End of the Beginning

VII

“THIS IS STUPID, OSCAR.” REAL ALARM RODE SUSIE HIGGINS’ VOICE. “YOU’RE going to get yourself killed, and you’re going to land everybody who ever heard of you in hot water.”

“Which bothers you more?” Oscar van der Kirk asked.

“You think I want the Japs breathing down my neck, you’re nuts.” Susie was one hard-headed gal.

Oscar couldn’t even say Charlie Kaapu hadn’t done anything. He didn’t know that, not for sure. From what the police sergeant in Honolulu said, the Japs sure as hell thought he had. The Kempeitai… The more he repeated the name to himself, the scarier it sounded. Would they knock on his door in the middle of the night, the way the Gestapo was supposed to do?

“I’m just going to spread some fish around,” Oscar said. “The way things are these days, food works better than cash.”

“You can’t even talk to the Japs,” Susie said, which was largely true. “How are you going to get them to do what you want? They won’t even know who you’re trying to spring.”

He made money-counting motions. He couldn’t very well make fish-counting motions; there weren’t any.

“I’ll manage,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “Besides, they’re bound to be using local clerks and such. Somebody will understand me. If you’re trying to give somebody something, people always understand you.”

Not even Susie tried to argue with that. She only said, “You’ll get into more trouble than you know what to do with.”

“You said the same thing when I went to the police station,” Oscar reminded her.

She wasn’t impressed. “Okay, you were lucky once. How come you think you’ll be lucky twice?”

That was a better question than Oscar wished it were. Trying to make light of it, he said, “Hey, I’m lucky all the time, babe. I’ve got you, don’t I?”

Susie turned red. She was a lot tanner than she had been when the war left her stuck in the middle of the Pacific, but the flush was still easy to see. “Damn you, Oscar, why do you have to go and say stuff like that?” she said angrily.

“Because I mean it?” he suggested.

She turned even redder. Then, very suddenly, she jumped up and dashed into the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She stayed in there for quite a while, and didn’t flush before she came out. Her eyes were suspiciously bright. She wagged a finger at him the way his mother had when he was four years old. “You know, it’s funny.”

“What is?” Oscar said. Whatever she’d been doing in there, it sure as hell wasn’t laughing.

“First time I saw you, before you ever touched me or took me out on that surfboard or anything, I knew I was going to go to bed with you,” she answered. “I wanted to get the taste of Rick out of my mouth as fast as I could.” Rick was the ex-husband whose becoming ex- her trip to Hawaii had celebrated. She wagged that finger again. “And don’t you dare say anything about getting the taste of you in my mouth.”

“Me? I didn’t say anything,” Oscar answered as innocently as he could, though she’d done that, all right. He’d slept with a lot of women getting over their exes in a tropical paradise. That was one of the things a surf-riding instructor-a surf bum-was for.

“Oh, yes, you did.” Susie sounded fierce. “You said something sweet. Going to bed with you is easy. The hard part is thinking I might…”

“Might what?”

“Might love you,” she said in a tiny voice.

“Oh.” Oscar went over to her and put an arm around her. “You know what, kiddo? I might love you, too. You know what else? I think we ought to wait and see what happens before we do anything. If it looks like the Japs’ll win and keep this place, then we know where we are. If the Americans come and take it back, then we know where we are, too. Right now, it’s just a mess. How can we make plans if we don’t know what the heck to plan for?”

“How can we make plans if you go sticking your head in the lion’s mouth?” But Susie clung to him as if he were a surfboard and the shore a long, long way away.

He kissed her. But then he said, “I’ve got to do it, hon. Nobody else is gonna give a darn about Charlie, but he’s my friend.”

She took a deep breath. Had she said, If you loved me…, they would have had a row. A few months earlier, she probably would have. Now she swallowed it instead. “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I’ll be here if you come back, that’s all.” She didn’t wag a finger at him this time-she poked him in the ribs. “Now I suppose you’ll expect another fancy sendoff. Won’t you, bub? Huh? Won’t you?” She poked him again.

“Who, me?” Oscar hoped he didn’t sound like somebody about to drool on the shoes he wasn’t wearing. Susie laughed at him, so he probably did. Later that night, they emphatically enjoyed each other’s company. Oscar slept soundly.

He went to Honolulu Hale the next morning. Life went on under the Japanese. People got married. They bought and sold property. They paid taxes on it. They got peddler’s licenses. They sued one another. Most of the clerks who’d worked for the U.S. Territory of Hawaii went right on working for the Japanese Kingdom of Hawaii.

There was a new department, though. SPECIAL CASES, the sign above the door said. It wasn’t quite All hope abandon, ye who enter here, but it might as well have been. Several people in other, safer queues looked up, startled, when Oscar walked through that door. A little old woman who seemed hapa — Hawaiian and maybe hapa-Chinese made the sign of the cross.

A clerk who might have been of the same blood glanced up from the papers on his government-issue desk. The nameplate on the desk said he was Alfred Choi. He gave a good game impression of never letting anything take him by surprise. “Yes?” he said. “You wish?”

“I have a friend who’s been, uh, jailed. I don’t think he’s done anything, and I want to help him get out if I can,” Oscar said.

“This is for the police, or for a lawyer,” Alfred Choi said. Oscar unhappily shook his head. Choi looked at him, as if noting the door through which he’d come. “This man, this friend”-he made it sound like a dirty word-“has some connection to the occupying authorities?”

“Uh-huh,” Oscar admitted, even less happily than he’d nodded before.

“Give me his name.”

“Charlie Kaapu.” Oscar wondered if Choi was going to press a secret button that sent a dozen Kempeitai men with pistols and samurai swords charging into the room. Nothing like that happened. The clerk got up, walked to a four-drawer filing cabinet about ten feet away, and went through the third drawer for a minute or so.

When he came back, his face was grim. “You can do nothing,” he said. “I can do nothing. No one can do anything. The occupying authorities have dealt with him.”

“Is he-dead?” Oscar didn’t want to say the word, or even think it.

Alfred Choi shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, which didn’t sound good.

Maybe he was trying to put on the squeeze. Oscar hoped so; that was better than the alternative. Picking his words with care, Oscar said, “I catch a lot of fish-more than I need, sometimes.”

“I have enough to eat, thank you,” Choi said. “I could take fish from you. I could, ah, string you along.” He used the slang self-consciously. “But since I have enough, I tell you straight out: I cannot do anything for your friend. Nobody can do anything for your friend. His case is pau.” The Hawaiian word for finished, in common use in the islands, sounded dreadfully final here.

“Could I talk to anybody else?” Oscar asked.

“Do you want the Kempeitai to talk to you?” Alfred Choi sounded abstractly curious, as if he didn’t give a damn one way or the other. He likely didn’t. It was no skin off his rather flat nose.

“I guess maybe not,” Oscar said reluctantly.

“I guess maybe not, too. This is wise.” The clerk pointed to the door. “You leave through the door you came in by.”

Oscar left through that door. Some of the people in the wider hall onto which SPECIAL CASES opened looked surprised anyone was allowed to leave. He decided he’d done everything he could possibly do for Charlie Kaapu. He wished he knew what Charlie had done, or what the Japs thought he’d done. And he wished he knew what they’d done to him.

THE MEMORY OF HALF-RAW, half-burnt pork was just that-a memory-for Jim Peterson these days. He was back to not so slowly starving on the usual Kalihi Valley rations, back to working himself to death too many inches at a time.

He stood in the rain for morning roll call. The Japs who did the counting had umbrellas, of course. The POWs? The mere idea was a joke. Peterson hoped the count would go smoothly. If it didn’t, the Japs would probably just send the whole gang of them into the tunnel without breakfast. Prisoners starving? So what? Time lost on the tunnel? A catastrophe!

Things seemed to be moving well enough when there was a commotion to the southwest. The Japanese had the escape route well blocked off. Every once in a while, a POW grew desperate enough to try it anyway. Those who did usually got caught. Then they served as object lessons for the others. Watching them tortured to death a little at a time had given Jim Peterson more than one of his many nightmares.

This wasn’t an escaped prisoner. These were new damned souls, come to take their places in hell. Along with his fellow sufferers, Peterson stared at the newcomers. “They aren’t soldiers,” somebody behind him said through the patter and plink of raindrops.

The man was obviously right. Instead of wearing tatters of khaki or Navy blue, they wore tatters of blue jeans and plaid or flowered shirts. Just because they were civilians didn’t mean they hadn’t seen their fair share of abuse and then some. They were bruised and battered and beaten. Quite a few of them limped. A lot of them had bloody mouths. They showed missing front teeth that obviously hadn’t been missing long.

One of the Japs herding them forward smashed a fellow who looked half Hawaiian in the head with a rifle butt for no reason Peterson could see. The man staggered and groaned, but stayed on his feet. Peterson thought that blow would have felled an elephant. But the Japs had also put him in places where you died if you went down. This looked like one of those places for the luckless prisoner.

Somebody not far away muttered, “Look how fat they are.”

They weren’t fat, not really. Not even the Japanese guards, with a couple of exceptions, were fat. But they had vastly more flesh on them than the filthy, bearded skeletons already laboring in the Kalihi Valley.

Shouts in Japanese went back and forth between the soldiers bringing in the new prisoners and the guards in charge of the men already there. Those guards seemed about as delighted to see the new arrivals as a housewife would have been to find more mice marching into her kitchen.

Peterson knew why, too, or at least one of the reasons why. “If this doesn’t fuck up the count…” he said morosely. Several men standing within earshot of him groaned. A Jap guard looked their way. They all pretended they hadn’t let out a peep. After a baleful stare right out of a gangster movie, the guard looked away.

By a minor-league miracle, the new prisoners didn’t foul up the count too badly. Shouting in fragmentary English, the Japs got them to line up in ranks of ten. That told the guards how many of them there were. Then the Japs went back to counting the POWs already there. They only needed to do it twice before the answer satisfied them.

Breakfast wouldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes late. To the Japs, that was fifteen minutes too long. Despite groans and curses from the POWs, they headed them off toward the tunnel mouth. Curses and groans didn’t count for much against fit men, fixed bayonets, and live ammunition.

The Japs drove the newcomers toward the mouth of the tunnel, too. The new fish didn’t complain. They didn’t know they were missing breakfast, and they didn’t know what the devil they were getting into, either. “Wonder what the hell they did to get sent here,” Peterson remarked.

“Must’ve been something juicy,” Gordy Braddon said. After a meditative moment, he added, “They’re the first batch of civilians ever came here. Japs must want ’em dead bad.”

“Yeah-same as us,” Peterson said tightly. Braddon nodded.

“What are we doing here?” asked the big half-Hawaiian guy the Jap had clouted with his rifle butt. Blood and rainwater ran down the side of his face. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.

“Digging a tunnel through the mountains.” Peterson found himself liking the newcomer’s coolness. He added his name and stuck out a hand.

“Jim,” the newcomer repeated, taking it. “I’m Charlie-Charlie Kaapu.” His grip was hard and firm.

Why not? He didn’t have beriberi taking bites out of his strength. Not yet, anyway. If he stayed here very long, he would.

“What did you do that made ’em love you well enough to send you to this garden spot?” Peterson asked.

“Some garden,” Charlie said, and laughed a loud, raucous laugh, the laugh of a man who couldn’t be beaten-or at least of a man who didn’t know he could. He went on, “They say I was spying for the United States.”

“Yeah? Were you?” Peterson didn’t ask the question. A fellow named Seymour Harper did. Peterson wasn’t the only one who suspected him of snitching to the Japs, though nobody’d ever been able to nail that down for sure.

A couple of men coughed. That was about as much warning as they could give the new guy without landing in trouble themselves. It wasn’t enough, not really. But Charlie Kaapu turned out not to need it. He started to shake his head, then grimaced and thought better of it. “Shit, no,” he answered. “What really happened was, this Jap major’s girlfriend thought I was better in bed than he was.” He laughed again, complacently. “You know these Japs ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of needle dicks. But she got mad at him one day and told him what she thought, and the motherfucker went and grabbed me-or he had the cops do it, anyway.”

Gordy Braddon said, “You had more fun getting here than we did, that’s for goddamn sure.” Peterson found himself nodding. He found himself smiling, too, and that wasn’t something he did every day, not in the Kalihi Valley it wasn’t.

Charlie was smiling, too, which only proved he’d just got here. “So how do we dig this stinking tunnel?” They rounded the last bend in the road in front of the tunnel mouth. Jungle no longer hid the hole in the mountainside or the sorry collection of hand tools in front of it. The tools would rust in the rain, but the Japs didn’t care. If a tool broke, that gave them one more excuse to take it out on a prisoner. Peterson pointed at the picks and shovels and crowbars. “Now you see it, Charlie-Devil’s Island, 1943.”

“Oh, boy.” The half-Hawaiian started singing, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go” in a melodious baritone. Peterson had seen Snow White, too-who hadn’t? — but he hadn’t felt like singing since he got here. He still didn’t.

Inside the tunnel, torches and kerosene lamps gave just enough light to move and work by. There had been candles and lamps that burned palm oil or something like that. No more. POWs stole them to eat the tallow and drink the oil.

“You work!” If a Jap overseer was going to know any English, that was it. This one, a sergeant, brandished a length of bamboo to make sure the prisoners got the message. At one time or another, he’d already walloped everybody but the new fish at least twice.

In a low voice, Peterson said, “We don’t go any faster than we have to.”

Charlie Kaapu’s shadow swooped and dipped along the rough black basalt of the tunnel wall as he nodded. “No huhu, Jim,” he answered. “I get it.”

But he and the rest of the newcomers still did a lot more work than any of the POWs who’d been there for a while. That wasn’t because they were more diligent-Jim Peterson thought they’d all got the message about not pushing too hard. With the worst will in the world toward the Japs, though, they couldn’t help themselves. They were so many Charles Atlases alongside the skeletally thin, malnourished prisoners of war. Of course a man with real muscles could outdo somebody who had nothing left between his skin and his bones.

After an eternity, the shift ended. Charlie Kaapu had got hit a couple of more times for not working fast enough to suit the guards. “You did good,” Peterson told him as they stumbled back toward the camp and what would be their meager evening meal.

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. “How long till I look like you?”

Peterson had no real answer for that, but he knew it wouldn’t be long.

ACCOMPANIED BY A PAIR of stalwart petty officers, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida bicycled through the streets of Honolulu. The petty officers weren’t so much bodyguards as men who could get out in front of him and yell, “Gangway!” to clear traffic. Most places, he would have gone by car, and his driver would have leaned on the horn. That he didn’t here was a telling measure of how tight fuel had got in Honolulu.

Panting a little, he stopped in front of the building where Minoru Genda had his office-stopped so abruptly that his tires drew black lines on the pale concrete of the sidewalk. “Wait for me,” he told the petty officers. “I won’t be very long.” They nodded and saluted.

Fuchida charged up the stairs to Genda’s office-and then had to charge down again when a young officer said, “So sorry, Commander-san, but he’s not here this morning. He’s gone to Iolani Palace.”

“Zakennayo!” Fuchida snarled.

When he turned to go without another word, the junior officer said, “Sir, you’re welcome to use a telephone here to call him.”

“I’d better go see him,” Fuchida said. If he’d wanted to telephone Genda, he could have done it from Pearl Harbor. Some things, though, were too important to trust to wires-or to junior officers. The youngster raised an eyebrow. When Fuchida ignored him, he sighed and went back to work.

“That was fast, sir,” one of the petty officers remarked when Fuchida emerged from the building.

“We’re not done yet-that’s why,” Fuchida answered. “Genda-san’s not here. We’ve got to head back west, over to Iolani Palace. Run interference again for me, if you’d be so kind.”

“Yes, sir,” they chorused. If they sounded resigned, then they did, that was all. What choice had they but obedience? None, and they knew it as well as Fuchida did. They got back onto their bicycles and started bellowing, “Gangway!” some more. That, at least, seemed as if it ought to be fun. The way civilians scattered before them clearly declared who the conquerors were.

Fuchida skidded to another stop in front of the palace. The big Hawaiian soldiers at the bottom of the front stairs came to attention and saluted as he hurried by them. So did the Japanese troops at the top of the stairs. He paused for a moment to ask them, “Where’s Commander Genda?”

They looked at one another with expressions he found unfathomable. After a longish pause, their sergeant said, “Is it very urgent, sir?”

“You bet your life it’s urgent!” Fuchida exclaimed. “Would I be here like this if it weren’t?”

Stolidly, the noncom gave back a shrug. “You never can tell, can you, sir? You’ll likely find him in the basement.”

“The basement?” Fuchida echoed in surprise. The Japanese soldiers nodded as one. Fuchida had assumed Genda was here to talk with General Yamashita, who had his office on the second floor. Admiral Yamamoto had used a basement office here, but the commander of the Combined Fleet was long since back in Japan.

To make things more annoying, the front entrance didn’t offer access to the basement. Fuming, Fuchida had to go down the stairs, past the Hawaiian soldiers again, and pedal around the palace so he could go downstairs into the lower level. What the devil was Genda doing here? And where in the basement was he likely to be? That damned sergeant hadn’t said.

Hawaiian bureaucrats were using some of the rooms down there. Fuchida prowled past those. The brown men-and the white-gave him curious looks; since Admiral Yamamoto departed, Japanese officers were seldom seen down here. He looked into those open rooms, and did not see Commander Genda.

Fuming, he yanked open the first door to a windowless room he found-and almost got buried by an avalanche of dustpans and brooms and other cleaning gear. The Americans called a place like that Fibber McGee’s closet; Fuchida thought the phrase came from a radio show.

He went down the hall and tried another closed door. This time, he was rewarded by a whiff of perfume, a startled female gasp, and a muttered obscenity. He shut the door in a hurry, but he didn’t go away-the obscenity had been in Japanese.

Maybe I’m wrong, he thought. But he wasn’t. Commander Genda came out of the small, dark room a couple of minutes later, still hastily setting his uniform to rights. He looked put upon. “What wouldn’t wait till I got back to the office?” he demanded irritably.

“Nothing I can talk about till we’re out of this place,” Fuchida said, and then, with irritation of his own, “If you have to lay one of the maids here, couldn’t you do it when you’re not on duty?”

Genda didn’t talk about that till they were out of Iolani Palace. Even then, he waved the petty officers who’d come along with Fuchida out of hearing range before saying, “I’m not laying one of the palace maids. I’m laying Queen Cynthia.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Fuchida had, from time to time, thought of converting to Christianity. That wasn’t what brought out the oath, though. A lot of Japanese who’d been exposed to Western ways used it whether they took the religion of Jesus seriously or not.

“You’re my friend. I hope you’ll keep your mouth shut. Life would get more… more complicated if you didn’t,” Genda said: a commendable understatement. Occupying the islands was one thing, occupying King Stanley Laanui’s wife something else again. Fuchida could imagine nothing better calculated to show what a false and useless regime the restored Kingdom of Hawaii really was. Before he could express his horror, Genda asked, “And what’s the news that made you come over here and hunt me down? By the Emperor, it had better be important.”

That brought Fuchida back from disasters hypothetical to disasters altogether too real. He also made sure the petty officers couldn’t overhear before he answered, “The Americans put two fish into Zuikaku a couple of hours ago.”

“What? That’s impossible!” Genda exclaimed. Sadly, Fuchida shook his head. Genda went on more moderately: “That’s terrible!” Fuchida could and did nod. “How did it happen? Will she sink?” Genda asked.

“How? They don’t know how. They were getting close to Oahu, and wham!” Fuchida said. “They don’t think she’ll go down-she hasn’t lost power, and the pumps are working. But she’s not going to sail against the Americans with Akagi and Shokaku, either. She’s limping in to Pearl Harbor for emergency repairs, and she may have to go back to Japan again.”

“How could the Americans have got a sub in the right place to torpedo her?” Genda wasn’t really asking Fuchida-he was asking an uncaring world.

Fuchida only shrugged. “Dumb luck,” he said. “Shigata ga nai.”

“Obviously it can’t be helped,” Genda said. “It wouldn’t have happened if it could be. But I’ll tell you something, Fuchida-san: it almost makes me wonder if the Yankees are reading our codes.”

“What?” That shocked Fuchida almost as much as Genda’s dalliance with the redheaded Queen of Hawaii. “Don’t be silly. Everyone knows our codes are unbreakable.”

“Well, yes.” That Genda admitted the fact did a lot to ease Fuchida’s mind. “Dreadful news, though. Zuikaku! We could really use her, because the Americans are building up for another go at us. That gets plainer every day.”

“We’ll be able to fly the planes off the airstrips here…” Fuchida began.

Genda was a small man, and usually a mild-mannered man as well. His scowl now stopped Fuchida in his tracks. “The only way that will do us any good is if we lose the fight on the ocean. I don’t want to lose the fight on the ocean,” he said. “I presume we’ve already screamed to Tokyo that we need more carriers?”

“Oh, yes,” Fuchida said. “Whether Tokyo will listen is probably a different story, though. They keep going on and on about how thin their resources are stretched.”

“Our resources won’t have to stretch so far if we lose Hawaii, that’s for sure,” Genda snapped. “Can’t they see that?”

“We need more carriers. We need more trained pilots,” Fuchida said. “The Americans seem to turn out as many as they want. Why can’t we?”

“Admiral Yamamoto always said we couldn’t hope to match them,” Genda replied. “That was the main reason we gambled so much in this attack: so what they could do wouldn’t matter.” He sighed. “But it turns out that it does matter. It’s just taken longer to be obvious.”

Involuntarily, Fuchida looked north and east. “What do we do now?”

“The best we can,” Genda told him. “What else is there?”

“You were doing the best you could with the Queen, neh?” If Fuchida thought about such things, he wouldn’t have to think about the real troubles facing the Japanese in Hawaii-for a little while, anyway.

“It’s not quite like that,” Genda said with more embarrassment than Fuchida had expected from him.

“She’s… very sweet, really, and her husband doesn’t understand her at all.”

How many men sleeping with other men’s wives had said exactly the same thing? Fuchida wondered if telling Genda as much would do any good. Since he doubted it, he reluctantly put aside his own thoughts of King Stanley’s striking spouse. Duty was calling, and in a strident voice. “We’ve got to get you back to Pearl Harbor as fast as we can.”

Commander Genda sighed once more. “Yes, I suppose so. You came out here to give me the news in person so you wouldn’t have to use the telephone or the radio?”

“Hai.” Fuchida nodded.

“Sensible. Good security. The story will get out anyway-bad news always does-but it will take longer this way. We’ll have the chance to come up with some propaganda of our own, maybe even some genuine good news.”

“That’s what Admiral Kaku thought.” Fuchida turned to one of the petty officers. “Okano!”

“Yes, sir?” The man came to attention.

“I’m going to commandeer your bicycle for Commander Genda here. He needs to go to Pearl Harbor right away,” Fuchida said. Okano nodded and saluted-again, what choice did he have? Fuchida went on, “See if you can borrow one or take one from a civilian. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to walk.”

“He can ride behind me, sir,” the other petty officer said. “I don’t mind.”

The effect wouldn’t be dignified, but Fuchida wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not now. “All right. We’ll do it that way, then,” he said. “Now let’s get moving.”

ENSIGN JOE CROSETTI GAVE HIS FIGHTER plane a little more throttle. The F6F Hellcat responded as if angels flapped their wings harder. A slow grin stretched across Joe’s face. “Wow!” he said.

He’d had some experience with Wildcats now. The F4F wasn’t hopeless against the Zero-it could outdive the top Jap fighter and could take a lot more damage-but it wasn’t a match for the enemy plane, either. The Hellcat… The Hellcat was a long step up.

It was faster than a Wildcat. It had better-much better-high-altitude performance, because its engine packed so much more power. It was even tougher than the older American plane.

Best of all, it was his. He didn’t have a lot of time to get used to it. Before long, they’d throw him into action against the Japs. He had to be ready. He had to be, and he intended to be.

He wouldn’t be alone in the sky when the clash finally came. That was the most important thing to remember. When he looked around-the cockpit gave better visibility than a Wildcat’s, too-he saw a lot of other Hellcats from the Bunker Hill flying with him in neat formation.

Pleasure unalloyed filled his grin. Back when he volunteered to become a Navy flier, this was what he’d had in mind: roaring off a fleet carrier to take the war straight to the Japs. Plenty of guys had volunteered with the same thing in mind. Most of them hadn’t made it. Some washed out of training. Some crashed.

(He crossed himself, there in the cockpit, remembering the funerals he’d gone to.) And so many were flying other kinds of aircraft: flying boats or transports or blimps on antisubmarine patrol off the coasts. But here he was, by God! He’d done what he set out to do.

And there, just a few planes away, flew Orson Sharp. Actually, Joe had been surer his roomie would get a place on a carrier than he had been about himself. He was good. He knew that. Not many who’d gone through the program with him were better. The big guy from Salt Lake City was one of the few.

The formation switched from a vee to line astern as they approached the Bunker Hill and landed one after another. It was just like landing on the Wolverine on Lake Erie-except it wasn’t. That was practice. Everybody knew it. You took it seriously. You had to, because you could get killed if you didn’t. But it wasn’t the real McCoy, all the same. This was. The Bunker Hill wasn’t a converted excursion steamer, and she wasn’t on the Great Lakes. That was the Pacific down there. Destroyers and cruisers screened the carrier, but they weren’t a one hundred percent guarantee no Japanese sub could sneak in and find her. She was in the war-and so was Joe.

His mouth twisted. He’d been in the war for a while now, ever since that Jap flying boat dropped a bomb on his uncle’s house after hitting San Francisco harbor. A lot of guys painted their wife’s name, or their sweetheart’s, on the nose of their plane. Joe’s Hellcat had two names on its nose: Tina and Gina. He’d crossed the country on a train to get to his cousins’ funerals.

Carrier landings were never automatic. If you thought they could be, it was your funeral-literally. When Joe’s turn came, he followed the landing officer’s wigwags as if he’d turned into a robot. One wing was down a little? He didn’t think so, but he brought it up. He was coming in too steeply? Again, he didn’t think so, but he raised the Hellcat’s nose just the same.

Down came both wigwag flags. Down came Joe, in the controlled crash that was a carrier landing. One of the arrester wires caught his tailhook. His teeth clicked together, hard. He was home.

He killed the engine, pulled back the canopy, and scrambled out of the plane. Men from the flight crew hauled the Hellcat out of the way, clearing the deck for the next landing. It was all as smooth and practiced as a ballet. As far as Joe was concerned, it was just as beautiful, too.

He ran for the island, so he wouldn’t be in the way if anything went wrong. When the ship wasn’t launching or recovering planes, he spent as much time as he could out on the flight deck. The North Pacific felt like home to him; he’d got to know it from the deck of his father’s fishing boat. Some of the guys who were first-rate pilots made lousy sailors. Not Joe. After a little boat’s rolling and pitching, nothing the massive Bunker Hill did could faze him.

Orson Sharp had landed before him. “We’re getting there,” the Mormon said.

Joe nodded. “You better believe it.” He’d wondered what kind of a sailor Sharp would prove-after all, his roomie had never even seen the ocean before he got to Pensacola for flight training. But Sharp seemed to be doing just fine now.

“When do you think we’ll go after the Japs?” Sharp asked.

“Beats me. Why don’t you get FDR on the phone?” Joe said. His buddy laughed at him. He went on, “I don’t think it’s gonna be real long, though. I mean, look what we’re flying, and look where we’re at.”

It was Sharp’s turn to nod. When they’d signed up to train as pilots, the Hellcat existed only on the drawing board. The Bunker Hill had been laid down, but only just barely. The USA hadn’t been serious about the war till after the Japs hit Hawaii. If it wasn’t serious now, though, it never would be.

“Look at all the other carriers we’re going to have with us, too,” Joe added, and his friend nodded again. Along with the Bunker Hill and the rest of the Es- sex class-big fleet carriers that could take on anything the Japs built-there were the repaired Hornet, the Ranger brought over from the Atlantic, several light carriers built on cruiser hulls, and even more escort carriers built on freighter hulls. Both classes carried far fewer planes than a fleet carrier. The escort carriers, with a freighter’s engines, couldn’t make more than eighteen knots. But they could all get fighters and dive bombers and torpedo planes close to the enemy, and that was the point of the exercise.

“Soon,” Orson Sharp murmured.

“Yeah.” Joe heard the raw hunger in his own voice. “Soon.”

BEFORE THE WAR, Kenzo Takahashi had never thought he would call on a girl carrying a sack of fish. Flowers, yes. Chocolates, sure. Mackerel? Mackerel had never once crossed his mind.

Chocolate had disappeared. He doubted any was left on Oahu. Flowers were there for the picking even now. As far as they went, Hawaii had an embarrassment of riches. Down by the harbor, Hawaiian women still made leis and sold them for a quarter or a yen, though Japanese sailors were less enthusiastic customers than American tourists had been.

But you couldn’t eat flowers. (Although, these days, Kenzo wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had made the experiment.) Fish made a much more practical present. Carrying them in a cloth sack let him worry less about people who might want to knock him over the head for the sake of a full belly. Even in Elsie Sundberg’s neighborhood, such a thing was a long way from impossible.

None of the cars parked in front of the neat houses here had tires any more. By now, the occupying authorities had confiscated them all. None of the cars had batteries any more, either. The Japanese had taken those, too. That didn’t show, though, not with a closed hood.

When Kenzo knocked on Elsie’s front door, her mother opened it. She smiled. “Hello, Ken. Come in,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.” He did. As always, he had to shift gears in this neighborhood. West of Nuuanu Avenue, he was Kenzo. But this was the haole part of town, all right. He didn’t really mind; to his way of thinking, an American needed to have an American-sounding name. He held out the sack. “I brought you folks these.”

As always, a gift of food was welcome. When Elsie’s mother said, “Thank you very much,” she plainly meant it. She went on, “We have some ripe avocados to give you when you go.”

“That’d be nice.” Kenzo also meant it. Without knowing the Sundbergs, he wouldn’t have had any for a long time.

“Let me get you some lemonade.” Mrs. Sundberg was firm in her hospitality-and avocados and lemonade were about all she could offer. She added, “Elsie will be ready in a minute.”

“Okay,” Kenzo said. The lemonade would be good. One of these days, maybe Elsie would meet him at the door and just go out with him. He shrugged. He didn’t plan on holding his breath. The Sundbergs clung to gentility with both hands. They didn’t have much else to cling to, not with the Japanese occupation knocking what had been the ruling race and ruling class over the head.

Elsie came into the kitchen while he was drinking the sweet-tart lemonade. She had a glass, too. By now, that was part of the routine for their dates. When they finished, her mom walked them to the door, saying, “Have a good time.”

“We will,” Elsie told her. As soon as the door closed behind them, she asked Kenzo, “Where do you want to go?”

“I was just thinking down to the park,” he answered. “We’ve seen all the movies on the island twice by now, and there isn’t a heck of a lot else to do. We can talk and… and stuff.”

“Yeah. And stuff,” Elsie echoed in ominous tones. She knew he meant necking as well as he did. His ears got hot; he took a couple of embarrassed, shuffling steps. But then she laughed and said, “Okay, we’ll do that.”

A couple of kids were playing on the slide and the surviving swings when they got to the park. They sat down on a bench. The grass was even longer and more luxuriant than it had been the last time they were there. People had more urgent things than mowing it to worry about. None of the greenery had been trimmed any time lately, either.

“How have you been?” Elsie asked.

“Pretty good, except for Dad.” Kenzo grimaced. “That’s a big except, though. The more he talks to the Japanese radio, the more trouble he gets into with his big mouth. What’s he gonna do when the Americans come back?”

“Do you really think they will?” Elsie asked with a bigger catch in her voice than she ever got after he kissed her.

He nodded. “I’d bet on it. All those planes coming over at night, and the subs around, and… all those kinds of things.” He’d never said a word to anybody, not even Elsie, about the flier he and Hiroshi had rescued. What she didn’t know could help keep her safe. He wondered how Burt Burleson had done once he got ashore. The Japanese hadn’t bragged about capturing him, anyhow. That was something.

“God, I hope you’re right,” Elsie breathed. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get things back to the way they were before all this happened?”

“Sure,” Kenzo said. Most ways, he thought. Would you still go out with me if things get back to the way they used to be? He had to admit she might. They’d been good friends before. That wasn’t quite the same, even if he had kissed her once.

A cloud passed in front of the sun. Rain started coming down. This was a little more than the usual “liquid sunshine.” It rained hard enough to send the kids home. That didn’t break Kenzo’s heart. Elsie’s sun dress clung to her. Kenzo admired the effect.

Elsie caught him doing it and wrinkled her nose in mock severity. Doing his best to be gallant, he said, “We can go under a tree if you want.”

She shook her head. “It won’t make any difference. The water’ll just drip through.” She was found to be right about that. She went on, “I don’t mind it. It’s nice and warm. And when it stops, we’ll dry out pretty fast.”

“Okay,” Kenzo said. “In the meantime…” He put his arm around her. She slid toward him on the bench. He kissed her. What could be better than necking in the park, even if it was raining? Actually, he knew what could be better. But Elsie didn’t want to do that-or if she did want to, she pretended not to like any other well brought-up girl.

Kisses could take on a life of their own. Kenzo opened his eyes and came up for air after what seemed like forever. Elsie’s eyes stayed closed, waiting for him to bend down to her again. But he didn’t. Instead, softly, he spoke her name.

However softly he spoke, it wasn’t the way a lover talked to his beloved. Her eyes came open, too. He pointed and said, still in a low voice, “I think you’d better get out of here.”

Three Japanese soldiers were coming into the park. They weren’t on patrol: they weren’t carrying weapons and they weren’t marching. What they were was falling-down drunk. One of them was singing something raucous.

“They won’t be any trouble,” Elsie said, but her voice lacked conviction.

The only way they wouldn’t be any trouble was if they hadn’t seen her. Kenzo hoped that was so; they were pretty well sloshed. But, like so many things, it turned out to be too much to hope for. “Hey, sweetheart, kiss me, too!” one of them called.

“Kiss my dick!” another one added. They all thought that was funny. Kenzo didn’t like the baying quality of their laughter, not even a little bit.

Elsie’s face didn’t change. For a foolish instant, Kenzo wondered why not. Then he realized they’d yelled in Japanese. He could go back and forth between the two languages without even realizing he was doing it. Elsie couldn’t. She didn’t know how lucky she was, either. “Sweetheart,” he said, “you’ve got to get out of here right now.”

That got through to her. She scrambled to her feet. But even then she asked, “What will they do to you if I take a powder?”

“Whatever it is, it won’t be half as bad as what they’d do to you. Now get lost.” He swatted her on the fanny to make sure she got the point. She yipped, but she took off. She was no dope, either. Instead of heading for any of the sidewalks, she went straight away from the Japanese soldiers, even though that was through some of the thickest bush.

“Come back!” “Where do you think you’re going, you stupid bitch?” “We can catch her!” The soldiers shouted at Elsie and at one another. They pounded toward the park bench at a staggering lope. One of them fell on the wet grass. The other two hauled him upright again.

Seeing that, Kenzo waited till the very last instant before he got up and ran. He went in the same direction as Elsie had, wanting to stay between her and the soldiers. If he went any other way, they were too likely to forget about him and just keep on after her. He thought they were too drunk to catch her, but you never could tell.

He also thought they were too drunk to catch him. The Three Stooges couldn’t have put on a clumsier act than that pratfall of theirs. But then he took a pratfall of his own, tripping over a root and landing splat! on his face. Worse yet, he knocked the wind out of himself.

He was just lurching to his feet when one of the soldiers grabbed him. “Let me go!” he yelled in Japanese. “I didn’t do anything!”

They seemed momentarily startled to hear him speak their language. One of them hit him anyway. “Shut up, you bastard!” the soldier shouted. “You told the girl to get away!” He couldn’t have known enough English to be sure of that, but he didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

Kenzo tried to twist free. He didn’t try to fight back. One against three, even three drunks, was bad odds. All he wanted to do was get away. To his dismay, he discovered he couldn’t. They hit him a few more times, knocked him down, and started kicking him. That was bad. He did his best to roll into a ball and protect his head with his arms.

Then one of the soldiers said, “We’re just wasting time. That stupid cunt is getting away.”

They forgot about Kenzo and pounded off after Elsie. This time, Kenzo lay there for some little while before he painfully pulled himself upright again. He hoped he’d bought Elsie enough time to escape. His biggest fear had been that they would decide she had got away and it was his fault. In that case, they might have stomped him to death.

He spat red. He hadn’t done a perfect job of covering up. And that wasn’t just rainwater trickling down his jaw. Breathing hurt, too; his ribs had taken a shellacking. But he didn’t feel knives in his chest when he inhaled, so he supposed nothing in there was broken. In the movies, the hero recovered from a beating as soon as it was over. Life, unfortunately, didn’t imitate Hollywood. Kenzo felt like hell, or maybe a little worse.

None too steady on his feet, he lurched over to the water fountain in one corner of the park. When he turned the knob, water came out. He washed his face. It hurt. He started to dry it on his sleeve, but didn’t. For one thing, his shirt was already pretty soggy. For another, he didn’t want to get bloodstains on it. They hardly ever came out clean.

All he could do was hope Elsie had got home safe. He wanted to find out if she had, but he didn’t do that, either. If he ran into those Japanese soldiers again, it might literally be the last thing he ever did. And he didn’t want to lead them to the Sundbergs’ house.

Instead, he walked back to the tent he shared with his father and brother. Nobody stared at him, so maybe he didn’t look too bad. Or maybe people in Honolulu had just got used to seeing guys who’d been roughed up.

To his enormous relief, his father wasn’t in the tent. His brother was. Hiroshi did stare at him, and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! What happened to you?”

So much for not looking too bad, Kenzo thought. “Japanese soldiers,” he answered shortly. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse. I think Elsie got away from them, and I’ll be okay.”

“Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, and then, “You gonna tell Dad?”

“What’s the use?” Kenzo said. “If I did, he’d probably say it was my own damn fault.” He waited, hoping his brother would tell him he was wrong. Hiroshi didn’t. Kenzo sighed, disappointed but not much surprised.

“COME ON. Let’s go!” Lester Dillon shouted as the Marines in his platoon filed onto a bus. “Move it, you lazy lugs! You want to keep Hirohito waiting?”

His company commander grinned at him. “That’s pretty good,” Captain Bradford said.

“Thank you, sir.” Dillon didn’t think it was all that funny himself, but he wasn’t about to say so, not if his CO liked it. He did say, “About time we got another shot at those slanty-eyed bastards.”

“You better believe it,” Bradford agreed. “Maybe this time the Navy’ll hold up their end of the deal.”

“They damn well better,” Dillon exclaimed. “If they don’t-”

“If they don’t, I reckon they’ll be too dead for us to complain about it,” Braxton Bradford said. “That’s how it worked out last year, anyways.”

Since he was both right and an officer, Dillon let it rest there. This was a funny kind of war. If the Navy pukes didn’t do their job, if they got killed, he and his buddies were pretty safe. But if the sailors and flyboys cleared the Japanese Navy out of the way in the Pacific, the Marines and the Army got to land on Oahu and tackle the Japanese Army. It only stood to reason that a lot of them wouldn’t live through the campaign. But he was champing at the bit, and so was every other Marine he knew. The Army’s opinion mattered to him not at all.

Does this make me patriotic, or just a damn fool? He’d got shot once, and here he was, eager to give a brand new enemy a chance to punch his ticket? He looked inside himself. He really was.

He climbed aboard the bus himself, the last man to do so. The door hissed shut. The driver put the bus in gear. Diesel engine grumbling, it started south, one of the dozens, maybe hundreds heading down from Camp Pendleton to San Diego. Pendleton had the room to train Marines by the tens of thousands. San Diego still had the port.

The convoy of buses had Pacific Coast Highway almost to itself. Gasoline rationing had made civilian traffic disappear. Les saw only a handful of cars coming north. Most of the vehicles in the other lane were trucks painted olive drab.

The Pacific was more interesting and prettier. Gulls and terns glided overhead. Waves rolled up onto the beach. In Hawaii, surf-riders would have skimmed ashore atop them. Nobody’d thought of doing that here. Every so often, a lone man or a knot of two or three friends would stand by the edge of the sea with fishing poles. Dillon saw a lot of fishermen, but he never saw anybody catch anything.

Then the buses got down into San Diego. They rolled right past the park where the Padres played. The team must have been on the road, because the ballpark was quiet and empty. Talk inside Les’ bus got louder and more excited when it pulled into the harbor. He didn’t see any battlewagons or carriers tied up there; they’d probably already put to sea. The harbor was full of ungainly Liberty ships and the destroyers that would escort them and-everybody hoped-keep subs away.

With a squeal of brakes that needed work, the bus shuddered to a stop. “Everybody out!” Les said.

“You’ve got a chance to stretch your legs, so you better take it. You think we were tight in here, wait till we get on the damn troopship. Only difference between us and sardines there is, they won’t pack us in olive oil.”

Some of the Marines laughed. Most of them didn’t. They’d been through last year’s abortive campaign, and they knew this wasn’t going to be a trip to Hawaii on a luxury liner.

They did stretch and twist when they got down on the concrete. Les lowered his pack to the ground. Something along his spine crunched when he stretched. He was older than the men he led. He was in good hard shape for a man his age, but every now and then his body insisted on reminding him that good hard shape for a man in his forties wasn’t the same as it had been when he was in his twenties. He hoped he would be able to keep up when they landed on Oahu.

If they landed on Oahu. Things had gone wrong once. He hoped they wouldn’t go wrong again, but life didn’t come with a money-back guarantee. Too damn bad, he thought.

“My company, form on me!” Captain Bradford called from a nearby bus. “We’ll be boarding that ship.” Since Dillon’s bus stood between him and his company commander, he couldn’t see which ship Bradford had in mind. It didn’t matter much; Liberty ships were as like as peas in a pod, only a lot uglier.

Bradford pointed again when Les could see him. Valdosta Liberty was stenciled in big white letters on the black paint at the freighter’s stern. But for the name, she could have been the Alamogordo Liberty or the Missoula Liberty or any of the others crowding Coronado Bay.

Up the gangplank he went. Merchant seamen in dungarees crewed the ship. He didn’t much like that, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The Navy had trouble finding sailors for all its new warships, let alone troopships. But if trouble came, would these civilians know what to do with the antiaircraft gun at the Valdosta Liberty’s bow?

Hell with it, he thought. If they don’t, some of us’ll take over. Any Japs want this ship, they’ll have to pay the bill for her.

Captain Bradford, being an officer, would share a cabin with his social equals. Dillon, being a noncom, went down into the bowels of the Liberty ship with the rest of the Marines. The air down belowdecks felt still and dead. It would only get worse. They’d be sailing south, so it would get hotter. The men wouldn’t have many chances to bathe. Odds were the galley would serve beans, too. All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia, Dillon thought.

Nobody gave a damn about his opinion. He got his platoon settled in the cramped space available as best he could. The first card games started even before all the men had slung their packs up onto their bunks. The Valdosta Liberty’s engines came to life. He felt them through the soles of his feet as well as hearing them. The whole fabric of the ship vibrated. Then she began to move.

“Here we go again,” somebody said. Les nodded. That summed it all up as well as anything.

KENZO TAKAHASHI MOVED LIKE AN OLD MAN. By late afternoon, he felt all the bruises and lumps the Japanese soldiers had given him earlier in the day. He kept walking all the same. He had to find out if Elsie was okay.

He flinched when he walked past a squad of Japanese soldiers. But he bowed, too, so they didn’t bother him. He might have been bruised, but he wasn’t wearing a scarlet letter (he laughed at himself for remembering American Lit at a time like this). Besides, they were on duty, not on leave and drunk. And he wasn’t walking with a girl, which no doubt counted most of all.

He flinched again when he went up the Sundbergs’ walk and knocked on the front door. If Elsie wasn’t there… If she wasn’t there, Mrs. Sundberg would start screaming at him, and how could he blame her?

The door opened. Elsie’s mom stared out at him. Then she said, “Ken! Thank God!” and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. She pulled him into the house and called, “Elsie! Ken’s here!”

From the back of the house, Elsie squealed. She came running up to Ken, threw herself into his arms-she almost knocked him over-and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the sort of peck he’d got from her mother, either. It was the real McCoy. And Mrs. Sundberg, who stood there watching, didn’t pitch a fit. She beamed at him and Elsie.

After the kiss ended, Elsie took a real look at him. “Oh, Ken!” she exclaimed. “You got hurt!”

“It’s not too bad,” he said, and that kiss made him less of a liar than he would have been a couple of minutes earlier. “I’m just glad you got away from those bastards, that’s all.” He bobbed his head toward her mother. “Excuse me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Sundberg said warmly. “Elsie told me what you did. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” She eyed him, too. “Can I get you some ice?”

“Probably too late for that,” Kenzo answered. “I’ll be okay in a few days. They didn’t kick me in the teeth, and my ribs are just sore. Nothing’s busted.”

“I’m so sorry!” Elsie squeezed his hands in hers.

He shrugged. “Not your fault. Those miserable goons…” He couldn’t call them what he wanted to, not in front of Elsie and her mother.

“They certainly are.” Mrs. Sundberg’s voice wasn’t warm any more, not when she talked about the Japanese soldiers. She turned to Elsie. “I’m going to let the neighbors know Ken’s all right, too. I’ll be back in a while. I know the two of you have a lot to, uh, talk about.”

He felt he’d earned his American name. Out the door Mrs. Sundberg went. Kenzo nodded to Elsie.

“Hiya,” he managed.

She wasn’t laughing. She looked on the edge of tears. “They really could have killed you,” she said.

“Yeah, well…” He shrugged again. It hurt. He went on, “They would have done some pretty horrible things to you, too.”

Her face twisted. “You hear stories about things like that, but you don’t think they can happen to you. Then they do-or they almost do.” She looked down at the rug. “You hear stories about heroes, too, but you never think you know one.”

“Anybody would have done the same thing,” Kenzo said.

“I don’t think so.” Elsie sounded almost angry. “I don’t think you should be so modest, either. They could have killed you.”

It wasn’t that she was wrong. On the contrary. Uncomfortably, he said, “I don’t like thinking about that any better than you like thinking about, uh, the other stuff.”

“Okay,” Elsie said; that must have made sense to her. “What do you want to think about instead? How about this?” She kissed him again.

The kiss took on a life of its own. His arms tightened around her. She molded herself against him. He squeezed her backside, pressing her closer yet. She didn’t try to pull away. She just made a wordless sound of pleasure.

They finally broke apart, but not very far. “Elsie-” he began, and stopped.

“I know, sweetheart. It’s okay. It’s… better than okay.” She kissed him once more, gently this time.

“You risked your life for me. That counts for a lot. Anything I can do to pay you back is pretty small stuff, anything at all.”

“You don’t have to do anything because of that,” he said. “I didn’t do it to get paid back.”

“I know. It’s better that way,” Elsie said. “Suppose I do it because I want to, then?”

This time, he kissed her. When his hand found her breast, she didn’t try to slap it away. She just made that happy noise again. He made one quite a bit like it, but deeper. After a while, his heart pounding, he asked, “What about your mom?”

Elsie laughed. “She won’t be back for a while. Mom’s no dummy. She didn’t leave by accident. Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m not worried about anything,” Kenzo said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along.

“Come on, then.” She took his hand and led him back to her bedroom.

A teddy bear almost the size of a three-year-old sat on the bed. Elsie set it on the floor with its back to the bed. Then she nodded, as much to herself as to Kenzo, and pulled the sun dress off over her head. She sat down on the edge of the bed to take off her bra and panties.

Kenzo tried not to stare as much as he wanted to. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered. He got out of his own clothes in a hurry.

“Oh, Ken!” Elsie said when she saw the bruises and welts on his ribs and his back and one thigh. She jumped up and kissed them one by one, so softly that her lips almost weren’t there. “Is that better?” He didn’t know what it did for the bruises. What it did for the rest of him was obvious. Elsie giggled.

They lay down together. It wasn’t quite Kenzo’s first time, but it was his first time with anybody who mattered to him, who didn’t want him to go away as soon as he could so she could take on somebody else. Elsie sighed when his mouth found the pink tips of her breasts.

A little later, with him poised above her, she inhaled sharply. “Be careful,” she said. “It hurts.”

“I’ll try,” he told her, though nothing in all the world could have kept him from driving deeper then. Elsie bit her lip, but didn’t say anything more. Before long, his world exploded in delight. As he came back to himself, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“I-think so,” she answered. “They say it’s supposed to hurt the first time, and they aren’t wrong. But you’re sweet.” She squirmed under him. “Let me up. I don’t want to leave a stain on the bedspread.” When she stood up, she laughed and said, “Oops-too late. Well, cold water will get most of it out. I hope.”

“Me, too.” He felt foolish, and started getting dressed again. Elsie carried her clothes down the hall to the bathroom. She walked spraddle-legged, as if she’d been riding a horse for a long time. When she came back she had a wet washrag, which she used to scrub at the red stain.

“There,” she said after a bit. “That’s better, anyhow.”

“Uh-huh.” Kenzo didn’t know what to do or say next. He tried, “I think maybe I better go.”

“Okay,” Elsie said, and then, in a different tone of voice, “I hope to God I don’t catch.”

“Catch? Oh!” Kenzo said. Neither of them had worried about that while it was going on. “I hope you don’t, too. That would be terrible.”

“It would be complicated, anyway,” Elsie said.

If you knocked a girl up, you either ran away and started over somewhere else or you married her. Kenzo couldn’t run far, not the way things were now. He didn’t want to marry anybody yet, though he didn’t suppose Elsie would be too bad. But she was dead right: no matter who ran Hawaii, a Japanese guy marrying a haole girl would cause complications. They’d be different complications, depending on whether the Rising Sun or the Stars and Stripes flew over the islands, but they’d always be there.

He and Elsie walked out into the front room. “We’ll be careful,” she said. He didn’t know if she meant careful about her not getting pregnant or careful about going where Japanese soldiers could cause trouble. It struck him as a good idea either way.

“Sure,” he said. “So long.” He kissed her, then went out the door. He looked back when she closed it, but didn’t blow her a kiss or anything. The neighbors didn’t need to know. Neither did Elsie’s mom-not officially, anyhow.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU LED HIS SQUAD through the streets of Honolulu. It was a routine patrol. Nobody gave them any trouble. By now, the locals had learned to bow and get out of the way when they saw Japanese soldiers. They hadn’t needed object lessons for quite a while.

The only thing even slightly unusual that Shimizu saw was a local Japanese man, about the age of most of the privates in his squad, who walked along whistling even though a black eye and a fat lip said he’d been in a brawl and probably lost it. Shimizu almost stopped him and asked him what he was so happy about, but in the end he didn’t. Being happy wasn’t against the rules.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed the local. “Whatever that guy’s been drinking, I want some,” Private Wakuzawa said.

That was funny enough to make not only Shimizu but also several other soldiers laugh. Wakuzawa was already the most cheerful man in the squad. Why did he need anything to make him happier yet? Better something like that should go to Senior Private Furusawa, who thought too much for his own good-or so it seemed to Shimizu, anyhow.

Soldiers were drilling in a park. They weren’t Army men-they belonged to the special naval landing forces. They wore olive-drab uniforms, not Army khaki, and their boots were black rather than brown.

The Navy officer putting them through their paces wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than perfection, and didn’t want to recognize perfection when he saw it. “You are not worthy of dying for the Emperor!” he screamed at the sweating, panting soldiers. “Not worthy, do you hear me?”

“Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the soldiers chorused.

“Then act like it, damn you!” Iwabuchi roared. “If we have to fight the Americans, we are going to make them drown in their own blood! And how do we do that? By making them drown in our blood!”

“Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the troops from the naval landing force repeated.

Iwabuchi pointed toward Shimizu and his squad. “Look at those Army men! They’re soft. They’re ragged. Do you want to be like them? You’d better not! You have to want to die for the Emperor. You have to be proud to die for the Emperor! The man who does not fear death, the man who welcomes death, will surely be triumphant!”

“Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the Navy men said once more.

Shimizu was furious, though of course he did not show it in the presence of a superior. A Navy captain ranked with the commander of his regiment or any other Army colonel, too: not just a superior but an almost godlike figure. Despite that, Shimizu’s own opinion of the special naval landing forces was not high. They made good enough occupation troops. But when they had to fight other soldiers, they didn’t fare so well. Despite these drills, the Army did a much better job of training its men in infantry tactics than the Navy did.

Captain Iwabuchi went right on yelling at his men. They might not fight skillfully under a leader like that, but they would fight hard. They would fear him more than they feared the Americans, and they would have reason to. An officer like that would kill anybody who he thought was hanging back.

“We’ll leave this place a ruin! We’ll never give in!” he shrieked. “A ruin, do you hear me? Not one brick left on top of another!”

“He’s not so tough,” Yasuo Furusawa said, but he sidled up to Shimizu and spoke in the next thing to a whisper, taking no chances that the fanatical officer could overhear him.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu answered-also in a low voice. After a moment, he went on, “Nothing wrong with dying for the Emperor, mind you. There’s no better end for a Japanese soldier. It’s an honor. It’s a privilege.” He’d had all that drilled into him in basic training, and he believed it. Even so… “The real point, though, is to make the enemy die forhis country first.”

“Hai!” Furusawa nodded. “I think that’s just right, Corporal-san. And I don’t think it ever once crossed that Captain Iwabuchi’s mind.”

“No, I don’t, either. But all we can do about it is feel sorry for those poor Navy men.”

“Maybe it won’t matter,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “Maybe the real Navy will beat the Americans on the sea, the way they did last year.”

“Of course they will.” Shimizu couldn’t show doubt about anything like that. It would have been unpatriotic. He did think Captain Iwabuchi couldn’t have been much of an officer. If he were, he would have had shipborne duty. Instead, he was stuck doing things that weren’t really a Navy officer’s proper job. Serves him right, Shimizu thought.

Even after his squad turned the corner, he could still hear Captain Iwabuchi screaming at his men and haranguing them. He might push them too far. Japanese military men were an enduring lot. They had to be. But even endurance had its limits. He wondered if Iwabuchi might suffer an unfortunate-oh, such an unfortunate! — accident. Every once in a while, things like that did happen.

The rest of the patrol stayed routine. Shimizu approved of routine. Routine meant nothing was going wrong. It also meant he didn’t have to think for himself. If he didn’t have to think, he couldn’t make any mistakes. If he didn’t make any mistakes, his own superiors couldn’t start yelling at him. They wouldn’t be as bad as Captain Iwabuchi, but all the same he didn’t fancy an officer shouting in his face and maybe slapping him around.

He brought his men back to the barracks. He made his report to Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander. He mentioned marching past the park where Iwabuchi was drilling his men; he couldn’t very well leave it out. “Ah,” Horino said. “And what did you think of that, Corporal?”

“Captain Iwabuchi is a very… energetic man, sir,” Shimizu said carefully.

Horino laughed. “He certainly is. All right, Corporal. You may go.” Shimizu saluted and left in a hurry. He’d got his message across and hadn’t got in trouble for it. That would do-and then some.