THE AIRSTRIP BY Haleiwa had to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Out beyond the grass and the palm trees and the beach was the vast turquoise expanse of the Pacific. Neither the beauty nor the perfect climate did anything to salve Lieutenant Saburo Shindo’s temper. When he looked north to the Pacific, he saw only an opportunity he would not have. The Americans stuck their head in the tiger’s mouth when he happened to be ashore. Others aboard the Akagi and the Soryu would hunt them at sea. As for him…
Feeling like a caged tiger himself, he paced back and forth at the edge of the runway. The pilots drawn up at attention there followed him with their eyes. He glared at them, then deliberately stopped so they had to look west, into the sinking sun, to see him.
“I hope we will be unlucky,” he said. “I hope the men on our carriers will find the Americans and sink them before they can make their night run towards Oahu. But if the carrier pilots fail, we will see American planes overhead early tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”
“Hai! ” the fliers chorused.
“You had better,” Shindo snarled. “Because you will be up and waiting for them when they arrive. You will be waiting for them, and you will make them sorry they dared come anywhere near this island. Do you understand that?”
“Hai! ” they chorused again.
Shindo scowled. “All right, then. I will be up there with you, and I will be watching. Anyone who lets an American escape-even one American, do you hear? — will answer to me. I am more dangerous to you than any stinking Yankee pilot ever born. Do you understand that?”
“Hai! ” the pilots said once more.
“Good. You’d better.” Shindo turned his back. “Dismissed.” He heard the men muttering, but he didn’t look at them again. Let them mutter. As long as they were worrying about him, they wouldn’t worry about the enemy. That was what he had in mind.
JANE ARMITAGE BROKE a nail weeding her potato patch. She hardly bothered to swear. That wasn’t because she didn’t want to seem unladylike. She couldn’t have cared less. These days, though, a broken nail was nothing to get excited about. She looked down at her hands. Before the war started, the only mark they’d had was a small callus on the side of her right middle finger: a writer’s callus. Now hard yellow calluses banded her palms. Her fingers were battered and scarred. Her nails… didn’t bear thinking about. They’d been a disaster even before she broke the latest one. She bit it off short and reasonably straight-why wait to go back to the apartment and dig out a manicure scissors? Then she got back to work.
Pretty soon she’d be able to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down toward the Waianae Range. A shower would be-not quite heavenly, not without hot water, but welcome even so. Then she could go have supper. She was amazed how important food had become in her life now that she didn’t have enough of it. Just thinking of supper was enough to make her stomach rumble. It would go on rumbling after she ate, too.
Never enough… Everyone in Wahiawa got thinner by the day. That had to be true of everyone on Oahu, everyone in the Territory of Hawaii, but Jane hadn’t gone outside of Wahiawa since the fighting started. She felt as if she’d fallen back through time like someone in an H. G. Wells story. What was she but a peasant from the Middle Ages, tied to her little plot of land?
She paused again in her weeding. This time, it wasn’t a broken fingernail but a distant droning in the sky. She frowned. The Japs didn’t fly all that much, certainly not so much as the Army Air Corps had before Hawaii changed hands. Maybe they didn’t have as much fuel as they would have liked. Or maybe they just didn’t think they had anything to worry about. Whatever the reason, they didn’t.
And the swelling drone didn’t sound as if it came from Japanese planes. Jane had heard enough of them to know what they sounded like. She looked up. Coming out of the northeast, over the Koolau Range, was a V of big, two-engine, twin-tailfinned airplanes. She stared at them, hardly daring to hope that…
They flew right over Wahiawa, low enough to let her make out the stars on their wings. They were! They were American planes!
Jane wanted to yell and scream and dance, all at the same time. She heard cheers here and there. She heard them, but she didn’t do anything except go on staring up at the sky. Too many people were out and about. Someone might see her and report her to the Japs if she celebrated too hard. You never could tell, and you didn’t want to take a chance.
How had they got here? They looked too big to be carrier planes. Had they flown all the way from the Pacific Coast? If they had, they surely couldn’t carry enough gas to get back. What were they going to do?
What they were going to do now was attack Wheeler Field, not far southwest of Wahiawa. A few antiaircraft guns started shooting at them, but only a few. The Japs must have been as taken aback as the Americans were when the war started. Would some Japanese politician stand up in whatever they used for a parliament and make a speech about April 18, the way FDR had about December 7? By God, I hope so! Jane thought savagely.
Crump! Crump! Crump! Yes, that was the noise of bursting bombs. Jane had become altogether too well acquainted with it to harbor any doubts. Give it to ’em! Give it to the lousy sons of bitches! She didn’t say a thing. She thought her head would burst with the effort of holding those loud, loud thoughts inside.
Not everybody bothered. She heard an unmistakable Rebel yell. And somebody shouted, “Take that, you fucking slant-eyed bastards!” She didn’t recognize the voice. She hoped nobody else did, either.
A column of greasy black smoke rose into the sky, and then two more in quick succession. They weren’t anything like the massive pall that had marked Pearl Harbor’s funeral pyre, but they were there. The bombers had hit something worth hitting.
The dinner bell rang, summoning people all over Wahiawa to the community kitchen. Jane’s amazement grew by leaps and bounds. For a few wonderful minutes, she hadn’t even realized she was hungry.
COMMANDER MINORU GENDA snatched up the jangling telephone in his office. “Moshi-moshi! ” he said impatiently. An excited voice gabbled in his ear. Genda’s impatience gave way to astonishment. “But that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. More gabbling assured him that it wasn’t. “How the-?” He broke off. He heard bombs going off in the distance, not at Wheeler Field-that was too far away for the sound to carry-but off to the west. Hickam! he thought in dismay. “So sorry, but I’ve got to go,” he told the officer on the other end of the line, and hung up before the man could squawk any more.
He rushed downstairs and out onto the sidewalk in front of his office building. The sun was dropping down toward the Pacific. Genda caught glints of light off airplane wings. He knew the silhouette of every plane Japan made. Those weren’t Japanese aircraft.
They were, they could only be, American. He watched them drone east past the southern edge of Honolulu. He knew every carrier-based U.S. warplane by sight, too. He had to. The planes he saw weren’t any of those, either.
Other people also realized they belonged to the USA. The whoops and cheers that rang out all over Honolulu told him as much. If he’d had any doubts that Hawaii wasn’t fully reconciled to Japanese occupation, those whoops would have cured them.
Those weren’t carrier-based aircraft. They were… “Zakennayo! ” Genda exclaimed. He seldom swore, but here he made an exception. Those were U.S. Army B-25s.
A million questions boiled in his head. How did they get here? came first and foremost. They didn’t have the range to fly from California. The answer to that one formed almost as fast as the question did. The Americans must have flown them off one of the carriers the picket boat had spotted. Genda bowed slightly toward the U.S. bombers in token of respect. That had taken imagination and nerve.