Days of Infamy (25 page)

He almost bumped noses with a mongoose. Which of them was more surprised and appalled would have been hard to say. The mongoose scurried away. It reminded him of a weasel: all slithery grace. Heart thumping, he crawled on.

The thrashing in the cane up ahead wasn't coming from any mongoose. “Hey, up there!” Peterson hissed. “Who's hit worst?”

One of the men just kept calling for his mother. Another one, though, said, “Take Steve. He got a slug in the chest.” That took balls: lying there shot and saying somebody else was worse off than you.

Steve turned out to be the one who wanted his mother. Andy had a wounded leg, the third guy a shattered right arm. “You can crawl,” Peterson told him. “Follow me back.”

“I don't want to leave Andy,” the sailor said through clenched teeth—he wore a U.S. Navy armband on the left sleeve of a khaki shirt. He couldn't do much with one good arm, but Peterson didn't waste time arguing with him. He figured Steve would buy his plot if he wasted time.

Going back was ten times as bad as coming forward had been. He had to drag the wounded man behind him. After a while, Steve stopped moaning. Peterson wished he would start again. He didn't want to think he might be dragging a corpse. And, just to make matters worse, the Japanese machine gunner started spraying bullets around again. They made little
clip-clip-clip
noises as they cut through the cane. Peterson knew what kind of noises one of them would make if it cut through him. He knew what kind of noises he would make then, too.

A jumpy American almost shot him when he got back into the lines. He managed to persuade the kid that he wasn't Hirohito's brother-in-law. Steve was still breathing; Peterson managed some weary pride at that. Stretcher-bearers took the injured man away.

“You did good, soldier,” a sergeant said to Peterson, and then, his voice rising in surprise, “Hey! Where the hell you going?”

“Two more wounded out there,” Peterson answered. “If I bring one, the other can make it back on his own. He's standing guard on his buddy.”

“You bring him back and I'll make you a corporal on the spot,” the sergeant promised.

For a Navy lieutenant to be thrilled at the prospect of getting two stripes on his sleeve was one of the more surreal things that had happened since the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. But Peterson was. He crawled back into the cane, hoping he would find Andy and the man whose name he didn't know.

They were still making noise, so it wasn't too hard. But he must have got overenthusiastic moving toward them, because the Jap machine gunner sent a long burst slicing after him. He flattened out like a toad after a truck ran over it.

Working a Springfield one-handed was a bastard, especially if that one hand was your left. But Andy's buddy had found a way. He'd propped the muzzle end of the rifle on a rock and aimed it in the direction of the Japanese. “Look at young Tom Edison,” Peterson said. The man with the wounded arm managed a grin.

Instead of dragging Andy, Peterson got him up on his back. Andy was
healthy enough to let out a yelp when he did. The Jap with the machine gun started shooting again.

A bullet hit. Peterson heard it. He didn't feel it, though. Andy didn't jerk. Awkwardly, Peterson looked behind him. The man with the wounded arm had been coming after him and Andy. Now the fellow sprawled bonelessly, his brains splashed over the dirt.

“Aw, shit,” Peterson said softly. He brought Andy in. That sergeant saw him do it, and gave him the two stripes and a threaded needle. Two out of three wasn't bad. So he told himself, again and again. But remembering the guy who'd stopped a machine-gun round with his ear sucked all the pride out of the promotion.
That could have been me
, dinned in Peterson's head.
Sweet Jesus, that could have been me
.

C
OMMANDER
M
ITSUO
F
UCHIDA
looked down on Honolulu from his Nakajima B5N1. “Now, remember,” Fuchida told his bombardier, “we don't want to hit too far inland this time, and we don't want to hit too far west. That's the Japanese part of town.”

“Yes, sir.” The bombardier sounded more resigned than anything else. Fuchida tried to remember how many times he'd told the man the same thing. More than he should have? Probably.

The Americans kept throwing up antiaircraft fire. They showed more spirit than Fuchida had expected. He'd thought they would surrender once they realized Japan had got the upper hand. But they were still putting up the best fight they could. It wouldn't be enough. Fuchida could see that. He suspected the enemy could, too. That didn't keep the Americans from making the fight.

A shell burst near the Nakajima. The plane staggered in the air. Fuchida didn't hear any shrapnel bang the fuselage or wing. “There's the Aloha Tower,” he told the bombardier. “Do you see it?”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied. “Shall we go after the docks again?”

“Yes. Plenty of warehouses there. The sooner the Americans get hungry, the sooner they do what we want.”

Down went the stick of bombs. The B5N1 bounced in the air, not so rudely as it had from the near miss by the shell. Fuchida watched the bombs tumble toward their target. The bursts sent up clouds of smoke and dust. “Ha!” the bombardier said. “I think one of those hit the tower itself.”

“Nicely done.” Fuchida wanted to keep his crewman happy. He didn't care about the Aloha Tower one way or the other. It mounted no guns; as far as he knew, it stored no food. Still . . . “If you did hit it, that will be a blow to the Americans' pride.”

“
Hai
,” the bombardier said. “Pride is about all they have left,
neh
?”

“They still have soldiers and guns,” Fuchida pointed out.

The bombardier laughed. “Fat lot of good those have done them.”

In a strictly military sense, he was right. But the Japanese were monitoring radio stories from the mainland about the “Heroes of Hawaii.” The Americans here might be doomed to failure. They still made good propaganda, and helped distract the people of the USA from the advances General Homma's army was making in the Philippines and the rapid push down the Malayan peninsula toward Singapore against the British.

Things are going our way
, Fuchida thought.
We have to keep moving fast. If we let up, if we let our enemies catch their balance, we could be in trouble. But so far, everything is fine
.

Other bombers were pounding the docks and the area just inland from them. Unopposed bombers could do dreadful things to cities. The Germans had shown as much over Rotterdam and Belgrade. Now Japan, having swept away American air power in Hawaii and the Philippines, was teaching the same lesson to Honolulu and Manila.

Fuchida wondered if the rumors he'd heard could be true. Had the Americans in the Philippines really let their planes get caught on the ground? The Japanese hadn't hit them from Formosa till a day after fighting opened here in Hawaii. People said General MacArthur was supposed to be a good commander. If he'd been caught with his pants down like that, though . . . A Japanese officer would have slit his belly to atone for the disgrace. The Americans seemed to lack the idea of seeking an honorable death.

They lacked all sorts of notions of honor. And yet no one could fault the courage with which they'd fought here in Hawaii. The contrast left Fuchida puzzled. How could courage come into being without honor?

The other thing that puzzled him was how so much courage sprang from so much wealth. The homes, the swarms of motorcars, the vast numbers of telephones and radios . . . All of it made a Japanese stare in astonished disbelief. The meat and vegetables in the shops had been a surprise, too, but they
were starting to run low. Put everything together and it was amazing the Yankees weren't too soft to fight. Somehow, though, they weren't.

Fuchida swung the B5N1 back to the north for the short hop back to Haleiwa. All hops here were short, which saved fuel. Not all of what the bomber was burning had come off the
Akagi
. Quite a bit was taken from captured filling stations. The Americans, with all the petroleum in the world at their fingertips, hadn't thought to destroy much of what was in that stock to keep the Japanese from using it.

More antiaircraft shells burst around the bomber as Fuchida flew over the front. The Americans were falling back into the high ground that covered Honolulu from the north. They might be hard to root out of there. Fuchida shrugged in the privacy of the cockpit. The Army had done a good job so far—better than he'd expected. It should be up to this, too.

“Wish we had some more bombs on board, sir, so we could drop some on these fellows' heads,” the bombardier said.

“We have people paying attention to them, I promise,” Fuchida said dryly.

“I know that, sir,” the bombardier answered. “But I want to do it myself.”

“Every man in his place,” Fuchida said. But the bombardier showed fine martial spirit. Of course the Japanese had it. They were a warrior race, schooled in the ways of
bushido
. It was the Americans who should have been without it. But they made warriors, too. Fuchida shrugged again. However strange that was, it was the truth.

He landed at that first captured airstrip by Haleiwa. Elsewhere in the north, combat engineers were making new runways with captured earth-moving equipment. Ordinary American builders had more bulldozers and other heavy machinery than Japanese military engineers—another example of American prodigality, or maybe just of American wealth.

“How did it go, sir?” a groundcrew man asked as Fuchida climbed out of the bomber.

“According to plan,” he answered, and laughed—he sounded like Lieutenant Shindo. But it was true. “Just according to plan.”

“L
OUSY
J
AP
!” K
ENZO
T
AKAHASHI
heard that shout every time he stuck his nose outside. “Lousy stinking Jap!”

It had been bad before. It was worse now that the Japanese were bombing Honolulu. That brought the war home to people for whom, even after Pearl Harbor, it hadn't seemed quite real. Hard to deny reality when you were out on the street because your house, and maybe your wife or your son, too, had been blown to smithereens.

The only good thing about being out on the street in Honolulu in January was that you wouldn't freeze, the way you might somewhere on the mainland. If you had a sweater, that was plenty. Even if you didn't, you'd get by. But if you were on the street and you saw a young man with golden-brown skin, high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and coarse black hair, you weren't going to wish him the top of the morning and ask him how he was.

“I'm not a Jap. I'm an American!” Kenzo had tried protesting the first few times people showered abuse on him. It had got him exactly nowhere, accomplished exactly nothing. It just made people yell at him even more. It had also almost got him into a couple of fistfights.

One of those would have happened if a cop hadn't broken it up. The policeman, a
haole
, hadn't wanted his thanks. “I ain't got much use for you, neither, kid,” he said, “but there's too much real shit going on to waste time with pissant stuff. Get the hell out of here.” Kenzo got.

He told Hiroshi about it. He didn't tell his father. He knew what his old man would have said: that it proved he ought to be saluting the Rising Sun and not the Stars and Stripes. He couldn't stomach that.

“I
am
an American, dammit,” he raged, “even if the
haoles
can't see it.”

“Yeah, I know. Me, too,” Hiroshi said. “But you know what? It's not just the
haoles
yelling at us these days. It's everybody—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos.” His grin was haggard.

Kenzo only grunted. Part of that fell under
what can you expect?
Japan was at war with China, ruled Korea, and now had invaded the Philippines. But it still stung. Just as
haoles
in Hawaii looked down their noses at everybody else (with the partial exception of the Hawaiians themselves, and they weren't competition), the Japanese here thought themselves better than Koreans and Filipinos, and probably Chinese, too.

“You know how bad it is?” Hiroshi said. Kenzo shook his head. His brother said, “Even the Puerto Ricans are yelling, ‘Goddamn Jap!' these days.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said, unconsciously echoing his father. There weren't many Puerto Ricans in Hawaii. The ones who were there were seen as
thieves and crooks and grifters by everybody else. The story was that the governor of Puerto Rico lo these many years ago, asked for a shipload of laborers, had provided it by emptying the local jails and whorehouses. Kenzo didn't know if the story was true, but everybody told it.

Getting out on the Pacific in the
Oshima Maru
was something of a relief. Kenzo had never imagined he would think something like that. But his father, however loopy the old man's ideas were, didn't hate him. The other advantage of going to sea was not being there when the bombs went off. That didn't help so much, though, because Kenzo still worried about his mother.