‘Is there any truth…’ I began.
‘Can’t say yet. But something serious seems to have happened. A few of us are going over to Pearl City. We can probably manage to tuck you in if you want to come along. John’s going, the Brass want him down there.’
I packed my things as quickly as I could. In a sense, rushing over to Pearl City was a form of panic, a desire to do something, to avoid sitting still and waiting. That’s the way terror got you, you just ran aimlessly around in any direction.
It was only when I walked with my bag out to the car park that I found John. I was glad to see he didn’t look too worried.
‘I find this very difficult to believe. Something’s happened all right but it must have become exaggerated. We’d better go over and find out exactly what it is.’
Scarcely a word was spoken on the journey to Hailo airport. Nobody said very much there either. We all got on to the plane in silence. It put down for a short stop in the island of Maui and then went on to Honolulu. A big station wagon was waiting for us. There was very little traffic on the road as we made our way to the naval base. Then came a hold-up when it was found that neither John nor I was an American citizen. After a delay, in which I suppose a number of phone calls were put through, we were separated from the others and told that a car would be made available to take us to a downtown hotel. After the best part of an hour a car did appear and we made away in it. In the car John said, ‘I told Art we would go to the Waikiki.’
We got rooms at the hotel. I tried to ring Los Angeles but found all lines engaged. Then I lay flat out on my bed in a quite blank state of mind. I had a call from John on the house phone at about six o’clock suggesting we meet downstairs in the bar for a drink. It seemed as good an idea as anything else. After the drink we went to dinner in the hotel restaurant.
‘I wonder if I could have a talk with you chaps?’ The speaker was an Australian. We told him to pull up a chair. Clearly he had finished dinner. We were only half-way through the main course. We introduced ourselves, and took stock of our new acquaintance. It struck me I had become far more suspicious, far less free and easy, in the last few hours. I felt as if I was on some kind of an assignment. The Australian had an athletic look about him. His manner was pleasant and open.
‘I heard you talking and realized you were a couple of Britishers.’
The clans were certainly drawing together. Our exclusion at Pearl City and now this.
‘How about a walk on the beach when you’ve finished, I’ll be in the bar.’
Then he was gone.
Not long afterwards Art Clementi appeared. We naturally wanted to know the news:
‘It looks bad, real bad. There’s no doubt the west coast has been attacked.’
We tried to get more out of him but either he knew nothing more or he wouldn’t say. It was all very odd. It was also odd that Clementi went off without eating dinner with us. He excused himself by saying he had already eaten but I knew from the way he looked at the food that this couldn’t be so. What the hell did it mean, the contrast between this frigidity and the uproarious welcome we had received only the other day in California?
We got the beginnings of an answer from our Australian acquaintance. He waited until we were well away on the beach before he would talk. The man was a QANTAS pilot. He had been on a regular flight from Honolulu to the United States. As he approached the international airport at Los Angeles a message had come through directing him to return.
‘There was something crook about it.’
‘In what way?’
‘It didn’t look right. In fact it was all wrong, just as wrong as it bloody well could be.’
‘Things wouldn’t look very pretty after a nuclear attack.’
I had told John nothing of Helena Summers. In the poor light I don’t suppose they could have seen my distress.
‘That’s just it. If I could have seen a lot of damage, a lot of smoke, I wouldn’t have been surprised.’
‘There must have been smoke.’
‘Well, there wasn’t. It was a clear day. Of course I was nearly fifty miles out to sea. Yet as far as I could tell there was nothing.’
We stopped in astonishment. The surf broke loudly, not far away on our right. We waited for the rippling noise to die away.
‘Nothing?’
‘Not a bloody thing. I could see the whole Los Angeles basin. And I tell you there wasn’t a bloody thing there.’
‘I tried to ring Los Angeles this afternoon. They told me all the lines were engaged, so there must be something there.’
‘Do you think they’d tell you if there wasn’t?’
‘Didn’t you get any signals from the control tower?’
‘Not a damn thing. Not a peep. I thought the radio must be out of action. We couldn’t pick up anything, not from San Francisco either, or from the control stations to the east. I told the wireless operator to keep trying. He did a big search over the whole shortwave band. Do you know what he came up with?’
‘If the war’s really started all long-range stuff will be off the air. Local TV stations and news stations will be on, probably.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you this. I got the control back here, exactly as usual. And I got some shortwave stuff from Britain. And that was it, nothing anywhere else.’
‘You got the usual British channels?’
‘As far as I could tell. We’re a long way off here. So I only got odd snatches. As far as we could judge it was about what was to be expected in a normal way.’
We walked on for a while before John said, ‘Could that be the trouble do you think? It seems incredible but if Britain’s really on the air in any normal way she hasn’t been attacked.’
‘It could be.’
‘Did you get anything from the west, the other way?’
‘From Fiji, nothing from Sydney.’
It didn’t make sense, except perhaps for one ray of light.
‘Do you think they imagine we’ve gone neutral? If Britain is more or less normally on the air that’s what it looks like.’
‘I’d thought of that,’ answered John. ‘It would fit. If they think we’ve ratted on them it would be natural enough for them to treat us pretty distantly. Yet it seems fantastic. British policy and American policy are in it together. I would have thought we couldn’t keep out even if we wanted to.’
We headed back to the hotel. I asked, ‘What are you going to do? With your plane? Go back to Australia?’
The pilot paused for a moment. ‘I’ve given quite a bit of thought to that. I’m supposed to be on a through flight Los Angeles to London, with a refuelling stop in Canada. I suppose if I insist they’ll let me take off as long as I agree to keep over Canadian territory all the way.’
‘Isn’t that the natural thing to do?’
‘I suppose so. But I’m leery about it. I can’t say exactly why, but I’d prefer it if I could go right through in one hop.’
‘I thought the new planes could pretty well do that, at any rate from California. Can’t you make it with a light load?’
‘I’ve got one of the old jobs.’
‘Pity, because we ought to be getting back home—at any rate if the atmosphere doesn’t get warmer around here.’
‘Day after tomorrow we have a long-distance plane coming through. It could make the trip. I’ll have a word with the captain if you like.’