Days of Infamy

II

THE MESSAGE CAME in to the Enterprise from one of the scouts just after eight in the morning: “White 16-Pearl Harbor under attack! Do not acknowledge.”

Aboard the carrier, rage boiled. “Those little slanty-eyed cocksuckers want a war, they’ve got one!” Lieutenant Jim Peterson shouted to whoever would listen.

“You were the one who said they wouldn’t fight.” Three people reminded Peterson of that at the same time.

He was too furious to get embarrassed at being wrong. “I don’t give a shit what I said,” he snarled. “Let’s knock the yellow bastards into the middle of next week.”

But that was easier said than done. Everyone knew the Japanese were somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands-but where? Had they come down out of the north or up from the south? The Enterprise couldn’t even ask the harried men at Pearl Harbor what they knew. As soon as that horrifying message came in, Admiral Halsey slapped radio silence on the whole task force. No Japs were going to spot the carrier and her satellites by their signals.

In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese-and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who’d shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.

The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They’d been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news-about seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose-far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.

As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the Enterprise. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary-people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too-but what trickled in didn’t sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row’s taken a hell of a licking.”

“That won’t end the world,” Peterson said. “The Navy’s needed to get rid of those wallowing tubs for years.” He spoke like what he was: a carrier fighter pilot. Billy Mitchell had proved battleships obsolete twenty years earlier. Nobody’d paid any attention then. It sounded as if the Japs were driving home the lesson. Would anybody pay attention now?

“You’re a coldhearted bastard, Peterson,” a lieutenant named Edgar Kelley said. “It’s not just ships, you know. It’s God knows how many sailors, too.”

“Yeah? So?” Peterson scowled at the other pilot. “If they didn’t get it now, they sure as hell would when they took their battlewagons west to fight the Japs. Carrier air would take ’em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn’t think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren’t a realist about the way the world worked, you’d take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.

Just after noon, a cry not far from despair came over the intercom: “Third wave of attackers striking Pearl!”

That was followed almost immediately by Admiral Halsey’s unmistakable rasp: “Boys, we’ve got to give the land-based air a hand. The Japs have knocked out a lot of it on the ground, and I’ll be double-damned and fried in the Devil’s big iron spider before I let those monkeys have it all their own way when I can give ’em a lick. Go get ’em! I only wish I were up there with you.”

Cheering, the pilots ran for their Wildcats. Peterson’s was third in line. He fired up the engine even before he’d closed the canopy and fastened his safety belts. The fierce roar of the 1,200-horsepower Wright radial engine filled him. His fingernails, his bones, his guts all shook with it. It made him feel not just alive but huge and ferocious-he might have been making that great noise, not his plane.

A red flag hung from the bridge: the signal that the Enterprise was about to launch her airplanes. No men in blue jerseys were left on the deck but the two who stood by to remove the chocks from the squadron leader’s wheels. Sailors in yellow smocks formed a line across the deck.

What might have been the voice of God thundered from the island: “Prepare to launch planes!”

The sailors in blue whipped away the chocks. The lead Wildcat rolled forward, a man in yellow walking backwards just ahead of it, leading it on to a point midway up the flight deck. A little ahead of the island stood another man in a yellow jersey. This one held a checkered flag in his right hand.

That biblically amplified voice roared again: “Launch planes!”

As the man with the flag turned his free hand in a grinding motion, the squadron leader gunned his engine. When the note suited the sailor in yellow, he dropped the flag. The plane sped down the deck and zoomed off into the air. The next fighter taxied up to the takeoff line. At the flagman’s orders, the pilot built up the boost on his engine. The flag fell. The Wildcat roared away.

Then it was Peterson’s turn. The sailors in blue jerseys pulled away the chocks. Up to the line he went, following the man in yellow. The flagman made his grinding motion. Peterson gave his engine the gun. Down went the flag. Peterson whooped with delight. Acceleration shoved him back in his seat as the fighter raced down the Enterprise ’s flight deck.

As always when he went off the end of the deck, there was that sickening lurch, that moment when he wondered whether he’d go into the sky or into the drink. But the Wildcat climbed after the two planes that had taken off ahead. Peterson whooped again. This was where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do.

More fighters rose from the carrier. They formed in pairs: leader and wingman. Peterson’s wingman was a j.g. named Marvin Morrison. He had a squeaky tenor voice that broke when he got excited, which happened frequently. It sounded in Peterson’s earphones now: “We’re going to clean the Japs’ clocks for them.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Peterson agreed. “If they want a war, Marv, we’ll give ’em all the war they want-you bet your ass we will.”

Similar outraged chatter crackled through the squadron. Along with the outrage was a sense of astonishment: how could the Japanese, with their buck-toothed, bespectacled pilots and their lousy scrap-metal planes, dare to take on the United States of America? The fighter pilots also monitored radio traffic from Pearl Harbor. When one frantic officer relayed rumors that the Japs had German pilots doing some of their flying for them, Peterson nodded to himself. The little yellow men couldn’t have done it all on their own. Say what you would about the Nazis, but they’d shown the world they knew what the hell they were doing when it came to war.

He saw the thick black smoke rising into the blue tropical sky when he was still a devil of a long way out from Pearl. More and more of it came up every minute, too. “Jesus,” he said softly. With or without help from Hitler’s Aryan supermen, the Japs had done something really terrible here.

Radio from Pearl Harbor abruptly cut off. He didn’t think it was silence imposed by command. More likely, a bomb had wrecked the transmitter-the signal went away in the middle of a word.

As Peterson drew closer to Oahu, he saw more smoke rising from the Marine Corps airfield at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. In fact, people in Honolulu used Ewa as a synonym for west, the same as they used Waikiki for east. Till he got close, though, the small smoke from Ewa was lost in the greater conflagration of Pearl Harbor.

And the closer he got, the worse those fires looked. The tank farms had to be burning, sending untold millions of gallons of fuel oil up in smoke. Peterson swore softly, more in awe than in anger. This was a disaster, nothing else but. Somebody’d been asleep at the switch, or it never could have happened. Heads would roll among the big brass. They’d have to. But that did nobody one damn bit of good now.

“Bandits!” In Peterson’s earphones, that was more a cry of exultation than a mere word. “Bandits dead ahead!”

He peered through the bulletproof windscreen. Sure as hell, there they were: shiny silver planes with meatballs on their wings and sides. They were tiny as toys now, but swelled even as he watched. “Come on, Marv!” he called to his wingman. “Time to go hunting!”

“I’m right with you,” Morrison answered.

Peterson more than half expected the Japs to run away. Now they’d have to fight, after all, not just kick somebody while he was down. Did they really have the balls for that? But they’d seen the planes from the Enterprise, too, and here they came.

His thumb tensed on the firing button on top of the stick. Just when he thought he had the first of the enemy fighters in his sights, though, the Jap did a flick roll and zoomed upwards. Christ, but he’s maneuverable, Peterson thought, and then, with a twinge of alarm, He climbs like a son of a bitch, too.

He gave his Wildcat full throttle. If the Jap wanted to dogfight, he’d play along. Marvin Morrison stuck to him like a burr, the way a good wingman was supposed to. Several of the Wildcats were shooting now, flames spurting from the four.50-caliber machine guns each one carried. A Japanese fighter fell from the sky trailing smoke and flame. Peterson whooped.

But the enemy planes were firing, too, and the shells from their wing-mounted cannon bit chunks out of the fighters from the Enterprise when they hit. And they seemed to be able to hit whenever they pleased. Peterson rapidly discovered that dogfighting the Japs was a mistake. It was like trying to pick up water with a fork. Their fighters could turn inside his and out-climb him as if the Wildcat were nailed to the mat.

This isn’t right, he told himself. What the hell are they doing with hotter planes than we’ve got?

“I’m hit!” Morrison wailed in his earphones. “I’m going down!” The wingman’s Wildcat spun toward the ground and the sea far, far below. Flames licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit.

“Get out!” Peterson screamed. “Get out while you can!” But he didn’t think Marvin Morrison could.

And then he had to stop worrying about Marv and try to save his own skin. The Jap he’d been hunting had been hunting him, too. Now the bastard was on his tail. Peterson jinked like a maniac, but he couldn’t shake the enemy or turn the tables on him. Tracers flashed past. Peterson tensed, not that that would do him any good if a shell slammed through his armored seat and into his back.

Machine-gun bullets stitched across his wing. Two cannon shells hit his engine, one right after the other. It quit. None of his cursing and clawing brought it back to life. All of a sudden, he was flying the world’s most expensive glider.

He’d told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice-if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free… right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.

He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so… Better the jungle than the sharks.

Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who’d shot him down? One burst from the bastard’s machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.

Peterson waved back with a one-finger salute. Fortunately, the enemy flier either didn’t see it or didn’t know what it meant. He flew back into the fight instead of returning to wipe out the insult in blood.

Like bad-tempered dandelion fluff, Peterson floated down. He spilled air from the chute and swung his weight this way and that, fighting not to go into the drink. And he didn’t. He came down on the fairway of a golf course about a quarter of a mile from the sea.

Two gray-haired men advanced on him with upraised five-irons. “Surrender!” they shouted.

In spite of everything, he almost burst out laughing. Here he was, taller than either one of them, fairer than either one of them-and they thought he was a goddamn Jap because he came out of the sky. “Get me to a car and get me to an airfield,” he growled. “If they can find a plane for me, I’ve got some more fighting to do.”

The golfers gaped at him as if he’d started spouting Japanese. If they’d lived here a while, they might even have understood some Japanese. Did they understand English? “I think he’s an American, Sid,” one of them said, as if announcing miracles.

“You’re right, Bernie,” the other declared after cogitations of his own.

Peterson felt like murdering them both. Instead, they drove him back towards Ewa. To the east, the flames and smoke of the U.S. Navy’s funeral pyre climbed higher into the air every moment. Soot floated down like black rain.

IN HIS ZERO, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo watched Pearl Harbor go up in smoke below him. This was the blow Commander Fuchida had wanted to strike: the blow against the harbor’s great tank farms and repair facilities. Even if the invasion of Oahu failed by some accident, the Americans would have a devil of a time getting much use out of their forward base in the Pacific. The channel was plugged, too, with ships sunk trying to steam out and fight. The Japanese task force wouldn’t have to worry about sorties, not for a while.

Shindo flew at four thousand meters. The thick, black, greasy smoke had already climbed past him. How high would it go? How far would the pall spread? He couldn’t begin to guess. He also couldn’t see the ground as well as he would have liked, for the smoke obscured it. The very success of the attack was ruining reconnaissance.

“We were attacked by carrier-based aircraft flying in from the west,” Shindo said into the radio. He knew the carriers wouldn’t answer, but Admiral Nagumo, Commander Genda, and Commander Fuchida urgently needed to hear. “Repeat: attacked by carrier-based aircraft from the west. Approximate bearing 290 degrees from Pearl Harbor. Range unknown, but not likely to be far. Out.”

His lips curled up at the corners in the disciplined beginnings of a smile. He’d knocked down two Wildcats himself. The pilot of one had managed to get out and get his chute open; he thought he’d killed the other American flier in the cockpit. The enemy was brave-no doubt about that. But Shindo had quickly seen he and his men were better trained. And the Zero could fly rings around the slow, stubby Wildcat.

Shindo laughed softly. He knew how the Americans looked down their noses at Japan and what she made. Well, the arrogant white men had got themselves a little surprise today.

Back aboard the task force, they’d be launching a flight of Nakajima B5N2s. They’d held the torpedo bombers out of the third wave just in case American carriers showed up. Now at least one was on the board. Shindo would have bet there was only one, or the enemy would have thrown more fighters at his force.

The plan called for his planes to plaster Schofield Barracks after they’d finished with Pearl Harbor. But he knew he could fly along the bearing from which the Wildcats had come and have a good chance of finding the carrier that had launched them. The B5N2s would be coming from much farther away. They wouldn’t know where along that bearing the carrier might lie, so they’d have to waste time searching.

Shindo made up his mind. He pulled half a dozen Zeros and ten Aichi D3A1 dive bombers out of the Schofield Barracks attack and ordered them off to the west with him. If that carrier was there, he wanted to be in at the kill. Taking it out might be the most important thing the Japanese Navy did.

There was Ewa down below. Planes still burned on the runways, where they’d been lined up almost wingtip-to-wingtip: a perfect target. The Americans had a couple of antiaircraft guns up and working. They fired at Shindo’s detachment, but the shell bursts didn’t come close.

On he flew, out over the Pacific. It was so much bluer and more beautiful than it had been around Japan. The air above Oahu had smelled sweet and spicy before battle began. This was a wonderful place. It would make a fine addition to the Japanese Empire. But to make sure it did, where was that carrier?

If I’m on a wild-goose chase… Alone in the cockpit, Shindo shrugged. If he was, he was. He had to take the chance.

There was Kauai, off to the northwest of Oahu. The Garden Island, its nickname was. He’d run into that in an intelligence briefing. It was supposed to be even lovelier than Oahu. Shindo wondered if that were possible.

Then all thoughts of Kauai, all thoughts of beauty, vanished from his head. There south of the island were ships, their white wakes very visible as they steamed towards Oahu at full speed. Shindo’s heart thuttered with excitement. Now-was the U.S. carrier with them? Yes, that had to be it, there at the heart of the flotilla. The escorting ships-were those battleships, or only cruisers?

He couldn’t tell. He didn’t care, or not much. The carrier counted for more than all the others put together. He radioed its position to his own fleet and to the torpedo bombers that already had to be on the way.

Then he spoke to the pilots he led: “The carrier is your first priority. Attack it at all costs. Only after it is destroyed will you worry about any other ships. Banzai for the Emperor!”

Answering Banzai! s dinned in his earphones. The American ships swelled as he drew closer to them. Flame and smoke burst from the guns of the forward vessels. They’d spotted him, then. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky ahead. They hadn’t quite found the range. But they would. They would.

“Enemy fighters ahead!” a Zero pilot yelled.

Shindo swore, but only mildly. Of course the American carrier would have a combat air patrol overhead. Zeros orbited the Japanese task force, too-just in case. “Our job is to keep those fighters off our dive bombers,” he radioed to his comrades. “We are expendable. They are not. Let’s go.” He didn’t shout Banzai! again. He was not a showy man.

The Zero’s engine roared as he brought it up to full combat power. He and his fellow fighter pilots left the D3N1s behind as if they were nailed to the sky. There were the Wildcats, boring in on them. He’d already seen the American Navy fliers had courage and to spare.

What they didn’t have was enough in the way of airplanes under them. The Zeros slashed into the enemy planes. One Wildcat after another tumbled toward the Pacific. A Zero fell, too, and then another. The Japanese fighters were lighter and faster and more maneuverable than the Americans, but the Wildcats could take more punishment and keep flying.

There-Shindo turned quicker and harder than any Wildcat could hope to do. His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin 20mm cannon in his wings roared. A tracer round scored a line of what Japanese pilots called ice candy across the sky. Shells blew holes in the Wildcat just behind the cockpit. No plane could survive punishment like that. Spinning wildly, flames pouring from it, the American fighter went down.

Where were the dive bombers? In the fight to keep the Wildcats off them, Shindo had lost track. Then the glint of sun off a cockpit let him spy them. They’d gone into their attack run, stooping on the frantically zigzagging carrier like so many falcons.

In these cerulean seas, the American Navy’s camouflage scheme-dark gray below and light gray above-left something to be desired. It was better suited to gloomier climes farther north. Even from his height, Shindo could make out the planes on the flight deck. Whether the carrier was going to fly them to Oahu or launch a strike against his task force, he didn’t know. Too late now, either way.

Antiaircraft fire snarled up at the diving Aichis. One of them was hit, caught fire, and spiraled into the Pacific. Its bomb went off when it struck, sending up a white geyser of water. But the rest of the dive bombers pressed on fearlessly. They released their bombs one after another and pulled up and away.

“Banzai! ” Shindo shouted when the first bombs exploded. But they were near misses, one astern, the other to port. The carrier kept dodging, staggering across the sea like a drunk. It did not save her, though. The next three bombs were hits: one near the stern, one on the island, and one not far from the bow. The bursts of flame and great clouds of black smoke showed him the difference between what he’d thought a hit looked like and the real thing.

The hit near the stern, among the airplanes loaded with fuel and torpedoes and bombs, was the one that devastated the carrier. Secondary explosions followed almost at once as the munitions, bathed in fire, went off on their own. Engines damaged, the stricken ship slowed to a crawl. Brave men crewed her, though. The antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out kept firing at the Japanese planes.

Seeing their comrades’ success, the last three dive bombers pulled up without dropping their bombs. “What are you doing?” Shindo called to them.

“Sir, the carrier is dead in the water,” one of those pilots replied. “We request permission to attack a battleship instead.”

“I think they’re cruisers,” Shindo said. “But even if they are battleships, the carrier is the primary target.” He looked down at it. The Aichi pilot was right; it could not move at all. Still, the Americans were supposed to be very clever, very skillful, at damage control. Shindo made up his mind. “Two of you will strike the carrier again. The third may use his bomb against a cruiser. Do you understand me? All three of you-speak up!”

“Aye aye, sir!” they chorused.

“Obey, then.” Shindo radioed the rest of the D3A1s: “Go back to the ships. If you pass the torpedo bombers coming this way, give them a course.”

The three bomb-laden Aichis climbed back up into the sky, then dove once more. As Shindo had commanded, two of them attacked the carrier. One missed even though the target lay dead in the water. The other bomb, though, struck square amidships. Shindo thought afterwards that that one might have been enough to sink her all by itself. She began to list to starboard. The list quickly grew. Whatever men remained aboard her could do nothing to stop it.

Shindo was so intent on watching her that the fire and smoke suddenly spurting from a cruiser’s-or was it a battleship’s? — superstructure took him by surprise. “Banzai! ” an excited young pilot shouted in his earphones. “That is a very solid hit!”

“Yes, it is,” Shindo agreed. He ordered the remaining D3A1s back to the carriers, and all the Zeros except his own. If he spotted the torpedo bombers, he could guide them down to the American ships. He throttled back. His plane had more endurance than the dive bombers, especially when he wasn’t going all out in combat. He could afford to loiter here for a while. And he wanted to watch that carrier sink.

She went to the bottom about twenty minutes later. A few boats and rafts bobbed in the water. He supposed individual men were floating and swimming, but he was too high to spot them. Destroyers and cruisers, including the damaged one, gathered to pick up survivors.

Then the ships scattered. They couldn’t possibly have finished picking up all the men from the carrier, but they abandoned them and started throwing up flak. Saburo Shindo spotted the torpedo bombers a couple of minutes later. How had the Americans known about them so soon? Had a cruiser launched a scout? If so, wouldn’t he have seen the slow, clumsy plane catapulted off its ship and shot it down? But if not, how had they done it? Did they have detection gear the Empire of Japan lacked?

That was a question for later. Now Shindo dove on a cruiser and strafed the deck, doing everything he could to distract it from the oncoming Nakajimas. Tracers sizzled all around him. He counted himself lucky that he wasn’t hit. If he had been, he’d intended to try to fly his plane into one of the U.S. ships.

Lieutenant Fusata Iida had tried that sort of thing at Kaneohe. He’d said before the attack began that he would do his best to strike an enemy target if he was shot down. He had been hit, and he’d aimed his Zero at a hangar housing flying boats. He hadn’t been able to hit it, but he’d made the effort. His spirit deserved praise.

One of the Nakajima B5N2s caught fire and tumbled into the Pacific. The planes had to fly low and straight to launch their torpedoes. It made them dreadfully vulnerable. Had the Americans here still had any fighters flying, things would only have been worse. Their ships maneuvered desperately. Two destroyers almost collided. “Too bad!” Shindo exclaimed, seeing they would miss. If the foe had hurt himself, that would have been sweet.

Another torpedo bomber exploded in midair-a big shell must have hit it. But torpedoes splashed into the sea one after another. Here the B5N2s had open water of unlimited depth. This wasn’t a problem like the one Pearl Harbor itself had presented. The narrow, shallow lochs at the American base had made the Japanese modify their torpedoes so they wouldn’t bury themselves in the bottom after they fell from their planes.

No such worries here. Just white wakes in the water, straight as arrows. Shindo cursed when a dodging destroyer managed to evade one of those arrows. But then he shouted, “Banzai! ” again-a torpedo hit the damaged cruiser amidships. The cruiser shuddered to a stop. A destroyer was hit, too, and her back broken. She sank faster than the carrier had.

And there was another cruiser (or battleship? Shindo could still hope) hit, her bow torn off by the force of the blow. Shindo wished for more bombers to finish off the whole flotilla. He shrugged, then let out another cheer as a second destroyer was struck. Despite the cheer, he knew the carrier-based planes were lucky to have accomplished this much. The American carrier was dead. That mattered most. The Japanese Navy also had a swarm of submarines in Hawaiian waters. Maybe they could finish off some of the U.S. ships that had escaped the torpedo bombers.

That wasn’t Shindo’s worry, or not directly. He’d done everything he could here. The surviving Nakajimas were flying back toward the northeast. He followed them, as he’d trained to do. They had better navigation gear than he did. He smiled as he buzzed along over the Pacific. It wasn’t as if he had to worry about American pursuit. No, everything had gone just like a drill.

THE FIRST ATTACKS on Oahu passed Schofield Barracks by. Listening to the radio, looking at the smoke rising from nearby Wheeler Field, Fletcher Armitage was almost insulted. “What’s the matter?” he exclaimed. “Don’t they think we’re worth hitting, the lousy yellow bastards?”

Little by little, the brass started waking up from the haymaker they’d taken. Orders came for units to move to their defensive positions. The Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment headed for Waikiki. The Ninety-Eighth Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) rolled out for Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu. And, along with the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion hurried up to the north shore, to defend the beach between Haleiwa and Waimea.

They hurried, that is, once they got everything ready to roll. That took a while. Along with everybody else, Armitage discovered war was different from drills. The sense of urgency was much higher. Unfortunately, it made a lot of people run around like chickens that had just had a meeting with the hatchet and chopping block.

“Come on, goddammit!” Fletch screamed at a sergeant fifteen years older than he was. “You know how to hitch the gun to the truck. How many times have you done it?”

“About a million, sir,” the sergeant answered quietly. “But never when it counted, not till now.” He looked down at his trembling hands as if they’d betrayed him.

That wasn’t the only foul-up, small and not so small, in the battalion-far from it. Armitage thanked God things weren’t worse. At last, all the 105mm guns and their limbers were attached. All the men who would fire them had piled into the trucks. All the infantrymen in the accompanying regiment had their rifles and ammunition and helmets. They started north from Schofield Barracks a little before two in the afternoon.

They had barely begun to move when the antiaircraft guns still at the barracks began pounding away, throwing shells up into the sky. Through the roar and rumble of the trucks’ diesel engines, Armitage hadn’t been able to hear any airplanes overhead. “Are they shooting for the fun of it?” he asked whoever would listen to him.

He got his answer less than a minute later, when bombs started bursting not far away. The truck stopped, so suddenly that the soldiers in back were pitched into one another. “Holy shit!” somebody shouted.

Fletch was shouting too, in a fury at the driver: “What the hell are you doing? Keep going!”

“I can’t, sir,” the man answered. “Truck two ahead of this one just got blown to hell and gone. Road’s blocked.”

“Well, get off the road and go around him,” Armitage raged.

“I’ll try, sir,” the driver said dubiously.

Armitage wished he could see better. With the olive-drab canvas cover over the back of the truck, he might as well have been inside a Spam can for all the visibility he had. Then a fragment of bomb casing ripped through the canvas about six inches above his head. He decided he didn’t want a view all that badly.

The driver let out a frightened howl: “Fighters! Jap fighters!”

They were coming in low, plenty low enough for Fletch to hear their motors over the noise the trucks were making. He heard their machine guns and cannon going off, too. And, half a heartbeat later, he heard the driver scream.

He had other things to worry about, though. Machine-gun bullets finished the job of shredding the canvas. They did a pretty good job of shredding men, too, and metal as well. Four or five soldiers in the rear compartment started screaming and shouting and cursing, all at the same time. Something hot and wet splashed Fletch’s ear and the side of his face. The iron stink of blood filled the compartment.

More screams followed when the truck ran into the one in front of it. Next to getting strafed by a Zero, though, a collision was a small thing. The diesel engine didn’t go up in flames the way a gasoline-powered motor would have. Even so, Fletch said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Nobody argued with him. In fact, soldiers scrambled over him to escape. Some of them were wounded, others just panicked. By the time he got out, blood splashed the front of his uniform, even if he wasn’t hurt himself.

Japanese planes still buzzed overhead. Here came a fighter, low, flames winking on and off as its machine guns shot up the U.S. column. “Get down!” people were shouting. “Hit the dirt!”

Fletch was damned if he would, even after a bullet slammed into a man less than ten feet away with a noise like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon. The luckless soldier clutched at himself and crumpled. Fletch yanked the.45 from his belt and banged away at the Jap. He had about as much chance of hitting the speeding fighter as he did of taking wing himself, but he gave it his best shot.

Infantrymen started firing at the enemy, too. That actually gave him a little hope. Put enough lead in the air and it was liable to do some good. Meanwhile, though, the handful of enemy planes were cutting the column to ribbons. Bombers pounded it from on high, while the fighters swooped low to strafe again and again. At every pass, men died and vehicles caught fire.

Somebody not far away moaned, “Where the hell are our airplanes?”

“You stupid asshole!” Fletch pointed south, toward the funeral pyre of Wheeler Field. “Where the fuck do you think they are? This has got to be the worst sucker punch in the history of the world.”

A bomb screamed down, louder and louder. With artillery fire, it meant the shells were headed right for you when the sound behaved like that. Armitage didn’t know if bombs worked the same way, but he didn’t want to find out by experiment, either. Now he did throw himself flat, a split second before the bomb burst.

Blast picked him up and slammed him down again like a professional wrestler. It tried to tear his lungs out through his mouth and nose. Dazed, he tasted blood. Concussion could kill without leaving visible injury. As he staggered upright again, he realized that had almost happened to him.

Closer to the crater the bomb had dug, men hadn’t been so lucky. Some of what he saw might have come straight from a butcher’s shop. Butcher’s meat, though, didn’t scrabble frantically, trying to put itself back together. Butcher’s meat didn’t scream for its mother, either.

Fletch bent over and was noisily sick. Then he yelled, “Corpsmen! We need some corpsmen over here!” That shout was rising everywhere.

He bent again, this time by an injured man. With clumsy fingers, he put on a wound bandage to slow the soldier’s bleeding. Then, almost stabbing himself in the process, he gave the man a morphine injection. The wounded soldier sighed as the drug began to take hold.

Next to him, a sergeant was using a bayonet to cut another wounded man’s throat. Considering what the bomb had left of the young man, Armitage only nodded. The sergeant was doing him a favor.

After plunging the bayonet into the ground three or four times to clean it, the sergeant looked over to him. “How the hell are we supposed to get to our deployment area now, sir?” he asked.

The column was an abbatoir. Trucks burned. Others lay on their side or upside down. Guns had been flipped about like jackstraws. “Sergeant, I’ll be damned if I can tell you,” Fletch answered. “Truth is, I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive the last few minutes to care about anything else.”

“Yeah,” the noncom said. “But we better start caring PDQ, don’t you think?”

Fletch looked around again. He saw ruin and wreckage and slaughter. He looked up to the sky. He didn’t see any more Japanese planes, for which he heartily thanked God. But that didn’t mean the bastards with the meatballs wouldn’t come back again. He also didn’t see any American planes. That didn’t surprise him. The Japs must have swept them away like kids in second grade erasing a blackboard. How the hell was his force supposed to do anything if the Japs could hit it from above whenever they pleased?

He had no idea, none in the whole wide world. But he managed a nod he hoped wasn’t too downhearted. “Yeah, Sergeant. You’re right. We’ve got to try.”

JIRO TAKAHASHI TOOK the Oshima Maru out on Sunday just like any other day. The idea of the Sabbath meant nothing to him. The Sabbath was for haoles, who’d invented the silly notion. As far as he was concerned, work was work, and one day as good for it as another.

Maybe Hiroshi and Kenzo had different ideas. If his sons did, they’d never had the nerve to say anything about them. If he’d sent them out in the sampan while he stayed home and slept, they might have. As things were, his example pulled them along. If he was willing-even eager-to get out of bed before sunrise and head for Kewalo Basin, how could they tell him they didn’t want to? They couldn’t. They hadn’t yet, anyhow.

Some sampans were coming in even as the Oshima Maru put to sea. A few men went fishing by night, trailing lights in the water to lure nehus and the tuna that fed on them. They were first to market with their catch, and so got good prices. But their expenses were higher, too-Jiro didn’t have to worry about a generator or the fuel to run it or light bulbs. The work was harder at night, too, though that fazed him much less than the extra cost did.

He set a tub of minnows down in the bottom of the sampan. A fairy tern swooped down to try to steal some of the little fish. He waved his hat. The white bird with the big black eyes flew off toward Waikiki.

“Waste time, bird!” Hiroshi said. Kenzo laughed. Jiro only shrugged. He got the Oshima Maru ’s engine going. The sampan shook and thudded with the diesel’s vibration. Out to sea they went. The sky had just started turning pale yellow, out there beyond Diamond Head. Pink would follow, and then the sun.

Today, he got out early enough to suit him. He’d cleared the defensive sea area well before sunrise. Today, other old-school fishermen would be complaining about their lazy, good-for-nothing sons. Not even Jiro could find anything wrong with his boys this morning. They’d done everything he wanted, and done it in good time, too.

He didn’t tell them so. He didn’t want them getting swelled heads. Besides, why should he praise them for merely doing what they were supposed to do? If he did, then they’d want praise for every little thing. They’d expect it, but they’d be disappointed. He wasn’t the sort to throw praise around. He never had been, and he never would be.

They chattered back and forth in incomprehensible English as the Oshima Maru skimmed over the water. When they needed to talk with him, they switched to Japanese. That was almost always pure business. They didn’t waste a lot of time on chitchat with him. This past week, with no progress in the talks in Washington, the impulse to talk had dried up even more than usual. For all his efforts to make them into good Japanese, they saw things from the USA’s point of view.

Jiro looked ahead, trying to spot a good fishing ground. Hiroshi did the same, even if he wasn’t so good at it. Kenzo stared over the sampan’s stern, back in the direction from which they’d come. Jiro almost told his younger son, “Waste time!” but figured he’d be wasting his breath.

Then Kenzo pointed north towards Oahu and spoke one word: “Look!”

The urgency in his son’s voice made Jiro turn around. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, an oath he used even though he was a Buddhist and Shintoist, not a Christian. Those black clouds on the horizon couldn’t be good news.

“That’s not Honolulu. It’s too far west,” Hiroshi said. “That’s Pearl Harbor. I wonder if some of the ammunition there blew up or something.”

Maybe he would make a proper fisherman one of these days after all. He was dead right about the direction from which the smoke was rising. Kenzo said, “I wish we had a radio on board. Then we’d know what was going on.”

As far as Jiro was concerned, a radio for the boat was more expensive than it was worth. He said, “Whatever’s going on up there, it’s got nothing to do with us. We have a day’s work ahead of us, and we’re going to do it.”

Neither Hiroshi nor Kenzo argued with that. If they’d tried, he would have knocked their heads together, and so what if he would have had to stand on tiptoe to do it? Some things simply needed doing, and he would have done what needed doing here without the least hesitation.

As things were, the Oshima Maru ’s diesel kept pounding away. Most of the smoke to the north vanished below the horizon. Jiro forgot about it. He’d find out what it was when he got home. In the meantime, there were fish to catch. If his sons wanted to go on about Pearl Harbor while they worked, he didn’t mind-as long as they did work.

He steered the sampan to what he thought would be a good spot. Boobies plunged into the sea nearby. That said there were small fish around. Where there were small fish, there could be tuna to feed on them. He killed the motor. The sampan glided to a stop, alone on the Pacific-alone but for that nasty smoke smudge in the north, anyhow. Whatever had happened to Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t anything small.

Again, Jiro made himself shove that aside. He picked up a tub of bait minnows and poured them into the ocean. Away they streaked: little silver darts racing in all directions. “Come on,” he told Hiroshi and Kenzo. “Let’s get the lines in the water and see how we do today.”

The fishing lines followed the bait. To Jiro’s eyes, those big, barbless hooks didn’t look much like minnows. Tuna, fortunately, were less discriminating.

As soon as he and the boys started hauling in the lines, he knew it would be a good day. Fat aku and bigger ahi hung from the hooks like ripe fruit from a branch. Take them off, gut them, store them, throw more minnows in the water to lure more tuna to their doom…

Noon came and passed, and the fishermen hardly even noticed. Most days, Jiro and his sons would break for lunch no matter how things were going. Not today. Today the younger men seemed as much machines as their father. Jiro began to think the weight of fish they were taking might swamp the Oshima Maru. He shrugged broad shoulders. There were worse ways to go.

Kenzo broke the spell about one o’clock, again by pointing north towards Oahu. He said not a word this time, nor did he need to. Those great black greasy clouds spoke for themselves. Even from here, miles away, they boiled high into the sky, swelling and swelling.

Hiroshi whistled softly. “That is something really, really big,” he said. “I wonder if one of the battleships blew up, or if they have a fire in their storage tanks.”

“I wonder how many people are hurt,” Kenzo said. “Something that big, they’re not going to get off for free.”

Jiro Takahashi didn’t say anything. He just eyed the smoke. When the Oshima Maru couldn’t hold another aku, he started the motor and steered the sampan back toward Kewalo Basin. He was not a man to go guessing wildly when he didn’t know. But he wondered whether any accident, no matter how spectacular, could have caused that kind of conflagration. He also wondered what had, what could have, if an accident hadn’t.

Hiroshi pointed east across the water. “There’s another sampan coming in. Maybe they’ll know what’s going on. Will you steer toward them, Father?”

Most of the time, Jiro would have gruffly shaken his head and kept on toward Honolulu. The ever-swelling black clouds to the north, though, were too big and too threatening to ignore. Without a word, he swung the Oshima Maru to starboard.

The other skipper steered his disreputable, blue-painted fishing boat to port. He waved a dirty white cap in the direction of the Oshima Maru and shouted something across the water. Jiro couldn’t make out the words. He cupped a hand behind his ear. The other skipper shouted again. Jiro snorted in disgust. No wonder he couldn’t understand-the other man was speaking English.

“He says, what’s going on at Pearl Harbor?” Kenzo reported.

Hiroshi didn’t hide his disappointment. “I was hoping he’d be able to tell us,” he said in Japanese, then switched to English to yell back at the other sampan. The men on board pantomimed annoyance. They’d wanted to find out what was going on from the Takahashis.

Kenzo called in English toward the other sampan, too. Then he return to Japanese: “We’ll run into more boats when we get closer to the basin.”

“Hai. Honto,” Jiro said. And it was true. Somehow, though, his younger son contrived to speak Japanese with English intonations. It wasn’t Kenzo’s accent; the teachers at the Japanese school had made sure he spoke better than Jiro, who was a peasant from a long line of peasants. But anyone with an ear to hear had to notice the influence of the other language on he way he put his sentences together. They weren’t exactly wrong, but they were… different. Jiro didn’t know what to do about it. Hiroshi had the same problem, but not so badly.

Both sampans skimmed north over the waves. Sure enough, other Maru s were also making their way back to Kewalo Basin. (To the Japanese, anything that floated was a Maru.Haoles got a laugh out of their calling sampans ships rather than boats.) On one of them, the crew were all but jumping out of their dungarees.

Hiroshi pointed to the excited men. “They’ll know.”

“Yes.” Jiro swung the rudder. The Oshima Maru wasn’t the only sampan making for that one, either. Now Jiro raised his voice. “What is it?” he yelled, and waved northwest, in the direction of Pearl Harbor.

The four fishermen on the sampan had a radio. News tumbled out of them, some of it in English, some in Japanese. Jiro didn’t get all of it. But he understood enough: the Empire of Japan had attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, and had struck a devastating blow.

His first reaction was pride. “This is how Admiral Togo hit the Russians in Manchuria when I was young,” he said.

Hiroshi and Kenzo didn’t say anything for a little while. Then, gently, his older son answered, “But, Father, you weren’t living in Manchuria when they attacked it.”

“A surprise attack is a dirty way to start a war,” Kenzo added, not gently at all. “That’s how Hitler does things.”

Jiro blinked. In the Nippon jiji and Jitsugyo no Hawaii and other local Japanese-language papers-the ones he paid attention to-Hitler got pretty good press. The writers worried more about Communists. Wasn’t it the same in English?

He pointed out what was obvious to him: “This isn’t Hitler. This is Japan.”

His sons looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to want to say anything. At last, Hiroshi did: “Father, we’re Americans.” Kenzo nodded.

I’m not! The words leaped into Jiro’s mouth. They were true. Both his sons had to know it. Even so, he didn’t say them. If he had, something would have broken forever between the two boys and him. Sensing that, he kept quiet. Reiko would have understood, but she was of his generation, not his sons’.

Hiroshi went on speaking carefully: “This attack is going to be bad for all the Japanese in Hawaii-all the Japanese on the mainland, too. The fat cats will think we wanted it. They’ll think we were all for it. And they’ll make us pay.” His brother nodded again, nothing but gloom on his face.

“When have things been good for the Japanese in Hawaii?” Jiro asked. “When have the big shots not made us pay? And things would have been even worse if the Japanese government hadn’t complained and made the planters live up to their contracts. All that was before you were born, so you don’t remember. But it happened.”

“Don’t you see, Father? That doesn’t matter now,” Kenzo said. “We’re at war with Japan.”

We’re at war with Japan. The words stabbed Jiro like a dagger. They put him and his sons on opposite sides of a chasm. What he hadn’t said, Kenzo had. He wasn’t at war with Japan. Japan was his country. It always had been, even if he hadn’t lived there since he was young. The haoles who ran Hawaii had made it very plain that they didn’t believe he was an American, or that he could turn into one.

His sons might think themselves Americans. The haoles who ran the islands didn’t think they were. There weren’t enough jobs for Japanese who had the education to fill them. They couldn’t move up in society. They couldn’t join the Army, either. No Japanese were allowed in the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth Divisions, though every other group in Hawaii had members there. Kenzo and Hiroshi had to know that. But they didn’t want to think about it.

And Jiro didn’t want to think about what the attack on Pearl Harbor might mean, or about what might happen in its aftermath. Because he didn’t, he steered the Oshima Maru back toward Kewalo Basin without another word. The time for a real quarrel might come later. He didn’t want it now, out on the open sea.

The other sampans hurried north along with his. The one with the radio was a bigger boat, with a bigger engine. Minute by minute, it pulled away. That proved its undoing. A buzz in the sky swelled into a roar. A dark green fighter with unmistakable U.S. stars on wings and fuselage swooped down on the lead sampan. Machine guns roared. The fighter streaked away.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed once more. His sons stared in horror. The other sampan lay dead in the water.

Jiro brought the Oshima Maru up alongside it. Two of the fishermen aboard were gruesomely dead, one almost cut in half by bullets, the other with his head blown open. One of the others was clutching a wounded leg. “They thought we were invading!” he moaned. The fourth fisherman, by some miracle, hadn’t been hit, but stood there in shock, a dreadful amazement frozen on his face.

“Come on,” Jiro told his boys, trying to ignore the stink of the blood that was everywhere on the shattered sampan. “We’ve got to do what we can for them.”

“What if that plane comes back?” Kenzo quavered.

Jiro shrugged fatalistically. “What if it does? It shows you what the haoles think of how American you are, neh? ”

Neither Kenzo nor Hiroshi had anything to say to that. Gulping, they scrambled onto the other sampan.

“COME ON! COME on!” Lieutenant Yonehara shouted. “Move! Move! Move! You can’t waste a minute! You can’t even waste a second!”

A great stream of Japanese soldiers emerged from the hold of the Nagata Maru. Once upon a time, during his brief schooling, Corporal Takeo Shimizu had heard something about the circulation of the blood. There were little things inside the blood that swirled through the body over and over again.

Corpuscles! That was the name. He wouldn’t have bet he could put his finger on it, not after all these years. He felt like a corpuscle himself, one out of so very many. Corpuscles, though, weren’t weighted down with helmets and bayoneted rifles and packs that would sink them like stones if they couldn’t make the journey from the transport to the landing barges coming alongside.

It was black night, too, which didn’t make things any easier. The Nagata Maru had charged forward all through the day and after darkness came down. The ship and the other transports unloading their cargoes of soldiers and equipment were supposed to be near the north coast of Oahu. Shimizu hoped their captains and navigators knew what they were doing. If they didn’t…

Someone stepped on his foot. That gave him something more urgent than captains and navigators to worry about. “Watch it,” he growled.

“So sorry,” a soldier said insincerely.

“So sorry, Corporal,” Shimizu snapped. The soldier, whoever he was, let out a startled gasp. It was still too dark to recognize faces, and Shimizu hadn’t been able to tell whose voice that was, either.

The Nagata Maru rolled and pitched in the Pacific swells, rising and falling six or eight feet at a time. Behind Shimizu, somebody noisily lost the supper he’d had the evening before. The sharp stink made the corporal want to puke, too. Again, though, he had other things to worry about. The swells wouldn’t make boarding the barges any easier.

His platoon commander didn’t seem worried. “This isn’t bad, men,” Lieutenant Yonehara called. “We could board in seas twice this high!”

“Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try it,” said a soldier protected from insubordination by darkness. Another soldier stepped in the new puddle of vomit and cursed monotonously.

Yonehara’s platoon did keep advancing toward the rail, so Corporal Shimizu supposed other men from the regiment were going down the side of the ship and onto the barges. It was either that or they were all going over the side and drowning. They could have done that back in Japanese waters, if it was what the High Command had in mind. They wouldn’t have needed to come all this way.

“Wait!” a sailor called. The tossing didn’t seem to bother him a bit. “Another barge is coming alongside. That’s the one you’ll go into.”

Corporal Shimizu wondered how he could tell. It was as dark as the inside of a pig. Something hard and cold caught him just above the belly button-the rail. Automatically, his hands reached out to take hold of it. His right hand closed on iron, his left on rope: part of the netting down which he’d scramble when the word came.

He stood there, hoping the pressure behind him wouldn’t send him over the side before he was supposed to go. Without warning, the sailor slapped him on the back. “Down you go,” the fellow said. “Hurry! Don’t hold things up.”

“Hai,” Shimizu said. He swung over the rail, hanging on for dear life while his boot found the net. If he’d been a monkey, able to grasp with feet as well as hands, everything would have been simple. As things were, he clambered down slowly and carefully.

“Hard work!” said a soldier scrambling down beside him. Corporal Shimizu nodded. This time, that was true literally as well as metaphorically.

The Daihatsu landing craft bobbed in the Pacific beside the Nagata Maru. It was about fifty feet long, with a beam of ten or twelve feet. Its hull was made of steel, supported by heavy wooden braces. It had twin keels riveted on to the hull. Except for the two machine guns at the bow and the steel shield protecting the wheel, it could have been a fishing boat going after sardines on the Inner Sea.

Getting down into the barge from the transport was tricky. Shimizu clung to the net. He didn’t want to get squashed between the two vessels. If he did, they’d scrape him off the steel.

“Come on!” a man on the barge called encouragingly. “Lean out. I’ll grab your boots and keep you safe.”

Leaning out, taking his feet out of the net, was the last thing Shimizu had in mind. Glumly, he realized he had no choice. With the burden he was bearing, how long could he hang on with arms and hands alone? How soon would he go into the water? “Hurry up!” he called to the fellow in the barge.

“I’ve got you,” the man answered, and so he did. “Let go. You’ll come in.”

Reluctantly, Shimizu obeyed. He was falling… into the barge. He laughed in relief as he straightened up. “Arigato,” he said.

“Do itashimashite.” The other man waved away his thanks. “Don’t pay back-pay forward. Help your friends coming down.”

That was good advice, and Corporal Shimizu took it. No one got crushed between the Nagata Maru and the landing barge. There were a couple of close calls, passed off with laughs and bows and exclamations of, “Hard work!”

The whole company squeezed onto the barge. Shimizu wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Lieutenant Yonehara seemed pleased. “All according to plan,” he said. “We should start for Oahu any minute now.”

“I thought we were going to Hawaii,” a soldier said.

“Oahu is one of the islands of Hawaii,” the platoon leader explained. “It’s the one with the good harbor, and the one where the Americans have all their soldiers. Once we take it away from them, all the Hawaiian Islands are ours.”

It all sounded very easy when Lieutenant Yonehara put it like that. Shimizu let out a soft sigh of relief. He wanted it to be easy. People said the planes from the carriers had done a good job of hitting the harbor and the rest of the island’s defenses. Shimizu had been in the Army long enough not to trust what people said. This time, though, he hoped rumor told the truth.

The diesel engine at the stern of the landing barge took on a deeper note. The barge pulled away from the Nagata Maru. Another took its place. The motion was fierce-up hill and down dale, much worse than it had been in the freighter. Shimizu’s stomach lurched. I won’t be sick, he told himself sternly. A few soldiers did puke up whatever was in their bellies.

Twilight began turning the eastern sky pale as the barge-one of a whole flotilla of invasion craft-lumbered toward the shore. Most of the other landing craft carried soldiers, as Shimizu’s did. Some had howitzers or light tanks aboard. Shimizu hoped they were well chained down. If they shifted, they could capsize their barges and take them to the bottom.

Other men worried about other things. “If American planes come overhead right now, we’re sitting ducks,” a sergeant said. Nobody could contradict him, for he wasn’t wrong. What pilot could want a better target than wallowing invasion barges?

“Will the Americans be waiting for us on the beach?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked.

That was another good question. Shimizu didn’t know how to answer it. It was a day now since the carrier task force had started pounding Oahu. Would the Americans think it was just a hit-and-run raid, or would they expect an invasion to follow the attack from the air? Shimizu would have, but he didn’t know how Americans thought.

Lieutenant Yonehara found his own way to deal with the question: “Whether they are on the beach or not doesn’t matter, Private. If they are, we’ll beat them there. If they aren’t, we’ll move inland and beat them wherever we find them. Plain enough?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Wakuzawa would goof off whenever he got the chance, but he wasn’t foolhardy enough to show an officer disrespect. A man who did that soon regretted the day he was born.

The sky grew ever lighter. Soldiers pointed ahead and exclaimed, “Land!”

“Well, what did you expect when we got into the barges?” Shimizu demanded. “That they’d dump us in the middle of the sea?” The men laughed. Some of them probably hadn’t thought much about getting into the barges one way or the other. A lot of soldiers were like that: they took things as they happened, and didn’t worry about them till they happened.

“It’s so warm, and the air smells so good,” Private Wakuzawa said. “The weather sure is better than it was when we left the Kurils.”

“Hai! ” Several soldiers agreed with him. Maybe Siberia had worse weather than the Kurils did, but maybe not, too. After all, most of the weather those northern islands got blew straight down from Siberia.

The machine guns at the landing barge’s bow began banging away. Shimizu followed the lines of tracers rising up into the brightening sky and saw his worst nightmare-everybody’s worst nightmare-realized. Three American fighter planes were swooping down on the fleet of barges. Their guns started winking. Bullets kicked up spurts of water. Screams from other barges said not all the bullets were splashing into the Pacific.

But then the American planes suddenly broke off the attack. They darted away. Zeros swooped down on them like falcons after doves. Takeo Shimizu let out a wordless cry of joy and relief. An American fighter caught fire and cartwheeled into the sea. Another went down a moment later. Shimizu didn’t see what happened to the third, but it didn’t come back. Nothing else really mattered.

“If I ever meet those Zero pilots, I’ll buy them all the sake they can drink,” Private Wakuzawa exclaimed. “I thought we were in trouble.”

“The Navy will not let us down,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. He might have said much more than that; Wakuzawa had shown not just a lack of confidence but a lack of martial spirit. But the platoon leader dropped it there. Maybe he’d had a moment of alarm, too. Shimizu knew he had, even if he’d kept quiet about it.

He peered south. The sun came up over the horizon, spilling ruddy light across the golden beaches dead ahead, the palm trees just behind them, and the jungle-clad mountains a little farther inland. The sight was one of the most beautiful Shimizu had ever seen. It all seemed so peaceful. It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

Waves broke on the beach. They looked like pretty good-sized waves to Shimizu. Could the barge get through them without flipping over? He hoped so. He’d find out any minute now.

A few machine guns on the shore started shooting at the invasion barges. The barges shot back. Something bigger and heavier threw shells at the Japanese-those were big splashes rising from the sea. Zeros dove at the beach. Dive bombers appeared overhead. They swooped down, too. The shelling suddenly stopped.

Some of the machine guns kept firing. Two bullets ricocheted off the shield that protected the sailor at the wheel. A soldier howled when another one, instead of ricocheting, struck home. Shimizu had fought in China. He’d seen plenty of gunfire worse than this. It was just something a soldier went through on the imperial way. To the new men, it must have seemed very heavy and frightening.

Shiro Wakuzawa said, “The Americans won’t have any ammunition left for when we come ashore if they keep shooting like this.”

“Oh, I think they’ll save a bullet or two,” Shimizu said. “Maybe even three.” Some of the first-year soldiers, taking him seriously, gave back solemn nods. Most of them, though, joined the men who’d been in the Army longer and laughed.

Somebody pointed to the water, right where the waves began breaking. “Are those people? What are they doing? They must be out of their minds!”

Two nearly naked men rode upright on long boards toward the beach. Bullets must have whipped past them in both directions. They seemed oblivious. They skimmed along on the crest of a wave, side by side. Shimizu stared at them, entranced. He’d never dreamt of such a skill.

“They must be Americans. Shall I knock them down?” asked a machine gunner at the bow of the barge.

“No!” Corporal Shimizu was one of the dozen men shouting the same thing at the same time. He added, “They might almost be kami, the way they glide along.”

“Christians talk about their Lord Jesus walking on water,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. “I never thought I would see it with my own eyes.”

The two men reached the beach still upright on their boards. Then they did the first merely human thing Shimizu had seen from them: they scooped the boards up under their arms and ran. That was also an eminently sensible thing to do. Machine-gun bullets kicked up sand around their feet. Not all the men on the landing barges must have felt as sporting as the soldiers on this one. But Shimizu didn’t see them fall. Maybe they really were spirits. How could an ordinary man be sure?

His own barge came ashore, much less gracefully than the surf-riders had. It didn’t quite bury its bow in the sand, but it came close. He staggered. He didn’t know how he stayed on his feet. Somehow, he managed. “Off!” the sailors were screaming. “Get off! We have to go back for more men! Hurry!”

He scrambled out of the barge and jumped down. His boots scrunched in the sand. Some Americans were still shooting from the plants-almost the jungle-on the far side of the road. Machine-gun and rifle muzzles flashed malevolently. A bullet cracked past Shimizu’s head, so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage.

He couldn’t run away. There was no away to run to, not at the edge of a hostile beach. He ran forward instead. If he and his comrades didn’t kill those Americans, the Americans would kill them instead. “Come on!” he shouted, and the men in his squad came.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK and Charlie Kaapu spent their Sunday morning surf-riding at Waimea Beach and grumbling that the waves weren’t bigger. Every so often, one of them would look up at the planes flying back and forth overhead. At one point, Charlie remarked, “Army and Navy must have a hair up their ass. That’s the biggest goddamn drill I ever saw. Has to cost a fortune.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, and thought no more about it. Six-foot waves weren’t so much, not when he’d been hoping for surf three or four times that size, but you could still find all sorts of unpleasant ways to hurt yourself if you didn’t pay attention to what you were doing.

Finally, his stomach started growling so loud, he couldn’t stand it any more. He and Charlie went into Waimea for something to eat. It wasn’t a big town. There weren’t a lot of choices, especially on a Sunday. As they usually did when they were up there, Oscar and Charlie headed for Okamoto’s siamin stand. For a quarter, you could get a bowl of noodles and broth and sliced pork and vegetables that would hold you for a hell of a long time.

Old man Okamoto looked faintly apprehensive when they walked in. Oscar wondered why. They hadn’t cadged a meal off him in a year and a half, and they’d paid him back for that one the next time they were here. They ordered their noodles and sat down to wait while the gray-haired little Japanese man ladled them out of the big pot he kept bubbling in back of the counter. He set the bowls on the table along with the short-handled, big-bowled china soup spoons every Japanese and Chinese place in Hawaii seemed to use.

“Thanks, Pop,” Oscar said, and dug in. He and Charlie both ate like wolverines. He was halfway down the bowl before he noticed old man Okamoto had the radio tuned to KGMB, not to the nasal-sounding Japanese music he usually listened to. KGMB should have been playing music, too, if of a more normal sort. It wasn’t. Instead, an announcer was gabbling into the mike. He sounded as if he’d have kittens right there on the air.

That was how Oscar-and Charlie, too-heard about Pearl Harbor. “Jesus,” Charlie said. Then he spooned up some more siamin. Oscar nodded. He went on eating, too. After a couple of minutes, he glanced over to old man Okamoto. No wonder the old guy was nervous! If the Japs had done that down there, he probably counted himself lucky that his neighbors hadn’t come by with pitchforks and tar and feathers.

Oscar laughed. Like most old-country Japanese, Okamoto had come to Hawaii to work in the fields. He’d been running this place for as long as anybody could remember, though. You had to be crazy to think of him as a danger to the United States. His neighbors must have felt the same way-no sign of tar and feathers.

“Your KGMB time is eleven-forty-eight,” the man on the radio said, his voice getting shriller every minute. “We have been ordered off the air by the United States Army, so that our signal does not guide Japanese airplanes or parachutists. We will return only to transmit official bulletins and orders. Please stay calm during this period of emergency.”

This time, Charlie laughed first. Oscar followed suit. The radio signal cut away to sudden, dead silence. How would the horrible news, followed by the station’s disappearance, make anybody stay calm?

Something else crossed his mind. Japanese parachutists? What would happen if the Japs invaded Oahu? He hoped the Army would trounce them. What else was it here for? But suppose it didn’t. It sounded as if the Japs had landed on things with both feet. Suppose…

Oscar eyed old man Okamoto again, more thoughtfully this time. If the Japanese Empire’s soldiers came to Oahu, how would the local Japanese respond? He’d heard Army and Navy brass had sleepless nights about questions like that.

But it was their worry, not his. He and Charlie got to the bottom of their bowls at the same time. “What now?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t want to go back to Honolulu right away. Everybody’s gotta be going nuts down there,” Oscar answered. “Besides, if the Japs are shooting up Wheeler and Schofield and Kaneohe, God knows if we can even get there from here. We might as well hang around and surf and hope the waves get better. What do you think?”

Charlie nodded. “Suits me. I was gonna say the same thing, but some haoles, they figure they all the time gotta do stuff, you know what I mean?”

“If I saw anything I could do, I’d do it,” Oscar said. “You want to join the Army right now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we’re doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.

By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he’d just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.

They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto’s seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand a loaf of bread wasn’t easy, but he managed.

He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.

Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water at dawn the next morning. It didn’t occur to the soldiers to try to stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he’d listened.

He didn’t know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.