“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. No chance for a plane. We haven’t got any planes to give you right now,” a yeoman said through his own muffling of gauze.
Peterson knew nobody had any planes. He’d heard nothing but how nobody had any planes since those gray-haired geezers from the golf course got him to Ewa. “Let me have a rifle, then,” he said. “Let me have a rifle and a helmet and permission to go north. There’s a war on up there.”
Unlike the Marine captain over at Ewa, the yeoman shook his head. “We don’t want to do that, sir. If we get planes, we don’t want to find out that all the people trained to fly them have turned into casualties in the meantime.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Peterson exploded. “Where the hell are you going to get more planes from? Pull ’em out of your asshole? Everybody and his mother-in-law says the Japs have blown all the planes in Hawaii to hell and gone. What did I join the Navy for if you won’t even let me fight?”
The yeoman turned red. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said stolidly. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, sending you to the front with a rifle is about like putting a doughboy into a fighter cockpit and expecting him to shoot down Japs.”
“My balls!” To Peterson, ground combat looked simple. You aimed at a Jap, you shot the son of a bitch, and then you aimed at the next one. What was so complicated about that? Flying a plane, now, was a whole different business. That took skill and training.
With a shrug, the yeoman said, “However you want it, sir. If you like, I’ll bump you on to Lieutenant Commander McAndrews. I don’t have the authority to change orders like that. He does.”
“Bring him on!” Peterson said eagerly.
Lieutenant Commander McAndrews still had an office in a real building to call his own. As it did everywhere, rank had its privileges. McAndrews, a jowly man in his late forties, looked at Peterson as if he were a cockroach in the salad. “So you want to go off and be a hero, do you?” he said in a voice like ice.
“No, sir. I want to serve my country, sir.” Peterson could yell and cuss at the yeoman-he outranked him. The shoe was on the other foot here. He had to move carefully. “They won’t let me get back into an airplane. If they would, I’d gladly fly. But the enemy is here. I want to fight him.”
“You may not be doing yourself any favors, you know,” McAndrews said. “Things aren’t going so well. The Army may have promised more than it can deliver.” He sniffed, as if to say one couldn’t expect anything else from the Army. By all the signs, the rivalry between Navy blue and Army khaki counted for more with him than the war against Japan.
Maybe that made sense in peacetime. Peterson had had plenty of rude things to say about the Army, too. What Navy man didn’t? But you could take it too far. “Good God, sir!” he said. “In that case, they need all the help they can get.”
McAndrews eyed him curiously. “Are you really so eager to get yourself killed, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Peterson answered. “What I’m eager for is killing those little yellow bastards who jumped on our backs when we weren’t looking.”
“Your spirit does you credit,” McAndrews said, but not in a way that made it sound like a compliment. “It is policy not to risk those men who have skills that may be valuable in the future…”
“How? Where? We haven’t got any airplanes to speak of, and we have got more pilots than we know what to do with,” Peterson said. “Sir.”
“If I have more money than I know what to do with, Lieutenant, I don’t throw some of it in the fire,” McAndrews said coldly. “Do you?”
“I don’t know, sir. I never had more money than I knew what to do with.” As a matter of fact, Peterson had done the equivalent of throwing his money in the fire plenty of times. When he was in port, he spent it on booze and broads and bright lights. What else was it good for?
“I was speaking metaphorically.” Lieutenant Commander McAndrews’ tone declared that Peterson wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it bit him in the leg. He might have accused the younger man of eating with the wrong fork. “But if you are mad enough to want to go…”
“If somebody doesn’t go stop the Japs up there, sir, don’t you think they’ll come down here?” Peterson asked. “What happens if-no, when — they do?”
By the horrified expression that washed across McAndrews’ face, he hadn’t even imagined that. A lot of possibilities about the Japanese hadn’t occurred to Americans till too late. Peterson knew all about that; he was one of the Americans those possibilities hadn’t occurred to. Maybe McAndrews hadn’t let himself think about this one. He looked as if he hated Peterson for making him think about it.
Five minutes later, Peterson had in his possession an order releasing him for ground combat “in the best interest of the Navy and the United States of America.” McAndrews’ eyes said he hoped Peterson stopped a bullet with his teeth. Peterson didn’t care. Regardless of what McAndrews thought, he had what he wanted.
WHEN THE AMERICANS pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d done their best to wreck the airstrip near the little town on the north shore of Oahu. They’d dynamited the runways to try to make sure planes couldn’t land or take off on them. A lot of pick-and-shovel men would have needed a long time to get the airstrip ready for operations again, and the Japanese Army didn’t have that kind of manpower to spare.
As Lieutenant Saburo Shindo took off from that airstrip, a smile wreathed his usually impassive features. The Americans hadn’t been as smart as they thought they had. When they pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d left behind a couple of bulldozers and a steamroller. With those, Japanese military engineers had been able to repair the airstrip in a couple of days, not several weeks.
The smile faded a little as he gained altitude. There sat one of the dozers, painted a friendly civilian yellow, by the side of a runway. Such a casual display of U.S. wealth bothered Shindo a little, or more than a little. That wealth of earth-moving equipment wouldn’t have been casually available in a Japanese small town. His countrymen had been able to take advantage of it, yes. But they couldn’t come close to producing it themselves. Attacking a nation that could was worrying.
With a shrug, Shindo dismissed such worries from his mind. They were things to keep an admiral or a cabinet minister up in the wee small hours, not a lieutenant. As a matter of fact, nothing much kept Shindo awake at night. He looked forward, not back.
Forward lay the American positions. U.S. forces were trying to form a line between Oahu’s two mountain ranges, the Waianae in the west and the Koolau in the east. They seemed to assume the land outside the mountain ranges didn’t matter much. So far, they hadn’t managed to stop the Japanese advance, but they had slowed it down.
Black puffs of antiaircraft fire appeared behind Shindo’s Zero. The Americans were much more alert than they had been when the fighting started. They still didn’t lead the Japanese fighters enough. They couldn’t believe how fast Zeros were.
Shindo dove on a U.S. artillery position in front of Wahiawa. Sooner or later, the Yankees were bound to figure out that the Japanese had a land-based airstrip and weren’t just flying off carriers any more. When they did, 105mm guns here had no trouble reaching Haleiwa. Knocking them out was important.
He dove on the guns. The Americans realized they had an important position here, too, though they might not have realized why. Tracers from machine-gun fire spat past the stooping Zero. Shindo couldn’t do anything about them, so he ignored them. If they knocked him out of the sky, that was fate, karma. If they didn’t, he would carry out his mission.