Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s

Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

http://www.penguinputnam.com

ALSO BYHARRYTURTLEDOVE

“Daimon” in

Worlds That Weren’t

Rule Britannia

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

I

ON A GRAY, drizzly morning in the first week of March 1941, an automobile pulled up in front of the

great iron gates of the Imperial Naval Staff College in Tokyo. The young commander who got out was

short even by Japanese standards—he couldn’t have been more than five feet three—and so slim he

barely topped the hundred-pound mark. All the same, the two leading seamen on sentry duty at the gates

(both of whom overtopped him by half a head) stiffened to attention at his approach.

“Your papers, sir, if you please.” The senior sentry slung his rifle so he could take them in his right hand.

The sentry studied them, nodded, and handed them back. “Thank you, sir. All in order.” He turned to

his comrade. “Open the gates for Commander Genda.”

“Hai,” the second seaman said, and did.

Genda hurried to the eastern wing of the staff college. He hurried everywhere he went; he fairly burned

with energy. He nearly slipped once on the wet pavement, but caught himself. The drizzle was not enough

to wash the city soot from the red bricks of the building. Nothing short of sandblasting would have been.

Just inside the door to the east wing sat a petty officer with a logbook. Genda presented his papers

again. The petty officer scanned them.Commander Genda to see Admiral Yamamoto , he wrote in the

log, and, after a glance at the clock on the wall opposite him, the time. “Please sign in, Commander,” he

said, offering Genda the pen.

“Yes, yes.” Genda was always impatient with formality and paperwork. He scrawled his name, then

almost trotted down the hall till he came to the stairway. Despite his small size, he took the stairs to the

third floor two at a time. He wasn’t breathing hard when he came out; he might be little, but he was fit.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

A captain on the telephone looked at him curiously as he went past the officer’s open door. Genda

didn’t meet the other man’s eyes, or even notice his gaze. All the commander’s energy focused on the

meeting that lay ahead.

He knocked on the door. “Come in.” Admiral Yamamoto’s voice was deep and gruff.

Heart pounding, Genda did. He saluted the commander-in-chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet. Isoroku

Yamamoto returned the courtesy. He was no taller than Genda, but there the physical resemblance

between the two men ended. Yamamoto was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested: a wrestler’s body,

made for grappling with the foe. His gray hair was closely cropped above his broad, hard face. He had

lost the first two fingers of his left hand in battle against the Russians at Tsushima in 1905, the year after

Genda was born.

After waving Genda to a chair, he asked, “Well, Commander, what’s on your mind?” He was no more a

time-waster than Genda himself.

Genda licked his lips. Yamamoto could be—often strove to be—intimidating. But the younger man

asked the question he had come to ask: “Sir, if war against the United States comes, what do you think

of our chances?”

Yamamoto did not hesitate. “I hope this war does not come. If I am told to fight regardless of the

consequences, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the

second or third year. I hope we can endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war.”

“You say this in spite of the blow we have planned against Pearl Harbor?” Genda asked. He had been

involved in preparing that blow from the beginning.

Admiral Yamamoto nodded heavily. “I do. If we succeed there, the attack buys us time. Maybe it will

buy us enough to take the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and form a defensive

perimeter so we can hold what we have conquered. Maybe. I do not believe it myself, but maybe.”

“If the United States can still use the forward base in Hawaii, matters become more difficult for us,”

Genda observed. His thick, expressive eyebrows quirked upward as he spoke.

“Much more difficult,” Yamamoto agreed.

“Well, then,” Genda said, “why do we limit ourselves to an air strike on Pearl Harbor? The Americans

will rebuild, and then they will strike back at us.”

Yamamoto nodded again. “Every word of this is true. It is one of the arguments I used against the

operation. Should hostilities break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that

we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. I wonder if our politicians have

confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

That went further than Commander Genda wanted. He said, “May we return to discussing the Hawaii

problem?” Yamamoto’s smile was almost indulgent. He waved for Genda to go on. The younger man

did: “We should follow up on our strike at Pearl Harbor with a landing. If Hawaii is occupied, America

will lose her best base. If we make this attack at all, we had better make it decisive.”

Yamamoto sat and considered. His face showed nothing. He was an outstanding bridge and poker

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

player. Genda could see why. “Well, Commander, no one will ever accuse you of thinking small,”

Yamamoto said at last. “Tell me—have you discussed this proposal with Rear Admiral Onishi?”

That was exactly the question Genda wished he would not have asked. “Yes, sir, I have,” he answered

unhappily.

“And his view is . . . ?”

“His view is that, with our present strength, we cannot take the offensive in both the eastern and southern

areas,” Genda said, more unhappily still.

“Rear Admiral Onishi is an airman’s officer,” Yamamoto said. “He is also a very hard-driving,

determined man. If he does not believe this can be done, his opinion carries considerable weight. How

do you respond to his objections?”

“By saying that half measures will not do against the United States, sir,” Genda replied. “If we strike a

blow that merely infuriates the enemy, what good is it? Less than none, in my opinion. If we strike, we

must drive the sword home all the way to the hilt. Let the Americans worry about defending their West

Coast. If they lose Hawaii, they cannot possibly think about striking us.”

Again, Admiral Yamamoto showed nothing of what he was thinking. He asked, “How many men do you

suppose we would need to subdue Hawaii after the air strike?”

“If all goes well, they should be flat on their backs by then,” Genda said. “One division should be

plenty—ten or fifteen thousand men.”

“No.” Now Yamamoto shook his head. His eyes flashed angrily. Genda realized he’d overlooked

something. Yamamoto spelled it out for him: “The Americans keep two divisions of infantry on Oahu.

Even with air superiority, one of ours would not be enough to root them out. If this enterprise is to be

attempted, it must not fail. You are absolutely right about that.”

Genda didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or apprehensive. The Navy could have pulled together a

division’s worth of men from its own resources. For a force the size Yamamoto was talking about . . .

“Will the Army cooperate with us, sir? Their eyes are on China, and on the south—the Philippines and

the Dutch East Indies. And they never like to think of anything new.” He spoke with a lifelong Navy

man’s scorn for the ground-pounders.

“They might like to think about not having to fight the USA so soon,” Yamamoto said. “They might. And

they might like to think of fighting the Americans from a position of much greater advantage. The advance

in the south may be slower if we take this course. But I do believe you are right, Commander. When we

hit the Americans, we can hold nothing back. Nothing! The reward for victory in the east could be

victory everywhere, and where else have we any hope of finding that?”

Genda could hardly hide his jubilation. He’d been far from sure he could persuade the older man that

this was a needful course. Rear Admiral Onishi hadn’t been able to see it. But Yamamoto, as his

mutilated hand showed, was of the generation that had fought the Russo-Japanese War, the war that had

begun with a surprise Japanese attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur. He was alive to

the advantages of getting in the first punch and making it count.

Yamamoto was. Were others? Anxiously, Commander Genda asked, “Are you sure you can persuade

the Army to play its part in this plan?” Without Army cooperation, it wouldn’t work. Yamamoto had

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

rubbed Genda’s nose in that. He hated the knowledge. That those Army blockheads might hold Japan

back from its best—its only, he was convinced—chance to fight the USA and have some hope of

winning was intolerable.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto leaned forward a few inches. He was not a big man, and it was not a large

motion. Nevertheless, it made him seem to take up the entire room and to look down on Genda from a

considerable height when in fact their eyes were level. “You may leave that to me, Commander,”

Yamamoto said in a voice that might have come from akami ’s throat rather than a man’s. Genda

hastened to salute. When Yamamoto spoke like that, who could doubt him? No one. No one at all.

COAL SMOKE BELCHINGfrom its stack, the locomotive pulled into the railroad yard at Esashi, in

northernmost Hokkaido. Behind it, the troop train rattled and clattered to a halt. Corporal Takeo Shimizu

looked out the window and shook his head. “It’s not much like home, is it?”

All the privates in his squad hastened to shake their heads. “Oh, no,” they chorused. Shimizu had every

right to thump them if they gave him any trouble. He took less advantage of the privilege than some

underofficers did. A round-faced farmer’s son, he hadn’t been promoted to corporal as soon as he might

have because his superiors wondered if he was too easygoing for his own good.

One of the soldiers, a skinny little fellow named Shiro Wakuzawa, said, “I’d sure rather be back in

Hiroshima right now. It’s hundreds of kilometers south of here, and we wouldn’t be shivering in our

seats.” The rest of the squad nodded again. A coal-fired stove at the front of the passenger car did next

to nothing to hold the chill outside at bay.

“No grumbling,” Shimizu said. “We will uphold the honor of the Fifth Division.” His squad was only a

tiny part of the division, but he did not want to let the larger unit down in any way. That was especially

true because he didn’t want to lose face before friends, neighbors, and relatives. The whole division came

from the Hiroshima region.

Wakuzawa, who had an aisle seat, leaned forward so he could look out the window, too. He stared this

way and that, then shook his head in obvious disappointment.

“What were you looking for?” Shimizu asked, curious in spite of himself.

“Hairy Ainu,” Wakuzawa answered. “They’re supposed to live on Hokkaido, aren’t they? They have

beards up to here”—he touched his face just below his eyes—“and down to here.” He tapped himself in

the middle of the chest.

Corporal Shimizu rolled his eyes. “And you expect to find them in the middle of a railroad yard? What

do you use for brains? If they work here, they’ve got to shave so they look like everybody else. I’m

hairy, too”—he was proud of his thick beard—“but I shave.”

The other soldiers jeered at Wakuzawa. The corporal had, so they joined in. He looked properly

abashed. That was smart of him. He was just a first-year conscript, with no rights and no privileges. If he

got out of line, they’d give him lumps. They might give him lumps anyhow, on general principles.

Lieutenant Osami Yonehara, who commanded the platoon of which Corporal Shimizu’s squad was a

part, got up and called, “Everybody out! Get your gear! Form column of fours by the car. Move, move,

move!” He was shouting by the time he was done. His officer’s sword banged against his hip. He was an

educated man as well as an officer, which made the gulf between him and the men he led twice as wide.

Shimizu didn’t worry about it. Officers gave orders and men obeyed. That was how things worked.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

A nasty cold breeze blew down from the north. It felt as if it hadn’t touched a thing since it started up in

Siberia. Corporal Shimizu’s teeth started to chatter. Somebody behind him said, “Why didn’t they give

us winter uniforms? My balls are crawling up into my belly.”

“Silence in the ranks!” Shimizu shouted, to show he was on the job in case one of his superiors heard the

grumbler.

“Forward—march!” The command came from Lieutenant Colonel Mitsuo Fujikawa, the regimental

commander. March the soldiers did. Shimizu hadn’t the faintest idea where he was going. He didn’t

worry about it. Somebody set above him would know. All he had to do was follow the man in front of

him.

Through the streets of Esashi they tramped. Women on their way to shops and workmen gaped at them

as they strode past. Some of the workmen had on Western-style overalls and cloth caps. Most of the

women wore kimonos, not dresses. Shimizu thought more people back home used Western clothes than

was true up here. His slung rifle thumped his shoulderblade at every step. That always annoyed him, and

he couldn’t do a thing about it.

Around the railroad yard, the buildings were Western style: square, boring structures of brick and

concrete. Then the Eleventh Regiment went through an older part of town. Roofs curved and arched.

Wood and paper replaced brick. To Shimizu, that made pretty good sense. In an earthquake, brickwork

came down on your head. And the purely Japanese buildings looked a lot more interesting than the ones

built on Western lines.

When they got to the harbor, Western buildings predominated again. They went with machinery, as they

did in the railroad yards. They seemed more solid and sturdy than their Japanese equivalents. And the

machinery, or the ideas behind the machinery, came from the West, too. Perhaps it was more at home in

familiar structures.

Gulls wheeled and mewed overhead. They descended on fishing boats in vast skrawking clouds, hoping

for a handout or a theft. The salt tang of the sea—slightly sullied by sewage—filled Shimizu’s nostrils.

He trudged up a pier toward a big merchant ship. Her name—Nagata Maru—was painted in hiragana

and in Roman letters on her stern. Up the gangplank he went. His boots clanged on the iron plates of the

deck. Sailors stared at him as if he were nothing but a monkey. He glared back, but only to show he

wasn’t intimidated. On land, he knew what he was doing. But this was the sailors’ world. Maybe he

wasn’t a monkey to them. Maybe he was just . . . cargo.

“This way,” Lieutenant Yonehara called, and led them down a hatch into the hold. TheNagata Maru

had been a freight hauler. Now the freight she would haul was men. Double racks of rough, unsanded

wood had been run up in the hold. Each one held a straw mat. They had numbers painted on them.

Yonehara checked them. “My platoon goes here.” He raised his voice to make himself heard over the

clatter of more soldiers marching with their hobnailed boots on the steel deck not far enough overhead.

Two of his squads got upper racks, two lowers. Corporal Shimizu and his men were assigned to uppers.

He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. They were right under the deck and could bang their heads if

they sat up carelessly, but nobody was spilling anything on them from above.

The hold filled and filled and filled. The mats on the racks were very close together. If a man rolled over,

he was liable to bump into the fellow next to him. “Packing us in like sardines,” Corporal Shimizu said.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Most of his men just nodded. They sprawled on the mats. Three or four of them had started a card

game. But a young soldier named Hideo Furuta said, “It could be worse, Corporal.”

“How?” Shimizu demanded—he thought it was already pretty bad.

Furuta realized he’d blundered. Anger at his own stupidity filled his broad, acne-scarred face. But he

had to answer: “If it were hot, the deck right above us would be like an oven.”

He was right. That would have been worse. Being right did you little good, though, when you were only

a first-year conscript. Shimizu said, “Why don’t you bring us a pot of tea?” He’d seen a big kettle in the

improvised kitchen up on deck.

“Yes, Corporal!” Thankful Shimizu hadn’t hit him, Furuta got down from his mat and hurried up the

narrow aisle toward the ladder that led to the deck. He had to go belly-to-belly with newly arriving

soldiers coming the other way.

“Hard work!” somebody called after him. That could mean several things: that the work really was hard,

or that the man calling sympathized with the one stuck with the job, or simply that the luckless onewas

stuck with it. Tone of voice and context counted for more than the words themselves.

After what seemed a very long time, Furuta came back with a pot of tea. Shimizu thought about bawling

him out for dawdling, but decided not to bother. Given the crowd, the kid had done the best he could.

By the way the men in the squad praised the tea, they thought the same thing.

Before long, all the soldiers packed into the hold made it hot and stuffy in there even without the summer

sun beating down on the metal deck above. There were no portholes—who would have bothered adding

them on a freighter? The only fresh air came down the hatch by which the men had entered.

Lieutenant Yonehara didn’t stay with the platoon. Officers had cabins of their own. Things were

crowded even for them; junior officers like the platoon commander had to double up. Corporal Shimizu

didn’t particularly resent their better fortune.Shigata ga nai , he thought—it can’t be helped.

At last, soldiers stopped coming. Had they crammed the whole regiment into theNagata Maru ?

Shimizu wouldn’t have been surprised. The engine began to thump. The ship began to throb. The deck

above Shimizu’s head thrummed. Army dentists had given him several fillings. They seemed to vibrate in

sympathy with the freighter.

As soon as theNagata Maru pulled away from the pier, the rolling and pitching started. So did the cries

for buckets. The sharp stink of vomit filled the hold along with the other odors of too many men packed

too close together. Green-faced soldiers raced up the ladder so they could spew over the rail.

Rather to his surprise, Corporal Shimizu’s stomach didn’t trouble him. He’d never been in seas this

rough before. He didn’t enjoy the journey, but it wasn’t a misery for him, either.

No one had told him where the ship was going. When the authorities wanted him to know something,

they would take care of it. Till then, he worried about keeping his squad in good order. The men who

could eat went through the rations they’d carried aboard theNagata Maru : rice and canned seaweed

and beans, along with pickled plums and radishes and whatever else the soldiers happened to have on

them.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Every morning, Lieutenant Yonehara led the men topside for physical training. It wasn’t easy on the

pitching deck, but orders were orders. The gray, heaving waters of the Sea of Okhotsk and the even

grayer skies spoke of how far from home Shimizu was.

When not exercising, the soldiers mostly stayed on their mats. They had no room to move around. Some

were too sick to do anything but lie there and moan. Others gambled or sang songs or simply slept like

hibernating animals, all in the effort to make time go faster.

The Kuril Islands seemed like an afterthought to Japan: rocky lumps spattered across the Pacific,

heading up toward Kamchatka. Etorofu was as windswept and foggy and desolate as any of the others.

When theNagata Maru anchored in Hitokappu Bay, Shimizu was unimpressed. He just hoped to get

away as fast as he could. He wouldn’t even have known where he was if the platoon commander hadn’t

told him.

He had hoped to be able to get off the freighter and stretch his legs. But no one was allowed off the ship

for any reason. No one was allowed to send mail. No one, in fact, was allowed to do much of anything

except go up on deck and exercise. Every time Corporal Shimizu did, more ships crowded the bay. They

weren’t just transports, either. Ships bristling with big guns joined the fleet. So did flat-topped aircraft

carriers, one after another.

Something big was building. When the men went back down into the hold, they tried to guess what it

would be. Not a one of them turned out to be right.

YOU CAN BEunhappy in Hawaii as easily as anywhere else. People who cruise over from the mainland

often have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. The sea voyage from San Francisco or Los Angeles

takes five days. They set the clocks back half an hour a day aboard ship, so that each outbound day lasts

twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. By the time you get there, you’re two and a half hours behind the

West Coast, five and a half behind the East.

And then, after Diamond Head and the Aloha Tower come up over the horizon, you commonly stay in a

fine hotel. You eat splendid food. You drink . . . oh, a little too much. You don’t get drunk, mind. You

get . . . happy. You admire the turquoise sky and the sapphire sea and the emerald land. Strange tropical

birds call in the trees. You savor the perfect weather. Never too hot, never too cold. If it rains, so what?

The sun will come out again in a little while. You want to be a beachcomber and spend the rest of your

days there. If you find a slightly brown-skinned but beautiful and willing wahine to spend them there with

you, so much the better.

Hawaii is what God made after he’d done Paradise for practice. How could anyone be unhappy in a

place like that?

First Lieutenant Fletcher Armitage had no trouble at all.

For one thing, Armitage—called Fletch by his friends—was a green-eyed redhead with a face full of

freckles. In between the freckles, his skin was white as milk. He hated the tropical sun. He didn’t tan. He

burned.

For another, his wife had left him three weeks before. He didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure Jane

understood why. He didn’t think there was somebody else. Jane hadn’t said anything about anybody

else. She’d said she felt stifled in their little Wahiawa apartment. She’d said he didn’t give her enough of

his time.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

That had frosted his pumpkin—not that frost had anything to do with anything on Oahu. “For Christ’s

sake, I give you every minute I’ve got when I’m not with my guns!” he’d howled. He served with the

Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion—the Lucky Thirteenth, they called themselves—in the Twenty-fourth

Division. “You knew you were marrying an officer when you said ‘I do.’ ”

She’d only shrugged. She was small and blond and stubborn. “It’s not enough,” she’d said. Now she

had the apartment, and presumably felt much less stifled without him in it. She was talking with a lawyer.

How she’d pay him on a schoolteacher’s salary was beyond Fletch, but odds were she’d figure out a

way. She usually did.

What Armitage had, on the other hand, was a hard cot at Schofield Barracks BOQ and a bar tab that

was liable to outdo Jane’s legal fees. He had the sympathy of some of the officers and men who knew

what had happened to him. Others suddenly didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. Almost all of

those were married men themselves. They might have feared he had something catching. And so he did:

life in the military. If anything could grind a marriage to powder, that’d do it.

He sat on a bar stool soaking up whiskey sours with Gordon Douglas, another lieutenant in the battalion.

“She knew I was an officer, goddammit,” he said—slurred, rather, since he’d already soaked up quite a

few. “She knew, all right. Knew I had to take care of . . . this stuff.” He gestured vaguely. Just what he

had to do wasn’t the clearest thing in his mind right then.

Douglas gave back a solemn nod. He looked like the high-school fullback he’d been ten years earlier.

He was from Nebraska: corn-fed and husky. “You know, it could be worse,” he said slowly—he’d

matched Armitage drink for drink.

“How?” Fletch demanded with alcohol-fueled indignation. “How thehell could it be worse?”

“Well . . .” The other man looked sorry he’d spoken. But he’d drunk enough to have a hard time

keeping his mouth shut, and so he went on, “It could be worse if we spent more time in the field. Then

she would’ve seen even less of you, and all this would’ve come on sooner.”

“Oh, yeah. If.” But that only flicked Fletch on another gripe of his, one older than his trouble with his

wife (or older than his knowledge of his trouble with his wife, which was not the same thing). “Don’t hold

your breath, though.”

“We do the best we can.” Gordon Douglas sounded uncomfortable, partly because he knew he was

liable to touch off a rant.

And he did. Fletch exploded. “Do we?Do we? Sure doesn’t look that way to me. This is a hell of a

parade-ground army, no bout adout it.” He paused, listened to what he’d just said, and tried again.

“No . . . doubt . . . about it.” There. That was better. He could roll on: “Hellof a parade-ground army.

But what if we really have to go out there and fight? What will we do then, when we’re not on parade?”

“We’d do all right.” Douglas still sounded uncomfortable. But then he rallied, saying, “Besides, who the

hell would we fight? Nobody in his right mind would mess with Hawaii, and you know it.”

Down the hatch went Armitage’s latest whiskey sour. He gestured to the Filipino bartender for another

one. Even before it arrived, he went on, “All this shit with the Japs doesn’t sound good. They didn’t like

it for beans when we turned the oil off on ’em.”

“Now I know you’re smashed,” his friend said. “Those little fuckers try anything, we’ll knock ’em into

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

the middle of next week. I dare you to tell me any different.”

“Oh, hell, yes, we’d lick ’em.” No matter how drunk Fletch was, he knew how strong Hawaii’s

defenses were. Two divisions based at Schofield Barracks, the Coast Artillery Command with its

headquarters at Fort DeRussy right next to Waikiki Beach, the flyboys at Wheeler right by the barracks

complex here, and, just for icing on the cake, the Pacific Fleet . . . “They’d have to be crazy to screw

with us.”

“Bet your ass,” Douglas said. “So how come you’ve got ants in your pants?”

Armitage shrugged. “I just wish . . .” His voice trailed away. He wished for a lot of things that mattered

more to him right now than just how prepared the men at Schofield Barracks were to turn back an attack

unlikely ever to come. And those weren’t ants in his pants. He and Jane had been married for five years.

He was used to getting it regularly. These past three weeks had been a hard time in more ways than one.

He sipped at the drink. “Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?”

“Plenty of people in it are bastards, that’s for goddamn sure,” Gordon Douglas agreed. “You keep the

hell away from ’em if you can, you salute ’em and go, ‘Yes, sir,’ if you can’t. That’s the way things work,

buddy.” He spoke with great earnestness.

“Yeah. I guess.” Fletch’s head bobbed up and down. He didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like crying.

He’d done that only once, the night he moved out of the apartment and into BOQ. He’d been a lot

drunker then than he was now. Of course, he could still take care of that. The whiskey sour vanished. He

signaled for a refill.

“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow morning,” Douglas said, also putting his drink out of its misery. “If

they have live-fire practice, you’ll wish your head would fall off.” That bit of good advice didn’t keep him

from reloading, too.

Armitage shrugged. “That’s tomorrow morning. This is now. If I’m drunk, I don’t have to worry

about . . . anything.”

“Look on the bright side,” his friend suggested. “If we were back home, there might be snow on the

ground already.”

“If you were back home, there might be snow on the ground,” Fletch said. “That’syour worry. I’m from

San Diego. I don’t know any more about it than the Hawaiians do.”

“You grew up in a Navy town,” Douglas said. “You’re here where they’ve got more goddamn sailors

than anywhere else in the world. So what the hell are you doing in the Army?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Armitage said. If he had one more whiskey sour, he was going to start

wondering about his own name, too. The only thing getting drunk didn’t make him wonder about was

Jane. She was gone, and he wouldn’t get her back. That was why he was drinking in the first place. It

didn’t seem fair. He turned his blurry focus back to the question. “What the hell am I doing in the Army?

Best I can right now. How about you?”

Gordon Douglas didn’t answer. He’d put his head down on the bar and started to snore. Fletch shook

him awake, which wasn’t easy because he kept wanting to yawn, too. They lurched back to BOQ

together. Patrolling sentries just kept patrolling; it wasn’t as if they’d never seen a drunken officer before,

or even two.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

The next morning, aspirins and most of a gallon of black coffee put only the faintest of dents in Fletch’s

hangover. He managed to choke down some dry toast with the coffee. In his stomach, it felt as if it were

all corners. Douglas looked as decrepit as he felt, a very faint consolation indeed.

And they did go through live-fire exercises. Having a 105mm gun go off by his head did nothing to speed

Fletch’s recovery. He gulped more aspirins and wished he were dead.

JIROTAKAHASHI ANDhis two sons carried tubs full ofnehus onto theOshima Maru as the sampan

lay tied up in Kewalo Basin, a little west of Honolulu. Takahashi, a short, muscular, sun-browned man of

fifty-five, had named the fishing boat for the Japanese county he’d left around the turn of the century. He

watched the minnows dash back and forth in the galvanized iron tubs. They knew they weren’t coming

along for a holiday cruise.

He wondered if his sons knew the same. “Pick up your feet! Get moving!” he called to them in

Japanese, the only language he spoke.

Hiroshi and Kenzo both smiled at him. He didn’t see that they moved any faster. They should have.

They were less than half his age, and both of them were three or four inches taller than he was. They

should have been stronger than he was, too. If they were, he hadn’t seen it. They didn’t have the fire in

their bellies, the passion for work, that he did. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to give

it to them.

Hiroshi said something in English as he set his tub down on the deck. His younger brother answered in

the same language. They’d both been educated in American schools on Oahu. They used English as

readily as Japanese, even though Jiro had sent them to Japanese schools after the regular schools ended.

They went by Hank and Ken as often as by the names he’d given them.

They both laughed—loud, boisterous, American laughs. Jiro shot them a suspicious glance. Were they

laughing at him? They sometimes used English to keep him from knowing what they were saying.

All over Kewalo Basin, big diesel engines were growling to life. Blue-painted sampans glided out of the

basin and into the wide Pacific. The blue paint was camouflage. The fishermen hoped it fooled the tuna

they caught. They knew good and well it fooled other fishermen who might try to poach in fine fishing

spots.

Back when Jiro first came to Hawaii, sampans had been sail-powered. Diesels let them range much

farther asea. Takahashi muttered to himself as he started theOshima Maru ’s engine. He liked to be one

of the first boats out of the basin. Not today, not when he’d had to drag his boys out of bed. Did they

think the tuna were going to sleep late, too?

Up at the bow, the two of them were tossing a hollow glass globe as big as their heads back and forth.

The net float had drifted here all the way from Japan. A lot of sampans carried one or two of them,

sometimes more. They showed up around Kauai more often than anywhere else: some trick of the

currents, no doubt.

Jiro hauled in the mooring line and got theOshima Maru going. His sons went right on tossing the float

back and forth. He finally lost patience with them. “Will you two knock off that foolishness?” he shouted.

“Sorry, Father,” Hiroshi said. He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. He had a silly grin on

his face.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: