If Peterson was any judge, Burroughs came to a place like this to escape his fans. There probably was no escape, though. No escape for me, that’s for sure, Peterson thought unhappily. The major didn’t seem to want to run dry.
At last, he did. That let Peterson escape, and it let him look east across the center of Oahu. He could trace the front all the way over to the Koolau Range on the other side of the island. It wasn’t that far. If the Americans could hold the Japs north of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa, he thought they had a decent chance.
Kolekole Pass would have made a hell of an observation post. Peterson started to say something about that, then hesitated. A Navy lieutenant could make such suggestions. What about a buck private in the Army? Wasn’t he supposed to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told? That was what he would have wanted from an ordinary seaman in the Navy. He buttoned his lip.
A little later, he heard the major talking into a field telephone. The officer was pinpointing the location of a Japanese artillery position. Peterson laughed at himself. Old Granny Army didn’t need him to teach her how to suck eggs.
Off in the distance, artillery boomed. Machine guns rattled. Rifles crackled like fireworks. Here in the pass, everything was quiet. Soldiers played pinochle or acey-deucey. Birds chirped. Peterson could no more name them than the trees in which they perched.
It was quiet duty. Considering what was going on only a few miles away, it was miraculously quiet. Most of the men seemed delighted to be out of anything more dangerous. Peterson muttered and fumed. He wanted to have a go at the Japs, not sit here twiddling his thumbs in a place where they were anything but likely to show up.
After fuming till the sun swung down toward the horizon, he decided to beard the major after all. The man heard him out. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry, Private. I commend your initiative. It does you credit. But the answer is still no. We are serving a necessary function here. I would sooner be in combat myself. But I am doing what was ordered of me, and you will do what is ordered of you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Peterson said. That the man was obviously right only made his refusal more galling.
They had beans for supper, beans and roast pork. The beans couldn’t have come off of Peterson’s truck; they’d been soaked before they were boiled. They weren’t anything fancy, but they were okay. As for the pork, everybody smiled and ate in a hurry. Peterson suspected the pigs had been liberated from some little local farm. No one said anything, though, and he didn’t think he’d make himself popular by asking a whole lot of questions.
He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep on the ground. Some of the soldiers had mosquito netting. He didn’t. He wondered how high a price he’d pay for that. He tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. Snores rose around him. The Army men had no trouble sleeping on bare ground. If he’d got used to sacking out in a bunk every night, that was his hard luck.
And then, some time around midnight, shouts woke everybody who’d managed to fall asleep. “Out! Out! Out!” the major yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here before we get cut off and surrounded!”
“What the fuck?” somebody said, which perfectly summed up what Peterson was thinking.
“The Japs,” the major said, which was no shock: Mussolini’s men, for instance, were a hell of a long way away. But what followed was a shocker: “Goddamn slanteyes landed on the west coast, and they’re over the mountains behind us. That’s why we’re pulling out.”
“Did they get through Pohakea Pass south of here?” a soldier asked.
“No. They’re over the goddamn mountains, I tell you. Don’t ask me how-they must be part monkey. But most of what we’ve got is up at the front. God only knows how we’ll stop ’em, or even slow ’em down. Gotta try, though. Come on, get moving!”
Peterson scrambled out of his bedroll. Maybe he’d see action after all. It didn’t occur to him to wonder if that was what he really wanted.
SOME CIVIL WAR general-Fletch Armitage was damned if he could remember who-had said raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as a virgin. Some things hadn’t changed a bit in the past eighty years.
Fletch looked west, toward the Waianae Range. He was damned if he could see how anybody human could have got over those steep, jungle-covered mountains. For all he knew, the Japs weren’t human. But they were over the mountains, and square in the U.S. Army’s rear with… how many soldiers? Fletch had no idea, and he didn’t think any other Americans did, either.
Too many-that was certain. They weren’t just on the Army’s flank. They were in its rear. And if the Americans couldn’t pull back in a hurry and form some kind of new line farther south, they were probably history, and ancient history at that.
Pulling back meant giving up Wahiawa, leaving it to its fate. Plenty of people in the town didn’t intend to be left. Refugees packed the roads. Fletch had seen that before, when the people from Haleiwa and Waimea ran away from the oncoming Japs. This was worse. More people lived in Wahiawa. Japanese fighters had a field day shooting up the Kamehameha Highway. They didn’t seem to care whether they blasted soldiers or civilians. Why should they? They spawned chaos with every cannon shell, with every burst of machine-gun fire.
As the beat-up De Soto with his gun in tow slowly-so slowly-rattled south through Wahiawa, Fletch looked now this way, now that. One of the infantry privates newly hauled into artilleryman’s duty said, “Sure is a pretty place. Sure is a shame, letting the Japs have it.”
“I wasn’t looking at the town,” Fletch said tightly. He was looking for his more or less ex-wife. If he spotted Jane, he intended to shoehorn her into the car. Okay, she didn’t love him any more. But after what he’d seen, he wouldn’t have left a dying, half-witted dog to the mercy of the Japs. Maybe Jane would thank him for getting her out of there. Maybe she’d try to spit in his eye. He didn’t give a damn either way. If he saw her, she was going.
But he didn’t see her. All he saw was Wahiawa. He didn’t think it was all that lovely. It was the sort of town that grows up alongside any Army base, full of cheap, hastily run-up buildings that held businesses designed to separate soldiers from cash: bars; hamburger stands; chop-suey joints; tailors’ shops that sold cheap, loud clothes; tattoo parlors; dives that called themselves burlesque houses but were really brothels. To make matters worse, the Japs had bombed and shelled the place. No, it wasn’t lovely in his eyes.
But it wasn’t so ugly as a base-side town back on the mainland would have been, either. Palm trees swayed in the breeze. Hibiscus didn’t care that it was December. Blooms of gold and red and white brightened the day. Fletch didn’t know the names of a lot of the other flowers busily blooming in the middle of winter. Mynah birds and zebra doves and red-headed, gray-backed cardinals from South America added to the tropic scenery.
Fletch wished he could hop out of the car and run over to the apartment where he’d lived till not so long before. He knew he couldn’t. Rescuing Jane if he saw her on the street would have been one thing. Abandoning his gun to go after her would have been something else again: dereliction of duty.
A couple of hundred yards ahead, dirt fountained into the air. Another shell came down, and another, and another. Most of the column there was civilian. People scattered, screaming. “Son of a bitch,” Fletch said softly.
“Sir?” the dragooned infantryman said.
“Those aren’t the bursts the Japs get from their usual field pieces.” Armitage spoke with authority. He’d earned the right; he’d seen what the enemy’s guns could do. U.S. troops had mountain howitzers that broke down into loads light enough for one or two soldiers to manhandle them forward no matter what the terrain. Evidently, the Japs did, too. He thought about manhandling even mountain guns over the Waianae Range. Who could have dreamt the Japs could manage such a thing?