Harry Turtledove - Hawai 2 - End Of The Beginning

Also by Harry Turtledove

“THE DAIMON” IN WORLDS THAT WEREN’T

RULED BRITANNIA

IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES

DAYS OF INFAMY

I

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA WALKED PAST THE FRONT ENTRANCE TO IOLANI

PALACE. Fairy terns, almost whiter than white, floated through the blue, blue Hawaiian sky. The flag of

the newly restored Kingdom of Hawaii fluttered on five flagpoles above the late-Victorian palace. Seeing

that flag made Genda smile. The Hawaiians had gone out of their way to accommodate both Britain and

the United States, with the Union Jack in the canton and red, white, and blue horizontal stripes filling the

rest of the field.

Much good it did them, the Japanese officer thought. White men economically dominated the Kingdom

of Hawaii for years before America overthrew it and brought the islands under U.S. control.

Well, things were different now. The Stars and Stripes no longer flew over Iolani Palace. The building no

longer housed the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, as it had for decades. King Stanley Owana

Laanui—King by the grace of God and, much more to the point, by that of the Emperor of

Japan—reigned here now, along with his redheaded Queen Cynthia. And, where King Stanley reigned,

Major General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who’d commanded the Japanese Army forces that conquered

Hawaii, ruled.

Japanese soldiers stood guard at the top of the stairs leading up into the palace. They weren’t big

men—few of them had more than a couple of inches on Genda’s five-three—but, with their businesslike

Arisaka rifles, they didn’t need to be. At the base of the stairs stood a squad of the revived Royal

Hawaiian Guard. Putting the tall men at the bottom and the small men at the top 2 minimized the size

difference between them. King Stanley’s guardsmen wore pith helmets and blue coats with white belts:

purely ceremonial uniforms for purely ceremonial soldiers. They carried bayoneted Springfields—the

Japanese had captured them by the thousand from the U.S. Army—but Genda had heard the rifles’

magazines held no cartridges.

The Royal Hawaiian Guards came to an even stiffer brace as Genda strode by them. He nodded back,

politely acknowledging the compliment. He turned a corner and then another one, heading for the back of

the palace. More guards, both Hawaiian and Japanese, stood there. Another stairway led up into the

building. And a shorter, narrower set of steps led down into Iolani Palace. Genda chose that stairway.

In the nineteenth century, the basement had been the servants’ quarters. It had also housed the

storerooms where the kahili—the feather-topped royal staffs—and the palace silver service, the wine,

and other necessities were kept. Because at the last minute the architect had added a walled dry moat

around the palace, the basement rooms had full-sized windows and weren’t nearly so dark and gloomy

as they would have been otherwise.

In front of one of the rooms along the wide central corridor stood two Japanese sailors in landing rig:

their usual blues modified by black-painted steel helmets; infantrymen’s belts, ammunition pouches, and

canteens; and white canvas gaiters. Like the sentries outside, they carried Arisakas.

“Yes, sir? You wish . . . ?” one of them asked when Genda stopped and faced them.

He gave his name, adding, “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Admiral Yamamoto.” He didn’t

need to look at his watch to know he was ten minutes early. Being late to a meeting with the

commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet was inconceivable.

Both men saluted. “Hai!” they said in unison. The sailor who’d spoken before opened the door for him.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto worked at a plain pine desk, nothing like the ornate wooden dreadnought in

King David Kalakaua’s Library on the second floor of the palace, the one General Yamashita used.

Genda thought that most unfair; Yamamoto outranked Yamashita, and should have taken over the finer

work area. But he hadn’t done it. He was in Hawaii only temporarily, and hadn’t wanted to displace the

permanent garrison commander.

Yamamoto got to his feet as Genda walked in. They exchanged bows. Yamamoto was only slightly taller

than Genda, but had a wrestler’s stocky, wide-shouldered body. “Sit down, sit down,” he said now.

“How are you feeling? Better, I hope? You look stronger than you did, and you have more color, too.”

“I’m much improved, sir. Thank you,” Genda said as he did sit. He’d had pneumonia when the Japanese

Navy squared off against the U.S. forces trying to retake Hawaii. Despite the illness, he’d come up from

Akagi’s sick bay to the bridge to do what he could to help the Japanese carriers against their American

opposite numbers. He didn’t take credit for the victory, but he’d taken part in it. More than a month after

the fight, he was starting to feel like his old self, though he hadn’t got there yet.

“Glad to hear it. I was worried about you,” Yamamoto said with gruff affection. Genda inclined his head.

Most of a generation younger than the admiral, he was Yamamoto’s protégé. He’d planned the biggest

part of the Pearl Harbor operation and the invasion of Hawaii. He’d planned them—and Yamamoto had

rammed the plans through, turning them into reality. And now . . . they were meeting in the basement of

Iolani Palace.

“The Americans have been very quiet since we stopped them,” Genda remarked.

“Hai.” Yamamoto nodded. “I think they will stay quiet a while longer, too. I am going to take this

opportunity to go back to Japan. Now that Hawaii is settled for the time being, we have to talk with the

Army about what to do next. Australia . . . India . . . And of course they’ll want to take another bite out

of China, and they’ll expect our help with that.”

“So they will,” Genda agreed. The Americans had offered to keep selling oil and scrap metal to

Japan—if she got out of China. War, even a risky war like the one against the USA, had seemed

preferable to the humiliation of bowing to another country’s will. Did the Yankees tell Britain to leave

India and her African colonies? Not likely! Did the Yankees hesitate to send in Marines when one of

their little neighbors got out of line? That was even less likely. But they thought they could order Japan

around. Bitterly, Genda said, “We don’t have round eyes. We don’t have white skin.”

“True enough.” Yamamoto nodded again, following Genda’s train of thought. “But we’ve shown the

world that that doesn’t matter.” He set both hands on the cheap pine desk. As a young officer, he’d lost

the first two fingers of his left hand at the Battle of Tsushima, in the Russo-Japanese War. He’d lost two

fingers—but the Russians lost most of the fleet that sailed halfway around the world to meet the

Japanese. And they lost the war.

Genda had had his first birthday in 1905. Like any of his countrymen, though, he knew what the

Russo-Japanese War meant. It was the first modern war in which people of color beat whites. And now

the Japanese were beating the Americans and the British and the Australians, too.

Yamamoto said, “I hope I don’t have to come back too soon. American radio broadcasts make it very

plain the United States is not abandoning Hawaii. I hoped the USA would—I hoped our victories would

make them see they could not win, and so make peace. But that hasn’t happened. Karma, neh? They

have more people and more resources and more factories—many more—than we do. My guess is that

they will try to bring all of them into play. That will take some time.”

“We will be building, too,” Genda said stoutly.

“Hai,” Yamamoto said once more. But that was only acknowledgment, not agreement, for he went on,

“They can build faster than we can. I hope what we have done here in the Eastern Pacific has bought us

the time to take and use the resources we need to stay a great power in the modern world. I hope so . . .

but time will tell.”

“We’ve done everything we set out to do here,” Genda said.

“So we have. Now—is it enough?” Yamamoto seemed determined to be gloomy. He looked toward the

west. “Back in Tokyo, they think everything is wonderful. They think the United States is at death’s door.

They do not understand the enemy. They may have read Sun Tzu, but they do not think what he says

applies to them. Oh, no! They are far more clever than he.”

Such sarcasm flayed. What Clausewitz was in the West, Sun Tzu was in the East—and had been for

more than two thousand years. A military man disregarded the ancient Chinese general’s thoughts on

strategy and tactics only at his peril. Genda said, “Surely things are not so bad as that.”

“No—they’re very likely worse,” Yamamoto said. “Be thankful you’re well away from Tokyo. It’s a

poisonous place these days. Some of the poison comes from success, which makes it sweeter, but it’s no

less deadly on account of that. Deadlier, probably, in the long run, because success is the kind of poison

that makes you blind.”

“If the Germans knock the Russians out of the war—” Genda began.

“Yes, that’s what the Army is waiting for. If the northern beast dies, they’ll jump on the carcass and tear

off slabs of Siberia. If.”

“The Wehrmacht has a foothold in the Caucasus. They’re getting close to Stalingrad. Stalin’s ‘not one

step back’ speech after Rostov fell sounded desperate.”

Yamamoto only shrugged those broad shoulders. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all. The Germans were

at the gates of Moscow last winter, and they got thrown back. They’re after oil now. We have ours. If

they can get theirs . . . I hope they haven’t overreached, that’s all.”

“They keep the Americans and the British busy, too,” Genda said, “which works to our advantage.”

That made Yamamoto smile. He stood up and bowed to Genda, who hastily returned the gesture. “I

might have known you would think clearly. With men like you here, Hawaii will be in good hands.” He

bowed again, a little more deeply: dismissal.

Genda left his office as if walking on a cloud. The man he admired more than anyone else in the

world—the man all Japan admired more than anyone else in the world—approved of him! Most of Japan

knew—or rather, knew of—Admiral Yamamoto from gushing newspaper and magazine articles. Genda

knew the man himself, and found him all the more admirable for the acquaintance.

Trying to suppress a silly grin, Genda went up the stairs from the basement. He got to the top at the same

time as Cynthia Laanui, the newly crowned Queen of Hawaii, came down the back stairs from the

ground floor of Iolani Palace. “Your Majesty,” Genda said in English, carefully keeping the irony from his

voice.

“Hello, Commander Genda. How are you today?” The Queen knew him by sight; he was one of the four

officers—two from the Japanese Navy, two from the Army—who’d chosen her husband from among

the possible candidates for the restored Hawaiian throne. Stanley Owana Laanui—King Stanley

now—was the first candidate who’d made it plain he would cooperate with Japan.

Genda didn’t think Queen Cynthia knew how simple the selection criteria were. He didn’t intend to

enlighten her, either. “Better now, thank you,” he said. He read English well but, unlike Yamamoto,

spoke less fluently.

Cynthia Laanui smiled at him. She was, without a doubt, the first red-haired Queen the Kingdom of

Hawaii had ever had. The smile packed a punch. She was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty,

with green eyes, freckles, and, from the neck down, an abundant profusion of everything a woman ought

to have.

“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for my husband,” she said. King Stanley was at least

twenty years older than she was; Genda didn’t think she was his first wife. Why he’d married her was

obvious. Why she’d married him wasn’t, not to Genda. But she seemed to care about him.

“Glad to help him,” Genda said. “He is good man.” He wouldn’t have bet more than fifty sen—say, a

dime in U.S. money—on that but it was polite, and it gave him the excuse to keep talking with this

striking woman. She was only a centimeter or two taller than he was, too.

She wore a distinctly unqueenly sundress of thin cotton. When she nodded, everything else moved in

sympathy, and the dress showed it off. Genda hoped he didn’t notice too obviously. She said, “He’s a

very good man. Hawaii needs him, especially now.”

Did she believe that, or was she being politic? Genda would have guessed she believed it. If she was so

naive, she was liable to get badly hurt. “Good man, yes. Do many good things,” Genda said. Agreement

was always safe. And, as long as King Stanley did exactly what Japan told him to do, the occupiers

wouldn’t object if by some chance he turned out to be good, too.

Genda’s agreement won him a smile brighter than the Hawaiian sunshine from Queen Cynthia. He felt as

if a bomb had gone off in front of him and he’d got flash-burned. “I’m so glad you think so,” she

breathed. He’d never found the simple act of breathing so admirable before.

They chatted a little longer. Then, after another dazzling smile, she went back into the palace. Genda

knew he needed to return to his duties. He waited till she’d gone all the way up the stairs, though.

THERE WAS A ZERO, swelling in Joe Crosetti’s windshield. Joe peered through the Grumman

Wildcat’s gunsight. Can’t lead the son of a bitch too much, but if I don’t lead him enough I’ll miss,

too. The thought was there and then it was gone. If you got close enough, you damn well wouldn’t miss.

He waited till the hated enemy filled the bulletproof glass, then jammed his thumb down on the firing

button atop the stick.

His wing machine gun roared. Tracers tore into the Jap. The enemy plane went up like a torch and

plunged toward the Pacific. The pilot didn’t have a prayer of getting out. Maybe he was dead from the

burst of fire, anyway.

“Nailed the bastard!” Joe yelled exultantly. He swung the fighter back toward the carrier. Navigating

over the trackless ocean wasn’t easy, but he managed. There was the welcoming flight deck, dead

ahead. He brought the Wildcat down toward the carrier’s stern. This was the tricky part. . . .

Down! The plane’s tailhook caught an arrester wire, and the machine jerked to a stop. He was down,

and he was safe!

A voice spoke in his earphones: “Well, Mr. Crosetti, that wasn’t too bad.”

Reality returned with a bump harder than the one with which he’d landed. His Wildcat turned into a

pumpkin, like Cinderella’s carriage: actually, into a humble Texan advanced trainer. The flight deck

became a yellow rectangle outlined on concrete. The arrester wires stretched across it were the McCoy,

though. This was only the second time he’d landed using them.

His flying instructor, a lieutenant, junior grade, named Wiley Foster, went on, “I liked your attack run on

the target. You got a four-oh on that one.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joe said.

“Don’t thank me yet—I wasn’t finished,” Foster answered. “Your landing was okay, but nothing to write

home about. You’re not supposed to set down as hard as you would on a real flight deck, not yet. You

need to convince me you can make smooth landings before you do rough ones.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Joe wanted to claim he’d come down that way on purpose, but he hadn’t—and the

flying instructor wouldn’t have cared it he had.

“As for your navigation . . .” Lieutenant Foster paused significantly.

“Sorry, sir,” Joe repeated, sounding as miserable as he felt. He’d struggled with navigation right from the

start. A lot of the cadets at Pensacola Naval Air Station were college grads, or had at least some college.

Joe had graduated from high school, but he was working in a San Francisco garage when the Japs

bombed Pearl Harbor. He understood engines from the ground up, but his geometry and trig were barely

enough to let him keep his head above water when it came to figuring out how to get from A to B and

back again. And if he ever had to ditch in the vast, unforgiving Pacific, odds were he wouldn’t keep his

head above water long.

“It could have been worse,” Foster allowed. “I’ve seen cadets try to head for Miami or New Orleans or

Atlanta. But it could have been a hell of a lot better, too. If you want carrier duty, you’d better keep

hitting the books hard.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” Joe said fervently. Carrier duty—the chance to hit back at Japan as soon as he

could—was the reason he’d signed up as a Navy flying cadet in the first place.

Lieutenant Foster slid back the canopy. He and Joe climbed out of the Texan. The flying instructor was a

lanky six-footer. He towered over Joe, who barely made five-seven. That might have mattered if they

were bashing at each other with swords. Who cared how big a pilot was? Joe had heard Southerners

say, It’s not the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog. What the Japanese

had done since December 7 proved the same thing, but Joe wasn’t inclined to give a bunch of goddamn

Japs credit for anything.

He eyed the Texan with a mixture of exasperation and affection. It was a big step up from the sedate

Stearman biplane on which he’d done his primary flight training. No sooner had that thought crossed his

mind than a Yellow Peril buzzed by overhead. The Navy painted all its Stearmans a luminous yellow to

warn other pilots that trainees were in the air.

Yes, the Texan was a long step up from a Yellow Peril. It was a monoplane with a real metal skin, not

the doped canvas covering a Stearman. It had a machine gun in the left wing root—the one Joe had used

to blast away at the target another plane towed. It had bomb racks, too. It could do a pretty good job of

impersonating a warplane.

But it was only an impersonation. The Texan’s engine put out half the horsepower of a Wildcat’s. Its top

speed was only about two-thirds of the Navy fighter’s. That that all made it much more forgiving than the

genuine article was only a detail to Joe.

Groundcrew men came out to detach the plane’s tailhook from the wire and get it out of the way so

another cadet could land on the yellow-outlined “carrier deck.” Lieutenant Foster said, “How soon do

you think you’ll be ready to solo in a Texan?”

Joe blinked. He hadn’t expected that question from Foster, especially not after the instructor reamed out

his navigation. But it had only one possible answer: “Sir, I’m ready to take a swing at it right this minute if

you want me to.”

Foster had blond hair, a lock of which kept falling down on his forehead, and an aw-shucks smile that

probably put the girls in mind of Gary Cooper. It put skinny, swarthy Joe Crosetti in mind of the Nob Hill

nobs who looked down their straight noses at dagos like him. But the officer didn’t give him a hard time

because of his last name or his looks. Foster said, “I approve of your spirit, Mr. Crosetti. The Navy

needs more men who don’t hesitate. But if the flesh doesn’t quite measure up to it, you’re better off

waiting, and the country would be better off if you did, too.” Joe must have looked stubborn, or maybe

angry, because the flying instructor sighed and went on, “How many memorial services have you

attended since you got here?”

“Uh, a few, sir,” Joe admitted. He’d been to more than a few, and he was sure Wiley Foster knew it. As

soon as cadets started getting up into the air, they started finding ways to kill themselves. One midair

collision between Yellow Perils had wiped out two cadets and two instructors. Cadets had crashed on

the runway. They’d gone into the swamps around Pensacola Naval Air Station. A kid took a Stearman

out over the Gulf of Mexico and never came back. No one ever found a trace of him—he was missing

and presumed dead. All the same, Joe said, “That wouldn’t happen to me.” He had faith in his own

indestructibility.

Lieutenant Foster clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s what they all say. Sometimes it’s the last

thing they say.” He eyed Joe. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I can swing it,” Joe said stubbornly.

Foster looked down at the card on which he’d recorded Joe’s marks for the session. “Maybe you can,

by God. Next time you go up, you’ll go up by yourself.”

“Thank you, sir!” Joe wanted to get all excited. He did get all excited, but he didn’t let most of it show.

He was damned if he’d act Italian in front of somebody who looked the way Wiley Foster did.

He did head back to the barracks at the next thing to a dead run. When he first got to Pensacola, he and

his roomie had shared a tent. Some cadets still slept under canvas—no enormous handicap in the steamy

Pensacola summertime. But he and Orson Sharp had graduated to better things.

By the time he got to the two-story brick barracks building, he was drenched in sweat. San Francisco

hadn’t come close to getting him ready for Florida heat and humidity. His father was a fisherman; he’d

gone out of Fisherman’s Wharf with his old man on weekends and during summers before he landed the

job at Scalzi’s garage. Till he got here, though, he’d never understood what a lobster went through when

you dropped it in boiling water.

Heat and humidity or not, he took the stairs two at a time. He ran down the hall and threw the door

open. Orson Sharp sat in a chair by his bunk, studying navigation. The cadet from Salt Lake City was big

and fair and even-tempered. He didn’t swear and he didn’t drink coffee, let alone beer. Sharp was the

first Mormon Joe had ever met. Joe sometimes thought he was too good to be true, though he never

would have said so.

“How did it go?” Sharp asked, looking up from his book.

Joe’s enormous grin probably said everything he needed to say, but he spelled it out just the same:

“Lieutenant Foster’s going to let me solo next time I go up! I can’t wait!”

His roomie’s pleasure seemed entirely unalloyed. “That’s terrific! I know you were hoping, but I don’t

think you expected it quite so soon.”

“Nope. He liked my firing run at the target. I think that’s what clinched it.” Slower than he should have,

Joe remembered Sharp had flown this morning, too. “How about you?”

“My instructor let me take it up by myself today.” Sharp shrugged in wry self-deprecation. “I lived.”

Joe fought down a stab of jealousy. His roommate had soloed in a Stearman a week before he had, too.

Sharp did everything well and didn’t fuss about anything. He was so unassuming, you almost had to act

the same way around him. Joe walked over and stuck out his hand. “Way to go! Congratulations!”

“Thanks, buddy.” Orson Sharp’s hand was almost half again as big as his. When the cadets played

football, Sharp was a lineman. Joe played end or defensive back. He was quick, but he wasn’t big.

“We’re getting there,” Sharp added.

“Yeah!” Joe said. “We’ve still got instrument flying to do, on the Link trainers on the ground and then up

in the air, and I suppose they’ll give us some flight time on F3Fs, too.” The Navy’s last biplane fighter

had stayed in front-line service till less than two months before Pearl Harbor. Joe tried to imagine F3Fs

mixing it up with Zeros. Perhaps mercifully, the picture didn’t want to form. Now the F3F was a last-step

trainer. Joe added two more words: “And then . . .”

“And then we see where they assign us,” Sharp said. “Did you put down VC on all three lines on your

preference questionnaire way back when?”

“Carrier duty? You bet your . . . You bet I did.” Around his roomie, Joe didn’t swear very much, either.

“You?”

“Oh, sure,” Sharp answered. “If they don’t give me that, I don’t care what I get. Everything else is a

booby prize.”

“I’m with you.” Joe didn’t give a damn about patrol planes or flying boats (no, that wasn’t true—he

hated Jap flying boats, because one had dropped a bomb on the house where his uncle and aunts and

cousins lived, but he didn’t give a damn about piloting an American flying boat) or anything but

carrier-based air, preferably fighters.

“I hope we do end up together,” Orson Sharp said seriously. “We’ve made a pretty good team so far.”

“Uh-huh.” Joe nodded. “I better get some more of that navigation under my belt, too, or else I’m not

going anywhere.” He pulled his own book out of the metal footlocker by his bed and sat down in a chair.

He knew his roomie would give him a hand where he had trouble. He’d helped Sharp through some of

the mysteries of engine maintenance. They did make a pretty good team. Look out, Hirohito, Joe

thought, and dove into the book.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO RARELY GOT EXCITED about anything. Some people said the

Navy pilot was a cold fish. He didn’t see it like that. To his way of thinking, most people got excited over

nothing.

He stood on the Akagi’s flight deck and looked around Pearl Harbor. The view here wasn’t what it had

been before Japan and the United States went to war. Then the American ships in the harbor were tied

up alongside piers or rested easily at anchor. Now they were nothing but twisted, blackened, rusting

metal. Some of them still leaked oil into the water. Shindo could see several of those rainbow patches.

The mineral stink of the fuel oil fouled the tropical breeze.

The third wave of Japanese planes over Oahu had sunk two American destroyers in the channel leading

out from Pearl Harbor to the Pacific, trapping the rest of the U.S. Pacific Fleet inside the harbor and

letting the Japanese pound it to pieces at their leisure. Shindo nodded to himself. The Americans would

have tried to sortie against the Japanese strike force. They probably wouldn’t have had much luck, not

without carrier support, but just as well they hadn’t got the chance.

Japanese naval engineers had got the destroyers out of the channel only a few weeks before the failed

American invasion. Shindo was glad they had. Now Akagi had somewhere local to make repairs without

worrying about American submarines: the antitorpedo net was back in place at the mouth of the channel.

Shindo laughed unpleasantly. The Yankees hadn’t bothered with torpedo netting for individual ships last

December. They hadn’t figured anyone could rig torpedoes to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.

Japan taught them otherwise. The devastation here proved that.

Devastation held sway on land, too. Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been palm trees and

ferns where it wasn’t U.S. Navy installations. Now it was rubble with greenery poking through; hardly

anything held greenery in check for long here. The Americans had fought house to house in Pearl City,

north of the harbor. The town where Navy personnel and the civilians who worked for them lived was as

battered as the island.

And the land to the east was worse. The Americans had stored their fuel there, and Japanese bombs sent

the oil and gas up in smoke. Shindo vividly remembered the smoke: the funeral pyre of U.S. ambitions in

the Pacific. The great black greasy plume had stayed in place for weeks, till the fires finally burned

themselves out. Nothing grew there. Shindo wondered whether anything ever would. Ford Island and

Pearl City had seen war. The tank farms had seen hell.

Near those fuel tanks had stood the U.S. Navy repair facilities. The Yankees wrecked those themselves

when they realized they weren’t going to be able to hold Oahu. Japanese engineers were full of

professional admiration for the job their American counterparts did. It made operating Pearl Harbor as a

base for the Japanese Navy much harder—much harder, but not impossible.

As if to underscore that, Akagi’s flight deck vibrated under Shindo’s feet. Metallic clatters and bangs

came from below. A dive bomber had got one home on the carrier during the fight north of the Hawaiian

Islands. The bomb penetrated the flight deck near the bow and exploded in the hangar. Luckily, just

about all the ship’s planes were in the air, defending Akagi or attacking the enemy’s carriers. Otherwise,

things would have been even worse.

Damage-control parties had got steel plates over the hole in the flight deck so the carrier could launch

aircraft. That was the essential, the indispensable, repair. Everything else had waited. The crew was

attending to the rest now, as best they could here in Hawaiian waters.

Zuikaku, much more badly damaged than Akagi, had had to limp back to Japan for repairs. That left her

sister ship, Shokaku, the only undamaged Japanese carrier in the Eastern Pacific. Shindo muttered to

himself. Shokaku’s fliers and sailors had less experience than Akagi’s. In a crisis . . .

No less a personage than Admiral Yamamoto thought a crisis unlikely any time soon. The Americans had

hurt the Japanese carrier force. Japan had crushed the Americans. Two of the three U.S. carriers that

had sailed from the American mainland lay on the bottom of the Pacific now. The third, hurt worse than

either Akagi or Zuikaku, had barely staggered back to the West Coast. Whatever invasion fleet

followed behind the carriers and their escorts had also run for home.

We smashed them, Shindo thought complacently. If they come back here again, we’ll smash them

again, that’s all.

A tall, horse-faced officer came up onto the flight deck from below. Seeing Shindo, he waved and

walked toward him. Shindo waved back, then saluted as the other man drew closer. “How are you

feeling, Fuchida-san?” he asked.

“Better day by day, thanks,” Commander Mitsuo Fuchida answered. He’d come down with appendicitis

during the fight with the Americans. He’d completed his attack run, brought his bomber back to Akagi,

gone straight to sick bay, and parted with the inflamed organ.

“Glad to hear it,” Shindo said. He’d led Akagi’s fighters during the last wave of the attack on Oahu and

in the recent battle against the Yankees north of Hawaii. Fuchida had been in overall command in the first

wave and also, illness or no, in the fight where he’d come down sick.

“It’s over. I got through it. They patched me up,” Fuchida said as more clanging and banging came from

the hangar deck. Fuchida smiled. “Akagi can say the same thing.”

“I wish it weren’t taking so long,” Shindo grumbled. A thoroughly businesslike man, he didn’t notice

Fuchida’s joke till it was too late to respond. Keeping his mind on business, he looked north and east. “I

wonder what the Americans are doing with that beat-up flattop of theirs.”

“She’s under repair up in Seattle,” Fuchida answered.

“Ah, so desu? I hadn’t heard that,” Shindo said.

“I just found out a few hours ago myself,” Fuchida said. “One of our H8Ks spotted her. They’re amazing

aircraft.” Enthusiasm filled his face. And the big flying boats were remarkable planes. Flying out of what

had been the Pearl City Pan Am Clipper base, they could reach the West Coast of the USA for

reconnaissance work or even to drop bombs. Fuchida had flown on one in a three-plane raid on San

Francisco. That, no doubt, accounted for a good part of his enthusiasm.

It also made Shindo jealous as could be. Fuchida was very able. Nobody would have quarreled with

that; Shindo certainly didn’t. Because he was so able, he sometimes got to do things he wasn’t strictly

entitled to do. Sitting in the copilot’s seat of an H8K was one of those, sure enough.

None of what Shindo thought showed on his face. That was true most of the time, but he made a special

point of it now. The two of them served together, but they weren’t close friends the way Fuchida and

Minoru Genda were. And Fuchida had two grades on Shindo. Letting a superior see what you thought of

him was never a good idea.

All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”

“Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at

one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”

“If they want another go at us, they can have it,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them the same kind of lesson

we did six weeks ago.” He paused, eyeing Fuchida. Now the other naval aviator’s face was the sort of

polite blank mask behind which anything could have hidden. Shindo decided to press a little to see what

was there: “We’re just about back up to strength here with aircraft and pilots.”

“In numbers, yes,” Fuchida said. “Do you think the replacements fly as well as the men we lost? Are the

bombardiers as accurate?”

So that was it. Shindo said, “They’ll get better as they get more flying time. I was thinking the same thing

not long ago about Shokaku’s crew.”

“I hope so.” Fuchida still sounded worried. “We don’t have the fuel to give them all the practice I wish

they could get.”

Saburo Shindo grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. Blowing up the tank farms had hurt Japan as well

as the USA—though the Americans surely would have fired them to deny them to the invaders. As things

were, the Japanese in Hawaii didn’t have the fuel to do all the patrolling by air or water Shindo would

have liked to see. They’d spent gasoline and fuel oil like a drunken sailor to get through the last battle.

Now they had to bring in more, a ship at a time. It wasn’t a good way to do business, not when the

merchant ships were short of fuel, too—and not when American subs would be hunting them.

“How soon will we be able to start using the oil we’ve taken in the Dutch East Indies?” Shindo asked.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Fuchida answered. “Maybe Commander Genda would

know, but I don’t.”

“If it’s not pretty soon, why did we go to war?” Shindo grumbled.

“Because if we hadn’t gone to war, we wouldn’t have any oil coming in at all,” Fuchida said. “And you

can’t very well worry about using or rationing what you don’t have.”

However much Shindo would have liked to argue with him, he didn’t see how he could.

JIM PETERSON STOOD IN THE CHOW line with his mess kit and spoon. The rice and vegetables

the Japs doled out to American POWs in labor gangs weren’t enough to keep body and soul together.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t hungry and didn’t want the meager supper. Oh, no! For a little while after he

ate it, he’d feel . . . not quite so bad.

He’d seen what happened when people got too weary to give a damn about food. The Japs didn’t let

them rest. They worked them just as hard as anybody else, and beat them if they couldn’t keep up. And

if the POWs died under such treatment—well, tough luck. Japan hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention.

As far as her soldiers were concerned, surrender was the ultimate disgrace. Having surrendered, the

American soldiers and sailors on Oahu were essentially fair game.

Plop! The man four in front of Peterson got his miserable supper. Plop! The man three in front. Plop!

Two in front. Plop! The guy right ahead of Peterson. And then, plop!—he got his. For ten or fifteen

seconds, the world was a glorious place. He had food! He hurried off to eat it, cradling the mess tin to his

chest like a miser with a sack of gold.

A lump of gluey rice and anonymous greens about the size of a softball—that was what he was getting all

excited about. He knew it. It shamed him. It made him disgusted at himself. But he couldn’t help it. That

was how much his body craved even the scanty nourishment the Japs gave him.

For this I went to Annapolis? he thought bitterly as he shoveled glop into his face as fast as he could.

Harry Turtledove - Hawai 2 - End Of The Beginning

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