Days of Infamy (59 page)

Everybody kept pressing drinks on him. If he'd drunk all of them, they would have had to carry him aboard the eastbound train on a stretcher. He poured down enough to put a thick glass canopy—like that of a fighter plane—between himself and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then he walked around with a half-filled glass in his hand, which kept most people from offering him a new full one.

They kept telling him—sometimes in alarmingly explicit detail—what to do to the Japs when he got the chance. He would nod and try to move on. He wanted to do all those things to them. But nobody here seemed to have the slightest idea that the Japs were liable to shoot back.

With everything from Hawaii to Burma lost, with Japanese troops and planes at Port Moresby looking across the Coral Sea towards Australia, Joe didn't see how people could be so blind, but they were.
Civilians
, he thought. He hadn't had much to do with civilians the past five months. He had been one of them. No more. He wasn't a naval officer yet—he wasn't what he was going to be—but he sure wasn't what he had been, either.

Late that night, his father drove him back across the Bay to Oakland. Dad had put away a lot of booze, too, but not even the craziest drunk—which he wasn't—could do anything too drastic at the speeds blackout permitted. “Take care of yourself, Joey,” Dad said on the platform. “Take care of yourself,
but pay those bastards back
.”

“I will,” Joe said.
I hope I will
.

He had no trouble sleeping sitting up, not that night he didn't. When he woke, the sun was hitting him in the face. His head felt as if someone were dancing on it with a jackhammer. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. Slowly, the ache receded. Coffee helped, too.

After so much time cooped up in a seat, Joe felt like an arthritic orangutan when the train pulled into the Pensacola station again. He had trouble straightening up to grab his duffel bag from the rack above the seat. All his joints creaked and popped.

When he got out, he found Orson Sharp waiting for him on the platform. “Hey, you didn't have to do that,” Joe said, touched. “I was gonna flag a cab.”

Sharp looked at him as if he'd suddenly started speaking Japanese. “We're on the same team.” He might have been talking to a moron. “I borrowed Mike Williams' De Soto. Big deal. If you don't help the guys on your team, why should they help you?”

Joe didn't see anything he could say to that, so he just nodded. By the time they'd left the station and gone out into the potent Pensacola sun, he found a couple of words: “Thanks, buddy.” He'd left family behind in San Francisco. Now he realized he'd come back to family, too.

P
LATOON
S
ERGEANT
L
ESTER
Dillon had been a Marine for twenty-five years. He'd seen a hell of a lot in that span. He'd gone over the top half a dozen times in France in 1918 in the desperate fight that hurled the Kaiser's men back from their final drive on Paris and toward their own border once more.
The last time, a German machine gun took a bite out of his left leg. He'd celebrated the Armistice flat on his back in a military hospital.

Since then, he'd been in Haiti and in Nicaragua and at the American legation in Peking. He'd served aboard two destroyers and two cruisers. If he hadn't joined the Corps, he didn't know what he would have done with his life. Ended up in trouble, probably. He was a big sandy-haired guy with cold blue eyes in a long, sun-weathered face, and he'd never been inclined to take guff from anybody. If he'd stayed a civilian, he might have knocked somebody's block off and done a stretch—or maybe more than one stretch—in the pokey.

Now he sat in San Diego twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the rest of the country to get off the dime. He was ready to hit the beach on Oahu tomorrow. The Navy wasn't ready to get him there yet, though, or to make sure that the Japs didn't strafe him or drop bombs on his head or otherwise make life difficult for him.

But things were starting to move. Camp Elliott held so many Marines, it was bursting at the seams. The Navy had bought an enormous rancho up the coast from San Diego. What would be Camp Pendleton would have enough room to train troops even on the scale this war would require. But Pendleton wasn't ready yet. The contractors swore up and down that it would be come September, which did nobody any good right this minute.

He sat in the enlisted men's club nursing a Burgie and smoking a Camel. Across the table from him sat Dutch Wenzel. The other platoon sergeant had almost as much fruit salad on his chest as Dillon did. He was three or four years younger than Les, a little too young to have seen France, but he'd done plenty of bouncing around since. He took a pull at his bourbon and soda. A White Owl sent a thin plume of fragrant smoke up from the ashtray in front of him.

“It's a bastard,” Dillon said. “We could tear the Japs a new asshole if we could just get at 'em.”

Benny Goodman lilted out of the radio. Wenzel paused to savor the clarinet solo and to blow a smoke ring. “Army didn't,” he observed.

“Yeah, well, that's the Army for you.” Like any Marine worth his salt, Les Dillon looked down his nose at the larger service.

“Little yellow bastards aren't bad.” Wenzel liked playing devil's advocate.

“Fuck 'em. You were in China, too, right?” Dillon didn't need to wait for the other man to nod. The Yangtze service ribbon was blue in the center, with
red, yellow, and blue stripes on either side. “Okay, you saw the Japs in action, didn't you? They're brave, yeah, okay, but no way in hell they can stand up to us. Besides, their tanks are a bunch of junk.”

“Six months ago, people said the same thing about their planes,” Wenzel remarked.

“That's different,” Dillon said. “With their tanks, it's really true.”

“They're liable to have better ones by the time we can get over there,” Wenzel said.

Dillon grimaced. That was a cheery thought. He sipped at his beer. After a moment, he brightened. “Well, so will we. The Army just had Stuarts in Hawaii, and they didn't have very many of 'em. A Lee'll make a Stuart say uncle any day, and a Sherman . . . !” With reasonable armor and a 75mm gun in a proper turret, a Sherman was a very impressive piece of machinery.

Dutch Wenzel nodded. “Okay. I'll give you that one,” he said. “But the Japs won't be sound asleep when we hit the beach, the way the Army was when they landed.”

Now he admitted the Army hadn't done everything it might have to defend Oahu. The Navy hadn't, either. If Dillon could have got his hands on General Short and Admiral Kimmel, he would have given them worse what-for than the Japs were, and scuttlebutt said the Japs were hard as hell on prisoners. For that matter, the Marines at Ewa and Kaneohe hadn't done enough to stop the enemy, either.
You get caught with your pants down, that's what happens to you
, Dillon thought unhappily.

“I just wish we could get at them,” he said, and finished the Burgermeister. Sucking foam off his upper lip, he went on, “Sooner or later, we will. And when we do, I want to be the first guy off the boat.”

“First guy to get his ass shot off, you mean,” Wenzel said. Dillon lazily flipped the other noncom the bird. He knew Wenzel was as eager to get within rifle range of the Japs as he was.

Two days later, his company commander summoned him to his office. Captain Braxton Bradford was as Southern as his name; he had a Georgia drawl thick enough to slice. “How would you like to make gunnery sergeant, Dillon?” he asked, stretching Les' surname out into three syllables.

“What do I have to do, sir?” Dillon asked eagerly. He couldn't think of anything he wanted more than a second stripe on the rocker under the sergeant's three.

“Hoped that might get your attention.” Captain Bradford pointed north. “We're gonna need us a hell of a lot of new Marines. All of those boots are gonna need somebody to show 'em how to
be
Marines. That there's one of the things a gunny is for.”

“Oh.” Les thought for a moment, but only for a moment. “Thank you very much, sir, but I'll pass.”

Bradford's eyebrows came down and together. His nostrils pinched. His lips narrowed. He would have scared a boot out of ten years' growth. Dillon already had all his growth. After machine-gun fire, nothing a captain did or said could be more than mildly annoying. Bradford kept on trying his level best to intimidate: “Suppose you tell me why, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Dillon said stolidly. “They're going to throw the old breed at the Japs in Hawaii. If I'm up there at that Camp Pendleton place, I won't get to go. If I stay where I'm at, I will.” He threw away the promotion without the least regret. He wanted some things more than that second stripe on the rocker after all.

It was Captain Bradford's turn to say, “Oh.” He did his best to hold on to his glower, but his best wasn't good enough. “Goddammit, I can't even get angry at an answer like that.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Dillon, who wasn't sorry one bit.

Bradford's sour smile showed a gold front tooth. “Now tell me one I haven't heard. You think of anybody who'd take a promotion to go on up to this new place, or maybe to Parris Island or Quantico?”

“Nobody I know, sir,” Dillon answered. “You can always ask, though.”

“Officers all over Camp Elliott are asking—other places, too, for all I know,” Bradford said. “Lots of good people turning 'em down. You aren't the only one. In a way, that's good. We want our first team on the field against the Japs. But we want first-raters showing the boots the ropes, too. If mediocre people show 'em what being a Marine's all about, they're liable to make mediocre Marines.”

“Yes, sir.” Dillon said no more. With officers, the less you said, the better off you were. He didn't disagree with Captain Bradford. He knew what was important to him, though—knew very plainly, if he'd turned down a promotion to keep it. And he had.

Bradford studied him. “Nothing I can do to make you change your mind, Sergeant?”

“No, sir.” Les almost added another,
Sorry, sir
. But that would have been laying it on too thick.

The company commander made a disgruntled noise down deep in his throat. “All right. Go on. Get the hell out of here.”

Dillon thought about asking Bradford if
he
felt like going to Camp Pendleton. He didn't do that, either, though. He just saluted with machinelike precision, did an about-face, and left the captain's office.

As usual, the sun was shining. As usual, it wasn't all that warm even so. It would get up into the low seventies today, and that was it. San Diego had a milder climate than Los Angeles did, even if it was more than a hundred miles down the coast from the bigger city. Mission Bay and the ocean currents and the prevailing winds all had something to do with it. Les didn't know the wherefores, or worry about them. He just knew it stayed mild almost the whole year around.

He was stripping a BAR that afternoon when Dutch Wenzel came up to him. “So,” Wenzel said, “you a gunny?”

“Fuck, no,” Les answered. “You?”

“Nah.” Wenzel shook his head. “Somebody else is gonna have to whip them boots into shape.”

“That's what I told Bradford, too.” Les set down the oily rag he was using and wiped his hands on a cleaner one. “We're the ones who're gonna have to take those islands away from the Nips. This is what I signed up for, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna miss it.”

“I'm with you.” Wenzel turned and looked southwest. “Matter of fact, I figure I will be with you. You hit the beach, I'll either be in the same landing craft or the next one over.”

“Gluttons for punishment, that's us,” Dillon said. The other platoon sergeant laughed, for all the world as if he'd been joking. Dillon went on, “Hell, you haven't even got shot up. You really want a Purple Heart that bad?”

“Look who's talking,” Wenzel retorted. “You got it once, and you're dumb enough to come back for more?”

“Damn straight I am,” Dillon told him. Wenzel nodded in perfect understanding. They were both Marines.

J
ANE
A
RMITAGE WAS
beginning to think Oahu would make it. There had been times when she wondered if everybody on the island would starve to death. She'd lost at least twenty pounds herself, and she hadn't carried any extra weight to begin with. Everybody she knew had lost at least that much—except Major Hirabayashi and the rest of the Jap soldiers in and around Wahiawa. They hadn't changed a bit. That didn't surprise her, but it did infuriate her.

She knew better than to let the occupiers see what she thought. Almost everybody in Wahiawa knew better than that. Not being noticed was the best thing you could hope for these days.

A lot of what had been pineapple fields before the invasion were rice paddies now. The Japs seemed convinced the islands could grow enough rice to feed themselves. They talked about two crops a year. Yosh Nakayama didn't sound too dubious. Jane put more faith in that. What the Big Five had to say . . . What the Big Five had to say, for the first time since before Hawaii belonged to the United States, didn't matter one damn bit. And if the families who'd run the islands for so long had any brains, they didn't want the Japs noticing them, either.

As for Jane, she had a new crop of turnips and a new crop of potatoes coming in. Eating what she'd raised with her own hands, with her own sweat, gave her pride of a sort she'd never known before. If only there'd been more.

She'd also discovered that zebra doves were as tasty as they looked. Mynahs,
on the other hand, were nothing to write home about. She wouldn't have eaten them by choice. Roast mynah beat the hell out of going hungry, though. Nobody was fussy any more.

One of the kids who'd been in her class before the war started came by on a scooter. The school had stayed closed since the Japanese occupied Wahiawa, and especially since Mr. Murphy's untimely demise. Mitsuru Kojima was skinnier than he had been, too, but it didn't seem to matter so much on a little kid—and he hadn't been fat to begin with.

“Hello, Mitch,” Jane said. That was what she'd always called him. Most of the Japanese kids in her class had had American names that they used alongside the ones their folks had given them.

He stared at her out of black button eyes. When he said, “My name's
Mitsuru
,” he sounded more arrogant than an eight-year-old kid had any business doing. He added something in Japanese. Jane didn't know exactly what it meant, but she'd heard soldiers say it. One thing she had no doubt of: it wasn't a compliment.

Away Mitch—
Mitsuru
—Kojima went. He was just a little kid, but he'd put her in her place. He'd put everything that had been going on in Hawaii before December 7 in its place. He didn't even know it. All he knew was that he wanted to use his Japanese name, not his American one, and that he was entitled to say rude things to a white woman, even if she had been his teacher.

That was plenty, wasn't it?

Jane used the hoe to get rid of a few weeds. No matter how many she murdered, new ones kept popping up. She wasn't much of a farmer, and never would be, but she'd already discovered how hard it was to keep crops alive and stay ahead of pests.

She looked down at her blue jeans. The fabric over the knees was getting very, very thin. It would split pretty soon. None of her other pairs was in any better shape. Some already had patches on the knees or at the seat. Had these been normal times, she would have needed to buy more. She
did
need to buy more, but there were none to buy. Make do or do without was the rule these days.

She suspected she would end up using one pair for fabric to keep the others going as long as she could. Then another pair would have to be cannibalized, then another, until finally she'd have one pair left, made of bits and pieces from all the rest.

And what would happen when
that
pair bit the dust? Jane used a savage
slash to decapitate another weed. She might almost have been Major Hirabayashi, cutting off Mr. Murphy's. . . .
Stop that
, she told herself fiercely.
Just stop it, right this minute
. But the thought wouldn't go away. Neither would the memory of the meaty thunk the sword had made biting into—biting through—the principal's neck.

Somehow, that memory joined with the way Mitch Kojima didn't want to be Mitch any more to drive home to her that the Japanese were liable to hold Hawaii for a long time. What
would
people do as things from the States wore out and broke down? Could Japan supply replacements? On the evidence so far, Japan didn't give a damn about supplying anything beyond a minimum amount of food—and the Japs grudged even that.

Sudden tears stung Jane's eyes. She stood there in the middle of her plot, clutching the hoe handle till her knuckles whitened. She didn't usually let things get to her. She went on from day to day, doing what she had to do to get by in this horribly changed world. Doing that kept her too busy and too tired to worry about anything more.

But she didn't want to be out here tending turnips and digging weeds and killing bugs when she was thirty-five, or forty-five, or sixty-five, and she was damned if she could see what to do about it. Damned was the word, all right. If this wasn't hell, it would do till she made the acquaintance of the genuine article.

Two Japanese soldiers strode by. Jane bowed and lowered her eyes to the ground. She didn't want them noticing she was upset. She didn't want them noticing her at all. Every once in a while, they would drag somebody into the bushes and do whatever they wanted with her—to her. Several women in Wahiawa went around with dead eyes and started to shiver whenever they saw a Jap.

If they came for her . . . If they came for her, she had to run. She would have liked nothing better than splitting their skulls with the hoe. But bayonets sparkled on their rifles. If she hurt them, they wouldn't just rape her and they wouldn't just shoot her dead. They'd kill her slowly, and they'd laugh while they did it. They might kill some other people, too, so nobody got any ideas above her station.

They kept walking. She breathed again. She always felt as if she couldn't get enough air into her lungs when the Japs were close by. A man worked in the next plot. He also bowed to the soldiers, but he didn't seem on the edge
of panic. As long as he followed the rules they set, he was—probably—safe. No female between ten and sixty could say even that much.

The woman beyond him tensed, the same as Jane had. Having felt the tension in her own bones, Jane recognized it when she saw it. Again, the soldiers went right on past the woman as if she didn't exist. As soon as she saw their backs, life returned to the way she stood.

Jane looked to the northeast. She wished a hundred, a thousand, American bombers were roaring toward her. At supper a few days before, somebody had whispered that the British had attacked a German town with a thousand bombers. Maybe somebody had access to a secret radio. Maybe the rumor was just wishful thinking.

Either way, the sky over Wahiawa stayed clear: bare of clouds, bare of bombers, bare of hope. Jane muttered something she'd learned from Fletch, something she never would have said even when she was all alone while she was married to him. Well, circumstances altered cases, by God. These days, she despised him much more for being part of the Army that hadn't defended Oahu than she ever had for not being much of a husband.

A fly lit on her arm. She smashed it, wiped her hand on her dungarees, and went back to weeding.

L
IEUTENANT
S
ABURO
S
HINDO
was not a happy man. Yes, bulldozers had repaired the airstrip at Haleiwa with commendable speed. Yes, more antiaircraft guns poked their camouflaged snouts into the sky around it now. As far as Shindo was concerned, the B-25s never should have got to Oahu in the first place.

He drove down to Honolulu to make his feelings known. Parts of the Kamehameha Highway were in excellent shape, set to rights not by bulldozers but by gangs of POWs. Shindo thoroughly approved of that. Since they'd surrendered, how were they better than any other draft animals? Why shouldn't Japan use them—or use them up—as necessary?

Commander Genda and Commander Fuchida waited for him in Genda's office. He saluted both of them, then came straight to the point, as was his way: “We should have done a much better job against the Americans. The warning we got was inaccurate, and lulled us into a false sense of security. We would have been better off with no warning at all.”

Had his superiors tried to deny that, he would have been very angry. He would have tried not to show it; a man without self-control would never progress in the Japanese Navy—or anywhere in Japan, come to that. But the feeling would have been there. He probably would have taken it out on his subordinates, as mothers-in-law got their own back for what they'd had to put up with when they were daughters-in-law.

But Mitsuo Fuchida only gave him a wry smile and said, “
Hai. Honto.
”

“I think we can expect more trouble from the Americans, too, now that we've poked them in the snout as they poked us,” Minoru Genda added.

“I believe that. Bombing the mainland was well done.” Shindo didn't have to disguise his envy as he eyed Fuchida. The commander had all the luck! Not only first over Pearl Harbor but first over San Francisco! Either one of those could make a man's career. Both? To have both seemed downright unfair.

Fuchida was modest, too. “It was Genda's idea,” he said.

That didn't matter so much to Shindo. A lot of the Pearl Harbor plan had also been Genda's. So what? Fuchida was the one who'd made it real.

With an effort, Shindo brought his thoughts back to the purpose for which he'd come down to Honolulu. “We need more air cover here,” he said. “I don't just mean land-based. I mean carriers.
Akagi
by herself isn't enough. That's all the more true if you really do expect the Americans to pay us another call. I don't want them to surprise us again. I want to be the one who goes hunting and finds them first.”

“That may not be as easy as you hope, Lieutenant,” Genda said. “They have something they call
radar
. We have the name from prisoners we have taken.” He went on to explain what the word meant.

The more Shindo listened, the less happy he got. “That's terrible!” he exclaimed. “They can see us coming and guide their planes straight to us?”

“It seems so, when everything goes right,” Genda answered.

“They detected us coming in when we attacked Pearl Harbor,” Fuchida added.

“
Zakennayo!
” Shindo said. “They
are
idiots, then. Why didn't they scramble their planes? They could have hurt us badly.”

“For one thing, they were expecting a flight of B-17s along almost the same course. The bombers came in just a little later, and we shot them up on the ground,” Genda answered. He was the man with the facts at his fingertips. He went on, “And, for another, they didn't
really
believe we would attack them.”

“In future operations, neither of these factors will hold true.” Commander Fuchida's voice was dry.

“I should say not.” No matter how phlegmatic Shindo was, he had to fight to keep dismay from his voice. He gathered himself and did his best to think about tactical implications. After a moment, he nodded. “This only makes it more urgent that we reinforce the
Akagi
. If they have a technical edge, we'll need the advantage in numbers all the more.”

“Our engineers in Japan were already working on radar,” Genda said. “We've flown some of the prisoners to Tokyo so they can give our people more information as that becomes necessary. The principles seem clear. We should be able to deploy sets of our own before long—in fact, we have some trial installations in place now.”

“Will we have working models before the Americans try hitting us again?” Shindo asked. Genda and Fuchida looked at each other. Their elaborately casual shrugs said it was unlikely. Shindo hadn't expected anything else. He went on, “I'm just a flying officer. Nobody pays any particular attention to me, here or back in Tokyo. But the two of you, you have the ears of important people.” Nobody was more important than Admiral Yamamoto, for instance. “You can persuade them we really
need
more carriers here.”

The two commanders looked at each other again. They gave Shindo another matched set of slightly overacted shrugs. Once more, he had to fight not to show the anger he felt. Minoru Genda said, “Please believe me, Shindo-
san
—you aren't the only one who has seen this problem coming. The carriers had other things to do. But now that Admiral Nagumo's force has returned to home waters from its sortie into the Indian Ocean . . .”

“
Ah, so desu!
” Shindo breathed. The Japanese strike force had sunk a British carrier and smashed up ports and shipping along the east coast of India and in Ceylon. That would help Japan tighten its grip on Burma and perhaps clear the way for an invasion of India. Shindo gave back a shrug of his own. The western fringe of the Japanese Empire wasn't his special worry. The eastern edge was. “How many carriers will we get?” he asked eagerly.

“Two,” Genda answered.