Oscar had been brought up bourgeois. Every so often, he wondered what the hell he was doing with his life. But all the doubts flew away when he rode along at the crest of a wave-or when he rode one of the girls he’d taught to kneel on a board in the wahine surf near the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. He was having a good time: that was what he was doing. Who needed anything more?
He snagged a lot of lessons toward the end of 1941. He’d been short on cash, and winter brought the tourists out from the cold parts of the country. But when his latest girlfriend threw a vase at his head after he didn’t ask her to marry him the night before she sailed back to Los Angeles, he decided the time had come to get away from it all for a little while.
He loaded his board into the Chevy. With him rode Charlie Kaapu, a large, smiling, half-Hawaiian fellow who also lived for the surf and a good time. Charlie’s surfboard was six or eight inches longer than Oscar’s. They tied a red rag to the back of it to keep cars behind them from running into them, then took off for the north coast and whatever they found there.
“Peace and quiet,” Oscar said, more plaintively than usual. “I told that Shirley it was only for fun, but she didn’t want to listen.” He took a hand off the wheel to touch his right ear, the only part of his anatomy the vase had grazed. Four inches to the left and he would have been very unhappy. As things were, he wouldn’t be able to go barefoot in his apartment till he swept up all the broken glass.
Charlie Kaapu laughed at him from the back seat. “Women hear what they want to hear. Don’t you know that by now?”
“I ought to,” Oscar said. “I mean, she was fine for a week or two, but forever?” He shook his head. “She’d drive me nuts. Hell, I’d drive her nuts.”
“They put out for you, they think it’s gotta be for life,” Charlie said, and then, philosophically, “She’s gone now. You don’t gotta worry about it no more.”
“Yeah.” Oscar spoke with a mixture of relief and regret. He was glad Shirley’d got on the liner and out of his hair-no doubt of that. But he still wished things had gone better. He didn’t like ugly scenes. They weren’t his style. A kiss on the cheek, a pat on the fanny, a good-bye from the pier as the ship headed back to the mainland… That was how he liked things to go, and how they usually went.
He got out of Honolulu, went past the back side of Pearl Harbor, and drove up the Kamehameha Highway toward the north coast. The drive wasn’t so pleasant as he would have wanted. He got stuck behind a snorting convoy of olive-drab Army trucks chugging up to Schofield Barracks. Not only did they slow him down, but the exhaust made his head ache. He hadn’t had that much to drink the night before… had he?
Pineapple fields stretched out along the right side of the road, pineapple and sugarcane to the left. Most of the time, he would have smelled the damp freshness of growing things. Diesel stink made an inadequate substitute.
They rattled past Wheeler Field, off to the left of the highway. Charlie pointed to the planes drawn up in neat, tight rows on the runways. “Pretty snazzy.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said again. “Nobody’s gonna get at ’em or do anything to ’em.” He drove on for a little while, then asked, “You think anything’s gonna come of this war scare, Charlie?”
“Beats me,” Charlie Kaapu answered. “Everybody’s pretty stupid if us and the Japs do start fighting, though.”
Oscar nodded. He said, “Yeah,” one more time. The trucks pulled off to the left, the way to Schofield Barracks. He stepped on the gas. The Chevy went a little faster: not a lot, since the only way it could have hit fifty was to go off a cliff. But he was glad not to have to breathe fumes any more. Smiling, he lit a cigarette and passed Charlie the pack.
The Dole pineapple plantation north of Wahiawa was one of the biggest in the world. Most of the workers in the fields were Japanese and Filipinos. Having put in some time there himself, Oscar had seen enough to feel sorry for them.
He stopped for gas in Waialua, just short of the ocean: eighteen and a half cents a gallon at the Standard Oil station. That made him grumble-Hawaii was more expensive than the mainland. Up at Haleiwa, on the Pacific, he had to stop his car just short of a narrow bridge buttressed by double arches of steel. Another convoy of trucks was heading to Schofield Barracks, these diesel snorters loaded with men who’d been enjoying leave on the north shore.
Even before the last truck came through, Charlie Kaapu was doing some snorting of his own. He pointed north, past the last of the olive-drab monsters. “You see that, Oscar? You see, goddammit? Ain’t got no fuckin’ surf!”
“Could be better,” Oscar agreed. “Could be worse, too. I figure-what, five-six feet?”
“Something like that,” Charlie said, still disgusted. “Hell, I can piss higher’n that. I wanted some big waves.”
“Maybe they’ll come,” Oscar said hopefully. “Maybe there’s a storm up north blowing like hell. Maybe they’ll be twenty or thirty feet by tomorrow. And besides, this still isn’t too bad.”
“Ha!” Charlie Kaapu said. “We could do this out by Diamond Head. You gonna tell me I’m wrong?”
“No.” Oscar couldn’t, and he knew it. “But we’re here, so we might as well make the best of it.” He’d been making the best of it ever since he got to Hawaii. He saw no reason to change now. “Tell you what-I’ll go on to Waimea Bay. It’ll be better there than anywhere else along this coast.”
“Okay, go ahead,” Charlie said. “We’ve come this far. What’s another few miles? Anyway, looks like we’ll just find more soldiers if we stay around here.”
He wasn’t wrong about that, either. The Army used Waialua Bay as a place to give its men rest and recreation. It looked to have taken most of them back to Schofield Barracks in the truck convoy that had blocked the bridge, but not all the olive-drab tents had disappeared from the beach here. The trucks would have to come back for the rest of the men.
When they got to Waimea, though, the surfers had things to themselves. Oscar parked the Chevy across the road from the beach. He and Charlie pulled their surfboards out of the car, stuck them under their arms, and carried them down toward the sea. Oscar’s toes dug into the sand. It was softer than any he’d known on a California beach. He knew he’d feel that more on the return trip, when he was going uphill. Now…
Now he didn’t want to think about the return trip. Easier to get out into the ocean when the waves weren’t so fierce. The surfboard went into the water. He lay down atop it and paddled with his arms. Ten feet away, Charlie Kaapu was doing the same thing.
After Oscar had paddled out far enough, he turned the board around. The swells pushed him back toward the shore. He scrambled upright on the bobbing, tilting, darting surfboard and rode the crest of a wave all the way up onto the beach.
He looked around for Charlie. There he was, separated from his surfboard, which washed ashore without him. “Surf’s not too easy, is it?” Oscar called.
His friend gave him the finger. “This shit can happen down by Diamond Head, too,” Charlie said. He wasn’t wrong about that, either; he’d lost his front teeth within a couple of miles of Waikiki.
They surfed all day. Oscar wiped out several times himself. He’d known he would, and didn’t worry about it. When the sun sank down toward Kaena Point, they put the boards back into the Chevy and walked into Waimea. A chop-suey house there gave them a cheap, filling supper.
“You don’t want to drive back in the dark, do you?” Charlie Kaapu hinted.
Oscar smiled. “No. I was thinking we’d sleep in the car, put the boards on the roof, and go at it again first thing in the morning.”
Charlie’s face lit up. “Now you’re talking!”
Sleeping in the Chevy was a cramped business, but Oscar had had practice. Charlie hadn’t, or not so much, but he managed. His snores escaped through the glassless rear window.
Those same snores helped wake Oscar around sunup. Yawning, he sat up in the front seat and stretched. He did some more stretching after he got out of the car, to work
the kinks from his neck and back. He walked over and pissed at the base of a coconut palm. Only the waning gibbous moon looked down at him from low in the west.
His belly growled. He wished he’d thought to bring along something for breakfast. Nothing in Waimea would be open so early. And this was Sunday morning, too, so it was anybody’s guess if anything would be open at all.
He couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was put his board in the water. He looked out to the Pacific and muttered under his breath. The waves were no better than they had been the day before. If anything, they were a little flatter. Oscar shrugged. What could you do?
When he got his board off the roof of the Chevy, the noise woke Charlie Kaapu. The big half-Hawaiian extracted himself from the car. As Oscar had, he stretched and yawned. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Oscar didn’t wear a watch. But a glance at the sun gave him a fair idea. “About half past seven, I guess.”
Charlie looked out to sea. He made the same sort of mutters as Oscar had. Then he went off to take a leak by the same palm tree. When he came back, he got down his surfboard, too. “We’re here. We might as well give it a go,” he said resignedly.
“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He crossed the road and headed down the beach toward the water. Charlie Kaapu followed.
Oscar had a couple of good rides in. The second time, Charlie went off his board. He had a scowl on his face when he recaptured it. He stood there at the edge of the sea, dripping and fuming. Then he frowned, looking north. “What’s that noise?”
After a moment, Oscar heard it too: a distant drone that put him in mind of mosquitoes. He also looked north. He pointed. “There they are. That’s a hell of a lot of airplanes. The Army or the Navy must be up to something.”
The airplanes flew in several groups. Some went south through the central valley. Others took a more southwesterly course. They were plenty high enough to make it over the Waianae Range. Oscar briefly wondered why they were all coming off the ocean. Then he shrugged again. What the military did wasn’t his worry. He and Charlie went back to their surf-riding.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO piloted his Zero back toward the Akagi. Exultation filled the commander of the second wave’s fighters. The first two attacks had heavily damaged the ships at Pearl Harbor and punished the airfields on Oahu. Now, Shindo thought, now we finish the job.
There was the carrier, with some of the fleet’s screen of destroyers and cruisers and battleships. And there were the transports, steaming south towards Oahu as fast as they could go. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. He was usually on the phlegmatic side. Not today. Today he felt like a tiger. And by tomorrow morning, the Japanese would be landing on the island.
Meanwhile, he had to land on the Akagi. Another Zero came in just ahead of his. The deck crew manhandled the plane to one side. The landing officer signaled for Shindo to continue his approach. He did, concentrating on the man’s signals to the exclusion of everything else. The carrier’s deck was pitching and rolling in front of him. The man on it could gauge his path better than he could himself. Learning that lesson was the hardest thing any Navy flier did.
Down went the flags. Shindo dove for the Akagi ’s deck. The arrester hook caught a wire. His Zero jerked to a stop. He shoved back the canopy, scrambled out of the plane, and ran for the carrier’s small portside island. “Admiral Nagumo!” he called. “Admiral Nagumo!”
Admiral Chuichi Nagumo came out onto the deck to meet him. He was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, with a round face, two deep vertical lines between his eyes, and thinning hair cropped close to his skull. He was a big-gun admiral, not a flying man, which sometimes worried Shindo. He’d got command of the Pearl Harbor expedition by seniority: the usual Japanese way. So far, though, he’d handled things as smoothly as anyone could have.
“All is well?” he asked now. Tension stretched his voice taut.
“All is very well!” Shindo flashed a grin at Minoru Genda and Mitsuo Fuchida, who’d come out onto the flight deck behind Nagumo. Fuchida, the air commander, was a couple of years older than Genda, taller, with long, horsey features. Shindo pulled himself back to the admiral’s question: “Yes, sir, all is very well. We need to launch the third wave right away, to smash the dock facilities and the fuel tanks and to hit Schofield Barracks for the Army’s benefit.”
“Where are the American carriers?” Nagumo demanded.
That was the one fly in the ointment. They hadn’t caught any of the carriers in port. Shindo gave the only answer he could: “Sir, I don’t know.”
Those lines between Admiral Nagumo’s eyes got deeper yet. “You are thinking about what happens to Hawaii,” he said heavily. “I am thinking about what happens to my fleet. What if the Americans strike us while we linger here?”
From behind him, Commander Genda said, “Sir, we have six carriers. At most, the Americans have three, and they probably aren’t concentrated. We have the best fliers in the world. They have… less than the best. If they find us, they will be the ones to regret it.”
“So you say.” Nagumo still sounded anything but happy. Shindo had yet to hear him sound happy since the fleet sailed from Japan. Even the astounding damage the first two waves of attackers had caused did nothing to cheer him. He went on, “I tell you, gentlemen, if it were not for the landing forces accompanying us, I would turn around and sail for the home islands now.”
Commander Fuchida couldn’t hide his horror. “Sir, we have a job to finish!” he exclaimed.
“I know,” Nagumo answered. “And I will stay, and I will carry it through. Those are my orders, and I cannot abandon the soldiers. But what I told you is no less true. We are in danger here.”
“So are the Americans,” Shindo said. Genda and Fuchida both nodded. At last, reluctantly, so did Admiral Nagumo.
II
THE MESSAGE CAME in to the Enterprise from one of the scouts just after eight in the morning: “White 16-Pearl Harbor under attack! Do not acknowledge.”
Aboard the carrier, rage boiled. “Those little slanty-eyed cocksuckers want a war, they’ve got one!” Lieutenant Jim Peterson shouted to whoever would listen.
“You were the one who said they wouldn’t fight.” Three people reminded Peterson of that at the same time.
He was too furious to get embarrassed at being wrong. “I don’t give a shit what I said,” he snarled. “Let’s knock the yellow bastards into the middle of next week.”
But that was easier said than done. Everyone knew the Japanese were somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands-but where? Had they come down out of the north or up from the south? The Enterprise couldn’t even ask the harried men at Pearl Harbor what they knew. As soon as that horrifying message came in, Admiral Halsey slapped radio silence on the whole task force. No Japs were going to spot the carrier and her satellites by their signals.
In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese-and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who’d shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.
The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They’d been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news-about seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose-far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.
As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the Enterprise. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary-people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too-but what trickled in didn’t sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row’s taken a hell of a licking.”
“That won’t end the world,” Peterson said. “The Navy’s needed to get rid of those wallowing tubs for years.” He spok
e like what he was: a carrier fighter pilot. Billy Mitchell had proved battleships obsolete twenty years earlier. Nobody’d paid any attention then. It sounded as if the Japs were driving home the lesson. Would anybody pay attention now?
“You’re a coldhearted bastard, Peterson,” a lieutenant named Edgar Kelley said. “It’s not just ships, you know. It’s God knows how many sailors, too.”
“Yeah? So?” Peterson scowled at the other pilot. “If they didn’t get it now, they sure as hell would when they took their battlewagons west to fight the Japs. Carrier air would take ’em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn’t think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren’t a realist about the way the world worked, you’d take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.
Just after noon, a cry not far from despair came over the intercom: “Third wave of attackers striking Pearl!”
That was followed almost immediately by Admiral Halsey’s unmistakable rasp: “Boys, we’ve got to give the land-based air a hand. The Japs have knocked out a lot of it on the ground, and I’ll be double-damned and fried in the Devil’s big iron spider before I let those monkeys have it all their own way when I can give ’em a lick. Go get ’em! I only wish I were up there with you.”
Cheering, the pilots ran for their Wildcats. Peterson’s was third in line. He fired up the engine even before he’d closed the canopy and fastened his safety belts. The fierce roar of the 1,200-horsepower Wright radial engine filled him. His fingernails, his bones, his guts all shook with it. It made him feel not just alive but huge and ferocious-he might have been making that great noise, not his plane.
A red flag hung from the bridge: the signal that the Enterprise was about to launch her airplanes. No men in blue jerseys were left on the deck but the two who stood by to remove the chocks from the squadron leader’s wheels. Sailors in yellow smocks formed a line across the deck.
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