“Torpedoing?” Jiro said. “What’s this? I’ve been out on the ocean all day without a radio.”
“A damned American submarine sank the Bordeaux Maru this afternoon,” the soldier told him. “She was bringing supplies to the island, but. . . . Karma, neh? The Americans want everyone here to starve. That’s why I said Kita-san would be so glad to get your tuna.”
He opened the door for Jiro, who took the ahi inside. Nagao Kita, the consul, was a short, stocky, round-faced man. He was in animated conversation with three or four Army and Navy officers, but broke off when he saw Jiro. “Takahashi-san!” he said, and the fisherman was proud this important personage had remembered his name. A broad smile spread across the consul’s face. “What have you got there, my friend? Doesn’t that look beautiful?”
“It’s for you, sir,” Jiro said, “and maybe for these gentlemen, if you feel like sharing.”
“Yes, if I do,” Kita said, and laughed. The officers were ogling the splendid ahi, too. A Navy captain licked his lips, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Kita stepped up and took the fish from Jiro. The consul gave him a more than polite bow. “Very kind of you to think of me, Takahashi-san, very kind. I won’t forget it, believe me. When I have the chance, you can bet I’ll think of you.”
Delighted, Jiro returned the bow. “I’m sure that’s not necessary, sir.”
“I think it is.” Having received the tuna with his own hands, Kita called for one of his aides to take charge of it. He turned back to Jiro. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now. We have to figure out what to do about the miserable business this afternoon.”
He didn’t say what the business was. Jiro didn’t show he knew. That might have landed the sentry in hot water. He just nodded and said, “Of course, sir,” and turned to go.
“I won’t forget you,” Kita promised. “You’re a reliable man.” As Jiro pushed through the blackout curtains that kept light from escaping when the door opened, he felt ready to burst with pride. The consul thought he was reliable! The Emperor might have just pinned the Order of the Rising Sun on his chest.
JOE CROSETTI’S INSTRUCTOR in essentials of naval service was a graying lieutenant named Larry Moore. He had a face as long as a basset hound’s, and normally about as doleful, too. When he came into the classroom wreathed in smiles one morning, Joe figured something was up.
And he was right. Lieutenant Moore said, “Gentlemen, yesterday the Grunion sent a Jap freighter to the bottom off the north coast of Kauai. We are starting to hit back at those slanty-eyed so-and-sos.”
A savage cheer—almost a growl—rose from the throats of the flying cadets. Joe joined in. Several young men clapped their hands. Orson Sharp raised his. When Moore pointed to him, he said, “Sir, are the Japs making any effort to bring in supplies for the civilians in Hawaii, or is everything they’re shipping in for their garrison?”
“That’s . . . not entirely obvious,” Moore said after a brief pause. “But that ship could have been carrying munitions or aircraft as readily as rice for soldiers or civilians.”
“Yes, sir.” As usual, Sharp was punctiliously polite. “Were there secondary explosions after the torpedo hit?”
“I don’t know one way or the other, so I can’t tell you,” the instructor answered. “If you’d be so kind, though, you might tell me why you’re wasting grief on a bunch of damn Japs.”
Most cadets, if challenged that way, would have lost their temper or backed down. Orson Sharp did neither. “Sir, I’ll wave bye-bye to all the Japs we send to the bottom. But there are an awful lot of hungry people in the Hawaiian Islands. If they’re going to get hungrier, I am sorry about that.”
Lieutenant Moore studied him. Sharp hadn’t been disrespectful or insubordinate in any way. He had an opinion, and he’d come out with it. If it wasn’t one the instructor happened to share . . . Well, was this still a free country or not? No, Joe realized, that wasn’t the right question. The country was still free. How freely anyone in the Navy could speak up was a whole different ballgame.
At last, Moore said, “Well, we’ll let it go this time, then.” He sounded like a governor pardoning a prisoner who probably didn’t deserve it. After another moment or two, Moore went on, “Where were we? Oh, yes. We were going to talk about yesterday’s quiz. About half of you didn’t know that a chief bosun can’t be tried by summary court-martial. Well, gentlemen, he can’t. A chief bosun is a warrant officer, which means the rules for ratings don’t apply to him.”
Bill Frank, who was sitting to Joe’s left while Sharp sat to his right, whispered, “Did you get that one?”
Joe nodded infinitesimally. “Yeah,” he whispered back. “How about you?”
“I think I blew it.” His roomie put a world of pathos into five almost inaudible words.
Lieutenant Moore went over the quiz item by item, concentrating on the ones a lot of cadets had missed. Along with courts and boards, essentials of naval service covered ranks and their duties, naval customs and usages, and all the endless formalities that let officers and ratings work together smoothly. Joe had seen a commander tromp all over a j.g. for something dumb the junior officer did one morning, then play bridge with him that night as if nothing had happened.
He didn’t fully understand how that worked. If anybody had been so bitingly rude to him, he would have wanted to brain the son of a bitch with a tire iron, not play cards with him. But the career Navy men seemed able to build a wall between what happened on duty and what happened off. Of course, they’d had years of practice. That kind of discipline didn’t come naturally. Without it, though, a lot of guys would have grabbed tire irons.
The instructor might have been reading his thoughts. “A ship is a very crowded place,” Moore said. “The sooner you start thinking like Navy men, the better you’ll fit in when you go to sea. We have round holes, gentlemen. People who insist on being square pegs don’t have an easy time of it.” He was looking at Orson Sharp as he said that.
When they got out of essentials of naval service, they had to hustle to make it to introductory navigation. Joe liked that least of the three academic courses in the program; it showed him he hadn’t paid enough attention in geometry and trig. But plenty of other cadets were struggling harder than he was.
“I hope you didn’t get Moore mad at you,” he said to Sharp as they hurried from one building to another.
“So do I, but I won’t lose any sleep over it,” the cadet from Utah replied. “I had a legitimate question.”
“I guess so,” Joe said.
Sharp’s eyes said Joe had just flunked a test. “Don’t you care what happens to the civilians in Hawaii? They’ve got a tough row to hoe.”
“Well, yeah,” Joe admitted. “But isn’t kicking the Japs out the best thing we can do for them? Odds are, whatever that freighter was carrying was going to the Jap Army or Navy, not to civilians.”
“Maybe. I suppose we have to hope so.” Sharp sounded no more convinced than Joe had a minute earlier. “They can’t let everybody starve, though.”
“Who says they can’t?” Joe retorted. “Look what the Nazis are doing in Russia.” Sharp winced but didn’t carry the argument any further, from which Joe concluded he’d won the point.
Any pride in his prowess disappeared in introduction to navigation. He butchered a problem—and he did it on the blackboard so everyone could see. “I’m afraid that answer is just exactly 180 degrees off, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said. “In other words, you couldn’t be wronger if you tried. Take your seat.” Ears blazing, Joe did. The instructor looked around. “Who sees where Mr. Crosetti went astray here?” Several people raised a hand. The instructor pointed. “Mr. Sharp.”
Orson Sharp solved the problem with what looked like offhand ease. He wasn’t having any trouble in the class. When he sat down, he didn’t act as if he’d just shown Joe up. Maybe he didn’t even feel that way. Joe knew he would have were their positions reversed. That made him resent his roomie even if Sharp did
n’t resent him.
After the lecture, the instructor gave out more problems, these for pencil and paper. Joe thought he did pretty well on them. You probably did, but so what? he jeered at himself. Everybody already watched you show what a jerk you could be.
He breathed the heady—and chilly—air of freedom again when he got out of class. As far as he could tell, he’d never make it back to his carrier if he took off from one. But when he said that out loud, Orson Sharp shook his head. “I saw what you did. You took the tangent instead of the sine—just a little goof. You won’t do it with your neck on the line.”
“I hope not,” Joe said. Sharp perplexed him almost as much as his mangled navigation. Maybe the other cadet really wasn’t mad at him after all. Did that mark almost inhuman restraint or a genuinely good person?
The cadets’ other academic class was identification and recognition: how to tell bombers from fighters, cruisers from battleships, and Allied planes and ships from the ones that belonged to the Axis. They’d already had to learn the silhouettes of some new German and Japanese planes that hadn’t been known when they started the course.
Joe eyed blown-up photos and drawings with something less than his usual attention. He kept thinking about the question he’d asked himself between classes. How do you identify and recognize a genuinely good person? It wasn’t as if that were something he had to worry about every day. He knew too well that he didn’t fill the bill. Orson Sharp might.
Despite absentmindedness, he got out of the class without embarrassing himself again. Along with the other cadets, he trooped over to the cafeteria—now styled the galley in deference to the influx of Navy fliers—for lunch. The choice was between chicken à la king (which the cadets universally called chicken à la thing) and creamed chipped beef on toast (which had an older and earthier nickname). Joe chose the chicken. Sharp filled his plate with the beef.
At every table, some wit tapped out dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, the Morse for SOS. People snorted. Orson Sharp looked puzzled. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Pointing to Sharp’s plate, Joe said, “You know what they call that stuff.”
“No. What?” The kid from Utah seemed more confused than ever.
As the pseudo-distress calls went on and on, Joe fought not to roll his eyes. Sharp really had led a sheltered life. Patiently, Joe spelled it out for him: “Shit on a shingle. S-O-S.”
“Oh.” A light went on in Sharp’s eyes. “No, I didn’t know that. Well, at least it makes sense now.” He dug in. “I don’t care what they call it. I think it’s good.” As usual, he didn’t let being different from the other cadets faze him. He had his own standards, they suited him, and he stuck to them.
After lunch came athletics. Orson Sharp knocked people into next week on the football field. Joe played offensive end and defensive back. Bigger guys tried to run over him. He tried not to let them. Along with everybody else, they both got knocked around by the dirty-fighting instructors. Swimming felt strange to Joe. He already had a pretty good crawl, but they wanted him to use a modified breaststroke because it kept his head out of the water better. He did his best to learn it. He’d gained five pounds since coming to Chapel Hill, all of it muscle.
And when the lights went out at half past nine, he fell asleep as if he’d been clubbed.
IX
ACCELERATION PRESSED LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO back into his seat as he roared off the Akagi’s flight deck. He’d had the mechanics install steel plates in the back and bottom of the seat. A lot of Japanese pilots disdained the extra weight: it made their Zeros slower and less maneuverable. The Americans had carried much more armor than he did. It had saved a lot of pilots, or at least let them bail out. It hadn’t saved Hawaii, but he still thought it was a good idea.
Surrounded by a screen of destroyers, Akagi patrolled northeast of Oahu. The Japanese had also commandeered some big fishing sampans, mounted radios on them, and posted them in a picket arc close to a thousand kilometers out from the Hawaiian Islands. No carrier-based bomber could fly that far and return to the ship that had launched it. The United States wasn’t going to catch Japan napping, the way Japan had caught the USA.
Just in case the boats in that picket arc had missed something, Shindo watched the sky like a hawk. Some people slacked off when they didn’t expect to run into trouble. Shindo wasn’t one of those. Routine meant routinely capable, routinely excellent, to him.
He also glanced down at the ocean every now and again. Losing the Bordeaux Maru was a wake-up call for the Japanese Navy. That had happened more than three weeks ago now. The submarine that got the freighter was bound to be long gone. That didn’t mean others hadn’t come to take its place, though. Shindo couldn’t sink one if he spotted it on the surface: the Zero didn’t carry bombs. But he could shoot it up. If his machine guns and cannons filled it full of holes, it couldn’t submerge. Then it would be easy meat for bombers or destroyers.
Here, though, nothing marred the Pacific but the ships of the Japanese flotilla and their wakes. The rest of the ocean seemed glassy smooth. There was hardly any chop; the wind was the next thing to a dead calm. No big swells were rolling down out of the north, either, as they had been when the task force moved on Hawaii. Had those been much worse, the barges would have had trouble landing, and the invasion might have turned into a fiasco. Admiral Yamamoto had bet against the kami of wind and wave, and he’d won.
Shindo called the other fighter pilots flying combat air patrol: “Anything?”
A chorus of “No”s resounded in his earphones. Some pilots were even tempted to take the radio out of a plane to save weight. Shindo had issued stern orders against that. As far as he was concerned, staying in touch counted for more than the tiny bit of extra speed and liveliness you might gain from saving the kilos the radio weighed. Some people had grumbled about it, but he’d stood firm.
A sudden spurt of steam down below, foam and spray everywhere as a great bulk heaved itself out of the water. Excitement coursed through Shindo. Was that a broaching submarine? A few seconds later, the Japanese flier started to laugh. That was no submarine—it was a breaching whale. The war between Japan and the USA meant nothing to it. To it, the ocean mattered only for krill. Men had other ideas, though. One of those ideas had put Shindo in a fighter plane and taken him far from home.
He listened to excited radio calls from the other pilots who’d seen the whale. “I was going to dive on it and shoot it up,” somebody said.
“Shame to waste all that meat without a factory ship close by,” someone else replied.
That made people laugh. Shindo smiled a thin smile inside his cockpit. Better when the men were happy and laughing. They paid closer attention to what was going on around them. Right here, right now, that probably didn’t matter. No Yankees were likely to be within hundreds of kilometers. But you never could tell.
Throttled back, a Zero could stay in the air for more than two hours. Shindo and his comrades buzzed along in great spirals around the Akagi and the destroyers that covered her. The whale was the most interesting thing any of them saw. Shindo didn’t yawn as he flew—he was far too professional to let down on the job—but it was a long way from the most exciting patrol he’d ever led.
He took the flight back to the carrier after its replacements had risen into the air. Nobody felt like yawning landing on a rolling, pitching flight deck. Shindo made himself into a machine, automatically obeying the signals of the landing officer at Akagi’s stern. The man on the ship could judge his course better than he could. He knew that, however little he cared to admit it even to himself.
When the landing officer’s wigwag flags went down, Shindo dove for the deck. He bounced when he hit, so that the Zero’s hook missed the first arrester wire. But it snagged the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.
Shindo pushed back the canopy and scrambled out. The deck crew took charge of the Zero, shoving it to one side, away from the path of the incoming planes behind it. Shindo
sprinted for the island. The motion of the deck under his feet seemed as natural as the motion of air in his lungs.
Commander Genda greeted him just inside. “Anything unusual?” he asked.
“No, sir.” Shindo shook his head. “About the most interesting thing we saw was a whale. We wondered if it was a Yankee sub, but it was only a whale.”
“All right,” Genda said. “The splash the big ones make when they come to the surface can confuse you at first. But the Americans don’t build subs with fins and flukes.” He chuckled.
Shindo managed another thin smile. Fins and flukes . . . Where did Genda come up with such nonsense? The smile didn’t last long; Shindo’s smiles seldom did. He said, “Forgive me for saying so, sir, but I’m afraid this patrol is costing us more fuel than it’s worth. How likely are we to encounter the enemy?”
Genda only shrugged. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, you don’t know, either. That’s why we’re here: to help find out how likely we are to run into the Americans sticking their long noses where they don’t belong. We learn something if we meet them . . . and we learn something if we don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” Shindo said, an answer a subordinate could never go wrong in giving to his superior. His own opinion he kept to himself. If Genda wanted it, he would ask for it.
He didn’t. He just said, “Prepare your report. We’ll put it together with all the others and see what kind of picture it makes.”
“Yes, sir,” Saburo Shindo said again, and gave Genda a salute as mechanically perfect as his landing a few minutes before. As he had then, he followed someone else’s will rather than his own. He shrugged, if only to himself. A lot of military life involved following someone else’s will.
THE SUN SANK toward the Pacific. Jim Peterson took a nail out of his mouth and used it to fasten a plank to a two-by-four. He wished he were using his hammer to smash in a Jap’s skull instead. The guards, though, were on the other side of the barbed wire as the POW camp rose near Opana—about as far north as anyone could go on Oahu. From there, it was nothing but ocean all the way up to Alaska. Peterson could look up and see waves rolling onto the beach.
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