Just in case the boats in that picket arc had missed something, Shindo watched the sky like a hawk. Some people slacked off when they didn’t expect to run into trouble. Shindo wasn’t one of those. Routine meant routinely capable, routinely excellent, to him.
He also glanced down at the ocean every now and again. Losing the Bordeaux Maru was a wake-up call for the Japanese Navy. That had happened more than three weeks ago now. The submarine that got the freighter was bound to be long gone. That didn’t mean others hadn’t come to take its place, though. Shindo couldn’t sink one if he spotted it on the surface: the Zero didn’t carry bombs. But he could shoot it up. If his machine guns and cannons filled it full of holes, it couldn’t submerge. Then it would be easy meat for bombers or destroyers.
Here, though, nothing marred the Pacific but the ships of the Japanese flotilla and their wakes. The rest of the ocean seemed glassy smooth. There was hardly any chop; the wind was the next thing to a dead calm. No big swells were rolling down out of the north, either, as they had been when the task force moved on Hawaii. Had those been much worse, the barges would have had trouble landing, and the invasion might have turned into a fiasco. Admiral Yamamoto had bet against the kami of wind and wave, and he’d won.
Shindo called the other fighter pilots flying combat air patroclass="underline" “Anything?”
A chorus of “No”s resounded in his earphones. Some pilots were even tempted to take the radio out of a plane to save weight. Shindo had issued stern orders against that. As far as he was concerned, staying in touch counted for more than the tiny bit of extra speed and liveliness you might gain from saving the kilos the radio weighed. Some people had grumbled about it, but he’d stood firm.
A sudden spurt of steam down below, foam and spray everywhere as a great bulk heaved itself out of the water. Excitement coursed through Shindo. Was that a broaching submarine? A few seconds later, the Japanese flier started to laugh. That was no submarine-it was a breaching whale. The war between Japan and the USA meant nothing to it. To it, the ocean mattered only for krill. Men had other ideas, though. One of those ideas had put Shindo in a fighter plane and taken him far from home.
He listened to excited radio calls from the other pilots who’d seen the whale. “I was going to dive on it and shoot it up,” somebody said.
“Shame to waste all that meat without a factory ship close by,” someone else replied.
That made people laugh. Shindo smiled a thin smile inside his cockpit. Better when the men were happy and laughing. They paid closer attention to what was going on around them. Right here, right now, that probably didn’t matter. No Yankees were likely to be within hundreds of kilometers. But you never could tell.
Throttled back, a Zero could stay in the air for more than two hours. Shindo and his comrades buzzed along in great spirals around the Akagi and the destroyers that covered her. The whale was the most interesting thing any of them saw. Shindo didn’t yawn as he flew-he was far too professional to let down on the job-but it was a long way from the most exciting patrol he’d ever led.
He took the flight back to the carrier after its replacements had risen into the air. Nobody felt like yawning landing on a rolling, pitching flight deck. Shindo made himself into a machine, automatically obeying the signals of the landing officer at Akagi ’s stern. The man on the ship could judge his course better than he could. He knew that, however little he cared to admit it even to himself.
When the landing officer’s wigwag flags went down, Shindo dove for the deck. He bounced when he hit, so that the Zero’s hook missed the first arrester wire. But it snagged the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.
Shindo pushed back the canopy and scrambled out. The deck crew took charge of the Zero, shoving it to one side, away from the path of the incoming planes behind it. Shindo sprinted for the island. The motion of the deck under his feet seemed as natural as the motion of air in his lungs.
Commander Genda greeted him just inside. “Anything unusual?” he asked.
“No, sir.” Shindo shook his head. “About the most interesting thing we saw was a whale. We wondered if it was a Yankee sub, but it was only a whale.”
“All right,” Genda said. “The splash the big ones make when they come to the surface can confuse you at first. But the Americans don’t build subs with fins and flukes.” He chuckled.
Shindo managed another thin smile. Fins and flukes… Where did Genda come up with such nonsense? The smile didn’t last long; Shindo’s smiles seldom did. He said, “Forgive me for saying so, sir, but I’m afraid this patrol is costing us more fuel than it’s worth. How likely are we to encounter the enemy?”
Genda only shrugged. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, you don’t know, either. That’s why we’re here: to help find out how likely we are to run into the Americans sticking their long noses where they don’t belong. We learn something if we meet them… and we learn something if we don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” Shindo said, an answer a subordinate could never go wrong in giving to his superior. His own opinion he kept to himself. If Genda wanted it, he would ask for it.
He didn’t. He just said, “Prepare your report. We’ll put it together with all the others and see what kind of picture it makes.”
“Yes, sir,” Saburo Shindo said again, and gave Genda a salute as mechanically perfect as his landing a few minutes before. As he had then, he followed someone else’s will rather than his own. He shrugged, if only to himself. A lot of military life involved following someone else’s will.
THE SUN SANK toward the Pacific. Jim Peterson took a nail out of his mouth and used it to fasten a plank to a two-by-four. He wished he were using his hammer to smash in a Jap’s skull instead. The guards, though, were on the other side of the barbed wire as the POW camp rose near Opana-about as far north as anyone could go on Oahu. From there, it was nothing but ocean all the way up to Alaska. Peterson could look up and see waves rolling onto the beach.
He drove another nail to make sure the plank stayed securely fastened. He might have to stay in the barracks he was building. He wanted to make sure the building kept off the rain. He didn’t have to worry about making sure the place was warm, the way he would have on the mainland. A good thing, too, because the Japs couldn’t have cared less if their prisoners froze.
He fastened another plank, and another, and another. He worked till a Jap outside the wire blew a horn. The bastard must have thought he was Satchmo Armstrong; he put some Dixieland into the call that let the POWs knock off for the day. And wasn’t that a kick in the nuts-a Jap who liked jazz? Peterson had run into some crazy things in his time, but that might have taken the cake.
The prisoners lined up to return their tools. The guards kept track of every hammer and saw and chisel and axe and screwdriver and pliers they issued each morning. If the count didn’t add up when the tools came back, there was hell to pay. They’d beaten the crap out of a guy who tried to stick a chisel in his pocket and walk off with it. You had to be nuts to think you’d get away with something like that, but young Einstein had taken a shot at it. He’d paid for his stupidity, too; he was still laid up in the infirmary.
Peterson turned in the hammer without any fuss. No matter what he wanted to do with it, he couldn’t, not with armed Japs ready to kill him if he got cute with the sergeant in charge of checking off the tools on a chart full of incomprehensible squiggles.
Prez McKinley stood a couple of men behind Peterson in line. He gave the Jap sergeant his saw. Then he and Peterson got bowls and spoons from their tent and headed for the chow line. The march up to Opana had taught them sticking with a buddy was a good idea. The Japanese had hardly bothered to feed the POWs on the trek across the island. What the guards did give out, the strong had tried to snatch from the weak. Two men together were stronger than any lone wolf could be. Nobody had robbed the two of them. They’d got to Opana in fair shape. Some of the weaker, hungrier men had lain down by the Kamehameha Highway and, too weary to go on, let the Japs do them in.