End of the Beginning

XII

LES DILLON HAD ALREADY DISCOVERED THAT SOME OF THE JAPS FIGHTING THE Marines carried Springfields, not Arisakas. That made sense; after the Army threw in the sponge here, it must have handed over a zillion rifles, plus the ammo to shoot them for a zillion years. But it made him have a harder time telling by ear who was shooting at whom.

That was doubly dangerous right now, because the enemy in front of his platoon didn’t seem to be Japs at all. They spoke English as well as half the Marines, and they wore what looked like U.S. Army khaki, not the darker shade Japan preferred.

He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed, either. “Who are you guys?” a Marine yelled through the racket of gunfire.

The answer came back at once: “Royal Hawaiian Army! Get the fuck off our land, haole asshole!” A burst from a machine gun punctuated the words.

Royal Hawaiian Army? Les blinked. He knew the Japs had given Hawaii a puppet king. He hadn’t known-he hadn’t dreamt-anybody besides the Japs took the King of Hawaii seriously. Not sticking his head up, he called, “Why aren’t you people on our side, not the enemy’s?”

That got him another burst. He’d been smart to keep low-tracers went right over his foxhole. Whoever was handling that gun knew what to do with it. “Japan never took our land away from us! Japan never took our country away from us!” another Hawaiian shouted. “The USA sure as hell did!”

Yeah, but that was a long time ago. The words died unspoken on Les’ lips. It might seem a long time ago to him. To the noisy bastard on the other side of the line, it wasn’t even the day before yesterday. For that matter, you couldn’t talk about the Civil War with a lot of Southerners-Captain Bradford included. It wasn’t the Civil War to them, either. It was the War Between the States… or, if they’d been drinking for a while, the War of Damnyankee Aggression. Whatever you called it, it happened long before Hawaii joined-or was joined to-the United States.

He tried another tack: “Why fight now, for Chrissake? You can’t win, and you’ll just get shot.” He knew damn well the Japs wouldn’t surrender. He’d seen them fight to the death in hopeless positions too many times to have any doubts on that score. But maybe the Hawaiians were different. If he could do things on the cheap instead of putting his one and only irreplaceable ass on the line, he would, and gladly.

No words came back this time. One more burst of machine-gun fire did. Whatever the men in front of him had in mind, surrender wasn’t it. He muttered to himself. Sooner or later, he’d find out what those bastards in old-fashioned khaki were worth.

It turned out to be sooner. Not long after dark fell, a runner brought word that the Marines would go forward the next morning, half an hour after sunrise. Les almost opened fire before the man stammered out the countersign to his hissed challenge. When he got the news instead, he half way wished he had shot the fellow.

He lay in his foxhole, trying to grab whatever uneasy sleep he could. That wasn’t much. Little firefights kept breaking out all along the line. Maybe the Hawaiians knew something was up, or maybe they just wanted to prove they had balls. He would have been happy to take it on faith.

The U.S. barrage started as soon as morning twilight painted the eastern sky gray. Volley after volley of 105s crashed down on the enemy positions in front of Les and his buddies. Mortar bombs added to the weight of flying metal. He’d seen heavier bombardments in the last war, but this was plenty to cut a man into screaming hamburger if he stood up in it-and maybe if he didn’t, too. The Royal Hawaiian Army wouldn’t have faced artillery fire before. He wondered how the Hawaiians liked it.

Under cover of the booming guns, half a dozen Shermans clanked up toward the line. Les was glad to see the big, ugly iron monsters. They could clear out the strongpoints that survived the artillery-and some always did. And they drew enemy fire, too. Infantrymen always aimed small-arms fire at tanks. Les didn’t know why-rifle and machine-gun bullets couldn’t penetrate armor plate. But he’d seen it again and again. If the Hawaiians were shooting at the Shermans, they wouldn’t be shooting at him so much.

He approved of that. Oh, yes. He approved of that very much indeed.

His belly knotted as soon as the 105s fell silent. He knew what was coming next. And it came. Captain Bradford yelled, “Come on, men! Up out of your holes! Follow me!”

Grunting, Les scrambled out of his foxhole and ran forward. He bent over. He zigged and zagged. He knew none of that would do him a damn bit of good if the bullet with his name on it was out there flying. A Boche machine gunner had taught him that lesson once and for all time in 1918, and he still had the puckered scars to prove it.

Bullets cracked past him. The Hawaiians weren’t dead, and they weren’t paralyzed, either. Too fucking bad, he thought. When you heard a crack, a round came much too close. He ducked automatically whenever he did hear one. He’d been ashamed of that till he saw everybody else did it, too, which sure hadn’t taken long.

He’d fought in trenches before, in 1918 and here. That was the worst war had to offer. The Germans had been tough. The Japs here were even worse, because they didn’t give up and they kept coming at you till they were dead or you were. So he had standards of comparison. The fifteen or twenty minutes till the Marines killed the last man from the Royal Hawaiian Army were the worst minutes of his life-even worse than the time Cindy Lou Callahan’s father caught them in bed together and ran for his shotgun, which went a long way towards explaining how and why Les joined the Marines.

The Hawaiians wouldn’t give up, either. They wouldn’t retreat. They didn’t just stay in place and die. They kept making countercharges at the Marines, screaming and swearing and throwing grenades. Like anybody who’d done any fighting, Les vastly preferred bullets to his bayonet. The bayonet got blood on it in those trenches. So did his Kabar. So did the butt end of his rifle. He killed one bastard with his bare hands in an animal tangle of flying arms and legs. If he hadn’t tucked his chin down tight to his chest, the enemy soldier might have broken his neck instead of the other way round.

Afterwards-but only afterwards, when the red madness of battle eased-he wondered why the Hawaiians sold their lives so dear. Did they think the USA would hang them for traitors and they had nothing to lose? Did they really hate Americans? Or were they simply as much caught up in the madness as the men who faced them? He couldn’t even ask a prisoner afterwards. There were no prisoners. Like Napoleon’s guards, like the Japanese who’d given them guns, the men from the Royal Hawaiian Army died but did not surrender.

Once the last of them had died, Les Dillon squatted in a muddy trench and lit a cigarette. He’d just finished bandaging a Marine’s leg. He hoped the man wasn’t hamstrung. All he could do was hope; he was no corpsman. Another Marine who’d also come through unhurt stared at him from about ten feet away. He too had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Fuck,” he said, and then again:

“Fuck.”

Les nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and, “Jesus.” That amounted to about the same thing. If he’d spoken first, he would have said what the younger man had.

He looked around. These torn-up trenches weren’t worth a thing by themselves, any more than one German trench had been worth anything in particular during the War to End All Wars. How many men had died defending them? How many had died or been maimed taking them? He knew the answer to the last question, knew it out to the tenth decimal place: too goddamn many. He threw down the cigarette butt and lit a new one.

A runner came over from the right. “What are you guys sitting around with your thumbs up your asses for? Pick up your feet-get moving. Back where I came from, they’re going forward like Billy-be-damned.”

A burst of weary profanity answered him. Les said, “Cut us some slack, okay? We almost got our heads handed to us here. Those fucking Hawaiians wouldn’t give up for shit.”

“Goldbricks. I knew you guys were goldbricks,” the runner said.

“Goldbricks, my ass,” Les said. Even after a fight like the one he’d just been through, sometimes your own side was a worse enemy than the bastards who’d been trying to kill you. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“Hawaiians,” the runner sneered. “You can’t bullshit me about Hawaiians-I damn well know better. We had Hawaiians in front of us, too, all decked out like the Army was when the shit hit the fan. They fired two, three shots and then threw down their pieces and threw up their hands. We musta took a company’s worth o’ POWs.”

The man meant it. Les could see that. He and the other Marines who’d just gone through hell stared dully at the irate runner. “Fuck,” he mouthed, as the youngster had a few minutes earlier. He gathered his men by eye. “Come on,” he said. “We gotta get back in the goddamn war.”

THINKING BACK ON THINGS, Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa couldn’t account for being alive. Most of the men from his regiment had died at or near Oahu’s northern beaches. They’d done everything they could to throw the Americans into the sea. They’d done everything they could-and it hadn’t been enough.

Furusawa stayed alive after the first day’s fighting-one of the few who did. Naval bombardment didn’t kill him. Neither did U.S. air strikes. Nor did enemy artillery and small-arms fire. By the second morning, nobody survived to give him orders.

He’d retreated several times since then. For one thing, he had no one left to tell him not to. For another, he wasn’t a typical soldier. Most of the men in his regiment-even most of his noncoms-had come into the Army straight off a farm. A lot of them had had to learn how to make up a bed that stood on a frame instead of just on the floor. They sucked up the indoctrination about the duty to die for their country along with the rest of their training till it became as automatic as slapping a new clip into an Arisaka.

It wasn’t that Furusawa was unwilling to die for Japan. Like any soldier with a gram of sense, he knew that was always possible, often likely, sometimes necessary. But he was less inclined to die if it wasn’t necessary than most of his comrades. Because he was a druggist’s son, he’d got more education than the average conscript. And his father had taught him to think for himself in a way most Japanese didn’t.

“You always have to worry. Is this the right medicine? Is this the right dosage? Will it be good for this patient? Never assume anything. Always check, always question-always.” Furusawa didn’t know how many times he’d heard his father say that. And the old man, being a typical Japanese father in a lot of ways, would usually follow the advice with a clout in the ear to make sure it sank in. The method was brutally simple. The Army used it, too. Like a lot of brutally simple things, it worked.

In his innocence, the younger Furusawa had gone on asking questions after he was conscripted. The Army, far more brutal than his father ever dreamt of being, soon cured him of that-at least of asking them out loud. But the habit of thought persisted. He would sometimes smile to himself when he ran into things that made no logical sense. Even smiling could be dangerous. He was convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps because he didn’t act like a patriotic machine. Of course, he didn’t know a single soldier who wasn’t convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps, so who could say for sure?

After the Americans landed, he’d fought hard. But he’d watched other soldiers rush across open ground to try to come to close quarters with the enemy. And he’d watched rifles and machine guns and mortars and artillery shells tear them to bloody shreds before they accomplished a thing. If a sergeant or a lieutenant had shouted at him in particular-“You! Furusawa! Forward!”-he supposed he would have charged, too. No superior had. That left him to use his own judgment. And he was still alive and fighting, while flies buzzed around the bloated, stinking corpses of most of his regiment.

How long he could escape becoming a bloated, stinking corpse himself was anybody’s guess. He crouched in a shell hole not far in front of the ruins of Schofield Barracks. The U.S. Army’s former base had been smashed twice now, first by the Japanese when the Yankees held it and now by the Americans to keep Japan from getting any use out of it.

Several of the men nearby were stragglers and orphans like himself. Others belonged to a company whose captain wasn’t shy about grabbing reinforcements wherever he could. A corporal spoke in bitter frustration: “Those stinking bastards!”

“Who?” Furusawa asked. That could have meant either the enemy or the Japanese high command.

“The Yankees,” the corporal answered. “When the wind blows from them to us, you can smell their cigarettes. When was the last time you had one?” Naked longing filled his voice.

“Please excuse me, but I don’t smoke,” Furusawa said.

“Ai!” The noncom’s disgusted grunt might have meant, Why do they saddle me with idiots like this? Furusawa’s cheeks heated. The corporal went on, “Well, even you’ll know they don’t send many smokes from Japan. I haven’t had one for weeks. American tobacco’s good, too-better than what we use ourselves. I’m tempted to sneak over there and cut somebody’s throat just so I can steal his cigarettes.”

He sounded as serious as a funeral. “Are cigarettes worth risking your life for?” Furusawa asked.

“Why not? I’m going to get killed pretty damn quick anyway,” the corporal said. “Cigarettes or hooch or pussy-might as well have fun while I can.”

That made more sense to Furusawa than it might have to a lot of his countrymen. “You don’t think we can win?” he said.

“Win, lose-who gives a shit? They’ll use us up either way.”

And that made sense to Furusawa, too, however much he wished it didn’t. All the phrases the Japanese Army used to convince its men to fight to the end no matter what came bubbling up in his mind. He didn’t bring any of them out. But even thinking them at a time like this showed he’d been more thoroughly indoctrinated than he thought. What were such words worth on a real battlefield, with the stench of death and its lesser cousin, the stench of shit, all around?

Words were worth enough to send young Japanese men into the face of enemy guns by the hundreds, by the thousands. A lot of those young Japanese men were part of that battlefield stench now. How could anything be worth more than a man’s life? The words said the country was, the Emperor was. And the young men, or most of them, believed it.

He knew what questioning it here and now would get him: a bullet in front of the ear or in the back of the neck, unless some officer who heard him decided to make him into an example for other doubters. In that case, he’d die a lot slower and hurt a lot more while he was doing it.

He opened a ration can he’d taken from a dead American. A lot of the food the enemy ate was nasty, but he got lucky this time-it was chopped, salty meat. It wasn’t anything he would have got back home, but it was like something he might have got. He wolfed it down. As he did, he remembered the cans of the stuff called Spam he’d found for his squad when the Japanese were conquering. He sighed nostalgically. Now that-that had been really good.

Not five minutes after he’d finished, the Americans started shelling the Japanese line. Furusawa huddled in his hole, right next to the can he’d dropped. Had the kami decided to discard him the same way? Getting discarded hadn’t hurt the can. If his time was here, he hoped he would be as lucky.

Huddled next to him, the corporal who wanted a smoke said, “Stinking Hawaiians. It’s their fault we’re in this mess.”

He didn’t mean Japan. Japan’s problems weren’t the Hawaiians’ fault. But those of this particular knot of Japanese soldiers were. Furusawa said the most he could for the men of the Royal Hawaiian Army:

“Some of them fought well.”

“And some of them damn well didn’t,” the noncom snarled as a nearby shell burst sent splinters screeching overhead. “Some of them ran away. Zakennayo! Some of them surrendered, the worthless turds.” Furusawa had run away. He would have been dead if he hadn’t. The corporal had probably run away, too.

Surrender… That was scarier than the artillery barrage. You didn’t just disgrace yourself if you gave up. You disgraced your family, too. Who could say what the authorities would do to them if word that you were a prisoner got back to Japan? And it wouldn’t be only the authorities. Who would go to a druggist whose son had thrown down his rifle? Who wouldn’t turn away when a man like that, a man who had raised such a worthless son, walked by? Who wouldn’t talk about him behind his back? — not that he wouldn’t know what all his neighbors, all his former friends, were saying.

Mortar bombs hissed down along with the shells. Furusawa really dreaded mortars. You could hardly hear them coming, and they dropped straight down into foxholes. You couldn’t hide from them, the way you could from ordinary artillery. If one of them decided to rip you up, there you were-sashimi-and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

Then, as suddenly as a Hawaiian rain shower, the bombardment stopped. Furusawa and the corporal looked at each other, each one making sure the other was still breathing and hadn’t been blown to red rags without even a chance to scream.

Shouts in harsh English came from the north. So did bursts of machine-gun fire to make the Japanese keep their heads down. And so did clanking rattles that sent fresh ice walking down Furusawa’s spine. Tanks! He’d seen the new U.S. tanks before-always from some little distance, or he wouldn’t be here worrying about them now. They were bigger and tougher-looking than their Japanese counterparts, not that any Japanese tanks were close by. Their cannon would wreck machine-gun nests, their machine guns would chew up infantrymen, and what could a poor damned foot soldier do about them? Not bloody much.

Furusawa popped out of his hole a couple of times to fire at the oncoming Marines. Bullets cracked past him whenever he did. He took his life in his hands even to try to shoot. But he knew the Yankees would run up and kill him if he didn’t fight back. The risk of death against its certainty… You braced yourself, you took the risk, and you hoped for the best. If no bullet found you, you did it again.

A burst of machine-gun fire from one of the U.S. tanks almost tore his head off. He crouched in the hole, shuddering. Then the machine gun swung elsewhere, to torment other luckless Japanese soldiers.

As soon as it did, the corporal with whom Furusawa had been talking sprang up and ran toward the tank, which was horribly close. He scrambled onto the metal monster before the bow gunner could swing his weapon back to bear on him. Through the din of battle, Furusawa heard the noncom tap two grenades on his helmet, or possibly on the side of the tank, to start their fuses. He opened a hatch and chucked them in. Then he jumped down and tried to get away.

One of the American tankers cut him down with half a dozen rounds from the submachine gun he carried as a personal weapon. The grenades went off: two muffled thumps inside the big steel box. An instant later, much bigger booms followed-the grenades must have touched off the tank’s ammunition. The big machine ground to a halt. A thick column of greasy black smoke rose from it.

Five men and a traveling fortress slain. The corporal’s spirit would have a lot to be proud of as it took its place with so many others in Yasukuni Shrine. Furusawa admired the man’s bravery, and admitted to himself he couldn’t match it.

Seeing the tank go up in flames made the Yankees hesitate. It filled the Japanese with new spirit, at least for a little while. Another soldier used a bottle full of burning gasoline to disable a second tank, though Furusawa thought some of that crew got away. He hoped the new loss would make the Americans draw back. It didn’t. They might have lacked the stubborn stoicism of Japanese troops, but they were brave, tough men.

“Give up!” someone shouted in Japanese. “You won’t be harmed after surrender! You’ll be fed and treated well.”

Only a long burst of machine-gun fire answered that call. The Americans must have found a local Japanese to do their talking-to do their lying-for them. They’d done that when the American Army was advancing, too. You listened to those wills-o’-the-wisp at your peril. Furusawa had seen men do what they said and then get shot down.

Another call came from behind him: “Back here! We’ve got another line set up!” That was a Tokyo man talking. He didn’t have the Hiroshima accent of the men from Furusawa’s regiment-and of most Japanese settlers in Hawaii. That made Furusawa believe him. It also gave the senior private an excuse to retreat with his honor more or less intact.

He seized the chance, scrambling and scurrying and scuttling. Bullets whipped by him, but none bit. He flopped down into a hole deeper and much better made than the one in which he’d sheltered. This had to be a position American POWs had prepared in advance. He nodded to himself. Good. Now the Army would get some use out of all that digging.

A U.S. FIGHTER PLANE ROARED LOW OVER THE VAST POW CAMP in Kapiolani Park. Fletcher Armitage stood in line for the evening meal-whatever rice and weeds the Japs cared to give their prisoners. The plane’s pilot waggled his wings as he zoomed away. When American fliers first started doing that, some of the prisoners had waved back. After the beatings the Japanese guards handed out, that stopped in a hurry.

One of the guard towers sent a stream of bullets after the fighter, but it was long gone. The machine guns in the towers bore on the camp. When the towers went up, the Japs hadn’t figured those guns would need to shoot down U.S. planes. Too bad, you bastards, Fletch thought.

A man in front of him said, “I wonder what the hell they call that aircraft. Sure as hell didn’t have anything like it when we got took.”

He was right about that. It looked more businesslike than any plane Fletch had known in 1941, and its business was death.

The line snaked forward. When Fletch got up to the cooks, one of them plopped a ladleful of overcooked, gluey rice and green stuff in his bowl. The ladle was small. For all he knew, the greens were lawn trimmings. He didn’t care. For one thing, he didn’t get enough to matter. For another, he would have eaten all he did get. If the Japs had cooked grubs in with the gruel, he would have eaten those, too.

He savored what little he got. For a couple of hours, he wouldn’t feel like a man starving to death-which he was. He would just be very hungry. To a POW in Hawaii, very hungry seemed wonderful.

Two emaciated prisoners carried an even more emaciated body to the disposal area near the perimeter. Several others lay there, some scrawnier yet. Men who should have been in the prime of life died here every day, and not a few of them. Fletch glanced warily toward the guard towers. If the Japs in them decided to open up, men inside the perimeter would die by the hundreds, by the thousands. And they were thinking about it. He could feel the tension in the air. If anything, those American fighters made it worse. The Japs were losing the fight for Oahu. The distant rumble of artillery fire and bombs going off wasn’t so distant any more. If the guards wanted to take a last revenge on the POWs in their hands and under their machine guns, they could.

If they did, the Americans would avenge themselves in turn. That was obvious. It might have restrained Americans guarding Japanese prisoners. Fletch could tell the Japs didn’t give a shit. They intended to fight to the death any which way. If they could get rid of men who might recover and fight them again-or just men who’d fought them in the past-they would do it, and then die with smiles on their faces.

I’ll give you something to smile about, you slant-eyed mothers. Fletch’s hands balled into fists. He’d had that fantasy so many times. And he couldn’t do one goddamn thing to make it real. Not one. The Japs were on the right side of the wire and he was on the wrong side. He didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting out, either. Hell, a Chinaman would have had a better chance than he did. A Chinaman might have been able to fool the guards into thinking he was another Jap. Tall, thin, freckled, and auburn-haired, Fletch made a most unconvincing Japanese.

He did what most of the POWs did most of the time: he lay down and tried to rest. The laughable rations gave them next to no energy. The less they used, the better off they were. He shook his head when that occurred to him. The less energy he used, the longer he’d last. Whether that made him better off was a long way from obvious.

But sleep had dangers of its own. When he slept, he dreamt of… food. He burned too low for sex to mean anything to him. But food-food was a different story. Those dreams never went away. If anything, they got worse as he got weaker. Steaks smothered in onions danced in his dreams. So did mashed potatoes and string beans. Bacon and eggs. Pancakes-mountains of pancakes smothered in melted butter and maple syrup. Cherry pie a la mode. Not slices-whole pies, with quarts of vanilla ice cream plopped on top. Coffee with cream and sugar. Beer. Brandy. Whiskey.

And when he woke up, the dreams would seem so vivid, so real. He’d be just about to dig in, just about to make up for more than a year and a half of tormenting hunger-and then he’d have his food snatched away by cruel consciousness. When a man cried in Kapiolani Park, he most likely cried after a dream of food.

Still, if you didn’t dream of roast beef, sleeping was better than staying awake. General anesthesia would have been better still. The only kind the Japs offered, though, was too permanent to suit him.

When he didn’t dream of food, he often did dream of combat. Sometimes he and the U.S. Army triumphed over the Japs. Waking up after those hurt almost as bad as waking up after a dream of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Sometimes he got shot in the night or, worse, bayoneted. Returning to himself after those dreams came as close to relief as anything in the POW camp.

He dreamt of combat tonight. It was artillery in his head, which could be as bad as bayonets. He’d commanded a 105; he knew too well what shellfire did to human flesh. If he hadn’t known before, what he’d seen in the fighting would have taught him plenty.

And when he woke, he woke from a noisy dream of combat to… combat. Machine guns and rifles and mortars were going off much too close by. Tracers ripped through the prisoner camp, mostly from south to north. The tracers were red. Fletch needed a moment to remember what that meant. The Japs used ice-blue tracers. Red tracers meant… Americans!

“Holy Jesus!” Fletch whispered. Tears filled his eyes. Maybe those were tears of weakness. He didn’t care. Somebody’d remembered he and his comrades in misery existed. Somebody was trying to save them.

What might have been the voice of God but was more likely a Marine or sailor on a PA system shouted through the racket of gunfire: “Prisoners! U.S. prisoners! Move toward the beach! We’ll get you out!” As if to underscore that, a mortar round hit a guard tower. It went over with a crash. There was one machine gun that wouldn’t shoot back-and wouldn’t shoot any POWs, either.

But the guards and soldiers around Kapiolani Park weren’t about to give up without a fight. As far as Fletch could see, the Japs never gave up without a fight-never gave up, in fact. They stopped fighting only when they died. Their cold-looking tracers spat out at the attacking Americans. And, as the POWs started moving toward their rescuers, automatic-weapons fire lashed the camp.

Men died and fell wounded and screaming just as they were on the point of being rescued. The unfairness of that tore at Fletch. So did raw terror. He didn’t want to be one of those casualties, not now, not at this of all moments. But the prisoners couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. They had no place to hide. Bullets either nailed them or didn’t. It was all luck, one way or the other.

A squad of guards rushed into the camp and turned their Arisakas on the POWs, too. They must have thought they could turn the Americans back. Instead, careless of whether they lived or died, the POWs surged toward them. Disciplined to the end, the Japs all emptied their clips at about the same time. As they were reloading, the Americans swarmed over them. The scene was straight out of Durer or Goya: skeletons rising up to attack the living. The Japs screamed, but not for long. Fletch had always thought only artillery could tear a man to pieces. He found he was wrong. Bare hands did the job just fine.

One by one, machine guns in the guard towers fell silent, knocked out by the attackers. “Move! Move! Move!” roared the big voice on the loudspeaker. “American prisoners, move to the south!”

Tracerlight gave Fletch his first glimpse of the soldiers who’d hit the beach to liberate the POW camp. He needed a moment to recognize them for what they were. They wore dark uniforms-dark green, he thought-not the khaki that had been his color. Even their helmets were different: pot-shaped domes that covered more of the head than the British-style steel derbies Fletch and his comrades had used. For a heartbeat, he wondered if they really were Americans. But they had rifles and submachine guns in their hands, and they were shooting up the Japs. What else mattered? He would have kissed Orson Welles’ Martians if they turned their fearsome heat rays on those guard towers.

These weren’t Martians. They were Americans, even if they wore funny clothes. “Haul ass, youse guys!” one of them yelled in pure New York. “We got boats on the beach waitin’ for youse. Shake a leg, already!”

Fletch gave it all he could. He had the feeling a tortoise with a tailwind would have left him in the dust, but he couldn’t do anything about that. The Marines had landed with bulldozers with armored driver’s boxes to tear paths through the barbed wire. He stumbled out through one, stumbled across Kalakaua Avenue, and then fell down when he got to the sand.

Not all the Japs were out of action. Falling down might have saved his life-a sniper’s bullet cracked past just over his head. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered on. The beach was alive with stick figures just like him.

“This way! This way!” Marines and sailors with red flashlights steered POWs toward the boats that waited for them. “We got plenty for everybody. Don’t fight! Don’t trample!”

Obeying that order came hard. How could anyone stand to wait another moment to be free? As he stood there, bullets still snapping and cracking past every so often, he got a look at the boats that would take him and his partners in misery away. He knew damn well that the U.S. military had owned no such slab-sided, front-mouthed machines before the war with the Japs started. Like the airplanes, like the uniforms, these had all been designed and built from scratch while he waited on the sidelines. A career officer, he wondered if he’d have any career left even after he got his strength back.

While he was staring at the landing craft, the men who crewed them stared at the nearly rescued POWs.

“You poor sorry sons of bitches,” one of them said. “We ought to murder every motherfucking Jap in the world for this.”

Before Fletch could say anything, one of the other Americans on the beach beat him to the punch:

“Sounds good to me.”

One by one, the boats filled and waddled off the beach and into the water. They were every bit as ungainly there as they were on land. Fletch’s turn finally came. He climbed an iron ramp and got into a boat. A sailor was passing out cigarettes to the POWs. “Here ya go, pal,” he said, and gave Fletch a light. The first drag on the Chesterfield after so long made him dizzy and light-headed and sick to his stomach, as if he’d never smoked at all. It felt wonderful.

Another sailor said, “You guys are so skinny, we can load more of you on each boat than we figured.” It only went to show there were advantages to everything, even starvation. Fletch would gladly have forgone that one.

A motor started. Chains rattled. The ramp came up. Sailors dogged it shut. All of a sudden, it was the bow of the boat. Awkward as a drunken sow, the landing craft backed into the water. Beside Fletch, a man quietly started to bawl. “We’re free,” he blubbered. “We’re really free. I didn’t think we ever would be, but we are.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said, and then he was crying, too, joy and weakness all coming out at once. Inside a couple of minutes, half the breathing skeletons in the boat were sobbing as if their hearts would break.

Sailors dealt out more smokes. And they passed out open ration cans, too. Tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Everybody crowded forward, wanting his with a fierce and terrible desire. None of them would ever be the same about food again. Fletch was sure of that. Right now, they might have been hungry wolves in a cage. Not till his hands closed around a can did a low, unconscious growl die in his throat.

He ate with his fingers. The can held greasy roast-beef hash. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate beef. Probably when his Army rations ran out. “My God,” he muttered, over and over again. “My God!” That such food was out there! Even his dreams hadn’t been anything like this. He cut his tongue licking the inside of the can to make sure he got every tiny scrap out of it.

The boat’s motion and the rich food they weren’t used to made several men seasick. After some of the stinks Fletch had known lately, that one wasn’t so bad. His own stomach seemed to take the wonderful food for ballast. Nothing bothered him as the boat chugged away from Oahu. He didn’t think anything would ever bother him again. He might have been wrong, but he felt that way.

After a couple of hours, his landing craft and the others came up alongside ships that took the POWs aboard. That wasn’t easy. They couldn’t climb nets, the way sailors and Marines did. Sailors on deck lowered slings to the boats. The sailors there fitted them around the prisoners’ shoulders. The men on the ship hauled them up.

Fletch felt more like a package than the daring young man on the flying trapeze. “Careful, buddy,” a sailor said as he came up over the rail. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I’m out of that goddamn camp,” Fletch answered. “How could anything hurt me now?” As soon as he was safely up on deck, he asked, “Can I get some more food? Can I have a bath?”

“We got saltwater soap, and those showers are going,” the sailor said. “Otherwise it’s a sponge bath-too many men and not enough fresh water. Food… Doc’s gotta say it’s okay before we give you much. Sometimes you eat too much too fast, you get sick.”

“I wouldn’t.” Fletch knew he sounded like a whiny little kid. He couldn’t help it. When it came to food, he felt like a whiny little kid.

He decided to take a shower. Even he didn’t believe how filthy he was. As he stripped off his rags, a sailor said, “You got anything in the pockets you need to keep? Otherwise we’re gonna deep-six all of this shit.”

“No, there isn’t anything,” Fletch answered. He wasn’t used to being around well-fed Americans any more. Their fleshy bodies looked wrong, distorted. He knew the problem was in the way he looked at these strangers who’d rescued him and taken him in, not in the men themselves. Knowledge didn’t change perception.

Saltwater soap was nasty stuff, but he needed something nasty to get a few layers of filth off. Lots of freed POWs scrubbed themselves in the showers. An ocean-temperature shower wasn’t too bad, not when the ocean was off Hawaii. He kept flicking glances toward the naked men in there with him. He could see every bone and every tendon in their bodies. That was how Americans were supposed to look. Next to them, the sailors and Marines seemed almost… inflated.

After he came out of the shower and dried off, all he got in the way of clothes was a bathrobe. “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor who handed it to him. “We didn’t know you guys’d be in such miserable shape.”

“It’s okay,” Fletch said. But for modesty, going naked in this climate was no hardship. The Hawaiians had done it all the time. And he didn’t need anybody else to tell him he was in miserable shape. He knew that himself.

He didn’t actually see a doctor. A pharmacist’s mate looked him over. “You don’t seem too bad, all things considered,” the man said after a very quick, very cursory check. “Just don’t try to fatten yourself up all at once.” He picked up a spray gun. “Shed the robe.” He sprayed both Fletch and the garment.

Fletch’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that stuff?” he asked. Whatever it was, it had a harsh, chemical tang. There were other kinds of bad smells besides those that sprang from filth and death.

“Shit’s called DDT-and now you know as much as you did before, right?” the pharmacist’s mate said.

“What you need to know is, it kills lice, mosquitoes, every kind of bug under the sun, kills ’em dead, dead, dead. You may not believe it, but you aren’t lousy any more.”

“What about the nits?” Fletch scratched automatically.

“Kills them, too,” the sailor said. “And if a louse does somehow hatch, what’s left of the DDT in your hair is plenty to make the little bastard buy the farm. I’m telling you, buddy, this shit is the straight goods.”

“Yeah? What’s it do to people, then?” Fletch asked.

“Diddly squat. Safe as houses. Greatest thing since sliced bread.” The pharmacist’s mate gave him back the robe. “Go feed your face. Not too much, though, you hear? Or you’ll be sorry.”

“Yes, Mother,” Fletch said, which made the other man laugh. He went on to the galley. They had biscuits there, with butter and jam. Flour had vanished from Oahu even before the American surrender. It all came from the mainland-and then it stopped coming. Butter and jam were only memories, too. “Thank you, Jesus!” somebody said: as short and sincere a grace as Fletch had ever heard.

And then the cooks brought out platters of fried chicken. At the sight, at the mouth-watering smell, several POWs burst into tears. One of them said, “But what’s for all the other guys?” That got a laugh and defused the tension that had built at the presence of so much food. Fletch felt the fear-somebody else might get more than he did. He had to remind himself there was plenty for everyone. His head might know that, but his belly didn’t.

He snagged a drumstick. The coating of batter crunched in his mouth. Then he was eating hot chicken. He wasn’t dreaming about it. It was real. Tears streamed down his cheeks. It was real. When he set the bone down, not the tiniest scrap of meat was left on it. No crumbs from the biscuits remained on his plate, either.

He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t feel starved. He didn’t even feel hungry. He could hardly remember what that was like. “Wow!” he said.

The man next to him grinned. “Right the first time, buddy.”

A sailor came by to pick up plates. A POW stopped him, saying, “I was at the Opana camp for a while, up at the other end of the island. That place was as big as this one, maybe bigger. Have you gone after the guys there, too?”

The sailor’s face clouded. “We can’t,” he said. “As soon as we got close to it, the Japs started shooting up the place. We weren’t ready for it then-we didn’t think anybody could act that bastardly. Shows what we knew.” He made as if to spit on the deck, then caught himself at the last second. “Don’t know for sure how many guys those fuckers murdered-gotta be thousands.”

“Jesus!” The prisoner who’d asked the question crossed himself.

Fletch was horrified but not surprised. Everything the Japanese had done since taking Hawaii showed POWs were nothing but a nuisance to them. They’d starved their captives, abused them, and worked them to death. Why wouldn’t they slaughter them to keep them from being rescued? It made perfect sense-if you fought the war like that.

“Thanks for getting to us before they did the same thing at Kapiolani,” he said. The gob hadn’t had thing one to do with it, but Fletch had enough gratitude to spread around to anybody in the U.S. military right now.

“Brass figured we’d better try,” the sailor said. “I’m gladder’n hell it went as well as it did.”

How many Japanese machine-gun bullets had snapped by within a couple of feet of Fletch? How many scrawny, starving men had those bullets killed? He didn’t know. He wondered if anyone would ever know exactly. He knew who would, if anybody ever did: Graves Registration. And yet here he was, on an American ship, his belly full-really full! — of American food. He was gladder than hell the rescue had gone as well as it had, too.

THE GUARDS IN THE KALIHI VALLEY WERE JUMPIER than ever. That made the prisoners tunneling through the Koolau Range jumpier than ever, too-those of them who kept the strength to worry. Jim Peterson still did. So did Charlie Kaapu. Peterson admired the hapa-Hawaiian’s strength and determination. He wished he could match them, but he’d been here much longer than Charlie, and he’d been in worse shape when he got here. His spirit was willing. His flesh? He had no flesh to speak of, not any more. He had skin, and he had bones, and only hunger between them.

“We got to get out of here,” Charlie whispered to him one evening before exhaustion knocked them over the head. “We got to. Those fuckers gettin’ ready to do us all in. You can see it in their eyes.”

Peterson nodded. He’d had the same thought himself. Every time artillery fire got closer, every time American fighters flew by overhead, they might have been twisting a knife in the Japs’ guts. The guards would lash out then, the way a kid who’d just lost a schoolyard brawl might kick a dog. They didn’t have any dogs to kick, though. They had POWs instead, and kicking was the least of what they did to them.

At the same time, Peterson shook his head. Even that took effort. “Go ahead, if you think you can get away. I’d just hold you back.”

“You can do it, man,” Charlie said. “Gotta be tough. Get back to Honolulu, you be okay.”

He might be okay if he got back to Honolulu. Flesh melted off him day by day, but he still had some. The first Jap who saw Peterson would know him for what he was-he didn’t think he weighed a hundred pounds any more. And that would be all she wrote. The outskirts of Honolulu weren’t more than three or four miles away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the good that did Peterson.

“I’m done for,” he said. “Not enough left of me to be worth saving.”

“Shit,” Charlie said. “Don’t you want to get your own back? Don’t you want to watch these assholes get what’s coming to ’em? How you gonna do that if you lay down and die?”

“I’m not laying down,” Peterson said, remembering how fiercely he’d sworn revenge back when captivity was new. “I’m not laying down, dammit, but I can’t go anywhere very far, either. Look at me.” He held out his arm: five knobby pencils attached to a broomstick. “Look. How am I going to run if we get spotted?”

Charlie Kaapu looked. He swore, his words all the more terrible for being so low-voiced. “I’ll go. I’ll bring back help. Bet I find American soldiers in Honolulu.”

Maybe he would. There’d been a hell of a lot of shooting from somewhere down that way a few nights earlier. Whatever it was all about, the guards had been even nastier since. Peterson wouldn’t have imagined they needed an excuse for that, but they seemed to. He said, “If you make it, tell ’em we’re up here. Far as anybody knows, I bet we’ve fallen off the edge of the world.”

“I’ll do it,” Charlie said. “You really can’t come, man?” Peterson shook his head again. The hapa — Hawaiian reached out in the darkness and set a hand on his bony shoulder. “Hang on, brother. I’m gonna get away. I’m gonna bring help.”

In spite of everything, Jim Peterson smiled. “Just like in the movies.”

“Fuckin’-A, man!” Charlie said. “Just like in the movies!”

“Well, if you’re gonna do it, do it fast,” Peterson said. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last, and God only knows how long the Japs’ll let anybody last.”

“Cover for me at roll call in the morning,” Charlie Kaapu said.

“Will do,” Peterson answered, though he feared the Japs would notice Charlie was missing even if their count came out right. They had trouble telling one emaciated white man from another, yeah. All Occidentals look alike to them, Peterson thought, and damned if he didn’t smile again. But Charlie was only half white-and only half emaciated, too, which counted for more. He stood out. He had as much life in him as half a dozen ordinary POWs put together. He…

As if to prove his own point, Peterson fell asleep then, right in the middle of a thought. He woke up some time later-he didn’t know how long. Charlie Kaapu wasn’t lying beside him any more. Good luck, Charlie, he thought, and then he fell asleep again.

Three men died during the night. The POWs who lived on carried the corpses out with them so the guards could keep the precious count straight. And those living POWs did what they could to keep the guards from noticing one of their number wasn’t there and wasn’t dead. They shifted around in the ranks that were supposed to be still and unmoving. The Japs clouted several of them. The guards would do that without an excuse. When they had one, they did it even more.

But they were stupider than Peterson had figured them for. He thought the Americans were going to get away with their deception, and wondered how the Japs could fail to miss what wasn’t right in front of their noses. The answer wasn’t all that hard to find. Their officers didn’t want smart bastards here. They wanted mean bastards-and what they wanted, they got.

Still and all, the Japs would have had to be dumber than a pile of pebbles not to notice pretty damn quick that Charlie Kaapu wasn’t there. They were just about to let the POWs queue up for the miserable breakfast when a corporal let out a yelp, as if somebody’d poked him with a pin: “Kaabu!” When the Japs tried to say p, it mostly came out as b. Peterson had got used to being called Beterson.

Naturally, Charlie didn’t answer. The guards had the conniptions they should have had twenty minutes earlier. They started beating people in earnest, with swagger sticks, with rifle butts, and with their fists. They kicked men who fell, too. They were even more furious than Peterson had figured they would be.

And they weren’t just mad at the POWs. They also screamed at one another. The men who’d been on watch during the night would surely catch holy hell. That didn’t break Jim Peterson’s heart. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

The prisoners didn’t get breakfast that morning. They got marched straight into the tunnel instead. The Japs cut them no slack. If anything, the guards worked them even harder than usual. Anyone who faltered got beaten or kicked without mercy. Along with taking out endless buckets of rock, the POWs dragged out several corpses.

They got no supper that night, either. Nobody dared say a word. If the Japs kept that up for another few days, they wouldn’t need to worry about escapes from the Kalihi Valley any more. All the POWs here would be dead.

A few months earlier, mistreatment like this might have prompted lots of men to try to escape. No more. Next to nobody had the strength. And the guards would be shooting at their own shadows now. The prisoners went nowhere. The timing was bad.

Just before sunup the next morning, two trucks came up to the camp in the Kalihi Valley from Honolulu below. Jim Peterson and the other prisoners stared in amazement. The trucks themselves were ordinary: U.S. Army vehicles the Japs had commandeered, painting over the white star on each driver’s-side door. But their being here wasn’t ordinary. They were the first trucks Peterson had seen since coming to the punishment camp.

And, instead of getting the prisoners to do the work for them the way they almost always did, the Japs unloaded the trucks themselves. The contents seemed harmless enough: crates with incomprehensible Japanese squiggles on the sides. The guards lugged them over to the mouth of the tunnel. Then they set up another machine-gun position nearby, and posted several riflemen next to the crates, too.

“They treat that shit like it’s the Hawaiian crown jewels,” another prisoner remarked to Peterson.

“How do you know it’s not?” he said. “If their side’s losing, this is a hell of a place to stash ’em.”

He got a lesson in the way rumors worked. By the time the POWs assembled for roll call half an hour later, everybody was convinced the Japs were going to stow the Hawaiian crown jewels in the tunnel. No one had any evidence that that was so, but nobody seemed to need any, either. In nothing flat, a chance comment swelled into one of those things everybody knew.

Another thing everybody knew was that the Japs were going to be double tough on the count this morning. Peterson and the other POWs had only been guessing about the crown jewels. What everybody knew turned out to be dead right this time. No one presumed even to twitch as the guards stalked along the prisoners’ ranks. One luckless fellow who sneezed with a guard right behind him got beaten and kicked till he lay on the ground, all bloody and groaning.

Peterson shuddered to think what would happen if the Japs screwed up the count even though the prisoners were cooperating. For a wonder, the guards didn’t. For what felt like an even bigger wonder, they let the POWs line up for breakfast. As always, it wasn’t much and it wasn’t good. After a day and a half of emptiness and brutal labor, anything at all in Peterson’s belly seemed wonderful. He knew he was still a starving man. But he wasn’t starving quite so fast.

After the prisoners ate, the guards pointed toward the tunnel mouth. “All go! All go!” they shouted, and, “Speedo!”-the English they used for, Make it snappy, Mac! Of course, a clout in the head with a rifle butt or a length of bamboo was as much a part of a universal language as a smile or a caress. Somehow, the poets had never got around to singing the praises of a good, solid wallop.

When the Japs said, “All go!” they weren’t kidding. They routed out the cooks and sent them into the tunnel, too. And they made the healthier prisoners-health being very much a relative term here-carry the men who were too sick to walk but not yet dead into the shaft. “American bomber!” they said. That made Peterson wonder. For one thing, the American attackers had shown exactly no signs of caring about the Kalihi Valley. For another, up till now the Japs had shown exactly zero interest in their prisoners’ safety. No, that wasn’t quite true. The Japs sometimes went out of their way to decrease safety for the POWs. Improving it was another story.

More or less fortified by his more-or-less meal, Peterson attacked the rock face with a pick. Other prisoners scooped up the rock he’d torn loose, loaded it into baskets, and carried it away. Peterson heard gunshots from the direction of the tunnel mouth. He didn’t think much of it-the Japs often got a wild hair up their ass-till a POW came staggering back toward the excavators. “They’re killing us!” he shouted. “They’re shooting us!” Then he fell over. Peterson marveled that he could have come so far so fast shot through the chest.

Work came to a ragged halt. One by one, picks and shovels fell silent. No guards lashed out with clubs or shouted, “Speedo!” and “Isogi!” In fact, no guards seemed to be in the tunnel at all.

When Peterson realized that, ice ran through him. “The Japs don’t have the crown jewels in those boxes!” he shouted. “They’ve got dynamite! They’re going to blow in the tunnel mouth and trap us in here!”

He threw down his pick. The steel head clanked on stone. A moment later, he picked up the tool again. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but he couldn’t get a better one till he knocked a Jap over the head and stole his Arisaka.

“Come on!” he yelled. “They aren’t going to get away with this, God damn them!” He started back up the long, straight shaft the POWs had dug. Nor was he the only one. Everybody who still had the strength stormed up the tunnel toward the tiny circle of light at the end.

The Japs must have known something like that would happen. They’d shifted the machine guns that had protected those crates so they pointed straight down the tunnel. They fired a burst. A few rounds struck home at once. Others viciously ricocheted off ceiling, floor, and tunnel walls before finding a prisoner to wound.

That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was listening to the machine gunners laugh as they squeezed off some more rounds. In their shoes, Peterson would have laughed, too. Why not? They could fire those Nambus till the barrels glowed red, and the poor bastards they were killing couldn’t even shoot back.

“We’ve got to keep going!” he cried. “It’s our necks if we don’t!”

“It’s our necks if we do,” somebody else said, which was just as true.

“I’d rather get shot than buried alive.” Peterson wished he had some better choices, but those seemed to be the only ones on the menu.

He’d had nightmares where he was trying to run somewhere but his feet seemed stuck in quicksand. This was one of those, except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. If he didn’t get to the mouth of the tunnel before the camp guards did whatever they did, he never would.

Their machine gunners kept on shooting down the shaft. They kept on laughing between bursts, too. Then they stopped shooting. Peterson could think of only one reason why they would do that. They must have lit the fuse, and they were all running for cover.

And he was too far away. He knew he was too far away. He tried to force more speed from his poor, abused carcass, but a shuffling shamble was all it would give him. Quicksand, he thought desperately. Quick-

He was one of the leaders of the mob of POWs. He’d got within a hundred yards of the tunnel mouth when the Japanese explosives went up. The next thing he knew, it was black, and untold tons of rock were coming down on him. Oh, good, he thought. At least I’m not bur OSCAR VAN DER KIRK JUMPED when somebody knocked on his door a little before eleven. Susie Higgins jumped higher. She’d seen horror out on the street. Oscar had just heard about it. “Who the hell’s that?” she said, her voice shrill with fear.

“Don’t know.” Oscar heard the fear in his own voice, too. The knock came again, quick and urgent. Two years earlier, whoever it was would have just walked in. Odds were long against the door’s being locked in those days. Now… Now was a different story. Oscar’s fear swelled with each tap. Anybody out after curfew was in trouble with the Japs. Anybody in trouble with the Japs these days was as good as dead. And so was anybody who helped someone in trouble with the Japs.

“Don’t let him in,” Susie whispered.

“I’ve got to,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t let those bastards get their hands on a gooney bird, let alone a man.”

Before Susie could start a fight-and before he could lose his nerve-he threw open the door. “Oscar,” croaked the man in the hallway. He was about Oscar’s height, but only skin and bones draped in rags. His eyes burned feverishly, deep in their sockets. A powerful stench came off him in waves, a stench that said he hadn’t bathed in weeks.

“Who the-?” But Oscar broke off with the question unfinished. “Charlie? Jesus Christ, Charlie, get your ass in here!”

Charlie Kaapu gave him a ghost of the grin he knew. “Then get out of my way.” Numbly, Oscar did. Charlie staggered past him and into the little apartment. If Oscar had ever wanted to see a dictionary illustration of the phrase on your last legs, here it was in front of him. He was so shaken, he didn’t even close the door after Charlie till Susie hissed at him.

She gasped when she got a good look at the hapa-Hawaiian. He wasn’t just four steps from starving to death. Somebody-the Japs, Oscar supposed-had been beating on him with sticks. The welts showed it: on his arms, across his face, and, visible through the holes and tears in his shirt, on his chest and back as well. He was missing some teeth he’d had when the Japs got hold of him.

He sat down on the ratty rug, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him up-and they likely didn’t. “You think I look bad, you ought to see the other poor bastards up in the Kalihi Valley,” he said. “Next to them, I’m Duke goddamn Kahanamoku.”

“Here.” Susie ran to the icebox and pulled out a couple of ripe avocados and a mackerel.

Suddenly, Charlie’s attention focused on her like a searchlight. In the presence of food, he forgot about everything else. Oscar didn’t suppose he could blame him, either. “Let me have those, please,” Charlie said, an unusual restraint in his voice. He sounded like a man holding himself back from leaping on what he wanted.

“I was going to do something with the fish-” Susie said uncertainly.

He shook his head. His hair and scalp were full of scabs, too. “Don’t bother,” he told her. “I’ve eaten fish Jap-style plenty of times. And I don’t much want to wait, you know what I mean?”

Without a word, Susie gave him the mackerel and the alligator pears. Oscar didn’t think he’d ever seen her speechless before, but she was now. Charlie made the avocados and the fish disappear in nothing flat. He ate with a singleminded concentration like nothing Oscar had ever seen. Oscar didn’t try to talk with him till nothing was left but peel and seeds and bones. If he had spoken, he didn’t think Charlie would have answered, or even heard him.

“Oh, Lord, that was fine.” Charlie looked down at his rubbish. He’d even eaten the eyes out of the mackerel’s head. “I do that for days and days at a time, I start to be a man again.”

“Won’t be easy, not till the Americans get here,” Oscar said.

“Yeah.” Charlie Kaapu nodded. “I was hoping they’d be here already-all that shooting we heard down here from up in the valley. But I see it ain’t so. Some crazy Jap motherfucker almost shot me for the fun of it before I got here. ’Scuse me, Susie.”

“It’s okay,” Susie said. “I know about the crazy Jap motherfuckers. I know more than I ever wanted to.” She shuddered.

“What did they do to you, Charlie?” Oscar asked.

“Well, they taught me one thing-I ain’t never gonna screw around with no Jap officer’s special lady friend no more,” Charlie Kaapu said. In spite of himself, Oscar laughed. So did Susie. She clapped her hands, too. Charlie went on, “But you didn’t mean that. They tried to starve me to death. They tried to work me to death. When I didn’t start dying fast enough to suit ’em, they tried to beat me to death, too. The other guys there were POWs who were hard cases. Imagine what I’d look like if I was there three times as long. That’s them.”

“My God,” Susie said after trying to imagine that. “How come they aren’t all dead?”

“Lot of ’em are,” Charlie answered. “More dyin’ every day, too. But a hard case is a hard case, and some of ’em stayed alive just to spite the Japs. This guy named Peterson shoulda been dead months ago, but he was still breathin’ when I got away. One tough son of a bitch, you bet.”

“What the heck did they have you doing in the Kalihi Valley?” Oscar said. “I’ve been up there. It’s nothing but the river and trees, all the way back to the mountains.”

“Don’t I know it!” Charlie said. “What were we doin’? We were digging a tunnel through the mountains to the damn windward coast, that’s what. Digging with picks and shovels and crowbars and baskets, mind. The Japs didn’t give a shit if we ever got there. It was something to work us to death with, that’s all.”

“My God,” Oscar muttered. People had talked about ramming a tunnel through the mountains for years. He supposed they would have got around to it sooner or later. When they did, he supposed they would have used dynamite and jackhammers and all the others tools mankind had invented to make sure jobs like that didn’t take forever.

“Can I have a bath or a shower or something?” Charlie said. “I’m filthy, and I’m lousy, too. I hope you guys don’t get company on account of me.” Oscar hoped the same thing. He automatically started to scratch, then jerked his hand down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Susie doing the same thing. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grim. And Charlie was filthy; the rank smell that came off him filled the apartment.

“Go ahead,” Oscar told him. “I wish I had soap and hot water, that’s all. You can wear some of my clothes when you come out. Toss yours out and I’ll get rid of ’em.”

“Will do,” Charlie said. “We’re about the same size-well, we used to be, anyway. I can’t get over how fat people look.” Oscar and Susie were both skinnier than they had been when Japan took Oahu, and they were better off than most people because Oscar caught so many fish. To a skeleton, though, a skinny man had to look fat. Charlie went into the bathroom, then stuck his head out again. “What was all the shooting about a couple of nights ago? That’s why I thought the Army would be back here.”

“They cleaned out the prison camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. They rescued a bunch of guys who looked just like you. He didn’t say that. Except by not screwing around with women he should have left alone, Charlie couldn’t help the way he looked. Oscar added, “I guess they were afraid the Japs would start killing people if they just left ’em there.”

“Jeez, I believe that,” Charlie said. “I was hoping I could take soldiers back to Kalihi Valley. God knows what’s gonna happen to my buddies now.”

He closed the door again. Water started to run. In a low voice, Oscar said, “He’s gotta stay here for a while, babe. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else we can do.”

Susie waved the words aside. “It’s okay. You’re right. We can’t do anything else. My God! Did you see him? He looks like a photo in Life or National Geographic where they’re talking about famine in India or China or somewhere like that.” Now she did scratch her head. She smiled sheepishly, but said, “For heaven’s sake, throw his clothes somewhere far, far away. I’m going to imagine I’m itching for the next week, whether I really am or not.”

“Yeah, I know.” Oscar got a flowered shirt and a pair of pants out of the closet and tossed them into the bathroom. He didn’t have a belt that Charlie could use to hold up the pants; none of the ones he owned had enough holes. But a length of rope would keep his pal decent.

He glanced over at Susie. How… sympathetic would she feel if Charlie stayed here all the time? How would she show her sympathy? Like that ? Oscar shrugged a mental shrug. If she did, then she did, that was all. And if she did, didn’t that tell him she wasn’t the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? When Charlie got out of the tub, he threw his old clothes out from behind the door. He emerged a couple of minutes later, much cleaner. Maybe because he was cleaner, maybe because of the way Oscar’s shirt and pants hung on him, he looked even scrawnier than he had before.

Oscar picked up Charlie’s reeking rags with thumb and forefinger, like a fussy maiden lady. He didn’t care how he looked. If he’d had tongs, he would have used those. He took the clothes out to the front door of the building, poked his head outside to make sure no Japs spotted him, and threw everything into the gutter. He frantically wiped his hand against his own trouser leg as he went back to his apartment.

Charlie was telling Susie what things were like in the Kalihi Valley. She hung on his every word. Well, Charlie could tell stories with anybody this side of Will Rogers. Oscar wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t in Charlie’s league. He shrugged to himself again. He’d see what happened, that was all. Whatever it was, he was glad Charlie had got out of the Kalihi Valley in one piece.

JANE ARMITAGE HAD MADE A LAIR OF SORTS for herself in the Wahiawa experimental planting station. A stream ran through it, so she had water. Some of the trees had fruit on them, and gave her a little something to eat. Zebra doves weren’t nearly so common as they had been before the Japs invaded, but the little blue-faced birds were still around. Jane didn’t dare make a fire. If you got hungry enough, you could eat them raw. Jane wouldn’t have believed it, but it was true. And she was hungry enough.

She couldn’t have had a simpler plan: stay out of sight and try not to die till the Americans took Wahiawa. No one seemed to have come after her or the other comfort women who’d escaped from the blasted brothel. Jane knew exactly what that meant: the Japs had more important things to worry about. They were getting screwed now instead of doing the screwing. And they had it coming to them, too.

Every so often, other people came into the station to gather fruit. Jane hid from them like an animal, cowering in the thick bushes by the stream. That was partly because she feared they might betray her to the occupiers. And it was partly because, after what the Japanese had made her do, she felt unclean. Surely anyone who knew her, anyone who knew what she’d had to do, would think she was unclean, too. From third-grade teacher to whore in one easy step…

The front was getting close to Wahiawa, but not fast enough to suit her. The Japs made a stand in front of the town. They would, the bastards, Jane thought as she got hungrier. Even though they didn’t know she was here, they kept on trying to ruin her life.

They’d done it, all right. Here she was, not quite thirty, and she hoped to heaven she never saw, never touched, and most especially never tasted another cock as long as she lived. Maybe one day she’d change her mind. She laughed at that. Yeah-when I get to be ninety. Or maybe ninety-five.

There were times when she wouldn’t have bet she could make it to her thirtieth birthday, let alone to ninety-five. Except by standing and fighting, the Japs didn’t have anything to do with that. American shells had been falling on Wahiawa ever since the brothel got hit. Sometimes they fell in or near the planting station. Those fearsome crashes uprooted trees and sent shrapnel snarling through the leaves and the undergrowth. None of it hit Jane, but some came scarily close.

She’d been at the station four or five days when machine-gun bullets began snapping past overhead-because the gardens followed the course of the stream, most of the land here was lower than the surrounding countryside. Fletch had told her that when you could hear a bullet snap, it came closer than you wanted it to. She thought these bullets were wonderful. They meant the Americans were almost as close as she wanted them to be.

Then Japanese soldiers started falling back through the station. Jane hid herself as deep among the bushes as she could. She feared they would fight from the cover the exotic plants offered. The low ground, though, evidently counted for more than that. Some of the Japs paused to fill their water bottles in the stream. Then they trotted south to make a stand somewhere else.

Before long, their bullets cracked by above her head as they harassed the oncoming Americans. She lay down behind a fallen log and hoped it would protect her. Somebody set up a machine gun on the northern lip of the little valley. Its insane hammering made her fillings ache. She heard shouts that didn’t sound as if they were in Japanese, and then boots padding along the trails tourists had taken to see the elephant apple and the candle tree.

Ever so cautiously, she raised her head. For a moment, fresh fear shook her. Were these men Americans? They were white men, and they spoke English, but she’d never seen those green uniforms before. The helmets didn’t look anything like what Fletch had laughingly called his tin hat, either.

She had to nerve herself to speak. “Hello?” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper.

With frightening speed, two rifles swung to cover her. “The fuck?” one of the apparitions in green said.

“Son of a bitch! It’s a broad,” the other one said. “Come on out of there, lady. We goddamn near drilled you.”

“Goddamn near,” the first one agreed. “What the hell you doin’ here, anyways?”

“Hiding,” she answered. To her, it was the most obvious thing in the world. These-warriors-grinned as if she’d made a joke. “Who are you people, anyway?” she asked.

“Corporal Petrocelli, ma’am,” one of them said, at the same time as the other answered, “Private Schumacher, ma’am.” Together, they added, “United States Army.”

The Army didn’t wear uniforms like theirs. No-it hadn’t worn uniforms like theirs. There’d been some changes made. Schumacher (who was shorter and darker than Petrocelli, which only went to show you) asked, “Any Japs around?”

Jane pointed south. “They went thataway,” she said, as if she had a bit part in a B Western. “I hope you kill ’em all.”

“That’s what we’re here for, ma’am,” Corporal Petrocelli said. He looked her up and down, not like a man eyeing a woman (thank God!) but more like an engineer wondering how long a badly battered piece of machinery could keep running. Taking a couple of small cans out of a pouch on his belt, he handed them to her. “Here you go. Reckon you need these worse’n we do.” Thus prodded, Private Schumacher coughed up some rations, too.

“Thank you,” she whispered, on the edge of tears. Then she proved she did have a little common sense left: she asked, “How am I going to open these?”

“Here-try this.” Schumacher gave her a knife-no, a bayonet, longer and slimmer than the one on his rifle. It looked much too deadly for such a mundane job, but it would probably work. He said, “Took it off a dead Jap a couple days ago. Was gonna keep it for a souvenir, but there’s more. You can get some use out of it.”

“Toadsticker like that’ll scrag anybody who gets out of line, too,” Petrocelli said.

If I’d had it back in the brothel, if I’d stuck every man that touched me… Jane grimaced. If I’d done that, I’d’ve killed so many, the Army would probably be in Honolulu by now.

Not far away, somebody shouted. Jane had no idea what he said. It made sense to the soldiers, though. They trotted away. Schumacher looked back over his shoulder and waved. Then they were gone.

And most of Wahiawa had to be in American hands, and Jane had a weapon and food-my God, real food! She went back into her refuge under the bushes and behind the log. Maybe she’d come out after a while, and maybe she wouldn’t. In the meantime… She used the bayonet to open a can. It was roast-beef hash. She hadn’t eaten beef in going on two years. She thought it was the most wonderful thing she’d ever tasted, which only proved how long she’d gone without.