And one flight of bombers couldn’t be anything more than a nuisance to the Japs. They might remind Hawaii-and Tokyo-that the USA was still in the fight, but they weren’t about to bundle the Empire of Japan back across the Pacific. Too bad, Fletch thought, eyeing the barbed wire surrounding him. Too goddamn bad.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO wasn’t usually a man to show what he felt. Right now, though, he was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. The officers set over him had talked about an American attack at first light tomorrow morning. He’d been ready to meet that. He’d had his fellow fighter pilots at Haleiwa ready to meet it, too.
They hadn’t been ready for the single U.S. bomber that swooped low over the airstrip here now as afternoon passed into evening, dropped a stick of bombs, and roared off to the south. Had there been three bombers instead of one, they could have wrecked the whole field. Bombs from the one were bad enough. No Zeros could take off till those holes got filled in.
“Isogi! ” Shindo shouted at the bulldozer operator. The Army noncom tipped his hat to show that he was hurrying. Blue, stinking diesel smoke belched from the bulldozer’s exhaust pipe. The lowered blade shoved dirt into one of the last holes in the ground. The big, snorting machine tamped the dirt down flat with the blade and with its caterpillar treads.
Pick-and-shovel men would have taken a couple of days to repair the damage. Shindo knew that. Here, the sun still stood in the sky, though it sank toward the western horizon with each passing minute. And each passing minute meant one minute fewer in which he could hope to gain revenge.
As if moving in slow motion, the bulldozer cleared the runway. “Let’s go!” Shindo shouted to his men. They ran for their fighters. As soon as Shindo slammed his canopy shut, a groundcrew man spun his prop. The Zero’s engine roared to life. Obeying another groundcrew man’s signals, Shindo taxied out of the revetment that had saved the plane from damage and out to the runway.
He gave the Zero the gun. It bounced a couple of times as it ran over the hasty repairs the bulldozer had made, but he had no trouble getting into the air. He grudged the time he had to wait for his comrades to join him. As soon as they’d all taken off, they streaked away to the northeast after the now-vanished American bombers.
Where? Shindo didn’t know, not exactly. He was going on dead reckoning and gut instinct and the sketchy reports he’d got from other parts of Oahu. Any of those might have been wrong. All of them might have been wrong, and he knew it only too well. If they were… If they were, he’d see nothing but sky and ocean till he ran low on fuel or ran out of light.
He admired the Yankees’ nerve. They’d got everybody on Oahu jumping like fleas on a hot plate. Including me, he thought sourly. He still hadn’t figured out how they intended to get picked up. He couldn’t believe they’d be able to land on a carrier, even if they’d left from one. Would they ditch in the ocean and trust to luck? That seemed to stretch trust further than it ought to go.
“There, Lieutenant!” An excited voice in his earphones made him stop puzzling over it. “Isn’t that them, about ten o’clock low?”
“Hai.” Shindo, by contrast, sounded perfectly calm. He estimated the American bombers’ course and radioed it back to Oahu. It might help the Japanese carriers and their planes find the ships that had launched the B-25s. That done, he said, “Now we make them pay.”
It wouldn’t be easy. They had scant daylight left. And the bombers had seen them, too. The B-25s dove for the deck. They had a very fair turn of speed. They weren’t as fast or as maneuverable as the Zeros (nothing was as maneuverable as a Zero except the Japanese Army’s Hayabusa fighter, which was much more lightly armed), but they didn’t dawdle.
They also showed they had teeth. The machine gunners in their dorsal turrets blazed away at Shindo and his comrades. And those were heavy machine guns. A Zero must have got in the way of a few rounds, for it tumbled into the Pacific trailing smoke and flame. One reason Zeros were so fast and maneuverable was that they were lightly built. When they got hit, they paid the price.
Shindo chose a B-25. He gave it a burst from his own machine guns. Those were just rifle-caliber weapons. He made hits. He was sure of that. But the bomber kept flying as if nothing had happened to it. Sturdy construction and armor plate might make a plane slow and sluggish, but they too had their advantages.
Another Zero cometed into the sea. Shindo swore. Who was supposed to be shooting down whom? He brought another bomber into his sights. This time, he opened up with his twin 20mm cannon. A couple of hits from them would knock anything out of the sky. Getting the hits was the problem. They fired none too fast and carried only a limited store of ammunition.
Get in close, he thought. That was the fighter pilot’s number-one rule. Get in close enough and you couldn’t miss. Shooting at long range was the most common and worst mistake novices and bad pilots made. Once the enemy filled your windshield, you didn’t scare him when you opened up. You killed him.
The Americans knew that as well as Shindo did. Tracers streaked past his Zero. But they had to aim guns in turrets, which wasn’t easy. He pointed his fighter’s nose at the B-25 and started shooting. Chunks flew from the bomber. For a long, dreadful moment, he thought it would keep going all the same. But it heeled over and smashed down into the ocean. Even then, though, it left only an oil slick, not a floating patch of fire like a Zero. Another place the Yankees added weight was in self-sealing fuel tanks that really worked.
Three more B-25s-and another Zero-went into the Pacific before Shindo broke off the attack. If he and his comrades were going to get back to Oahu with any light in the sky, they had to turn south now. The bombers kept on heading northeast, as if they intended to fly to California. They couldn’t get there, though. Shindo wondered again what they did intend to do.
As he made for Oahu, he also wondered if he’d pursued too long. And then he saw that the groundcrew at Haleiwa had lit up the airstrip with parked cars and trucks and a searchlight that had stood in front of a movie theater. His landing was a long way from elegant, but he made it.
A groundcrew man with a flashlight guided him to a revetment. He killed the motor, leaped out of his Zero, and ran for the radio in the headquarters tent. He wanted to find out whether carrier-based aircraft could catch the enemy’s ships.
Other pilots came to listen with him. A couple of hours later, they got a nasty jolt. Instead of the Japanese finding the American carriers, a U.S. sub found the Soryu. The Yankees must have hoped the Japanese would charge after them, hoped and had submarines lying in wait. Now Shindo listened anxiously, fearing the carrier would sink. Not till after midnight was it plain the ship would survive. Two torpedoes had struck her, but only one exploded. Had they both… But they hadn’t, and the Soryu limped back toward safer waters.
With her came the Akagi. There would be no pursuit of the U.S. raiders after all. However they intended to recover their planes and crews, they could go ahead and do it.
XI
DOOLITTLE RAIDS HAWAII! THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES SCREAMED. TAKES JAPS BY SURPRISE! Only when you got to the fourth paragraph of the story did you discover that six of his sixteen B-25s had been shot down. The rest of what was in the paper was a paean to the heroism of the crews that had been rescued after they ditched in the Pacific-and, in slightly smaller measure, to the heroism of the destroyer crews that had done the rescuing.