End of the Beginning

XI

“YOU SURE YOU OUGHT TO GO TO WORK?” OSCAR VAN DER KIRK ASKED SUSIE.

“These Japs in town nowadays, they’ve got blood in their eye.”

“I’ll be okay.” Susie was wearing the frumpiest dress she owned, but nothing on God’s green earth would make her look like Margaret Dumont. She went on, “They’re not going to shoot me any which way,” and batted those cat-blue eyes at him.

There were times when he didn’t know whether to laugh or to pop her one. He ended up laughing now, because she would have hit back or thrown things if he did try to pop her. “You’ve got to worry about the other, too,” he said stubbornly. “Some of the things I’ve heard about those bastards-”

Susie made an impatient gesture. “We’ve heard that stuff about the Japs ever since they got here.”

“Some of it’s true, too,” Oscar said.

“Some of it, yeah, but not all of it. Most of the time, they haven’t been too bad,” Susie said. As far as Oscar was concerned, that was damning with faint praise, but Susie would do whatever she felt like doing. If the world didn’t like it, that was the world’s tough luck. As if to prove as much, she picked up her handbag, kissed him good-bye-a long, slow, delicious kiss, as if to give him something to look forward to when she got back that evening-and went out the door.

“Jesus,” Oscar said hoarsely, listening to her footsteps receding down the hall. He shook his head, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. It didn’t want to. Susie was a hell of a piece of work-a hell of a piece, period-no two ways about it.

Still shaking his head, he gathered up his sailboard and carried the contraption down to Waikiki Beach. To his relief, the Japs hadn’t cordoned it off with barbed wire. But they did have machine-gun nests and mortar positions camouflaged with golden sand every fifty yards or so along the beach, and more of those half-soldier, half-sailor types trotting here and there.

Fortunately, one of their noncoms or ratings or whatever the hell he was had seen Oscar before. Oscar bowed to him-not easy when he had the big, clunky surf board under one arm and the mast and rigging and sail in his other hand, but he managed. The Jap even deigned to bow back, though not so deeply. More to the point, the tough-looking little man waved him on toward the Pacific.

“Thanks,” Oscar said, and then, “Arigato.” He knew only a handful of Japanese words, but he’d learned that one long before the war started. It came in handy all kinds of places. And it sure came in handy now. The Jap’s face lit up; his grin exposed several gold teeth. He bowed again, this time as equal to equal, and shouted to his men. Oscar couldn’t understand any of it, but by the way they smiled and nodded it must have been good. How to win friends and influence people, he thought.

The Japanese had chased the fishermen off the beach, but they let Oscar paddle out to sea. They were used to him, and didn’t think he was heading out to a submarine or anything like that. Only he knew about the submarine he’d met. He hadn’t even told Susie, though he had asked the sub’s skipper to get word to her family on the mainland that she was all right.

He ran up his mast, rigged the sail, and scooted out to sea on the breeze from off the hills in back of Honolulu. Even as the land receded, he could still hear the rumble of artillery off in the distance. It made him think about things in a way he hadn’t for quite a while. If his countrymen took over again, could he patent the sailboard? If he could, there was probably money in it. He’d done without much money for a long time. Having some might be nice.

He’d got out far enough to think about dropping his hooks into the Pacific when he spotted something floating on the water. It was too small to be a boat, and it wasn’t going anywhere, just bobbing on the swells. Curious, he swung the sailboard towards it.

He’d just realized it was a rubber raft when a head popped up out of it. “Hey, mac, what the hell you call that thing you’re on?” the head’s possessor asked in purest Brooklynese.

“A sailboard,” Oscar answered automatically. He had questions of his own: “Who are you? Are you okay? How’d you get here? Want me to help you get to land?”

“A sailboard? Ain’t that somethin’? What’ll they think of next?” The guy in the raft jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Name’s Nick Tversky. Yeah, I’m jake-not a fuckin’ scratch on me. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good, ya know? Goddamn Nip flak tore hell outta my engine, but the shit all missed me. Can you get me ashore without letting everybody from Tojo on down in on where I’m at?”

“Uh…” Oscar paused. That would have been easy before the Americans came to Hawaiian waters. The Japs hadn’t been so antsy then. They sure as hell were now. “Don’t know for sure if I can sneak you in.”

“Okay. Don’t get your ass in an uproar about it.” The downed pilot sounded a lot more cheerful than Oscar would have in his little rubber boat. He explained why: “They got PBYs doin’ search and rescue. Figure I got a better chance of getting picked up than I do sneakin’ past the fuckin’ slanteyes. If I have to try it, I guess I can paddle that far.”

“Okay,” said Oscar, who was dubious. “You want me to give you a line and some hooks? You might catch something.” He’d been about to start fishing himself before he spotted the life raft.

“That’s white of you, buddy, but honest to God, I think I’ll be fine,” Nick Tversky said. He hadn’t been out here long. He wasn’t badly sunburned, and he hardly needed a shave. Plainly, he wasn’t too thirsty, either.

Oscar didn’t know what to do or what to tell him. Meeting a downed pilot was something he’d thought about now and again. Meeting a foulmouthed downed pilot who didn’t want to be rescued? That was a different story. “Awful good to see the USA coming back here,” he tried, adding, “About time.”

“Hey, I ain’t the brass. I can’t do nothin’ about that,” Nick Tversky said. “But speakin’ of brass, I figure we didn’t try it for a while after we screwed the pooch the first time on account of we wanted to make sure we had the brass knucks on.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Oscar said. “We sure missed you, though.”

“What can you do? Sometimes you just gotta stand the gaff.” Tversky obviously had no idea what Oahu had been through since December 7, 1941. On the other hand, Oscar had no idea what getting shot down in a fighter plane was like. Did the two balance out? He couldn’t have said, not like the scales of justice, but they probably belonged somewhere in the same ballpark.

“Good luck to you,” Oscar said uncertainly, afraid he was leaving Tversky to a fate much worse than the pilot imagined.

But then Tversky let out a whoop and pointed off to the east. “There’s my goddamn taxi, if I can flag it down!” Oscar looked that way. A speck in the sky swelled rapidly. It was a flying boat, all right. Was it an American flying boat? The Japs had ’em, too. Nick Tversky seemed in no doubt. He waved like a man possessed. He pulled out what looked like a pistol and fired it straight up. It turned out to be a flare gun. The flare was much less impressive than it would have been at night: a small red ball of fire. But either it or the pilot’s gesticulating-he damn near capsized the raft-did the trick. The flying boat swung its blunt nose toward him. He whooped again, louder and more ferocious than an Indian in a two-reeler Western.

The PBY, if that was what it was, splashed down onto the Pacific and rumbled toward him. Somebody leaned out of a hatch-Oscar was hazy on the right name-and yelled, “What’s this? Old home week?”

“He’s my buddy,” Tversky yelled back, and then, more quietly, “What the hell you say your name was?”

“Oscar,” Oscar answered.

“Oscar here’s good luck,” the pilot went on. “He shows up, and then you show up.”

“What the hell kind of a name for a Hawaiian is Oscar?” said the guy on the PBY.

“I’m from California,” Oscar said dryly. “I’ve lived here eight years or so.”

“Fuck me,” the flier said. They took Tversky aboard the flying boat. The engines roared back to life. The big, clumsy-looking airplane lumbered over the Pacific, graceless as a goose running across the surface of a lake to take off. When it finally got airborne, it didn’t seem so splendidly suited to the new medium as a goose. But it flew well enough. It kept on going in the direction it had been heading when its crew spotted the downed flier.

That left Oscar alone on the water with an empty rubber raft. “Score one for our side,” he said. He’d first set eyes on Tversky less than half an hour earlier. Now the pilot was gone. In a day or so if not in mere hours, he’d be back in the war. As for Oscar…I’ve got fish to catch, he thought, and sailed out a little farther before dropping his lines into the sea.

He’d hoped running into Tversky would bring him good luck, but it didn’t. His catch was average or slightly below. But you took what you could get. Maybe not for too much longer. Maybe things will get back to the way they used to be. He could hope, anyway.

He brought the sailboard back to Waikiki Beach with automatic skill he could hardly have imagined when he first thought up the gadget. As with anything else, practice made pretty darn good. Charlie Kaapu had been every bit as smooth as he was. What the devil had happened to Charlie? Oscar scowled as he took the sailboard over the breakers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything he could fix. He’d put his own neck on the line trying. That consoled him… not very much.

Some of the Japs on the beach actually applauded when he came ashore. He would have liked that better if he hadn’t been thinking about Charlie. He would have liked it better if he hadn’t had to cough up a couple of fat mackerel to keep their goodwill, too. Cost of doing business, he thought. That did console him-some, anyway.

When he got back to the apartment, he found Susie there. By all the signs, she’d been there quite a while. She was falling-down drunk; the place reeked of the horrible fruity stuff they called gin these days. She’d never done anything like that in all the time he’d known her. “What happened?” he blurted.

She looked up from the beat-up old sofa. Her eyes didn’t want to track him. “Oscar!” she said. “Thank God!” After a moist hiccup, she added, “It could’ve been me.”

“What could have?” he asked. “What happened, babe?” He wished he had some coffee in the place, but it was harder than hell to come by these days. He’d lost the habit.

“I was going to work. To work,” Susie repeated, maybe forgetting she’d just said that. “And these Japsh-Japs-at one of the barricades.” She had to try three times before she got the word right.

“These Japs, they had a girl down in the middle of the street, and they… They all…” She didn’t go on. Tears started running down her face. “It could have been me!”

“Hey,” Oscar said softly. “Hey.” He might have been gentling a spooked horse. I told you so, came to the tip of his tongue and died there, which was probably lucky for him. He’d heard that these sailor-soldiers did things like that, which was why he hadn’t been thrilled when Susie headed for work in the morning. He went over and cautiously put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but only a little. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he told her. She’d earned the right to get smashed, sure as the devil.

“It could have been me,” she said one more time. Then she clung to him and cried her heart out. He hadn’t seen many tears from her before. “What am I gonna do?” she asked after the storm passed.

“I think you better stay in here, not let those bastards spot you,” Oscar answered.

“I’ll go nuts,” she said. “I’ll lose my tan.” Snockered as she was, that seemed to matter a lot to her. But then she shuddered, remembering what she’d seen. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay,” Oscar said. “For now, just settle down. Get some sleep if you can. You’ll feel it when you wake up, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not drunk!” she said irately.

“Sure, babe. Sure.” Oscar lied without hesitation. The things you do for love, he thought with a wry smile. Then he stopped cold; as usual, the word brought him up short. But he nodded to himself. Whether the word made him nervous or not, it talked about something real. He gave Susie a kiss.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Just because,” he said. “Just because.”

GUARDS HUSTLED AMERICAN POWS SOUTH, away from the American soldiers who’d landed to bring Oahu back under the Stars and Stripes. Like most-probably all-of his buddies, Fletch Armitage would sooner have run toward the Americans than away from them, shooting squads or no shooting squads. The guards might have been bastards, but they weren’t stupid bastards. They could figure that out for themselves. The minute anybody got the slightest bit out of line, they opened fire. Dead prisoners marked the road back toward Honolulu.

Men slipped away anyhow, especially at night. Fletch got no sleep. Every few minutes, a rifle or a light machine gun would bark. Screams from the wounded punctuated the time between bursts of gunfire. Sometimes the Japs would let wounded men howl. Other times, they would go out and finish them off with rifle butts or bayonets. Fletch couldn’t decide which noises were more horrible.

But the noises weren’t what made him sit tight. A cold calculation of the odds was. Could he get away from the guards? Possible, but not likely. Once he did, could he sneak through the Japanese lines without getting murdered by ordinary enemy soldiers? Also possible, but even less likely. Put the two together, and he figured his chances were much less than drawing the king of spades to fill out a royal flush.

When the sun came up, he saw how many Americans had died trying to get away, and how many hadn’t died-yet. Had he had anything in his stomach, he might have thrown it up. The Japs hadn’t bothered feeding the POWs, though. It didn’t look as if they were going to start now, either.

Curses and kicks got the prisoners on their feet. The guards bayoneted one man who had trouble. After that, the stronger Americans helped their weaker buddies up. “Isogi!” the guards shouted. How they expected the POWs to hurry was beyond Fletch, but they did.

“Bastards,” somebody said. Fletch nodded. The Japs were also bastards who’d eaten; they’d brought rice along for themselves.

Before long, clouds drifted over the marching-actually, shambling-men. It started to rain. In the blink of an eye, everybody threw his head back and opened his mouth as wide as it would go. Men fell down because they couldn’t see where they were going. Nobody gave a damn. Fletch got a couple of swallows before the sun came out again.

By the afternoon of the second day, they reached the outskirts of Honolulu. Fewer men had tried to run off than had the day before. They were farther from the front, and they had the horrible examples of the day before still fresh in their memories. Honolulu looked fortified to a fare-thee-well. The Americans hadn’t fought in the city. They’d surrendered before drawing a couple of hundred thousand defenseless civilians into the battle. By all the signs, the Japs cared no more about civilians than they did about POWs. Fletch didn’t know what would make them surrender. He couldn’t think of anything that seemed likely to.

The POWs did get fed, after a fashion. They were marched past a pot of rice. Each man got a spoonful, shoved straight into his mouth by a cook who looked as if he hated them all. Everybody got the same spoon. Fletch didn’t care. By then, he would have eaten rice off a cowflop. He would have thought about eating the cowflop, too.

Hardly any locals were on the street. The ones who were seemed to cling to the sides of buildings and to do their best not to make themselves conspicuous in any way. They watched the prisoners with frightened eyes.

Through Honolulu. Through Waikiki. Fletch had a pretty good notion of where they were going by then.

When he turned out to be right, he started to laugh. The POW next to him must have thought he was nuts, and might not have been so far wrong. “What’s so goddamn funny?” the man demanded.

“This is where I came in,” Fletch answered.

Back to Kapiolani Park and the POW camp there. Back through the barbed-wire gates that had let him out when the Japs decided they’d sooner get work from their prisoners than leave them sit around idle and starving. As long as they were going to starve us, they could use us while we wasted away. Oh, yeah. That’s what you call efficiency.

Fletch wondered why the Japanese were bringing prisoners back here now. To keep them from running off to the Americans? That was bound to be one reason. To keep the Americans from shooting them up by mistake? In spite of his misery, he laughed again. The next sign the Japs showed of worrying about what happened to POWs would be the first. To gather a lot of prisoners together in one place so they could be massacred more easily? He looked at the machine guns in the towers out beyond the barbed wire. That seemed alarmingly likely.

And what could he do about it? Not one single, solitary thing, not that he could see. The gate shut behind his gang of POWs.

He looked around. The camp wasn’t so insanely crowded as it had been the last time he was here. That would have encouraged him if he hadn’t feared most of the missing men were dead.

His old tent had been right about… here. It was gone. Somebody else had the spot now, and had run up a lean-to that looked as if it would stop leaning and start collapsing any minute now. The barracks still stood, but he didn’t want anything to do with them. Any place where POWs congregated in large numbers was liable to be a place where the Japs could get rid of them in large numbers.

He didn’t mind sleeping on the ground. Why should he? He’d done enough of it lately. There was bound to be canvas to scrounge, and sticks as well. Before long, he could rig some kind of shelter to keep off the rain. Till then, he wouldn’t worry about it, not in this weather. Getting wet mattered much less than it would have on the mainland. He did head for the one water fountain in the park. The march down had left him dry as a bone.

Because the POW camp wasn’t so crowded, the line at the fountain was shorter than it had been in days gone by. Even so, while he waited another gang of POWs came in. He finally got to the water, and drank and drank and drank.

“Been through the Sahara, buddy?” asked the guy behind him.

“Feels like it.” Fletch splashed some water on his face, too. It felt wonderful. At last, reluctantly, he gave up his place.

Still more prisoners came into the camp. Fletch remembered what some crazy Roman Emperor had said, a couple of thousand years earlier. It went something like, I wish all humanity had a single neck, so I could cut off the head at one blow. He wished that hadn’t come back to him from whatever history class he’d heard it in. It described what the Japs looked to be doing here much too well.

THE TROUBLE WITH MORTARS was, you could hardly hear the bombs coming in before they burst. Les Dillon caught a faint hiss in the air and threw himself flat just in time. The fragments from the mortar round snarled past above him. He allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. The Japs had a particularly nasty little weapon the Americans called a knee mortar. It wasn’t fired off anyone’s knee, but one man could serve it, and every other Jap infantryman seemed to carry one. One of those bombs had almost punched his ticket.

Schofield Barracks lay not far ahead. Bombers had largely leveled the barracks halls. The Japanese didn’t seem to care. They were as ready to defend rubble to the death as they would have been to save Hirohito’s crown jewels.

A machine gun fired several quick bursts from the direction of the barracks-a reminder to Les to keep his head down, as if he needed one. The Japs were even tougher than he’d figured they would be. Logically, they didn’t have a prayer. They had no air cover left. They had next to no armor, and what they did have wasn’t good enough. If he were their CO, he would have dickered a surrender on the best terms he could get.

They didn’t think that way. They didn’t surrender, period. The only Japs who’d been captured were men either knocked cold or too badly hurt to get away or to kill themselves. They also took no prisoners.

God help you if you tried to surrender to them. Sometimes their wild counterattacks would overrun U.S. forward positions. Les had helped recapture one or two of those. The American corpses he’d seen made him hate the enemy instead of just being professionally interested in getting rid of him, the way he had been with the Germans in 1918. After that, he wouldn’t have let any Japs give up even if they’d tried.

One of the green young Marines in his platoon, an open-faced Oklahoma kid named Randy Casteel, hunkered down near him and asked, “Sarge, how come the Japs do shit like that? Don’t they know it just makes us want to fight ’em even harder?” His drawl only made him sound more horrified and more bewildered than he would have without it.

Les Dillon was bewildered, too, and he’d seen a lot more nasty things over a lot more years than Private Casteel had. “Damned if I can tell you,” he answered. “Maybe they think they’re scaring us when they do that kind of stuff to a body.”

“They got another think comin’!” Casteel said hotly.

“Yeah, I know.” Les also knew the Japs hadn’t done everything to bodies. Some of those poor men-most of them, probably-were alive when the enemy got to work on them. He could only hope they’d died pretty soon. “We just have to keep pushin’ and keep poundin’. They won’t do anything like that once they’re all dead.”

“Sooner the better,” Casteel said.

“Oh, hell, yes.” Les felt fatherly-almost grandfatherly-as he went on, “But you got to remember not to do anything dumb, though. Killing Japs is the name of the game. Don’t let them kill you. You do something stupid, they’ll make you pay for it before you can even blink. Take bayonets.”

Randy Casteel nodded eagerly. “Oh, yeah, Sarge. I know about that.”

“Make sure you remember, dammit. The Nips have more evil tricks than you can shake a stick at,” Les said. Normal bayonet drill meant keeping the cutting edge toward the ground. But the Japanese bayonet had a hooked hand guard. The Japs used it to grab on to a U.S. bayonet. A twist, and the Marine’s rifle went flying. “Keep the left side of the blade toward the deck and you’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, Sarge,” Casteel repeated. Several men had died before somebody was sharp enough to figure out a counter. To look at your average Japanese soldier, you wouldn’t think he was big enough or strong enough to win a bayonet fight-but he was. Oh, brother, was he.

“Other thing to remember is, don’t use the bayonet till it’s your last choice,” Les added. “Blow the little fucker’s head off instead. Let’s see him get sneaky trying to dodge a bullet.”

In training, everybody fussed about the bayonet. In the field, it made a tolerable can opener or barbed-wire cutter. It wasn’t a great combat knife; like almost all Marines, Les preferred the Kabar on his belt.

“Over here! C’mon! This way!” The call from ahead came in perfect English. Randy Casteel glanced at Les.

The platoon sergeant shook his head. “Sit tight,” he said. “Another goddamn decoy.” Some of the enemy soldiers knew the language, and some of the locals still worked with them and for them. The locals had grown up speaking English, so of course they had no telltale accent to give them away. If you paid attention to shouts from people you didn’t know, you’d charge right into an ambush.

Les stuck his head up-just for an instant, and not in a place from which he’d looked before. Somebody in khaki was moving out there. He snapped off a shot and ducked down again. Not even the scream that followed made him take another look. The Japs should have gone in for amateur theatricals. Look at the soldier you thought you’d just killed and it was even money he’d be waiting to plant one right between your eyes.

The sun dropped down toward the Waianae Range. Les muttered under his breath. “More goddamn infiltrators after dark, sure as shit.”

“Yeah, Sarge.” Randy Casteel nodded. In the daytime, American firepower and airplanes dominated. At night, it was the Japs’ turn. They’d sneak into the American lines by ones and twos. They’d roll grenades into foxholes or jump in with a knife. The rule now was two men in a hole, one of them awake all the time. It made war even more exhausting than it would have been otherwise, but it saved lives.

At least one American had been shot by somebody on his own side for not coming out with the password fast enough to suit a trigger-happy Marine. Les felt sorry that had happened, but not very. Anybody dumb enough to move around at night when he didn’t have to and dumb enough to draw a blank on the password was probably dumb enough to get himself killed some other way if he hadn’t found that one.

“You know the word for tonight?” Les asked Casteel.

“Lizard lips,” the kid answered. Les nodded. Most of the passwords had l’s and r’s in them: those were the English sounds that gave the Japs trouble.

Darkness fell fast here. Twilight didn’t linger the way it did in more northerly climes. And when it was dark, it was dark. The electricity was out. There was no background glow, the way there would have been if lights shone not far away. A few fires burned, but with the rice paddies wet there weren’t many of those, either.

“You gonna sack out on me if I give you first watch?” Les asked. “Tell me straight. If you’re beat, sleep now, and I’ll get you up at midnight. I can last, and I don’t want both of us screwed because you couldn’t.”

“If you don’t mind, Sarge, I better sleep now. I’m pretty beat,” Casteel said.

“Okay. Go ahead,” Les told him. The kid curled up, twisted a couple of times like a dog making a nest, and was dead to the world inside of two minutes. Les knew unconsciousness would sap him just as fast and just as hard when his turn came. Bare ground? Damp ground? Rain? He’d sleep on a bed of nails like an Indian fakir.

For now, though, he had to stay awake. He stuck his head up to look out of the hole. That was all he did; anyone walking around at night was presumed to be a Jap. He peered south, his rifle close by him. Most of the fires down around Schofield Barracks seemed to be out. He muttered something foul. He might have spotted Japs sneaking forward against a background of flame. Now he’d have to do it the hard way.

He wished for the moon. It wasn’t a childish wish for something he couldn’t possibly get. He just wished it were in the sky. But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t come up till Randy Casteel went on watch. He shrugged. Odds were the kid needed more help than he did. So he told himself, anyway.

A few strands of barbed wire looped in front of the American position. Les didn’t think they would slow the Japs down. But the Marines who’d set out the wire had also hung K-ration cans partly filled with pebbles from it. With luck, a noise from those would give some warning.

Off to his left, a rifle cracked-an Arisaka. A burst from an American machine gun answered it. Les wondered if a night firefight would break out. That would be the last thing anybody needed. But the firing died away. As far as Les could tell, all it had done was scare everybody who was awake. Casteel’s breathing never even changed.

Les longed for a cigarette. That would have to wait till daylight. The flash of a match and the glow of a coal just asked a sniper to draw a bead on you. He longed for a cigarette, but he wasn’t dying for one.

The stars wheeled across the sky. Nothing happened, but something always could. Waiting for it, wondering when it would come and how bad it would be, wore away your stomach lining.

Out ahead, something rattled. Les’ rifle was against his shoulder before he knew how it had got there. The noise might not have come from a Jap. The other night, somebody’d used up a stray cat’s nine lives all at once. But you never could tell.

Was that a moving shape, there on this side of the wire? It might have been too small and low for a man, but it might not have, too. The Japs could crawl on their bellies as well as snakes. Finger tight on the trigger, Les hissed out a challenge: “Password!”

No answer. No movement. Silence. He wondered if his nerves were getting the best of him. He called the challenge again. Still nothing. But the shape of the shadows ahead looked different from the way it had before he heard that rattle. It might have been his imagination. He didn’t think so. He thought it was a Jap, maybe two. The rifle bucked against his shoulder.

Japs had fine discipline-better discipline, probably, than the Marines. But holding still and not making a sound despite a wound from a high-powered.30-caliber round proved beyond this one. He groaned. Les fired again. The Jap screamed, the cry slowly subsiding into an agonized gurgle.

But sure as hell, more than one enemy soldier lurked out there in the darkness. With a bloodcurdling shriek, the Jap Les hadn’t hit dashed at him. He fired once more-and missed. Night shooting was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Still shrieking, the Jap jumped down into the foxhole with him.

If Les hadn’t got his M-1 up in a hurry, the Jap would have gutted him like a tuna. The knife in the enemy soldier’s hand rebounded from the stock. Les had told Randy Casteel about the virtues of firing as opposed to the bayonet. He had no time to aim and shoot. He didn’t even have time or room for a bayonet thrust. He used a buttstroke instead, and felt the big end of his piece slam the side of the Jap’s head.

He thought-he hoped-the blow would fracture the enemy’s skull. But either the Jap had a devil of a hard head or Les hadn’t hit so hard as he thought he had. The Jap kept fighting, if a little dazedly. He slashed out with his knife. Les felt his tunic tear and the hot pain of a blade cutting his arm. He hissed a curse.

Then the Jap grunted, more in surprise than anything else, and went limp. The hot-iron smell of blood filled the foxhole, as well as an earthier stink-the soldier’s bowels had let go. He was dead as shoe leather before he finished crumpling.

“Hell of a way to wake somebody up,” Randy Casteel said peevishly.

“Thanks, kid,” Les panted. “Got a wound dressing handy? Can you stick it on my arm? He nicked me a little.” He worked his hand. The fingers all opened and closed and gripped the way they were supposed to. He nodded to himself. “Doesn’t seem too bad.”

“Lemme see.” Casteel bent to get a close look in the darkness. “Yeah, I can patch you up. You just got a star to go with your Purple Heart.” He fumbled in his belt pouch for the dressing.

“All things considered, I’d rather have a blowjob,” Les said, which jerked a startled laugh from the other Marine.

“What the fuck’s going on?” somebody called from not far away. If he didn’t like the answer, a grenade would follow the question.

“That you, Dutch?” Les said. “Two Japs, looks like. I scragged one. Other one tried to keep us company. He cut me a little, but Casteel gave him a Kabar where it did the most good.”

Somebody else out there in the darkness asked a low-voiced question. Dutch Wenzel’s reply was loud enough to let Les hear it: “Oh, hell, yes, sir, that’s him. Ain’t a Jap in the world talks English like that.”

“I dusted some sulfa powder on the wound, too, Sarge,” Randy Casteel said.

“Good. That’s good. You did everything just right,” Dillon answered. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Uh, half past ten.”

“Think you can sleep another hour and a half? I’ll go back on watch. I won’t be able to get any shuteye for a while anyway-not till the arm quiets down a little.” He said nothing about the pounding of his heart, which also needed to ease. Nothing like damn near getting killed to keep you up at night.

Casteel said, “I’ll give it a try.” He needed almost ten minutes to start snoring this time. Les envied him his youth and resilience. I’m supposed to be the smart one, he thought. So how come I’m the one who got cut?

THE JAPANESE OFFICER ON TOP OF JANE ARMITAGE squeezed her breasts one last time, grunted, and came. She lay there unmoving, as she had while he pumped away inside her. He didn’t care, damn him. He patted her head, as if she were a dog that had done a clever trick. Then he dressed and walked out of the room.

Dully, she waited for the next violation. She knew she ought to douche, but what was the point? With so many Japs every day, douching seemed a pitiful stick in the wind against pregnancy and disease.

How long did the average comfort woman last? How long before the sheer physical endurance you needed to take on man after man after man-none of whom gave a damn about you except as one convenient hole or another-combined with mind-numbing self-loathing to make you decide you couldn’t stand to go on for one more cock, let alone one more day? Jane was stubborn. The end hadn’t come for her, because she still wanted to see the Japs dead more than she wanted to die herself. But new girls had replaced several from the original contingent by now, and the ones who’d left hadn’t gone on rest cures. They’d died, died by their own hands.

Jane flinched when the door opened. But it wasn’t another horny Jap wanting a few minutes of fun before he went back to killing American soldiers. It was one of the Chinese women who ran the soldiers’ brothel for the occupiers. She fluttered her fingers, a gesture that meant Jane had taken on her last man for the day.

Wearily, she nodded. The Chinese woman closed the door and went on to the next room. Occupiers. The word echoed in Jane’s head. In Shakespeare’s day, she remembered from a lit course at Ohio State, to occupy a woman meant to screw her. Jane had never thought to see the connection so vividly illustrated in the twentieth century.

Not far away, Japanese field guns boomed, shooting at the Americans pushing down from the north. She wished the guns would blow up in the Japs’ faces. She hadn’t really understood the futility of wishing till she got here.

Before long, American shells screamed in. Counterbattery fire, they called it. That was what she got for being an artilleryman’s wife. Ex-wife. Almost ex-wife. She shook her head in sour disbelief. She’d thought Fletch wasn’t the lover she deserved. Maybe he wasn’t. But a million years of Fletch would have been paradise next to what she’d gone through the past few weeks.

A white woman poked her head into the room. Beulah stayed-was stuck in-the room next door.

“Come on,” she said. “We might as well get something to eat.”

“Okay.” Jane made herself climb to her feet. More shells burst within a few hundred yards of the apartment building-turned-brothel. “I wish a couple of those would land on this place and blow it straight to hell.” Even though she knew wishing was useless, she couldn’t stop. What else did she have left?

Beulah only shrugged. She was broad-shouldered and stolid and, Jane suspected, not very bright. If anything, that helped her here; not thinking was an asset. “Gotta keep going,” she said. “What else can we do?”

Hang ourselves. But Jane didn’t say it. She’d been taught as a girl that saying something made you more likely to do it. She wasn’t sure she believed that any more, not after a couple of psychology classes, but any English major would have said words had power. If they didn’t, why pay attention to them in the first place?

The comfort women gathered together in what had been a storeroom and now, with the addition of chairs and tables no doubt stolen from people’s homes, did duty for a dining room. Some of the women didn’t want to have much to do with anybody. Jane was one of those. Others talked about what they’d done and what their Japs had done; they might have been factory workers comparing the behavior of machines. If they were going to talk, they didn’t have much else to talk about.

Supper was rice and vegetables-more than Jane would have got if they hadn’t kidnapped her. The Japs might not have wanted to fuck her if she looked like a starving woman. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t have done this for all the gold in Fort Knox. She wouldn’t even have done it for a T-bone smothered in mushrooms and onions.

Somebody said, “What’ll the Japs do if it looks like they’re gonna get kicked out of Wahiawa?” There was something new to talk about after all.

“Please, God,” somebody else said, “and soon!” A woman sitting near Jane crossed herself. That anyone could still believe in God impressed her-and horrified her, too. What did it take to get you to see nobody was on the other end of that telephone?

“Maybe they’ll let us go,” Beulah said.

“Not the Japs!” Jane said. “They never do anything for anybody. They do things to people instead.”

“So what’ll they do to us?” Beulah asked. “What can they do that they haven’t already done?”

Jane winced. That question made altogether too much sense. After weeks of having to lie down for endless men she hated, what was left in the way of degradation? But someone had an answer: “They’re liable to kill us all. That way, we won’t be able to tell anybody what they made us do.”

No one spoke for a little while. The unwilling comfort women weighed the odds. Would the Japanese murder them in cold blood? It didn’t strike Jane as the least bit unlikely. Dead women told no tales. She said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“How?” three women asked at the same time. The windows were barred. The doors were guarded. The Chinese women who ran the brothel for the Japs-their boss was a snake named Annabelle Chung-kept their eyes open for trouble all the time. Even talking about escaping was dangerous. Some of the miserable women in this room informed. No one knew who, but the fact seemed inarguable. What could they get that would make squealing on their fellow sufferers worthwhile? Not more food, the usual currency of betrayal in the rest of Wahiawa. Fewer horny Japs? After a while, what difference did that make? But Jane couldn’t see any other reason to snitch except general meanness. Of course, that wasn’t impossible, either.

No matter how many women asked the question, nobody answered it. An answer did occur to Jane: give the guards some of what she had to give the other Japanese soldiers. Before she landed here, sucking a stranger’s cock to get something she wanted would no more have occurred to her than killing herself.

She probably would sooner have killed herself. She remembered that, as if from very far away. Now… She’d had to get down on her knees so often for nothing at all, why not do it once more if she really needed to? And it wasn’t as if suicide were a stranger to her thoughts nowadays.

She looked around at the other comfort women. Were they thinking along with her? How could they not be? A few weeks of this had coarsened the women it didn’t kill. Some of them hadn’t even bothered to put on clothes before they came to supper. There had been evenings when Jane didn’t bother, either, though she’d thrown on a muumuu now. Would they all be thinking, Well, why not? What’s one more after so many?

And if by some accident they got out of this, what would their lives be like? Jane tried to imagine wanting a man to touch her. The picture refused to form. And she tried to imagine a decent man wanting to touch her if he knew what the Japs had made her do. That picture wouldn’t take shape, either. She shook her head. What was left for her? Nothing she could see.

Sometimes a woman broke down and sobbed here. Sometimes crying jags ran through them all, contagious as chicken pox. Not tonight, though. Maybe they were all trying to figure the odds.

Artillery and small-arms fire through the night didn’t keep Jane from sleeping like a stone. One more thing nobody’d told her: screwing all day was hard physical labor. And it wore out the spirit much worse than the body.

No rooster announced the dawn. As far as Jane knew, all the roosters in Wahiawa except one saved for stud were long since chicken stew. Since coming here, she’d wondered once or twice if he got sick of fucking strangers all day every day. She figured the odds were against it. After all, he was a goddamn male.

Usually, the breakfast gong took the rooster’s place. The women woke for that. If they didn’t get breakfast, they couldn’t eat till suppertime. Today, though, just as the eastern sky was beginning to go pink, four 105mm shells slammed into the brothel.

That got Jane out of bed-literally. She woke up on the floor, with one of the walls tilted sideways and with chunks of plaster falling on her head from the ceiling. Somebody was screaming, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Somebody else was just screaming, the agonized, unthinking cries of the badly wounded.

Jane scrambled to her feet. She cut one of them on broken glass, but she hardly cared. She let the muumuu fall over her head, then rushed out the door. It had been locked from the outside, but the blasts blew it open.

Beulah’s door had come open all by itself, too. Jane looked into the room. “Let’s get out of here!” she shouted. “We’ll never have a better chance!”

“I guess not,” Beulah said-she must have been in another line when they were handing out brains. All she had on was a pair of panties. She didn’t stop for anything else. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so dumb.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Annabelle Chung stood in the corridor, hands on her hips. Jane wasted no time on conversation. She hauled off and belted her oppressor in the chops. The Chinese woman shrieked and staggered, but tried to fight back. Jane gave her a pretty fair one-two. Maybe she’d been listening after all when Fletch went on and on about Joe Louis and Hank Armstrong.

The Chinese woman went down on hands and knees. When she started to get up, Beulah kicked her in the ribs. That wasn’t in the Marquis of Queens-berry rules, but it sure as hell worked. Annabelle Chung stayed down. “Way to go!” Jane shouted.

The side of the building had a hole in it you could drive a bus through. Comfort women streamed out. Some wore muumuus like Jane; one or two were buck naked. Several of them were limping or bleeding. None of that mattered. Getting out did.

Out in the open. Two Japs had stood nearby. Only the bottom part of one of them was left. The other had had his head almost blown off. Jane looked longingly at the Arisakas by the dead men. She knew how to use a bolt-action rifle. But lots of Japs still occupied Wahiawa. Even with a rifle, she couldn’t kill them all. Oh, but I want to! she thought. They could kill her, though, and they would if they saw her with an Arisaka in her hands. She hated to leave the rifles there, but she did.

“Let’s get away!” she said. Her partners in misery didn’t need the advice. They were already scattering as fast as they could. Some of them would have friends and families to go back to. Would they still be friends, would the families stay loving, when they found out what the women here had had to do? Maybe. Some of them might, anyhow. The rest? Well, they couldn’t be worse than the Japs.

Jane had nothing and nobody here. Fletch was a POW if he hadn’t died since she last saw him. For all practical purposes, he was an ex-husband, anyway. Would I take him back now? Jane laughed as she ran. That wasn’t the question, was it? Would he take me back now? She had no idea. Everything she’d done, she’d been forced to do. Everybody had to know that. Would anyone care, or would she stay soiled in the eyes of the world for the rest of her life?

She’d worry about that later. All she wanted to do now was get away from the brothel, get away from the Japs, and let the world scorn her if it would.

More artillery shells screamed in. Jane threw herself flat before they burst. Fletch had talked about that, too, and she’d seen it worked when the Japs came down from the north. Now her own country was doing its best to kill her. She forgave it. As she lay there in the gutter with fragments of sharp steel screeching by above her head, she cried tears of pure, unadulterated joy.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HELPED MECHANICS gut wrecked Zeros and Hayabusas, salvaging machine guns and 20mm cannon for use against the Americans on the ground. He’d already gutted his own fighter. To his mortification, the Yankees had caught it on the ground and shot it up bad enough to keep it there for good. He’d wanted to die in the air, with luck taking a few more enemy planes with him. The kami in charge of such things paid no attention to what he wanted.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Japanese fighter in the air. The Americans ruled the skies now. Their fearsome planes roared over Oahu like flying tigers, shooting up anything that moved. When the Japanese landed here, Zeros dominated the air. Now Shindo was finding out how taking what he’d dished out felt. He would rather have stayed on the other end of it.

“Pass me those tinsnips,” he said. The mechanic working with him did. He sliced away at the aluminum skin of a Zero’s wing. The fuselage had burned. The other wing had gone up with it. This one, by a freak of war, was pretty much intact. Put that cannon in some kind of improvised ground mount and it would make a few Americans sorry they’d ever been born.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before he heard a sound he’d come to hate: the roar of enemy engines in the air. American radials had a deeper note than their Japanese counterparts; anyone who’d heard both would never confuse the two. Shindo threw down the snips and ran for the nearest trench. The Japanese had dug lots of them when they thought they would still be able to fly out of Wheeler Field. That proved optimistic, but the trenches still gave people a place to hide when Yankee planes came over.

A few soldiers fired at the fighters and dive bombers with rifles. So Americans had fired at Zeros when the war was new: furiously, but without much hope. The Americans had knocked down a couple of Japanese planes-put enough lead in the air and you would. Much good it had done them. No doubt the Japanese here would knock down a few American planes, too, and much good that would do them.

In fact, the muzzle flashes told the Yankees where the trenches were. Shindo huddled in the damp-smelling dirt as heavy machine-gun slugs chewed up the ground all around him. Some of them struck home. Few men who were hit cried out, as they would have if a rifle-caliber round struck them. If a high-velocity bullet the size of a man’s thumb hit you, you were usually too dead to scream.

Bursting bombs made the earth shake under him. The noise was tremendous, something beyond the normal meaning of the word. Shindo felt it through his skin as much as he heard it. Dirt rained down on him. Fragments of bomb casing howled past not nearly far enough over his head.

And then, like a cloudburst, it was over-till the next time. Shindo looked at his wristwatch. He shook his head in slow wonder. All that horror, compressed into less than ten minutes? It was as abbreviated as air-to-air combat, and seemed even slower. In the air, he could have fought back. Here, he just had to take it.

The Americans hadn’t gone back to the north. They’d flown south instead, to harry Pearl Harbor and Ewa. That meant they might hit Wheeler Field again on the way home to their carriers. Shindo shrugged stoically as he climbed out of the trench. If they did, they did, that was all. He couldn’t do anything about it. He could help the Army meet the U.S. invaders.

Or he thought he could. When he got a look at the fighter he’d been cannibalizing, he wasn’t so sure any more. One bomb had landed right on it, another close by. One blast or the other had driven his tinsnips deep into the trunk of a palm tree, so deep he knew he’d need other tools to get them out. And the barrel of the cannon he’d been freeing had a distinct bend in it now. Nobody would use that weapon against the Yankees.

Shindo’s shoulders slumped. How were you supposed to fight the enemy when he blocked things even before you did them? Again, the Americans must have been asking themselves something like that at the end of 1941. Now that it was Japan’s turn, Shindo found no better answers than they had then.

JIM PETERSON STOOD AT ATTENTION WITH HIS FELLOW sufferers in the Kalihi Valley. Most of them were as skeletal as he was. Beriberi and dropsy swelled others past what was natural. A man like Charlie Kaapu, who was only gaunt, stood out as an extraordinary physical specimen.

POWs had tried to get away from this hellhole before the Americans came back to Oahu. Now, with the hope of rescue in the air, escape attempts came more often. But sick, starving men couldn’t go very far very fast. They usually got caught. And when they did, they paid.

This poor fellow looked like a rack of bones. The butcher’s cat would have turned up its nose at him even before the Japs beat the crap out of him. Now he was all over bruises and blood, too. They’d broken his nose. A couple of guards held him upright. He didn’t seem able to stand on his own.

“What’ll they do to him?” Charlie Kaapu whispered to Peterson. He’d quickly mastered the art of speaking without moving his lips.

“Don’t know,” Peterson whispered back. “That’s why we’re here, though-so they can make a show.” It wasn’t much of a show. The guards let the POW fall to his knees. A lieutenant swung his sword. Peterson had heard that samurai swords would cut through anything on the first try. One more lie-or maybe the Jap hadn’t taken good care of the blade. Any which way, he needed three hacks before the POW’s head fell from his neck. The body convulsed, but not for long. The head just lay there. If anything, it seemed relieved the ordeal was over.

“Fuck,” Charlie Kaapu whispered. Under his swarthy skin, he turned green.

He was a civilian. He hadn’t seen so much. Peterson only shrugged. The Japs had done plenty worse. The lieutenant let out a torrent of Japanese. A noncom who spoke fragments of English pointed to the emaciated corpse and the pool of blood soaking into the ground under it. “You run, you-” He pointed again. That got the meaning across, but Peterson suspected some of the lieutenant’s eloquence was lost in translation. Yeah, like I give a shit, he thought.

Off in the distance, bombs burst and.50-caliber machine guns chattered: the unmistakable sounds of American planes giving the Japs hell. The guards resolutely pretended nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The POWs had to pretend the same thing. Men who grinned or laughed caught hell. Several of them had died from it-not as spectacularly as the beheaded man, but every bit as dead. The guards were jumpy, and getting jumpier all the time, no matter what they pretended.

The sergeant with a little English pointed toward the mouth of the tunnel through the Koolau Range. “You go!” he yelled, and the POWs went.

It was madness. Peterson knew it. Everybody knew it, prisoners and guards alike. The only reason the men were digging through the mountains’ bowels was so they could die from hard labor and bad food. Too many of them hadn’t needed any further abuse from the Japs. The routine was deadly enough.

Besides that, even if there had been some point to all the man-killing labor, there wasn’t any more. The Japanese would never get a nickel’s worth of good out of the tunnel. By every sign Peterson could use to judge, they wouldn’t hold Oahu. The Stars and Stripes would fly here again. Everything the POWs in the Kalihi Valley did was an exercise in futility.

They got driven to it even so. If anything, they got driven harder than ever now. The guards might have feared they would rise up if they weren’t worked to death and otherwise intimidated. They might have been right, too.

Outside the tunnel mouth, Peterson grabbed a pick. Charlie Kaapu took a shovel. His face said he would sooner have bashed Japs with it than lifted chunks of rock. “Easy,” Peterson murmured. A machine-gun nest covered the tools. Anybody who got out of line would die fast. So would a lot of POWs who hadn’t done one damn thing.

The hapa-Hawaiian growled, down deep in his throat. But he carried the shovel into the tunnel instead of braining the nearest guard. Light vanished. It would have been dark in there even if Peterson had been well nourished. Night blindness had advanced with his beriberi. He couldn’t see much at all.

Lamps set into the wall here and there gave just enough light to let him keep moving forward. The sound of other POWs banging away at the living rock told him he was getting close. So did a Jap’s yell: “Hurry up! Faster!”

Peterson wanted to ask why. The Jap would have answered with a beating or a bayonet or a bullet. Those answers were persuasive enough, too. How could you argue with them? You couldn’t, not unless you had a club or a rifle yourself. Peterson wished for a rifle. He wished for a machine gun, and the strength to fire it from the hip. You could do that in the movies. In the real world? He knew better.

A Jap hit him with a bamboo swagger stick for no reason he could see. A pick was a weapon, too. He could have broken the bastard’s head. He could have, but he didn’t. He didn’t fear death himself, though he would surely die if he raised his hand to a guard. But the Japs would slaughter untold other POWs to avenge and punish. He didn’t want to die with that on his conscience.

Instead of smashing the guard’s skull, the pick bit into the rock. Pulling it free took all his strength. So did lifting it for the next stroke. How many had he made? Too many. Far too many. That was all he knew.

He grubbed rock out of the wall. Charlie Kaapu shoveled it up and dumped it into baskets. Some other poor, sorry son of a bitch carried away the spoil. Other POWs grubbed and shoveled and carried, too. The guards screamed at everybody to move faster. Dully, Peterson wondered what difference it could make. They weren’t that close to punching through, or he didn’t think they were. Even if they had been, what advantage could the Japs gain from moving men to the east coast? No fighting there. Could they get back over the mountains and hit the Americans in the flank? They’d done it in the west in their invasion, but they’d been up against a much weaker foe, and one who didn’t control the air. Peterson didn’t believe they could make it matter this time around.

Every so often, one of the laborers keeled over. The guards weren’t about to put up with that-it was too much like resting on the job. They fell on the sufferers like wolves, trying to get them back on their feet with blows and kicks. Some of the POWs could be bullied upright again. Some were too far gone, and lay on the tunnel floor no matter what the Japs did. And some didn’t keel over because they were tired. Some keeled over because they were dead.

The men who carried away rock also carried away corpses. That gummed up the works, because the rock accumulated. The Japs just screamed at them to move faster, too, and beat them when they didn’t-SOP for Imperial Japan.

Hours blurred together into one long agony. At last, after the usual eternity, the guards let the POWs stumble out of the tunnel. They queued up for the little bit of rice the Japs grudgingly doled out. There was even less than usual today. Men grumbled-food they took seriously. The Japs only shrugged. One who spoke a little English said, “More not come. Blame Americans.”

Had U.S. fighters (some of the ones Peterson had seen weren’t Wildcats, but new, plainly hot machines) shot up the rice on the way to the Kalihi Valley? Or had the Japs, with more important things to worry about than a bunch of damned-literally-POWs, just not bothered sending any? Either way, it made starving to death seem almost worthwhile.

Almost.

WHEN JIRO TAKAHASHI WALKED UP NUUANU AVENUE to the Japanese consulate, he was shocked not to see the Rising Sun flying in front of the compound. Then he noticed how many bullet holes pocked the buildings. The staff must have decided not to fly the flag to keep from giving a target to the American planes now constantly overhead.

For most of the occupation, the guards in front of the consulate had been a ceremonial force. No more. They crouched in sandbagged machine-gun nests, the snouts of their weapons pointing up toward the sky. There were fewer of them than there had been. Some, Jiro supposed, would have gone up to the front. Others… With the buildings as battered as they were, some of those bullets would have found flesh, too.

“It’s the Fisherman!” one of the guards called. The men who were left still knew Jiro. That made him feel good. The one who’d spoken went on, “You bring us some nice ahi, Fisherman, or even some mackerel?”

Jiro laughed nervously. He was emptyhanded, as they could see. “Not today, gomen nasai,” he answered. He was sorry, too; in better times, he would have had fish for the consul and the chancellor and often the guards as well. “Is Kita-san in?” he asked.

“I think so,” the talky guard answered. “Go on in any which way. They’ll be glad to see you. They’re glad to see anybody right now.” His laugh had a somber edge.

With such gallows humor ringing in his ears, Jiro did. Even some of the secretaries had put down their pens and picked up Arisakas. One of the remainder, a gray-haired fellow who would have been useless on a battlefield, said, “Oh, yes, Takahashi-san, the consul’s here. I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you. Please wait a moment.” He hurried back to Nagao Kita’s office.

Returning a moment later, he beckoned Jiro on. “Welcome, Takahashi-san, welcome,” Kita said after they exchanged bows. “Good to see you haven’t abandoned us.” His words showed spirit, but his round features were thinner and less jaunty than Jiro had ever seen them.

Jiro bowed again. “I wouldn’t do that, your Excellency,” he said, though the thought had crossed his mind. The radio broadcasts full of lies he’d had to read still rankled.

“Plenty of people would,” Kita said. “They want to forget they ever heard of Japan or the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Opportunists.” He laced the word with scorn. “They probably have American flags in their closets, waiting to come out when the time is right.”

“I’m still here,” Jiro said, reflecting that both his sons thought him an idiot for clinging to the land where he was born. His still being here prompted another thought. “Please excuse me, Kita-san, but where is Chancellor Morimura?”

“Somewhere up at the fighting front,” Kita answered. Jiro blinked; the skinny official with the doelike eyes hardly seemed a military man. But the consul went on, “I have learned he is a graduate of Eta Jima, invalided out of the Navy because of stomach trouble. He went into, ah, other work after that. Now, though, with every man needed to hold back the Americans, he has returned to the warrior’s life.”

Tadashi Morimura-was that even his real name? — a graduate of the Japanese naval academy? Jiro had trouble imagining it, let alone believing it. But it was plainly true. And what “other work” had Morimura been doing? By the way Consul Kita said it, the man had been a spy. “I’m-amazed, Kita-san,” Jiro said.

“So was I,” Kita answered. “You think you know someone, and then you find you didn’t know him at all.” He shrugged. “Shigata ga nai.”

“Hai.” Jiro nodded. He’d thought Morimura a friend, not an operative. Things looked clearer than they had. No wonder Chancellor Morimura had introduced him to Osami Murata. He’d wanted the radio man from Tokyo to use Jiro as a propaganda tool. And he’d got what he wanted.

If I saw Morimura now, I’d punch him in the nose, Jiro thought. He laughed at himself, even here. The younger man would probably mop the floor with him. He shrugged. Well, so what? Sometimes you have to do things like that, just to show you’re no man’s puppet. He felt as if he wore strings on his wrists and ankles.

Nagao Kita might have been reading his mind. “I am sorry to have to tell you this, Takahashi-san,” he said. “I fear it will make you less likely to stay loyal to the end.”

He was right to fear that, too. But Jiro said only, “I’ve come this far. I can’t very well jump out of the boat now.” It’s too late. It wouldn’t do me any good. Because he had the consul at a momentary disadvantage, he felt he could ask, “How does the fighting look?”

“They push us back,” Kita answered bleakly. “We fight with great courage, shouting the Emperor’s name and wishing him ten thousand years. For all we do, though, they rule the skies, and they have more tanks and artillery.”

“This is not good,” Jiro said.

“Honto. This is not good,” the consul agreed. “I don’t know what we can do about it, though, except die gloriously, not retreating even a centimeter, dying rather than yielding the ground we have conquered.”

That did sound glorious. It also sounded like a recipe for defeat. Modern Japan had never been defeated in a foreign war. She’d beaten China and Russia. She’d sided with the Allies in World War I, and beaten Germany in China and on the seas. The idea that she could lose was unimaginable-except that Jiro had to imagine it. He asked, “What will you do, Kita-san, if, if-the worst happens?”

“I am a diplomat. The rules for me are different from the ones for soldiers,” Kita replied. “I can be exchanged.”

Jiro had an inspiration. “I am a Japanese national. Can I be exchanged, too?” If Hawaii returned to American hands, he wouldn’t want to stay here. Most people would hate him for siding with Japan. They might do worse than hate him. They might decide he was a traitor and hang him or shoot him.

Consul Kita looked surprised. “Well, I don’t know, Takahashi-san. I would have to do something like put you on my staff, I suppose.”

“Could you?” Jiro asked eagerly. Going back to Japan would mean leaving his sons behind. He knew that. But Hiroshi and Kenzo had their own lives. And they were Americans, as much as he remained Japanese. They might be glad to see him go. They’d probably be relieved if he did.

“Depend on it.” Kita scribbled a note to himself. “We will go on hoping that black day does not come. But if it should, we will see what we can arrange.”

“Domo arigato, Kita-san.” Jiro bowed in his chair. There was one thing he wouldn’t have to worry about. Of course, he still might get killed, but that didn’t bother him the same way. It wasn’t certain, and he couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other. If Japan lost, though, American vengeance was as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. Now he’d done what he could to escape it.

WHEN MINORU GENDA PEDALED OVER TO IOLANI PALACE, something had changed. He needed a moment to realize what it was: the big, tough-looking Hawaiian soldiers who’d guarded the bottom of the stairway up to the front entrance were gone. He asked one of the Japanese guards at the top of the stairs what had happened to them.

“Sir, King Stanley sent them up to the front.” The noncom’s tone made it plain he had nothing to do with anything his superiors did. “He sent the whole Hawaiian Army to the front.”

The whole Hawaiian Army had about a battalion’s worth of men. “Did he?” Genda said. “Our officers approved it?”

“Sir, would those Hawaiians be there if they hadn’t?” the noncom asked reasonably.

“I suppose not.” Genda still had doubts, but he wasn’t about to discuss them with an underofficer. The occupying authorities had let King Stanley Laanui form an army of sorts because they’d nominally restored Hawaii’s independence, and independent countries always had armies-of sorts. At the time, nobody-doubtless including King Stanley-had imagined the Hawaiian Army might actually have to fight.

For that matter, nobody knew which side it would choose to fight on. Did the soldiers think of themselves as Hawaiians, loyal to the ancient kingdom, or as Americans on masquerade? Were there some who felt each way? If there were, the tiny army might have its own tiny civil war.

If it did that while it was holding some of the line… well, what followed wouldn’t be pretty. And yet the Japanese officers who presumably knew it best had let it go forward. Genda hoped they knew what they were doing. Too late to change it now, either way.

His ankle didn’t bother him too much when he went up the stairs to the library. He’d interviewed Stanley Laanui there, along with other possible candidates for the revived Hawaiian throne. Now the room again belonged to a distant relative of David Kalakaua, the King of Hawaii who’d had it built.

Seen from the front, the enormous Victorian desk behind which King Stanley sat seemed wide as Akagi’s flight deck. Poor Akagi! For a moment, pain for Genda’s lost ship stabbed at him, dagger-sharp. He bowed to the king, not least to make sure his face didn’t show what he was thinking. “Your Majesty,” he murmured.

“Hello, Commander. Nice of you to come to see me for a change.” Stanley Laanui slurred the words so Genda had trouble understanding them. Was he drunk this early in the morning? Whether he was or not, he alarmed the Japanese officer. Did he know about Genda’s visits to Queen Cynthia? If he did, what did he aim to do about them? If he kept a pistol as well as a bottle in one of those drawers… But the not very kingly King of Hawaii went on, “This Captain Iwabuchi is a lot nastier than General Yamashita ever was.”

Genda believed that. The commandant of the special naval landing forces struck him as hard and determined even by Japanese standards. “I am so sorry, your Majesty,” Genda said. “You know he has many worries.”

“Like I don’t!” the king exclaimed. “They won’t hang Iwabuchi if our side loses.”

He was bound to have that right. Genda couldn’t imagine the Japanese naval officer letting himself be captured. Iwabuchi would surely die in battle or commit seppuku before permitting such a disgrace. “Do not be hard on him,” Genda said. “Remember, he helps defend your country.”

“Oh, yeah,” King Stanley said. “He’ll defend it till everybody in Honolulu’s dead.”

Genda had no doubt Captain Iwabuchi intended to defend Honolulu just that way. “This is war, your Majesty,” he said-use was making his English more and more fluent. “This is not a game. We cannot stop and ask to begin again. It goes to the end, whatever the end may be.”

“If I’d figured the Americans were coming back, I don’t know that I would have let you stick a crown on my noggin,” Stanley Laanui said.

“Believe me, your Majesty, I do not want the Americans here any more than you do,” Genda said.

“Japan does all it can to beat them.”

“Hawaii’s doing everything it can, too,” the king said. “That’s why I sent my army up to join the fighting.”

“Hai,” Genda said, and not another word. Any other word might have been too much. But after a moment he did find a few that seemed safe: “I hope the Army will fight strongly for us.”

“Why shouldn’t it?” the king asked.

Genda said nothing. The question had too many answers-because the soldiers might not be loyal to the King of Hawaii, because they didn’t have all the weapons they needed to fight first-rate foes like the U.S. Marines and Army, because they had no combat experience, because some of them were either cutthroats or men looking for enough to eat and not really warriors at all. They’d all been trained since they joined up, but how much did that mean?

Only one way to find out. By now they’d be up near the line. Whatever Japanese officer they reported to would use them. Why not? They would surely kill some Americans. If they died themselves, even in swarms, so what? Better them than precious, irreplaceable Japanese troops.

King Stanley was doing his best to act like a proper ally. Genda admired him for that. He also pitied him. Japan didn’t want a proper ally here in Hawaii, any more than she wanted proper allies in any of the countries she’d conquered. She wanted puppets who would deliver natural resources and do as they were told.

Hawaii had no natural resources to speak of. Sugar? Pineapple? Neither would have been worth a single Japanese soldier or sailor. Hawaii’s position was its natural resource. Under the Rising Sun, it shielded everything farther west and made it hard for the USA to help Australia and New Zealand. Under the Stars and Stripes, it was a spearhead aimed straight at the rest of the Japanese Empire.

It behooved Japan to hold on to Hawaii as long as she could, then. How long that would be… “We will all do the best we can, your Majesty,” Genda said.

“How good is that?” King Stanley demanded. “You can hear the American guns off to the north. Sounds like they come closer every day, too. You don’t see anything but American planes any more. They shoot up anything that moves. They’ve damn near killed me two, three times by now. How can you stop them, Commander? Answer me that, please. Answer me that.”

“We will do the best we can,” Genda repeated. “We have more courage than the enemy does.” He believed that was true, even if the Marines were not to be despised.

The king looked at him. “What difference does courage make if they drop bombs on your head and you can’t do anything about it?”

“Well…” The question was too much to the point. Genda found he had no answer. He feared none of his superiors did, either.