End of the Beginning

XIII

THE AMERICANS WERE GOING TO OVERRUN WHEELER FIELD. LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO could see as much. The Japanese on the ground were doing everything they could to hold back the enemy. They’d taken gruesome casualties, and the Yankees still moved forward. The Americans had more and better tanks than the Japanese. They had more artillery, plus Navy vessels bombarding Oahu. And they had complete control of the air.

Shindo knew how important that was. He’d enjoyed it during the Japanese conquest of Hawaii. Having American fighters and bombers overhead from dawn to dusk was much less enjoyable than being up there himself.

Now he had the chance to get up there again. The groundcrew men at Wheeler Field had cannibalized Zeros and Hayabusas for their weapons. They’d cannibalized half a dozen wrecked fighters to put together one that would-they hoped-fly. Shindo hadn’t even had to pull strings to get to take it up against the Americans. He was, as far as he knew, the last pilot at the field alive and unwounded.

There was an American movie about a man made from parts of other men. The fighter Shindo would fly against the Americans was a lot like that. Most of it came from Zeros, with occasional pieces from Hayabusas. It was a deathtrap. He knew as much. Under normal conditions, he wouldn’t have walked past it, let alone got into the cockpit. Now… The whole Japanese garrison on Oahu would die. How was the only thing that mattered. Shindo wanted to die hitting back at the enemy, hurting the round-eyed barbarians who’d dared strike against his divinely ruled kingdom.

Before he got into the Frankenstein fighter, a groundcrew man handed him a bottle of the local not-quite-gin. He wouldn’t have drunk before an ordinary mission. What difference did it make now? None he could see. He’d have to be lucky to make a proper attack run. He’d need a miracle, and not such a minor one, to come back.

“Good luck. Hit them hard,” the groundcrew man said as Shindo handed back the bottle. “Banzai! for the Emperor!”

“Banzai!” Shindo echoed. He climbed up into the cockpit, closed it, and dogged it shut. The engine fired up the first try. Shindo took that for a good omen. He’d been desperately short of them lately. So had all the Japanese on Oahu.

One more good omen would be taking off without blowing up. He had a hundred-kilo bomb slung under the plane. What passed for a runway was only enough grass to get him off the ground… he hoped. If there wasn’t quite enough grass or if a wheel bumped down into a hole the grass hid-his mission would be shorter than he expected.

Despite the risks, he wished the bomb were bigger. The fighter could carry 250 kilos without any trouble, but the armorers hadn’t been able to find one that size. He shrugged and adjusted the safety harness. Then he released the brakes. The plane rolled forward. He gave it more throttle. When he neared the end of the grass, he pulled back on the stick. The Zero’s nose came up. He couldn’t have asked for a smoother takeoff.

He got a panoramic view of the fighting as he climbed. Wahiawa was gone, lost. So were the Schofield Barracks, just north of Wheeler Field. If the mechanics had waited much longer to get busy with their wrenches and pliers and rivet guns, they wouldn’t have been able to do this.

Below him, Wildcats and the new American fighters dove to shoot up a Japanese ground position. Machine-gun fire rose to meet them, but no real antiaircraft guns opened up. None of the American planes paid any attention to Shindo. If they noticed him at all, they assumed he was one of them. A Zero’s size and shape were a little like a Wildcat’s, but only a little. The biggest help he had was the Yankees’ assumption that no more Japanese aircraft could fly. If he couldn’t be Japanese, he had to be American. Logical, wasn’t it? But logic was only as good as its assumptions. Since those were wrong…

He flew north, toward the waiting American fleet. A flight of southbound planes waggled their wings at him. Maybe they thought he was in trouble. He politely waggled back, as if to say everything was fine. They flew on. So did he. He smiled a thin smile. As he had in air battles past, he could follow their vector back to the carriers that had launched them. “Domo arigato,” he murmured, doubting they would be glad to have his thanks.

The rest of the U.S. task force-destroyers, cruisers, and battleships-lay close inshore, so their big guns could shell the Japanese. They went at it methodically. Why not? No one could hit back at them. Shindo didn’t intend to. These ships, however impressive (and they put the biggest Japanese fleet to shame), weren’t the ones that really mattered. He wanted the carriers.

They steamed farther offshore, to make sure nothing from Oahu could reach them. Lieutenant Shindo smiled again. Something from Oahu was heading their way anyhow.

There they were! They had destroyers around them to protect against submarines and to deliver antiaircraft fire. They must have long since picked him up on radar. Even if they had, though, they didn’t think he was hostile.

Then he muttered, “Zakennayo!” The carriers still had a combat air patrol overhead. Here came a Wildcat to look him over. Just in case, the pilot was bound to be thinking. Shindo could survive a lot of things, but not close visual inspection. He knew the moment when the enemy flier realized what he was. The Wildcat suddenly sped up and started jinking.

The American thought he could win a dogfight. A lot of Wildcat pilots made the mistake against a Zero. They hardly ever made it more than once. This Yankee wouldn’t. Shindo turned inside him, got behind him, shot him up, and sent him spinning down toward the Pacific.

But the Wildcat pilot must have radioed his buddies. They all swarmed toward Shindo. He’d just run out of leisure. Things would happen in a hurry now. He dove toward the closest carrier. The Americans still didn’t space them out as widely as they should have. If the Japanese could have organized a real attack, they might have mauled this task force. As things were, Shindo could only do his best.

Antiaircraft guns opened up on him as he dove. The ships down below had finally figured out he wasn’t one of theirs. The closest carrier wasn’t a big one. He didn’t care. If he could hit it, he would.

He pulled the bomb-release lever. The bomb fell free. It exploded on the flight deck. Shell fragments or machine-gun bullets slammed into the Zero as it zoomed away. The engine coughed. Smoke trailed from the plane.

“Karma,” Shindo said. Sure enough, this was a one-way mission. He would have been angrier and more disappointed if he’d expected anything else.

He flew on toward the next nearest carrier, hoping his plane wouldn’t go into the drink before he got there. A Wildcat dove on him. He did a snap roll and got away. That changed his direction. There was another carrier, not far ahead. It was landing planes, and had lots of them on the flight deck. Perfect.

He gained a little altitude, then dove as if landing himself. Inside the cockpit, he braced himself for the impact, not that that would do any good. “ Banzai!” he shouted as the flight deck swelled below him.

“Ban-”

JOE CROSETTI RAN FOR THE BUNKER HILL’S island after scrambling out of his Hellcat. He wondered why some nearby ships were firing AA like it was going out of style. He wouldn’t have believed the Japs had any planes left.

What he believed didn’t matter worth a damn. He got his nose rubbed in that a moment later. A sailor pointed to starboard and screamed, “Holy fucking shit, it’s a Jap!”

And it was. The Zero was on fire. It skimmed low over the surface of the Pacific, straight for the Bunker Hill. Joe stared in helpless fascination. What the hell was that pilot thinking? He couldn’t be crazy enough to try to land on an American carrier, could he? He’d get shot to pieces before he could open the cockpit. And even if that weren’t so, he wasn’t lined up anyway.

He rose a little, then dove for the deck. Crosetti couldn’t believe he was going to crash his plane on purpose till he did it. The Zero went up in a fireball. So did half a dozen Hellcats.

“Fire!” Joe yelled. “Fire on the flight deck!”

A flightcrew man came running out of the inferno. His clothes were on fire-he might have been on fire, too. He screamed like a damned soul with devils sticking pitchforks into him.

“Down!” Joe shouted. “Down and roll!” That was what everybody got trained to do. Remembering the training when things hit the fan wasn’t so easy. Joe was still in his flight suit, with the heavy leather jacket. He wasn’t a big guy, but he dashed across the deck, tackled the flightcrew man, lay atop him and beat at the flames with his gloved fists. When most of the fire was out, somebody turned a hose on them for a few seconds. The man behind the hose had the sense to turn the nozzle to mist, not stream. Otherwise, the high-pressure water might have blasted them off the flight deck and into the drink.

Medics came up and hustled the burned man below. “How about you, buddy?” one of them asked Joe.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he answered dazedly. Gloves or not, he’d burned his hands. He had a burn on one cheek, too-he could feel it. But he was in one piece, nothing like the poor bastard who’d come out of that inferno.

The medic slapped ointment onto his cheek. It stung, then soothed. “You did good,” the guy said, then hustled away to look for more casualties.

He wouldn’t have to look far. That Jap had been a bastard, but a brave bastard. He’d done as much to the Bunker Hill as he could. Planes were still burning despite the ocean water the hoses poured on them. Burning gasoline and oil floated on top of the water, and had to be drowned or washed over the side.

If that Zero smashed down half a minute earlier… Joe shuddered. He would have been right in the middle of the fireball.

Now all he could do was help hang on to a hose that tried to defeat the flames. His burned hands screamed at him. He ignored them. The burns weren’t all that bad, and he didn’t think he was making them worse. He’d worry about it later any which way.

“Did you see that fucker?” asked the petty officer behind him. “You see the way he crashed that goddamn plane?”

“I sure did,” Joe answered. The CPO who held the nozzle doused a burning Hellcat that might have been his. “If he’d done it a little earlier, he would have got me.” There. He’d said it. The sky didn’t fall. But he didn’t think he would ever have the feeling that nothing could happen to him, not any more. Now he was just another-what had some wise guy called it? — another fugitive from the law of averages, that was it.

“He knew he was screwed, so he screwed us, too,” the petty officer said. “How the hell do you stop a guy who already knows he’s gonna buy a plot?”

“We didn’t,” Joe said.

“No shit!” the petty officer agreed. “Can you imagine what it would be like if a hundred o’ them Jap bastards tried to crash their planes into carriers and battlewagons all at once? They could fuck up the whole goddamn U.S. Navy.”

Joe thought about it. The idea was scary, but only for a moment. He shook his head. “Never happen, buddy. No way in hell. Where you gonna find a hundred guys crazy enough to kill themselves like it was close-order drill? Not even the Nips are that nuts.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” the petty officer said after some thought of his own. “You’d have to be Asiatic to do somethin’ like that, and not even the Japs are Asiatic that kind of way.” He pointed to an escort carrier off to starboard. A column of smoke rose from that ship, too. “Bastard must have put a bomb into her-either that or another plane got her.”

“Bomb, I think,” Joe said. “You can stick a bomb under just about any fighter. There was just the one plane, wasn’t there?”

“Well, I thought so,” the rating answered. “Now I ain’t so sure. God, what a fucking mess this turned out to be.”

He had that straight. Damage control was on the ball. They’d kept the fire from spreading, and now they just about had it out. But Bunker Hill’s flight deck was still a mess. They would have to shove six or eight planes over the side. They would have to repair the planking on the flight deck, too; some of it had caught fire. The air stank of gasoline and motor oil, of burnt paint and burnt rubber and burnt wood. And there was one more odor, too, one that made spit flood into Joe’s mouth before he realized what caused it, and then made him want to be sick. The smell of burnt meat would never be the same for him again.

PLATOON SERGEANT LES DILLON CROUCHED in a shell hole just north of the Wheeler Field runways. The Japs had machine-gun nests on the other side of those battered cement strips. Before long, somebody who didn’t have to do it was going to order the Marines to cross that bare ground. And they would, too, or die trying. Les didn’t want to be one of the poor bastards who died trying.

He heard the sweetest sound in the world: radial engines up in the air screaming their heads off. Hellcats strafed the Jap positions. He watched those.50-caliber rounds chew up the grass over there. Then he heard different engines: Louis Armstrong instead of Benny Goodman. The Dauntlesses put bombs down right on the money and then roared away to get more ordnance and do it again.

Crossing the killing ground still wouldn’t be easy. Any Jap who wasn’t dead or maimed would be up and shooting the minute the Marines came out of their holes. Even the ones who were maimed would hang on to a rifle or a grenade. They weren’t about to let you take them alive. That was fine with Les Dillon. He didn’t want to take them alive anyhow.

A whistle sounded. Les grimaced. This was it-the moment he hadn’t been waiting for. “Up, you bastards!” Captain Bradford yelled. “Are we Marines or not?”

That flicked the men’s pride. The company commander had to know it would. Les sprang up and ran forward. He hunched over as low as he could and dodged from side to side. All of that did more good than snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away, but not a whole hell of a lot.

And the planes hadn’t cleaned out all the Japs. He’d figured they wouldn’t. Marines fell. Others flopped down to fire back. An ice-blue tracer snapped past Dillon’s head. His first thought was of a firefly on benzedrine. His next was that the round had come much too close to punching his ticket. He should have thought that first, but your mind did crazy things sometimes.

Then he was in among the Japs. Some of them were real infantrymen; others, by their clothes, groundcrew for airplanes. They all fought like madmen; the next Jap with any quit in him that Les saw would be the first. But the Marines had no quit in them, either. More of them rushed up to help their buddies. The Japanese didn’t get much in the way of reinforcements; Les had the feeling the ones fighting here were the last Japs standing for quite a ways.

And then they weren’t standing any more. The Marines still on their feet finished off any of the enemy who still twitched. Word about the Opana POW massacre had got out. The Marines hadn’t been any more inclined to take prisoners than the Japs were to be captured even before it did. Now… Maybe they’d follow a direct order to try to capture some enemy soldiers for interrogation. Then again, maybe not. Had the Japs won the fight, Les knew a bullet through the head was the best he could hope for. Things went downhill from there, and in a hurry, too.

Three Sherman tanks rumbled and snorted across the ruined runway. Les eyed them with a mixture of appreciation and disgust. He was glad to see them-he was always glad to see tanks, because they took so much pressure off the foot soldiers-but he would have been gladder if they’d shown up an hour earlier. They could have made taking this position a hell of a lot easier.

He wasn’t the only one with that feeling, either. “Nice of you to join us, girls,” a Marine lisped, giving the tankers a limp-wristed wave.

“They didn’t want to get their hair mussed,” another grimy, unshaven leatherneck added, even more swishily than the first one. Les started to giggle. He didn’t know why, but listening to tough guys acting like a bunch of fruits always broke him up. Some fairies got into the Marines. When they were found out, they left the Corps a lot faster than they’d joined it. He’d seen that happen a few times, in China and back in the States. Some of the men who got bounced were losers for other reasons, too. Others would have made pretty fair Marines if they weren’t queer.

He laughed again, on a different note. For all he knew, there was a faggot or two in the company now. As long as a man didn’t advertise it-some did-how were you supposed to know?

Even while such thoughts occurred to him, he got down in a hole some Jap didn’t need any more. You didn’t want to be on your feet and upright when the Japs could start taking potshots at you any second. The tank crewmen, meanwhile, yelled insults back at the Marines who fought on foot. One bow gunner wanted to jump out of his tank and kick ass. The driver on that tank restrained him. He was probably lucky: ground pounders were likely to be in better shape and meaner than guys who had armor plate to hold the war at bay.

“Enough!” Les yelled. “Everybody-enough! We’ve got Japs to kill. You want to beat on each other, wait till we take Honolulu.”

That name had enough magic to calm people down. Marines who’d been to Hawaii before thought of Hotel Street. Those who hadn’t didn’t, but what they had in mind was something like Hotel Street. Honolulu was the Holy Grail. There were all sorts of incentives for throwing out the Japs, booze and pussy not the smallest among them.

“Where do we go now, sir?” someone asked Captain Bradford.

“I don’t have more orders yet,” the company commander answered. “We did this. Now we wait and see what happens next.” The men knew what to do about that. They settled themselves in the entrenchments they’d just won. Here and there, they heaved Japanese corpses out of them. They lit cigarettes. Some of them opened K-ration cans. As long as they weren’t going anywhere right away, they’d make themselves as comfortable as they could. Hurry up and wait was supposed to be an Army joke, but the Marines lived by it, too.

Dutch Wenzel came up to cadge a Camel from Les. “They don’t put cigars in the K-rats,” Wenzel said mournfully. “You still alive? Hadn’t seen you for a while, so I started to wonder.”

“Well, I was the last time I looked,” Dillon answered. “I wondered about you, too. Don’t see somebody for a coupla hours, you figure maybe he stopped one with his chest.”

“These Japs…” Wenzel bent close for a light, sucked in smoke, and held it as long as he could. Les wondered if he was going to finish that after he finally blew it out. Then he decided it didn’t matter.

Among the Marines, that was practically a complete sentence all by itself. Dutch exhaled a gray cloud and said, “You know, you can get damn near anything for cigarettes from the people here. They been without since they smoked the last of what they had. They go down on their knees to thank you if you give some away.”

“Yeah?” Les leered. “You get one of these gals to go down on her knees for you? I heard of being hung like a horse, but I never heard of being hung like a Camel.”

Wenzel made a horrible face, but he said, “I bet you could get sucked off for cigarettes, no shit. Tell you something-I think I’d rather get blown than lay most of these women. They’re so goddamn scrawny, it’d be like laying a ladder.”

Les nodded. All the civilians on Oahu were skinny. Even the Japs were skinny, and they’d had better rations than the locals. Just the same… “You’ve heard about the prisoners at that Opana place, and the ones our guys rescued down by Honolulu? Those poor mothers weren’t just skinny. They were fucking starving to death for real. Goddamn Japs have a lot to answer for.”

“Better believe it.” Dutch smoked the cigarette down to a butt. Then he took an alligator clip out of his pocket and went on smoking it even after it got too small to hold between his fingers. That was a good idea. Les reminded himself to scrounge his own clip off a radioman or a field-telephone operator or somebody else who messed around with wires. Wenzel went on, “There was supposed to be another camp somewhere, too, one where the Japs got even with guys who got their asses in a sling at the regular places. Scuttlebutt is, that one made the others look like a rest cure.”

“I heard something like that, too,” Les said. “You keep hoping that crap isn’t so. And then you find out it is, and that it’s worse than anybody said it was, on account of nobody would’ve believed it if they tried to say how bad it really was.”

Wenzel eyed the closest Japanese corpse. The Jap had taken one in the neck and one in the face. Either would have finished him. The one in the face had gone out through the back of his head and blown out most of his brains. Flies crawled over the blood-soaked grayish spatters. “He got it quick,” Dutch observed. “After what they did at Opana, I’d like to roast ’em all over a slow fire. Not half of what they oughta get, either.”

“Gonna be that kind of war, all right,” Les agreed mournfully. “Back in 1918, the Germans fought hard, but they fought pretty clean. So did we, even if”-he chuckled reminiscently-“their machine gunners had a lot of trouble surrendering. Those bastards thought they could bang away till you were right on top of ’em and then put up their hands. They had more accidents… But it’s all gonna be like that here, and we’re just starting out. Still a long way to Tokyo. Fuck, it’s still a long way to Midway.”

“Sir?” the radioman called to Captain Bradford.

The company commander listened and talked for a little while. Then he said, “Well, boys, we’ve got our orders now.” He waited for the expectant mutter to die away, then went on, “We’re going to do a left wheel and head for Honolulu with the rest of the guys moving south.”

“What the fuck?” Les muttered. He’d figured they would keep driving straight south. He said, “Sir, what about Pearl City and Pearl Harbor?”

“They’ll be taken care of, Sergeant, I promise,” Bradford said. “Only difference is, we won’t be the guys who do it.”

“Right,” Les said. Somebody somewhere way the hell up the chain of command had had himself a brainstorm. Whether it would end up being the good kind or the other kind-well, everybody would have to wait and see how that turned out. “Honolulu.” Dillon tasted the word. He’d been thinking about Hotel Street not long before. He wondered what was left of it. If the damn Nips didn’t shoot him first, he’d find out.

MINORU GENDA WAITED IN A HOTEL ROOM on Hotel Street. He’d brought his bicycle upstairs with him to the bare little cubicle. If he left it on the street, even chained to a lamppost, it would be gone by the time he came down. He’d paid too much for the room. He’d paid too much for the bottle of island gin he’d brought here, too. He shrugged. What did he have to do with his money now but spend it?

A knock on the door. He jumped up from the bed-the only furniture in the room but for a battered chest of drawers. Hotels on Hotel Street had only one thing in mind.

He opened the door. Queen Cynthia Laanui stood in the hallway. Probably the most recognizable woman in Hawaii, she’d taken pains not to be recognized. Her red hair was tucked up under a straw hat. Enormous sunglasses helped hide her face. She’d brought her bicycle upstairs, too. A cramped room with two bicycles in it amused Genda. Small things still could. Few big ones were amusing any more.

Queen Cynthia walked the bicycle in when Genda stood aside. He closed the door behind her and locked it. Then he took her in his arms. They kissed greedily. When they broke apart, she said, “It’s not going to work, is it?” She didn’t sound bitter-only very tired.

“No.” Genda wished he could lie to her. Back at Pearl Harbor, Japanese officers were still busy lying to one another. They kept on believing that if this went right, and if that went right, and if they caught the Americans napping here, they might still save Oahu. American officers must have danced that dance of delusion at the end of 1941 and the start of 1942. Before long, defeat stared them in the face even so. And it would stare the Japanese in the face, too. Genda went on, “We fight hard. We are brave. But, so sorry, we cannot win. The enemy is too strong.”

Saying something like that brought vast relief. His colleagues might have arrested him for telling the truth. If you didn’t look at something, they were convinced, it would go away. But being convinced didn’t make it true.

“What are we going to do, then?” Cynthia asked. “What can we do?”

What did we mean here? The Empire of Japan and the soon to be extinguished Kingdom of Hawaii? King Stanley and herself? Genda and herself? All of those at once? That last was Genda’s guess. He said, “We all do the best we can.” His answer was as ambiguous as her question.

She spotted the bottle on the chest of drawers. Two lithe strides took her to it. She yanked out the cork, swigged, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s nasty,” she said, coughing, and then drank again.

Genda took a pull, too. It was every bit as bad as Cynthia said it was. But the only thing worse than rotgut liquor was no liquor at all. “You have courage, not to try to get away,” he said.

Her laugh was all razors and barbed wire. “Where would I go? How would I get there? Wherever it is, somebody would know my face. Your propaganda people made sure of that. I’m on postage stamps, for crying out loud. And pretty soon I’ll be on post-office walls, too.” Seeing that that meant nothing to Genda, she explained, “That’s where we put posters of wanted criminals.”

He kissed her again. “You are not a criminal to me, but you are wanted.” Paying compliments in English wasn’t easy for him. He hoped that one came out right.

It must have, because she turned red. But she sounded no happier as she answered, “Yeah, and that only makes me a bigger villain to the USA. Like being Queen of Hawaii wasn’t bad enough, I fell for a Japanese officer. They won’t know whether to shoot me or hang me.”

She was probably right. No, she was bound to be right. If the Americans came back, they would have debts to pay.

He wished he could offer to take her to Japan. She deserved to escape such a fate. He didn’t think the two of them would last long as a couple once she got back to the home islands. King Stanley would have to come, too. Genda’s liaison with a round-eyed woman would draw much more notice, and much more censorious notice, in Japan than it did in this easygoing place. The King and Queen of Hawaii would undoubtedly go on being used for propaganda purposes: brave heads of a government in exile. Genda could see it all now.

What he couldn’t see was how to get Queen Cynthia-yes, and King Stanley-away from Oahu. If he’d known how to do that, he might have had some notion of how to get away himself. But no Japanese planes had been seen in these parts since the American fleet’s fighters and bombers smashed the fleet and then the land-based aircraft. An H8K flying boat might be able to sneak into Pearl Harbor. But the odds were long. As the Americans had shown by their landing at the Kapiolani Park POW camp, they controlled the sea and air all around Oahu, and their grip tightened by the day.

Genda didn’t think Japan could scrape together enough carriers and other ships to challenge this armada, even if she abandoned the rest of the war-which she couldn’t very well do. Everything Admiral Yamamoto had said about what the United States could do if roused was coming true. From Honolulu, though, Tokyo was more than 6,000 kilometers away. Even now, Hawaii shielded Japan.

Maybe a submarine could sneak in and out. None had come in, though. Genda didn’t know if any had tried. Which would be worse, knowing some had failed or knowing his superiors far to the west hadn’t dared risk any? One more question he hadn’t asked himself.

“When… things go wrong, Japanese people often kill themselves, don’t they?” By the way Queen Cynthia asked the question, she knew the answer.

“Yes, we do that.” Minoru Genda nodded. He didn’t go into details about seppuku. Women weren’t expected to disembowel themselves anyway, only to slit their throats. After the nod, he shook his head, trying to shove such unpleasant, unwelcome thoughts aside. It wasn’t the first time he’d had them. He said, “Too soon to worry about such things. Much too soon.” He sipped from the bottle on the dresser. If he drank enough of that, he wouldn’t worry about anything for a while.

Cynthia also drank. But her voice was completely sober. “Too soon to worry about it, yes. Much too soon? I don’t think so.”

Since Genda didn’t really think it was much too soon, either, he didn’t try to argue with her. He asked, “How is his Majesty?”

“He didn’t think… this would happen when he let you put the crown on his head,” she answered. Genda already knew that. She went on, “It’s funny. He’s at least hapa-haole himself, but he really is angry with haoles for what they’ve done to Hawaiians. That’s genuine. A lot of him is bluff and bluster and bullshit”-maybe she felt the almost-gin after all-“but that’s for real.” She looked down at her ring and flushed again. “Well, he isn’t angry at all the haoles.”

“No one could be-can be? — could be angry at you,” Genda said.

“That’s sweet. You’re sweet.” Now Cynthia Laanui kissed him. A long time ago, someone had told him that the person who started a kiss was the one who needed it more. By the desperate way Cynthia clung to him, that held a lot of truth. When they separated, she said, “You don’t know me very well. You can’t know me very well, if you tell me something like that. Don’t get me wrong-I like it. But I know it’s silly, too.”

“I don’t think so.” Genda was sure she was right, but he didn’t care. Right now, they had nothing left but each other, and they might not have each other long, either. He gathered himself, picked her up, and carried her to the bed. He was a small man, two or three centimeters shorter than she was, but he was strong.

Their lovemaking had always had the sweetness of stolen fruit. Now, every time they touched, they knew it might be the last. The way things were these days, each joining might be the last thing they ever did. For him, and evidently for her, too, that only made the flame burn hotter.

Afterwards, a pink flush mottling the pale skin between her breasts, she said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”

With the air of a successful stage magician, Genda pulled a pack of Chesterfields from a trouser pocket.

“Here,” he said.

Cynthia squealed and kissed him. “My God, my God, my God!” she said. “Where on earth did you get these? Where?” To hear her talk, the tobacco drought might have been worldwide, not confined to Hawaii.

Genda made a small ceremony of lighting one for her and one for himself. “A friend gave them to me,” he said, and let it go at that. The friend had got them from another friend, who’d got them from a dead U.S. Marine. That might be more than Cynthia wanted to hear.

She coughed when she first inhaled. Genda had done the same thing. They’d gone without tobacco so long, it was as if they’d never smoked at all. But the second puff made her smile. “Jesus, that’s good!”

she said, and then, after a momentary pause, “Can I have a few to take back to Stanley? I’m sorry. I know it’s greedy. But if I give him cigarettes, he won’t wonder why I went out.”

“Okay,” Genda said. The slang made Cynthia smile. Genda didn’t begrudge her five Chesterfields… very much. He knew she was right. If she gave the king those, he’d think she’d left Iolani Palace to get her hands on them. That she’d got them from her lover wouldn’t cross his mind-or Genda hoped it wouldn’t.

She smoked her cigarette down to the tiniest of butts, then stared sorrowfully at the scrap of tobacco that remained. “I feel like chewing this like a hillbilly,” she said.

Although Genda knew about snuff, chewing tobacco had never caught on in Japan. The idea made him queasy-or maybe it was just the Chesterfield.

The Queen of Hawaii got out of bed and started dressing. “I’d better go back now,” she said. As she had on the way from the palace to Hotel Street, she tucked her hair up under her hat and put on the sunglasses.

“We will do everything we can,” Genda said. Cynthia Laanui nodded. And after they’d done that… Neither one wanted to dwell on what might happen then. She nodded one more time, then walked the bicycle out the door without a backward glance.

Genda waited five minutes before he dressed so they wouldn’t be seen leaving together. He wrestled his own bicycle down the stairs and started back to Pearl Harbor. He hadn’t gone far before he realized the great naval center was under attack. Planes roared above it: fighters strafing and dive bombers stooping on targets to drop their bombs. Japanese antiaircraft guns-and some captured from the Americans at the surrender-filled the sky with puffs of black smoke.

Naval guns were also firing on Pearl Harbor, from ranges beyond the reach of shore-based artillery. Genda wished Japan hadn’t had to wreck the great coast-defense guns the USA had installed along the southern coast of Oahu. They would have taught those ships respect. But they could have harmed the Japanese Navy, and so Aichi dive bombers with armor-piercing bombs had blown up the casements in which they lurked.

Were those landing craft in the water? Whatever they were, they looked a lot more sophisticated than the Daihatsu barges on which Japan relied. Genda pedaled harder. He’d had permission to leave his station, but he wanted to be there to defend the harbor as long as he could. As if one man will make any difference now, he thought bitterly. But his legs pumped up and down all the same.

THE BUNKER HILL WAS A GOING CONCERN AGAIN, flight deck repaired, incinerated planes shoved into the drink, new Hellcats and Dauntlesses taken aboard. Joe Crosetti missed the fighter that had gone up in flames, but the new one would do the job just fine. He missed the men lost when that Jap crashed his Zero into the carrier far more. You couldn’t replace men the way you could airplanes.

Not far away, the Copahee was still under repair. The escort carrier had taken a bomb from that same Jap. The guy was a son of a bitch, yeah, but he’d done a hell of a piece of work there.

Sailors on the baby flattop took off their caps and waved to Joe as he and his buddies from the Bunker Hill flew over them, bound for Oahu. He waggled his wings to return the compliment. By rights, the sailors could have been pissed off. How had that Jap got through in spite of radar and the combat air patrol overhead?

Joe feared he knew the answer. The Americans had got overconfident and fallen asleep at the switch.

The blip on the radar coming in alone? So what? It was bound to be another American plane, wasn’t it? Well, no. And the guys flying CAP had been slow getting a handle on it, too.

The carriers fell away behind him. So did the destroyers and cruisers screening them. He came up on the warships bombarding Oahu. Their guns thundered below him. Flame and smoke belched from the muzzles. The ships heeled in the water at the recoil. Some dug-in Japs would be catching hell.

Fewer bombardment ships remained north of Oahu. A good many had steamed around the island to pummel Pearl Harbor. Joe and his fellow fliers were on their way there, too. He’d shot up the harbor before, plenty of times. Things were different today. Marines and dogfaces were landing. They were going to take the base away from the Japs. Just about all the Japanese soldiers were at the front. What kind of fight could sailors and other odds and sods put up?

“We’ll fix ’em, goddammit,” Joe said. A second front here would do almost as much good as the second front in Europe Stalin kept shouting for. Catch the enemy between hammer and anvil and smash him flat.

“Yeah,” Joe muttered. “Yeah.”

One thing the Japs had already made very plain-they had no quit in them. All the antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out were banging away like nobody’s business. Flying past a near miss was like driving a car over a hole in the road. You went down and then you went up again, sometimes hard enough for your teeth to click together. But you didn’t pick up shrapnel from a hole in the road unless somebody’d stuck a land mine down there.

Something clanged against the new Hellcat’s fuselage. Joe automatically checked the gauges. Everything looked good. These babies could take it. Hit a Zero or an Oscar with a good burst of.50-caliber bullets, and it’d break up in midair. The Army fighter the Americans called the Tony was a tougher bird, but nowhere near as tough as a Hellcat.

Orders were to shoot up anything Japanese at Pearl that might shoot back. Joe went in at not much above treetop height, machine guns blazing. He wondered if the place was worth taking away from the Nips. Two campaigns inside of two years had turned it into a pretty fair approximation of hell on earth. The water had a greasy sheen. He was so low, the odor of spilled fuel oil got into the canopy. Wrecked American and Japanese ships lay side by side, brothers in death. Before the war started, nobody except a few aviation-minded cranks had really believed airplanes could sink capital ships all by themselves.

“I believe! Oh, Lord, I believe!” Joe sounded like a Holy Roller preacher. How many hundred thousand tons of twisted steel lay below him? The last two times the U.S. and Japanese fleets clashed, neither side’s ships had set eyes on the other’s. Planes did all the dirty work.

Once upon a time, Ford Island, there in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been a tropical paradise, all palm trees and bougainvillea and frangipani. Nothing green was left now, just dirt and char marks and the wreckage of buildings-and antiaircraft guns among the wreckage. Joe squeezed the firing button on top of the stick. His six.50s hammered away. The recoil made the Hellcat jerk in the air. Japs scrambled for cover. He might have been playing pinball, except those were real people down there. Real people I hope I kill, he thought.

Out at the edge of the harbor, landing craft were coming ashore. Some of the AA guns were firing at them instead of at the airplanes overhead. That wasn’t so good. A three-inch gun could do horrible things to a boat that was meant to be equally awkward by land and sea. Joe strafed a gun from behind. He didn’t think its crew heard him coming. What.50-caliber slugs did to human flesh was even worse than what antiaircraft guns did to landing craft.

Some of the ugly, boxy boats came right up the channel. Wrecks blocked bigger ships from getting in, but the landing craft scraped past them. Joe wagged his wings in salute as he shot at a Japanese machine-gun nest.

A Hellcat trailing smoke plunged into the water of the West Loch. Joe looked around. He didn’t see a parachute. Maybe the poor bastard inside the plane was lucky not to get out. He would have come down in the middle of a big swarm of Japs, with a piss-poor chance of getting away. What they would have done to him before they let him die… Compared to that, going straight into the drink looked pretty good.

Joe made pass after pass, firing short bursts so he wouldn’t overheat his guns and burn out the barrels. Finally, his ammo ran dry. He still had plenty of fuel, but so what? Unless he wanted to imitate that Jap and see how big a fire he could start, it didn’t do him much good here.

It would take him home, though. He flew back over Oahu toward the Bunker Hill. The Japs shot at him several more times, and missed every one. Hitting a fast-moving airplane wasn’t easy. Frustrated gunners on both sides could testify to that.

A few more puffs of black smoke around him, and then he was out over the Pacific. He hoped none of the American ships would fire on him. If one did, they all would, and they threw up a lot of shells and bullets. They might not get him anyway, but why take chances?

He ran the gauntlet. A CAP fighter came over to have a look at him, but it pulled away when the pilot recognized he was in a Hellcat. It waggled its wings as it went. He returned the courtesy.

As always, landing on the Bunker Hill meant turning off his own will and doing exactly what the landing officer told him to. Fighter pilots were a willful breed. He hated surrendering control to somebody else. But the easiest of the many ways to kill yourself on carrier duty was to think you knew better than the landing officer. However little Joe liked it, he believed it.

At the officer’s signal, he shoved the stick forward and dove for the deck. “Jesus!” he said as he slammed home. His tailhook caught the second arrester wire. The Hellcat jerked to a stop.

Flightcrew men came running up as Joe opened the canopy and got out. “How’d it go, Mr. Crosetti?”

one of them called.

“Piece of cake,” Joe answered. “I need ammo. Then I can go back and give ’em some more. We’re going to take Pearl Harbor back from those bastards-you better believe we are.”

The sailors cheered. “We’ll have you back in the air in nothin’ flat, sir,” an armorer said. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“Not me,” Joe said. “That’s for the guys with lots of gold braid.” As an ensign, he outranked all the ratings around him. He was an officer, of course. But he felt he was barely an officer. Just about all the others on the ship were entitled to give him orders.

That was a worry for another day. Now all he wanted to do was hit the Japs another lick. What would end up happening to Pearl Harbor once the Americans took it back-was also a worry for another day, and not for the likes of him.

FIGHTING WAS GETTING CLOSE to Honolulu now. The roar of battle from Pearl Harbor never went away, no matter how much Jiro Takahashi wished it would. He’d made a bet not long after the Japanese conquered Hawaii. He’d bet they were the winning side. For a while, that bet looked pretty good. It didn’t any more.

He wished his sons would give him a harder time about it. He deserved a hard time for his foolishness. But they treated him sympathetically, as if he were an old rake coming back to earth after a spree with a young floozy who took him for everything but the gold in his teeth.

“Shigata ga nai, Father,” Hiroshi said. “When the Americans come back, we just have to try to keep you out of trouble if we can.”

“They can’t get him for treason.” Kenzo spoke as if Jiro weren’t in the tent in the botanical garden. “He’s not a U.S. citizen. He was just helping his own country.” No matter how dumb he was. He didn’t say that. He didn’t need to say it. Everything that had happened since the Americans came back shouted it for him.

“Do you think they’ll care?” Hiroshi asked. “To them, he’ll be a Jap who helped the other Japs.” The hateful key word was in English. His older son went on, “They’ll probably deal with all the people like that, so we’d better have some good reasons why they shouldn’t.”

“Don’t worry about me, boys,” Jiro said. “Consul Kita told me he would take care of me if he could, and I’m sure he meant it.”

They both stared at him. “Big deal,” Kenzo said. “Kita can’t even help himself now, let alone anybody else.”

“That’s the truth,” Hiroshi agreed. “All just talk and nonsense.”

“Well, I hope not,” Jiro said. “The consulate is still up and running.”

“Up and standing still, you mean,” Kenzo said. “It hasn’t got anywhere to run to. The Americans are in Pearl Harbor, Father. They’ll be here in Honolulu any day now. What can Kita do?”

Jiro shrugged. He got to his feet. “I don’t know. Maybe I ought to go and see, neh?”

“You ought to leave that place alone, Father,” Kenzo said. “Haven’t you got in enough trouble because you went there?”

“If America wins, you will be happy,” Jiro said. “All right-be happy. I wouldn’t be happy even if I never went on the radio. America is not my country. It has never been my country. I came here to make some money, not to live.”

“And you made more than you ever would have in Japan,” Hiroshi said.

“So what?” Jiro shrugged again. “So what, I say? I have lived for all these years in a land that does not like me, does not want me, and does not speak my language. If you want to go on being Japs”-he brought out the English word, too, and laced it with contempt-“in America, fine. Not for me, not if I can help it.”

He pushed past Hiroshi and Kenzo and out of the tent. His sons didn’t try to stop him. If they had, they would have got a surprise. They were taller and younger than he was, but he was meaner. I raised them soft, he thought. Most of the time, that pleased him. They didn’t need to be as hard as he had. But they didn’t have that toughness to fall back on, either.

The air stank of smoke, of burning. It wasn’t so bad as it had been when all the fuel at Pearl Harbor burned. Then Honolulu wore a shroud for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Still, it left his lungs as raw as if he were smoking three cigarettes at the same time. He smiled wryly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked one cigarette, let alone three.

Up Nuuanu Avenue he went. The guards at the Japanese consulate waved to him. “Konichiwa, Fisherman!” they called. “You haven’t got any goodies for us today?”

“Please excuse me, no,” Jiro answered. With so many American ships operating south of Oahu now, they probably would have sunk the Oshima Maru if he dared put to sea in her. “Is Kita-san in?”

“Yes-for now,” a guard said. Another one sent him a reproving look, as if he might have said too much. But no one stopped Jiro from walking up the stairs and into the consulate.

When he got inside, the smell of smoke was thicker. He needed only a moment to see why: secretaries were busy tearing up papers and burning them. That sobered him. If the staff at the consulate didn’t think Honolulu could hold, the game really was coming to an end.

One of the secretaries looked up from ripping reports into strips. For all Jiro knew, they were reports about him. If they were, better they should go into the fire. “Oh, hello, Takahashi-san,” the secretary said. “The honorable consul will be glad to see you. He was just talking about you, in fact.”

Maybe those reports really were about Jiro, then. “Thank you,” he said, and went on into Nagao Kita’s office.

“Do whatever you can to buy time. We need it,” Kita was saying into the telephone when Jiro walked in. The consul waved and gestured to a chair. When he finished talking, he hung up. “Good to see you, Takahashi-san,” he said. “Things are…” His little wave was more expressive than words could be.

“I see you are getting rid of your papers,” Jiro said.

“Can’t be helped,” Kita said. “Better not to let the Americans find out some of the things we did here. Better not to let the Americans find us here, either.”

“Ah, so desu-ka?” Jiro said. “Is there some way the Americans won’t find you here?” Despite Kita’s half-promise of a little while before, he did not presume to include himself among the number who might not be found here. When he talked with an important personage like the consul, he still felt very much like a horny-handed fisherman.

Nagao Kita smiled. “There is some way, yes. How would you like to stay here till tonight and come to Honolulu harbor with me? If we are lucky, a submarine will surface and take some of the people who matter to us back to Japan.”

“And you really would take me?” Jiro hardly dared believe his ears. “I am a man who matters enough to go back to Japan?” He wondered what the home islands would be like. He’d been away so long. A lot had changed here in Hawaii since he came. Japan was bound to be different, too.

The consul’s smile grew wider, almost filling his broad face. “I would take you. I am glad to take you, Takahashi-san. Your broadcasts served your country and served your Emperor well. And we have two spaces on the submarine we were not sure we would. The King and Queen of Hawaii have decided to stay here and face whatever happens.”

“They are brave.” Jiro thought they were also foolish. Then full understanding of what the consul had told him sank in. “I will get a place on this submarine that would have gone to the King or Queen of Hawaii? I will?” His voice rose to a startled squeak. It hadn’t broken like that since he was nineteen years old, but it did now.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kita said easily. “Even if they had decided to go, we would have found a place for you one way or another.”

Jiro bowed in his seat. “Domo arigato, Kita-san. You could put me in a torpedo tube. I wouldn’t care.”

“Oh, you might, if they had to shoot you at an American cruiser.” Kita had a good laugh, the kind that invited everyone who heard it to laugh along. It made even a silly joke funnier than it would have been otherwise.

“I would like to go back and say good-bye to my sons,” Jiro said slowly.

“Takahashi-san, if you were going on the submarine alone, I would tell you to go and do this,” Kita answered. “We’ve never talked much about your sons, and one reason we haven’t is that I know they think of themselves as Americans, not Japanese. I don’t hold that against you. How could I, when it is true of so many of the younger generation here? I don’t know that they would raise the alarm. For all I know, they probably wouldn’t. But, please excuse me, I would rather not take the chance.”

Jiro bowed his head. “I understand.”

“Thank you,” Kita said. “I do not want to make things more awkward than they have to be.”

After that, Jiro had nothing to do but wait. He leafed through magazines from Japan. Everyone in them seemed happy and cheerful and prosperous. All the news was good. They talked about beating the Americans again and again. In their pages, the United States seemed a clumsy, stupid giant, not worth taking seriously. Off in the distance-but not far enough off in the distance-artillery and bombs thundered. Every so often, an American plane would roar over Honolulu. The USA made a more serious foe than the propaganda magazines cared to admit.

Darkness fell. The staff at the consulate went right on burning papers. Jiro felt useless. He didn’t know enough to help. But they wouldn’t want to take him back to the home islands if he were useless, would they?

He dozed in his chair. Nagao Kita shook him awake. “It’s time, Takahashi-san,” the consul-the departing consul-said.

“Hai.” Jiro yawned and stretched. “I’m ready.” Was he? He was more ready to leave Honolulu if he could than to face the returning Americans. He supposed that made him ready enough.

The streets of Honolulu were dark and empty, but far from quiet. Off to the west, the battle for Pearl Harbor still raged. By all the signs, fighting was getting closer to the city. If that submarine didn’t come in now, it would never have another chance. Jiro could plainly see that. The Japanese occupation was finished. He sighed. He wished things had turned out different. Even if he wasn’t here to hear it, Hiroshi and Kenzo would be saying, I told you so.

Barricades and roadblocks slowed the journey down to the harbor. The special naval landing forces who manned them were alert, even jumpy. But Consul Kita talked his way past them every time.

Other little parties made their way to the harbor, too. Some of them were Japanese, others Hawaiians and even haoles who’d gone along with the new regime. They had a good notion of what they could expect when American rule returned. But the king and queen were staying behind. Yes, they were brave. Did they have any common sense?

He stared out past Sand Island, which helped protect the approaches to Honolulu’s harbor. The Americans hadn’t landed there yet; they probably hadn’t thought they needed to. A Japanese garrison still held the place. If U.S. troops had taken the island, the sub would have had a much harder time getting in-and getting out again afterwards.

Off to the west, tracers-American red and orange and Japanese blue-made a fireworks display against the night. They shed enough light to let Jiro see everyone else looked as worried as he felt. One of the Japanese, a bureaucrat in a civilian suit, said, “Where is the submarine?”

Not five minutes later, like a broaching whale but ever so much bigger, it surfaced by the pier. A hatch came open at the top of the conning tower. A moment later, several people exclaimed in disgust. Jiro didn’t, but he came close. The air that wafted out of the hatch was as foul as any he’d ever smelled, and fishermen knew everything there was to know about stinks. Too many people too close together for too long, foul heads, and sour food all went into the mix. So did the stink of oil and several other things he couldn’t name right away. He wondered how the sailors stood it, then decided they had to be so used to it, they didn’t even notice it any more.

An officer popped out of the hatch. “Is everyone here?” he called. “We can’t wait for stragglers, not if we want to get out in one piece.”

“The King and Queen of Hawaii are not coming,” Consul Kita said. “They have refused our invitations.”

“It’s their funeral,” the officer said. Jiro thought that was likely true. The officer climbed out of the hatch. Sailors followed him and laid a gangplank from the pier to the sub’s iron hull. The couple of dozen escapees came aboard. A sailor guided them to the ladder up to the conning tower. Another ladder led down into the dark, smelly bowels of the submarine. As people started down that ladder, the officer took their names. Nagao Kita vouched for Jiro. “Oh, yes.” The officer nodded. “When we were surfaced, I would pick up his broadcasts myself. Good man.”

“Arigato,” Jiro said shyly.

“Do itashimashite,” the officer answered. After the last person came aboard, he asked, “Where is Commander Genda? He’s supposed to be here, too.” When no one answered, the man muttered, “Zakennayo! The order for his recall comes from Admiral Yamamoto, no less. Well, we’re not going to wait, no matter what.”

Only dim orange lamps lit up the inside of the submarine. Pipes and wires ran overhead; even short men like Jiro had to duck all the time. Machinery was everywhere-above, below, and to either side. Whatever space existed for people seemed an afterthought.

The hatch clanged shut. The officer dogged it. He came down the internal ladder, his shoes clattering. He gave a series of crisp orders. The sub backed away from the pier and then went under, air bubbling out of the buoyancy tanks and water sloshing in. Slowly-Jiro gradually realized everything underwater happened slowly-it turned and started out the channel by which it had entered the harbor.

He sighed with mingled pleasure and disappointment. On the way home at last!

MINORU GENDA HAD NEVER IMAGINED he would disobey an order from Admiral Yamamoto. He looked to the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet as an example, a mentor, a friend. Yet the Japanese submarine had presumably come and presumably gone. Assorted dignitaries were presumably aboard the boat. He remained somewhere between Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, doing everything he could to hold back the advancing Americans.

Cynthia Laanui had nothing to do with it.

So Genda told himself, and believed he told himself the truth. The Queen of Hawaii made a wonderful diversion. He liked her more as a person than he’d thought he would, too. But none of that was reason enough to throw away his naval career.

Hawaii was.

This invasion had been Genda’s idea from the beginning. He’d proposed to Yamamoto the notion of following up the air strike with ground troops. Only with Hawaii under the Rising Sun, he’d said, could it serve as Japan’s shield rather than America’s outstretched arm. He’d persuaded Yamamoto. Yamamoto had persuaded the Army-a harder job, since the conquest of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and their vital resources had to move more slowly. But Yamamoto made the generals believe Japan had a better chance of keeping her conquests if she held Hawaii.

For close to two years, Hawaii had done what it was supposed to do. With a Japanese garrison here, the USA had to fight the Pacific war from its own West Coast. Its reach wasn’t long enough to do Japan much harm from there.

Now, though… Now Hawaii was falling back into U.S. hands. Genda was no fool, but no blind optimist, either. He knew the signs of defeat when he saw them, and he saw them now. The fall of Pearl Harbor was perhaps the next to last nail in the coffin.

And if he took credit for the victory of 1941, how could he not shoulder blame for the defeat of 1943? To duck it would make him into a liar, and he refused to lie to himself. He intended to atone in his own person for his plan’s failure. He thought Yamamoto would understand.

He had an Arisaka some soldier or naval landing force man would never need again. He wished he had a uniform that gave better camouflage than his Navy whites. By now, the whites had so many dirt and grass stains, they hid him better than they had a couple of days earlier. He wasn’t the only man in whites to form a part of the Japanese skirmish line. That made him feel better. He wasn’t the only officer determined to make the Yankees pay for everything they got.

The enemy skirmish line was a couple of hundred meters away. The Americans weren’t pushing forward right this minute. Every so often, they would fire a few rifle shots or a burst from a machine gun or a Browning Automatic Rifle to discourage the Japanese from attacking. The men on Genda’s side would do the same.

Genda didn’t think his countrymen could attack. They were a motley mix of Army and Navy men. An Army captain seemed to be in local command. Genda outranked him, but didn’t try to throw his weight around. The Army officer sounded capable, while he himself knew as much about infantry combat as he did about Paris fashions. He was learning fast, though.

As for the Americans… By all the signs, they were waiting till they built up overwhelming force. Then they would hit the Japanese line somewhere and pour through. The defenders would have the choice of dying where they stood or falling back to try to stop the enemy somewhere else. Genda had already seen the Yankees do that once. They didn’t take many chances. If he’d enjoyed all their materiel, he wouldn’t have taken many chances, either.

A senior private squatted in the foxhole along with Genda. He was filthy and weary, but managed a smile of sorts when he noticed Genda’s eye on him. “Hard work, sir,” he said wryly.

“Hai.” Genda nodded. In a mess like this, he worried less about rank than he would have otherwise. He said, “You look like you’ve done your share of hard work and then some.”

“Could be, sir,” the soldier answered. “I started up at the north coast-and here I am.”

That was something unusual. Most Japanese soldiers who’d met the Americans on the invasion beaches were dead. Genda knew the Army preferred dying in place to retreating. Keeping his voice carefully neutral, he said, “You must have seen a lot of fighting. How did that happen, Senior Private, ah…?”

“My name is Furusawa, sir.” The soldier showed no reluctance to give it. He didn’t seem to feel he’d done anything wrong. And he explained why: “I found all my superiors killed around me. That left me free to use my own judgment. I thought I would be more use to the Emperor killing as many Americans as I could than throwing my life away to no good purpose.” By the way he eyed Genda, anyone who presumed to disagree with him would be sorry.

But Genda didn’t disagree. “And have you done that?” he asked.

“Sir, I have,” the soldier answered. His rifle-an American Springfield-had plainly seen a lot of use, but it was clean and in good condition. Seeing Genda’s glance toward the weapon, Furusawa went on, “My unit’s barracks in Honolulu were bombed, and we lost our Arisakas.”

“How do you like the American piece?” Genda asked.

“It’s a little heavy, sir, but not too bad,” Furusawa said. “And it fires a larger-caliber round than an Arisaka, so it’s got more stopping power. I do like that.”

Like the rest of what Senior Private Furusawa had to say, that was more clearly reasoned than Genda would have looked for from a lowly enlisted man. And, while Furusawa’s accent said he came from somewhere in the south-down by Hiroshima, perhaps-he also sounded better educated than the farmers and fishermen who made up a large part of the population there.

“Why are you only a senior private?” Genda asked, by which he meant, Why do you talk the way you do? Why do you think the way you do?

The younger man understood what he didn’t say, which showed Furusawa did think that way. With a crooked smile, he replied, “Well, sir, for one thing, I was a pretty new conscript when we came here, and there weren’t a lot of promotions after that. And my father is a druggist. That sort of made me a white crow to a lot of the country boys in my regiment.” He echoed Genda’s thought there, and continued, “Complaining wouldn’t have done me much good. And keeping me down made some sense, too, because the others might not have followed me the way they would have with someone else.”

Genda wondered if he himself could have spoken so dispassionately about being passed over for a promotion he obviously deserved. He doubted it. “What do you think will happen now?” he asked.

“That depends, sir. You’d know better than I do-has the Navy got enough ships and planes to beat the Americans and drive them away?”

“No.” Genda spoke without hesitation.

Senior Private Furusawa shrugged. He didn’t seem very surprised. “Well, in that case we’ll just have to give it our best shot, won’t we?” He shrugged again. “Karma, neh?”

He could speak indirectly at least as well as Genda. What he meant was, We’re all going to die here, and we can’t do a damn thing about it. Genda thought about that, but not for long. He didn’t need long. He sighed, nodded, and said, “Hai.”

YASUO FURUSAWA KNEW HE OUGHT TO GET AWAY from Commander Genda. The naval officer knew he’d fallen back from the north instead of senselessly charging and throwing his life away. That made Genda dangerous to him as the Japanese were driven back into Honolulu. If the officer wanted to make an example of someone, he had a nice, juicy target. And sticking around Genda endangered Furusawa in another way, too. The Navy man was a greenhorn at infantry combat. His white uniform only made things worse. He drew bullets as well as he could have without painting a target on his chest. And bullets meant for him could all too easily find someone nearby instead.

But Furusawa stayed by him. Before long, he found himself Genda’s unofficial aide and orderly. Genda, he thought, was the smartest man he’d ever met. And the officer didn’t seem to think he was a baka yaro himself. That made Furusawa proud. Right now, pride was about all any Japanese had left.

He shook his head. Japanese soldiers, or most of them, had a contempt for death the Americans couldn’t begin to match. Oh, the Yankees were brave enough. He’d seen that in the first invasion, and he saw it again now. But he could not imagine an American rushing out against a tank with a flaming bottle of gasoline and smashing it down on the cooling louvers above the engine. The Japanese who did that must have known he couldn’t get back to cover alive. And he didn’t; the Americans shot him before he made even three steps. But their snorting mechanical monster went up in flames, and the Japanese picked off the crewmen bailing out. Without the tank, the enemy attack bogged down.

Could I do that? Furusawa wondered. His long retreat from the north left him with doubts about himself and about his courage. He didn’t think he was afraid to die if his death meant something. The death of that soldier with the Molotov cocktail certainly had. He’d cost the Americans a tank and five men.

That was one side of the coin. The other side was, losing that tank and those five men wouldn’t cost the USA the battle. Honolulu would fall. Hawaii would go back under the Stars and Stripes. Nobody but a blind man could believe anything else.

Well, in that case, why don’t we throw down our rifles and throw up our hands and surrender? But Furusawa shook his head. No less than any other Japanese, he believed surrender the ultimate disgrace. And he didn’t want to spread his own disgrace and shame to his family back in the home islands.

Besides, some of the men in charge of Honolulu might have been blind. If they didn’t think they could throw the Americans back, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. The garrison commander was a Navy captain-in Army ranks, he counted as a colonel-named Iwabuchi.

“We can do it!” he shouted to anyone who would listen. “We will do it! The white men have no stomach for blood! Well, before long we will drown them in an ocean of it!”

Furusawa remembered him drilling his special naval landing forces before the Americans landed. He’d been just as fanatical then. He’d sounded like a screaming madman, as a matter of fact, and he still did. But he did more than just scream. Furusawa wouldn’t have wanted to attack Honolulu. Artillery hid inside buildings here. Machine guns had elaborately interlocking fields of fire. If you took out one nest, you exposed yourself to fire from two or three others.

The only thing Captain Iwabuchi hadn’t worried about in Honolulu was its civilians. If they starved, if they got shot, if they got blown to pieces-well, so what? And if a fighting man wanted a woman for a little fun before he went back to his foxhole-again, so what?

You knew what kind of screams those were when you heard them. They sounded different from the ones that came from wounded people: they held horror as well as pain. Commander Genda clucked in distress. “This is not a good way to fight a war,” he said.

“Sir, this is what the Army did in Nanking, too,” Furusawa said. “I hadn’t been conscripted yet, but the veterans in my regiment would talk about it sometimes.” Most of them had sounded pleased with themselves, too. He didn’t tell Genda that.

“But American propaganda will have a field day,” the Navy man said. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is supposed to protect Asia from Western imperialism. Now who will protect Asia from Japanese imperialism?”

He put his life in Furusawa’s hands when he said something like that. If the senior private blabbed to someone like Iwabuchi… Well, one more time, so what? Genda would die a little sooner than he might otherwise, and perhaps a little more painfully. Given the perversity of war, though, neither of those was certain. None of the Japanese defenders was likely to get out of this any which way.

The Americans probed with infantry. They got a bloody nose and pulled back. Captain Iwabuchi was jubilant. “They can’t stand up to us!” he shouted. “If they come again, we’ll smash them again!”

Commander Genda sounded less gleeful. “They aren’t done,” he said to Furusawa. “They’re putting a rock in their fist, that’s all.”

“A rock, sir?” The senior private didn’t follow him for a moment.

“You’ll see,” Genda answered.

About fifteen minutes later, Furusawa did. American artillery started pounding the Japanese front-line positions. Furusawa had never imagined so many guns all going off at once. His own forces were not so lavishly provided with cannon. Huddling in a ball to make as small a target as he could, he felt as if the end of the world had come.

When the barrage lifted, the Americans surged forward again. Furusawa was too dazed to shoot for a little while, but Japanese machine guns opened up on the Yankees again. He was amazed he’d lived through the shelling, and even more amazed anyone else had. The automatic-weapons fire drove the Americans back again in front of his foxhole, but they broke through farther north.

“What do we do, sir?” he asked Commander Genda. “If we stay here, they’ll outflank us and cut us off.”

“Hai,” Genda answered. Any Army officer would have ordered a fight to the death where they were. Furusawa was as sure of that as he was of his own name. After a moment’s thought, Genda said, “We fall back. It doesn’t look like we can do much more where we are, does it?”

“Not to me, sir,” Furusawa said in surprise.

To his even greater surprise, Genda smiled at him. “Well, you know more about it than I do.” They fell back, passing the wreckage of a machine-gun nest that hadn’t survived the barrage. Furusawa wondered if the Army would have done better with people like Genda in charge. He feared he’d never know. XIV

WHY THIS IS HELL, NOR AM I OUT OF IT. KENZO TAKAHASHI REMEMBERED THE line from an English Lit class. It sounded like Shakespeare, but he didn’t think it was. Who, then? He couldn’t remember. Miss Simpson wouldn’t have approved of that at all. If Miss Simpson was still alive, though, she was just as busy trying not to get blown up as Kenzo was.

He and Hiroshi didn’t know where their father was. He’d headed for the Japanese consulate, and he’d never come back. Hiroshi and Kenzo both went looking for him, and neither one had any luck. Kenzo even went to the consulate himself. The guards let him in when he told them whose son he was, but nobody inside would tell him anything. Nobody of very high rank seemed to be there. He wondered where the consul and the chancellor and the other big shots were. Wherever it was, would they have taken Dad with them? Kenzo had trouble believing it.

When the big American push started, shells crashed into the refugee camp where he and his brother and their father had stayed since their apartment-and Kenzo and Hiroshi’s mother-burned in the Japanese attack on Honolulu. Japanese positions were nearby, so Kenzo could see why the Americans struck. Seeing why did nothing to ease the horror.

He and Hiroshi got out unhurt. That would do for a miracle till God decide to dole out a bigger one somewhere else. He’d seen bad things when the Japanese took Honolulu. He hadn’t seen the worst, because the Americans chose to surrender rather than let the worst happen to the civilians in the city. The Japanese didn’t care about civilians. They would fight as long as they had cartridges, and with bayonets after that.

And whether the Americans wanted to bring hell down on the civilians of Honolulu or not, what else were they going to do to get rid of the Japanese soldiers among them? Kenzo and Hiroshi stayed flat on their bellies all through the artillery barrage. They’d learned that much in the earlier round of fighting. It didn’t always help, but it was their best hope.

Shrapnel tore through their tent and the ropes that held it up. It fell down on them, which frightened Kenzo worse than he was already-something he wouldn’t have thought possible. Through the roars and crashes of exploding shells, he heard screams, some abruptly cut off.

When the shelling eased, he struggled free of the heavy canvas. The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”-something his missing father might have said. He could smell blood in the air. There lay a man gutted like an ahi-and there, a few feet away, lay most of his head.

Wounded men and women were worse than dead ones. They writhed and shrieked and moaned and bled and bled and bled. Kenzo bent to use a length of rope torn apart by shell fragments as a tourniquet for a woman who’d lost a big chunk of meat out of her leg below the knee. He hoped it would do her some good.

He was in the middle of that when someone shouted in Japanese: “Come on, give me a hand! Yes, you!” When he looked up, a soldier was leading Hiroshi away. The soldier had a stretcher, and needed Kenzo’s brother to help him carry wounded. No doubt they would deal with soldiers first, civilians later if at all.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said again. He couldn’t stop them from grabbing his brother, not unless he wanted to get killed himself and probably get Hiroshi killed with him. The other trouble was, they were both too likely to get killed anyway. More American shells screamed in, some on the Japanese positions, some on the luckless refugee camp. More screams rose, many of them screams of despair. Kenzo hugged the ground next to the injured woman and hoped none of the fragments would bite him. He had no idea what else to do.

When the barrage eased, he asked the woman, “How are you?” She didn’t answer. He took a look at her. A chunk of shrapnel had clipped off the top of her head. Her brains spilled out onto the dirt. Kenzo threw up. Then he spat again and again, trying to get the horrible taste out of his mouth. And then he staggered to his feet and stumbled away. Any place in the world had to be safer than where he was.

At first, his flight was blind. Before long, though, it had purpose: he headed for Elsie Sundberg’s house. If anything happened to her… If anything happened to her, he didn’t think he wanted to go on living. He’d been through a lot just then, and he was only twenty years old.

Getting to her house in eastern Honolulu was a nightmare in itself. He had to pass several checkpoints manned by special naval landing forces, and they would just as soon have shot civilians as looked at them. That was no exaggeration. Bodies lay in the street, blood pooled around them. Some of the women’s skirts and dresses were hiked up. Kenzo bit his lip; the occupiers hadn’t killed them right away.

Had he tried sneaking by, he was sure they would have put a bullet in him. Instead, he came up to each barricade and roadblock openly, calling, “I’m the Fisherman’s son! I’m looking for my father!”

He hated using his father’s collaboration in any way, but it got him by. And one of the men at a sandbagged machine-gun nest said, “Didn’t he get out on the submarine the other night?”

“What submarine?” Kenzo asked-this was the first he’d heard of it.

“There was one,” the landing-forces man said. Kenzo couldn’t very well argue with him, because he didn’t know there hadn’t been one. The fellow went on, “I don’t know whether your old man was on it or not, though. They don’t tell guys like me stuff like that.” He gestured. “Go ahead, buddy. I hope you find him. I always did like listening to him.”

“Thank you,” Kenzo said, wishing he hadn’t heard that quite so often from Japanese military men. He could have done without the compliment. Would his father have got on a submarine-one probably bound for Japan? Muttering unhappily, Kenzo nodded to himself. His father would be able to see the jig was up here. And he must have been afraid of what the Americans would do to him when they came back. He likely had reason, too, even if he was a Japanese citizen. Collaborators would catch it.

Kenzo talked his way past another couple of Japanese strongpoints. The special naval landing forces and the soldiers they had with them seemed determined to hold on to Honolulu as long as they were still breathing and still had ammo. God help the city, Kenzo thought, not that God seemed to have paid much attention to Honolulu since December 7, 1941.

The fresh shell crater in the Sundbergs’ front lawn made Kenzo gulp. One of the windows had only a few shards of glass in it. There was a fist-sized hole in the front door. Nobody answered when he knocked. He started to panic, but then quelled the alarm thudding through him. They’d built a hidey-hole under the house.

He tried the door. It swung open. He carefully closed it behind him, wanting things to look as normal as they could. Then he went to the closet that held the entrance to the foxhole. Sure enough, the rug over the trap door was askew.

If Elsie and her family were down there, they had to be panicking, hearing footsteps over their heads. Kenzo squatted down and rapped out shave and a haircut-five cents on the trap door. He didn’t think any Japanese soldier would do that. When he tried to lift the trap, though, he found it was latched from below. That was smart.

He rapped again, calling, “You okay, Elsie?” Could she hear him through the floor? He called again, a little louder.

Something slid underneath him-the latch. He got off the trap door so it could go up. It did, about an inch. Elsie’s voice floated out of the opening: “That you, Ken?”

“Yeah,” he said, almost giddy with relief. “You okay?”

“We are now,” she answered. “You gave us quite a turn there.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I figured I would, but it was too late by then.”

“How about you?” Elsie asked.

“The Americans shelled the camp,” he said bleakly. “There are machine-gun nests not far away, so they’ll probably do it some more. Hank and I are okay so far. The Japanese dragooned him into being a stretcher-bearer, but he was all right last I saw him.”

“What about your father?” Elsie knew where his worries lived, all right.

“I think he’s on his way to Japan right now,” Kenzo replied. “And if he is, that may be the best thing for all of us.”

Elsie’s mother spoke up: “If they’re shelling the camp, you won’t have anywhere to stay. Come down here with us.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Damn straight we’re sure.” That gruff male voice belonged to Mr. Sundberg, whom he hadn’t met so often. “We owe you plenty, Ken. Maybe we can pay back a little. Come on-make it snappy.”

Kenzo lifted the trap door high enough to get through it, then closed it over his own head. It was dark and gloomy under the house, and smelled of damp dirt. There’d been more digging since he last saw the shelter. Elsie squeezed his hand. “We just went down here yesterday,” she said. “We’ve got water. We’ve got some food. We can last till it’s over-I hope.”

“And we’ve got a honey bucket over there in the corner, at the end of that trench.” Mr. Sundberg chuckled hoarsely. “All the comforts of home.”

Kenzo’s nose had already noted the honey bucket. It was better than nothing. The whole setup was a lot better than staying out in the open. “Thanks,” he said. That didn’t go far enough. He tried again: “Thanks for looking at me and not seeing a Jap.”

Elsie squeezed his hand again. Her mother said, “We’ll sort that all out later. Let’s see if we can live through this first.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such good advice.

REPLACEMENTS CAME UP TO FILL THE RANKS of Captain Braxton Bradford’s company. Les Dillon looked at the new men joining his platoon with something less than delight. They were plainly just off the boat. They must have landed in the north, hopped on a truck to get down here-and now they’d go into the meat grinder. They were clean. They were clean-shaven. Their uniforms weren’t filthy, and weren’t out at the knees and elbows. The way the veterans looked and smelled and acted seemed to dismay them. They might have been in the company of so many wolves.

“Any of you guys ever seen combat before?” Les knew the answer would be no even before the new fish shook their heads. He sighed. Sheer ignorance was going to get a lot of them shot in the next few days. He couldn’t tell them that straight out. What he said instead was, “Try and stick close to somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Shoot first and ask questions later. The Japs have had time to get ready for us, and they don’t give up. We’ve got to make the damn bastards pay for what they’ve done to Hotel Street.”

“Hotel Street, Sergeant?” a replacement asked.

Les rolled his eyes. The kid didn’t even know. Wearily, Dillon said, “Best damn place in the world to get drunk and get laid. That give you the picture?” The young Marine nodded. He looked eager-gung-ho, people were calling it these days. Gung-ho was great if it kept you going forward. If you didn’t pay enough attention to where you were going, though…

“Y’all listen up, hear me?” That was Captain Bradford. A Southern drawl often seemed to be the Marine Corps’ second language. The company commander went on, “We are gonna go on through those houses and apartments in front of us, and we aren’t gonna stop till we get to the rubble past ’em where the Japs bombed Honolulu a year and a half ago. We’ll set up a perimeter on the edge of that zone and wait for the artillery and armor to soften up the way ahead. Questions, men?”

Nobody said anything. Les figured the new guys would keep going if they got half a chance. Marines were like that, grabbing as much as they could as fast as they could. The Army was more methodical. Dogfaces said the Marine way caused more casualties. Les thought there might be more at first, but not in the long run.

“You new men, keep your eyes open, hear?” Bradford added. “Damn Japs are better at camouflage than y’all ever reckoned anybody could be. Fuckers’ll hide in a mailbox or under a doormat. Everybody watches out, everybody helps everybody else. Right?”

“Right, sir!” the Marines chorused. Les caught Dutch Wenzel’s eye. The other platoon sergeant gave back a fractional nod. The replacements wouldn’t know what to look for. Some of them would get educated in a hurry. Others-probably more-wouldn’t stay in one piece long enough to have the chance.

Some of those houses and apartments and little shops up ahead were as innocent as they looked. Some held Jap riflemen or machine-gun positions. Japanese mortar crews would be waiting in the alleys and on the roofs. Les knew the Marines could clear them out. What the cost would be… That was the question.

A couple of bullets snapped past. Les was on the deck before he knew he’d thrown himself flat. It was just harassing fire, but it was from an Arisaka. He didn’t believe in taking chances. Some of the new guys gave funny looks to him and the other Marines who’d flattened out. He didn’t care. His mama hadn’t raised him to take chances he didn’t have to.

Machine guns, mortars, and some 105s opened up on the buildings ahead. Hellcats strafed them. By the time the barrage let up, they were smoking wreckage. Les wondered how anybody could tell them from the rubble farther east. He shrugged. He’d worry about that later, if at all.

“Boy, those Jap bastards must be dead meat now,” a recruit said happily.

Les laughed, not that it was funny. “Yeah, and then you wake up,” he said. “They’re waiting for us. You see one you think is dead, put a bullet in him. He’s liable to be playing possum, waiting to shoot you in the back.”

The replacement looked disbelieving. Les had neither time nor inclination to knock sense into his empty head. Captain Bradford yelled, “Forward!” and forward he went.

As usual, he ran hunched over, making himself the smallest possible target. He dodged like a halfback faking past tacklers. And the first piece of cover he saw-goddamn if it wasn’t a bathtub, blown from Lord knows where-he dove behind.

Sure as hell, the shelling and strafing hadn’t killed all the Japs. It hadn’t even made enough of them keep their heads down. Arisakas and Springfields and Nambu machine guns opened up. Knee mortars started dropping their nasty little bombs among the Americans. So did bigger mortars farther back. Les hated mortars not only because the bombs could fall right into foxholes but also, and especially, because you couldn’t hear them coming. One second, nothing. The next, your buddy was hamburger-or maybe you were.

Wounded men started screaming for medics. The Navy corpsmen who went in with Marines didn’t wear Red Cross smocks and armbands or Red Crosses on their helmets. The Japs used them for target practice when they did. The medics carried carbines-sometimes rifles-too. In France in 1918, the Germans mostly played by the rules. As far as Les could see, there were no rules here. This was a very nasty war.

He snapped off a shot or two, then ran forward again. Several Marines were shooting at a ground-floor window from which machine-gun fire was coming. Les Dillon put a couple of rounds in there, too, to give the Japs inside something to think about. Two Marines crawled close enough to chuck grenades through the window. The machine gun promptly squeezed off a defiant burst. More grenades flew in. This time, the enemy gun stayed quiet.

Les ran for a doorway. Dutch Wenzel ran for one a couple of houses farther on. He stopped halfway there, yelped, and said, “Aw, shit!” His rifle fell to the pavement.

“What happened, Dutch?” Les called.

“Got one right through the hand,” the other noncom answered. “Hurts like a son of a bitch. I never got shot before.”

“Welcome to the club.” Les wouldn’t have joined if he had any choice. But an injury like Wenzel’s…

“Sounds like you got a million-dollar wound. You did your bit, it won’t kill you, it’ll probably heal good, and you’re out of the fight for a while.”

“Yeah, I already thought of that,” Wenzel said. “But you know what? I’d sooner stay here with the rest of you guys. I feel like I’m getting thrown out of the game just after we went and scored six runs in the eighth.”

“Stay there till we push forward some more,” Les said. “Then you can get to the rear without worrying a sniper’s gonna get you.” Without worrying so much, he thought.

“Yes, Granny dear,” Wenzel said. Les laughed. Like him, the other platoon sergeant was more used to giving orders than taking them.

Then the laughter died in his throat, because the door he was standing in front of opened. Had the Jap behind it been a soldier, Les would have died in the next instant. Instead, he was a skinny eight-year-old kid in ragged shorts. “Watcha doin’, Mister?” he asked.

“Jesus!” Les exploded. “I almost shot you, you dumb little-” He broke off when he saw how skinny the kid was. Fumbling through the pouches on his belt, he found a K-ration can. “Here. This is chopped ham, I think. Bet you like it a hell of a lot better’n I do.”

The kid’s eyes got big as gumdrops. “Wow!” he breathed, as if Les had just given him the Hope Diamond. “Thanks, Mister!” He disappeared, yelling, “Mom! Mom! Guess what I got!”

You almost got a.30-caliber round in the teeth, that’s what. Les’ heart still thuttered. All kinds of bad things happened during a war. Even so, how could you make yourself forget you shot a little kid? Les knew he had lots of things to worry about, but that, thank God, wasn’t one of them.

NO MORE TAKING A SAILBOARD OUT from Waikiki Beach. The Japs had put down barbed wire and machine-gun nests and mines. Years after they were gone, some damnfool tourist would probably blow his foot off on one everybody missed till he found it the hard way.

Oscar van der Kirk wasn’t especially worried about some imaginary tourist. He just didn’t want to blow off his own foot crossing Waikiki Beach. He did want to live long enough to have the chance to cross it again.

Because of the fish he’d brought home, Oahu’s hunger hadn’t pinched him and Susie as much as it had most people. Now they had to do without, and it hurt. And they had Charlie Kaapu with them, so it hurt even more.

The only way to get food now was to go out and work. The only work was helping the Japs build more roadblocks and barricades and pillboxes to hold back the U.S. Marines and Army. Oscar thought it was a lot of work for precious little rice. Charlie started going out with him after a few days. Oscar wondered if he was strong enough to do the hauling and lifting, but he took them in stride.

“No huhu,” he said when he and Oscar didn’t happen to be close to any Japs. “Up in the goddamn tunnel, I did twice this much on a quarter the food. Everybody did.”

Remembering what he’d looked like when he came out of the Kalihi Valley, Oscar believed him. He did ask, “How?”

“They’d kill you if you didn’t,” Charlie answered. “That whole setup was made to kill people. Either the work would do you in or the guards would. I hope our guys gutshoot every one of those bastards. They deserve it.” He was normally an easygoing fellow. Not here. Not now. He meant every word of it.

But he knew how to bow and smile at the Japanese riflemen and machine gunners when he got anywhere near them. Oscar knew how to do that, too, but Charlie’d had the advanced course. Oscar could satisfy the Japs. Charlie could make them smile back and even laugh.

Sometimes he would cuss them in friendly tones while he smiled. He took his life in his hands every time he did it: some of the Japs had picked up bits and pieces of English. Oscar kept trying to warn him. And Charlie would say, “Yeah, Oscar. Sure, Oscar,” and he’d go right on doing it. It was as if he had to take his revenge on them no matter what it cost him.

Off to the west, the battle for Honolulu ground on. The Americans had the artillery. They had the tanks. They had the airplanes. They even brought Navy ships off the south coast of Oahu, to blast the city with big guns. All the Japs had were the rubble and their weapons and their stubborn courage. Those were plenty to make the American reconquest a long, slow, bloody job.

“I hope they all die,” Charlie said with a big grin on his face. “I hope they all die slow, and I hope they hurt all the time while they’re doing it. Yes, you, too, Sergeant-san,” he added to a Japanese noncom who walked by after fiddling with the sight on a machine gun. Hearing only the title of respect, the sergeant grinned and returned Charlie’s bow.

“Ohhh, Charlie,” Oscar said.

“Right, Oscar,” Charlie said, and Oscar shut up.

So far, Waikiki had been only at the edges of the fight. A few overs from the U.S. bombardment of the rest of Honolulu came down there. The big raid on the POW camp in Kapiolani Park had been just east of the main part of Waikiki. Oscar began to hope his district would come through without much damage.

Artillery didn’t shatter that hope. Planes from one of the carriers somewhere out in the Pacific did. In the abstract, Oscar didn’t suppose he could blame the pilots. They wanted to soften up the Japs so that, when the American foot sloggers finally ground this far east, they wouldn’t have to work so hard.

Oscar had got used to the roar of planes overhead. He’d even got used to the deeper tones of the new U.S. aircraft. They made Japanese aircraft sound like flying sewing machines. But the sound of dive bombers falling out of the sky straight toward him was new and altogether terrifying.

The Japs reacted before he could. Some of them dove for cover. Others either manned their machine guns and blazed away at the dive bombers or fired their rifles at them. Oscar could admire that kind of bravery without wanting to imitate it.

“Get down, you damn fool!” Charlie Kaapu yelled at him as the first bomb screamed down.

“Huh?” Oscar said brilliantly. Looking back, he had to admit it wasn’t his finest hour. Charlie used the handle of his shovel to knock Oscar’s legs out from under him.

Before Oscar could even squawk, the bomb hit. Blast sucked the air out of his lungs. Had the bomb burst a little closer, it would have torn them to pieces from the inside out so he drowned in his own blood. Chunks of casing screeched through the air, some of them not nearly far enough over his head.

And that bomb was only the first of eight or ten. Somebody in the Bible had wrestled with God and prevailed. Oscar felt as if he were wrestling with God and getting the crap slammed out of him. He got bounced and slapped around, and ended up all bruised and battered. He stopped complaining, even to himself, when he fetched up against the Japanese sergeant’s head. The man’s body was nowhere in sight. Oscar almost lost his meager breakfast.

The work he and Charlie and the rest of the Japs’ forced laborers had done was smashed to hell and gone. So were a lot of Japanese soldiers and special naval landing force troops and luckless locals dragooned into working for them. And the dive bombers were only the opening act of the show. As soon as they roared away, fighters swooped low and started spraying the landscape with bullets.

Oscar watched a Jap hit by a burst literally get cut in half. The worst part was, the man’s top half didn’t die right away. Even though blood spilled from it-and from the rest of him-like water from a hose, he yammered something in his own language, tried to lever himself upright, and even looked around for the rifle he’d dropped. Only after most of a dreadful minute did the expression drain from his face. He slumped over again, finally seeming to realize he was dead.

“Jesus!” Oscar turned away, clapping a hand to his mouth. He’d already seen a lot of things he never wanted to see again. That one, though… That one topped the list.

Charlie Kaapu watched the Jap with a face that might have been carved from the basalt underlying the islands. “Serves him right,” he said.

“But-” Oscar didn’t have time for any more than that. Another fighter roared in, its machine guns winking fire. He folded himself into the smallest ball he could and prayed he didn’t get chewed up the way the Jap had. Charlie Kaapu lay on the ground beside him, also doing his best to imitate a sowbug.

Bursts of fire from Japanese machine-gun nests answered the hail of lead from the sky. The Japs had nerve, even if Oscar thought they were short on brains. Then one of the American planes slammed into the ground and went up in a high-octane fireball. The Japs yelled like men possessed. Oscar had a hard time blaming them, too. They’d just proved they could hit back.

Both at the start of the Japanese invasion of Hawaii and now at the end of their tenure here, his own countrymen came closer to killing him than the Japs ever had. He waited for those fighters to come back and shoot up some more Japanese positions-positions, he hoped, a little farther away from him.

“SHIT!” Joe Crosetti exclaimed when another Hellcat crashed and exploded in flames in Waikiki. He knew that could happen to him, too. He hated being reminded. Somebody wasn’t going home to his mom and dad and brothers and sisters-maybe to his wife and kid. Some clerk in the War Department-some bastard thousands of miles away from the fighting and snug as a bug in a rug-would have to send out a Deeply Regrets telegram. And some family’s life would turn upside down.

As Joe’s thumb found the firing button and he raked the Japs below with.50-caliber slugs, he never once thought that they had moms and dads and brothers and sisters and maybe wives and kids, too. They were just… the enemy to him. They weren’t people, the way the guys on his own side were. And they were still doing their goddamnedest to kill him. Their pale, cold-looking tracers spat from machine guns down on the ground and probed for his fighter, trying to knock him out of the sky like that poor luckless son of a bitch who’d just bought the farm. Something clanged into the Hellcat. As always, Joe quickly scanned the instruments. Everything looked okay. The engine kept running. He reached out and patted the side of the cockpit. “Attababy!” he told the plane. They weren’t just whistling Dixie when they said a Hellcat could take it.

Down on the ground, the Japs were sure taking it. More fires than the one from that other plane’s funeral pyre were rising from Waikiki. See how you like it, you bastards, Joe thought. He hoped there weren’t too many civilians down there. If there were, it was their tough luck. They were almost as abstract to him as the enemy. He wished the Japs would just throw in the sponge, the way some lousy pug’s handlers would after Joe Louis beat the snot out of their pride and joy.

Sometimes, though, a pug stayed in there and went toe-to-toe with the champ till he got KO’ed. If the Japs wanted to do that against the USA, by God, they’d get carried out of the ring, too. Yeah, they’d landed a sucker punch at the start of the fight, but you only got one of those. And when you were up against the heavyweight champion of the world, one wasn’t enough.

Joe sprayed Waikiki with bullets as big as his thumb till his guns ran dry. Then he got on the radio to his squadron leader: “Going home for more ammo.”

“Roger that,” the other pilot answered. “We’ll keep ’em busy while you’re otherwise occupied, Admiral.”

“Out,” Joe said with a snort. Admiral! He still aspired to a lieutenant, j.g.’s, stripe and a half on his sleeve.

A few more tracers came up at him as he flew north: Japanese holdouts still doing their damnedest to make trouble. They still held a few pockets in central Oahu where they’d been encircled and bypassed. Sooner or later, soldiers and Navy fliers would clean out those pockets. It wasn’t as if the Japs could retreat to the jungle here and fight a long guerrilla war. Oahu had plenty of jungles. The only trouble, from what Joe’s briefings said, was that you’d starve if you tried playing Tarzan in them.

Five minutes after he left Waikiki behind, he was out over the ocean again. Unless you flew over Oahu, you didn’t realize what a small island it was. He waggled his wings as he flew past the destroyers and cruisers and battleships still firing from the north. Some of them had come around the island to hit targets near Pearl Harbor and Honolulu.

None of the ships shot at him. None of them had shot at that crazy Jap who crashed his Zero into the Bunker Hill, either. Bastard had extracted a high price for his worthless neck, too. He’d hurt that baby flattop along with the big fleet carrier.

Combat air patrol came by to give Joe a look-see. They hadn’t done it soon enough with that Jap. Joe, of course, was harmless, at least to U.S. ships. He and the CAP planes exchanged more wing waggles and some raunchy banter over the radio. Then he flew on toward his carrier.

He still didn’t like carrier landings. He didn’t know a single pilot who did. He suspected there was no such animal. Like them or not, he did exactly what the nice gentleman with the wigwag flags told him to do. It worked: the landing officer didn’t wave him off. When the flags dropped, so did Joe’s Hellcat. His teeth clicked together as the wheels hit the flight deck. The tailhook caught. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Joe shoved back the canopy and scrambled out of the cockpit. He ran for the island as soon as his feet hit the deck planking. The faster you got away from the plane, the better off you were. The briefings had that one right. As if Joe needed the reminder, the Jap suicide pilot drove home that lesson.

“Over Waikiki, Crosetti?” the briefing officer said when Joe reported.

“Yes, sir.”

The other officer-a regular and an older man-smiled. “Not the way you expected to get there, I bet.”

“Sir, till the war started, I never figured I’d get there at all,” Joe answered.

“Well, since you did, suppose you tell me what you saw,” the briefing officer said.

“Aye aye, sir,” Joe said, and he did.

AT BREAKFAST ONE MORNING on the hospital ship, Fletch Armitage realized he was making progress. Breakfast, like most breakfasts on the Benevolence, was scrambled powdered eggs, fried Spam, and hash browns. Nothing was wrong with the hash browns. They had crunch over greasy softness, and you could pour on the salt till they tasted just the way they were supposed to.

The powdered eggs and Spam, on the other hand… Up till that morning, Fletch had shoveled them into his face with reckless abandon, like a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation. He damn well was a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation, and he wanted to claw back from that edge just as fast as he could. He made a pig of himself at lunch and dinner and snacks in between times, too.

Some of the rescued POWs had eaten themselves right into stomach trouble. The only trouble Fletch had was gaining weight back fast enough to suit him.

This particular morning, he took a big gulp of coffee with plenty of cream (well, condensed milk) and sugar and tore into breakfast. He ate a mouthful of Spam and eggs, then paused with the oddest expression on his face. “You know what?” he said to the guy next to him in the galley.

“No,” the other ex-prisoner said. “What?”

“These eggs and this meat-they’re really lousy.” Fletch knew he sounded astonished. He had all the food he wanted. Now he’d got to the point where he didn’t just want food. He wanted good food. Wanting it on a hospital ship was probably optimistic, but even so…

“You’re right.” The other man sounded as astonished as Fletch had. “I didn’t even notice up till now.”

“Neither did I,” Fletch said. The guy to his left was just as skinny as he was. Some of the poor bastards from Kapiolani Park had actually starved to death before the U.S. Navy could throw enough food into them to keep them going. Fletch hadn’t been in that boat, but he’d been in the one tied up right next to it.

“Take your plate, sir?” a Filipino mess steward asked. Fletch nodded. Good, bad, or indifferent, every scrap of food in front of him had vanished. He wondered if he would ever leave anything uneaten again. The way he felt now, he wouldn’t bet on it.

As the steward also took the other former prisoner’s plate, Fletch asked, “Any chance of getting fresh eggs and real ham around here?”

“Yeah,” the other former POW said. Several other scrawny men nodded.

The Filipino beamed at them like a proud mother just after Junior’s first steps. “Oh, my friends!” he said.

“You feel better! I am so happy for you!”

“Does that mean we don’t get the fancy grub?” asked the guy on Fletch’s left.

“Probably,” the mess steward answered, not beaming so much now. “Two thousand miles from the mainland, remember. You eat better than other people out here.”

“We’ve earned it,” Fletch said. He didn’t quite feel as if he were made of pipe cleaners any more. He’d graduated to pencils-gnarled, knotty pencils, but pencils all the same. He wondered what would come next in his gradual reinflation.

What came next that day was an examination by one of the doctors on the Benevolence. Fletch got weighed. He had his blood pressure taken. The sawbones looked pleased. “You’re getting there, Captain.”

“I’m just a lieutenant,” Fletch said.

“Nope.” The doctor shook his head. “If you weren’t a POW, you would’ve got the promotion by now. And so-you did.”

“Thanks, Doc!” Fletch would rather have heard it from somebody besides an M.D., but he wasn’t going to complain any which way. Instead of complaining, he asked, “When can I go ashore?”

“When we decide you’re strong enough, and when it seems safe,” the doctor answered. “I know you’re feeling better-you were one of the men bitching about chow this morning, weren’t you? That’s a good sign. But you’re not fit for active duty yet, and Oahu’s no place for tourists right this minute.”

“I understand that,” Fletch said. “My wife’s there, though-if she’s still alive, anyway.” He didn’t say anything about the divorce that had been in progress. It wasn’t final when the fighting started. Jane wouldn’t have kept on with it since then… would she?

He’d got the doctor’s attention. “Oh,” the other man said. “We are letting men in that situation onto the island. It won’t happen tomorrow, though, or the day after. You’ll have some hoops to jump through as far as the paperwork goes.”

“Let me at ’em!” Fletch said. “After what I went through with the Japs, I’ll never worry about that kind of crap again.”

“You’re not the first guy I’ve heard that from, either,” the doctor said. “One way or another, it’ll get sorted out. In the meantime, try to be patient-and the breakfasts are still good for you, even if they aren’t the most exciting thing in the world.” All of that was undoubtedly good advice, which didn’t make Fletch like it one bit better.

AFTER THE JAPS TOOK WAHIAWA, they set up a community kitchen in the elementary school to share what little there was to eat. The U.S. Army troops who retook the town kept the kitchen going.

These days, it doled out K-rations and C-rations and big, tasteless chocolate bars called D-rations. The joke was that if you ate one of those, it was in you for the D-ration.

Jane Armitage was not inclined to be fussy about what kind of food she got. There was plenty of it: the only thing that mattered to her. No, one more-she didn’t have to give herself to Japanese soldiers if she wanted to go on eating (to say nothing of breathing).

No one had thrown her time in the brothel in her face-yet. She didn’t think any of the other women had had trouble with it, either. If the Japs dragged you in there, kept you in there with bars on the windows, and screwed you whenever they felt like it, you pretty plainly weren’t collaborating. That meant you got to stand in line behind the people who damn well were.

Several women collecting their rations had hair clipped down to stubble to show what they were. They’d collaborated with the occupiers on their backs, but they’d done it for fun or for advantage, not because they had to. Most of them were local Japanese-most, but not all. One was a tall redhead who had been-maybe still was-married to somebody from Fletch’s old unit. She got her food and sat as far away from everybody else as she could. Her belly bulged. The baby was due any day now. Jane would have bet anything in the world that it wouldn’t have red hair.

But women who’d gone to bed with Japanese soldiers were only the small change of collaboration. Everybody stared when Yosh Nakayama came into the community kitchen. The nursery man stolidly collected his ration tins, sat down not far from Jane, and started to eat. He’d translated for Major Hirabayashi and relayed the Japanese commandant’s orders to the rest of Wahiawa. But he’d also done everything he could to get crops in the ground when Oahu was hungriest, and nobody’d ever claimed he’d informed on people. Jane knew he’d done what he could to keep her out of the brothel, though she’d been too dumb to realize it till too late. Some wanted to string him up. Others thought he deserved a medal. He went on about his business, there in the eye of the storm. It wasn’t as if he could hop in a plane and fly off to Tokyo.

There had been informers. Some of them had slipped out of Wahiawa before the U.S. Army came in. Jane hoped they were getting the shit bombed out of them in Honolulu. That would start to give them what they deserved. And some had tried to stay and brazen it out. Again, a lot of those were local Japanese who’d bet on the wrong horse. You could understand them even if you despised them.

But Smiling Sammy Little, who had the biggest used-car dealership in Wahiawa, was as Anglo-Saxon as George Washington. And he was in the guardhouse. He’d rolled over and wagged his tail for the Japs. They were on top, and he’d wanted to stay near the top: it seemed as simple as that. Figuring out how many people were dead because of his toadying wasn’t so simple. Jane hoped he’d get it in the neck.

Somebody lit a cigarette. Jane’s nostrils twitched. Along with almost all the other smokers on Oahu, she’d had to lose the habit during the Japanese occupation. The soldiers’ rations included little packs of cigarettes. Jane had smoked a few. They still made her dizzy and nauseated, the way they had when she was just learning how. She intended to keep at it till it seemed natural again.

As soon as she was done eating, she went back to her apartment. As long as she stayed in there with the door locked, things had a harder time getting at her. She started to head for the bathroom, then checked herself. She’d taken endless showers. They didn’t wash away the memory of all the hands that had groped her. She didn’t know how many times she’d douched with salt water. That couldn’t make her forget all the times she’d had to open her legs for the Japs. And, now that she had toothpaste again, she also brushed her teeth over and over. She remembered how they’d made her get down on her knees even so.

She was going to remember, going to have to deal with, all that the rest of her life. She was damned if she could see how. Maybe she was just damned, period. The Japs hadn’t cared what they did to her. All they’d wanted was a few minutes of fun each. If that left her ruined for the rest of her days, so what?

She snorted. They hadn’t cared about the rest of her days, not even a little bit. They’d intended to use her, use her up, and then knock her over the head. Who was she kidding? The only thing that had saved her was the U.S. reinvasion.

Slowly, she made herself straighten up and peer into the mirror over the sink. She still looked like death warmed over. But if she gave in to despair, didn’t the Japs win a battle inside her head? It felt that way.

Living well is the best revenge. That held a lot of truth. She wasn’t what she would have been if the Japs had left her alone, and that was a damn shame. But she wasn’t a slut or a basket case just because they’d done their goddamnedest to turn her into one. And if anybody didn’t like it… “Tough shit,” she muttered. She’d never liked the way Fletch swore. Maybe now she understood it a little better than she had when they were married.

She hoped Fletch was still alive. After what she’d seen, and after the stories soldiers told about what the Japs had done at the POW camp up by Opana, she knew the odds weren’t the best. She hoped anyhow. She might not have wanted to stay married to him. She didn’t hate him, though, and he’d done what he could for the country.

And when he found out what the Japs had made her do, he’d probably want to spit in her eye. She sighed, wishing some of the K-rations came with a little bottle of bourbon instead of cigarettes. Somebody in Washington should have done something about that. She sure as hell needed a drink now, and she was sure plenty of servicemen needed one even worse. They had to do without, and so did she.

Life isn’t fair, she thought. Her laugh was as bitter as-what was that stuff in the Bible? Wormwood, that was it. They’d used it to flavor absinthe, one more kind of booze she couldn’t have. As if I didn’t find out about that the hard way.

SANDBAGGED MACHINE-GUN NESTS AND CONCRETE pillboxes sprouted like pimples on the smooth green skin of the lawn around Iolani Palace. Trenches zigzagged from one to the next. The Japanese weren’t going to give up the Kingdom of Hawaii’s center of government without a fight.

Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa understood that. It was at least as much a propaganda point as a military one. As long as Iolani Palace stayed in Japanese-nominally, in Hawaiian-hands, the kingdom Japan had reestablished here remained a going concern. Strong Japanese forces also hung on in the gray, boring office buildings west of the palace. So did the remnants of the Royal Hawaiian Army. From what Furusawa had heard, some of King Stanley Laanui’s Hawaiians had fought with fanatical fervor. Others, unfortunately, had hardly fought at all.

Commander Genda looked northwest, the direction from which the U.S. Marines were likeliest to come. Then he looked back over his shoulder toward the palace. Like Honolulu City Hall to the east, it hadn’t been badly damaged. As if picking that thought from his informal aide’s mind, Genda said, “The Americans want to keep these places in one piece if they can. They intend to use them after they finish the reconquest.”

“Yes, sir.” Furusawa nodded. He’d figured that out for himself. He’d also realized Captain Iwabuchi didn’t intend to let the Americans have anything in Honolulu in one piece if he could help it. Here, he could. He kept insisting the Japanese would throw the Americans back. Commander Genda, Furusawa noted, claimed nothing of the sort. That also made sense to Furusawa, however little he liked it. The USA held an even more dominant position here than Japan had during the first invasion.

“How long do you think we’ve got, sir?” Furusawa asked.

Genda shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. We’ve already held out longer than I thought we could. The special naval landing forces are… dedicated men.”

“Hai,” Furusawa said. That was a diplomatic way of calling them maniacal diehards, which would have been just as true. The Army had orders against retreat. Its men knew better than to let themselves be captured. But the special naval landing forces rushed toward the enemy like lovers going to meet their beloved. They hurt the Americans, and sometimes even threw them back. The price they paid, though!

“I wish Captain Iwabuchi would not order charges,” Genda said, again thinking along with him. “They are wasteful, especially when we cannot replace our losses. Better to make the Yankees come to us and pay the price.”

“Would he listen if you told him something like that?” Furusawa asked.

Genda gloomily shook his head. “He would just call me soft. Maybe he would be right. I don’t know anything to speak of about commanding ground troops. What’s your opinion, Senior Private?”

“Mine?” Furusawa was flabbergasted. He didn’t think a superior had ever asked him that before. He wished someone would have done it sooner. Now… “It probably doesn’t matter much one way or the other, does it, sir?”

The naval officer looked at him in surprise. Furusawa wondered if he was in trouble. Then he laughed at himself. Of course he was in trouble. Before long, all the Japanese soldiers and men from the special naval landing forces would be dead. How could he land in trouble any worse than that?

After a moment, Genda started laughing, too. “Well, Furusawa-san, you’ve got the right way of looking at things-no doubt about it. All we can do here is all we can do. Once we’ve done it…” He licked his lips. “Once we’ve done it, they’ll start defending the Empire a little closer to the home islands, that’s all.”

Furusawa sent him an admiring glance. Defending the Empire closer to home sounded much better than dying to the last man here. They both meant the same thing, but how you looked at it did count.

A mortar bomb crashed down not far away. Furusawa and Genda both huddled in the trench. You couldn’t hear a mortar bomb coming. It announced itself by blowing up. Huddling in a trench wouldn’t do you any good if the damn thing came down on top of you, either.

More mortars opened up on the Japanese positions in front of Iolani Palace. So did regular U.S. artillery pieces. You could hear those shells coming in. The louder the scream in the air, the closer to you they were. Some were very close, close enough to throw dirt on Furusawa.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” someone shouted.

Furusawa popped up when he heard that. He might get killed if he did, but the American Marines would surely kill him if he waited in the hole. He squeezed off a couple of rounds from his Springfield. The U.S. barrage hadn’t knocked out all the Japanese strongpoints. Machine guns spat death at the big men in green uniforms. Some fell. Some ducked into doorways or dove behind piles of wreckage. Some drew back.

“We still have teeth,” Furusawa said proudly, even if he had no idea whether he’d hit any Americans.

“Hai.” Commander Genda jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. Smoke rose from the palace. A couple of shells had hit it. “In the end, they won’t care whether they destroy it. A pity-it’s a nice building. I hope… the people inside are all right.”

He didn’t talk about any one person in particular. Senior Private Furusawa had a pretty good idea which person in the palace mattered most to him, though. When Furusawa came to Hawaii from Japan, he’d never expected to meet a queen. There hadn’t been any queen here then. He couldn’t fault Genda’s taste. Queen Cynthia was a striking woman, even if her coppery hair and green eyes made her seem more like some kami than a proper human being.

An American with one of their automatic rifles started squeezing off short bursts to make the defenders keep their heads down. A bullet snapped past Furusawa’s ear. He ducked. So did Commander Genda. Furusawa sighed. His superior’s romance probably wouldn’t have ended well anyhow. It surely wouldn’t now.

LES DILLON’S FIRST GLIMPSE of Iolani Palace was almost his last glimpse of anything. As he ran up Hotel Street-not the good part, worse luck-and turned right on Richards, a burst of enemy machine-gun fire cut down the Marine next to him. The man, a replacement whose name Les had never learned, probably died before he finished crumpling to the pavement. Three slugs in the chest would do that to you. Les knew he could have caught the burst as easily as the other guy. Dumb luck, one way or the other.

He dove headlong into a doorway. Letting the Japs have another good shot at him would be stupid. Not everything that happened in combat was luck, not even close. If you gave the enemy a target when you didn’t have to, you almost deserved to get nailed.

The Japs kept shooting as if they thought somebody would outlaw ammunition in an hour and a half. To Les, the long bursts they fired from their machine guns showed poor training. If you fired off a whole strip of bullets, or a magazine’s worth from a light machine gun, of course most of them would go high. The muzzle couldn’t help pulling up. Three, four, five rounds at a crack was the right way to do it.

With all those bullets in the air, though, some had to hit something. The poor damned replacement had proved that the hard way. Calls for corpsmen rang out again and again. Les admired the Navy men who accompanied the Marines more than he could say. Combat wasn’t their proper trade, but they went anywhere he and his buddies did. And they put themselves in harm’s way every time they rescued a man under enemy fire. When corpsmen got liberty along with Marines, they had a hard time buying themselves drinks.

Mortars and artillery pounded the Japanese in front of Iolani Palace. Les wouldn’t have wanted to be a Jap, pinned down by superior firepower and with no place to go. But he’d already seen the slant-eyed monkeys had no quit in them. Maybe that barrage knocked out some of their strongpoints, but the ones that survived kept right on shooting.

Dauntlesses roared down out of the sky to bomb the Japs. The ground shook under Les. Blast slugged him like a Sugar Ray Robinson right-and he wasn’t even the target. No, he wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with the Emperor’s samurai.

Marines started dashing across Richards toward the palace grounds. Even after the dive bombers came in, the Japs had plenty of machine guns waiting for them. And snipers in the buildings on this side of the street took a toll, too.

A lieutenant from another company dove into the doorway with Les. “We’re going to have to clear this whole block,” he said.

“What? You and me?” Lieutenant or no lieutenant, Les was ready to tell him to piss up a rope if he said yes to that. Combat was one thing, and bad enough all by itself. Suicide when suicide wouldn’t do you or your side any good was something else again. As far as Les was concerned, the Japs were welcome to that.

But the officer, who’d probably been born about the time when Les started going over the top in France, shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “I’ve got some men following me. If they don’t get chopped up too bad, they’ll be along.”

“Okay, sir. That’s business,” Les said. The junior officer wasn’t asking his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, and he’d got here ahead of them. Les asked, “How are they fixed for grenades?”

“Lots,” the lieutenant said, which was the right answer. While waiting for the rest of the Marines to get there, Les kicked in the door. If Japs had lurked right behind it, he would have been dead long since. He went inside, his heart pounding. Then he had company, lots of company. It helped-some.

Clearing that block across the street from the palace grounds was as nasty a job as he’d ever been part of. The Japs, as usual, wouldn’t retreat and wouldn’t surrender. They had grenades, too. He would hear them banging the damn things on a helmet or against a wall to start their fuses. That would be the signal to duck into an office or back around a corner when you could, then to move forward again once the enemy grenades went off.

It might as well have been trench warfare. Along with the grenades, it came down to hand-to-hand more than once. Some Hawaiians fought alongside the Japs. Instead of being small and tough, they were big and tough, and no more inclined to surrender than Hirohito’s boys.

“Just my luck,” Les panted after the Marines finished a knot of them. He had blood on his bayonet and blood on his boots. The stink of it filled the air. “Some of these Hawaiian fuckers quit as soon as they got the chance-but none of the ones I ever ran into.”

“Maybe they don’t like you, Sarge,” a Marine said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Les said. The other leatherneck had put a bayonet into the kidneys of the Hawaiian he’d been fighting, so he couldn’t complain about undue familiarity. “Got a butt on you? I’m out.”

“Sure.” The Marine handed him a pack.

He took one and lit it with a Zippo. “Thanks, buddy. Damn, I needed that.” He gratefully sucked in smoke.

“I believe you,” the other Marine said. “Some of the people here, they’d rather have cigarettes than food, and they’re so goddamn skinny, they look like they oughta go into the hospital. It’s a funny business.”

“Yeah.” Les looked down at the Camel between his index and middle fingers. A thin, curling ribbon of smoke rose from it. “Wonder how come you want ’em so goddamn bad. They don’t do that much for you-not like booze or anything-but they sure get their hooks in.” He shrugged. “Fuck, what difference does it make?”

“None I can see,” the other Marine answered. “We’re gonna have to clean out the stinking palace next, won’t we? Boy, that’ll be fun.”

“Yeah, maybe even more fun than we just had here.” Les took another drag. His eyes crossed as he tried to focus on the glowing coal. “Well, we knew pretty damn quick this was gonna be a game of last man standing. Can’t be that many Japs left.”

“Here’s hoping,” the other Marine said.

WHEN PROPAGANDA AND MILITARY NECESSITY RAN into each other, propaganda had to take a back seat. Minoru Genda understood that. Unfortunately, the Americans did, too. They were methodically knocking down Iolani Palace above his head. They might even get propaganda mileage out of that-something on the order of, We had to destroy this historic building to liberate it. Before long, Japan would be in no position to contradict them.

If not for the basement, which had been the preserve of servants and bureaucrats in days gone by, the palace would have been uninhabitable. As things were, Genda took refuge there with a few Japanese soldiers-his unofficial runner, Senior Private Furusawa, among them-and with King Stanley Owana Laanui and Queen Cynthia.

King Stanley was holding up better than Genda would have expected. He was holding up better than a lot of the soldiers, in fact. He gave Genda a crooked smile and said, “Well, this didn’t work out the way we expected, did it?”

“Please excuse me, your Majesty, but it did not,” Genda said. “Karma, neh? We did the best we could.”

“I know. I’m not mad.” Stanley Laanui laughed. “I oughta be, huh?”

“What do you mean?” Genda asked cautiously. If the King of Hawaii knew about his affair with the Queen… Genda almost laughed, too. What difference did it make now? No matter how you sliced it, none of them was going to live much longer. A couple of 105mm shells slammed into the palace to underscore that. Something up above Genda fell over with a crash-one of the cast-iron columns supporting the second story?

But King Stanley said, “If you’d picked somebody else to put a crown on, he’d be in the hot seat now, and I’d be off somewhere else thinking, Better you than me, you poor, sorry bastard.”

“You were a good king,” Cynthia Laanui said. “You are a good king.” She set a hand on his arm. Genda had to work to keep his face impassive. She might have had fun with him-she had had fun with him-but she did love her husband. Or if she didn’t, she wouldn’t show it now, not when everything was falling apart.

“No offense to you, sweetheart, but I always did want to give the USA one right in the eye,” Stanley Laanui said. “I was just a little kid when that damn Dole and the rest of those pirates hijacked the kingdom, but I always figured I owed ’em one. So I tried to pay ’em back-and now they’re paying me back.” Up above, something else came down, hard enough to make the floor over their heads shake. Whatever it was, it had almost come through the floor.

A machine gun mounted at the edge of the dry moat began to chatter. If the U.S. Marines wanted Iolani Palace, they would have to pay the price for it. They did want it, and they were paying.

“All over now,” King Stanley said. “All over.” He had a U.S. Army.45 in a holster on his belt-a brute of a pistol that would knock over a horse, let alone a man. He took it out and looked at it. “Better to go this way than to let those shitheads catch me and hang me.” No Japanese could have put it better.

“Yes,” Cynthia said softly. She eyed the pistol with a strange fascination-half longing, half dread. “They wouldn’t let us go on living for very long, and they’d have fun with us before they did hang us or shoot us. We did what we did, and it didn’t quite work-you’re right-and now it’s time to close the door.”

Stanley Laanui glanced over to Genda. “Shall I give you one between the eyes before I finish Cyndi and me?” he inquired. The way things were, he might have asked the question anyhow. But the words held a certain bitter edge. He does know , Genda thought. His gaze flicked to Cynthia. She must have realized the same thing, for she couldn’t hide her surprise and alarm.

Genda decided not to show he understood everything King Stanley meant. Bowing, he said, “No, thank you, your Majesty. I will not live through defeat, either, I promise you. But we have our own way of ending.”

“Hara-kiri?” the king asked. Genda made himself not wince as he nodded; seppuku was a much more elegant, much less earthy way to put it. King Stanley grimaced. “Better you than me, buddy. I want to get it over with in a hurry.”

“It will be fast enough,” Genda answered. He turned to Senior Private Furusawa and spoke in Japanese:

“Will you please serve as my second? Things here cannot go on much longer.” As if to underscore that, the machine gun at the edge of the moat started hammering away again.

“I would be honored, Commander-san,” Furusawa said. “I will do it quickly, so you do not suffer.”

“Domo arigato,” Genda said, and then went back to English: “It is arranged.”

“Okay,” Stanley Laanui said. His mouth twisted when the machine gun abruptly fell silent. “You ready, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know.” Queen Cynthia’s voice shook. “I don’t know if anybody can be ready, but you’d better not wait.” She nodded to Genda. “Good-bye, Commander. We tried our best.”

“Hai. Sayonara.” Genda looked down at the floor.

The Hawaiian royal couple went into a little room off the central hallway. A shot rang out, and then a moment later another one. Genda opened the door. If either of them needed finishing, he would take care of it. But Stanley Owana Laanui, while he might not have made much of a king, had done what he had to do here. He and his redheaded queen both lay dead, each with a neat gunshot wound to the temple-and a nasty exit wound on the other side.

“Sayonara,” Genda whispered again, and went back outside. He nodded to Senior Private Furusawa.

“The time has come,” he said, and sat cross-legged on the floor. Baring his belly, he drew his Navy-issue katana from its sheath. He’d never used it before. He should have had a wakizashi, a samurai’s shortsword, but he would have to make do.

“As the blade touches you, sir?” Furusawa asked.

“Let it go in first,” Genda said. “Then.” He looked up to the ceiling. “With this, my death, I atone for my failure here. May the Emperor forgive me. May my spirit find its home in Yasukuni Shrine.” He drove the sword home. The pain was astonishing, unbelievable. Discipline forgotten, he opened his mouth to scream. Then everything ended.

WHAT WAS LEFT OF THE TOP TWO FLOORS of Iolani Palace belonged to the USA again. Japs and Hawaiians sprawled everywhere in blood-soaked, unlovely death. So did too goddamn many Marines. Japs, and maybe Hawaiians, too, were still holed up in the basement. Every so often, they would fire up through the floor above them. That was a nasty angle when a bullet hit; two Marines, one in Les Dillon’s platoon, had had their balls shot off.

The Japs had driven back three attacks on the basement from outside. Now the Americans were trying something different. Marine engineers were setting up a shaped charge on the ground floor of the palace.

It would blow a big hole in the basement’s roof. With luck, that would let leathernecks get down there and go toe-to-toe with the enemy.

Luck, Les thought. Some fucking luck. The Japs down there would die. So would a lot of Marines. He was too likely to be one of them.

Another bullet crashed up through the floor. By luck that really was good, that one missed everybody. Getting shot at from below was still goddamn scary. Several Marines fired a round or two down through the floor at the Japs they couldn’t see. Then they all went somewhere else in a hurry, so the slant-eyed sons of bitches wouldn’t nail them by shooting back where the bullets had gone through. Their boots clumping around overhead probably gave the enemy a hint about where they were anyway.

Through all the chaos, the engineers went on working. One of them looked up at Les and said, “Okay, we’re about ready to blow this bastard.”

“Hear that, people?” Les called to the other Marines. “Get your grenades ready. We’ll see how many of those fuckers we can blow to hell and gone before we go down there ourselves.”

Another engineer lit a fuse. The Marines drew back. After a sharp, surprisingly small whump! the charge blew a hole about four feet square in the floor. Along with his buddies, Les chucked grenades through the hole as fast as he could. Some fragments came back up. They bit one man in the hand. The Marines kept on tossing grenades into the basement. They didn’t want live Japs anywhere near that hole. Les didn’t see how anybody could live through what the enemy was getting, but the Japs had surprised him before.

“Come on!” he said, and let himself drop through the hole. He was down there by himself for only a heartbeat. More leathernecks dropped down with him. He saw a few twisted bodies close by. Then a bullet cracked past his head. Sure as hell, some of Hirohito’s warriors still had fight in them.

A Marine with a tommy gun sprayed death as if from a garden hose. After that, it was the usual chaos of a firefight, made worse because it was at such close quarters. Les was too busy to be afraid and too afraid to be anything else. He charged forward yelling like a banshee, and at least one of the fierce roars that burst from his throat started life as a terrified shriek. Even if he knew that, with luck the Japs wouldn’t.

Hell, they’ve gotta be as scared as I am, went through his mind in one of the brief moments when he wasn’t shooting or throwing a grenade into one of the rooms off the central hallway or using his bayonet. He’d already used it more here in Hawaii than he ever did in the trenches in 1918. If the Japanese soldiers he faced were afraid, they sure didn’t show it. Les wasn’t showing it, either, but he knew what was going on inside his own head. To him, the Japs might have been targets on the firing range, except they had the nasty habit of fighting back.

He fired and stabbed and used his rifle butt once or twice. He got a cut on one forearm, but it was hardly more than a scratch. If he wanted more oak leaves for his Purple Heart, he supposed he could get them. But he didn’t much care. The Purple Heart wasn’t a medal anybody in his right mind wanted to win.

More and more Marines jumped down into the basement. They went forward faster than they could get killed or wounded. Before too long, no more enemy soldiers were still standing. The Americans went through the basement, methodically finishing off wounded Japs. “Save a couple for prisoners,” Les called.

“The brass wants to grill ’em.”

He got grumbles from the men down there with him. “After what those mothers did to our guys, they ought to grill ’em over a slow fire,” one of them said.

“Save a couple,” Les repeated. “Maybe what we squeeze out of ’em will save enough of our guys while we’re cleaning out the last of ’em to make it worthwhile.”

“Maybe.” The Marine didn’t sound convinced, but he didn’t shoot the unconscious Jap at his feet, either. The enemy soldier showed no gunshot wounds, but he was out cold. Les wondered if he’d got the Jap with his rifle butt, or if one of the other leathernecks had done it.

He shrugged. That didn’t make much difference. The fighting right here was over. He could enjoy the breather-for a little while.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” a voice asked in Japanese.

Yasuo Furusawa forced his eyes open. His head hurt worse than after the worst hangover he’d ever had. “Hai,” he whispered so he wouldn’t have to hear himself. The man looking down at him was Japanese, but wore civilian clothes. They were in a tent: that was canvas behind the other man. Furusawa tried to take stock, but didn’t have much luck. “What happened?” he asked at last.

“You were in Iolani Palace. Do you remember?” the other man said.

“Hai,” Senior Private Furusawa repeated, again as if from very far away. He remembered finishing Commander Genda. Genda had died as a samurai should. And he remembered a hole blown in the ceiling, and U.S. Marines jumping down into the palace basement roaring like tigers. He remembered trying to fight off a big one… and that was the last thing hedid remember. That meant…“ Zakennayo!” he exclaimed. “Am I…?” He couldn’t make himself say the words.

The other man nodded. “Yes, you are a prisoner of war. You were taken while unconscious. It is not your fault. You did not surrender.”

That helped-about as much as bailing with a bucket helped keep a battleship afloat. “A prisoner!” Furusawa said in despair. The knowledge hurt almost as much as his head, which said a lot. Furusawa squeezed his eyes shut as shame washed over him. “My family is disgraced forever.”

“Your family doesn’t know,” the other man said. By his old-fashioned accent-and by how thin he was-he had to be a local Japanese working with the Americans. “No one will tell them till the war is over. You can sort it out then. Meanwhile, aren’t you glad you’re alive?”

“No.” Furusawa shook his head, which also hurt. “What… What will they do to me?” You could do anything to a prisoner, anything at all.

As if picking that thought from his mind, the local Japanese said, “America follows the Geneva Convention. No one will torture you for the fun of it, or anything like that. You will be questioned, but it will only be questions. Do you understand?”

“I hear you,” Furusawa said wearily. He heard gunfire, too, not close enough to be alarming but not that far away, either. “We’re still fighting!”

“Yes, but it’s mopping up now,” the other man said. “Honolulu will fall. Oahu will fall. The war will go west.”

Furusawa wished he could call a local Japanese a liar. He knew he couldn’t. He’d been sure Oahu would fall since his own countrymen couldn’t keep the Americans off the northern beaches. Hawaii would no longer be the Empire’s eastern shield. Now the USA could use the islands against Japan. Shigata ga nai, he thought. He certainly couldn’t do anything about it.

“Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?” the other man asked.

“Hai.” Furusawa sat up on the edge of the cot where they’d put him.

“I’ll get you food,” the local Japanese said. “There are guards outside. Don’t try to leave. It would be the last thing you did.”

Furusawa hadn’t thought of leaving. He barely had the strength to sit. The local Japanese went out. He spoke in English. Someone answered him in the same language. He hadn’t been lying, then. Furusawa hadn’t thought so. The other man came back in a few minutes with U.S. ration tins and a cup of coffee. Furusawa ate greedily. He felt a little more alive when he finished.

“You were in the palace basement, neh?” the local Japanese said. Furusawa nodded, and didn’t wish he was dead right afterwards. The other man-who was, Furusawa slowly realized, an interrogator-went on, “Do you know what happened to the man and woman who called themselves King and Queen of Hawaii?”

“Hai.” Why not answer? What difference did it make now? What difference did anything make now? This felt more like a strange life after death than anything else. “He shot her. Then he shot himself. They didn’t want to be captured, either.”

“Well, I can believe that,” the local man said. “They would have had a hard time of it.” He paused to look at a notebook. Questions he wanted to ask? “Do you know who the Navy officer who committed seppuku was?”

“Commander Genda.” With a certain mournful pride, Furusawa added, “I had the honor to act as his second.”

“Lucky you.” The interrogator’s tone proved him more American than Japanese.

“I thought so.” Furusawa paused and winced. It felt as if someone were trying to drive a blunt spike through his skull. “Please excuse me. My head hurts.”

“I believe that. They say you’re lucky it didn’t get broken for good,” the local Japanese answered. This is luck? Furusawa thought. The local Japanese held out two white tablets. “Here are some aspirins. They may help a little.”

Poison? Furusawa wandered. But, as a druggist’s son, he recognized aspirins when he saw and smelled them. He swallowed them with a last little swig of coffee. “Arigato,” he said. Maybe the interrogator meant it. Maybe the Americans were easier on prisoners than his own people would have been-were. He could hope, anyhow.

And hope was all he could do. He’d fought as long and as hard as he could, but now, for him, the war was over.