Black puffs of antiaircraft fire appeared behind Shindo’s Zero. The Americans were much more alert than they had been when the fighting started. They still didn’t lead the Japanese fighters enough. They couldn’t believe how fast Zeros were.
Shindo dove on a U.S. artillery position in front of Wahiawa. Sooner or later, the Yankees were bound to figure out that the Japanese had a land-based airstrip and weren’t just flying off carriers any more. When they did, 105mm guns here had no trouble reaching Haleiwa. Knocking them out was important.
He dove on the guns. The Americans realized they had an important position here, too, though they might not have realized why. Tracers from machine-gun fire spat past the stooping Zero. Shindo couldn’t do anything about them, so he ignored them. If they knocked him out of the sky, that was fate, karma. If they didn’t, he would carry out his mission.
His thumb came down on the firing button. He was better at shooting up ground targets than he had been when the fighting here began. He didn’t overshoot any more. As with everything else, practice made perfect. The men around the American guns scattered. Some of them fell. One or two snatched up rifles and banged away at him. That was brave. It was also futile.
Or so Shindo thought till a sharp clank told him somebody’s bullet had struck home. He pulled up, eyeing his instrument panel. No fuel leak showed. His eyes flicked to left and right. His wing tanks weren’t on fire, either. All the controls answered. The round must have hit somewhere harmless. In the privacy of the cockpit, he allowed himself a sigh of relief.
The Americans wasted weight on self-sealing fuel tanks and armored pilot’s seats. That cost them speed and maneuverability. Japan’s fliers had been inclined to laugh at them on account of it. Lieutenant Shindo still was . . . but less so than when the fighting started. Yes, the extra weight hurt performance. But Shindo had seen U.S. planes take hits that would have sent a Zero down in flames and keep on flying as if nothing had happened. There were advantages on both sides.
Half his attention was on the ground as he looked for more strongpoints to shoot up. The other half was in the air. Every so often, the Yankees sent up some of their few surviving fighters. They weren’t much if you knew they were coming, but they could give you a nasty surprise if they got on your tail before you knew it. The pilot who didn’t learn to check six in a hurry usually didn’t last long enough to learn at his leisure.
Shindo didn’t spot any trouble this time. As usual, the Japanese had the skies over Oahu to themselves. All he had to worry about was ground fire. That didn’t bother him much. He had its measure.
A column of olive-drab trucks was heading north up the highway that ran through the center of the island. The column wasn’t moving anywhere near so fast as it might have. Southbound refugees, some on foot, others in automobiles, clogged the road. Shindo laughed. He’d seen that before. Americans had no discipline. They refused to keep refugees off the road by whatever means necessary, as Japanese soldiers surely would have. And they paid the price for their softness, too.
Radial engine roaring, the Zero dove on the road. Shindo cut loose with the fighter’s machine guns and cannons. It was like stamping on an anthill. People down there scattered in what seemed like slow motion—far too slowly to evade bullets and shells.
Fire and smoke erupted from truck and automobile engines. The plume was tiny compared to the one rising from Pearl Harbor, but every little bit served its purpose. Those soldiers wouldn’t get where they were going when they wanted to get there. That ought to help the Japanese move forward.
On the way back to Haleiwa, Shindo spotted an American machine-gun nest spitting tracers at Japanese foot soldiers. A tank would have taken care of it, but none seemed close by. The pilot felt as if he were looking for a policeman when he really wanted one. He had to do the job himself. And he did, swooping down on the gunners from behind. They might have died before they even knew they were under attack.
Behind the Japanese lines, commandeered cars carried soldiers here and there. Again, Shindo’s side took advantage of the enemy’s wealth. He wished his own country had a larger share of wealth for itself. Getting that larger share, of course, was what this war was all about.
Shindo was used to coming in on the rolling, pitching deck of a carrier. Landing at a strip on dry land felt ridiculously easy, as if he were back in flight school. The only thing the signalman had to do was guide him into one of the earth-banked revetments engineers had made with the bulldozers. They kept his plane safe from anything but a direct hit. As soon as the Zero was in the U-shaped shelter, camouflage nets covered it. The Yankees wouldn’t spot it from the air.
“How did it go?” a groundcrew man asked after Shindo climbed out of the fighter.
“Routine,” he answered. “Just routine.”
MACHINE-GUN BULLETS STRUCK flesh with wet slaps. The noise reminded Fletcher Armitage of the last few fights he and Jane had had before she threw him out of the apartment. When she slapped him, though, his head had only felt as if it would fly off his shoulders. When a real machine-gun bullet hit . . .
The Zero roared away to the south, bound for more mischief. It was low enough to the ground to kick up dust. Fletch fired a last futile shot at it. The fellow piloting it was an artist, which didn’t keep Fletch from hoping he’d burn in hell, and soon, too.
He had more immediate things to worry about, though. Two of his precious, irreplaceable gunners were down, one clutching his leg and moaning, the other ominously still. A quick glance told Fletch nobody could help the second man this side of Judgment Day. He’d caught a slug in the back of the head, and spilled his brains out in the dirt. The only good thing you could say about such an end was that it was quick. He’d never known what hit him.
The artilleryman with the leg wound, by contrast, screamed about God and his mother and shit, all of which amounted to the same thing: he was in pain and didn’t like it. “Hold still, Vic,” Fletch said, kneeling beside him. “I’ll get a bandage on you.” A week earlier, he might have lost his lunch trying. Not any more. He’d had practice. What was that line from Hamlet? Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness, that was it. Old Will had known what he was talking about there, sure as hell.
“Hurts. Hurts like shit,” Vic said.
“Yeah, I know.” Fletch used his bayonet to cut away the khaki cloth of the other man’s uniform—one of the few things a bayonet was actually good for. He could see the artery pulsing inside the wound. It looked intact. If it weren’t, Vic probably would have bled to death.
Fletch dusted the gash with sulfa powder. He couldn’t sew it shut, but fumbled in one of the pouches on his belt and produced three safety pins. They’d help hold it closed, anyhow. He got a bandage over the wound, then stuck Vic’s syringe of morphine into his thigh and pressed down on the plunger.
A couple of minutes later, Vic said, “Ahh. That’s better, sir.” He sounded eerily calm. The drug had interposed a barrier between his torment and him.
“We’ll take him now, sir,” someone behind Fletch said.
He looked up. There were two corpsmen, Red Crosses prominent on their helmets and on armbands. “I wish you guys got here sooner,” he said.
The man who’d spoken gave back a shrug. “It’s not like there’s nothing going on for us, sir.” He looked weary unto death.
His buddy nodded, adding, “Goddamn Japs shoot at us regardless of these.” He tapped the Red Cross emblems. “Bastards don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention.”
“Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. The memory of the American soldier the Japanese had captured rose in him again. His stomach churned. “You don’t want to let yourselves get caught,” he told the corpsmen.
They nodded in unison. “Yeah, we already know about that,” one of them said. They got Vic onto a stretcher and carried him away. “Come on, buddy—the docs’ll fix you up.”
That left Fletch to figure out how to fight his gun without two more trained men. He had untrain
ed infantrymen jerking shells now. His gun wouldn’t shoot as fast as it had before, but he could still get out two or three rounds a minute. If he had to lay the gun by his lonesome . . . then he did, that was all.
He muttered to himself. Even from here, the piece could reach all the way to the north shore and into the Pacific. And how was it being used? As a direct-fire gun, banging away at whatever targets he could see. He had no idea where the rest of the 105s in the battery were. The two guns close by belonged to another outfit. They’d been shot up worse than his crew. And that was par for the course. If anything, it was better than par for the course. He’d taken everything the Japs could throw at him, and he was still in the fight. A hell of a lot of people weren’t.
In the sugar fields off to the northeast, a Japanese machine gun started hammering away. The Japs were aggressive with their automatic weapons. They pushed them right up to the front and went after U.S. infantry with them. He didn’t care to think what they would have done with Browning Automatic Rifles. So far, they hadn’t shown any signs of owning weapons like those. He thanked God for small favors.
Aiming the gun at a target by himself was only a little faster than dying of old age. And he hadn’t finished the job before shouts of, “Tank! Tank!” from right in front of him made him give it up.
From everything he’d heard, the U.S. M3 wasn’t anything special compared to what the Germans and the Russians were throwing at each other these days. M3s could usually make the Jap machines say uncle, though. That truth would have pleased Fletch more if any of those U.S. tanks were in the neighborhood. They weren’t. If anything was going to stop this snorting Jap beast from running roughshod over the infantrymen, it was his gun.
“Armor-piercing!” he shouted to the foot soldiers he’d dragooned into his service.
“Which ones are those, sir?” one of them asked.
“Shit,” Fletch said. But he said it under his breath; it wasn’t the infantrymen’s fault that they didn’t know one kind of round from another. “The ones with the black tips. Shake a leg, guys, or that son of a bitch is going to—”
That son of a bitch did start shooting first. Fletch and his makeshift crew threw themselves flat. Fragments of sharp, hot steel snarled overheard. Standing up while you were getting shelled was asking to get torn to pieces. Sometimes you had to, but you never wanted to.
An American machine gun opened up on the tank. For all the good their bullets did, the soldiers at the gun might as well have thrown marshmallows at the Japanese machine. A tank that wasn’t armored against machine-gun fire had no raison d’être.
“French, yet,” Fletch muttered. But the machine gun did do one thing: it distracted the Japs in the tank from the distant artillery piece to the annoyance right at hand. Fletch didn’t know if that was what the machine gunners had had in mind. He doubted it, as a matter of fact. But it let him get to his feet and yell till his crew did the same. “Come on, you bastards! They’ve given us a chance. They’re human, by God! They can make mistakes, just like us.”
The Japs hadn’t made very many, damn them. By sheer dumb luck, the tank wasn’t very far from the line on which the 105 pointed. Fletch swung the barrel to bear on it. Range was about seven hundred yards. He turned the altitude screw. The muzzle lowered, ever so slightly. “Fire!” he shouted.
The gun roared. Flame shot from the muzzle. The shell kicked up dirt in front of the tank and a little to the left. “Short!” one of the infantrymen shouted—they were starting to learn the ropes.
Now—had the Japs seen the shot? Fletch didn’t think so. They went on banging away at the machine gun. “Armor-piercing again!” he said. “Quick, goddammit!” As the shell went into the breech, he corrected his aim—or hoped he did. The tank wasn’t going very fast, but this gun wasn’t made for hitting any kind of moving target. He’d already seen that. “Fire!”
Boom! The 105 went off again. The foot soldiers who served it flinched. They usually remembered to cover their ears, but they didn’t know opening their mouths helped at least as much when it came to beating an artillery piece’s noise.
But then they started making noise of their own, screaming, “Hit! Hit! Jesus God, that’s a hit!” and, “You nailed that fucker, Lieutenant! Nailed his ass good!”
Fletch didn’t think any tank in the world, U.S., British, German, or Russian, could stand up to a 105mm AP round. This Japanese hunk of tin didn’t have a prayer. He couldn’t have aimed it better if he’d had the most highly trained crew in the world and tried for a week. It struck home right at the join between hull and turret, and blew the turret clean off the tank and a good six feet in the air. Ammo in the turret started cooking off, while the hull erupted in a fireball. The crew never had a chance, not that Fletch wasted much grief on them.
“You see how that Jap tank tipped his hat to our gun?” one of the infantrymen yelled.
Fletch laughed his head off. It was a pretty good line, and all the better because it came from somebody so raw. But that wasn’t the only reason. He felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief. The odds had favored the tank, not him. All he had to protect him from fragments was a flimsy shield. He’d had to be dead accurate to kill before he got killed—and he’d done it.
And, as far as he could tell, doing it did neither him nor the American position one damn bit of good. A couple of hours later, he got the order to fall back to the outskirts of Wahiawa. The Army would try to make another stand there.
OSCAR VAN DER KIRK’s life swayed back and forth between something approaching normality and something approaching insanity. Some of the tourists the war had stuck on Oahu still wanted surf-riding lessons. He gave them what they wanted. Why not? He needed to pay his rent just like anybody else. His landlord, a skinflint Jap named Mas Fukumoto, would have flung his scanty belongings out in the street the day after he failed to pay.
He’d had the crummy little apartment on Lewers Street for a couple of years now, after getting the heave-ho from another place much like it. All that time, of course, he’d known Mas Fukumoto was a Jap. He’d known Fukumoto was a skinflint, too. As a matter of fact, he’d never known a landlord who wasn’t a skinflint. The one who’d tossed him out when he got behind was Irish as Paddy’s pig.
But to think of Mas Fukumoto as a skinflint Jap now was to think of him as an enemy—as the enemy—in a way it hadn’t been before December 7. Oscar didn’t know Fukumoto wasn’t loyal to the United States. He had no reason to believe his landlord wasn’t, in fact. That didn’t keep him—and a lot of Fukumoto’s other haole tenants—from giving the man a fishy stare whenever they saw him.
And even when Oscar paddled out into the Pacific—warm despite its being the week before Christmas—with a wahine from Denver or Des Moines, he couldn’t help seeing and smelling the black, stinking smoke that still rose from the Navy’s shattered fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor.
The wahines mostly didn’t care. They’d come to Hawaii to forget whatever ailed them on the mainland. They intended to go right on forgetting, too. And when they couldn’t forget, they said things like, “Well, but that’s all going on way up there. Everything’s pretty much okay down here in Waikiki and Honolulu, right?”
That was a strawberry blonde named Susie. She’d come to Hawaii from Reno to forget about a recently ex-husband, and she was doing quite a job of it, too. She was ready for any kind of lessons Oscar wanted to give her. He had a sure instinct about such things.
He wondered if saying something would mess up his chances. Lying there on the surfboard with her, he shrugged a tiny shrug. She wasn’t the only fish in the sea. He said, “Wahiawa’s only half an hour away. The north coast is only an hour away—a buddy of mine and I were surf-riding up there when the Japs landed. They were shooting at us.”
Susie looked back over her slightly sunburned shoulder at him. Her eyes were blue as a Siamese cat’s. “What was that like?” she asked.
When the bullets started flying back and forth, I pissed myself. Nobody but me’ll ever
know, because I was dripping wet anyway, but I damn well did. “Not a whole lot of fun,” he answered out loud, which was not only true but sounded tough and not the least bit undignified. He wondered if the same thing had happened to Charlie Kaapu. No way to ask, not ever.
What he said seemed to satisfy Susie. She made a little noise, almost a purr, down deep in her throat. “I’m glad they missed,” she told him.
“Me, too,” Oscar said, and she laughed. If he lowered his chin a couple of inches, it would come down on her cotton-covered backside. He decided not to. Unlike some of the women to whom he gave lessons, Susie didn’t need much in the way of signals. He paddled out a little while longer (so did she, not very helpfully), then swung the surfboard back toward the beach. “This time, we’re going to get you up on your knees on the board, okay?”
“What happens if I fall off?” she asked.
“You swim,” he answered, and she laughed. He started paddling shoreward. “Come on. You can do it. I’ll steady you.” And he did, kneeling behind her with his hands on her slim waist. That was a signal of sorts, but it was also line of duty, and she could ignore it if she wanted to. She laughed again. She wasn’t ignoring anything—except the Japs. Oscar wished he could do the same.
Actually, her sense of balance was pretty good—plenty good enough to keep her kneeling on the board with only a little support. The surf wasn’t very big—Oscar had chosen this place with care. But she got enough of the roller-coaster thrill to let out a whoop as they neared the beach.
“Wow!” she said when the surfboard scraped to a stop on the soft sand. There were stars in her eyes. She turned back and gave him a quick kiss. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said, keeping any hint that he’d expected it out of his voice. If they knew you knew, they got coy. “Want to try it again?”
“Sure,” she said, “unless you’d rather just go on back to my room instead.”
Even Oscar hadn’t thought she’d be that brazen. Sometimes the ride lit a fire, though; he’d seen that before. He said, “Well, you’ve paid for two hours of lessons. Afterwards . . . I don’t have anything else going on, so. . . .”
Days of Infamy Page 13
