“Reminds me a little of New Orleans,” said somebody behind Joe. The comparison would have meant more to him if he’d ever been to New Orleans.
Whites and Negroes walked along the sidewalks and went in and out of shops and homes. They seemed not far from equal in numbers. As it had been in North Carolina, that was plenty to tell Joe he was a long way from home. Colored people in San Francisco were few and far between.
Because of the name, he’d figured the Naval Air Station would lie right next to the town. But it didn’t; it was half a dozen miles away. On the way there, Joe’s bus passed a massive fort of brickwork and granite. “This here is Fort Barrancas,” the driver said, playing tour guide. “The Confederates held it for a while during the War Between the States, but the Federals ran ’em out.”
Joe had heard people talk about the War Between the States in North Carolina, too. In San Francisco, it had always been just the Civil War. Cadets from the South seemed a lot more… serious about it than those from other parts of the country. Of course, their side had lost, which doubtless made a difference.
“Over there across the channel on Santa Rosa Island is Fort Pickens,” the driver went on. “It could’ve touched off the war if Fort Sumter didn’t. The Confederates never did take it, even though the fellow who attacked it was the same man who’d built it before the war. They kept Geronimo the Apache there for a while after they caught him, too.”
Leaning out past Orson Sharp, Joe got a glimpse of Fort Pickens. It had five sides, with a bastion at each corner. Even now, it looked like a tough nut to crack. He imagined gunfire sweeping the sand of Santa Rosa Island and shivered a little. No, trying to take a place like that wouldn’t have been any fun at all.
And then he forgot all about the Civil War or the War Between the States or whatever you were supposed to call it. Along with the gulls and pelicans fluttering over Fort Pickens, he spotted an airplane painted bright yellow: a trainer. The buzz that filled the bus said he wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, either. Excitement blazed through him. Before long, he’d go up in one of those slow, ungainly machines-except it seemed as swift and sleek as a Wildcat to him.
Pensacola Naval Air Station itself was a study in contrasts. The old buildings were old: brickwork that looked as if it dated from somewhere close to the Civil War. And the new ones were new: some of the plywood that had gone into hangars and administrative buildings hadn’t been painted yet, and hadn’t started weathering yet, either. And out beyond the buildings sprouted a forest of tents.
The driver might have been reading Joe’s mind. “You gentlemen will be staying in those for a while, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’re putting up real housing as fast as we can, but there’s a lot going on, and we’ve had to get big in just a bit of a hurry, you know.”
That got laughs all through the bus. A couple of years earlier, nobody’d wanted to hear about national defense, much less talk about it. Now nobody wanted to pay attention to anything else. But making up for lost time was no easier, no more possible, than it ever was.
Brakes groaning, the bus stopped. The cadets shouldered their duffels again. As they descended, a lieutenant commander came out of the closest old brick building and greeted them with, “Welcome to Pensacola Naval Air Station, gentlemen. You will have no mothers here. We assume you’re old enough to take care of yourselves till you show us otherwise-at which point we’re liable to throw you out on your ear. Now if you’ll line up for processing…”
Processing here was for the cadets about what it was for a cow going through the Swift meat-packing plant in Chicago. Joe didn’t end up with USDA CHOICE stamped on his backside, but that was almost all he escaped. The paperwork he filled out made what he’d done at Chapel Hill seem like the kindergarten course. “We ought to drop this stuff on the Japs,” he grumbled to Orson Sharp. “It’d smash ’em flatter than a ten-ton bomb.”
“It can’t be helped.” Sharp took everything, even bureaucratic nonsense, in stride. Joe didn’t know whether to admire him or to want to clobber him.
They shared a two-man tent a good deal more spacious than their four-man dorm room. Joe looked at a mimeographed handout a bored petty officer had given him. He rolled his eyes up to the heavens and let out a theatrical groan.
“For heaven’s sake, what is it?” Sharp asked. Any other cadet in the group would have said something more pungent than for heaven’s sake.
“Listen to this.” Joe read from the handout: “ ‘Flight training and academic preparation will continue in the ratio of three parts to two. Academic subjects to be covered will include the following: navigation, ordnance and gunnery, indoctrination, recognition, communications, and airplane engines.’ We’re stuck with more classes, for cryin’ out loud.” He would have been more pungent himself with anybody but his roommate. He refused to admit that Orson Sharp was a good influence on him.
“Well? We need to know all those things.” Sharp was so reasonable, he could drive anybody nuts.
“I thought we were done with notebooks and desks and tests. Lord knows I hoped we were.” Joe refused to cheer up, even though he already knew a lot about engines.
“I’m not thrilled, either, but we can’t quit now. We just have to go through with it.” Sharp wasn’t wrong. Joe didn’t clobber him. He couldn’t have said why, not to save his life.
COMMANDER MINORU GENDA was working in a Honolulu office that had once housed a U.S. Navy officer. The space was larger and better appointed than anyone below flag rank would have had in Japan, but nothing out of the ordinary here. His work was nothing out of the ordinary, either. That left him slightly discontented. He wouldn’t have minded leaving Oahu and going on to fight in the Philippines or the Dutch East Indies. Things were too quiet here. He wanted new problems to sink his teeth into.
He hadn’t had that thought more than ten minutes before an excited radioman ran into his office and exclaimed, “Sir, one of our picket boats has sighted two American carriers heading toward these islands!”
“Well, well,” Genda said. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the Yankees to try to raid Hawaii. “Give me more details.”
“Sir, there are no more details,” the radioman answered. “The picket boat’s signal cut off in the middle of the message.”
“Ah, so desu. I understand.” Genda nodded. No, he wouldn’t be able to get more details from the picket boat’s crew. No one this side of the Yasukuni Shrine for the spirits of the war dead would. Now he had to think about what to do to make sure the Americans paid for their folly. “Akagi and Soryu have been notified?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Captain Hasegawa says he wants to let the American ships come closer before he launches his attack against them. The Americans will have to come closer if they’re going to strike at Oahu.”
“Hai. Honto,” Genda said. That was why the picket boats were out there, some more than a thousand kilometers north and east of the island. No carrier-based bombers could fly that far and return to the ships that had launched them. Genda looked at his watch. It was almost three. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans intended to run in towards Oahu all through the night, as the Japanese strike force had done back in December. Thinking out loud, he went on, “We caught them by surprise, though. They won’t play the same trick on us. We’ll be ready and waiting tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Do you need me to pass anything on to either of our carriers?”
“Just one thing-good hunting.”