Before he got into the Frankenstein fighter, a groundcrew man handed him a bottle of the local not-quite-gin. He wouldn’t have drunk before an ordinary mission. What difference did it make now? None he could see. He’d have to be lucky to make a proper attack run. He’d need a miracle, and not such a minor one, to come back.
“Good luck. Hit them hard,” the groundcrew man said as Shindo handed back the bottle. “Banzai! for the Emperor!”
“Banzai!” Shindo echoed. He climbed up into the cockpit, closed it, and dogged it shut. The engine fired up the first try. Shindo took that for a good omen. He’d been desperately short of them lately. So had all the Japanese on Oahu.
One more good omen would be taking off without blowing up. He had a hundred-kilo bomb slung under the plane. What passed for a runway was only enough grass to get him off the ground… he hoped. If there wasn’t quite enough grass or if a wheel bumped down into a hole the grass hid-his mission would be shorter than he expected.
Despite the risks, he wished the bomb were bigger. The fighter could carry 250 kilos without any trouble, but the armorers hadn’t been able to find one that size. He shrugged and adjusted the safety harness. Then he released the brakes. The plane rolled forward. He gave it more throttle. When he neared the end of the grass, he pulled back on the stick. The Zero’s nose came up. He couldn’t have asked for a smoother takeoff.
He got a panoramic view of the fighting as he climbed. Wahiawa was gone, lost. So were the Schofield Barracks, just north of Wheeler Field. If the mechanics had waited much longer to get busy with their wrenches and pliers and rivet guns, they wouldn’t have been able to do this.
Below him, Wildcats and the new American fighters dove to shoot up a Japanese ground position. Machine-gun fire rose to meet them, but no real antiaircraft guns opened up. None of the American planes paid any attention to Shindo. If they noticed him at all, they assumed he was one of them. A Zero’s size and shape were a little like a Wildcat’s, but only a little. The biggest help he had was the Yankees’ assumption that no more Japanese aircraft could fly. If he couldn’t be Japanese, he had to be American. Logical, wasn’t it? But logic was only as good as its assumptions. Since those were wrong…
He flew north, toward the waiting American fleet. A flight of southbound planes waggled their wings at him. Maybe they thought he was in trouble. He politely waggled back, as if to say everything was fine. They flew on. So did he. He smiled a thin smile. As he had in air battles past, he could follow their vector back to the carriers that had launched them. “Domo arigato,” he murmured, doubting they would be glad to have his thanks.
The rest of the U.S. task force-destroyers, cruisers, and battleships-lay close inshore, so their big guns could shell the Japanese. They went at it methodically. Why not? No one could hit back at them. Shindo didn’t intend to. These ships, however impressive (and they put the biggest Japanese fleet to shame), weren’t the ones that really mattered. He wanted the carriers.
They steamed farther offshore, to make sure nothing from Oahu could reach them. Lieutenant Shindo smiled again. Something from Oahu was heading their way anyhow.
There they were! They had destroyers around them to protect against submarines and to deliver antiaircraft fire. They must have long since picked him up on radar. Even if they had, though, they didn’t think he was hostile.
Then he muttered, “Zakennayo!” The carriers still had a combat air patrol overhead. Here came a Wildcat to look him over. Just in case, the pilot was bound to be thinking. Shindo could survive a lot of things, but not close visual inspection. He knew the moment when the enemy flier realized what he was. The Wildcat suddenly sped up and started jinking.
The American thought he could win a dogfight. A lot of Wildcat pilots made the mistake against a Zero. They hardly ever made it more than once. This Yankee wouldn’t. Shindo turned inside him, got behind him, shot him up, and sent him spinning down toward the Pacific.
But the Wildcat pilot must have radioed his buddies. They all swarmed toward Shindo. He’d just run out of leisure. Things would happen in a hurry now. He dove toward the closest carrier. The Americans still didn’t space them out as widely as they should have. If the Japanese could have organized a real attack, they might have mauled this task force. As things were, Shindo could only do his best.
Antiaircraft guns opened up on him as he dove. The ships down below had finally figured out he wasn’t one of theirs. The closest carrier wasn’t a big one. He didn’t care. If he could hit it, he would.
He pulled the bomb-release lever. The bomb fell free. It exploded on the flight deck. Shell fragments or machine-gun bullets slammed into the Zero as it zoomed away. The engine coughed. Smoke trailed from the plane.
“Karma,” Shindo said. Sure enough, this was a one-way mission. He would have been angrier and more disappointed if he’d expected anything else.
He flew on toward the next nearest carrier, hoping his plane wouldn’t go into the drink before he got there. A Wildcat dove on him. He did a snap roll and got away. That changed his direction. There was another carrier, not far ahead. It was landing planes, and had lots of them on the flight deck. Perfect.
He gained a little altitude, then dove as if landing himself. Inside the cockpit, he braced himself for the impact, not that that would do any good. “ Banzai!” he shouted as the flight deck swelled below him.
“Ban-”
JOE CROSETTI RAN FOR THE BUNKER HILL’S island after scrambling out of his Hellcat. He wondered why some nearby ships were firing AA like it was going out of style. He wouldn’t have believed the Japs had any planes left.
What he believed didn’t matter worth a damn. He got his nose rubbed in that a moment later. A sailor pointed to starboard and screamed, “Holy fucking shit, it’s a Jap!”
And it was. The Zero was on fire. It skimmed low over the surface of the Pacific, straight for the Bunker Hill. Joe stared in helpless fascination. What the hell was that pilot thinking? He couldn’t be crazy enough to try to land on an American carrier, could he? He’d get shot to pieces before he could open the cockpit. And even if that weren’t so, he wasn’t lined up anyway.
He rose a little, then dove for the deck. Crosetti couldn’t believe he was going to crash his plane on purpose till he did it. The Zero went up in a fireball. So did half a dozen Hellcats.
“Fire!” Joe yelled. “Fire on the flight deck!”
A flightcrew man came running out of the inferno. His clothes were on fire-he might have been on fire, too. He screamed like a damned soul with devils sticking pitchforks into him.
“Down!” Joe shouted. “Down and roll!” That was what everybody got trained to do. Remembering the training when things hit the fan wasn’t so easy. Joe was still in his flight suit, with the heavy leather jacket. He wasn’t a big guy, but he dashed across the deck, tackled the flightcrew man, lay atop him and beat at the flames with his gloved fists. When most of the fire was out, somebody turned a hose on them for a few seconds. The man behind the hose had the sense to turn the nozzle to mist, not stream. Otherwise, the high-pressure water might have blasted them off the flight deck and into the drink.
Medics came up and hustled the burned man below. “How about you, buddy?” one of them asked Joe.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he answered dazedly. Gloves or not, he’d burned his hands. He had a burn on one cheek, too-he could feel it. But he was in one piece, nothing like the poor bastard who’d come out of that inferno.
The medic slapped ointment onto his cheek. It stung, then soothed. “You did good,” the guy said, then hustled away to look for more casualties.