Days of Infamy

IV

WHILE AT ANNAPOLIS, Lieutenant Jim Peterson had taken a lot of military history. Back around the time of Christ, he remembered, the Roman Empire had tried to conquer the Germans. (That looked like a damn good idea nowadays; too bad it hadn’t worked.) Augustus sent three legions into the middle of Germany under a bungling general, and they didn’t come back. The Emperor howled, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Peterson felt like howling, “General Short, give me back my airplanes!”

Yes, the Japs had sunk the Enterprise and the Lexington, but they’d both gone down swinging. They’d shot down enemy planes. A couple of surviving pilots claimed the Lexington ’s aircraft had nailed an enemy carrier, maybe even two.

But the Army? Before the Japs struck, the Army had lined up its fighters and bombers wingtip-to-wingtip. Scuttlebutt said the illustrious General Short had been scared of saboteurs. Peterson didn’t give a damn about scuttlebutt. What Short had done was set up the bowling pins. And when the Japs did show up, they knocked just about every one of them down.

Not that the Navy came off smelling like a rose. There was plenty of blame to go around, as far as Peterson could tell. Looking back on it, Admiral Kimmel’s decision to have most of the Pacific Fleet in port every weekend seemed something less than brilliant. If Hirohito’s boys had somebody keeping an eye on Pearl Harbor-and anybody with two brain cells to rub together would have-they’d spot the pattern lickety-split. And, again, the USA paid because the Japanese were on the ball when its own top officers weren’t.

Peterson also wondered why the hell neither the Army nor the Navy had spotted the enemy carriers before they launched their planes. Someone should have been looking off to the north. That was the logical direction for the Japs to pick if they were crazy enough to attack the United States at all. Peterson hadn’t thought they would be.

Crazy? The slant-eyed bastards were raking in the chips. “Shows how goddamn smart I am,” he muttered inside the Pearl Harbor BOQ, where he’d gone from Ewa. It was, at the moment, a tent city. Japanese bombs had blown the original structure to hell and gone.

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Peterson had taken English Lit, too. Lines like that stuck in the mind as firmly as Augustus’ anguished cry. This one was a pretty good description of what things were like at Pearl Harbor right now. Everybody wore gauze of some sort over his nose and mouth. Despite the Americans’ best efforts to douse the flames, the fuel-tank farm still burned a week after it was bombed. Noxious smoke filled the air. It got on everything and everybody, and made men look as if they were in blackface for a minstrel show.

Distant thunder came from off to the north. The only trouble was, that wasn’t thunder. It was an artillery duel, the Japs versus the U.S. Army. Again, scuttlebutt was the only way to get a handle on what was happening if you weren’t at the front. On the rare occasions the radio said anything, it belched out optimistic twaddle that made Peterson want to puke. He knew bullshit when he heard it.

Gossip and rumor said the Americans were falling back. The way the distant thunder didn’t seem quite so distant argued that gossip and rumor knew what they were talking about. They also said you didn’t want to try to surrender to the Japs. Peterson didn’t know about that. He’d talked to people who’d talked to people who’d talked to people who said they’d seen this, that, and the other thing. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. There were party games where you passed a sentence around the room from mouth to mouth. It always came back to the person who’d started it garbled beyond recognition. The rumor just didn’t make any sense to Peterson. If the Japanese abused American prisoners of war, wouldn’t the USA declare open season on captured Japs? Who’d want to start anything like that?

His doubts weren’t what propelled him out of BOQ. Nobody had yet figured out how to get him into action. He’d been patient as long as he could stand. Now he intended to start pounding on desks and shouting at people till he got what he wanted. That was the strategy of a four-year-old throwing a tantrum, but it often worked. The squeaky wheel got the grease. Peterson wouldn’t just squeak. He’d scream.

He winced when he emerged from the tent. Hawaii had always struck him as paradise on earth, or as close as anybody was likely to come. The thought was profoundly unoriginal, which made it no less true. Here, hell had visited itself on paradise. The noxious smoke swirled everywhere, now thicker, now thinner, depending on the vagaries of the breeze. Maybe the gauze mask Peterson wore helped some, but he still had a permanent nasty taste in the back of his throat, while his eyes felt as if somebody’d thrown ground glass into them.

Heavy black fuel oil fouled the turquoise waters of the harbor. The floating fires were finally out. That helped a little, but only a little. The Navy’s proud battlewagons lay shattered and broken, their terrible grace and beauty turned to trash: Oklahoma capsized; West Virginia and California sunk; Arizona not just sunk but with her back broken, too, her bridge and foremast all twisted and askew and blackened by the conflagration that had raced over her. And Nevada, or what was left of her. Yet another armor-piercing bomb had struck her in the third wave of the attack, after she beached herself near Hospital Point, and started fires that still smoldered. She might be salvageable, but it would be a long, slow job.

Bombs had savaged the lush greenery on Ford Island, too, toppling palm trees and showing the earth all naked and torn. This is what war looks like. This is what war feels like. This is what war smells like, Peterson thought. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined it at Annapolis. It wasn’t even the way he’d imagined it when that goddamn Jap shot him down. That had been a duel in the air, a fair fight-except that his Wildcat was a lumbering pig when measured against the machine the Jap flew. This… Nothing even remotely fair about this. Japan had kicked the USA right in the nuts, and this was the aftermath.

Peterson wanted with all his heart to visit the same devastation on Tokyo. He couldn’t. His country couldn’t. He was painfully aware of that. But Japanese soldiers were within reach on Oahu, and getting closer all the time. He could pay them back for some of what they’d done to Hawaii.

That they might do the same to him never crossed his mind. He’d spent his whole military career training as a pilot. Ground combat was a closed book to him, though one he wanted to open.

If they tell me no, goddammit, I can steal a Springfield and a bike and head for the fighting myself, he thought. Hell, I don’t even need a bike. I can hoof it. This isn’t what anybody’d call a big island. Being ready to contemplate ignoring orders spoke strongly about how frazzled he was.

Bombs had hit the dispatching office, too. Is there anything around here bombs haven’t hit? But the clerks-the pen-pushers and rubber-stamp stampers and typewriter jockeys without whom the military couldn’t function but who often thought themselves the be-all and end-all instead of the men who did the fighting and dying-the clerks persisted, even if they had to go to tents, too. Some of them had died here. Some of them might even have fought here.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. No chance for a plane. We haven’t got any planes to give you right now,” a yeoman said through his own muffling of gauze.

Peterson knew nobody had any planes. He’d heard nothing but how nobody had any planes since those gray-haired geezers from the golf course got him to Ewa. “Let me have a rifle, then,” he said. “Let me have a rifle and a helmet and permission to go north. There’s a war on up there.”

Unlike the Marine captain over at Ewa, the yeoman shook his head. “We don’t want to do that, sir. If we get planes, we don’t want to find out that all the people trained to fly them have turned into casualties in the meantime.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Peterson exploded. “Where the hell are you going to get more planes from? Pull ’em out of your asshole? Everybody and his mother-in-law says the Japs have blown all the planes in Hawaii to hell and gone. What did I join the Navy for if you won’t even let me fight?”

The yeoman turned red. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said stolidly. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, sending you to the front with a rifle is about like putting a doughboy into a fighter cockpit and expecting him to shoot down Japs.”

“My balls!” To Peterson, ground combat looked simple. You aimed at a Jap, you shot the son of a bitch, and then you aimed at the next one. What was so complicated about that? Flying a plane, now, was a whole different business. That took skill and training.

With a shrug, the yeoman said, “However you want it, sir. If you like, I’ll bump you on to Lieutenant Commander McAndrews. I don’t have the authority to change orders like that. He does.”

“Bring him on!” Peterson said eagerly.

Lieutenant Commander McAndrews still had an office in a real building to call his own. As it did everywhere, rank had its privileges. McAndrews, a jowly man in his late forties, looked at Peterson as if he were a cockroach in the salad. “So you want to go off and be a hero, do you?” he said in a voice like ice.

“No, sir. I want to serve my country, sir.” Peterson could yell and cuss at the yeoman-he outranked him. The shoe was on the other foot here. He had to move carefully. “They won’t let me get back into an airplane. If they would, I’d gladly fly. But the enemy is here. I want to fight him.”

“You may not be doing yourself any favors, you know,” McAndrews said. “Things aren’t going so well. The Army may have promised more than it can deliver.” He sniffed, as if to say one couldn’t expect anything else from the Army. By all the signs, the rivalry between Navy blue and Army khaki counted for more with him than the war against Japan.

Maybe that made sense in peacetime. Peterson had had plenty of rude things to say about the Army, too. What Navy man didn’t? But you could take it too far. “Good God, sir!” he said. “In that case, they need all the help they can get.”

McAndrews eyed him curiously. “Are you really so eager to get yourself killed, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir,” Peterson answered. “What I’m eager for is killing those little yellow bastards who jumped on our backs when we weren’t looking.”

“Your spirit does you credit,” McAndrews said, but not in a way that made it sound like a compliment. “It is policy not to risk those men who have skills that may be valuable in the future…”

“How? Where? We haven’t got any airplanes to speak of, and we have got more pilots than we know what to do with,” Peterson said. “Sir.”

“If I have more money than I know what to do with, Lieutenant, I don’t throw some of it in the fire,” McAndrews said coldly. “Do you?”

“I don’t know, sir. I never had more money than I knew what to do with.” As a matter of fact, Peterson had done the equivalent of throwing his money in the fire plenty of times. When he was in port, he spent it on booze and broads and bright lights. What else was it good for?

“I was speaking metaphorically.” Lieutenant Commander McAndrews’ tone declared that Peterson wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it bit him in the leg. He might have accused the younger man of eating with the wrong fork. “But if you are mad enough to want to go…”

“If somebody doesn’t go stop the Japs up there, sir, don’t you think they’ll come down here?” Peterson asked. “What happens if-no, when — they do?”

By the horrified expression that washed across McAndrews’ face, he hadn’t even imagined that. A lot of possibilities about the Japanese hadn’t occurred to Americans till too late. Peterson knew all about that; he was one of the Americans those possibilities hadn’t occurred to. Maybe McAndrews hadn’t let himself think about this one. He looked as if he hated Peterson for making him think about it.

Five minutes later, Peterson had in his possession an order releasing him for ground combat “in the best interest of the Navy and the United States of America.” McAndrews’ eyes said he hoped Peterson stopped a bullet with his teeth. Peterson didn’t care. Regardless of what McAndrews thought, he had what he wanted.

WHEN THE AMERICANS pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d done their best to wreck the airstrip near the little town on the north shore of Oahu. They’d dynamited the runways to try to make sure planes couldn’t land or take off on them. A lot of pick-and-shovel men would have needed a long time to get the airstrip ready for operations again, and the Japanese Army didn’t have that kind of manpower to spare.

As Lieutenant Saburo Shindo took off from that airstrip, a smile wreathed his usually impassive features. The Americans hadn’t been as smart as they thought they had. When they pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d left behind a couple of bulldozers and a steamroller. With those, Japanese military engineers had been able to repair the airstrip in a couple of days, not several weeks.

The smile faded a little as he gained altitude. There sat one of the dozers, painted a friendly civilian yellow, by the side of a runway. Such a casual display of U.S. wealth bothered Shindo a little, or more than a little. That wealth of earth-moving equipment wouldn’t have been casually available in a Japanese small town. His countrymen had been able to take advantage of it, yes. But they couldn’t come close to producing it themselves. Attacking a nation that could was worrying.

With a shrug, Shindo dismissed such worries from his mind. They were things to keep an admiral or a cabinet minister up in the wee small hours, not a lieutenant. As a matter of fact, nothing much kept Shindo awake at night. He looked forward, not back.

Forward lay the American positions. U.S. forces were trying to form a line between Oahu’s two mountain ranges, the Waianae in the west and the Koolau in the east. They seemed to assume the land outside the mountain ranges didn’t matter much. So far, they hadn’t managed to stop the Japanese advance, but they had slowed it down.

Black puffs of antiaircraft fire appeared behind Shindo’s Zero. The Americans were much more alert than they had been when the fighting started. They still didn’t lead the Japanese fighters enough. They couldn’t believe how fast Zeros were.

Shindo dove on a U.S. artillery position in front of Wahiawa. Sooner or later, the Yankees were bound to figure out that the Japanese had a land-based airstrip and weren’t just flying off carriers any more. When they did, 105mm guns here had no trouble reaching Haleiwa. Knocking them out was important.

He dove on the guns. The Americans realized they had an important position here, too, though they might not have realized why. Tracers from machine-gun fire spat past the stooping Zero. Shindo couldn’t do anything about them, so he ignored them. If they knocked him out of the sky, that was fate, karma. If they didn’t, he would carry out his mission.

His thumb came down on the firing button. He was better at shooting up ground targets than he had been when the fighting here began. He didn’t overshoot any more. As with everything else, practice made perfect. The men around the American guns scattered. Some of them fell. One or two snatched up rifles and banged away at him. That was brave. It was also futile.

Or so Shindo thought till a sharp clank told him somebody’s bullet had struck home. He pulled up, eyeing his instrument panel. No fuel leak showed. His eyes flicked to left and right. His wing tanks weren’t on fire, either. All the controls answered. The round must have hit somewhere harmless. In the privacy of the cockpit, he allowed himself a sigh of relief.

The Americans wasted weight on self-sealing fuel tanks and armored pilot’s seats. That cost them speed and maneuverability. Japan’s fliers had been inclined to laugh at them on account of it. Lieutenant Shindo still was… but less so than when the fighting started. Yes, the extra weight hurt performance. But Shindo had seen U.S. planes take hits that would have sent a Zero down in flames and keep on flying as if nothing had happened. There were advantages on both sides.

Half his attention was on the ground as he looked for more strongpoints to shoot up. The other half was in the air. Every so often, the Yankees sent up some of their few surviving fighters. They weren’t much if you knew they were coming, but they could give you a nasty surprise if they got on your tail before you knew it. The pilot who didn’t learn to check six in a hurry usually didn’t last long enough to learn at his leisure.

Shindo didn’t spot any trouble this time. As usual, the Japanese had the skies over Oahu to themselves. All he had to worry about was ground fire. That didn’t bother him much. He had its measure.

A column of olive-drab trucks was heading north up the highway that ran through the center of the island. The column wasn’t moving anywhere near so fast as it might have. Southbound refugees, some on foot, others in automobiles, clogged the road. Shindo laughed. He’d seen that before. Americans had no discipline. They refused to keep refugees off the road by whatever means necessary, as Japanese soldiers surely would have. And they paid the price for their softness, too.

Radial engine roaring, the Zero dove on the road. Shindo cut loose with the fighter’s machine guns and cannons. It was like stamping on an anthill. People down there scattered in what seemed like slow motion-far too slowly to evade bullets and shells.

Fire and smoke erupted from truck and automobile engines. The plume was tiny compared to the one rising from Pearl Harbor, but every little bit served its purpose. Those soldiers wouldn’t get where they were going when they wanted to get there. That ought to help the Japanese move forward.

On the way back to Haleiwa, Shindo spotted an American machine-gun nest spitting tracers at Japanese foot soldiers. A tank would have taken care of it, but none seemed close by. The pilot felt as if he were looking for a policeman when he really wanted one. He had to do the job himself. And he did, swooping down on the gunners from behind. They might have died before they even knew they were under attack.

Behind the Japanese lines, commandeered cars carried soldiers here and there. Again, Shindo’s side took advantage of the enemy’s wealth. He wished his own country had a larger share of wealth for itself. Getting that larger share, of course, was what this war was all about.

Shindo was used to coming in on the rolling, pitching deck of a carrier. Landing at a strip on dry land felt ridiculously easy, as if he were back in flight school. The only thing the signalman had to do was guide him into one of the earth-banked revetments engineers had made with the bulldozers. They kept his plane safe from anything but a direct hit. As soon as the Zero was in the U-shaped shelter, camouflage nets covered it. The Yankees wouldn’t spot it from the air.

“How did it go?” a groundcrew man asked after Shindo climbed out of the fighter.

“Routine,” he answered. “Just routine.”

MACHINE-GUN BULLETS STRUCK flesh with wet slaps. The noise reminded Fletcher Armitage of the last few fights he and Jane had had before she threw him out of the apartment. When she slapped him, though, his head had only felt as if it would fly off his shoulders. When a real machine-gun bullet hit…

The Zero roared away to the south, bound for more mischief. It was low enough to the ground to kick up dust. Fletch fired a last futile shot at it. The fellow piloting it was an artist, which didn’t keep Fletch from hoping he’d burn in hell, and soon, too.

He had more immediate things to worry about, though. Two of his precious, irreplaceable gunners were down, one clutching his leg and moaning, the other ominously still. A quick glance told Fletch nobody could help the second man this side of Judgment Day. He’d caught a slug in the back of the head, and spilled his brains out in the dirt. The only good thing you could say about such an end was that it was quick. He’d never known what hit him.

The artilleryman with the leg wound, by contrast, screamed about God and his mother and shit, all of which amounted to the same thing: he was in pain and didn’t like it. “Hold still, Vic,” Fletch said, kneeling beside him. “I’ll get a bandage on you.” A week earlier, he might have lost his lunch trying. Not any more. He’d had practice. What was that line from Hamlet?Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness, that was it. Old Will had known what he was talking about there, sure as hell.

“Hurts. Hurts like shit,” Vic said.

“Yeah, I know.” Fletch used his bayonet to cut away the khaki cloth of the other man’s uniform-one of the few things a bayonet was actually good for. He could see the artery pulsing inside the wound. It looked intact. If it weren’t, Vic probably would have bled to death.

Fletch dusted the gash with sulfa powder. He couldn’t sew it shut, but fumbled in one of the pouches on his belt and produced three safety pins. They’d help hold it closed, anyhow. He got a bandage over the wound, then stuck Vic’s syringe of morphine into his thigh and pressed down on the plunger.

A couple of minutes later, Vic said, “Ahh. That’s better, sir.” He sounded eerily calm. The drug had interposed a barrier between his torment and him.

“We’ll take him now, sir,” someone behind Fletch said.

He looked up. There were two corpsmen, Red Crosses prominent on their helmets and on armbands. “I wish you guys got here sooner,” he said.

The man who’d spoken gave back a shrug. “It’s not like there’s nothing going on for us, sir.” He looked weary unto death.

His buddy nodded, adding, “Goddamn Japs shoot at us regardless of these.” He tapped the Red Cross emblems. “Bastards don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention.”

“Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. The memory of the American soldier the Japanese had captured rose in him again. His stomach churned. “You don’t want to let yourselves get caught,” he told the corpsmen.

They nodded in unison. “Yeah, we already know about that,” one of them said. They got Vic onto a stretcher and carried him away. “Come on, buddy-the docs’ll fix you up.”

That left Fletch to figure out how to fight his gun without two more trained men. He had untrained infantrymen jerking shells now. His gun wouldn’t shoot as fast as it had before, but he could still get out two or three rounds a minute. If he had to lay the gun by his lonesome… then he did, that was all.

He muttered to himself. Even from here, the piece could reach all the way to the north shore and into the Pacific. And how was it being used? As a direct-fire gun, banging away at whatever targets he could see. He had no idea where the rest of the 105s in the battery were. The two guns close by belonged to another outfit. They’d been shot up worse than his crew. And that was par for the course. If anything, it was better than par for the course. He’d taken everything the Japs could throw at him, and he was still in the fight. A hell of a lot of people weren’t.

In the sugar fields off to the northeast, a Japanese machine gun started hammering away. The Japs were aggressive with their automatic weapons. They pushed them right up to the front and went after U.S. infantry with them. He didn’t care to think what they would have done with Browning Automatic Rifles. So far, they hadn’t shown any signs of owning weapons like those. He thanked God for small favors.

Aiming the gun at a target by himself was only a little faster than dying of old age. And he hadn’t finished the job before shouts of, “Tank! Tank!” from right in front of him made him give it up.

From everything he’d heard, the U.S. M3 wasn’t anything special compared to what the Germans and the Russians were throwing at each other these days. M3s could usually make the Jap machines say uncle, though. That truth would have pleased Fletch more if any of those U.S. tanks were in the neighborhood. They weren’t. If anything was going to stop this snorting Jap beast from running roughshod over the infantrymen, it was his gun.

“Armor-piercing!” he shouted to the foot soldiers he’d dragooned into his service.

“Which ones are those, sir?” one of them asked.

“Shit,” Fletch said. But he said it under his breath; it wasn’t the infantrymen’s fault that they didn’t know one kind of round from another. “The ones with the black tips. Shake a leg, guys, or that son of a bitch is going to-”

That son of a bitch did start shooting first. Fletch and his makeshift crew threw themselves flat. Fragments of sharp, hot steel snarled overheard. Standing up while you were getting shelled was asking to get torn to pieces. Sometimes you had to, but you never wanted to.

An American machine gun opened up on the tank. For all the good their bullets did, the soldiers at the gun might as well have thrown marshmallows at the Japanese machine. A tank that wasn’t armored against machine-gun fire had no raison d’etre.

“French, yet,” Fletch muttered. But the machine gun did do one thing: it distracted the Japs in the tank from the distant artillery piece to the annoyance right at hand. Fletch didn’t know if that was what the machine gunners had had in mind. He doubted it, as a matter of fact. But it let him get to his feet and yell till his crew did the same. “Come on, you bastards! They’ve given us a chance. They’re human, by God! They can make mistakes, just like us.”

The Japs hadn’t made very many, damn them. By sheer dumb luck, the tank wasn’t very far from the line on which the 105 pointed. Fletch swung the barrel to bear on it. Range was about seven hundred yards. He turned the altitude screw. The muzzle lowered, ever so slightly. “Fire!” he shouted.

The gun roared. Flame shot from the muzzle. The shell kicked up dirt in front of the tank and a little to the left. “Short!” one of the infantrymen shouted-they were starting to learn the ropes.

Now-had the Japs seen the shot? Fletch didn’t think so. They went on banging away at the machine gun. “Armor-piercing again!” he said. “Quick, goddammit!” As the shell went into the breech, he corrected his aim-or hoped he did. The tank wasn’t going very fast, but this gun wasn’t made for hitting any kind of moving target. He’d already seen that. “Fire!”

Boom! The 105 went off again. The foot soldiers who served it flinched. They usually remembered to cover their ears, but they didn’t know opening their mouths helped at least as much when it came to beating an artillery piece’s noise.

But then they started making noise of their own, screaming, “Hit! Hit! Jesus God, that’s a hit!” and, “You nailed that fucker, Lieutenant! Nailed his ass good!”

Fletch didn’t think any tank in the world, U.S., British, German, or Russian, could stand up to a 105mm AP round. This Japanese hunk of tin didn’t have a prayer. He couldn’t have aimed it better if he’d had the most highly trained crew in the world and tried for a week. It struck home right at the join between hull and turret, and blew the turret clean off the tank and a good six feet in the air. Ammo in the turret started cooking off, while the hull erupted in a fireball. The crew never had a chance, not that Fletch wasted much grief on them.

“You see how that Jap tank tipped his hat to our gun?” one of the infantrymen yelled.

Fletch laughed his head off. It was a pretty good line, and all the better because it came from somebody so raw. But that wasn’t the only reason. He felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief. The odds had favored the tank, not him. All he had to protect him from fragments was a flimsy shield. He’d had to be dead accurate to kill before he got killed-and he’d done it.

And, as far as he could tell, doing it did neither him nor the American position one damn bit of good. A couple of hours later, he got the order to fall back to the outskirts of Wahiawa. The Army would try to make another stand there.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK’s life swayed back and forth between something approaching normality and something approaching insanity. Some of the tourists the war had stuck on Oahu still wanted surf-riding lessons. He gave them what they wanted. Why not? He needed to pay his rent just like anybody else. His landlord, a skinflint Jap named Mas Fukumoto, would have flung his scanty belongings out in the street the day after he failed to pay.

He’d had the crummy little apartment on Lewers Street for a couple of years now, after getting the heave-ho from another place much like it. All that time, of course, he’d known Mas Fukumoto was a Jap. He’d known Fukumoto was a skinflint, too. As a matter of fact, he’d never known a landlord who wasn’t a skinflint. The one who’d tossed him out when he got behind was Irish as Paddy’s pig.

But to think of Mas Fukumoto as a skinflint Jap now was to think of him as an enemy-as the enemy-in a way it hadn’t been before December 7. Oscar didn’t know Fukumoto wasn’t loyal to the United States. He had no reason to believe his landlord wasn’t, in fact. That didn’t keep him-and a lot of Fukumoto’s other haole tenants-from giving the man a fishy stare whenever they saw him.

And even when Oscar paddled out into the Pacific-warm despite its being the week before Christmas-with a wahine from Denver or Des Moines, he couldn’t help seeing and smelling the black, stinking smoke that still rose from the Navy’s shattered fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor.

The wahines mostly didn’t care. They’d come to Hawaii to forget whatever ailed them on the mainland. They intended to go right on forgetting, too. And when they couldn’t forget, they said things like, “Well, but that’s all going on way up there. Everything’s pretty much okay down here in Waikiki and Honolulu, right?”

That was a strawberry blonde named Susie. She’d come to Hawaii from Reno to forget about a recently ex-husband, and she was doing quite a job of it, too. She was ready for any kind of lessons Oscar wanted to give her. He had a sure instinct about such things.

He wondered if saying something would mess up his chances. Lying there on the surfboard with her, he shrugged a tiny shrug. She wasn’t the only fish in the sea. He said, “Wahiawa’s only half an hour away. The north coast is only an hour away-a buddy of mine and I were surf-riding up there when the Japs landed. They were shooting at us.”

Susie looked back over her slightly sunburned shoulder at him. Her eyes were blue as a Siamese cat’s. “What was that like?” she asked.

When the bullets started flying back and forth, I pissed myself. Nobody but me’ll ever know, because I was dripping wet anyway, but I damn well did. “Not a whole lot of fun,” he answered out loud, which was not only true but sounded tough and not the least bit undignified. He wondered if the same thing had happened to Charlie Kaapu. No way to ask, not ever.

What he said seemed to satisfy Susie. She made a little noise, almost a purr, down deep in her throat. “I’m glad they missed,” she told him.

“Me, too,” Oscar said, and she laughed. If he lowered his chin a couple of inches, it would come down on her cotton-covered backside. He decided not to. Unlike some of the women to whom he gave lessons, Susie didn’t need much in the way of signals. He paddled out a little while longer (so did she, not very helpfully), then swung the surfboard back toward the beach. “This time, we’re going to get you up on your knees on the board, okay?”

“What happens if I fall off?” she asked.

“You swim,” he answered, and she laughed. He started paddling shoreward. “Come on. You can do it. I’ll steady you.” And he did, kneeling behind her with his hands on her slim waist. That was a signal of sorts, but it was also line of duty, and she could ignore it if she wanted to. She laughed again. She wasn’t ignoring anything-except the Japs. Oscar wished he could do the same.

Actually, her sense of balance was pretty good-plenty good enough to keep her kneeling on the board with only a little support. The surf wasn’t very big-Oscar had chosen this place with care. But she got enough of the roller-coaster thrill to let out a whoop as they neared the beach.

“Wow!” she said when the surfboard scraped to a stop on the soft sand. There were stars in her eyes. She turned back and gave him a quick kiss. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said, keeping any hint that he’d expected it out of his voice. If they knew you knew, they got coy. “Want to try it again?”

“Sure,” she said, “unless you’d rather just go on back to my room instead.”

Even Oscar hadn’t thought she’d be that brazen. Sometimes the ride lit a fire, though; he’d seen that before. He said, “Well, you’ve paid for two hours of lessons. Afterwards… I don’t have anything else going on, so…”

“I like the way you think-among other things,” she said. “Okay, we’ll do that.”

And they did. By the end of the lesson, she was kneeling unsupported. She did fall off on one run, but struck out strongly for the shore. When the lessons were done, she gave Oscar her room number. He took the board back to the Outrigger Club, then went over to the hotel.

If he’d gone in with her, the house detective would have had to notice. This way, the fellow just tipped him a wink and looked in the other direction. All along Waikiki Beach, the house dicks and the surf-riding instructors had their informal understandings. A few dollars every now and then, a few drinks every now and then, and nobody got excited about anything. No huhu, Charlie Kaapu would have said.

Oscar knocked on the door. “It’s open,” Susie called. He turned the knob. She lay on the bed, naked and waiting.

“Jesus!” he said. “What if I’d been the plumber or something?”

Those blue eyes went wide in some of the phoniest innocence he’d ever seen. “That depends,” she said throatily. “Is the plumber here good-looking?” Oscar’s jaw dropped. Susie’s laugh was pure mischief. “Since it’s you, how’s your plunger?”

“Let’s see,” he managed, and slipped off his trunks. By the way she eyed him, he passed muster. He got down on the bed beside her. She slid toward him. He rapidly discovered she had no inhibitions hidden anywhere about her person. Once she got back to the mainland, she’d probably rediscover them. He’d known more than a few other women who left them behind in San Pedro or San Francisco or Seattle. This one seemed an extreme case-not that extremes couldn’t be extremely enjoyable.

He was poised to find out just how enjoyable she could be when sirens started wailing and bells started clanging. “What the hell is that?” Susie exclaimed, and then, “Whatever it is, for God’s sake don’t stop now.”

But Oscar said, “That’s the air-raid siren. We’d better get in the trenches.” Having been under fire once, he didn’t care to repeat the experience. He’d helped dig some of the trenches that marred the greenery around the hotel buildings.

Susie stared at him. “Don’t be silly. They wouldn’t bomb Waikiki. We’re civilians. ” She spoke the last word as if it were a magic talisman.

“Maybe they wouldn’t, not on purpose,” Oscar said, though he wasn’t convinced. “But Fort DeRussy’s just Ewa from the Waikiki hotels.” She sent him a blank look. “Just west,” he explained impatiently, adding, “If they bomb that and they miss…”

Susie reached out and gave him a regretful squeeze. “Okay, I’m sold,” she said, all the kitten gone from her voice. “The trenches.” She ran for the bathroom, and emerged in her bathing suit by the time Oscar had his on again.

They weren’t the only scantily dressed people hurrying down the hallways. The sharp, flat boom! of a bomb bursting not far away made several people-not all of them women-scream and made everybody hurry faster. More bombs went off as Oscar and Susie raced across the lawn and scrambled down into a trench.

Antiaircraft guns at the fort added to the din. Sure enough, DeRussy was what the Japs were after. Most of their bombs fell on it-most, but not all. When a bomb burst on the hotel, it made a noise like the end of the world. Sharp fragments of hot metal hissed and screamed by overhead. The ground shook, as if at an earthquake. Blast stunned Oscar’s ears. As if from very far away, he heard Susie say, “Well, you were right.” She kissed him-more, he judged, from gratitude than passion.

And then an armor-piercing bomb, or maybe more than one, penetrated the reinforced concrete protecting the coast-defense guns in the fortress and their magazines. The explosions that followed made the ones from the bombs themselves seem like love pats. Chunks of cement and steel rained down out of the sky. Shrieks said some of them came down in trenches. Oscar wondered how many men Fort DeRussy held-had held, for they were surely dead now.

The raid lasted about half an hour. The antiaircraft guns kept firing for five or ten minutes after bombs stopped falling. Shrapnel pattered down out of the air along with debris from the fort. Oscar wished for a helmet. That stuff could smash your skull like a melon.

Despite the secondary explosions, people started climbing out of the trenches. “Christ, but I want a drink!” somebody said, which summed things up as well as Edward R. Murrow or William L. Shirer could have done.

Susie let out a wordless squawk of dismay. She pointed at what had been her room and was now nothing but smoking rubble. Oscar gulped. If they’d ignored the sirens and gone on with what they were doing, they might have died happy, but they sure would have died.

Then Susie found words: “What am I going to do? All my stuff was in there. God damn the dirty Japs!”

Oscar heard himself say, “You can move in with me for a while if you want to.” He blinked. He’d taken in stray kittens before, and once a puppy, but never a girl. It wasn’t even that he was all that crazy about Susie. If it hadn’t been for the war, they’d have screwed each other silly for a few days and then gone their separate ways. But he didn’t see how he could leave her stranded here with nothing but the bathing suit on her back.

By the way she eyed him, she was making some calculations of her own. “Okay,” she said after a few seconds. “But it’s not like you own me or anything. Whenever I want to walk out, I’m gone.”

“Sure,” Oscar said at once. “I don’t have any trouble with that. If you start driving me nuts, I’ll hold the door open for you. In the meantime, though…” He stuck out his hand. “Uh, what’s your last name?”

“Higgins,” she said as she shook it. Her hand almost got lost in his, but she had a pretty good grip. “What’s yours?” He told her. “Van der Kirk?” she echoed, and started to laugh. “You’re so brown, I would’ve figured you for a dago.”

He shrugged. “I’m out in the sun all the time. That’s one of the reasons I like Hawaii. You want to see the place? It’s only a few blocks mauka from here.” Susie Higgins looked blank again. “North. Toward the mountains,” Oscar told her. Hawaiian notions of directions had baffled him, too, when he first got to Oahu. Now he took them for granted. But he was on his way to becoming a kamaaina — an old-timer-here; he wasn’t a just-arrived malihini any more, the way Susie was. “Come on,” he said, and she went with him.

The apartment building plainly didn’t impress her. Well, it didn’t much impress Oscar, either. She did seem surprised when he opened his door without a key. Once she walked in, she said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t bother to lock it because you don’t have anything worth stealing.”

“Only things I own that are worth anything are my car and my surfboard, and my car isn’t worth much,” Oscar answered with another shrug. “You don’t need much to live here.”

Susie didn’t say anything about that. Even so, he got the idea she wasn’t going to stay there forever, or even very long-she was a girl who liked things. He could tell. What she did say was, “You want to lock the door now?”

“How come?” he said, and then, “Oh.”

She laughed at him. He deserved it. He laughed, too. She said, “We were doing something or other when that air raid started.” As if to remind him what, she peeled off her bathing suit.

The bed was narrow for two, but not too narrow. Things were going along very nicely when a great roar made the walls shake and the window rattle-it was a miracle the window didn’t break. Susie squealed. Oscar needed a bit to recover. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have needed a moment to recover after that. He’d just started again when another identical roar made Susie squeal again.

This time, though, it didn’t unman him, for he’d realized what it was: “More things blowing up at Fort DeRussy, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” Susie exclaimed. “Jesus!”

Oscar didn’t answer, not with words. After a while, he managed to distract her, which he took as a compliment to himself-distracting somebody from the thunder of those explosions was no mean feat. Susie’s gasp said he hadn’t just distracted her-he’d got her hot. A moment later, Oscar exploded too. He stroked his cheek. “Not so bad,” he said, and tried to believe it. What the hell had he got into, getting into Susie? Well, he’d find out.

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER showed himself. Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s rifle jumped to his shoulder. He steadied on the target, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. Just like a drill, he thought as the Arisaka rifle kicked. The American crumpled. Shimizu ducked down deep into his foxhole in the pineapple field outside of Wahiawa.

He didn’t feel particularly proud of himself for shooting the enemy. The Americans were brave. He’d seen that since coming ashore. They were braver than he’d expected, in fact, even if some of them did try to surrender instead of fighting to the death. That made for amusing sport.

But shooting them hardly seemed fair. Hadn’t anyone taught them anything about taking cover? He was one of the veterans in his regiment who’d fought in China. You never saw the Chinese bandits till one of them put a bullet between your eyes. They didn’t have a lot of rifles, and even less in the way of heavy weapons, but they made the most of what they had, and of the ground on which they fought.

The Yankees, by contrast, were very well armed-better than Shimizu’s own men, probably. If their air power hadn’t been knocked out, they would have been tough to shift. But they didn’t seem to know what to do with what they had-and they paid the price for it, again and again.

Machine-gun bullets snarled over Shimizu’s head. He laughed. The Americans must have thought he’d stay upright waiting to get shot. They were like someone who covered his belly when you hit him there, then covered his face when you hit him there. They didn’t know what was coming next, and they didn’t think their foes did, either. And they paid the price for being so naive.

Behind Shimizu, a mortar started going pop-pop-pop. The bombs came down around the machine-gun position the Yankees had incautiously revealed. Shimizu hoped they knocked out the gunners. Even if they did, though, they were unlikely to put the gun out of action. A machine gun wasn’t so complicated that ordinary soldiers couldn’t handle it.

Lieutenant Yonehara crawled up to Shimizu’s foxhole. Yonehara had pineapple leaves fixed to his helmet to make him harder to spot. His belly never came up higher off the ground than a snake’s. He pointed south. “Do you see that white frame house, Corporal?”

Shimizu warily raised his head for half a heartbeat. Then he ducked back down again. “Yes, sir. I see it. The one about a hundred meters behind the enemy line?”

“Hai,” Yonehara said. “That is the one. It’s on high ground. Our company has been ordered to seize it. You will prepare your men to take part in the attack.”

“Yes, sir,” Shimizu said: the only thing he could say when he got an order like that. No, not quite, for he did add a few words that expressed his opinion of the order: “Hard work, sir.”

“Yes, hard work,” Yonehara agreed, his voice not without sympathy. “Colonel Fujikawa feels it is necessary, however. I will lead the attack. We will use the sword and bayonet if that is what it takes to clear the Americans from their positions.”

A bayonet made a handy tool for gutting a chicken. If you stabbed it in the ground, the socket held a candle. Shimizu had yet to fight with his. But if the lieutenant led, he would follow. “Yes, sir,” he said. And if the Americans didn’t run, he would give them the bayonet-unless he shot them from close range instead.

“At my order,” Yonehara said, and crawled away. Shimizu passed the news to his men.

Mortar fire picked up. From farther back of the line, field guns started pounding the American position. When Lieutenant Yonehara shouted, “Forward!” Shimizu jumped out of his foxhole and ran toward the American line.

“My squad, with me!” he yelled. They too came out of their holes. Pride filled him. Truly he sprang from a warrior race. How could the Americans hope to stop his comrades and him?

He got the answer to that sooner than he wanted. The Americans hoped to stop them with sheer firepower. The machine gun that had been shooting at him opened up again. So did others that had been silent till then. Onrushing Japanese soldiers fell as if scythed. A bullet tugged at Shimizu’s sleeve, as if to tell him he had to go back or go down.

He kept going forward nonetheless. The platoon commander had given the order, and he had to obey. Lieutenant Yonehara had drawn his katana. The sword blade shone in the sun. It could lop off an arm, or a head-if Yonehara ever got close enough to use it. No sooner had that thought crossed Shimizu’s mind than a bullet caught the lieutenant in the face and blew out the back of his head. He crumpled as if all his bones had turned to water.

Seeing him fall was like waking from a fevered delirium. Corporal Shimizu looked to his right and to his left. A lot of the company was down. Like him, the men still on their feet wavered. If they kept on advancing, they wouldn’t waver. They would die. Shimizu could see that perfectly well. Machine-gun bullets didn’t care whether you were a warrior. They’d kill you any which way.

But the soldiers had been ordered to advance. Shimizu wondered how to change that. The officer who’d given him the order was dead, but the thing itself remained very much alive. Bullets couldn’t slaughter an order, only the soldiers who tried to obey it. No one had ever trained Shimizu or any other Japanese soldier in retreating. If he ordered the survivors to fall back, they might not obey him.

All that ran through his head in less than a heartbeat. And then, fast as lightning, he found the answer. “Men, we’re going to recover our positions!” he shouted. That didn’t say a word about retreat. It got the message across even so. And it gave the soldiers an honorable way to get back to the foxholes and trenches from which they’d emerged.

They took advantage of it, too. Shimizu might not have called it a retreat, but a retreat was what it was. They dragged the wounded back with them and left the dead where they had fallen. American fire stung them all the way back to their starting point.

A private jumped into Shimizu’s foxhole with him. Akira Murakami was a first-year soldier, still wet behind the ears-or he had been till combat started. Nobody who’d landed on Oahu was wet behind the ears any more, not like that. But Murakami’s eyes were wide and staring as he asked, “What will they do to us for… for coming back?” He wouldn’t say retreat, either.

“We tried our best,” Shimizu said. “Maybe a tank could take that house. Infantry can’t, not by itself.” Murakami only shrugged. He didn’t dare contradict a corporal, but he didn’t believe him, either. Shimizu went on, “Besides, what can they do to us that the Yankees’ machine guns wouldn’t have?” That got home. The young soldier shivered and nodded.

No one ever said a word about the retreat. An hour and a half later, Aichi dive bombers screamed down out of the sky. They pulverized the position the luckless company hadn’t been able to overrun. The order to advance went out again. With the defenses shattered, the Japanese had no trouble pushing forward toward Wahiawa.

Why didn’t they send in the bombers before the Americans chewed us up? Shimizu wondered. But he had no one he could ask that question. It stayed unspoken. The fight went on.

HAVING GOT WHAT he’d asked for, Lieutenant Jim Peterson quickly discovered it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Since he was still a young man, he fondly imagined this discovery to be unique to himself. Everyone around him was too busy trying to stay alive to tell him any different.

The Navy might have been willing to slap a tin hat on his head, toss him a rifle, and send him off to the front. Once he got there, the Army showed itself less than delighted to have him. A sergeant looked at him and said, “Sir, you’re going to have to shed those captain’s badges before you get a bunch of people killed.”

“Captain’s…? Oh.” A Navy captain-which had been Peterson’s first thought-was the equivalent of a bird colonel in the Army. But the two silver bars of a Navy lieutenant matched an Army captain’s rank emblem. Peterson said, “I didn’t come here to command a company.”

“Damn good thing,” the sergeant said. Put him in Navy blue and he’d have made a good CPO. He paused to light a King Sano, then went on, “Up here, your rank don’t mean shit-pardon my French-on account of you don’t know anything. If you were a Marine… But you’re not. Tell you the truth, what’s likely gonna happen is that you’ll get shot for nothing.”

“If I can take out a couple of Japs first, it won’t be for nothing,” Peterson said savagely. “I’m no infantry officer, but I can shoot. I know how to take orders, too.”

For the first time, the sergeant looked at him as if he were something more than a fly in the soup. Peterson realized he’d said the right thing, even if it was at least half by accident. After blowing a meditative smoke ring, the sergeant said, “Okay, sir. That’s fair enough. As of now, you’re Private, uh”-he looked down to check the paperwork in front of him-“Private Peterson. That suit you?”

“You bet!” Peterson said. The sergeant looked at him. He realized something more was expected. “Uh, yes, Sergeant!” This man was suddenly his superior.

“Okay.” The noncom nodded. “Now, then, like I told you, get rid of those silly-ass silver bars.”

That was an order. He’d claimed he knew how to take them. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said again, and removed them. He felt younger with them in his pocket, as if nothing that had happened since Annapolis counted any more. In some pretty basic ways, it didn’t. He also felt weaker, which made sense. Everybody could tell him what to do now. It was like his first year at the Naval Academy, only worse. Then he’d been bound for officer’s status. Now he’d chucked it out the window.

“Tell you what I’m going to do,” the sergeant said meditatively. “I’m going to send you to the garrison guarding Kolekole Pass, off to the west of Schofield Barracks. That’ll help me peel some trained soldiers out of there and put ’em in a part of the line where there’s more going on.”

Peterson realized he’d just been handed the Army equivalent of the coast defense of South Dakota. He started to say that he’d come up here to fight, not to make it easier for somebody else to. The words didn’t pass his lips. Privates didn’t get to make protests like that. The sergeant undoubtedly knew more about how things were going than he did. He managed a nod. “All right, Sergeant.”

“There you go,” the noncom said. “That’s almost always the right answer. Truck full of beans and stuff heading over there pretty soon. You hustle, you can scrounge a lift. And you better hope you don’t see too many Japs there. You do, we’re in deep shit. Go on, scram. I got more things to worry about besides you.”

Off Peterson went. He did catch the truck, and rode in the cab with the driver. The kid behind the wheel was named Billy Joe McKennie, and hailed from somewhere deep in the South. He said, “If’n them Japs”-it came out Jayups, the first time Peterson had ever heard it as a two-syllable word-“try comin’ over the Waianae”-a name that had to be heard to be believed-“Mountains, they’ll have to come through us’ns, an’ I don’t reckon they kin.”

“How do you know they won’t try somewhere else?” Peterson asked.

McKennie might not speak much real English, but he understood it. He looked at Peterson as if he were crazy. “On account of a goat’d have trouble gittin’ over them mountains, let alone a lousy Jap.”

The truck rumbled through Schofield Barracks. The east-west road that cut the immense base in half remained intact. The barracks, and all the other buildings around the facility, had taken a hell of a beating. Burned-out cars and trucks had been hastily dragged off the road. They sprawled alongside it, a terrible tangle of twisted metal. Peterson didn’t like to think about the men who’d been inside them when they were hit.

West of the base, the land began climbing toward the mountains. The closer Peterson got to them, the more he started to think Billy Joe McKennie had a point. They weren’t especially tall, but they rose swift and steep. And they were covered with the thickest, most impenetrable-looking jungle he’d ever seen. He couldn’t have named half the plants-hell, he couldn’t have named any of them-but he wouldn’t have wanted to try pushing through that maze of trees and ferns and thorny bushes.

Halfway through Kolekole Pass, the road stopped. The mountains loomed up on either side. The American detachment faced west. It boasted some field guns, several nicely sited machine guns, and a couple of command cars-soldiers called them peeps-with pintle-mounted machine guns of their own for mobile firepower.

Peterson helped McKennie and the soldiers already at the strongpoint unload the truck. Nobody seemed to find anything out of the ordinary about him. He pulled his weight. When McKennie drove off, a whole squad of men rode in the back of the truck.

“We give away a dozen and we get one back,” grumbled the major in charge of the garrison. By the disgusted look on his face, this wasn’t the first time that had happened. “Pretty soon we’ll have all the guns in the world and not a soul to shoot ’em.”

He stood in no serious danger of having all the guns in the world. Whether he’d run out of men was a different question. The question related to it was whether he ought to have any men there at all. The more Peterson looked at those mountains, the more he suspected the garrison was what the Army did instead of snapping its fingers to keep the elephants away.

“Sir, I don’t think Tarzan of the Apes could come at us through country like this,” he said.

The major blinked. Then he grinned. “You never can tell with Tarzan,” he said. “He got around a lot-that lost Roman city and…” He went on and on. Peterson realized he’d run into an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanatic. The major shifted to John Carter on Mars, then to Carson Napier on Venus. Peterson had to listen to him, and listen, and listen. The officer started talking about Burroughs himself, who, it turned out, spent a lot of his time on Oahu.

If Peterson was any judge, Burroughs came to a place like this to escape his fans. There probably was no escape, though. No escape for me, that’s for sure, Peterson thought unhappily. The major didn’t seem to want to run dry.

At last, he did. That let Peterson escape, and it let him look east across the center of Oahu. He could trace the front all the way over to the Koolau Range on the other side of the island. It wasn’t that far. If the Americans could hold the Japs north of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa, he thought they had a decent chance.

Kolekole Pass would have made a hell of an observation post. Peterson started to say something about that, then hesitated. A Navy lieutenant could make such suggestions. What about a buck private in the Army? Wasn’t he supposed to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told? That was what he would have wanted from an ordinary seaman in the Navy. He buttoned his lip.

A little later, he heard the major talking into a field telephone. The officer was pinpointing the location of a Japanese artillery position. Peterson laughed at himself. Old Granny Army didn’t need him to teach her how to suck eggs.

Off in the distance, artillery boomed. Machine guns rattled. Rifles crackled like fireworks. Here in the pass, everything was quiet. Soldiers played pinochle or acey-deucey. Birds chirped. Peterson could no more name them than the trees in which they perched.

It was quiet duty. Considering what was going on only a few miles away, it was miraculously quiet. Most of the men seemed delighted to be out of anything more dangerous. Peterson muttered and fumed. He wanted to have a go at the Japs, not sit here twiddling his thumbs in a place where they were anything but likely to show up.

After fuming till the sun swung down toward the horizon, he decided to beard the major after all. The man heard him out. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry, Private. I commend your initiative. It does you credit. But the answer is still no. We are serving a necessary function here. I would sooner be in combat myself. But I am doing what was ordered of me, and you will do what is ordered of you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Peterson said. That the man was obviously right only made his refusal more galling.

They had beans for supper, beans and roast pork. The beans couldn’t have come off of Peterson’s truck; they’d been soaked before they were boiled. They weren’t anything fancy, but they were okay. As for the pork, everybody smiled and ate in a hurry. Peterson suspected the pigs had been liberated from some little local farm. No one said anything, though, and he didn’t think he’d make himself popular by asking a whole lot of questions.

He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep on the ground. Some of the soldiers had mosquito netting. He didn’t. He wondered how high a price he’d pay for that. He tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. Snores rose around him. The Army men had no trouble sleeping on bare ground. If he’d got used to sacking out in a bunk every night, that was his hard luck.

And then, some time around midnight, shouts woke everybody who’d managed to fall asleep. “Out! Out! Out!” the major yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here before we get cut off and surrounded!”

“What the fuck?” somebody said, which perfectly summed up what Peterson was thinking.

“The Japs,” the major said, which was no shock: Mussolini’s men, for instance, were a hell of a long way away. But what followed was a shocker: “Goddamn slanteyes landed on the west coast, and they’re over the mountains behind us. That’s why we’re pulling out.”

“Did they get through Pohakea Pass south of here?” a soldier asked.

“No. They’re over the goddamn mountains, I tell you. Don’t ask me how-they must be part monkey. But most of what we’ve got is up at the front. God only knows how we’ll stop ’em, or even slow ’em down. Gotta try, though. Come on, get moving!”

Peterson scrambled out of his bedroll. Maybe he’d see action after all. It didn’t occur to him to wonder if that was what he really wanted.

SOME CIVIL WAR general-Fletch Armitage was damned if he could remember who-had said raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as a virgin. Some things hadn’t changed a bit in the past eighty years.

Fletch looked west, toward the Waianae Range. He was damned if he could see how anybody human could have got over those steep, jungle-covered mountains. For all he knew, the Japs weren’t human. But they were over the mountains, and square in the U.S. Army’s rear with… how many soldiers? Fletch had no idea, and he didn’t think any other Americans did, either.

Too many-that was certain. They weren’t just on the Army’s flank. They were in its rear. And if the Americans couldn’t pull back in a hurry and form some kind of new line farther south, they were probably history, and ancient history at that.

Pulling back meant giving up Wahiawa, leaving it to its fate. Plenty of people in the town didn’t intend to be left. Refugees packed the roads. Fletch had seen that before, when the people from Haleiwa and Waimea ran away from the oncoming Japs. This was worse. More people lived in Wahiawa. Japanese fighters had a field day shooting up the Kamehameha Highway. They didn’t seem to care whether they blasted soldiers or civilians. Why should they? They spawned chaos with every cannon shell, with every burst of machine-gun fire.

As the beat-up De Soto with his gun in tow slowly-so slowly-rattled south through Wahiawa, Fletch looked now this way, now that. One of the infantry privates newly hauled into artilleryman’s duty said, “Sure is a pretty place. Sure is a shame, letting the Japs have it.”

“I wasn’t looking at the town,” Fletch said tightly. He was looking for his more or less ex-wife. If he spotted Jane, he intended to shoehorn her into the car. Okay, she didn’t love him any more. But after what he’d seen, he wouldn’t have left a dying, half-witted dog to the mercy of the Japs. Maybe Jane would thank him for getting her out of there. Maybe she’d try to spit in his eye. He didn’t give a damn either way. If he saw her, she was going.

But he didn’t see her. All he saw was Wahiawa. He didn’t think it was all that lovely. It was the sort of town that grows up alongside any Army base, full of cheap, hastily run-up buildings that held businesses designed to separate soldiers from cash: bars; hamburger stands; chop-suey joints; tailors’ shops that sold cheap, loud clothes; tattoo parlors; dives that called themselves burlesque houses but were really brothels. To make matters worse, the Japs had bombed and shelled the place. No, it wasn’t lovely in his eyes.

But it wasn’t so ugly as a base-side town back on the mainland would have been, either. Palm trees swayed in the breeze. Hibiscus didn’t care that it was December. Blooms of gold and red and white brightened the day. Fletch didn’t know the names of a lot of the other flowers busily blooming in the middle of winter. Mynah birds and zebra doves and red-headed, gray-backed cardinals from South America added to the tropic scenery.

Fletch wished he could hop out of the car and run over to the apartment where he’d lived till not so long before. He knew he couldn’t. Rescuing Jane if he saw her on the street would have been one thing. Abandoning his gun to go after her would have been something else again: dereliction of duty.

A couple of hundred yards ahead, dirt fountained into the air. Another shell came down, and another, and another. Most of the column there was civilian. People scattered, screaming. “Son of a bitch,” Fletch said softly.

“Sir?” the dragooned infantryman said.

“Those aren’t the bursts the Japs get from their usual field pieces.” Armitage spoke with authority. He’d earned the right; he’d seen what the enemy’s guns could do. U.S. troops had mountain howitzers that broke down into loads light enough for one or two soldiers to manhandle them forward no matter what the terrain. Evidently, the Japs did, too. He thought about manhandling even mountain guns over the Waianae Range. Who could have dreamt the Japs could manage such a thing?

Who could have dreamt the Japs would strike at Hawaii in the first place? Oh, the people in charge of the Army and Navy here had played with the idea before. But it was only play, and everybody here had treated it that way. The trouble was, Japan hadn’t. She’d been dead serious about it.

And now we’re paying the piper, Fletch thought. He gave the car some gas. When he shifted up into second, gears clashed. The De Soto wasn’t made for towing an artillery piece. It would break down altogether pretty soon. In the meantime, he’d get what use from it he could. If a shell from one of the mountain howitzers came down on him… then it did, that was all. He had to get the gun free if he possibly could.

He did it. A spent shell fragment clanged off his fender, but he got through, skirting potholes all the way. Down toward Pearl Harbor and Honolulu he drove, wondering where the next stop would be.

JANE ARMITAGE STAYED in her apartment when the Japanese Army entered Wahiawa. She didn’t know what the Japs would do to civilians. She especially didn’t know what they would do to white female civilians. She didn’t want to find out the hard way, either.

She couldn’t help looking out the window. Was that skinny little man skulking along the street really a soldier? He looked as if he ought to be in the eighth grade. He wore short pants. His legs seemed skinny as matchsticks. By his size, the big Americans she was used to should have been able to tie him in knots and throw him away. But a helmet that looked too large perched on his head. He carried a rifle, and had the air of a man who knew what to do with it.

He looked up toward the window. Jane drew back, not wanting him to see her. He must not have, for he kept going. Two more Japs followed him a moment later. One was even skinnier, the other stocky and strong-looking but still very short. The stocky soldier had an American canteen bumping on his hip.

Occasional shots rang out. The Americans had pulled out hours before. Maybe the Japs weren’t sure about that. Maybe they were shooting people for the fun of it, or to put the fear of God into the ones they didn’t shoot. Jane laughed shakily. They sure know how to get what they want, don’t they?

She wondered if she should have headed south before the Japs came in. What she’d seen and heard from the refugees out of Waimea and Haleiwa had made her decide to sit tight. The Japanese had shelled them and shot at them and strafed them from the air. All they had was what they could carry. American soldiers had commandeered a lot of their cars. And the Army men might have shot the refugees who tried to refuse to give them up.

What had really made Jane decide to stay in Wahiawa was the fear that fleeing wouldn’t do any good. The Japs seemed only too likely to take all of Oahu. If they did, where would she be better off? In her own apartment, or somewhere on the road with only the clothes on her back? The choice had looked obvious.

Now that she’d gone and made it, she wished she hadn’t. Part of the island remained free, but not her part. If she was wrong, if the Army could somehow stop the Japs…

She wondered how Fletch was doing. She hoped he was still alive and fighting, at least as much because an artilleryman could really hurt the Japs as because, up till fairly recently, she’d loved him. She hadn’t seen him in the American retreat through town. Who could say what that proved, though, or if it proved anything?

Time crawled by. The gunfire gradually sputtered into silence. And then a man shouting something broke the silence. As he got closer, Jane managed to make out what he was saying: “Everyone come to the corner of Makani and California at four o’clock. The Japanese commander will give the rules for the occupation. Makani and California! Four o’clock! Rules for the occupation! You have to be there!” Whoever he was, he spoke good English, with only a slight Japanese accent.

Was he an invader who’d learned the language in college on the mainland? Or was he a local Jap doing what the occupiers told him? Would the local Japs do what the occupiers told them? Were they cheering to see the Stars and Stripes come down and the Rising Sun go up? Some of them are, I bet, Jane thought furiously.

She wondered if she ought to go listen to the Jap commander, or if the order was a trick or a trap. Reluctantly, she decided she had to take the chance. If the Japs gave more orders at this gathering, she didn’t want to get shot for not knowing what the rules were. Makani and California was only a few blocks east of Kamehameha Highway, and only a few from her building. She locked the door behind her when she left, not that that would do much good against a rifle butt.

Other people were also coming out of hiding. Jane waved and nodded to the ones she recognized. They all tried to pretend the Japanese soldiers prowling the streets weren’t there. The Japs just eyed the haoles. They talked with the Japanese who’d lived in Wahiawa. Some of those Japanese answered, too. Tone of voice was plenty to tell Jane the shoe was on the other foot, all right.

One of the local Japanese, a man who ran a nursery, stood on a table with a Jap officer at Makani and California. The local man translated for the invader: “Major Hirabayashi says that from now on you must bow to all soldiers of the Empire of Japan. You must make way for them on the street. Soldiers may stay with people here. If they do, you will be responsible for their room and board.”

The locals muttered at that. They did no more than mutter, though, not with soldiers all around. Major Hirabayashi went on, “All guns must be turned in. Anyone found with a gun after three days’ time will be executed. Also, all food in Wahiawa will be shared. When ordered, you will deliver your supplies to a central distribution point. Anyone caught hoarding after that will also be executed.”

More mutters. A dull horror washed over Jane. So much for what she’d bought. If only she lived in a house with a yard. She could have buried some by dead of night. Not with only an apartment around her, and lots of nosy neighbors. Maybe I should have run away after all.