End of the Beginning

VIII

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO WAS LESS GLAD TO BE AT SEA AGAIN THAN HE’D EXPECTED. Akagi and her escorting destroyers and cruisers steamed north. So did Shokaku, some kilometers away. They wouldn’t have sortied if there hadn’t been good intelligence that the Americans were on their way again.

He wished Zuikaku were with them. They’d had three carriers the last time they faced the U.S. Navy, and they’d needed all of them. The Yankees might not be very skillful, but they didn’t give up. That worried Shindo, who’d thought conquering Hawaii would be plenty to knock the USA out of the Pacific War.

“Karma,” he muttered. That submarine skipper had got lucky. He’d heard some of his superiors wondering if the Americans had broken Japanese codes, but he didn’t believe it. How could gaijin ever learn Japanese well enough to do such a thing? It had to be impossible.

Akagi and Shokaku steamed toward the biggest breach the Americans had torn in the line of picket boats. It stood to reason that the Yankees would try to send their ships through there. He would have done the same thing if he commanded the American fleet.

Commander Fuchida was pacing along the flight deck. He nodded to Shindo. “Your planes will be ready to fight when we make contact?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Shindo answered. “Of course, sir.” Shindo paused, then asked, “Do we know how big the enemy fleet is?”

“Not exactly,” Fuchida answered. “Our best guess is that it’s about the same size as the one last year, maybe one carrier more. Even with only two carriers of our own, we should be able to handle that.”

“Why don’t we know better, sir?” Shindo asked.

“Because most of the yards where the Americans build carriers are on their East Coast,” Fuchida said.

“We can’t do reconnaissance there, and neither can Germany.”

“Their ships have to come through the Panama Canal to get at us,” Shindo said. “Can’t we count them once they’ve got to the Pacific?”

“We’ve tried. We haven’t had much luck,” Fuchida told him. “We’ve lost a couple of H8Ks that tried to spy on the canal. The Americans patrol aggressively in that area. We didn’t get any worthwhile information, either.”

“Too bad,” Shindo said, which was as close as he would come to criticizing any of his superiors. He wanted to know what he was up against. Meticulous planning was a big part of what made the Hawaii operation so successful.

“Shigata ga nai,” Fuchida said, which was true enough. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I do wish we had Zuikaku here with us, though. Well, shigata ga nai there, too.”

“If the Yankees have the same number of carriers and the same kinds of planes as they did last year, we’ll beat them again. We’ll beat the pants off them.”

Before Fuchida could answer, the public-address system called his name: “Commander Fuchida! Report to the bridge immediately! Commander Fuchida! Report to the-”

“Please excuse me,” Fuchida said, and dashed across the flight deck towards Akagi’s island.

What was going on? Shindo waited for his own summons to the bridge, or perhaps for the klaxons of general quarters. Neither came, which left him stewing in his own juices. A couple of minutes later, though, Akagi changed course to starboard. He nodded to himself. The skipper had found out something he hadn’t known before.

And then the PA system brayed to life again: “All flying crews report to the briefing room! Attention, please! All flying crews report to the briefing room at once!”

Now it was Shindo’s turn to run as if possessed. He sprinted for a hatchway: the briefing room was on the hangar deck, below the flight deck. The soles of his shoes clanged on the iron treads of the stairs.

A few fliers beat him to the briefing room, but only a few. He found a seat near the front, so he could get the best look at the maps and charts and blackboards there. More and more men came in after him, all chattering excitedly. They knew they were liable to be going into action before long.

They quieted when Commander Fuchida and Commander Genda walked into the room. The man who led air operations and the man who planned them waited a few minutes to let the laggards crowd in. Then Minoru Genda spoke without preamble: “We have found the enemy.”

“Ah.” Shindo made the same noise as most of the men around him. The boys in Intelligence hadn’t been altogether asleep at the switch, then. They really had known the Americans were coming. Akagi and Shokaku had sailed in good time to give the enemy a warm reception.

“The Americans are moving more or less along the path we anticipated,” Genda went on. “A sampan just east of the ones the Yankees have been attacking spotted their ships and broke radio silence to deliver the warning. The signal cut off abruptly before the message was completed.”

Saburo Shindo knew what that meant. The Yankees had spotted the sampan or traced the signal. Some good men, some brave men, were dead. Yasukuni Shrine held some new spirits.

“It appears the U.S. fleet may be somewhat larger than we expected,” Commander Fuchida said. “We shall engage it even so, of course. The more damage we do to it, the harder the time the Americans will have landing on Oahu. Banzai for the Emperor!”

“Banzai! Banzai!” The cry filled the briefing room. Shindo joined it.

“Oahu has received the sampan’s signal,” Genda said. “Mitsubishi G4Ms are airborne, and will assist us in our attack on U.S. forces.”

More Banzai!s rang out. Shindo joined those, too, though less wholeheartedly. The G4M was fast for a bomber, and could carry a large load a long way. There its virtues ended. It was gruesomely vulnerable to enemy fighters; with gallows humor, G4M pilots called their plane the one-shot lighter for the ease with which it caught fire. And a good deal of combat had proved high-level bombers had to be lucky to hit ships moving far below. Some of the G4Ms doubtless would carry torpedoes, but their pilots didn’t have the practice carrier-based B5N2 fliers got.

“Range to our targets is about three hundred kilometers,” Fuchida said. “We want to strike as fast as we can, before they are fully prepared.”

“Suggestion, sir!” Shindo’s hand shot into the air.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Fuchida said.

“We ought to fly a dogleg to the east or west before proceeding against the enemy,” Shindo said. “That way, he won’t be able to follow the reciprocal of our course back to the ship, whether he picks us up visually or with his fancy electronics.”

The idea seemed to take Fuchida by surprise. He talked with Genda in voices too low for Shindo to make out what they were saying. Then, with some reluctance, he shook his head. “If we had worked this out with Shokaku beforehand, it would be a good ploy. But we can’t break radio silence to discuss it, and we can’t have our planes arriving over the target after hers. A coordinated attack is vital.”

“Yes, sir.” Shindo wished he’d thought of it sooner, but he could see that Fuchida’s reply made at least some sense.

Genda added, “Even if the Americans get through, I believe our combat air patrol should be able to handle them. Their torpedo bombers are waddling death traps, and we will be more alert for their dive bombers.”

Last time, Akagi had been damaged, Zuikaku badly damaged. Shindo hoped Genda wasn’t being too optimistic. But the powers that be weren’t wrong when they said a quick, hard blow would serve Japan best.

“I’ll be with you,” Fuchida said. “Remember-carriers first. Everything else is an afterthought. Strike hard, for the Emperor’s sake. Banzai!”

“Banzai!” Shindo shouted along with the rest of the fliers. “Banzai!”

A SCOWLING REGULAR NAVY LIEUTENANT COMMANDER PROWLED the front of the Bunker Hill’s briefing room. He sipped from, of all things, a glass of milk as he paced. No one laughed at him. It soothed his ulcer, which he’d got perhaps not least from contemplating the idea of a fleet carrier full of Reserve pilots.

“The Japs know we’re here,” he said without preamble. “One of their damn little picket boats got off a signal before we sank her. Odds are good we’ll be seeing bandits before too long. They’ll get their strike in on us before we can hit them. That means we probably have to take a punch and then knock them cold. Are you up for it, gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir!” Joe Crosetti’s hungry howl was one among many. He’d been waiting for this day more than a year and a half, since December 7, 1941. Now the Japs seemed likely to be within arm’s reach, or at least within Hellcat’s reach-at last. The urge to go out and hit them all but overwhelmed him.

After another swig from that glass of milk, the briefing officer said, “Well, you’d better be. Your aircraft have cost Uncle Sam a nice piece of change. So has your training, such as it is.” He had a long nose, excellent for looking down. “Add in whatever you happen to be worth and it comes to quite a sum. Try to bring it back-unless you find a good reason not to, of course.”

That last sobering sentence reminded Joe this wasn’t a game. They were playing for keeps, and there might be reasons not to come home. He refused to worry about it. He didn’t think it would, or could, happen to him.

“Questions?” the briefing officer asked.

Nobody said anything for a little while. All Joe wanted to know was, Where are the Japs? The briefing office couldn’t tell him that, not yet. By the looks on the other fliers’ faces, they felt the same way. Then someone asked, “Sir, what do we do if we run into enemy planes on the way to their ships?”

That was a good question. Attacking the Japanese aircraft along the way might make it harder for the Japs to strike the U.S. carriers here, but it would also lessen the Americans’ chances of knocking out the enemy carriers. The briefing officer frowned. “You’ll have to use your best judgment on that, gentlemen. If you think you can hurt them, do it. If you think you’ll have a better shot at their carriers by avoiding contact, do that.”

Joe turned to Orson Sharp and whispered, “Whatever we do, we get the credit if it works out and the blame if it doesn’t.”

“What else is new?” Sharp whispered back, a response more cynical than he usually gave.

“For now, take your places in your aircraft,” the briefing officer said. “You don’t have long to wait. I’d bet my life on that.” He was betting his life on how well some of the pilots could do against a foe who had smashed U.S. fliers whenever they met.

Not this time, Joe thought fiercely as he hurried to his Hellcat. The F6F wasn’t a particularly pretty plane. The big radial engine gave it a blunt nose, like that of a prizefighter who’d stopped too many lefts with his face. A Jap Zero looked a lot more elegant. But the Hellcat had almost twice the horsepower, more firepower with its battery of heavy machine guns, sturdier construction, self-sealing fuel tanks, and good armor protecting the pilot. The pilot. The words weren’t an abstraction to Joe, not any more. That means me.

He raced across the planking of the flight deck and scrambled up into his plane. He slid the canopy shut and dogged it. The cockpit smelled of leather and avgas and lubricants: intimate odors and mechanical ones, all mixed together. Joe longed for a cigarette, but smoking around oxygen and high-octane gas was hazardous to your life expectancy.

Sailors in yellow helmets and thin yellow smocks worn over their tunics stood by to direct the planes’ movements when they took off. Sailors in red helmets and smocks waited near the carrier’s island. They were crash crews and repairmen. The only men in blue helmets and smocks-the sailors who handled the planes while static-left on the flight deck were the pair poised to take away the chocks that secured the lead Hellcat in its place.

“Pilots, start your engines!” It wasn’t the voice of God roaring through the loudspeakers, but that of the executive officer. On the Bunker Hill, as on any ship, the skipper was God, and the exec was his prophet.

Joe knew a horrid fear that his engine wouldn’t catch, that he would have to stay behind. But it roared to life with the others. The prop blurred into near-invisibility. Joe eyed the instruments. It wasn’t a test this time; he wasn’t sitting in a simulator or a lard-butt trainer. This was for all the marbles.

The sailors in yellow formed a line across the flight deck. “Prepare to launch planes!” came the command from the island. Joe heard it both over the loudspeakers and through his earphones. The last two men in blue took the chocks away from the lead plane. A man in yellow walked backwards, making come-hither motions with his hands. The Hellcat followed, also at a walking pace.

Just in front of the island stood a man with a checkered flag in his right hand. He made grinding motions with his left. The lead plane’s engine sped up. Another roar came from the loudspeakers: “Launch planes!” The man with the flag made more grinding motions. The lead plane’s motor raced. The checkered flag went down. The F6F raced along the flight deck, dipped as it shot off the bow, then gained altitude again and shot up to take its place in what would soon be the greatest assemblage of naval airpower the world had ever known.

Plane after plane took off. After what seemed forever but was only a few minutes, Joe’s turn came. He followed the beckoning sailor in yellow to the center of the deck, revved his engine higher and higher at the flagman’s signal, and whooped when the checkered flag dropped. Now!

Acceleration slammed him back in his seat as the Hellcat darted forward. That sickening lurch when it went off the deck… He hauled back on the stick and gave the plane all the throttle she had. Up she went. Hell, she might have been doing the Indian Rope Trick, the way she climbed. Nothing he’d trained in even came close.

But an F6F wasn’t a widowmaker, the way some hot planes were. She played tough, but she played fair. And the higher Joe got, the more of the U.S. fleet he could see spread out below him. With any luck at all, they’d give the Japs the biggest kick in the ass the world had ever known.

Along with Bunker Hill, Essex and three more brand-new fleet carriers steamed toward Hawaii. So did the repaired Hornet. So did Ranger. She wasn’t an ideal combat carrier, but she could carry planes to make this big fist even bigger. And so did five light carriers, which could keep up with their bigger sisters no matter what, and close to a dozen escort carriers, which couldn’t. The baby flattops would get left behind in a fast-moving action, but among them they brought almost as many planes into action as the Essex-class ships.

Joe spotted his element leader and took his place below and to the right of the other Hellcat. He’d wanted to lead an element-Orson Sharp led one. But wingman was what they’d given him, and he knew he had to squash that gnawing jealousy. He’d been good enough to get here, goddammit. If he did his job well, he might be leading an element pretty damn quick.

Dive bombers and torpedo planes went into formation with the fighters. The torpedo planes were new Grumman Avengers, not the lumbering Douglas Devastators that couldn’t get out of their own way and had failed so miserably the year before.

“All hands! All hands! Listen up, everybody!” Excitement crackled in Joe’s earphones. On the short-range, plane-to-plane circuit, the officer went on, “We’ve got a bearing on the Japs-a cruiser’s recon plane found the bastards. I got the word just before I launched. Range about 160, maybe 170, course 200. That’ll get us close enough to find ’em on our own, anyway. Let’s go hunting!”

The fierce shouts that filled Joe’s head made him want to snatch off the earphones. But he didn’t. He added to the din. Like a swarm of bees-a big swarm of bees-the U.S. aircraft buzzed south.

MITSUO FUCHIDA’S B5N2 FELT DIFFERENT WITH A TORPEDO from the way a B5N1 had with bombs slung beneath. The long, heavy torpedo made the aircraft a bit slower, a bit clumsier. He shrugged. He would do what needed doing anyway.

Patches of white, fluffy cloud sailed past every now and again. For the most part, though, the sky was clear and the sea below calm. As the Yankees had the year before, they’d picked better weather to attack Hawaii than Japan had at the end of 1941. Fuchida shrugged again. The United States could pick and choose. As far as he could see, Japan hadn’t had a choice. Roosevelt had cut off metal shipments, frozen assets, and, most important, stopped the flow of oil, all to dislodge Japan from her rightful empire in China. If she’d bowed to U.S. extortion, she would have been America’s puppet forever after. Better to fight, to seize the chance to be one of the great powers in the world.

He peered ahead, hoping to catch sight of the American ships. That was foolish, as a glance at his watch told him. He and his comrades hadn’t flown nearly long enough to put the enemy in sight.

He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He didn’t have so many comrades as he would have liked. Only about 120 planes were winging their way north-a third as many as had flown against Hawaii at the start of the war in the Pacific. He wished Zuikaku hadn’t been hit. That had to be bad luck… didn’t it? Her planes would have made this sortie half again as strong.

“Airplanes ahead!” The words in his earphones were quietly spoken, but they might as well have been screamed. Now he would see what the Americans had come up with this time.

When he found the enemy air armada, he thought for a moment he was seeing spots before his eyes. That many planes? He bowed in the cockpit, not to the oncoming Yankees but to Admiral Yamamoto. The commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet had said before the war started that Japan would have six months or a year to do as she pleased in the Pacific, but things would get much harder after that. Conquering Hawaii had stretched Japan’s hegemony out to a year and a half and even a little more, but Yamamoto, as usual, seemed to know what he was talking about.

As more Japanese fliers saw the Americans, questions dinned in Fuchida’s earphones. He commanded the Emperor’s aircraft, as he had at Pearl Harbor and in the first fight in the North Pacific. Most of the increasingly alarmed queries boiled down to, Do we attack the enemy’s planes, or do we go on to strike at his ships?

To Fuchida, that had only one possible answer. “We go for the American carriers,” he declared over the all-planes circuit. “Without carrier decks to land on, airplanes here are useless. If we sink the enemy’s carriers, he cannot possibly invade Hawaii. Press on!”

The Americans should have been thinking along the same lines: so it seemed to him, anyway. But, taking advantage of their numbers, they sent some of their fighters against the Japanese strike force. Even before Fuchida called orders, some of the Zeros shot ahead to defend the precious torpedo planes and dive bombers.

They’re coming very fast, Fuchida thought. The Americans had been flying higher than the Japanese. Part of that speed came from losing altitude-but only part. Alarm tingled through him. The enemy had something new. Wildcats couldn’t have performed like this. Neither could Zeros.

Fuchida’s B5N2 had a pair of forward-firing machine guns, plus another pair in the rear cockpit controlled by the radioman. “Be ready, Mizuki,” Fuchida called through the intercom.

“What else am I going to be, sir?” the first flying petty officer replied. They’d been together a long time. Mizuki could get away with backtalk that would have sent a lot of ratings to the brig.

Fuchida didn’t answer. Some of the enemy fighters ahead, he saw, were Wildcats, but they weren’t the ones attacking the Japanese. The Americans knew Wildcats couldn’t equal Zeros. They thought these new machines could.

And they might have been right. A Zero tumbled toward the Pacific, trailing smoke. Another simply exploded in midair. That pilot, at least, probably never knew what hit him. Fuchida waited to see enemy fighters going down, too. He finally spotted one, but only after several Japanese planes were lost.

The melee with the Zeros that had gone out ahead of the main force didn’t last long. The Americans in the new fighters knew the planes that could hurt their ships were more important. They bored in on the Nakajimas and Aichis.

When Fuchida tried to get one of the Americans in his sights, he had trouble holding it there-it was that fast. He fired a quick burst, then threw the B5N2 sharply to the left. The new fighter zoomed by, close enough to give him a good look at the pilot. The plane bore a family resemblance to an oversized Wildcat, but had been refined in almost every way possible. How powerful was the engine that drove it? Strong enough to leave Zeros in the dust, plainly. That was not good news.

Mizuki fired a burst, too. His snarls came through the intercom, so he hadn’t hit anything, either. Maybe he’d made the American pull away. That would be something, anyhow.

Not all the beefy new American fighters were turning away. Compared to them, the Aichis and Nakajimas the Japanese strike-force pilots flew might have been nailed in place. Dive bombers and torpedo planes fell out of the sky one after another. A few pilots cried out over the radio as they went down. More didn’t have the chance.

Then, like a summer lightning storm, the Americans were gone. The rest of the Japanese no doubt as horrified and dismayed as Fuchida, they flew on. What waited for them when they found the enemy fleet?

DON’T DOGFIGHT THE JAPS. Use your speed. Use your firepower. People had been telling Joe Crosetti that from the minute he started training. He’d believed it, too, but only in the way he believed in the Pythagorean theorem: it was one more thing he’d learned in school.

The minute he saw Zeros maneuvering, he suddenly understood why everybody said the same thing about them. The Japs turned tighter than anything he’d flown probably since graduating from Yellow Perils. Get into a dogfight with them and they’d turn inside you and shoot your ass off.

Diving past them, raking them with your machine guns, standing on the Hellcat’s tail to climb again for another dive-that looked like a better plan. Joe’s element leader was as green as he was, but he also remembered the lessons. They zoomed past the Zeros, guns blazing, and then went after the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes-Vals and Kates in the reporting code they’d learned. Zeros were supposed to be Zekes, but most pilots called them Zeros anyway.

Back in school, some people couldn’t remember what the big deal about the square of the hypotenuse was. Sure as hell, some of the Navy pilots here couldn’t remember not to get into a turning contest with the fighters with meatballs on their wings. Some of them paid for it, too. “I’m going down!” somebody wailed. Somebody else shouted for his mother, but Mommy couldn’t help him now.

As Joe made for a Kate, the plane with the torpedo under its belly opened up on him. Tracers zipped past the cockpit. He swung slightly to the left, expecting the Kate to turn to the right. But the pilot-a slightly horse-faced fellow with a mustache-pulled his plane to the left instead. That caught Joe by surprise and left him without a good shot at the Kate.

There was a flight of Vals. The dive bombers seemed to waddle through the air. Their fixed landing gear made them look like antiques. They’d done a hell of a lot of damage to Allied ships, though.

Joe’s element leader bored in on them. He shot one down almost at once. They were built tougher than Zeros, but a few rounds through the engine would do the trick. Joe got one in his sights. The other thing they’d said in school was, Get in close. He did. The Val almost filled his sights before he thumbed the firing button on the stick.

Flames shot from the machine guns on his wings. Recoil made the Hellcat seem to stagger in the air. Joe whooped when he saw chunks of sheet metal fly off the Val. Trailing smoke, the plane spun down toward the ocean more than two miles below. “Got him!” Joe yelled. “Fucking nailed him!”

A moment later, a Jap in another Val almost nailed him. He’d forgotten Vals and Kates carried rear gunners. All his combat training had been fighter against fighter. The assumption was that if he could handle that, he could handle anything. And so he could-if he didn’t do something idiotic. He dove to get away from the gunner.

He tried to count how many Japanese planes went down. He couldn’t. Too much was happening too fast. But the Hellcats knocked down a good many. He was sure of that. He was swinging around for another go at the Kates when the squadron leader summoned the American fighters back to the Dauntlesses and Avengers they were shepherding.

“This is just act one, boys,” the officer said. “We’ve got carriers to catch. That’s the blowoff.”

He was right, and Joe knew it. All the same, he hated to break away.

SABURO SHINDO WAS CALM to the point of being boring. He knew as much. He even cultivated the image. It made him all the more impressive on the rare occasions when he lost his temper-or seemed to for effect.

Now, though, he felt shaken to the core. He’d just seen his Zeros-planes that had dominated every foe they faced-hammered as if they were so many Russian biplanes. He hadn’t thought it was possible, but these new American fighters could outrun, outdive, and outclimb his beloved aircraft by margins embarrassingly large. How had the Yankees done it? That there were such swarms of the new enemy planes only made things worse.

The American pilots were raw. He saw that right away. He was able to take advantage of it almost at once, getting on an enemy plane’s tail and sending a burst of machine-gun fire into it. But he couldn’t stay on its tail for long, because it ran away from him with effortless ease. And the machine-gun rounds didn’t knock it down or set it on fire. Wildcats had been able to take a lot of damage-and needed to. By all appearances, this new and bigger fighter was tougher yet.

He used his 20mm cannon against the next American he fought. They did the trick-the enemy plane spiraled down toward the sea. But they were slow-firing and didn’t have a lot of ammunition. If he ran dry with them, he was in trouble.

And he could be in trouble even if he didn’t. A bullet slammed into his right wing-fortunately, out near the tip, past the fuel tank. Watching another Zero going down trailing a comet’s tail of fire reminded him how inadequate the self-sealing on those tanks was. And getting hit by a burst might well make his plane break up in midair even if it didn’t burn. Zeros were built light to make them faster and more maneuverable. Everything came with a price, though. If they got shot up, they often paid that price.

A horrified voice in his earphones: “What do we do, sir? They’re tearing us up!”

“Protect the strike planes,” Shindo answered, banking frantically to try to protect himself. “They’re the ones that matter. We’re just along for the ride.” Even as he spoke, another Aichi dive bomber caught fire and plummeted, the pilot probably dead.

Giving the order and having it mean anything were very different. The Americans dove on the Aichis and Nakajimas, flailed them with those heavy machine guns they carried, streaked away before the protecting Zeros could do much, and climbed to deliver another punishing attack.

Then, quite suddenly, they were gone. They closed up on their own torpedo planes and dive bombers and flew on to the south, towards Akagi and Shokaku. Shindo belatedly realized that his fighters hadn’t had the chance to attack the enemy’s strike aircraft. The combat air patrol above the Japanese carriers would have to defend them.

And the combat air patrol above the American’s carriers would have to defend them. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. No one, from the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific here, had yet managed to keep Japanese Navy fliers from striking what they intended to strike. And, he vowed to himself, no one would now.

But how many carriers did the Yankees have, to have launched so many planes? That was also a belated question. He should have wondered sooner, but all he could do now was shrug. However many there are, we’ll deal with them, that’s all. We have to. He flew on.

ON AKAGI’S BRIDGE, Commander Minoru Genda got reports from the radiomen monitoring signals from the Japanese aircraft and what they could pick up from the Americans. Quietly, Rear Admiral Tomeo Kaku said, “Gentlemen, it appears likely we will soon be under attack. I rely on our airmen to hold the enemy at arm’s length, and on our crew to fight the ship if for any reason the airmen are not completely successful.”

“Sir, from everything I’m hearing, this attack will be larger and more severe than the one we faced last year,” Genda warned. “Our intelligence estimates of what the Americans could throw at us seem too low.”

Kaku shrugged. “Karma, neh? Things are what they are. We can’t change them now. All we can do is our best, and I know we will do that.”

Was he really as calm as he seemed? If he was, Genda, whose heart pounded beneath his tunic, admired him tremendously. He couldn’t help saying, “I wish we had Zuikaku with us.”

“So do I.” But Kaku shrugged again. “The Yankees got lucky, and we got… not so lucky. That’s karma, too. Here we are, and here they are, and we’ve got to beat them with what we have, not with what we wish we had.”

The officer in charge of the recently installed radar set was a young, studious lieutenant named Tanekichi Furuta who’d studied engineering at the University of Southern California. “Sir,” he said to Kaku, “we have a signal coming out of the north. Range is about a hundred kilometers and closing.”

“I understand,” the skipper said. He nodded to Genda. “We have about twenty minutes, Commander. Any last notions that will give us a better chance?”

“All I can think of, sir, is to tell the fighters above our carriers to hit the enemy strike planes with everything they have and to ignore the U.S. fighters as much as they can,” Genda answered. “They should already know that, though.”

“Very well.” Kaku nodded again. “We will wait, then, and be ready to maneuver and to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Genda said gravely. Akagi carried a dozen 120mm guns and fourteen twin 25mm mounts.

She could put a lot of shells in the air. Her escorts could put up even more. How much good would all that firepower do? In the last fight, facing what was plainly a smaller strike force, two of the three Japanese carriers had been hit. Japanese fliers had given better than they got, though, so that battle proved a success. Could they do it again? Would this one?

“All ahead full,” Admiral Kaku called down to the engine room. In time of need, Akagi could be handled almost like a destroyer. And time of need was coming. The ships ahead of the carrier started shooting. A moment later, so did the carrier herself. Puffs of black smoke appeared in the sky.

Trailing smoke, an enemy plane-one of the ferocious new fighters everyone was talking about? — cartwheeled into the sea. A great splash, and the aircraft was gone. “Banzai!” someone called. But how many more planes would have to fall before this battle became a success?

ONE THING JOE CROSETTI HADN’T TRAINED for was antiaircraft fire. There were obvious reasons why not. If such training got too realistic, he might have had to practice bailing out… if he could.

As the attack force neared the Japanese fleet, shell bursts appeared in the sky ahead of him and then all around him. When one shell burst not nearly far enough below him, it was like driving a car over a nasty pothole you hadn’t seen-he bounced sharply down and then sharply up again, so that his teeth clicked together. Only after he tasted blood in his mouth did he realize he’d bitten his tongue.

A few seconds later, he got another pothole bump, and something clanged into his fuselage. “Jesus!” he yipped, anxiously scanning all the dials on the instrument panel at once. Nothing seemed wrong or out of place. He still had fuel, oil, hydraulics… That clang scared him out of ten years’ growth just the same.

Only one thing to do-take out his moment of panic on the Japs. The little yellow slant-eyed sons of bitches thought they owned the world. They thought they had the right to own the world, and to take whatever pieces of it they fancied. Joe was here, literally, to show them they were wrong.

Here they came. The U.S. Hellcats had ripped into the Japanese strike force. Now it was the Japs’ turn to try to knock down as many Dauntlesses and Avengers as they could before the dive bombers and torpedo planes struck at their ships.

Nobody could say the guys who flew those Zeros weren’t game. Nobody could say the bastards didn’t know their business, either. They understood just what they had to do, and they aimed to do it. If Wildcats and Hellcats got in their way, they fought them. Otherwise, they went for the planes that mattered more.

“Hit ’em, boys!” The squadron leader’s voice rasped in Joe’s earphones. “The best defense is a good offense. This is what we came for.”

Joe’s element leader needed no more encouragement than that. “Come on, Crosetti,” he called. “Let’s go hunting.”

“Roger,” Joe answered, and stuck with the other Hellcat when it zoomed out ahead of the American dive bombers and torpedo planes, as if to tell the Japs they’d have to go through the fighters to get where they wanted to go.

The Japanese fighters flew in what Joe thought of as a gaggle-not nearly such a rigid formation as the Americans used. It put him in mind of boxing against a southpaw: you weren’t sure what was coming next. They looked as if they ought to be easy to pick off one at a time. If they were so damn easy, though, how come they’d given American pilots two successive sets of lumps around Hawaii, to say nothing of the black eye in the Philippines?

“Oh, shit!” That was the voice of Joe’s element leader, and panic filled it. Joe saw why, too. A Zero had put a cannon shell into one of his wing tanks. Self-sealing was all very well, but nothing would have stopped that leak or that fire. “I’m going down!” he wailed, and he did, spinning wildly. Joe hoped to see a chute open, but there was nothing, nothing at all-just a Hellcat falling toward the sea.

An instant later, an Avenger blew up. That wasn’t gasoline catching on fire; that was the torpedo slung under the aircraft blowing up. A Jap fighter must have made a lucky shot.

Joe looked around frantically for someone to latch on to. He felt naked and alone up there, the way anybody suddenly bereft of his comrade would have. For the time being, he had nobody to keep an eye out for him.

And then, suddenly, somebody was flying alongside of him. The other American pilot waved, as if to say he’d lost his leader and was looking for somebody to link up with. By the way the fellow flew, he was content to stay a wingman. That wasn’t how Joe wanted to become an element leader, but one of the fastest lessons he got in combat was that nobody gave a damn about what he wanted.

Some of the Avengers had already started heading down toward the Pacific for their torpedo runs. They weren’t the hopelessly slow, hopelessly clumsy Devastators that had preceded them, but they weren’t any real match for Zeros, either. Several Japanese fighters dove after them.

When Joe saw that, he laughed a very nasty laugh. The Zero that could outdive a Hellcat hadn’t been born yet. He pointed, then shoved his stick forward. His fighter’s nose dropped. As he dove after the Japs, his new wingman stuck like glue.

He got on a Jap’s tail and thumbed the firing button. The Zero caught fire. It went straight down into the ocean. Yelling like a red Indian, he went after another one. This Jap must have spotted him at the last second, because the fellow did a flick roll and squirted away like a wet watermelon seed shot out between your fingers. One second he was there; the next, gone.

“Son of a bitch!” Joe said: frustration mixed with reluctant respect. The Zero really was as maneuverable as people said. Joe sure wouldn’t have tried that getaway in a Hellcat, but it worked like a charm. Still, in evading him, the Jap had to break off his attack on the Avengers, so Joe figured he’d done his job.

And his altimeter was unwinding like a son of a bitch. He leveled off at under two thousand feet, then pulled the stick back and climbed. If he’d had any Japs on his tail, he would have left them behind as if they’d nailed their shoes to the floor.

As he gained altitude, he got a look at the Japanese ships not far ahead. He’d spent more than a year studying silhouettes and photos and models from every angle under the sun-and he still had a devil of a time telling destroyers from cruisers, cruisers from battleships. Even the carrier was hard to spot, and he was damned if he knew for sure which one she was.

But that wasn’t his headache, not really. He needed to run out of planes before he worried about ships. He looked around for more Zeros to shoot up.

FUCHIDA HAD KNOWN IT WOULD BE BAD. The American air armada and the ferocious attack it got off against the Japanese strike force had warned him of that. But nothing in his blackest nightmares had warned him it would be as bad as this.

American ships stretched as far as the eye could see, as far and farther. Fuchida knew-few men knew better-the resources the Japanese Empire had available. Raw fear almost made his hand shake on the torpedo plane’s stick. How were those slender resources going to stand against… this?

A warrior’s iron steadied him. Japan had beaten the Americans before. One well-trained man who despised death was worth half a dozen of the ordinary kind. So his country’s doctrine insisted, and so it had seemed up till now.

If, however, the enemy opposed you with a dozen ordinary men…

He shook his head. He would not think like that. The Japanese strike force had plenty, even now, to blunt the force of this attack. He believed that. He had to believe it. The alternative was feeling that rising panic again.

“Commander-san?” The voice on the intercom belonged to his bombardier.

“Hai?” Fuchida did his best to suppress what was going on inside him, but he could still hear the tension even in that one-word response.

“Sir, I was just thinking-it’s a shame we can’t carry two torpedoes,” the rating said.

Fuchida broke up, right there in the cockpit. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. Laughter washed away the last of the fear. “Domo arigato, Imura-san,” he said. “I needed that. We’ll just have to do what we can with what we’ve got.”

From the rear cockpit, Mizuki the radioman said, “That’s what the man with the little dick said when he went to bed with the geisha.”

Both Fuchida and Imura snorted. Fuchida’s confidence, having returned, now soared. How could his country lose when it had men who cracked silly jokes in the face of death?

The Americans seemed intent on showing him exactly how Japan could lose. The destroyers and cruisers protecting the U.S. carriers-and were those battleships out ahead of them, too? — threw up a curtain of flak the likes of which he’d never seen before. That didn’t worry him so much, though. The antiaircraft fire would knock down a few planes, but only a few. You went ahead and did your job and didn’t worry about it. If you and an enemy shell happened to wind up in the same place at the same time, that was hard luck, and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

But the Yankees, despite having dispatched such an enormous strike force against Akagi and Shokaku, also kept a formidable combat air patrol above their own fleet. Wildcats and the new fighters-whose name Fuchida did not know-tore into the attacking Japanese planes.

Mizuki’s rear-facing machine guns chattered. “Scared the baka yaro off!” the radioman said triumphantly. And he must have, for no machine-gun bullets tore into the torpedo plane. Fuchida allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. He hadn’t even seen the enemy plane Mizuki fired at.

Two burning Zeros plummeted into the Pacific. Part of the problem was that the new American fighters looked a lot like bigger versions of the Wildcats with which they mingled. They were plainly descended from the planes with which Fuchida and the Japanese were familiar. But any careless Zero pilot who tried to take them on as if they were Wildcats discovered he’d made a mistake-usually his last one. Zeros could outfly the older American fighters, but not these, not these.

A piece of shrapnel clanged against Fuchida’s wing. He glanced to the left. He didn’t see fire. That deserved-and got-another sigh of relief from him. Then the curtain of antiaircraft fire eased. He’d brought his Nakajima past the enemy’s screening ships. A carrier loomed ahead.

It threw out its own flak, of course. Tracers stabbed toward him. He ignored them. A torpedo run had to be straight. “Ready?” he called to the bombardier.

“Ready, sir,” Imura answered. “A hair to the right, sir, if you please. I think she’ll try to dodge to port when we launch.”

Fuchida made the adjustment. The torpedo splashed into the sea. The Nakajima suddenly grew lighter, faster, and more maneuverable. Now Fuchida wished he were only a spectator, and a man who had to get out of there alive if he could. But, as the officer in overall command of the Japanese air strike, he had to linger and do what he could to direct his countrymen against the enemy. And lingering, in this neighborhood, was asking not to grow old.

“Diving against a Yankee carrier. May the Emperor live ten thousand years!” The radio call made Fuchida look around to see if he could find the attacking Aichi. But the Americans were spread out over so much ocean, he couldn’t spot it. It might have been a good many kilometers away. He didn’t see any sudden great plume of smoke rising from a stricken ship, either. Too bad, he thought.

THE PILOT IN THIS WILDCAT flew his plane as aggressively as if it were one of the new American fighters. Saburo Shindo didn’t mind that at all. Aggressiveness was a great virtue in a fighter pilot-when he had the aircraft that could make the most of it. This fellow didn’t, not against a Zero. Shindo got on his tail and stayed there, pumping bullets into the enemy plane till at last it caught fire and went down.

Shooting down enemy fighters was the reason he’d accompanied the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes against the Americans. Doing his job should have given him more satisfaction, especially since he was good at it. Today, he felt like a man snatching up whatever he could as he escaped a burning house. He might hang on to a few trinkets, a few toys, but the house would still be gone forever.

Two American fighters knocked down a Nakajima just as it started its run against an enemy ship. Shindo was too far away to help or to draw off the American planes. He could only watch helplessly.

That summed up how he felt about too much of this fight. The Japanese strike force from Akagi and Shokaku that had done such splendid work around Hawaii was getting hacked to bits before his eyes. One after another, planes tumbled into the sea. Where would more highly trained, highly experienced pilots and aircrew come from after these men were gone? He had no idea.

He also had no idea whether he would live long enough for the question to be anything but academic to him. The Americans were hitting the strike force with everything they had, and they had more than he’d ever imagined. He felt like a man who’d stuck his hand into a meat grinder.

Being an experienced fighter pilot had drilled the habit of checking six into him. That let him spot an onrushing American plane in time to pull up and roll away. The enemy zoomed by without being able to open fire on him. Had this fellow flown a Wildcat, Shindo would have gone after him in turn. But the Yankee had one of the new fighters. Chasing them in a Zero was like trying to fly up to the sun. You could try, sure, but it wouldn’t do you any good.

“Banzai!” The victory shout made Shindo look around. He hadn’t heard it nearly often enough in this fight. He felt like cheering himself when he saw a U.S. carrier on fire and listing to starboard. Something had gone right. About time, too.

But how many carriers formed the core of this fleet? However many there were, they far outnumbered the half dozen Japan had used to open the war against the USA. His own country had been prepared to lose a third of that force if it meant a successful attack. Would the Americans be any less ruthless in their counterattack? It seemed unlikely.

“Shindo-san! Are you still there? This is Fuchida.”

“Yes, sir. I’m still here. What are your orders?”

“We’ve done everything we can here, I think-and the Americans will have done what they can do to us,” Fuchida answered; Shindo wished he’d left out the second part of the observation, no matter how true it was. The strike-force commander went on, “Time to return to our ships.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo repeated stolidly. Whether the Japanese carriers were still there was anybody’s guess. Shindo knew as much, and no doubt Fuchida did, too. That didn’t mean the senior officer was wrong. They had to try.

ALL OF AKAGI’S antiaircraft guns seemed to be going off at once, the heavy and the light together. The din on the bridge was indescribable. Genda and the other officers had to shout to make themselves heard. Admiral Kaku had the conn himself. Genda could do things the skipper couldn’t. His strategic grasp reached from Hawaii into the Indian Ocean, while he doubted Tomeo Kaku cared a sen’s worth about anything that happened beyond the ends of Akagi’s flight deck. But Kaku handled the carrier the way a fighter ace flew his Zero: as if the craft were an extension of his own body. Genda admired his skill and knew he would never be able to match it himself, not if he lived to be ninety.

Machine guns blazing, an American fighter raked the flight deck from no higher than the top of the island. Despite the bellowing antiaircraft guns, the enemy escaped. “That is a brave man,” Genda said.

“Zakennayo!” somebody else replied. “How many of our brave men did he just shoot up?” Genda had no answer for that.

“Helldivers!” someone screeched. Genda involuntarily looked up, though steel armor kept him from seeing the sky. But then, he didn’t need to see to imagine dive bombers racing down towards Akagi. He was one of the men who’d brought the technique to Japan, and he’d brought it from the USA.

Rear Admiral Kaku swung the wheel hard to port, then even harder to starboard. Muscles in his shoulders bunched as he tried to force the carrier to respond to his will at once. Bombs splashed into the sea all around Akagi, but the first few missed. So far, so good, Genda thought.

Then another shout pierced the racket on the bridge: “Torpedo! Torpedo to port!”

This isn’t fair was what went through Genda’s mind. Too much happening all at once. He and his countrymen had kept the Americans off-balance through the first two fights in Hawaiian waters. Now the shoe was on the other foot, and much less comfortable this way.

Cursing horribly, Kaku yanked the wheel to port again, intending to turn into the torpedo’s path. But either that took him into the path of the dive bombers overhead or the Yankee pilots simply guessed with him and outguessed him. Three bombs hit Akagi: near the stern, amidships, and right at the bow.

The next thing Genda knew, he was on the floor. One of his ankles screamed at him when he tried to put weight on it. He hauled himself upright anyhow-duty shouted louder than pain. Several men were down and wouldn’t get up again; the steel beneath his feet had twisted like cardboard and was awash in blood.

Kaku still wrestled with the wheel. He went on cursing for a few seconds, then said something worse than the blackest of oaths: “She doesn’t answer her helm.” If Akagi couldn’t steer… Kaku turned to the speaking tube to shout down to the engine room. A ship could be guided, crudely, by her engines. It wasn’t much, but it was what they had.

The torpedo hit then, as near amidships as made no difference.

Akagi had taken a torpedo, from a plane off the Lexington, during the first strike against Hawaii. That fish, like a lot of the ones the Americans used in the first months of the war, proved a dud. This one-wasn’t.

Genda found himself on the floor again. Getting up a second time hurt even more than it had the first. All the same, he did it. Once he was on his feet, he wondered why he’d bothered. For a moment, he also wondered if he could stand straight. Then he realized the problem wasn’t his but Akagi’s: the ship had a list, one that worsened every minute.

Flames were shooting up through holes in the flight deck, too. Men with hoses fought them, but they weren’t having much luck.

“My apologies, Commander,” Admiral Kaku said, as if he’d accidentally bumped into Genda.

“Sir, we’ve got to abandon ship,” Genda blurted. As if to underscore his words, an explosion shook Akagi. Maybe that was aviation gasoline going up, or maybe it was the carrier’s munitions starting to cook off.

Calmly, Tomeo Kaku nodded. “You are correct, of course. I will give the order.” He spoke into the intercom, which by some miracle still functioned: “All hands, prepare to abandon ship! This is the captain speaking! All hands, prepare to abandon ship!” Bowing politely to Genda, he went on, “You should head for the flight deck now, Commander. I see you have an injured leg. Give yourself all the time you need.”

“Yes, sir.” Genda took one lurching stride towards a doorway twisted open. “What about you, sir?”

“What about me?” Kaku smiled a sweet, sad smile. “This is my ship, Commander.”

Genda couldn’t very well misunderstand that. He did protest: “Sir, you should save yourself so you can go on serving the Emperor. Japan needs all the capable senior officers she can find.”

“I know you younger men feel that way,” Kaku said, smiling still. “If that course seems right and proper to you, then you should follow it. As for me… I have made mistakes here. If I had not made mistakes, I would not be losing Akagi. The least I can do is atone to his Majesty for my failure. Sayonara, Commander.”

After that, nothing would change his mind. Recognizing as much, Genda bowed and limped away. The last he saw of Rear Admiral Kaku, Akagi’s skipper was fastening his belt to a chair so he would be sure to go down with his ship.

When Genda got to the flight deck, he saw more flames leaping up from the bomb hit at the stern. “Come on, boys, over the side!” a petty officer shouted, sounding absurdly cheerful. “Swim away from the hull as fast as you can, mind, so the undertow doesn’t drag you down when she sinks!”

That was good, sensible advice. And the ship’s growing list made going over the side easier. Genda cursed when he hit the water even so. That ankle was definitely sprained, and might be broken. He rolled over onto his back and pulled away from Akagi with his arms.

American fighters strafed sailors in the sea. Bullets kicked up splashes only a few meters from him. He swam past a dead man leaking scarlet into the Pacific. The blood would draw sharks, but sharks, at the moment, were the least of his worries.

Their antiaircraft guns still blazing, destroyers circled the doomed Akagi to pick up survivors. Some men clambered up cargo nets hung from the sides. With his bad leg, Genda couldn’t climb. He clung to a line till sailors aboard the Yukikaze could haul him up to the deck.

“Domo arigato,” he said. When he tried to stand on that bad leg, it wouldn’t bear his weight. He had to sit and watch Akagi slide beneath the waves. His face crumpled. Tears ran down his cheeks. Since he was already soaking wet, only he noticed. He looked away from the carrier that had fought so long and so well, and noticed he was far from the only man off Akagi doing the same. She deserved mourning-and so did Admiral Kaku, who’d never left the bridge.

AN EXULTANT VOICE HOWLED in Joe Crosetti’s earphones: “Scratch one flattop!” Yells and cheers and curses rang out as the enemy carrier sank.

“How do you like that, you Jap bastards?” Joe shouted. He looked around for more Zeros, and didn’t see any. Some might still be airborne, but not close to him. He’d made a few runs at sailors bobbing in the sea, but decided he could hurt the enemy worse by shooting up his ships. That felt like a real duel, because the Japs shot back for all they were worth. Watching sailors scatter was a hell of a lot of fun.

After he’d made a couple of passes, an authoritative voice sounded off: “Attention, Hellcat pilots! We’ve got a formation of bandits coming up from the south at about 15,000 feet. Time to give them a friendly American welcome, hey?”

Joe needed a few seconds to figure out where south was. He’d got all turned around in his strafing runs. When he did, he started to climb. His new wingman still clung like a burr, which was what a wingman was supposed to do. He wondered who the guy was, and from which carrier he’d taken off.

There were the bandits, buzzing along as if they didn’t have a care in the world. If they didn’t, they were about to. Joe had trouble recognizing ships, but planes he knew. He clicked through a mental card file. Bombers. Twin-engined. Streamlined-they looked like flying cigars. Bettys, he thought. They could carry bombs or torpedoes. The point of the exercise, as far as he was concerned, was to make sure they didn’t get the chance to use whatever they were carrying.

They’d seen the American fighters, and started taking evasive action. That was pretty funny. They weren’t slow and they weren’t completely ungraceful, but no bomber had a prayer of outdodging a fighter that wanted to come after it. The Bettys also started shooting. They carried several machine guns in blisters on the fuselage-almost impossible to aim well-and a 20mm cannon in a clumsy turret at the rear of the plane.

When Joe got on the tail of one, the Jap in that rear turret started banging away at him. The cannon didn’t shoot very fast. There’d be a flash and a puff of smoke as the shell burst, then a little while later another one. Joe fired a burst as he swung the Hellcat’s nose across that turret. The tail gunner stopped shooting: wounded or dead.

With that annoyance gone, Joe sawed the Hellcat’s nose across the Betty’s left wing root and squeezed off another burst. Sure as hell, the bomber caught fire. Intelligence said Bettys carried a lot of fuel to give them long range, and that they lacked armor and self-sealing tanks. It sure looked as if Intelligence knew what it was talking about.

He went after another bomber and shot it down just the same way. The poor bastard in the rear turret never had a chance-and once he was gone, none of the weapons the Betty carried could damage a tough bird like a Hellcat except by luck. Joe knew a moment’s pity for the fliers trapped in their burning planes, but only a moment’s. They would have bombed his carrier if they’d got the chance. And they would have yelled, “Banzai!” while they did it, too. Screw ’em.

Still… Three miles was a hell of a long way to fall when you were on fire.

Other U.S. pilots found different ways of attacking the Bettys. Some flew straight at the bombers and shot up their cockpits. Others climbed past them and dove like falcons stooping on doves. The unescorted Bettys were slaughtered. Watching, taking part, Joe again felt tempted to pity, but again not for long. This was the enemy. The only reason they weren’t doing the same thing to him was that they couldn’t. They surely wanted to.

Trails of smoke and flame told of Betty after Betty going into the Pacific. They never had a chance. They must have counted on getting close to the American fleet without being spotted. They might have done some damage if they had. The way things were, it was a massacre.

“Let’s head for home, children,” the squadron leader said. “We’ve got one enemy carrier sunk, one enemy carrier dead in the water and burning, no other carriers spotted. By the size of the enemy strike, it probably set out from two ships. We did what we came to do, in other words. We’ve cleared the way for things to go forward.”

That sounded good to Joe. He wanted to shoot up some more Japanese ships, but a glance at the fuel gauge told him hanging around wasn’t a good idea. He had to find north again, the same way he’d had to find south when he went after the Bettys.

He shook his head with amazement that approached awe. Two Bettys for sure. He thought he’d got a Zero and a Kate. One fight and he was within shouting distance of being an ace. He’d dreamt about doing stuff like that, but he’d had trouble believing it. Believe it or not, he’d done it.

He hoped Orson Sharp was okay. He’d looked around whenever he got the chance-which wasn’t very often-but he hadn’t spotted his longtime roomie. He kept telling himself that didn’t prove anything one way or the other. Sharp was probably looking around for him, too, and not finding him.

On he went toward the north. He wondered how much damage the Jap strike force had been able to do. Less than it would have before it tangled with the American planes, that was for damn sure. And where would the Japs land now? Both of their carriers were out of business. Would they go on to Oahu? Maybe some of the Zeros could get there, but the Vals and Kates didn’t have a chance. “Oh, too bad,” Joe said, and laughed.

He might have been speaking of the devil, because he got a radio call on the all-planes circuit from a Hellcat a few miles ahead of him: “Heads up, boys. Here come the Japs on the way home-except they don’t know home burned down. Every plane we splash now is one more we don’t have to worry about later on.”

Joe didn’t need long to spot what was left of the enemy’s air armada. He whistled softly to himself. The Japs had had a lot more planes the first time the American strike force ran into them. The U.S. fleet’s antiaircraft guns and the combat air patrol must have done a hell of a job. That looked like good news.

Zeros still escorted the surviving dive bombers and torpedo planes. Hellcats roared to the attack. Joe took another look at his fuel gauge. He’d be pushing it if he gunned his bird real hard-but why was he in this cockpit, if not to push it?

He saw a Kate flying south as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Was that the sneaky bastard who’d given him the slip last time by jinking left instead of right? He nodded to himself. He thought so. “Fool me once, shame on you,” he said. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” He goosed the Hellcat and raced toward the Jap torpedo plane.

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA’S HEART WAS HEAVY as lead inside him. He knew the strike force he led hadn’t come close to defeating and driving back the U.S. fleet. In words of one syllable, the Japanese had got smashed. A glance at the battered remnants of the strike force was enough to tell him that. Far too many Japanese planes had never got to the American fleet. Of the ones that had, far too many hadn’t got away.

And what would become of the ones that had done everything they were supposed to do? That was another good question, one much better than he wished it were. He’d seen the size of the American strike force when its path crossed his. What had the Yankees done to the Japanese fleet? Were any flight decks left for these few poor planes to land on?

He checked his fuel gauge. He’d been running as lean as he could, but he didn’t have a chance of getting back to Oahu with what was in his tanks, and he knew it. He hadn’t said anything to his radioman and bombardier, not yet. No point borrowing trouble, not when they already had so much. Maybe Akagi or Shokaku — maybe Akagi and Shokaku — still waited. He could hope. Hope didn’t hurt, and didn’t cost anything.

One of the handful of Zeros still flying with the strike force waggled its wings to get Fuchida’s attention. He waved to show he’d got the signal. The pilot (yes, that was Shindo; Fuchida might have known he was too tough and too sneaky for the Americans to kill) pointed south.

Fuchida’s eyes followed that leather-gloved index finger. There in the privacy of the cockpit, he groaned. Running into the U.S. strike force coming and going struck him as most unfair, though it wasn’t really surprising, not when both air fleets had to fly reciprocal courses to strike their enemies and return.

“Attention!” he called over the all-planes circuit. “Attention! Enemy aircraft dead ahead!” That would wake up anybody who hadn’t noticed. Then he added what was, under the circumstances, the worst thing he could say: “They appear to have seen us.”

“What do we do now, Commander-san?” Petty Officer Mizuki asked.

“We try to get through them or past them,” said Fuchida, who had no better answer. How? And what if they succeeded? Hope one of the carriers still survived? Hope some of the other ships in the Japanese fleet still survived, so he might be rescued if he ditched? That struck him as most likely, and also as a very poor best.

Reaching the Japanese fleet would be an adventure in itself. Here came the Americans. Fuchida tried to get some feel for their numbers, some feel for how many the combat air patrol over Akagi and Shokaku and the fleet’s antiaircraft had shot down. It wasn’t easy, not with enemy planes spread out all over the sky ahead. The shortest answer he could find was not as many as I wish they had.

Brave as a daimyo’s hunting dogs, the Zeros shot ahead to try to hold the Americans away from the Aichis and Nakajimas that might hurt enemy ships in some later fight… if they still had a flight deck to land on. But there weren’t nearly enough Zeros to do the job. A few American fighters engaged them.

That kept them busy while the other Yankees roared on toward the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes.

Fuchida fired a burst at an onrushing American fighter. That was more a gesture of defiance and warning than a serious attempt to shoot down the American. His B5N2 made a good torpedo plane. The Nakajima had also made a pretty good level bomber, though it was obsolete in that role now. It had never been intended to make a fighter.

After squeezing off the burst, Fuchida flung the aircraft to the left, as he had on the way north. Then he’d shaken off his attacker. This time, to his horror and dismay, the enemy went with him without an instant’s hesitation. The American plane carried half a dozen heavy machine guns, not two feeble popguns like the B5N2.

Bullets slammed into the torpedo plane. Oil from the engine sprayed across the windshield. The bombardier screamed. So did Mizuki. Fuchida wondered why he hadn’t been hit himself. It wouldn’t matter for long. The plane was falling out of the sky, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Still wrestling with the controls, he shouted, “Get out! Get out if you can!” The Pacific rushed up to meet him. He braced himself, knowing it would do no good.

Impact.

Blackness.

A COLUMN OF SMOKE GUIDED Saburo Shindo to Shokaku ’s funeral pyre. The carrier burned from stem to stern. Destroyers clustered around her, taking off survivors. He supposed they would torpedo her before long. She deserved a merciful coup de grace, as a samurai committing seppuku deserved to have a second finish him after he’d shown he had the courage to slit his own belly.

Akagi was already gone. Shindo had found no sign of the proud carrier from which he’d taken off. That made things about as bad as they could be.

Antiaircraft shells burst around him. Some of the ships down there feared he might be an American, coming back for another strike. “Baka yaro!” he snarled. Yes, they were idiots, but hadn’t they earned the right?

He watched an Aichi go into the sea not far from a destroyer. The aircraft was lost, but the crew might live. Few strike planes had managed to come even this far. After two encounters with the U.S. strike force and after the furious defense above the American fleet, the Japanese had taken a beating the likes of which they hadn’t known since… when? The encounter with the Korean turtle ships at the end of the sixteenth century? No other comparison occurred to Shindo, but this had to be worse.

He thought about ditching, too, thought about it and shook his head. Unlike the Nakajimas and Aichis, he had a chance to get back to Oahu. Hawaii would need as many airplanes as possible to defend her. Japan certainly wouldn’t be able to bring in any more. If he could land his Zero, he should.

On he flew, then. A cruiser burned not far south of Shokaku. Again, lesser ships were rescuing survivors. They probably should have been fleeing back toward Hawaii, too. The Americans were bound to strike again as soon as they could. What the devil could stop them now? This whole fleet lay at their mercy.

Perhaps half a dozen other Zeros remained in the sky with him. Shindo shook his head in disbelief. Those few fighters were all that was left of two fleet carriers’ worth of air power. Zuikaku was laid up at Pearl Harbor, a sitting duck for American air strikes. He hoped her air contingent had moved to land bases on Oahu. Even if the planes were gone, though, half of Japan’s fleet-carrier strength would have to be written off. The Yankees had put more fleet carriers into this strike than Japan had left-to say nothing of their swarm of light carriers.

“What are we going to do?” he muttered. He had no idea. Whatever it was, it would be under the Army’s aegis from now on. Japan’s naval presence in and around Hawaii had just collapsed. A man would have to be blind to think anything different. Shindo hoped he could see trouble clearly, anyhow.

The engine on one of the surviving Zeros quit. Maybe the plane had a small fuel leak. Maybe it had just flown too hard in the battle. Either way, it wouldn’t get back to Oahu. The pilot saluted as he started the long glide down to the ocean. Maybe he could ditch smoothly. Maybe a Japanese ship would find him if he did. But his chances weren’t good, and he had to know it.

Shindo wondered what his own chances were. He’d flown hard, too. He throttled back even more, using just enough power to stay airborne. Soon, he thought. Soon I’ll see the island.

And he did. The engine started coughing not long afterwards, but he got down on the Haleiwa airstrip. He’d flown from there during the Japanese invasion of Hawaii. Now he would have to defend it against an American return he’d never really expected.