Days of Infamy (58 page)

In any case, the round trip between Honolulu and San Francisco was about twenty hours. Without a layover—again, unlikely!—much of it had to be by night.

After about three and a half hours, Lieutenant Muto yawned and stretched and opened his eyes. He looked over at Fuchida and asked, “How is everything?”

“Fine,” Fuchida answered. “We were going on to the Panama Canal from San Francisco, weren't we?”

“The Panama Canal?” Muto's eyes flashed to the compass. Only after he made sure of the course did he laugh. “You know how to wake a fellow up in a hurry, don't you, Commander?”

“I try,” Fuchida said. Lieutenant Muto clucked in mock reproach and shook his head. Though Fuchida had been joking, he couldn't help looking back toward the southeast. The Panama Canal lay in that direction. If Japan could put it out of action, that would be a tremendous blow to the USA. If the Americans had to ship everything around South America . . .

Regretfully, he shook his head. The Panama Canal was more than twice as far from Honolulu as San Francisco was: out of range even for an H8K. The Canal would be well defended, too, and the Americans would move heaven and earth to repair whatever damage it suffered. Attacking it was nice to think about. So was making love to a beautiful movie actress. In real life, neither was likely to be practical.

Little by little, the sky began to grow light. They were flying away from the sunrise, which slowed it, but it came anyway. Even when dawn did arrive, though, there was nothing to see but sky above and an endless expanse of ocean below. Fuchida checked the fuel gauge. They'd filled every tank to overflowing before takeoff. Even so, they didn't have enough left to get back to Honolulu.

Half an hour later, the radioman's voice sounded in Muto's earphones, and in Fuchida's: “I have the signal from the
I-25!
”

“
Ichi-ban!
” Muto exclaimed. The relief in his voice said he must have been watching the needle drop toward empty, too. “What is the bearing?”

“Sir, we're going to need to swing south about five degrees,” the radioman replied. “We'll all keep our eyes peeled after that. By the strength of the signal, I don't think we're very far away.”

“Pass the word to the other planes on the low-power circuit,” Muto said. “No one's likely to pick it up here, and no one's likely to be able to do anything about it even if he does.”

“
Hai
,” the radioman said.

A crewman on one of the other flying boats first spotted the surfaced submarine. His radioman passed the word to Fuchida's H8K and the third one. Then Fuchida and Muto both pointed out the window at the same time. Muto brought the flying boat down to the water. Spray kicked up from the hull as it landed. Suddenly, its motion took on a new character. For a plane, it had an excellent hull. For a boat . . . Fuchida gulped.
I am a good sailor
, he told himself sternly.

Muto taxied up alongside the
I-25
. Sailors on the sub's deck waved to the flying boat. “How did it go?” somebody shouted. Muto and Fuchida waved and grinned. The sailors clapped their hands. They yelled, “
Banzai!
”

Then they got down to business. The
I-25
carried fuel for the last leg of the flying boats' return to Honolulu. Two sailors in a boat ran a hose from the submarine to the H8K. Fuchida listened to fuel flowing into the tanks. When the plane had enough to get back to Honolulu, the sailors disconnected the hose.

Muto taxied out of the way. The other two flying boats refueled in turn. When all three had got what they needed, the submarine sailed away. Fuchida breathed a silent sigh of relief when the H8Ks got airborne once more after long takeoff runs that put him in mind of geese sprinting along the surface of a lake before they could get airborne. The flying boats had been hideously vulnerable as they bobbed on the surface of the Pacific. Now they were in their proper element again, and could take care of themselves.

They came back to the Pan American Clipper base about four in the afternoon. Japanese officers waited for them as if they really were tourists coming to Hawaii from the West Coast of the USA. Applause and shouts of, “
Banzai!
” greeted them as they got out of the planes.

“Radio in the United States is going mad!” a signals officer yelled. “The Yankees are saying this was as big an embarrassment as Pearl Harbor!”

Fuchida and Muto bowed to each other. Then they both yawned. Together, they started to laugh.

C
OMPASSIONATE LEAVE WAS
the last thing Joe Crosetti wanted. But here he was, tearing across the country on the fastest trains he could get. Most of the bombs the Japs had dropped on San Francisco came down on the harbor or near it. As they were leaving, though, they'd emptied their racks—and one of those afterthoughts had landed on the house where Uncle Tony and Aunt Maria and their four kids lived. One of the kids was still alive, though he'd lost a leg. He'd been blown into a tree across the street, which doubtless saved his life. The rest of the family? Gone.

In the harbor, the Japs had damaged a cruiser, a destroyer, and two freighters, and they'd sent another freighter to the bottom. Nobody'd laid a glove on them, not so far as anyone could tell. They'd come out of the night, done their dirty work, and then disappeared again.

To Joe, the ships mattered much less than his family. Had his aunt and uncle's house not been hit, he might have given the enemy grudging credit for a nice piece of work. Not now. Now the war was personal. He did want to string up the San Francisco civil-defense authorities, who must have been asleep at the switch when the Japs came in. Had they had their radar on? Had they watched it if they had? Not likely, not by what had happened.

No one paid any special attention to him as he rolled west across the country. Men in uniform were a dime a dozen. More were soldiers than sailors, and more sailors were ratings than officers, but Joe wasn't unusual enough to draw notice. That suited him fine. He preferred being alone with his thoughts.

His own family lived only a few blocks from what had been Uncle Tony's house. The bomb could have blown up his mom and dad as easily as his aunt and uncle. He couldn't see anything but dumb luck that had kept it from doing just that—and there was a thought he would rather not have had.

His train got into the Southern Pacific station at First and Broadway in Oakland at two in the morning on the day of the funeral. His father waited on the platform for him. Dad was in his usual fisherman's dungarees; he wouldn't change to a suit till later.

They embraced. Dad hadn't shrunk, exactly, but he seemed frailer than he had before Joe started flight training. Joe didn't stop and think how much more muscle he'd added since then; he wasn't built like a middle infielder any more.

His father kissed him on the cheek, saying, “Good to see you, boy. I wish it wasn't for something like this.”

“Jesus, so do I!” Joe said. “Those dirty, stinking bastards. I—”

“You go pay 'em back, that's all,” his father said. “Those other pilots, they can yell, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!' when they give the Japs what-for. You, you yell, ‘Remember Tony and Maria and Lou and Tina and Gina!'—and Paul, too, dammit!”

“I will,” Joe said. “I've got a picture of 'em in my wallet. Whenever I go up, it goes up with me.” He wished he were flying planes hotter than the sedate trainers at Pensacola. You had to crawl before you could walk and walk before you could run, but he wanted to run like Jesse Owens—run right at the Japs and run right over them.

“Okay, Joey.” His father set a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, then. I'll take you back to the house. That all your stuff?”

“Yeah.” Joe slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. “They teach us to travel light.” He yawned. “I'd like to sleep for about a week when I get home.”

“Funeral's at ten,” Dad warned.

“I know. I'll want to take a bath, too.” After so long on the train, Joe felt grubby all over. “Be nice to get in the tub for a change. I haven't had anything but showers since I went back East.”

At that hour, the parking lot was almost empty. Next to no traffic was on the roads. They went back to San Francisco on the Bay Bridge. Joe remembered the hoopla with which it had opened in 1936. It was a hell of a lot more convenient than the ferry that had linked San Francisco and the East Bay. It would have been, anyhow, if they could have gone faster than the crawl the new, strict blackout regulations imposed.

Something else occurred to Joe. “You all right for gas, Dad?” He hadn't paid much attention to gas rationing since becoming a cadet. He didn't have a car, so it wasn't his worry.

His father shrugged. “It'll be okay. And this—this is more important than crap like that.” Joe bit his lip and nodded.

He was damned if he could figure out how his old man navigated in the pitch blackness. Masking tape covered all but the narrowest strip of headlights. What was left didn't let you see far enough to spit. Dad managed, though. He didn't clip any of the other cars groping their way through the night, and he got back to the house with no wrong turns anywhere.

After months of bunks and cots, Joe's bed seemed ridiculously soft. Lying down on it made him feel like a kid, as if he'd shed years. He wondered if the ticking of the alarm clock on the nightstand would bother him. It did—for ninety seconds, maybe even two minutes. After that, he heard nothing.

When the alarm clock went off, he had to figure out what it was and how to turn it off. Reveille had been rousting him since he joined the Navy. He realized he didn't have to change out of his pajamas before he went to breakfast. Now
there
was luxury.

His mother burst into tears when she saw him. His brother Carl was sixteen, and stared at him in awe. His sister Angie was twelve. She just seemed glad to have him back. He shoveled down breakfast with the single-minded determination he would have shown back in Pensacola. Carl gaped. Dad grinned. His mother brought him seconds. In Pensacola, he would have overloaded his plate the first time around.

With all the talk at the breakfast table, he didn't have time for a bath after all. He zipped through the shower and put on his dress uniform. When he came downstairs again, his mother started crying for a second time. Carl's eyes damn near bugged out of his head. His brother and father wore almost identical black suits. Joe ignored the faint smell of mothballs.

They all piled into the car to go to church. When they got there, they found reporters waiting outside. Joe hadn't expected that.
Goddamn vultures
, he thought. Along with the rest of his family, he pushed past them without a word.

Relatives and friends and neighbors packed the church. Joe solemnly shook hands again and again. Dominic Scalzi set a hand on his shoulder. “Garage ain't the same without you, kid,” the mechanic said. “Guy who's filling your slot ain't half as good. But what you're doing, it's important. You make all of us proud.” His suit gave off that chemical tang, too.

“Thanks, Mr. Scalzi.” Joe's mind was only half on what his ex-boss was saying. “Excuse me, please.” He went over and sat down with his folks. There were the coffins, looking dreadfully final—and all the more so because they were closed. He knew what that meant: the mortician hadn't been able to clean up the bodies enough to let anybody look at them.

Even in the wool dress uniform, he shivered. He'd seen more than one Yellow Peril crash, and he'd seen what happened afterwards. The first time, he'd thrown up right on his shoes. To imagine something like that happening to
his aunt and uncle and his cousins . . . His hands slammed shut into fists. He felt as if he'd let them down.

That was ridiculous. The logical part of his mind knew as much. A funeral, though, wasn't made for the logical part of the mind.

The Mass helped steady him. The genuflections and the sonorous Latin were made, not to drive grief away, but to put it in channels made for its flow. The dry tastelessness of the Communion wafer on his tongue brought the ritual to a close. When the priest intoned, “
Ite, Missa est
,” at the end, he did feel better.

But then came the funeral procession and the burial itself. He was a pallbearer, of course. He was young and strong and healthy, and he'd been twenty-five hundred miles away from where he could do anybody any good. Watching and hearing dirt thud down on the coffins made him bury his face in his hands.

“It's okay,” his father whispered in a ravaged voice. “This once, it's okay.”

Joe shook his head. It wasn't okay. It wasn't going to be okay. If it were okay, he would still have been back at Pensacola, and his relatives would have been going on about their business. Instead, he was here, five of them lay in holes in the ground, and the sixth wouldn't get out of the hospital for at least another two weeks. Tears dripped out between his fingers and fell on the green graveyard grass.

After the burial, everybody went back to his folks' house. People packed it to overflowing. The war was supposed to have made things hard to come by. The food his mother set out and the booze his father set out made a mockery of that. He wondered how big a hole they'd dug for themselves with such a big spread and with the cost of five funerals. As soon as he did, he shrugged the thought away. At a time like this, you didn't stint.