“There you go,” the noncom said. “That’s almost always the right answer. Truck full of beans and stuff heading over there pretty soon. You hustle, you can scrounge a lift. And you better hope you don’t see too many Japs there. You do, we’re in deep shit. Go on, scram. I got more things to worry about besides you.”
Off Peterson went. He did catch the truck, and rode in the cab with the driver. The kid behind the wheel was named Billy Joe McKennie, and hailed from somewhere deep in the South. He said, “If’n them Japs”-it came out Jayups, the first time Peterson had ever heard it as a two-syllable word-“try comin’ over the Waianae”-a name that had to be heard to be believed-“Mountains, they’ll have to come through us’ns, an’ I don’t reckon they kin.”
“How do you know they won’t try somewhere else?” Peterson asked.
McKennie might not speak much real English, but he understood it. He looked at Peterson as if he were crazy. “On account of a goat’d have trouble gittin’ over them mountains, let alone a lousy Jap.”
The truck rumbled through Schofield Barracks. The east-west road that cut the immense base in half remained intact. The barracks, and all the other buildings around the facility, had taken a hell of a beating. Burned-out cars and trucks had been hastily dragged off the road. They sprawled alongside it, a terrible tangle of twisted metal. Peterson didn’t like to think about the men who’d been inside them when they were hit.
West of the base, the land began climbing toward the mountains. The closer Peterson got to them, the more he started to think Billy Joe McKennie had a point. They weren’t especially tall, but they rose swift and steep. And they were covered with the thickest, most impenetrable-looking jungle he’d ever seen. He couldn’t have named half the plants-hell, he couldn’t have named any of them-but he wouldn’t have wanted to try pushing through that maze of trees and ferns and thorny bushes.
Halfway through Kolekole Pass, the road stopped. The mountains loomed up on either side. The American detachment faced west. It boasted some field guns, several nicely sited machine guns, and a couple of command cars-soldiers called them peeps-with pintle-mounted machine guns of their own for mobile firepower.
Peterson helped McKennie and the soldiers already at the strongpoint unload the truck. Nobody seemed to find anything out of the ordinary about him. He pulled his weight. When McKennie drove off, a whole squad of men rode in the back of the truck.
“We give away a dozen and we get one back,” grumbled the major in charge of the garrison. By the disgusted look on his face, this wasn’t the first time that had happened. “Pretty soon we’ll have all the guns in the world and not a soul to shoot ’em.”
He stood in no serious danger of having all the guns in the world. Whether he’d run out of men was a different question. The question related to it was whether he ought to have any men there at all. The more Peterson looked at those mountains, the more he suspected the garrison was what the Army did instead of snapping its fingers to keep the elephants away.
“Sir, I don’t think Tarzan of the Apes could come at us through country like this,” he said.
The major blinked. Then he grinned. “You never can tell with Tarzan,” he said. “He got around a lot-that lost Roman city and…” He went on and on. Peterson realized he’d run into an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanatic. The major shifted to John Carter on Mars, then to Carson Napier on Venus. Peterson had to listen to him, and listen, and listen. The officer started talking about Burroughs himself, who, it turned out, spent a lot of his time on Oahu.
If Peterson was any judge, Burroughs came to a place like this to escape his fans. There probably was no escape, though. No escape for me, that’s for sure, Peterson thought unhappily. The major didn’t seem to want to run dry.
At last, he did. That let Peterson escape, and it let him look east across the center of Oahu. He could trace the front all the way over to the Koolau Range on the other side of the island. It wasn’t that far. If the Americans could hold the Japs north of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa, he thought they had a decent chance.
Kolekole Pass would have made a hell of an observation post. Peterson started to say something about that, then hesitated. A Navy lieutenant could make such suggestions. What about a buck private in the Army? Wasn’t he supposed to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told? That was what he would have wanted from an ordinary seaman in the Navy. He buttoned his lip.
A little later, he heard the major talking into a field telephone. The officer was pinpointing the location of a Japanese artillery position. Peterson laughed at himself. Old Granny Army didn’t need him to teach her how to suck eggs.
Off in the distance, artillery boomed. Machine guns rattled. Rifles crackled like fireworks. Here in the pass, everything was quiet. Soldiers played pinochle or acey-deucey. Birds chirped. Peterson could no more name them than the trees in which they perched.
It was quiet duty. Considering what was going on only a few miles away, it was miraculously quiet. Most of the men seemed delighted to be out of anything more dangerous. Peterson muttered and fumed. He wanted to have a go at the Japs, not sit here twiddling his thumbs in a place where they were anything but likely to show up.
After fuming till the sun swung down toward the horizon, he decided to beard the major after all. The man heard him out. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry, Private. I commend your initiative. It does you credit. But the answer is still no. We are serving a necessary function here. I would sooner be in combat myself. But I am doing what was ordered of me, and you will do what is ordered of you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Peterson said. That the man was obviously right only made his refusal more galling.
They had beans for supper, beans and roast pork. The beans couldn’t have come off of Peterson’s truck; they’d been soaked before they were boiled. They weren’t anything fancy, but they were okay. As for the pork, everybody smiled and ate in a hurry. Peterson suspected the pigs had been liberated from some little local farm. No one said anything, though, and he didn’t think he’d make himself popular by asking a whole lot of questions.
He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep on the ground. Some of the soldiers had mosquito netting. He didn’t. He wondered how high a price he’d pay for that. He tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. Snores rose around him. The Army men had no trouble sleeping on bare ground. If he’d got used to sacking out in a bunk every night, that was his hard luck.
And then, some time around midnight, shouts woke everybody who’d managed to fall asleep. “Out! Out! Out!” the major yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here before we get cut off and surrounded!”
“What the fuck?” somebody said, which perfectly summed up what Peterson was thinking.
“The Japs,” the major said, which was no shock: Mussolini’s men, for instance, were a hell of a long way away. But what followed was a shocker: “Goddamn slanteyes landed on the west coast, and they’re over the mountains behind us. That’s why we’re pulling out.”
“Did they get through Pohakea Pass south of here?” a soldier asked.
“No. They’re over the goddamn mountains, I tell you. Don’t ask me how-they must be part monkey. But most of what we’ve got is up at the front. God only knows how we’ll stop ’em, or even slow ’em down. Gotta try, though. Come on, get moving!”
Peterson scrambled out of his bedroll. Maybe he’d see action after all. It didn’t occur to him to wonder if that was what he really wanted.
SOME CIVIL WAR general-Fletch Armitage was damned if he could remember who-had said raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as a virgin. Some things hadn’t changed a bit in the past eighty years.
Fletch looked west, toward the Waianae Range. He was damned if he could see how anybody human could have got over those steep, jungle-covered mountains. For all he knew, the Japs weren’t human. But they were over the mountains, and square in the U.S. Army’s rear with… how many soldiers? Fletch had no idea, and he didn’t think any other Americans d
id, either.
Too many-that was certain. They weren’t just on the Army’s flank. They were in its rear. And if the Americans couldn’t pull back in a hurry and form some kind of new line farther south, they were probably history, and ancient history at that.
Pulling back meant giving up Wahiawa, leaving it to its fate. Plenty of people in the town didn’t intend to be left. Refugees packed the roads. Fletch had seen that before, when the people from Haleiwa and Waimea ran away from the oncoming Japs. This was worse. More people lived in Wahiawa. Japanese fighters had a field day shooting up the Kamehameha Highway. They didn’t seem to care whether they blasted soldiers or civilians. Why should they? They spawned chaos with every cannon shell, with every burst of machine-gun fire.
As the beat-up De Soto with his gun in tow slowly-so slowly-rattled south through Wahiawa, Fletch looked now this way, now that. One of the infantry privates newly hauled into artilleryman’s duty said, “Sure is a pretty place. Sure is a shame, letting the Japs have it.”
“I wasn’t looking at the town,” Fletch said tightly. He was looking for his more or less ex-wife. If he spotted Jane, he intended to shoehorn her into the car. Okay, she didn’t love him any more. But after what he’d seen, he wouldn’t have left a dying, half-witted dog to the mercy of the Japs. Maybe Jane would thank him for getting her out of there. Maybe she’d try to spit in his eye. He didn’t give a damn either way. If he saw her, she was going.
But he didn’t see her. All he saw was Wahiawa. He didn’t think it was all that lovely. It was the sort of town that grows up alongside any Army base, full of cheap, hastily run-up buildings that held businesses designed to separate soldiers from cash: bars; hamburger stands; chop-suey joints; tailors’ shops that sold cheap, loud clothes; tattoo parlors; dives that called themselves burlesque houses but were really brothels. To make matters worse, the Japs had bombed and shelled the place. No, it wasn’t lovely in his eyes.
But it wasn’t so ugly as a base-side town back on the mainland would have been, either. Palm trees swayed in the breeze. Hibiscus didn’t care that it was December. Blooms of gold and red and white brightened the day. Fletch didn’t know the names of a lot of the other flowers busily blooming in the middle of winter. Mynah birds and zebra doves and red-headed, gray-backed cardinals from South America added to the tropic scenery.
Fletch wished he could hop out of the car and run over to the apartment where he’d lived till not so long before. He knew he couldn’t. Rescuing Jane if he saw her on the street would have been one thing. Abandoning his gun to go after her would have been something else again: dereliction of duty.
A couple of hundred yards ahead, dirt fountained into the air. Another shell came down, and another, and another. Most of the column there was civilian. People scattered, screaming. “Son of a bitch,” Fletch said softly.
“Sir?” the dragooned infantryman said.
“Those aren’t the bursts the Japs get from their usual field pieces.” Armitage spoke with authority. He’d earned the right; he’d seen what the enemy’s guns could do. U.S. troops had mountain howitzers that broke down into loads light enough for one or two soldiers to manhandle them forward no matter what the terrain. Evidently, the Japs did, too. He thought about manhandling even mountain guns over the Waianae Range. Who could have dreamt the Japs could manage such a thing?
Who could have dreamt the Japs would strike at Hawaii in the first place? Oh, the people in charge of the Army and Navy here had played with the idea before. But it was only play, and everybody here had treated it that way. The trouble was, Japan hadn’t. She’d been dead serious about it.
And now we’re paying the piper, Fletch thought. He gave the car some gas. When he shifted up into second, gears clashed. The De Soto wasn’t made for towing an artillery piece. It would break down altogether pretty soon. In the meantime, he’d get what use from it he could. If a shell from one of the mountain howitzers came down on him… then it did, that was all. He had to get the gun free if he possibly could.
He did it. A spent shell fragment clanged off his fender, but he got through, skirting potholes all the way. Down toward Pearl Harbor and Honolulu he drove, wondering where the next stop would be.
JANE ARMITAGE STAYED in her apartment when the Japanese Army entered Wahiawa. She didn’t know what the Japs would do to civilians. She especially didn’t know what they would do to white female civilians. She didn’t want to find out the hard way, either.
She couldn’t help looking out the window. Was that skinny little man skulking along the street really a soldier? He looked as if he ought to be in the eighth grade. He wore short pants. His legs seemed skinny as matchsticks. By his size, the big Americans she was used to should have been able to tie him in knots and throw him away. But a helmet that looked too large perched on his head. He carried a rifle, and had the air of a man who knew what to do with it.
He looked up toward the window. Jane drew back, not wanting him to see her. He must not have, for he kept going. Two more Japs followed him a moment later. One was even skinnier, the other stocky and strong-looking but still very short. The stocky soldier had an American canteen bumping on his hip.
Occasional shots rang out. The Americans had pulled out hours before. Maybe the Japs weren’t sure about that. Maybe they were shooting people for the fun of it, or to put the fear of God into the ones they didn’t shoot. Jane laughed shakily. They sure know how to get what they want, don’t they?
She wondered if she should have headed south before the Japs came in. What she’d seen and heard from the refugees out of Waimea and Haleiwa had made her decide to sit tight. The Japanese had shelled them and shot at them and strafed them from the air. All they had was what they could carry. American soldiers had commandeered a lot of their cars. And the Army men might have shot the refugees who tried to refuse to give them up.
What had really made Jane decide to stay in Wahiawa was the fear that fleeing wouldn’t do any good. The Japs seemed only too likely to take all of Oahu. If they did, where would she be better off? In her own apartment, or somewhere on the road with only the clothes on her back? The choice had looked obvious.
Now that she’d gone and made it, she wished she hadn’t. Part of the island remained free, but not her part. If she was wrong, if the Army could somehow stop the Japs…
She wondered how Fletch was doing. She hoped he was still alive and fighting, at least as much because an artilleryman could really hurt the Japs as because, up till fairly recently, she’d loved him. She hadn’t seen him in the American retreat through town. Who could say what that proved, though, or if it proved anything?
Time crawled by. The gunfire gradually sputtered into silence. And then a man shouting something broke the silence. As he got closer, Jane managed to make out what he was saying: “Everyone come to the corner of Makani and California at four o’clock. The Japanese commander will give the rules for the occupation. Makani and California! Four o’clock! Rules for the occupation! You have to be there!” Whoever he was, he spoke good English, with only a slight Japanese accent.
Was he an invader who’d learned the language in college on the mainland? Or was he a local Jap doing what the occupiers told him? Would the local Japs do what the occupiers told them? Were they cheering to see the Stars and Stripes come down and the Rising Sun go up? Some of them are, I bet, Jane thought furiously.
She wondered if she ought to go listen to the Jap commander, or if the order was a trick or a trap. Reluctantly, she decided she had to take the chance. If the Japs gave more orders at this gathering, she didn’t want to get shot for not knowing what the rules were. Makani and California was only a few blocks east of Kamehameha Highway, and only a few from her building. She locked the door behind her when she left, not that that would do much good against a rifle butt.
Other people were also coming out of hiding. Jane waved and nodded to the ones she recognized. They all tried to pretend the Japanese soldiers prowling the streets weren’t there. The Japs j
ust eyed the haoles. They talked with the Japanese who’d lived in Wahiawa. Some of those Japanese answered, too. Tone of voice was plenty to tell Jane the shoe was on the other foot, all right.
One of the local Japanese, a man who ran a nursery, stood on a table with a Jap officer at Makani and California. The local man translated for the invader: “Major Hirabayashi says that from now on you must bow to all soldiers of the Empire of Japan. You must make way for them on the street. Soldiers may stay with people here. If they do, you will be responsible for their room and board.”
The locals muttered at that. They did no more than mutter, though, not with soldiers all around. Major Hirabayashi went on, “All guns must be turned in. Anyone found with a gun after three days’ time will be executed. Also, all food in Wahiawa will be shared. When ordered, you will deliver your supplies to a central distribution point. Anyone caught hoarding after that will also be executed.”
More mutters. A dull horror washed over Jane. So much for what she’d bought. If only she lived in a house with a yard. She could have buried some by dead of night. Not with only an apartment around her, and lots of nosy neighbors. Maybe I should have run away after all.
V
THE OSHIMA MARU ’S planking throbbed under Jiro Takahashi’s feet. Diesel growling at the sampan’s stern, it scooted out into the Pacific. Takahashi was happy. “Now we get to go work again,” he said. Staying at home without working had been harder on him than all the backbreaking labor he went through here on the ocean.
His sons seemed less delighted. “Merry Christmas,” Hiroshi said, in sarcastic English. Jiro had always bought the boys presents at Christmastime. Why not? Everybody else did. But for the presents, though, the day meant nothing to him. What difference did a haole holiday make?
In Japanese hardly less sardonic, Kenzo added, “You know why they’ve let us go out again, don’t you, Father?”
“I don’t care why,” Jiro said. “Isn’t it good to breathe clean air?” The tank farms at Pearl Harbor had mostly burned themselves out by now, but acrid, eye-stinging haze still filled the air in Honolulu. No sooner had Jiro praised the air away from the city than he lit a cigarette. “Have to be careful with these,” he remarked. “They’re starting to run low.”
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