Maybe we should have put bigger garrisons on the other islands, Genda thought. But Oahu was the one that really counted. Either Japan would have had to pull men from here or brought in more troops overall, which meant more mouths to feed. It hadn’t seemed worthwhile.
The ground shook under Genda as bombs burst only a few hundred meters away. Yamashita sat, impassive, in front of the map. Maybe he’d already resigned himself to death, now or before too long. Genda supposed he ought to do the same. A warrior had to, after all. But achieving that indifference, he found, came harder than it should have.
“YOU SURE YOU OUGHT TO GO TO WORK?” OSCAR VAN DER KIRK ASKED SUSIE.
“These Japs in town nowadays, they’ve got blood in their eye.”
“I’ll be okay.” Susie was wearing the frumpiest dress she owned, but nothing on God’s green earth would make her look like Margaret Dumont. She went on, “They’re not going to shoot me any which way,” and batted those cat-blue eyes at him.
There were times when he didn’t know whether to laugh or to pop her one. He ended up laughing now, because she would have hit back or thrown things if he did try to pop her. “You’ve got to worry about the other, too,” he said stubbornly. “Some of the things I’ve heard about those bastards-”
Susie made an impatient gesture. “We’ve heard that stuff about the Japs ever since they got here.”
“Some of it’s true, too,” Oscar said.
“Some of it, yeah, but not all of it. Most of the time, they haven’t been too bad,” Susie said. As far as Oscar was concerned, that was damning with faint praise, but Susie would do whatever she felt like doing. If the world didn’t like it, that was the world’s tough luck. As if to prove as much, she picked up her handbag, kissed him good-bye-a long, slow, delicious kiss, as if to give him something to look forward to when she got back that evening-and went out the door.
“Jesus,” Oscar said hoarsely, listening to her footsteps receding down the hall. He shook his head, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. It didn’t want to. Susie was a hell of a piece of work-a hell of a piece, period-no two ways about it.
Still shaking his head, he gathered up his sailboard and carried the contraption down to Waikiki Beach. To his relief, the Japs hadn’t cordoned it off with barbed wire. But they did have machine-gun nests and mortar positions camouflaged with golden sand every fifty yards or so along the beach, and more of those half-soldier, half-sailor types trotting here and there.
Fortunately, one of their noncoms or ratings or whatever the hell he was had seen Oscar before. Oscar bowed to him-not easy when he had the big, clunky surf board under one arm and the mast and rigging and sail in his other hand, but he managed. The Jap even deigned to bow back, though not so deeply. More to the point, the tough-looking little man waved him on toward the Pacific.
“Thanks,” Oscar said, and then, “Arigato.” He knew only a handful of Japanese words, but he’d learned that one long before the war started. It came in handy all kinds of places. And it sure came in handy now. The Jap’s face lit up; his grin exposed several gold teeth. He bowed again, this time as equal to equal, and shouted to his men. Oscar couldn’t understand any of it, but by the way they smiled and nodded it must have been good. How to win friends and influence people, he thought.
The Japanese had chased the fishermen off the beach, but they let Oscar paddle out to sea. They were used to him, and didn’t think he was heading out to a submarine or anything like that. Only he knew about the submarine he’d met. He hadn’t even told Susie, though he had asked the sub’s skipper to get word to her family on the mainland that she was all right.
He ran up his mast, rigged the sail, and scooted out to sea on the breeze from off the hills in back of Honolulu. Even as the land receded, he could still hear the rumble of artillery off in the distance. It made him think about things in a way he hadn’t for quite a while. If his countrymen took over again, could he patent the sailboard? If he could, there was probably money in it. He’d done without much money for a long time. Having some might be nice.
He’d got out far enough to think about dropping his hooks into the Pacific when he spotted something floating on the water. It was too small to be a boat, and it wasn’t going anywhere, just bobbing on the swells. Curious, he swung the sailboard towards it.
He’d just realized it was a rubber raft when a head popped up out of it. “Hey, mac, what the hell you call that thing you’re on?” the head’s possessor asked in purest Brooklynese.
“A sailboard,” Oscar answered automatically. He had questions of his own: “Who are you? Are you okay? How’d you get here? Want me to help you get to land?”
“A sailboard? Ain’t that somethin’? What’ll they think of next?” The guy in the raft jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Name’s Nick Tversky. Yeah, I’m jake-not a fuckin’ scratch on me. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good, ya know? Goddamn Nip flak tore hell outta my engine, but the shit all missed me. Can you get me ashore without letting everybody from Tojo on down in on where I’m at?”
“Uh…” Oscar paused. That would have been easy before the Americans came to Hawaiian waters. The Japs hadn’t been so antsy then. They sure as hell were now. “Don’t know for sure if I can sneak you in.”
“Okay. Don’t get your ass in an uproar about it.” The downed pilot sounded a lot more cheerful than Oscar would have in his little rubber boat. He explained why: “They got PBYs doin’ search and rescue. Figure I got a better chance of getting picked up than I do sneakin’ past the fuckin’ slanteyes. If I have to try it, I guess I can paddle that far.”
“Okay,” said Oscar, who was dubious. “You want me to give you a line and some hooks? You might catch something.” He’d been about to start fishing himself before he spotted the life raft.
“That’s white of you, buddy, but honest to God, I think I’ll be fine,” Nick Tversky said. He hadn’t been out here long. He wasn’t badly sunburned, and he hardly needed a shave. Plainly, he wasn’t too thirsty, either.
Oscar didn’t know what to do or what to tell him. Meeting a downed pilot was something he’d thought about now and again. Meeting a foulmouthed downed pilot who didn’t want to be rescued? That was a different story. “Awful good to see the USA coming back here,” he tried, adding, “About time.”
“Hey, I ain’t the brass. I can’t do nothin’ about that,” Nick Tversky said. “But speakin’ of brass, I figure we didn’t try it for a while after we screwed the pooch the first time on account of we wanted to make sure we had the brass knucks on.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Oscar said. “We sure missed you, though.”
“What can you do? Sometimes you just gotta stand the gaff.” Tversky obviously had no idea what Oahu had been through since December 7, 1941. On the other hand, Oscar had no idea what getting shot down in a fighter plane was like. Did the two balance out? He couldn’t have said, not like the scales of justice, but they probably belonged somewhere in the same ballpark.
“Good luck to you,” Oscar said uncertainly, afraid he was leaving Tversky to a fate much worse than the pilot imagined.
But then Tversky let out a whoop and pointed off to the east. “There’s my goddamn taxi, if I can flag it down!” Oscar looked that way. A speck in the sky swelled rapidly. It was a flying boat, all right. Was it an American flying boat? The Japs had ’em, too. Nick Tversky seemed in no doubt. He waved like a man possessed. He pulled out what looked like a pistol and fired it straight up. It turned out to be a flare gun. The flare was much less impressive than it would have been at night: a small red ball of fire. But either it or the pilot’s gesticulating-he damn near capsized the raft-did the trick. The flying boat swung its blunt nose toward him. He whooped again, louder and more ferocious than an Indian in a two-reeler Western.