiian striped tuna, locally called aku, writhing on the hooks. They’d been after minnows and found something harder, something crueler. The three men worked like machines, gutting them and putting them on ice.

Jiro grabbed an especially fine striped tuna. His knife flashed. What could be fresher, what could be more delicious, than sashimi cut from a still-wriggling fish? A slow smile of pleasure spread over his face as he chewed. He offered some of the delicate flesh, almost as red as beef, to his boys. They ate with him, though they didn’t seem to enjoy it quite so much as he did. He sighed. They gobbled down hamburgers and french fries whenever they got the chance. That wasn’t the food he’d grown up on, and it tasted strange to him. To them, it was as normal as what they got at home.

Once the last of the catch was on ice, he said, “Back to it.” He and Hiroshi and Kenzo dumped the guts overboard and spilled another tub of nehus into the Pacific. The lines with their freight of hooks followed. The fishermen waited while the aku struck. Then they hauled in the lines and began gutting fish again.

A shark snapped past just as Kenzo pulled the last of the tuna into the Oshima Maru. He laughed. “Waste time, shark!” he said in English. That was another fragment of the language Jiro followed, mostly because both his boys said it all the time. Waste time meant anything futile or useless.

They fished till they ran out of bait. Not all the sharks wasted time; they brought in several tuna heads, the wolves of the sea having bitten off the rest of the fish. That always happened, most often after they’d been working for a while. The minnows drew the tuna, and the tuna-and the blood in the water from their guts-drew the sharks.

But it was a pretty good day. When Hiroshi said, “Let’s go back,” Jiro nodded. They’d done everything they could do. They would get a good price from the men at the Aala Market. These tuna were too good to go to the canning plants. Once the dealers bought them, they’d be sold one by one, mostly to Japanese restaurants and Japanese housewives. Chinese and Filipinos would buy some, and maybe the odd haole would, too, though Jiro grimaced when he thought about what whites did to such lovely fish. He’d heard of tuna salad. He’d never had the nerve to try it.

The sun had just set when the Oshima Maru tied up in Kewalo Basin once more. Dealers-some Japanese, some Chinese (and mixed outfits, like Oshiro and Wo)-came aboard to examine the catch. They said what they could to disparage it, to bring down the price, but the aku were too good to let them get away with much. Jiro went home with almost twenty dollars in his pocket. He wished he could do that well every day.

WHEN THE USS ENTERPRISE sailed for Wake Island on the morning of November 28, the carrier had done so under Vice Admiral William Halsey’s Battle Order Number One. Right from the start of the cruise, torpedoes had had warheads mounted. Planes taking off from the carrier’s flight deck carried loaded guns. They had orders to shoot down any aircraft not known to belong to the USA. All of Task Force Eight, which included three heavy cruisers and nine destroyers along with the Enterprise, had ammunition ready at the guns. Planes patrolled out to two hundred miles around the task force. Halsey insisted the Japanese were liable to attack without bothering to declare war.

Now the task force was bound for Pearl Harbor again. Nothing untoward had happened. They’d delivered Marine Corps Fighter Squadron 211 to Wake without any trouble. No one had seen any airplanes that didn’t look American. No one had spotted any subs, either, and subs worried Halsey even more than enemy aircraft did.

Lieutenant James Peterson thought all the extra excitement was just a bunch of hooey. He wasn’t shy about saying so, either. The fighter pilot, a rangy six feet two, was rarely shy about saying anything. “Anybody who thinks the Japs have the nerve to try us on for size has to be nuts,” he declared, swigging coffee with some of the other pilots. “We’d kick their ass from here to Sunday. They aren’t a bunch of dummies. They’ve got to know that as well as we do.”

“The Bull thinks they’re up to something,” said another pilot, a j.g. named Hank Drucker. “He wouldn’t have put out that Battle Order if he didn’t.” Several men nodded at that. If Halsey thought something, they were convinced it had to be true.

But Peterson remained unquelled and unconvinced. “I think he put it out just to keep us on our toes,” he said. “What the hell could the Japs do to us?”

“Halsey’s worried about submarines,” Drucker said. “One torpedo amidships can put a pretty fair crimp in your plans.”

“Yeah, but why would they do anything like that?” Peterson demanded. “It makes no sense. They couldn’t sink enough of our ships to hurt the Pacific Fleet very much-and then they’d be eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and we’d be all pissed off.”

“They’re already pissed off at us.” Lieutenant Carter Higdon had a Mississippi drawl thick enough to slice. Despite it, he was the brains of the squadron. When he was off duty, he was working his way through a beat-up copy of Ulysses. He went on, “We’ve cut off their oil. We’ve cut off their scrap metal. Somebody tried doing that to us, how would we like it?”

“I’d kick the son of a bitch right in the slats,” Peterson said.

“I think you just shot yourself down, Jim,” Drucker said, a split second after Peterson realized the same thing.

He got out of it as best he could: “But I’m an American, goddammit. Those slant-eyed bastards haven’t got the balls for anything like that.”

“Here’s hopin’ you’re right,” Higdon said. “But I reckon we’ll be steamin’ west for real before too long, get the war going in the Philippines or somewhere like that. If they don’t get their oil from us, where will they get it? Only other place is the Dutch East Indies-and if they go there, they’ll go loaded for bear.”

Several pilots nodded. The Dutch East Indies had hung like ripe fruit waiting to be picked ever since the Germans overran Holland the year before. And Vichy France, also under the Nazis’ thumbs, had given Japan the right to base troops in French Indochina. Of course, if Vichy had said no, the Japs would have gone in anyhow. This way, France maintained a ghostly sort of sovereignty over the area. Peterson wondered how happy that made the froggies.

“You think we ought to fight if the Japs do go into the East Indies?” Drucker asked Higdon. “Me, I’ll be damned if we ought to pull the Dutchmen’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

“If they do get that oil, it’s us next,” Higdon said, turning next into a two-syllable word. “We’re the only ones who can worry them. Holland and France are down for the count, and England’s got bigger worries closer to home. If Hitler takes Moscow and knocks the Russians out this winter, he’ll turn on England with everything he’s got next spring.”

The argument went on and on. Sometimes it was arguing in the wardroom, sometimes a poker game, sometimes argument and poker. Finally, Peterson got tired of it and went up onto the flight deck. His shoes thumped on the six-inch wooden planks. When the Enterprise was abuilding, there’d been talk about armoring the flight deck as the British were doing, but it hadn’t come to anything.

Color-coded cotton jerseys and cloth helmets told off the deck crew by function. Sailors in blue handled parked planes, those in yellow directed them while they moved, while those in red were the repair and crash crews. A couple of fire watchmen in suits of fuzzy white asbestos moved among them, looking like snowmen out for a stroll. Peterson wouldn’t have wanted that job for beans, especially not in warm weather.

Of course, when the fire watchmen went to work, they had more heat to worry about than what they got in the tropics. They watched the world through thick panes of smoked glass. Diving suits might have been heavier and more restrictive than what they wore. Peterson couldn’t think of anything else that came close. No, he wouldn’t have swapped jobs with them for anything.

One of them waved a gauntleted hand. Automatically, Peterson waved back. The fire watchman’s head was turned in his general direction, so he assumed the wave was for him. He might have been wrong. Trying to judge what a man meant when you couldn’t see his face wasn’t easy.

He laughed out loud. “What’s funny, sir?” asked a repair-crew man in a red jersey.

“I was just thinking I’d like to wear one of those goddamn fire suits the next poker game I get into,” Peterson answered. “Long as I keep the faceplate closed, who’s gonna know I’m raising on a busted flush?”

The sailor contemplated that, then grinned. “Don’t tell those firewatch bastards. They’d up and do it.”

“Who’d play with ’em if they did?” Peterson asked.

“Sir, we got us somewhere close to three thousand men on board,” the sailor replied. “You don’t figure some of ’em are suckers?”

“Well, yeah, but you’re not supposed to say so out loud. Otherwise, you will keep ’em out of the games,” Peterson said. They grinned at each other.

Peterson looked out to sea. A fresh breeze blew his sandy hair back from his face. The air was the freshest in the world. He didn’t consciously notice the salt tang of the sea, but it braced him even so. Off to port, a cruiser kept station with the Enterprise. A couple of destroyers prowled ahead, alert for periscopes-and, with their listening gear, for subs lurking below the surface.

A couple of gooney birds glided by on wings that seemed almost as long as a Wildcat’s. The big birds bred on Midway and some of the other islands in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian chain. In the air, they were nonpareils. On land… They came in as if they’d blown both tires and had a wheel go out from under them. They were almost as ungainly taking off, too. They needed a headwind and a long running start. Otherwise, they couldn’t get airborne at all.

More destroyers followed the carrier at the heart of the task force. Peterson turned and peered over the Enterprise ’s stern. That pointed him more or less in the direction of Japan. What were Tojo’s boys up to? Could they really be contemplating war with the USA? Peterson still had trouble believing it. Wasn’t all their tough talk just a bluff? With the America Firsters and the other isolationists running around loose and making a big noise in the papers and on the radio, weren’t the Japs trying to scare FDR into giving them what they wanted?

“Dammit, that’s still the way it looks to me,” Peterson muttered. If the President just stood firm, Japan would pull in its horns. The Japs had a million soldiers bogged down in China, for Christ’s sake. Why would they take on another country that was bigger than they were? It made no sense.

“Prepare to land a plane!” blared from the loudspeakers, and then, “Landing a plane!”

The squat F4F Wildcat came in from astern. The landing officer stood facing it. He held out the wigwag flags so they and his arms made a straight line out from his shoulders. He dipped to the right; the Wildcat straightened up. Jim Peterson laughed. If that wasn’t Ike Greenwald coming in, he’d eat his socks. Ike always carried one wing low. The landing officer straightened and moved the flags in small circles. The fighter sped up. The landing officer dropped the flags to his sides. The plane dove for the deck.

Tires smoked as they struck. The tailhook caught an arrester wire. The pilot killed the roaring engine. The stinks of sizzling rubber and exhaust ruined the clean air for a moment. The man in the cockpit rolled back the canopy and climbed out. Sure as hell, it was Greenwald. Nobody else on the Enterprise was built quite so much like a soda straw. People said he could sleep in the barrel of a five-inch gun. That wasn’t fair, though he might have managed in an eight-incher.

“Nice landing,” one of the sailors on the flight deck called to him.

He grinned sheepishly. He never knew what to do with praise. Peterson would have milked it for all it was worth. Greenwald just said, “I didn’t crash the crate, and I didn’t smash me. I’ll take it.”

Another Wildcat roared off to keep the combat air patrol at full strength. The plane dropped toward the Pacific as it sped off the flight deck, then steadied and began to climb. Peterson watched it with affection. The Wildcat was a pretty good machine. It measured up fine against land-based American fighters. That had to mean the Japs didn’t have anything that even came close.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK was a bum. He knew it. He was proud of it, as a matter of fact. He was a big blond man in his late twenties, his hair bleached even paler by constant exposure to sun and sea, his hide tanned almost as brown as a Hawaiian’s.

He hadn’t intended to turn into a bum. He’d graduated from Stanford in 1935: an English major with a history minor. His folks thought he should have studied accounting instead. But he was a second son, a kid brother, and Roger showed plenty of aptitude and eagerness for the family construction business when-if-Dad ever decided to retire. So, while disappointed, Oscar’s folks weren’t furious. They let him do what he wanted.

It was hard to be furious at Oscar anyhow. He had not a mean bone in his body. An aw-shucks smile made girls’ hearts melt. He’d studied coeds at least as much as Chaucer and Herodotus, and he’d got good grades in them.

As a graduation present, his folks gave him a trip to Hawaii. They booked him into the Royal Hawaiian, right on Waikiki Beach. The grounds were splendidly landscaped, with coconut palms and banyan trees insulating the great pink pile from the encroachments of the outside world. The room ran twenty dollars a day-this when millions would have got down on their knees and thanked God to make twenty dollars a week. Oscar had never had to worry about money-and he didn’t worry about it now.

Next door to the Royal Hawaiian stood the Outrigger Club, which since 1908 had been dedicated to the art and science of surf-riding. The proximity of club to hotel was the reason Oscar went from new-minted baccalaureate to bum in the course of two short weeks. He watched in open-mouthed awe the first time he saw men glide the big surfboards over the waves and up onto the white sand of the beach.

“By God, I’m going to try that!” he said. Nobody at the Royal Hawaiian took any particular notice of the remark. Quite a few visitors said they wanted to learn to ride the surf. A good many of them actually did it. A handful did it enough to start to know what they were doing.

The next morning, Oscar was out in front of the Outrigger Club half an hour before sunup. It didn’t open till eight. The man who let him in smiled and said, “Hello, malihini. You look eager.”

Malihini meant stranger or tenderfoot. Without the smile, it might have been an insult. Oscar wouldn’t have cared if it were. He nodded to the man, who was then the same shade of brown he would later become himself. “Teach me!” he said.

He learned to ride the surfboard on his belly, and then kneeling, and then, at last, standing. Skimming over the waves was like nothing he’d known in all his life. It was as if God had given him wings. Was this how angels felt? He didn’t know about angels. He did know this was what he was meant to do.

He was supposed to go home in two weeks. He cashed in his return ticket instead, and moved to digs much less impressive-and much less expensive-than the Royal Hawaiian. He stretched his money as far as it would go, to stay in Hawaii as long as he could. His only luxury (though to him it was a necessity) was more surf-riding lessons.

When the money he got from the ticket ran out, he worked on the docks for a while, and surfed almost every waking minute when he wasn’t working. Before long, he didn’t need to take lessons any more. Before much longer, he was giving them. By the time winter came, he was as good as men who’d been riding the waves as long as he’d been alive.

That was what he thought, anyway, till he followed the Outrigger Club members’ winter migration to the north shore of Oahu. There he found waves like none he’d seen, like none he’d imagined, near Honolulu. They rolled down across the North Pacific all the way from Alaska. And when they came ashore at Waimea and some of the other spots the club members knew, some of them were as tall as a three-story building.

Riding waves like that wasn’t just sport. If it went wrong, it was like falling off a cliff-except then the cliff fell on you. More than once, he came to the surface gasping and gouged and scraped from a tumble against the sand. He lost two front teeth when somebody else’s surfboard hit him in the face. That was, if anything, a membership pin. Half the really accomplished surfers at the Outrigger Club sported either bridgework or a space where their incisors had been.

He never did go back to northern California. His family wrote anguished letters for a while. He assured them he was fine. After a while, they gave up and stopped writing. He dropped them little notes every so often-whenever he happened to think of it. He was a good-natured fellow. As time went by, though, he thought about anything outside of Oahu less and less often.

He acquired a nickname: Smooth Oscar. He acquired a scar on his leg from a jagged chunk of coral. He acquired a series of lady friends from among the tourists who came from Seattle or St. Louis or Savannah to learn to ride the surf. The lessons were intimate enough to start with, and often got more so after the sun went down. The ladies, almost all of them, went home happy. Oscar smiled a lot.

When times were good, he got enough money from the lessons to make ends meet. When they weren’t so good, he went back to the docks or washed dishes in one of Honolulu’s nine million greasy spoons or worked in the cane and pineapple fields that filled the middle of the island. When he wasn’t out on the ocean, he didn’t much care what he did.

One day when he was, by his standards, flush, he paid a hundred bucks for a 1927 Chevy hardtop with no rear window. What the former owner perceived as a deficiency was to Oscar an asset. It let him stow his surfboard much more conveniently. The board, of three-inch-thick koa wood, was eleven feet long and not the easiest object to transport. After seeing how handy the missing window proved, three or four of his fellow surfers knocked the back glass out of their jalopies.

Oscar had been brought up bourgeois. Every so often, he wondered what the hell he was doing with his life. But all the doubts flew away when he rode along at the crest of a wave-or when he rode one of the girls he’d taught to kneel on a board in the wahine surf near the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. He was having a good time: that was what he was doing. Who needed anything more?

He snagged a lot of lessons toward the end of 1941. He’d been short on cash, and winter brought the tourists out from the cold parts of the country. But when his latest girlfriend threw a vase at his head after he didn’t ask her to marry him the night before she sailed back to Los Angeles, he decided the time had come to get away from it all for a little while.

He loaded his board into the Chevy. With him rode Charlie Kaapu, a large, smiling, half-Hawaiian fellow who also lived for the surf and a good time. Charlie’s surfboard was six or eight inches longer than Oscar’s. They tied a red rag to the back of it to keep cars behind them from running into them, then took off for the north coast and whatever they found there.

“Peace and quiet,” Oscar said, more plaintively than usual. “I told that Shirley it was only for fun, but she didn’t want to listen.” He took a hand off the wheel to touch his right ear, the only part of his anatomy the vase had grazed. Four inches to the left and he would have been very unhappy. As things were, he wouldn’t be able to go barefoot in his apartment till he swept up all the broken glass.

Charlie Kaapu laughed at him from the back seat. “Women hear what they want to hear. Don’t you know that by now?”

“I ought to,” Oscar said. “I mean, she was fine for a week or two, but forever?” He shook his head. “She’d drive me nuts. Hell, I’d drive her nuts.”

“They put out for you, they think it’s gotta be for life,” Charlie said, and then, philosophically, “She’s gone now. You don’t gotta worry about it no more.”

“Yeah.” Oscar spoke with a mixture of relief and regret. He was glad Shirley’d got on the liner and out of his hair-no doubt of that. But he still wished things had gone better. He didn’t like ugly scenes. They weren’t his style. A kiss on the cheek, a pat on the fanny, a good-bye from the pier as the ship headed back to the mainland… That was how he liked things to go, and how they usually went.

He got out of Honolulu, went past the back side of Pearl Harbor, and drove up the Kamehameha Highway toward the north coast. The drive wasn’t so pleasant as he would have wanted. He got stuck behind a snorting convoy of olive-drab Army trucks chugging up to Schofield Barracks. Not only did they slow him down, but the exhaust made his head ache. He hadn’t had that much to drink the night before… had he?

Pineapple fields stretched out along the right side of the road, pineapple and sugarcane to the left. Most of the time, he would have smelled the damp freshness of growing things. Diesel stink made an inadequate substitute.

They rattled past Wheeler Field, off to the left of the highway. Charlie pointed to the planes drawn up in neat, tight rows on the runways. “Pretty snazzy.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said again. “Nobody’s gonna get at ’em or do anything to ’em.” He drove on for a little while, then asked, “You think anything’s gonna come of this war scare, Charlie?”

“Beats me,” Charlie Kaapu answered. “Everybody’s pretty stupid if us and the Japs do start fighting, though.”

Oscar nodded. He said, “Yeah,” one more time. The trucks pulled off to the left, the way to Schofield Barracks. He stepped on the gas. The Chevy went a little faster: not a lot, since the only way it could have hit fifty was to go off a cliff. But he was glad not to have to breathe fumes any more. Smiling, he lit a cigarette and passed Charlie the pack.

The Dole pineapple plantation north of Wahiawa was one of the biggest in the world. Most of the workers in the fields were Japanese and Filipinos. Having put in some time there himself, Oscar had seen enough to feel sorry for them.

He stopped for gas in Waialua, just short of the ocean: eighteen and a half cents a gallon at the Standard Oil station. That made him grumble-Hawaii was more expensive than the mainland. Up at Haleiwa, on the Pacific, he had to stop his car just short of a narrow bridge buttressed by double arches of steel. Another convoy of trucks was heading to Schofield Barracks, these diesel snorters loaded with men who’d been enjoying leave on the north shore.

Even before the last truck came through, Charlie Kaapu was doing some snorting of his own. He pointed north, past the last of the olive-drab monsters. “You see that, Oscar? You see, goddammit? Ain’t got no fuckin’ surf!”

“Could be better,” Oscar agreed. “Could be worse, too. I figure-what, five-six feet?”

“Something like that,” Charlie said, still disgusted. “Hell, I can piss higher’n that. I wanted some big waves.”

“Maybe they’ll come,” Oscar said hopefully. “Maybe there’s a storm up north blowing like hell. Maybe they’ll be twenty or thirty feet by tomorrow. And besides, this still isn’t too bad.”

“Ha!” Charlie Kaapu said. “We could do this out by Diamond Head. You gonna tell me I’m wrong?”

“No.” Oscar couldn’t, and he knew it. “But we’re here, so we might as well make the best of it.” He’d been making the best of it ever since he got to Hawaii. He saw no reason to change now. “Tell you what-I’ll go on to Waimea Bay. It’ll be better there than anywhere else along this coast.”

“Okay, go ahead,” Charlie said. “We’ve come this far. What’s another few miles? Anyway, looks like we’ll just find more soldiers if we stay around here.”

He wasn’t wrong about that, either. The Army used Waialua Bay as a place to give its men rest and recreation. It looked to have taken most of them back to Schofield Barracks in the truck convoy that had blocked the bridge, but not all the olive-drab tents had disappeared from the beach here. The trucks would have to come back for the rest of the men.

When they got to Waimea, though, the surfers had things to themselves. Oscar parked the Chevy across the road from the beach. He and Charlie pulled their surfboards out of the car, stuck them under their arms, and carried them down toward the sea. Oscar’s toes dug into the sand. It was softer than any he’d known on a California beach. He knew he’d feel that more on the return trip, when he was going uphill. Now…

Now he didn’t want to think about the return trip. Easier to get out into the ocean when the waves weren’t so fierce. The surfboard went into the water. He lay down atop it and paddled with his arms. Ten feet away, Charlie Kaapu was doing the same thing.

After Oscar had paddled out far enough, he turned the board around. The swells pushed him back toward the shore. He scrambled upright on the bobbing, tilting, darting surfboard and rode the crest of a wave all the way up onto the beach.

He looked around for Charlie. There he was, separated from his surfboard, which washed ashore without him. “Surf’s not too easy, is it?” Oscar called.

His friend gave him the finger. “This shit can happen down by Diamond Head, too,” Charlie said. He wasn’t wrong about that, either; he’d lost his front teeth within a couple of miles of Waikiki.

They surfed all day. Oscar wiped out several times himself. He’d known he would, and didn’t worry about it. When the sun sank down toward Kaena Point, they put the boards back into the Chevy and walked into Waimea. A chop-suey house there gave them a cheap, filling supper.

“You don’t want to drive back in the dark, do you?” Charlie Kaapu hinted.

Oscar smiled. “No. I was thinking we’d sleep in the car, put the boards on the roof, and go at it again first thing in the morning.”

Charlie’s face lit up. “Now you’re talking!”

Sleeping in the Chevy was a cramped business, but Oscar had had practice. Charlie hadn’t, or not so much, but he managed. His snores escaped through the glassless rear window.

Those same snores helped wake Oscar around sunup. Yawning, he sat up in the front seat and stretched. He did some more stretching after he got out of the car, to work the kinks from his neck and back. He walked over and pissed at the base of a coconut palm. Only the waning gibbous moon looked down at him from low in the west.

His belly growled. He wished he’d thought to bring along something for breakfast. Nothing in Waimea would be open so early. And this was Sunday morning, too, so it was anybody’s guess if anything would be open at all.

He couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was put his board in the water. He looked out to the Pacific and muttered under his breath. The waves were no better than they had been the day before. If anything, they were a little flatter. Oscar shrugged. What could you do?

When he got his board off the roof of the Chevy, the noise woke Charlie Kaapu. The big half-Hawaiian extracted himself from the car. As Oscar had, he stretched and yawned. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Oscar didn’t wear a watch. But a glance at the sun gave him a fair idea. “About half past seven, I guess.”

Charlie looked out to sea. He made the same sort of mutters as Oscar had. Then he went off to take a leak by the same palm tree. When he came back, he got down his surfboard, too. “We’re here. We might as well give it a go,” he said resignedly.

“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He crossed the road and headed down the beach toward the water. Charlie Kaapu followed.

Oscar had a couple of good rides in. The second time, Charlie went off his board. He had a scowl on his face when he recaptured it. He stood there at the edge of the sea, dripping and fuming. Then he frowned, looking north. “What’s that noise?”

After a moment, Oscar heard it too: a distant drone that put him in mind of mosquitoes. He also looked north. He pointed. “There they are. That’s a hell of a lot of airplanes. The Army or the Navy must be up to something.”

The airplanes flew in several groups. Some went south through the central valley. Others took a more southwesterly course. They were plenty high enough to make it over the Waianae Range. Oscar briefly wondered why they were all coming off the ocean. Then he shrugged again. What the military did wasn’t his worry. He and Charlie went back to their surf-riding.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO piloted his Zero back toward the Akagi. Exultation filled the commander of the second wave’s fighters. The first two attacks had heavily damaged the ships at Pearl Harbor and punished the airfields on Oahu. Now, Shindo thought, now we finish the job.

There was the carrier, with some of the fleet’s screen of destroyers and cruisers and battleships. And there were the transports, steaming south towards Oahu as fast as they could go. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. He was usually on the phlegmatic side. Not today. Today he felt like a tiger. And by tomorrow morning, the Japanese would be landing on the island.

Meanwhile, he had to land on the Akagi. Another Zero came in just ahead of his. The deck crew manhandled the plane to one side. The landing officer signaled for Shindo to continue his approach. He did, concentrating on the man’s signals to the exclusion of everything else. The carrier’s deck was pitching and rolling in front of him. The man on it could gauge his path better than he could himself. Learning that lesson was the hardest thing any Navy flier did.

Down went the flags. Shindo dove for the Akagi ’s deck. The arrester hook caught a wire. His Zero jerked to a stop. He shoved back the canopy, scrambled out of the plane, and ran for the carrier’s small portside island. “Admiral Nagumo!” he called. “Admiral Nagumo!”

Admiral Chuichi Nagumo came out onto the deck to meet him. He was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, with a round face, two deep vertical lines between his eyes, and thinning hair cropped close to his skull. He was a big-gun admiral, not a flying man, which sometimes worried Shindo. He’d got command of the Pearl Harbor expedition by seniority: the usual Japanese way. So far, though, he’d handled things as smoothly as anyone could have.

“All is well?” he asked now. Tension stretched his voice taut.

“All is very well!” Shindo flashed a grin at Minoru Genda and Mitsuo Fuchida, who’d come out onto the flight deck behind Nagumo. Fuchida, the air commander, was a couple of years older than Genda, taller, with long, horsey features. Shindo pulled himself back to the admiral’s question: “Yes, sir, all is very well. We need to launch the third wave right away, to smash the dock facilities and the fuel tanks and to hit Schofield Barracks for the Army’s benefit.”

“Where are the American carriers?” Nagumo demanded.

That was the one fly in the ointment. They hadn’t caught any of the carriers in port. Shindo gave the only answer he could: “Sir, I don’t know.”

Those lines between Admiral Nagumo’s eyes got deeper yet. “You are thinking about what happens to Hawaii,” he said heavily. “I am thinking about what happens to my fleet. What if the Americans strike us while we linger here?”

From behind him, Commander Genda said, “Sir, we have six carriers. At most, the Americans have three, and they probably aren’t concentrated. We have the best fliers in the world. They have… less than the best. If they find us, they will be the ones to regret it.”

“So you say.” Nagumo still sounded anything but happy. Shindo had yet to hear him sound happy since the fleet sailed from Japan. Even the astounding damage the first two waves of attackers had caused did nothing to cheer him. He went on, “I tell you, gentlemen, if it were not for the landing forces accompanying us, I would turn around and sail for the home islands now.”

Commander Fuchida couldn’t hide his horror. “Sir, we have a job to finish!” he exclaimed.

“I know,” Nagumo answered. “And I will stay, and I will carry it through. Those are my orders, and I cannot abandon the soldiers. But what I told you is no less true. We are in danger here.”

“So are the Americans,” Shindo said. Genda and Fuchida both nodded. At last, reluctantly, so did Admiral Nagumo.