End of the Beginning

I

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA WALKED PAST THE FRONT ENTRANCE TO IOLANI PALACE. Fairy terns, almost whiter than white, floated through the blue, blue Hawaiian sky. The flag of the newly restored Kingdom of Hawaii fluttered on five flagpoles above the late-Victorian palace. Seeing that flag made Genda smile. The Hawaiians had gone out of their way to accommodate both Britain and the United States, with the Union Jack in the canton and red, white, and blue horizontal stripes filling the rest of the field.

Much good it did them, the Japanese officer thought. White men economically dominated the Kingdom of Hawaii for years before America overthrew it and brought the islands under U.S. control.

Well, things were different now. The Stars and Stripes no longer flew over Iolani Palace. The building no longer housed the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, as it had for decades. King Stanley Owana Laanui-King by the grace of God and, much more to the point, by that of the Emperor of Japan-reigned here now, along with his redheaded Queen Cynthia. And, where King Stanley reigned, Major General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who’d commanded the Japanese Army forces that conquered Hawaii, ruled.

Japanese soldiers stood guard at the top of the stairs leading up into the palace. They weren’t big men-few of them had more than a couple of inches on Genda’s five-three-but, with their businesslike Arisaka rifles, they didn’t need to be. At the base of the stairs stood a squad of the revived Royal Hawaiian Guard. Putting the tall men at the bottom and the small men at the top 2 minimized the size difference between them. King Stanley’s guardsmen wore pith helmets and blue coats with white belts: purely ceremonial uniforms for purely ceremonial soldiers. They carried bayoneted Springfields-the Japanese had captured them by the thousand from the U.S. Army-but Genda had heard the rifles’ magazines held no cartridges.

The Royal Hawaiian Guards came to an even stiffer brace as Genda strode by them. He nodded back, politely acknowledging the compliment. He turned a corner and then another one, heading for the back of the palace. More guards, both Hawaiian and Japanese, stood there. Another stairway led up into the building. And a shorter, narrower set of steps led down into Iolani Palace. Genda chose that stairway.

In the nineteenth century, the basement had been the servants’ quarters. It had also housed the storerooms where the kahili-the feather-topped royal staffs-and the palace silver service, the wine, and other necessities were kept. Because at the last minute the architect had added a walled dry moat around the palace, the basement rooms had full-sized windows and weren’t nearly so dark and gloomy as they would have been otherwise.

In front of one of the rooms along the wide central corridor stood two Japanese sailors in landing rig: their usual blues modified by black-painted steel helmets; infantrymen’s belts, ammunition pouches, and canteens; and white canvas gaiters. Like the sentries outside, they carried Arisakas.

“Yes, sir? You wish…?” one of them asked when Genda stopped and faced them.

He gave his name, adding, “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Admiral Yamamoto.” He didn’t need to look at his watch to know he was ten minutes early. Being late to a meeting with the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet was inconceivable.

Both men saluted. “Hai!” they said in unison. The sailor who’d spoken before opened the door for him. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto worked at a plain pine desk, nothing like the ornate wooden dreadnought in King David Kalakaua’s Library on the second floor of the palace, the one General Yamashita used. Genda thought that most unfair; Yamamoto outranked Yamashita, and should have taken over the finer work area. But he hadn’t done it. He was in Hawaii only temporarily, and hadn’t wanted to displace the permanent garrison commander.

Yamamoto got to his feet as Genda walked in. They exchanged bows. Yamamoto was only slightly taller than Genda, but had a wrestler’s stocky, wide-shouldered body. “Sit down, sit down,” he said now.

“How are you feeling? Better, I hope? You look stronger than you did, and you have more color, too.”

“I’m much improved, sir. Thank you,” Genda said as he did sit. He’d had pneumonia when the Japanese Navy squared off against the U.S. forces trying to retake Hawaii. Despite the illness, he’d come up from Akagi’s sick bay to the bridge to do what he could to help the Japanese carriers against their American opposite numbers. He didn’t take credit for the victory, but he’d taken part in it. More than a month after the fight, he was starting to feel like his old self, though he hadn’t got there yet.

“Glad to hear it. I was worried about you,” Yamamoto said with gruff affection. Genda inclined his head. Most of a generation younger than the admiral, he was Yamamoto’s protege. He’d planned the biggest part of the Pearl Harbor operation and the invasion of Hawaii. He’d planned them-and Yamamoto had rammed the plans through, turning them into reality. And now… they were meeting in the basement of Iolani Palace.

“The Americans have been very quiet since we stopped them,” Genda remarked.

“Hai.” Yamamoto nodded. “I think they will stay quiet a while longer, too. I am going to take this opportunity to go back to Japan. Now that Hawaii is settled for the time being, we have to talk with the Army about what to do next. Australia… India… And of course they’ll want to take another bite out of China, and they’ll expect our help with that.”

“So they will,” Genda agreed. The Americans had offered to keep selling oil and scrap metal to Japan-if she got out of China. War, even a risky war like the one against the USA, had seemed preferable to the humiliation of bowing to another country’s will. Did the Yankees tell Britain to leave India and her African colonies? Not likely! Did the Yankees hesitate to send in Marines when one of their little neighbors got out of line? That was even less likely. But they thought they could order Japan around. Bitterly, Genda said, “We don’t have round eyes. We don’t have white skin.”

“True enough.” Yamamoto nodded again, following Genda’s train of thought. “But we’ve shown the world that that doesn’t matter.” He set both hands on the cheap pine desk. As a young officer, he’d lost the first two fingers of his left hand at the Battle of Tsushima, in the Russo-Japanese War. He’d lost two fingers-but the Russians lost most of the fleet that sailed halfway around the world to meet the Japanese. And they lost the war.

Genda had had his first birthday in 1905. Like any of his countrymen, though, he knew what the Russo-Japanese War meant. It was the first modern war in which people of color beat whites. And now the Japanese were beating the Americans and the British and the Australians, too.

Yamamoto said, “I hope I don’t have to come back too soon. American radio broadcasts make it very plain the United States is not abandoning Hawaii. I hoped the USA would-I hoped our victories would make them see they could not win, and so make peace. But that hasn’t happened. Karma, neh? They have more people and more resources and more factories-many more-than we do. My guess is that they will try to bring all of them into play. That will take some time.”

“We will be building, too,” Genda said stoutly.

“Hai,” Yamamoto said once more. But that was only acknowledgment, not agreement, for he went on, “They can build faster than we can. I hope what we have done here in the Eastern Pacific has bought us the time to take and use the resources we need to stay a great power in the modern world. I hope so… but time will tell.”

“We’ve done everything we set out to do here,” Genda said.

“So we have. Now-is it enough?” Yamamoto seemed determined to be gloomy. He looked toward the west. “Back in Tokyo, they think everything is wonderful. They think the United States is at death’s door. They do not understand the enemy. They may have read Sun Tzu, but they do not think what he says applies to them. Oh, no! They are far more clever than he.”

Such sarcasm flayed. What Clausewitz was in the West, Sun Tzu was in the East-and had been for more than two thousand years. A military man disregarded the ancient Chinese general’s thoughts on strategy and tactics only at his peril. Genda said, “Surely things are not so bad as that.”

“No-they’re very likely worse,” Yamamoto said. “Be thankful you’re well away from Tokyo. It’s a poisonous place these days. Some of the poison comes from success, which makes it sweeter, but it’s no less deadly on account of that. Deadlier, probably, in the long run, because success is the kind of poison that makes you blind.”

“If the Germans knock the Russians out of the war-” Genda began.

“Yes, that’s what the Army is waiting for. If the northern beast dies, they’ll jump on the carcass and tear off slabs of Siberia. If.”

“The Wehrmacht has a foothold in the Caucasus. They’re getting close to Stalingrad. Stalin’s ‘not one step back’ speech after Rostov fell sounded desperate.”

Yamamoto only shrugged those broad shoulders. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all. The Germans were at the gates of Moscow last winter, and they got thrown back. They’re after oil now. We have ours. If they can get theirs… I hope they haven’t overreached, that’s all.”

“They keep the Americans and the British busy, too,” Genda said, “which works to our advantage.” That made Yamamoto smile. He stood up and bowed to Genda, who hastily returned the gesture. “I might have known you would think clearly. With men like you here, Hawaii will be in good hands.” He bowed again, a little more deeply: dismissal.

Genda left his office as if walking on a cloud. The man he admired more than anyone else in the world-the man all Japan admired more than anyone else in the world-approved of him! Most of Japan knew-or rather, knew of-Admiral Yamamoto from gushing newspaper and magazine articles. Genda knew the man himself, and found him all the more admirable for the acquaintance.

Trying to suppress a silly grin, Genda went up the stairs from the basement. He got to the top at the same time as Cynthia Laanui, the newly crowned Queen of Hawaii, came down the back stairs from the ground floor of Iolani Palace. “Your Majesty,” Genda said in English, carefully keeping the irony from his voice.

“Hello, Commander Genda. How are you today?” The Queen knew him by sight; he was one of the four officers-two from the Japanese Navy, two from the Army-who’d chosen her husband from among the possible candidates for the restored Hawaiian throne. Stanley Owana Laanui-King Stanley now-was the first candidate who’d made it plain he would cooperate with Japan.

Genda didn’t think Queen Cynthia knew how simple the selection criteria were. He didn’t intend to enlighten her, either. “Better now, thank you,” he said. He read English well but, unlike Yamamoto, spoke less fluently.

Cynthia Laanui smiled at him. She was, without a doubt, the first red-haired Queen the Kingdom of Hawaii had ever had. The smile packed a punch. She was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, with green eyes, freckles, and, from the neck down, an abundant profusion of everything a woman ought to have.

“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for my husband,” she said. King Stanley was at least twenty years older than she was; Genda didn’t think she was his first wife. Why he’d married her was obvious. Why she’d married him wasn’t, not to Genda. But she seemed to care about him.

“Glad to help him,” Genda said. “He is good man.” He wouldn’t have bet more than fifty sen-say, a dime in U.S. money-on that but it was polite, and it gave him the excuse to keep talking with this striking woman. She was only a centimeter or two taller than he was, too.

She wore a distinctly unqueenly sundress of thin cotton. When she nodded, everything else moved in sympathy, and the dress showed it off. Genda hoped he didn’t notice too obviously. She said, “He’s a very good man. Hawaii needs him, especially now.”

Did she believe that, or was she being politic? Genda would have guessed she believed it. If she was so naive, she was liable to get badly hurt. “Good man, yes. Do many good things,” Genda said. Agreement was always safe. And, as long as King Stanley did exactly what Japan told him to do, the occupiers wouldn’t object if by some chance he turned out to be good, too.

Genda’s agreement won him a smile brighter than the Hawaiian sunshine from Queen Cynthia. He felt as if a bomb had gone off in front of him and he’d got flash-burned. “I’m so glad you think so,” she breathed. He’d never found the simple act of breathing so admirable before.

They chatted a little longer. Then, after another dazzling smile, she went back into the palace. Genda knew he needed to return to his duties. He waited till she’d gone all the way up the stairs, though.

THERE WAS A ZERO, swelling in Joe Crosetti’s windshield. Joe peered through the Grumman Wildcat’s gunsight. Can’t lead the son of a bitch too much, but if I don’t lead him enough I’ll miss, too. The thought was there and then it was gone. If you got close enough, you damn well wouldn’t miss. He waited till the hated enemy filled the bulletproof glass, then jammed his thumb down on the firing button atop the stick.

His wing machine gun roared. Tracers tore into the Jap. The enemy plane went up like a torch and plunged toward the Pacific. The pilot didn’t have a prayer of getting out. Maybe he was dead from the burst of fire, anyway.

“Nailed the bastard!” Joe yelled exultantly. He swung the fighter back toward the carrier. Navigating over the trackless ocean wasn’t easy, but he managed. There was the welcoming flight deck, dead ahead. He brought the Wildcat down toward the carrier’s stern. This was the tricky part… Down! The plane’s tailhook caught an arrester wire, and the machine jerked to a stop. He was down, and he was safe!

A voice spoke in his earphones: “Well, Mr. Crosetti, that wasn’t too bad.”

Reality returned with a bump harder than the one with which he’d landed. His Wildcat turned into a pumpkin, like Cinderella’s carriage: actually, into a humble Texan advanced trainer. The flight deck became a yellow rectangle outlined on concrete. The arrester wires stretched across it were the McCoy, though. This was only the second time he’d landed using them.

His flying instructor, a lieutenant, junior grade, named Wiley Foster, went on, “I liked your attack run on the target. You got a four-oh on that one.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joe said.

“Don’t thank me yet-I wasn’t finished,” Foster answered. “Your landing was okay, but nothing to write home about. You’re not supposed to set down as hard as you would on a real flight deck, not yet. You need to convince me you can make smooth landings before you do rough ones.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Joe wanted to claim he’d come down that way on purpose, but he hadn’t-and the flying instructor wouldn’t have cared it he had.

“As for your navigation…” Lieutenant Foster paused significantly.

“Sorry, sir,” Joe repeated, sounding as miserable as he felt. He’d struggled with navigation right from the start. A lot of the cadets at Pensacola Naval Air Station were college grads, or had at least some college. Joe had graduated from high school, but he was working in a San Francisco garage when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. He understood engines from the ground up, but his geometry and trig were barely enough to let him keep his head above water when it came to figuring out how to get from A to B and back again. And if he ever had to ditch in the vast, unforgiving Pacific, odds were he wouldn’t keep his head above water long.

“It could have been worse,” Foster allowed. “I’ve seen cadets try to head for Miami or New Orleans or Atlanta. But it could have been a hell of a lot better, too. If you want carrier duty, you’d better keep hitting the books hard.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” Joe said fervently. Carrier duty-the chance to hit back at Japan as soon as he could-was the reason he’d signed up as a Navy flying cadet in the first place.

Lieutenant Foster slid back the canopy. He and Joe climbed out of the Texan. The flying instructor was a lanky six-footer. He towered over Joe, who barely made five-seven. That might have mattered if they were bashing at each other with swords. Who cared how big a pilot was? Joe had heard Southerners say, It’s not the size of the dog in the fight-it’s the size of the fight in the dog. What the Japanese had done since December 7 proved the same thing, but Joe wasn’t inclined to give a bunch of goddamn Japs credit for anything.

He eyed the Texan with a mixture of exasperation and affection. It was a big step up from the sedate Stearman biplane on which he’d done his primary flight training. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a Yellow Peril buzzed by overhead. The Navy painted all its Stearmans a luminous yellow to warn other pilots that trainees were in the air.

Yes, the Texan was a long step up from a Yellow Peril. It was a monoplane with a real metal skin, not the doped canvas covering a Stearman. It had a machine gun in the left wing root-the one Joe had used to blast away at the target another plane towed. It had bomb racks, too. It could do a pretty good job of impersonating a warplane.

But it was only an impersonation. The Texan’s engine put out half the horsepower of a Wildcat’s. Its top speed was only about two-thirds of the Navy fighter’s. That that all made it much more forgiving than the genuine article was only a detail to Joe.

Groundcrew men came out to detach the plane’s tailhook from the wire and get it out of the way so another cadet could land on the yellow-outlined “carrier deck.” Lieutenant Foster said, “How soon do you think you’ll be ready to solo in a Texan?”

Joe blinked. He hadn’t expected that question from Foster, especially not after the instructor reamed out his navigation. But it had only one possible answer: “Sir, I’m ready to take a swing at it right this minute if you want me to.”

Foster had blond hair, a lock of which kept falling down on his forehead, and an aw-shucks smile that probably put the girls in mind of Gary Cooper. It put skinny, swarthy Joe Crosetti in mind of the Nob Hill nobs who looked down their straight noses at dagos like him. But the officer didn’t give him a hard time because of his last name or his looks. Foster said, “I approve of your spirit, Mr. Crosetti. The Navy needs more men who don’t hesitate. But if the flesh doesn’t quite measure up to it, you’re better off waiting, and the country would be better off if you did, too.” Joe must have looked stubborn, or maybe angry, because the flying instructor sighed and went on, “How many memorial services have you attended since you got here?”

“Uh, a few, sir,” Joe admitted. He’d been to more than a few, and he was sure Wiley Foster knew it. As soon as cadets started getting up into the air, they started finding ways to kill themselves. One midair collision between Yellow Perils had wiped out two cadets and two instructors. Cadets had crashed on the runway. They’d gone into the swamps around Pensacola Naval Air Station. A kid took a Stearman out over the Gulf of Mexico and never came back. No one ever found a trace of him-he was missing and presumed dead. All the same, Joe said, “That wouldn’t happen to me.” He had faith in his own indestructibility.

Lieutenant Foster clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s what they all say. Sometimes it’s the last thing they say.” He eyed Joe. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I can swing it,” Joe said stubbornly.

Foster looked down at the card on which he’d recorded Joe’s marks for the session. “Maybe you can, by God. Next time you go up, you’ll go up by yourself.”

“Thank you, sir!” Joe wanted to get all excited. He did get all excited, but he didn’t let most of it show. He was damned if he’d act Italian in front of somebody who looked the way Wiley Foster did.

He did head back to the barracks at the next thing to a dead run. When he first got to Pensacola, he and his roomie had shared a tent. Some cadets still slept under canvas-no enormous handicap in the steamy Pensacola summertime. But he and Orson Sharp had graduated to better things.

By the time he got to the two-story brick barracks building, he was drenched in sweat. San Francisco hadn’t come close to getting him ready for Florida heat and humidity. His father was a fisherman; he’d gone out of Fisherman’s Wharf with his old man on weekends and during summers before he landed the job at Scalzi’s garage. Till he got here, though, he’d never understood what a lobster went through when you dropped it in boiling water.

Heat and humidity or not, he took the stairs two at a time. He ran down the hall and threw the door open. Orson Sharp sat in a chair by his bunk, studying navigation. The cadet from Salt Lake City was big and fair and even-tempered. He didn’t swear and he didn’t drink coffee, let alone beer. Sharp was the first Mormon Joe had ever met. Joe sometimes thought he was too good to be true, though he never would have said so.

“How did it go?” Sharp asked, looking up from his book.

Joe’s enormous grin probably said everything he needed to say, but he spelled it out just the same:

“Lieutenant Foster’s going to let me solo next time I go up! I can’t wait!”

His roomie’s pleasure seemed entirely unalloyed. “That’s terrific! I know you were hoping, but I don’t think you expected it quite so soon.”

“Nope. He liked my firing run at the target. I think that’s what clinched it.” Slower than he should have, Joe remembered Sharp had flown this morning, too. “How about you?”

“My instructor let me take it up by myself today.” Sharp shrugged in wry self-deprecation. “I lived.”

Joe fought down a stab of jealousy. His roommate had soloed in a Stearman a week before he had, too. Sharp did everything well and didn’t fuss about anything. He was so unassuming, you almost had to act the same way around him. Joe walked over and stuck out his hand. “Way to go! Congratulations!”

“Thanks, buddy.” Orson Sharp’s hand was almost half again as big as his. When the cadets played football, Sharp was a lineman. Joe played end or defensive back. He was quick, but he wasn’t big.

“We’re getting there,” Sharp added.

“Yeah!” Joe said. “We’ve still got instrument flying to do, on the Link trainers on the ground and then up in the air, and I suppose they’ll give us some flight time on F3Fs, too.” The Navy’s last biplane fighter had stayed in front-line service till less than two months before Pearl Harbor. Joe tried to imagine F3Fs mixing it up with Zeros. Perhaps mercifully, the picture didn’t want to form. Now the F3F was a last-step trainer. Joe added two more words: “And then…”

“And then we see where they assign us,” Sharp said. “Did you put down VC on all three lines on your preference questionnaire way back when?”

“Carrier duty? You bet your… You bet I did.” Around his roomie, Joe didn’t swear very much, either.

“You?”

“Oh, sure,” Sharp answered. “If they don’t give me that, I don’t care what I get. Everything else is a booby prize.”

“I’m with you.” Joe didn’t give a damn about patrol planes or flying boats (no, that wasn’t true-he hated Jap flying boats, because one had dropped a bomb on the house where his uncle and aunts and cousins lived, but he didn’t give a damn about piloting an American flying boat) or anything but carrier-based air, preferably fighters.

“I hope we do end up together,” Orson Sharp said seriously. “We’ve made a pretty good team so far.”

“Uh-huh.” Joe nodded. “I better get some more of that navigation under my belt, too, or else I’m not going anywhere.” He pulled his own book out of the metal footlocker by his bed and sat down in a chair. He knew his roomie would give him a hand where he had trouble. He’d helped Sharp through some of the mysteries of engine maintenance. They did make a pretty good team. Look out, Hirohito, Joe thought, and dove into the book.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO RARELY GOT EXCITED about anything. Some people said the Navy pilot was a cold fish. He didn’t see it like that. To his way of thinking, most people got excited over nothing.

He stood on the Akagi’s flight deck and looked around Pearl Harbor. The view here wasn’t what it had been before Japan and the United States went to war. Then the American ships in the harbor were tied up alongside piers or rested easily at anchor. Now they were nothing but twisted, blackened, rusting metal. Some of them still leaked oil into the water. Shindo could see several of those rainbow patches. The mineral stink of the fuel oil fouled the tropical breeze.

The third wave of Japanese planes over Oahu had sunk two American destroyers in the channel leading out from Pearl Harbor to the Pacific, trapping the rest of the U.S. Pacific Fleet inside the harbor and letting the Japanese pound it to pieces at their leisure. Shindo nodded to himself. The Americans would have tried to sortie against the Japanese strike force. They probably wouldn’t have had much luck, not without carrier support, but just as well they hadn’t got the chance.

Japanese naval engineers had got the destroyers out of the channel only a few weeks before the failed American invasion. Shindo was glad they had. Now Akagi had somewhere local to make repairs without worrying about American submarines: the antitorpedo net was back in place at the mouth of the channel.

Shindo laughed unpleasantly. The Yankees hadn’t bothered with torpedo netting for individual ships last December. They hadn’t figured anyone could rig torpedoes to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Japan taught them otherwise. The devastation here proved that.

Devastation held sway on land, too. Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been palm trees and ferns where it wasn’t U.S. Navy installations. Now it was rubble with greenery poking through; hardly anything held greenery in check for long here. The Americans had fought house to house in Pearl City, north of the harbor. The town where Navy personnel and the civilians who worked for them lived was as battered as the island.

And the land to the east was worse. The Americans had stored their fuel there, and Japanese bombs sent the oil and gas up in smoke. Shindo vividly remembered the smoke: the funeral pyre of U.S. ambitions in the Pacific. The great black greasy plume had stayed in place for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Nothing grew there. Shindo wondered whether anything ever would. Ford Island and Pearl City had seen war. The tank farms had seen hell.

Near those fuel tanks had stood the U.S. Navy repair facilities. The Yankees wrecked those themselves when they realized they weren’t going to be able to hold Oahu. Japanese engineers were full of professional admiration for the job their American counterparts did. It made operating Pearl Harbor as a base for the Japanese Navy much harder-much harder, but not impossible.

As if to underscore that, Akagi’s flight deck vibrated under Shindo’s feet. Metallic clatters and bangs came from below. A dive bomber had got one home on the carrier during the fight north of the Hawaiian Islands. The bomb penetrated the flight deck near the bow and exploded in the hangar. Luckily, just about all the ship’s planes were in the air, defending Akagi or attacking the enemy’s carriers. Otherwise, things would have been even worse.

Damage-control parties had got steel plates over the hole in the flight deck so the carrier could launch aircraft. That was the essential, the indispensable, repair. Everything else had waited. The crew was attending to the rest now, as best they could here in Hawaiian waters.

Zuikaku, much more badly damaged than Akagi, had had to limp back to Japan for repairs. That left her sister ship, Shokaku, the only undamaged Japanese carrier in the Eastern Pacific. Shindo muttered to himself. Shokaku ’s fliers and sailors had less experience than Akagi’s. In a crisis…

No less a personage than Admiral Yamamoto thought a crisis unlikely any time soon. The Americans had hurt the Japanese carrier force. Japan had crushed the Americans. Two of the three U.S. carriers that had sailed from the American mainland lay on the bottom of the Pacific now. The third, hurt worse than either Akagi or Zuikaku, had barely staggered back to the West Coast. Whatever invasion fleet followed behind the carriers and their escorts had also run for home.

We smashed them, Shindo thought complacently. If they come back here again, we’ll smash them again, that’s all.

A tall, horse-faced officer came up onto the flight deck from below. Seeing Shindo, he waved and walked toward him. Shindo waved back, then saluted as the other man drew closer. “How are you feeling, Fuchida-san?” he asked.

“Better day by day, thanks,” Commander Mitsuo Fuchida answered. He’d come down with appendicitis during the fight with the Americans. He’d completed his attack run, brought his bomber back to Akagi, gone straight to sick bay, and parted with the inflamed organ.

“Glad to hear it,” Shindo said. He’d led Akagi’s fighters during the last wave of the attack on Oahu and in the recent battle against the Yankees north of Hawaii. Fuchida had been in overall command in the first wave and also, illness or no, in the fight where he’d come down sick.

“It’s over. I got through it. They patched me up,” Fuchida said as more clanging and banging came from the hangar deck. Fuchida smiled. “Akagi can say the same thing.”

“I wish it weren’t taking so long,” Shindo grumbled. A thoroughly businesslike man, he didn’t notice Fuchida’s joke till it was too late to respond. Keeping his mind on business, he looked north and east. “I wonder what the Americans are doing with that beat-up flattop of theirs.”

“She’s under repair up in Seattle,” Fuchida answered.

“Ah, so desu? I hadn’t heard that,” Shindo said.

“I just found out a few hours ago myself,” Fuchida said. “One of our H8Ks spotted her. They’re amazing aircraft.” Enthusiasm filled his face. And the big flying boats were remarkable planes. Flying out of what had been the Pearl City Pan Am Clipper base, they could reach the West Coast of the USA for reconnaissance work or even to drop bombs. Fuchida had flown on one in a three-plane raid on San Francisco. That, no doubt, accounted for a good part of his enthusiasm.

It also made Shindo jealous as could be. Fuchida was very able. Nobody would have quarreled with that; Shindo certainly didn’t. Because he was so able, he sometimes got to do things he wasn’t strictly entitled to do. Sitting in the copilot’s seat of an H8K was one of those, sure enough.

None of what Shindo thought showed on his face. That was true most of the time, but he made a special point of it now. The two of them served together, but they weren’t close friends the way Fuchida and Minoru Genda were. And Fuchida had two grades on Shindo. Letting a superior see what you thought of him was never a good idea.

All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”

“Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”

“If they want another go at us, they can have it,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them the same kind of lesson we did six weeks ago.” He paused, eyeing Fuchida. Now the other naval aviator’s face was the sort of polite blank mask behind which anything could have hidden. Shindo decided to press a little to see what was there: “We’re just about back up to strength here with aircraft and pilots.”

“In numbers, yes,” Fuchida said. “Do you think the replacements fly as well as the men we lost? Are the bombardiers as accurate?”

So that was it. Shindo said, “They’ll get better as they get more flying time. I was thinking the same thing not long ago about Shokaku ’s crew.”

“I hope so.” Fuchida still sounded worried. “We don’t have the fuel to give them all the practice I wish they could get.”

Saburo Shindo grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. Blowing up the tank farms had hurt Japan as well as the USA-though the Americans surely would have fired them to deny them to the invaders. As things were, the Japanese in Hawaii didn’t have the fuel to do all the patrolling by air or water Shindo would have liked to see. They’d spent gasoline and fuel oil like a drunken sailor to get through the last battle. Now they had to bring in more, a ship at a time. It wasn’t a good way to do business, not when the merchant ships were short of fuel, too-and not when American subs would be hunting them.

“How soon will we be able to start using the oil we’ve taken in the Dutch East Indies?” Shindo asked.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Fuchida answered. “Maybe Commander Genda would know, but I don’t.”

“If it’s not pretty soon, why did we go to war?” Shindo grumbled.

“Because if we hadn’t gone to war, we wouldn’t have any oil coming in at all,” Fuchida said. “And you can’t very well worry about using or rationing what you don’t have.”

However much Shindo would have liked to argue with him, he didn’t see how he could.

JIM PETERSON STOOD IN THE CHOW line with his mess kit and spoon. The rice and vegetables the Japs doled out to American POWs in labor gangs weren’t enough to keep body and soul together. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hungry and didn’t want the meager supper. Oh, no! For a little while after he ate it, he’d feel… not quite so bad.

He’d seen what happened when people got too weary to give a damn about food. The Japs didn’t let them rest. They worked them just as hard as anybody else, and beat them if they couldn’t keep up. And if the POWs died under such treatment-well, tough luck. Japan hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. As far as her soldiers were concerned, surrender was the ultimate disgrace. Having surrendered, the American soldiers and sailors on Oahu were essentially fair game.

Plop! The man four in front of Peterson got his miserable supper. Plop! The man three in front. Plop! Two in front. Plop! The guy right ahead of Peterson. And then, plop! — he got his. For ten or fifteen seconds, the world was a glorious place. He had food! He hurried off to eat it, cradling the mess tin to his chest like a miser with a sack of gold.

A lump of gluey rice and anonymous greens about the size of a softball-that was what he was getting all excited about. He knew it. It shamed him. It made him disgusted at himself. But he couldn’t help it. That was how much his body craved even the scanty nourishment the Japs gave him.

For this I went to Annapolis? he thought bitterly as he shoveled glop into his face as fast as he could.

He’d been a Navy lieutenant on the Enterprise, coming back to Pearl Harbor after delivering fighter planes to Wake Island. He’d roared off the carrier’s deck to do what he could against the Japanese-and promptly got shot down. He’d thought his Wildcat was pretty hot stuff till he ran into his first Zero. It was also the last one he’d faced in the air. One was plenty. One had sure been plenty for him.

He managed to bail out, and came down on a golf course near Ewa, the Marines’ airfield west of Pearl Harbor. He’d done his damnedest to get back in the air. His damnedest turned out to be no damn good. Lots of pilots-Marines, Army and Navy men-were in line ahead of him. All they needed were planes. The Japs did a hell of a job blowing those to smithereens on the ground. Japanese mastery of the air in the invasion was absolute.

Since Peterson couldn’t fight the Japs in the air, he’d fought them on the ground as a common soldier. He’d even been promoted to corporal before the collapse; he still had the stripes on the sleeve of his ragged shirt. Nobody would use him as an officer on the ground, which was only fair, because he hadn’t been trained for that. He would have got people killed trying to command a company.

Nobody in his shooting squad knew he’d been an officer. No sooner had he thought of the squad than he thought of Walter London. Up came his head, like a bird dog’s. Where was London? There, sitting on a boulder, eating rice like everybody else. Peterson relaxed-fractionally. London was the weak link in the squad, the guy most likely to disappear if he saw half a chance-and if the other guys didn’t stop him.

That was what shooting squads were all about. The Jap who’d come up with the idea must have got a bonus from the Devil. If one man escaped, all the others got it in the neck. That violated all the rules of war, of course, but the Japs didn’t care. Anybody who’d seen them in action had no doubts that they would get rid of nine because the tenth vamoosed.

The sun sank behind the Waianae Range, Oahu’s western mountains. The labor gang was widening the road that led to Kolekole Pass from Schofield Barracks. Why the road needed widening, Peterson couldn’t see. He’d been stationed in the Kolekole Pass for a while during the fighting. Not many people wanted to get there, and he couldn’t imagine that many people ever would.

But it gave the POWs something to do. It gave the Japs an excuse to work them-to work them to death, very often. Peterson laughed, not that it was funny. Working the prisoners to death was probably no small part of what the Japanese had in mind.

He finished the last grain of rice in the mess kit. He always did. Everybody always did. He remembered when he’d left food on his plate in the Enterprise’s wardroom. No more. No more. He got to his feet. He topped six feet by a couple of inches, and had been a fine, rangy figure of a man. Now he was starting to look more like a collection of pipe cleaners in rags. He’d lost somewhere close to fifty pounds, and more weight came off him every day. He didn’t see how, but it did.

Peterson made a point of walking right past Walter London and scowling at him. Most POWs were scrawny wretches. London was skinny, but he wasn’t scrawny. He was a wheeler-dealer, a man who could come up with cigarettes or soap or aspirin-for a price, always for a price. The price was commonly food.

A stream ran down from the mountains, close by the side of the road. POWs rinsed their mess tins and spoons in it, getting them as clean as they could. Dysentery wasn’t bad here, but some men suffered from it-and more, weakened by hard labor, exhaustion, and starvation, came down with it all the time. You did what you could to stay clean and to keep your stuff clean. What you could do often wasn’t enough.

There were no huts. There were no beds. There weren’t even any blankets. In Hawaii, that mattered much less than it would have a lot of other places. Peterson found some grass and lay down. Other men were already lying close by. If they felt cold in the middle of the night, they would roll together and use one another to keep warm.

He woke in the morning twilight with a Japanese guard’s boot in his xylophone ribs. The Jap wasn’t kicking him, just stirring him to get him up and moving. If he kept lying there, though, he would get kicked. He scrambled to his feet and bowed to the guard. Satisfied, the Jap went on to prod the next closest American awake.

Peterson took his place for morning lineup. Till the men were counted, they got no breakfast. They formed up in rows of ten, which made it easy for the guards to count them. Or that should have made it easy; some of the Japs seemed to have trouble with numbers as big as ten. Maybe Peterson was just being rude in thinking so, but it looked that way to him. A lot of the camp guards seemed to be peasants from the Japanese back of beyond. They were ignorant and mean, and reveled in their petty authority over the Americans.

About one morning in three, something went wrong with the count. This was one of those mornings. Americans muttered to themselves when no guards were looking their way. “Fuck up a wet dream,” somebody behind Peterson said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a wet dream. When you were slowly starving to death, dreams of pussy went right out the window.

The Japanese sergeant in charge of the labor gang wasn’t a bad guy. At least, he could have been worse. He plainly had orders about how much he was supposed to feed the POWs and how much work he was supposed to get out of them. Like just about every Jap Peterson had seen, he conscientiously obeyed his orders. Past what he had to do, he wasn’t cruel for the sake of being cruel. He didn’t beat people or behead them just because he felt like it, and he didn’t let his men do anything like that, either.

Now, though, he looked about ready to explode. “Shooting squads!” he yelled: one of the handful of English phrases he knew.

Ice ran up Peterson’s back. It always did when the prisoners got that command. As usual, the first thing he did was look around to see where Walter London was. He didn’t spot him right away. Telling himself that didn’t mean anything, he joined his comrades in misery. Along with them, he silently counted off: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… nine. No ten. Wherever London was, he wasn’t here.

“Oh, fuck,” somebody said very softly. It seemed more a prayer than a curse.

“How did he get loose?” Peterson’s voice was also soft, but very grim. They’d kept a watch on London through the night, taking turns gapped out of their exhausted sleep. The man they worried about, of course, hadn’t had to watch himself. He’d slept like a baby. Till last night, he’d slept like a baby.

“I had the last watch,” a guy from Oregon named Terry said. Naked fear widened his eyes until you could see white all around the iris. “I guess maybe I fell asleep again, on account of the Jap kinda poked me awake this morning. I didn’t think anything about it till-”

“Yeah. Till,” somebody broke in. “You just put all our necks in the noose, God damn you.”

“Too late to do anything about it. The asshole’s gone.” Peterson sounded even wearier than he felt-no mean trick. Under the laws of war, a sentry who fell asleep at his post could go up in front of a firing squad. He didn’t take his buddies to perdition with him, though.

Here came the Japs. No chance to sneak in somebody from another group that had already been counted. The Japs might have trouble getting to eleven without taking off their shoes, but they knew nine, and they knew nine wasn’t ten. They started pointing and yelling and jabbering in their own language. The gang-boss sergeant tramped up. He had no trouble getting to nine and not to ten, either. The POWs stood at ramrod-stiff attention. The sergeant might not have been a bad guy, but he lost his temper now. Peterson even felt a moment’s sympathy for him; he’d probably get in Dutch because of the escape, too.

“Zakennayo!” he yelled-a handy-dandy all-purpose Japanese obscenity. “Baka yaro!” he tacked on for good measure. Idiots! That also didn’t fit the situation too badly. But cussing wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He walked up to the closest POW in the shooting squad and slapped him in the face, hard.

He might not normally have beaten people, but things weren’t normal now. Japanese noncoms belted their own privates when they got mad. The privates took it without blinking and went on about their business. The prisoners had to do the same, or else they would get shot on the spot.

Wham! Wham! Wham! The sergeant wasn’t real tall, but he had a bull’s shoulders. He didn’t hit like somebody’s girlfriend when she got mad. He was trying to knock you ass over teakettle. Peterson had just time to brace himself before he got it. His head whipped to one side. He refused to give the Jap the satisfaction of staggering, though he tasted blood in his mouth.

The damn Jap came back along the row, smacking everybody again. He screamed at the Americans. It was all in Japanese, but he illustrated with gestures. He did excellent impressions of being hanged, being shot, and having his throat cut-the last complete with gruesomely authentic sound effects. Then he pointed at the POWs. This is going to happen to you.

Peterson had figured it would happen right there. It didn’t. The sergeant told off three guards and had them march the nine remaining members of the shooting squad back to Opana, the northernmost point on Oahu, to the POW camp where they’d been held since not long after the fighting stopped. The men got no food and no water. Whenever one of them stopped for any reason, the Japs set on him with their rifle butts.

After a day of that, Peterson decided he would take off when they stopped for the night. If they shot him trying to escape, he didn’t figure he’d lost much. And they were going to do in his buddies anyway, so he couldn’t get them into any worse trouble. Disappearing-if he could-looked like his best hope.

He never got the chance. The Japs herded the shooting squad into Waimea, on the north coast, just as the sun was going down. The men spent the night in one cell of the town jail-all of them crammed into one cell. The cell, naturally, had not been made with nine men in mind. They filled it to overflowing and piled onto one another when they lay down.

Nobody fed them. But, because the cell had been built by Americans and not by Japanese, it boasted a cold-water sink and a toilet. Jim Peterson drank till he thought water would start coming out of his ears. He washed his face and hands, too. Everybody else did the same thing. And none of them had heard a toilet flush for a hell of a long time.

When morning came, the Japs herded them out. They’d already used the sink again, expecting that they wouldn’t get any water the rest of the day. They turned out to be right about that. And, because they didn’t seem demoralized enough to suit their captors, the Japs quickmarched them north and east along the highway towards Opana. Now even slowing down meant a goose with a bayonet or a kick or a rifle butt in the kidneys or the ribs or the head.

Of course, quickmarching the prisoners meant the guards had to quickmarch, too. But they were well fed, and they hadn’t been killing themselves with hard physical labor. They might have been tired by the time they got up to Opana. Peterson felt ready for the boneyard.

And the Japs were ready to give it to him, too. Everybody from the shooting squad went into punishment cells. They weren’t big enough for anybody to stand up or lie down in them. The prisoners spent ten days in them, with only a little rice and a little water on which to stay alive.

When Peterson finally did emerge from his cell, he could barely stand. Everybody else in the squad was just as bad off. An officer strode up to them with an interpreter-a local Jap-in tow. That worried Peterson all by itself. If the Japs had something to say that they wanted the POWs to understand, it wasn’t going to be good news.

Hand on the hilt of his sword, the officer snarled in Japanese. “You have failed in your obligation,” the interpreter said. “Because you have failed, you will be punished. No longer will you be allowed the light duty you have enjoyed up till now.”

Peterson didn’t laugh in the man’s face. If he had, the officer might have used that sword to cut off his head. He still wanted to live, though right at that minute he couldn’t have said why.

Another furious-sounding spate of Japanese. “You will be sent to road building in the Kalihi Valley,” the local Jap said. “This is your unbreakable sentence.” He might have been sending them off to Devil’s Island.

The officer growled one more time. The interpreter left it untranslated, which might have been just as well. The officer drew himself up straight, which would have been more impressive if he’d been taller than five-six. Like the rest of the men in the shooting squad, Peterson bowed. They knew what the Jap wanted.

As the officer swaggered away with the interpreter in his wake, Peterson dared breathe a sigh of relief. As far as he could see, they’d got off easy. Road building was road building. How could what they wanted him to do be any worse than what he’d been doing already?

And where the devil was the Kalihi Valley, anyway?

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU GATHERED HIS SQUAD by eye. “You boys ready to go back to Honolulu?” he asked.

“Yes, Corporal!” chorused the men under him. Of course they called out, “Hai!” at the top of their lungs. He was a noncom and they were only privates. If they annoyed him, he could slap them or punch them or kick them, and no one above him would say a word. No, that wasn’t quite true. Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander, would say, Well done! Keep your men disciplined! Certainly, though, no one above him would complain.

Odds were he wouldn’t smack them around. He had a ready smile and a readier laugh. He’d been a while making corporal; his superiors came right out and said they feared he was too easygoing for the job. But he’d fought, and fought well, in China before crossing the Pacific to land on a beach not far from where he was now. Once he had the rank, he kept his squad in line well enough even if he didn’t thump his men as often as some other corporals and sergeants did with theirs.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. His whole regiment had moved up from Honolulu to the beaches near Haleiwa on Oahu’s north shore to defend against an American reinvasion. It hadn’t come-the Japanese Navy had made sure it wouldn’t and couldn’t. Now the regiment was returning to its previous posting.

“This is pretty country. It’s a shame to leave,” Shiro Wakuzawa said. He wasn’t wrong-it was the sort of country where ferns sprouted from the dirt thrown up in front of foxholes, where coconut palms (the ones that hadn’t been knocked over when the Japanese shelled and bombed the beaches) swayed in tropical breezes, where the ocean was several improbably beautiful shades of blue. But Wakuzawa, who’d been a new conscript when he came ashore here, was such a sunny fellow that he made even Shimizu seem like a grouch.

An older private said, “I won’t be sorry to get back to Honolulu. No whorehouses up here.” With his meager pay, he couldn’t afford to go to a brothel even once a month. But several other soldiers who had no more money nodded. Shimizu didn’t try to argue with them. He also thought getting laid every once in a while was better than not getting laid at all. Getting laid regularly would have been better still. Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought.

He led the squad over to where the platoon was assembling. Everyone was clean. Everyone had all his gear. Everyone could stand inspection-everyone already had stood Shimizu’s inspection. Shimizu nodded to Corporal Kiyoshi Aiso, whose squad was also part of the platoon. Aiso nodded back. He was thin and leathery and tough-all in all, a more typical noncom than Shimizu.

Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander, condescended to speak to the assembled soldiers before they started marching down across Oahu. “Congratulations, men. You were ready for action,” he said. “I know you would have mown down the Americans if they had dared return to Oahu. We will stay ready in case they decide to try again. Banzai! for the Emperor.”

“Banzai!” the soldiers shouted.

The bugler blared out the order to advance. The soldiers started to march. “Be strong!” Shimizu called to his men. “You were soft as tofu on the march up here. I expect better.” Garrison duty in Honolulu had left all of them soft. Shimizu had suffered on the march up to Haleiwa, too, but hadn’t shown it in front of his men. If he kept up a bold front, he had no trouble ordering them around.

Everything seemed easy when he started out. He laughed at the mynah birds croaking and squawking in the rice paddies that had replaced most of the sugar cane and pineapple plantations past and through which he’d fought. Hawaii hadn’t come close to feeding itself before Japan conquered it. Now it nearly could.

Little blue-faced zebra doves and ordinary pigeons pecked at the growing rice. There were far fewer of them than there had been when Shimizu came ashore. They were good to eat, and people had got hungry enough to eat them. And zebra doves in particular were very tame and very stupid and very easy to catch.

Before long, Wakuzawa started to sing. He had a fine musical voice, and could stick to the tune even when the soldiers around him-who weren’t nearly so good-made a hash of it. Singing helped the kilometers go by. Shimizu had done a lot of it on endless dusty marches through China. The marches here weren’t endless, thank heaven, and they weren’t even dusty, for the roads were paved. But singing felt good all the same.

He thought so, anyhow. After Wakuzawa had led the men in a couple of ballads popular in Tokyo before they sailed for Hawaii, Lieutenant Horino said, “We are soldiers. If we’re going to sing, we should sing Army songs.”

Army songs had only one thing wrong with them: next to popular ballads, they were dull. Singing about the infantry’s branch-of-service color and about dying for the Emperor and living on inside his spirit wasn’t nearly so much fun as singing about women and getting drunk and looking for a chance to get rich and women again. Even the tunes were dull; they seemed more chants than proper songs. How could you care about singing something like that?

After a while, then, the men fell silent once more. Lieutenant Horino looked pleased with himself. To his way of thinking, he’d stopped a minor nuisance. Corporal Shimizu swallowed a sigh. When he was singing, he could do that and not notice the highway and each step along it. Now-thump, thump, thump-each footfall was what it was.

The soldiers trudged through Wahiawa. Like Haleiwa farther north, it wasn’t anything special: not very big, not very rich. It wasn’t very rich by Hawaiian standards, anyhow. But towns here never failed to remind Shimizu that America was a much richer country than Japan. Cars sat by the curb-so many! They couldn’t go now, because they had no fuel, but ordinary people had been able to buy them. In Japan, cars were for rich men.

Some of the tires on these automobiles had gone flat. Some had been removed, too. Sooner or later, Malaya would give Japan rubber, but she was desperately short of it now. All those tires weren’t doing the people of Hawaii any good, not when they couldn’t drive the cars on which the tires were mounted. Better they should help Japan, then.

In Wahiawa, as anywhere else, civilians had to bow when Japanese soldiers went by. Local Japanese not only took it in stride, they did it properly, showing just the right amount of deference and respect. Whites and Chinese and Filipinos weren’t so good, but orders were not to make an issue out of any bow that showed the right spirit.

A pretty blond woman in her late twenties-not far from Shimizu’s age-bent as the soldiers went past. He remembered seeing a pretty woman with yellow hair as his regiment marched up through Wahiawa. Was this the same one? How could he tell after several weeks?

He’d seen a handful of missionaries in China. But for them, these people on Oahu were the first whites he’d ever set eyes on. They were big. He’d seen that from the moment he landed, when they started shooting at him. But big didn’t mean tough-or not tough enough, anyhow. They’d fought hard, but in the end they’d surrendered.

Shimizu’s lip curled. They deserved whatever happened to them after that. He couldn’t imagine anything but fighting to the finish. At least then it was over. You didn’t give yourself up to the foe so he could do whatever he wanted with you-and to you.

Lieutenant Horino strode along with one hand on the hilt of his sword. “Let them see who their masters are,” he declared.

No one in Wahiawa showed the Japanese even the slightest disrespect. The locals would have been crazy to do so. Whoever tried it would have paid, and so would his or her family and friends and neighbors. Civilians didn’t have shooting squads the way prisoners did, but the occupying authorities would have come up with something to make people remember.

Then the regiment trudged out of the town. More rice paddies replaced cane and pineapple. Men muttered about sore feet. No one would have had the energy to sing now. Shimizu didn’t have the energy or the desire to order them to sing an Army song. He picked his feet up and put them down again, over and over and over.

The regiment didn’t quite make it into Pearl City, let alone Honolulu, before the sun went down. Colonel Fujikawa looked unhappy. He’d also been unhappy when they failed to march from Honolulu to Haleiwa in one day. “You’ve got weak,” he grumbled.

He was probably right, too. Oahu didn’t offer marching opportunities the way, say, China did. You could march forever in China. After a lot of campaigns there, Shimizu thought he had. This place wasn’t like that. You settled down and you patrolled in town, and that was that. If you did a whole lot of marching here, you marched into the Pacific.

As the men were settling down by the side of the road, an enormous flying boat landed in Pearl Harbor and taxied up to the shore at Pearl City. “I wonder what that’s all about,” said Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa, who was curious about everything.

“No idea,” Shimizu said. “If the brass wants us to know, they’ll tell us about it. As long as it’s one of our planes, I won’t lose any sleep about it.”

It must have been a Japanese plane-no gunfire erupted, no bombs burst. He ate rice, assigned sentries, and rolled himself in a blanket as soon as it got dark. And, weary as he was, he lost not even a moment’s sleep.

BY NOW, JANE ARMITAGE WAS USED TO JAPANESE soldiers tramping through Wahiawa. She was used to bowing whenever she saw them. She was used to keeping her thoughts to herself. If she didn’t, someone might blab to the Japs, and what happened after that wouldn’t be pretty.

And she was used to being hungry. She hated looking into the mirror in her apartment. The face that stared back was a stranger’s, all cheekbones and chin and staring eyes. Only her yellow hair reminded her that she was really herself. When she got into the shower, her ribs stood out like ladder rungs. She could watch muscles move on her arms and legs.

The only thing that kept her from complete despair was that everybody in Wahiawa was in the same boat-all the locals, anyhow, for the occupiers ate well enough to keep their weight on. One scrawny wretch in a group of normal people would have drawn notice. One scrawny wretch in a group of scrawny wretches? They said misery loved company. By God, they had a point.

“Damn you, Fletch,” she would whisper once in a while, when she was sure nobody could hear. Her ex-husband had been an artillery officer at nearby Schofield Barracks. He’d sworn up and down that the U.S. Army would give the Japs a black eye if they ever came anywhere near Hawaii. These days, Jane despised him more for being wrong than she did for drinking too much and generally for forgetting she existed except when he felt like a roll in the hay.

She couldn’t brood for very long. She had her vegetable patch to look after. She was growing turnips and potatoes. She hated what the work did to her hands. They were hard and callused and scarred, with short nails with permanently black rims. There too, though, she wasn’t the only one-far from it. Without the produce the locals grew, they might well have starved to death. The occupying forces wouldn’t have shed a tear. The Japs might have laughed instead.

She hardly ever thought, I should be teaching third grade, any more. The elementary school was closed, by all appearances permanently. The principal… Jane flinched away from that thought. She still remembered the thunk of Major Hirabayashi’s sword biting into Mr. Murphy’s neck when the Japs caught Murphy with a radio after they ordered all sets turned in.

But the dreadful sound and the memory came back to her even when she was weeding in the little plot of ground. She’d chop through some nasty plant’s stem… and Murphy’s head would leap from his shoulders, blood fountaining impossibly red and his whole body convulsing-but not for long, not for long.

“Your plot looks good.”

Four words returned her to reality. Bad as reality was, it beat the stuffing out of what had been going on in her head. She turned. “Thank you, Mr. Nakayama,” she said. She didn’t have to bow to Tsuyoshi Nakayama. He was just a local Jap, a nursery man, not one of the invaders. But she did have to treat him with respect. He was Major Hirabayashi’s interpreter and factotum. Get on his wrong side and you’d be sorry. Jane didn’t want to find out how sorry she could be.

“Thank you for working so hard,” Yosh Nakayama told her. He was about fifty, but looked older, his face tanned to wrinkled leather from a lifetime in the sun. “If everyone worked as hard as you, we would have more to eat.”

He’d lost weight, too. He hadn’t used his position to take special privileges-of which food came first these days, well ahead of money or women’s favors. By all appearances, he didn’t much want the job he had. That didn’t keep him from doing it conscientiously.

Jane saw a bug. Automatically, she lashed out with a foot and squashed it. Nakayama nodded approval.

“Some people don’t care enough to do things right,” he said. His English was slow and deliberate-fluent, but not quite the speech of someone who’d grown up with the language. “You are not like that.”

“Well, I hope not,” Jane said. “If you’re going to do something, do it right.”

He nodded again, and actually smiled. His teeth were very white, except for a couple of glinting gold ones. “Yes,” he said, and went on to the next vegetable patch without another word.

Yes? Jane wondered. Then why didn’t my marriage work? Of course, that had taken two, and Fletch hadn’t exactly held up his end of the bargain. Jane wondered if he was still alive. If he was, he was probably a prisoner. She shivered under the warm Hawaiian sun. The Japs treated POWs worse than they treated civilians, and that was saying something. Gangs of prisoners occasionally shambled through Wahiawa, on their way to God knows what. She didn’t like thinking that Fletch could be one of those skeletons in rags.

She didn’t wish her ex-husband anything particularly bad. If she ever saw him coming up the street in one of those labor gangs, she would… She didn’t have the faintest idea what she would do. Break down and cry, most likely. But if she broke down and cried about everything in Hawaii that upset her these days, she’d have no time to do anything else. She assassinated a weed instead.

PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON WAS NOT A HAPPY MAN. The Marines who served under him would have said he was never a happy man, but a platoon sergeant was supposed to make his men feel as if hell wasn’t half a mile off. He wanted them more afraid of him, and of letting him down, than of the enemy.

He knew how that worked. He’d been a buck private himself in 1918, and his own sergeant had scared him a damn sight more than the Germans did. He’d gone over the top time after time, till a machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg and put him on the shelf for the rest of what the politicians had insisted was the War to End All Wars.

But his unhappiness here was at least as much personal as it was institutional. His company commander, Captain Braxton Bradford, had ordered all his noncoms not to go drinking in San Diego. Bradford’s logic was crystal clear. “Y’all go drinking off the base, you’ll run into sailors,” he’d said-he was as Southern as his name. “Y’all run into sailors, you’ll fight ’em. Tell me I’m wrong and you can go.”

None of the corporals and sergeants had even tried. Les knew he wanted to punch the first swabbie he saw. One of his buddies, another platoon sergeant named Dutch Wenzel, said, “We wouldn’t if those pussies hadn’t blown the fight with the Japs.”

“They did their damnedest,” Captain Bradford answered. “Nobody can say any different.”

No one contradicted that, either. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the troopship carrying the regiment had had to hightail it back to the mainland after the Navy lost. Marines didn’t like running away, even for the best of reasons. There had already been a lot of brawls between angry leathernecks and sailors. Some of the sailors hadn’t even been part of the failed attack on Hawaii. The Marines weren’t inclined to be fussy.

And so Dillon sat in the Camp Elliott NCOs’ club, soaking up a beer and pondering the unfairness of the world-a melancholy pursuit usually reserved for privates and other lower forms of life. It wasn’t so much that he minded drinking with his own kind. He didn’t. But the decor left a good deal to be desired. And the chances of picking up a barmaid were pretty damn slim-there were no barmaids, only Filipino mess stewards to take away empties and sometimes help the bartender by bringing out reinforcements.

When Dutch Wenzel walked into the club, Les waved to him. Wenzel ambled over. He and Dillon were two of a kind: big, fair-haired men with bronze suntans that said they spent a lot of time in the open. Wenzel was a few years younger: too young to have got into the First World War. But he’d served in Central America and in China and on several warships, just like Les.

“Bourbon over ice,” he called to the barkeep, who waved back to show he’d heard. Wenzel nodded to Dillon. “Ain’t this a lovely snafu?”

“What? You mean you’d rather be drinking in Honolulu?” Les said.

“Bet your ass,” Wenzel replied. “And they wouldn’t try and put Hotel Street off limits, either. We’d riot if they did, and so would the Navy. Army, too,” he added after a moment-to a Marine, soldiers were hardly worth noticing.

“We coulda done it,” Dillon said, draining his beer and holding up the glass to show he wanted another one. “If they’d landed us, we could’ve kicked the Japs’ scrawny little ass.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Wenzel said. He paused while the bartender brought his drink and a new beer for Dillon.

“No doubt about it. They beat the Army, yeah, but they wouldn’t’ve had a chance with us. Not a chance.” He sounded as sure as if he were talking about the sunrise. That the Japanese had beaten the Army might almost have been proof they couldn’t beat the Marines.

“Wonder how long it’ll be before we have another go at the slant-eyed sons of bitches,” Les said moodily, and then answered his own question: “We’re gonna have to build more carriers first. God only knows how long that’ll take.”

“I hope they started ’em before we got whipped out there,” his friend said. “Hell, I hope they started before the bombs stopped falling on Pearl Harbor.”

Dillon nodded. “I wish they would’ve started a long time before that. Then we wouldn’t’ve had to worry about any of this in the first place.”

“Yeah, and then you wake up.” Wenzel knocked back the rest of his drink. He looked over to the man behind the bar and nodded. The barkeep started making him another one. He went on, “Half the guys who joined the Corps in the Thirties did it because they were out of work-no better reason than that.”

“Most of ’em turned out to make pretty fair Marines anyway,” Dillon said. He’d signed up in a wartime burst of patriotism. He didn’t ask why Dutch had. If Wenzel wanted to say, he would, but you didn’t ask. The Marines weren’t the French Foreign Legion, but they came closer than any other U.S. outfit.