End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

The man was obviously right. Instead of wearing tatters of khaki or Navy blue, they wore tatters of blue jeans and plaid or flowered shirts. Just because they were civilians didn’t mean they hadn’t seen their fair share of abuse and then some. They were bruised and battered and beaten. Quite a few of them limped. A lot of them had bloody mouths. They showed missing front teeth that obviously hadn’t been missing long.

  One of the Japs herding them forward smashed a fellow who looked half Hawaiian in the head with a rifle butt for no reason Peterson could see. The man staggered and groaned, but stayed on his feet. Peterson thought that blow would have felled an elephant. But the Japs had also put him in places where you died if you went down. This looked like one of those places for the luckless prisoner.

  Somebody not far away muttered, “Look how fat they are.”

  They weren’t fat, not really. Not even the Japanese guards, with a couple of exceptions, were fat. But they had vastly more flesh on them than the filthy, bearded skeletons already laboring in the Kalihi Valley.

  Shouts in Japanese went back and forth between the soldiers bringing in the new prisoners and the guards in charge of the men already there. Those guards seemed about as delighted to see the new arrivals as a housewife would have been to find more mice marching into her kitchen.

  Peterson knew why, too, or at least one of the reasons why. “If this doesn’t fuck up the count . . .” he said morosely. Several men standing within earshot of him groaned. A Jap guard looked their way. They all pretended they hadn’t let out a peep. After a baleful stare right out of a gangster movie, the guard looked away.

  By a minor-league miracle, the new prisoners didn’t foul up the count too badly. Shouting in fragmentary English, the Japs got them to line up in ranks of ten. That told the guards how many of them there were. Then the Japs went back to counting the POWs already there. They only needed to do it twice before the answer satisfied them.

  Breakfast wouldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes late. To the Japs, that was fifteen minutes too long. Despite groans and curses from the POWs, they headed them off toward the tunnel mouth. Curses and groans didn’t count for much against fit men, fixed bayonets, and live ammunition.

  The Japs drove the newcomers toward the mouth of the tunnel, too. The new fish didn’t complain. They didn’t know they were missing breakfast, and they didn’t know what the devil they were getting into, either. “Wonder what the hell they did to get sent here,” Peterson remarked.

  “Must’ve been something juicy,” Gordy Braddon said. After a meditative moment, he added, “They’re the first batch of civilians ever came here. Japs must want ’em dead bad.”

  “Yeah—same as us,” Peterson said tightly. Braddon nodded.

  “What are we doing here?” asked the big half-Hawaiian guy the Jap had clouted with his rifle butt. Blood and rainwater ran down the side of his face. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “Digging a tunnel through the mountains.” Peterson found himself liking the newcomer’s coolness. He added his name and stuck out a hand.

  “Jim,” the newcomer repeated, taking it. “I’m Charlie—Charlie Kaapu.” His grip was hard and firm. Why not? He didn’t have beriberi taking bites out of his strength. Not yet, anyway. If he stayed here very long, he would.

  “What did you do that made ’em love you well enough to send you to this garden spot?” Peterson asked.

  “Some garden,” Charlie said, and laughed a loud, raucous laugh, the laugh of a man who couldn’t be beaten—or at least of a man who didn’t know he could. He went on, “They say I was spying for the United States.”

  “Yeah? Were you?” Peterson didn’t ask the question. A fellow named Seymour Harper did. Peterson wasn’t the only one who suspected him of snitching to the Japs, though nobody’d ever been able to nail that down for sure.

  A couple of men coughed. That was about as much warning as they could give the new guy without landing in trouble themselves. It wasn’t enough, not really. But Charlie Kaapu turned out not to need it. He started to shake his head, then grimaced and thought better of it. “Shit, no,” he answered. “What really happened was, this Jap major’s girlfriend thought I was better in bed than he was.” He laughed again, complacently. “You know these Japs ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of needle dicks. But she got mad at him one day and told him what she thought, and the motherfucker went and grabbed me—or he had the cops do it, anyway.”

  Gordy Braddon said, “You had more fun getting here than we did, that’s for goddamn sure.” Peterson found himself nodding. He found himself smiling, too, and that wasn’t something he did every day, not in the Kalihi Valley it wasn’t.

  Charlie was smiling, too, which only proved he’d just got here. “So how do we dig this stinking tunnel?”

  They rounded the last bend in the road in front of the tunnel mouth. Jungle no longer hid the hole in the mountainside or the sorry collection of hand tools in front of it. The tools would rust in the rain, but the Japs didn’t care. If a tool broke, that gave them one more excuse to take it out on a prisoner. Peterson pointed at the picks and shovels and crowbars. “Now you see it, Charlie—Devil’s Island, 1943.”

  “Oh, boy.” The half-Hawaiian started singing, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go” in a melodious baritone. Peterson had seen Snow White, too—who hadn’t?—but he hadn’t felt like singing since he got here. He still didn’t.

  Inside the tunnel, torches and kerosene lamps gave just enough light to move and work by. There had been candles and lamps that burned palm oil or something like that. No more. POWs stole them to eat the tallow and drink the oil.

  “You work!” If a Jap overseer was going to know any English, that was it. This one, a sergeant, brandished a length of bamboo to make sure the prisoners got the message. At one time or another, he’d already walloped everybody but the new fish at least twice.

  In a low voice, Peterson said, “We don’t go any faster than we have to.”

  Charlie Kaapu’s shadow swooped and dipped along the rough black basalt of the tunnel wall as he nodded. “No huhu, Jim,” he answered. “I get it.”

  But he and the rest of the newcomers still did a lot more work than any of the POWs who’d been there for a while. That wasn’t because they were more diligent—Jim Peterson thought they’d all got the message about not pushing too hard. With the worst will in the world toward the Japs, though, they couldn’t help themselves. They were so many Charles Atlases alongside the skeletally thin, malnourished prisoners of war. Of course a man with real muscles could outdo somebody who had nothing left between his skin and his bones.

  After an eternity, the shift ended. Charlie Kaapu had got hit a couple of more times for not working fast enough to suit the guards. “You did good,” Peterson told him as they stumbled back toward the camp and what would be their meager evening meal.

  “Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. “How long till I look like you?”

  Peterson had no real answer for that, but he knew it wouldn’t be long.

  ACCOMPANIED BY A PAIR of stalwart petty officers, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida bicycled through the streets of Honolulu. The petty officers weren’t so much bodyguards as men who could get out in front of him and yell, “Gangway!” to clear traffic. Most places, he would have gone by car, and his driver would have leaned on the horn. That he didn’t here was a telling measure of how tight fuel had got in Honolulu.

  Panting a little, he stopped in front of the building where Minoru Genda had his office—stopped so abruptly that his tires drew black lines on the pale concrete of the sidewalk. “Wait for me,” he told the petty officers. “I won’t be very long.” They nodded and saluted.

  Fuchida charged up the stairs to Genda’s office—and then had to charge down again when a young officer said, “So sorry, Commander-san, but he’s not here this morning. He’s gone to Iolani Palace.”

  “Zakennayo!” Fuchida snarled.

  When he turned to go without another word, the junior officer sai
d, “Sir, you’re welcome to use a telephone here to call him.”

  “I’d better go see him,” Fuchida said. If he’d wanted to telephone Genda, he could have done it from Pearl Harbor. Some things, though, were too important to trust to wires—or to junior officers. The youngster raised an eyebrow. When Fuchida ignored him, he sighed and went back to work.

  “That was fast, sir,” one of the petty officers remarked when Fuchida emerged from the building.

  “We’re not done yet—that’s why,” Fuchida answered. “Genda-san’s not here. We’ve got to head back west, over to Iolani Palace. Run interference again for me, if you’d be so kind.”

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused. If they sounded resigned, then they did, that was all. What choice had they but obedience? None, and they knew it as well as Fuchida did. They got back onto their bicycles and started bellowing, “Gangway!” some more. That, at least, seemed as if it ought to be fun. The way civilians scattered before them clearly declared who the conquerors were.

  Fuchida skidded to another stop in front of the palace. The big Hawaiian soldiers at the bottom of the front stairs came to attention and saluted as he hurried by them. So did the Japanese troops at the top of the stairs. He paused for a moment to ask them, “Where’s Commander Genda?”

  They looked at one another with expressions he found unfathomable. After a longish pause, their sergeant said, “Is it very urgent, sir?”

  “You bet your life it’s urgent!” Fuchida exclaimed. “Would I be here like this if it weren’t?”

  Stolidly, the noncom gave back a shrug. “You never can tell, can you, sir? You’ll likely find him in the basement.”

  “The basement?” Fuchida echoed in surprise. The Japanese soldiers nodded as one. Fuchida had assumed Genda was here to talk with General Yamashita, who had his office on the second floor. Admiral Yamamoto had used a basement office here, but the commander of the Combined Fleet was long since back in Japan.

  To make things more annoying, the front entrance didn’t offer access to the basement. Fuming, Fuchida had to go down the stairs, past the Hawaiian soldiers again, and pedal around the palace so he could go downstairs into the lower level. What the devil was Genda doing here? And where in the basement was he likely to be? That damned sergeant hadn’t said.

  Hawaiian bureaucrats were using some of the rooms down there. Fuchida prowled past those. The brown men—and the white—gave him curious looks; since Admiral Yamamoto departed, Japanese officers were seldom seen down here. He looked into those open rooms, and did not see Commander Genda.

  Fuming, he yanked open the first door to a windowless room he found—and almost got buried by an avalanche of dustpans and brooms and other cleaning gear. The Americans called a place like that Fibber McGee’s closet; Fuchida thought the phrase came from a radio show.

  He went down the hall and tried another closed door. This time, he was rewarded by a whiff of perfume, a startled female gasp, and a muttered obscenity. He shut the door in a hurry, but he didn’t go away—the obscenity had been in Japanese.

  Maybe I’m wrong, he thought. But he wasn’t. Commander Genda came out of the small, dark room a couple of minutes later, still hastily setting his uniform to rights. He looked put upon. “What wouldn’t wait till I got back to the office?” he demanded irritably.

  “Nothing I can talk about till we’re out of this place,” Fuchida said, and then, with irritation of his own, “If you have to lay one of the maids here, couldn’t you do it when you’re not on duty?”

  Genda didn’t talk about that till they were out of Iolani Palace. Even then, he waved the petty officers who’d come along with Fuchida out of hearing range before saying, “I’m not laying one of the palace maids. I’m laying Queen Cynthia.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Fuchida had, from time to time, thought of converting to Christianity. That wasn’t what brought out the oath, though. A lot of Japanese who’d been exposed to Western ways used it whether they took the religion of Jesus seriously or not.

  “You’re my friend. I hope you’ll keep your mouth shut. Life would get more . . . more complicated if you didn’t,” Genda said: a commendable understatement. Occupying the islands was one thing, occupying King Stanley Laanui’s wife something else again. Fuchida could imagine nothing better calculated to show what a false and useless regime the restored Kingdom of Hawaii really was. Before he could express his horror, Genda asked, “And what’s the news that made you come over here and hunt me down? By the Emperor, it had better be important.”

  That brought Fuchida back from disasters hypothetical to disasters altogether too real. He also made sure the petty officers couldn’t overhear before he answered, “The Americans put two fish into Zuikaku a couple of hours ago.”

  “What? That’s impossible!” Genda exclaimed. Sadly, Fuchida shook his head. Genda went on more moderately: “That’s terrible!” Fuchida could and did nod. “How did it happen? Will she sink?” Genda asked.

  “How? They don’t know how. They were getting close to Oahu, and wham!” Fuchida said. “They don’t think she’ll go down—she hasn’t lost power, and the pumps are working. But she’s not going to sail against the Americans with Akagi and Shokaku, either. She’s limping in to Pearl Harbor for emergency repairs, and she may have to go back to Japan again.”

  “How could the Americans have got a sub in the right place to torpedo her?” Genda wasn’t really asking Fuchida—he was asking an uncaring world.

  Fuchida only shrugged. “Dumb luck,” he said. “Shigata ga nai.”

  “Obviously it can’t be helped,” Genda said. “It wouldn’t have happened if it could be. But I’ll tell you something, Fuchida-san: it almost makes me wonder if the Yankees are reading our codes.”

  “What?” That shocked Fuchida almost as much as Genda’s dalliance with the redheaded Queen of Hawaii. “Don’t be silly. Everyone knows our codes are unbreakable.”

  “Well, yes.” That Genda admitted the fact did a lot to ease Fuchida’s mind. “Dreadful news, though. Zuikaku! We could really use her, because the Americans are building up for another go at us. That gets plainer every day.”

  “We’ll be able to fly the planes off the airstrips here. . . .” Fuchida began.

  Genda was a small man, and usually a mild-mannered man as well. His scowl now stopped Fuchida in his tracks. “The only way that will do us any good is if we lose the fight on the ocean. I don’t want to lose the fight on the ocean,” he said. “I presume we’ve already screamed to Tokyo that we need more carriers?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fuchida said. “Whether Tokyo will listen is probably a different story, though. They keep going on and on about how thin their resources are stretched.”

  “Our resources won’t have to stretch so far if we lose Hawaii, that’s for sure,” Genda snapped. “Can’t they see that?”

  “We need more carriers. We need more trained pilots,” Fuchida said. “The Americans seem to turn out as many as they want. Why can’t we?”

  “Admiral Yamamoto always said we couldn’t hope to match them,” Genda replied. “That was the main reason we gambled so much in this attack: so what they could do wouldn’t matter.” He sighed. “But it turns out that it does matter. It’s just taken longer to be obvious.”

  Involuntarily, Fuchida looked north and east. “What do we do now?”

  “The best we can,” Genda told him. “What else is there?”

  “You were doing the best you could with the Queen, neh?” If Fuchida thought about such things, he wouldn’t have to think about the real troubles facing the Japanese in Hawaii—for a little while, anyway.

  “It’s not quite like that,” Genda said with more embarrassment than Fuchida had expected from him. “She’s . . . very sweet, really, and her husband doesn’t understand her at all.”

  How many men sleeping with other men’s wives had said exactly the same thing? Fuchida wondered if telling Genda as much would do any good. Since he doubted it, he reluctantly put aside his own th
oughts of King Stanley’s striking spouse. Duty was calling, and in a strident voice. “We’ve got to get you back to Pearl Harbor as fast as we can.”

  Commander Genda sighed once more. “Yes, I suppose so. You came out here to give me the news in person so you wouldn’t have to use the telephone or the radio?”

  “Hai.” Fuchida nodded.

  “Sensible. Good security. The story will get out anyway—bad news always does—but it will take longer this way. We’ll have the chance to come up with some propaganda of our own, maybe even some genuine good news.”

  “That’s what Admiral Kaku thought.” Fuchida turned to one of the petty officers. “Okano!”

  “Yes, sir?” The man came to attention.

  “I’m going to commandeer your bicycle for Commander Genda here. He needs to go to Pearl Harbor right away,” Fuchida said. Okano nodded and saluted—again, what choice did he have? Fuchida went on, “See if you can borrow one or take one from a civilian. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to walk.”

  “He can ride behind me, sir,” the other petty officer said. “I don’t mind.”

  The effect wouldn’t be dignified, but Fuchida wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not now. “All right. We’ll do it that way, then,” he said. “Now let’s get moving.”

  ENSIGN JOE CROSETTI GAVE HIS FIGHTER plane a little more throttle. The F6F Hellcat responded as if angels flapped their wings harder. A slow grin stretched across Joe’s face. “Wow!” he said.

  He’d had some experience with Wildcats now. The F4F wasn’t hopeless against the Zero—it could outdive the top Jap fighter and could take a lot more damage—but it wasn’t a match for the enemy plane, either. The Hellcat . . . The Hellcat was a long step up.

  It was faster than a Wildcat. It had better—much better—high-altitude performance, because its engine packed so much more power. It was even tougher than the older American plane.

  Best of all, it was his. He didn’t have a lot of time to get used to it. Before long, they’d throw him into action against the Japs. He had to be ready. He had to be, and he intended to be.