Much good it does me, Shindo thought. Smash one ant, and the rest would still steal the picnic. The Yankees were ashore. It was the Army’s fight now. The Navy had done everything it could-and failed. Shindo hated failure. He knew that none of what had happened was his fault. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, or that what sprang from it wouldn’t be bad.
American landing craft littered the beaches like children’s toys at the edge of a bathtub. Those ingenious boats, the great fleet of warships offshore, and the stifling enemy air umbrella overhead spoke of an industrial power and of a determination far greater than he’d imagined. He’d scorned the Americans in 1941. He didn’t enjoy that luxury any more.
Tracers zipped past his Zero. He couldn’t outdive or outclimb the U.S. fighter on his tail. He could outturn it, and he did, throwing his aircraft hard to the right. The American tried to stay with him, but couldn’t. Only a Japanese Army Hayabusa could turn with a Zero, but a Hayabusa couldn’t stay up with one if it did.
And Shindo and his Zero couldn’t stay up with the American. He fired a burst at the enemy fighter, but it did no harm. Then the other plane sped away from his as if he were wearing heavy boots. He’d seen that before, too. It infuriated and humiliated him. None of what he felt showed on his face or in his demeanor. It seldom did.
An antiaircraft shell from one of the ships below burst too close for comfort. It didn’t harm the Zero, but staggered it, as if it had rolled into a pothole in the air. He swung through some quick turns and speed changes to throw off the gunners, all the while wondering what to do next.
He couldn’t harm the enemy carriers, not now. Strafing the other warships wouldn’t do a thing to their big guns. He couldn’t do much to the landing craft, either, and what he could do wouldn’t matter; the Americans were on the beaches. I have to hit them there, then, he decided.
He came in low, machine guns hammering. His bullets sent something up in flames. Enemy soldiers scrambled for cover and flopped down when they found it. Not all of them ran. Some stood their ground and blazed away at him with small arms. They’d done the same thing during the first day of the Japanese attack on Hawaii. Anyone who thought the Americans weren’t brave was a fool. They were soft, and they let themselves be captured so their enemies could make sport of them, but in action they showed plenty of courage.
Machine guns also opened up on Shindo. They put enough lead in the air to be nuisances, or worse than nuisances. A bullet clanged home, somewhere behind the cockpit. Shindo eyed his instruments. No damage showed. His controls still worked. He climbed, spun back, and made another run along the beach.
More fire answered him this time. The Americans were ready to the point of being trigger-happy. They missed him, though, missed him again and again. He watched his own bullets chew up sand, and hoped they chewed up men as well.
After one more pass along the beach, he saw he was low on gas. Time to go back and refuel. He’d got out of Haleiwa by bouncing along the grass near the damaged airstrip: if he could take off from a rolling, pitching carrier deck, he could also manage that. But he pulled up instead of trying to land where he’d got airborne. The U.S. naval bombardment had cratered the fields near the runway. He would surely flip his Zero if he tried to put it down.
If he couldn’t land there, though, where could he? The next closest runway was at Wheeler Field, near the center of the island. He knew the Americans had worked Wheeler over, too, but they would have done that from the air alone. Some of the bigger naval guns might have reached it, but surely they would be concentrating on targets closer to shore. Shindo would have, were he mounting an invasion. He had to assume the Americans would do the same.
Wheeler was only a couple of minutes away. He realized at once that the runways would not serve. They’d been pounded hard, and the bulldozers that might have fixed them in a hurry had been pounded even harder. He saw several burnt-out hulks. One of them had been flipped onto its back, no mean feat with a machine so massive.
Bombs had fallen on the grass around Wheeler Field, but it wasn’t-Shindo was betting his life it wasn’t-an impossible landing surface. He came in as slow as he could, just above stalling speed. Down went his landing gear. He brought the fighter’s nose up and the tail down, as if he were out to snag an arrester cable on a carrier deck.
He bounced to a stop. It wasn’t a landing to be proud of, but he got down. For the moment, nothing else mattered. He undogged the canopy, pushed it back, and stood up in the cockpit. Groundcrew men ran toward him. “What do you need?” they shouted.
“Everything,” Shindo answered. “Gas. Oil. Ammunition. A place to piss.”
One of the men pointed back into the bushes. “Do it there. The Yankees won’t spot you that way. And do it fast, before their planes come over again, see you, and shoot you up.”
They weren’t just talking about him, of course. The Americans were much more likely to spy his Zero. As Shindo went into the bushes and undid his flying suit so he could ease himself, he heard the buzz of engines overhead. But that was the familiar buzz of his own country’s airplanes; the Zero and the Hayabusa used the same powerplant. Keeping a few planes in the air to protect what was left of Wheeler Field struck him as a good idea, though he pitied the Army pilots in their Peregrine Falcons. The fearsome new American fighters would chew them up and spit them out. Higher speed and the wing cannon gave Zeros at least some kind of chance against the enemy.
When he came out of the undergrowth, he didn’t see any armorers working on those wing cannon.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
A man reloading one of his machine guns said, “So sorry, Pilot-san, but this has been an Army field for a while. Because Hayabusas don’t carry cannon, I don’t think we’ve got any 20mm ammunition.”
“Zakennayo!” Shindo exclaimed. He thought hard. “Wait a minute. You fly Donryus out of here, neh?” The Ki-49-its name meant Dragon Swallower-was the Army’s counterpart to the Navy’s G4M bomber. It was faster, but had a much shorter range. Like the G4M, it mounted a 20mm cannon for defensive armament.
“I’m an idiot!” the armorer exclaimed. He clapped a hand to his forehead, then bowed. “Please excuse me, sir. We store ammunition for bombers separately from what fighters use.”
“I don’t care if you stow it up your back passage,” Shindo said. “Just get me some, and hurry about it.”
The armorer screamed at his colleagues. One of them dashed away. He came back fast enough to satisfy even the unhappy Shindo. No enemy airplanes had shown up, which was all to the good. Shindo wondered if he’d be able to take off again without nosing down into a hole in the ground. The run was bumpy, but he got airborne.
He would take off and land on highways if he had to. All he wanted to do was hit the Americans as hard as he could for as long as he could. But how would he get refueled if he had to land on a highway? How would the armorers reload his guns? He shrugged. For now, he had fuel and ammunition-and plenty of Americans to hit. He roared back toward the landing beaches.
JIRO TAKAHASHI STARED AT THE SCRIPT in front of him in dismay. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked up to Osami Murata in even greater dismay. “So sorry, Murata-san, but I can’t say this!”