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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
End of The Beginning
A New American Library Book / published by arrangement with the author
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Copyright © 2005 by Harry Turtledove
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A NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY BOOK®
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Electronic edition: November, 2005
Also by Harry Turtledove
“THE DAIMON” IN WORLDS THAT WEREN’T
RULED BRITANNIA
IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES
DAYS OF INFAMY
I
COMMANDER MINORU GENDA WALKED PAST THE FRONT ENTRANCE TO IOLANI PALACE. Fairy terns, almost whiter than white, floated through the blue, blue Hawaiian sky. The flag of the newly restored Kingdom of Hawaii fluttered on five flagpoles above the late-Victorian palace. Seeing that flag made Genda smile. The Hawaiians had gone out of their way to accommodate both Britain and the United States, with the Union Jack in the canton and red, white, and blue horizontal stripes filling the rest of the field.
Much good it did them, the Japanese officer thought. White men economically dominated the Kingdom of Hawaii for years before America overthrew it and brought the islands under U.S. control.
Well, things were different now. The Stars and Stripes no longer flew over Iolani Palace. The building no longer housed the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, as it had for decades. King Stanley Owana Laanui—King by the grace of God and, much more to the point, by that of the Emperor of Japan—reigned here now, along with his redheaded Queen Cynthia. And, where King Stanley reigned, Major General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who’d commanded the Japanese Army forces that conquered Hawaii, ruled.
Japanese soldiers stood guard at the top of the stairs leading up into the palace. They weren’t big men—few of them had more than a couple of inches on Genda’s five-three—but, with their businesslike Arisaka rifles, they didn’t need to be. At the base of the stairs stood a squad of the revived Royal Hawaiian Guard. Putting the tall men at the bottom and the small men at the top 2 minimized the size difference between them. King Stanley’s guardsmen wore pith helmets and blue coats with white belts: purely ceremonial uniforms for purely ceremonial soldiers. They carried bayoneted Springfields—the Japanese had captured them by the thousand from the U.S. Army—but Genda had heard the rifles’ magazines held no cartridges.
The Royal Hawaiian Guards came to an even stiffer brace as Genda strode by them. He nodded back, politely acknowledging the compliment. He turned a corner and then another one, heading for the back of the palace. More guards, both Hawaiian and Japanese, stood there. Another stairway led up into the building. And a shorter, narrower set of steps led down into Iolani Palace. Genda chose that stairway.
In the nineteenth century, the basement had been the servants’ quarters. It had also housed the storerooms where the kahili—the feather-topped royal staffs—and the palace silver service, the wine, and other necessities were kept. Because at the last minute the architect had added a walled dry moat around the palace, the basement rooms had full-sized windows and weren’t nearly so dark and gloomy as they would have been otherwise.
In front of one of the rooms along the wide central corridor stood two Japanese sailors in landing rig: their usual blues modified by black-painted steel helmets; infantrymen’s belts, ammunition pouches, and canteens; and white canvas gaiters. Like the sentries outside, they carried Arisakas.
“Yes, sir? You wish . . . ?” one of them asked when Genda stopped and faced them.
He gave his name, adding, “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Admiral Yamamoto.” He didn’t need to look at his watch to know he was ten minutes early. Being late to a meeting with the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet was inconceivable.
Both men saluted. “Hai!” they said in unison. The sailor who’d spoken before opened the door for him.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto worked at a plain pine desk, nothing like the ornate wooden dreadnought in King David Kalakaua’s Library on the second floor of the palace, the one General Yamashita used. Genda thought that most unfair; Yamamoto outranked Yamashita, and should have taken over the finer work area. But he hadn’t done it. He was in Hawaii only temporarily, and hadn’t wanted to displace the permanent garrison commander.
Yamamoto got to his feet as Genda walked in. They exchanged bows. Yamamoto was only slightly taller than Genda, but had a wrestler’s stocky, wide-shouldered body. “Sit down, sit down,” he said now. “How are you feeling? Better, I hope? You look stronger than you did, and you have more color, too.”
“I’m much improved, sir. Thank you,” Genda said as he did sit. He’d had pneumonia when the Japanese Navy squared off against the U.S. forces trying to retake Hawaii. Despite the illness, he’d come up from Akagi’s sick bay to the bridge to do what he could to help the Japanese carriers against their American opposite numbers. He didn’t take credit for the victory, but he’d taken part in it. More than a month after the fight, he was starting to feel like his old self, though he hadn’t got there yet.
“Glad to hear it. I was worried about you,” Yamamoto said with gruff affection. Genda inclined his head. Most of a generation younger than the admiral, he was Yamamoto’s protégé. He’d planned the biggest part of the Pearl Harbor operation and the invasion of Hawaii. He’d planned them—and Yamamoto had rammed the plans through, turning them into reality. And now . . . they were meeting in the basement of Iolani Palace.
“The Americans have been very quiet since we stopped them,” Genda remarked.
“Hai.” Yamamoto nodded. “I think they will stay quiet a while longer, too. I am going to take this opportunity to go back to Japan. Now that Hawaii is settled for the time being, we have to talk with the Army about what to do next. Australia . . . India . . . And of course they’ll want to take another bite out of China, and they’ll expect our help with that.”
“So they will,” Genda agreed. The Americans had offered to keep selling oil and scrap metal to Japan—if she got out of China. War, even a risky war like the one against the USA, had seemed preferable to the humiliation of bowing to another country’s will. Did the Yankees tell Britain to leave India and her African colonies? Not likely! Did the Yankees hesitate to send in Marines when one of their little neighbors got out of line? That was even less likely. But they thought they could order Japan around. Bitte
rly, Genda said, “We don’t have round eyes. We don’t have white skin.”
“True enough.” Yamamoto nodded again, following Genda’s train of thought. “But we’ve shown the world that that doesn’t matter.” He set both hands on the cheap pine desk. As a young officer, he’d lost the first two fingers of his left hand at the Battle of Tsushima, in the Russo-Japanese War. He’d lost two fingers—but the Russians lost most of the fleet that sailed halfway around the world to meet the Japanese. And they lost the war.
Genda had had his first birthday in 1905. Like any of his countrymen, though, he knew what the Russo-Japanese War meant. It was the first modern war in which people of color beat whites. And now the Japanese were beating the Americans and the British and the Australians, too.
Yamamoto said, “I hope I don’t have to come back too soon. American radio broadcasts make it very plain the United States is not abandoning Hawaii. I hoped the USA would—I hoped our victories would make them see they could not win, and so make peace. But that hasn’t happened. Karma, neh? They have more people and more resources and more factories—many more—than we do. My guess is that they will try to bring all of them into play. That will take some time.”
“We will be building, too,” Genda said stoutly.
“Hai,” Yamamoto said once more. But that was only acknowledgment, not agreement, for he went on, “They can build faster than we can. I hope what we have done here in the Eastern Pacific has bought us the time to take and use the resources we need to stay a great power in the modern world. I hope so . . . but time will tell.”
“We’ve done everything we set out to do here,” Genda said.
“So we have. Now—is it enough?” Yamamoto seemed determined to be gloomy. He looked toward the west. “Back in Tokyo, they think everything is wonderful. They think the United States is at death’s door. They do not understand the enemy. They may have read Sun Tzu, but they do not think what he says applies to them. Oh, no! They are far more clever than he.”
Such sarcasm flayed. What Clausewitz was in the West, Sun Tzu was in the East—and had been for more than two thousand years. A military man disregarded the ancient Chinese general’s thoughts on strategy and tactics only at his peril. Genda said, “Surely things are not so bad as that.”
“No—they’re very likely worse,” Yamamoto said. “Be thankful you’re well away from Tokyo. It’s a poisonous place these days. Some of the poison comes from success, which makes it sweeter, but it’s no less deadly on account of that. Deadlier, probably, in the long run, because success is the kind of poison that makes you blind.”
“If the Germans knock the Russians out of the war—” Genda began.
“Yes, that’s what the Army is waiting for. If the northern beast dies, they’ll jump on the carcass and tear off slabs of Siberia. If.”
“The Wehrmacht has a foothold in the Caucasus. They’re getting close to Stalingrad. Stalin’s ‘not one step back’ speech after Rostov fell sounded desperate.”
Yamamoto only shrugged those broad shoulders. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all. The Germans were at the gates of Moscow last winter, and they got thrown back. They’re after oil now. We have ours. If they can get theirs . . . I hope they haven’t overreached, that’s all.”
“They keep the Americans and the British busy, too,” Genda said, “which works to our advantage.”
That made Yamamoto smile. He stood up and bowed to Genda, who hastily returned the gesture. “I might have known you would think clearly. With men like you here, Hawaii will be in good hands.” He bowed again, a little more deeply: dismissal.
Genda left his office as if walking on a cloud. The man he admired more than anyone else in the world—the man all Japan admired more than anyone else in the world—approved of him! Most of Japan knew—or rather, knew of—Admiral Yamamoto from gushing newspaper and magazine articles. Genda knew the man himself, and found him all the more admirable for the acquaintance.
Trying to suppress a silly grin, Genda went up the stairs from the basement. He got to the top at the same time as Cynthia Laanui, the newly crowned Queen of Hawaii, came down the back stairs from the ground floor of Iolani Palace. “Your Majesty,” Genda said in English, carefully keeping the irony from his voice.
“Hello, Commander Genda. How are you today?” The Queen knew him by sight; he was one of the four officers—two from the Japanese Navy, two from the Army—who’d chosen her husband from among the possible candidates for the restored Hawaiian throne. Stanley Owana Laanui—King Stanley now—was the first candidate who’d made it plain he would cooperate with Japan.
Genda didn’t think Queen Cynthia knew how simple the selection criteria were. He didn’t intend to enlighten her, either. “Better now, thank you,” he said. He read English well but, unlike Yamamoto, spoke less fluently.
Cynthia Laanui smiled at him. She was, without a doubt, the first red-haired Queen the Kingdom of Hawaii had ever had. The smile packed a punch. She was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, with green eyes, freckles, and, from the neck down, an abundant profusion of everything a woman ought to have.
“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for my husband,” she said. King Stanley was at least twenty years older than she was; Genda didn’t think she was his first wife. Why he’d married her was obvious. Why she’d married him wasn’t, not to Genda. But she seemed to care about him.
“Glad to help him,” Genda said. “He is good man.” He wouldn’t have bet more than fifty sen—say, a dime in U.S. money—on that but it was polite, and it gave him the excuse to keep talking with this striking woman. She was only a centimeter or two taller than he was, too.
She wore a distinctly unqueenly sundress of thin cotton. When she nodded, everything else moved in sympathy, and the dress showed it off. Genda hoped he didn’t notice too obviously. She said, “He’s a very good man. Hawaii needs him, especially now.”
Did she believe that, or was she being politic? Genda would have guessed she believed it. If she was so naive, she was liable to get badly hurt. “Good man, yes. Do many good things,” Genda said. Agreement was always safe. And, as long as King Stanley did exactly what Japan told him to do, the occupiers wouldn’t object if by some chance he turned out to be good, too.
Genda’s agreement won him a smile brighter than the Hawaiian sunshine from Queen Cynthia. He felt as if a bomb had gone off in front of him and he’d got flash-burned. “I’m so glad you think so,” she breathed. He’d never found the simple act of breathing so admirable before.
They chatted a little longer. Then, after another dazzling smile, she went back into the palace. Genda knew he needed to return to his duties. He waited till she’d gone all the way up the stairs, though.
THERE WAS A ZERO, swelling in Joe Crosetti’s windshield. Joe peered through the Grumman Wildcat’s gunsight. Can’t lead the son of a bitch too much, but if I don’t lead him enough I’ll miss, too. The thought was there and then it was gone. If you got close enough, you damn well wouldn’t miss. He waited till the hated enemy filled the bulletproof glass, then jammed his thumb down on the firing button atop the stick.
His wing machine gun roared. Tracers tore into the Jap. The enemy plane went up like a torch and plunged toward the Pacific. The pilot didn’t have a prayer of getting out. Maybe he was dead from the burst of fire, anyway.
“Nailed the bastard!” Joe yelled exultantly. He swung the fighter back toward the carrier. Navigating over the trackless ocean wasn’t easy, but he managed. There was the welcoming flight deck, dead ahead. He brought the Wildcat down toward the carrier’s stern. This was the tricky part. . . .
Down! The plane’s tailhook caught an arrester wire, and the machine jerked to a stop. He was down, and he was safe!
A voice spoke in his earphones: “Well, Mr. Crosetti, that wasn’t too bad.”
Reality returned with a bump harder than the one with which he’d landed. His Wildcat turned into a pumpkin, like Cinderella’s carriage: actually
, into a humble Texan advanced trainer. The flight deck became a yellow rectangle outlined on concrete. The arrester wires stretched across it were the McCoy, though. This was only the second time he’d landed using them.
His flying instructor, a lieutenant, junior grade, named Wiley Foster, went on, “I liked your attack run on the target. You got a four-oh on that one.”
“Thank you, sir,” Joe said.
“Don’t thank me yet—I wasn’t finished,” Foster answered. “Your landing was okay, but nothing to write home about. You’re not supposed to set down as hard as you would on a real flight deck, not yet. You need to convince me you can make smooth landings before you do rough ones.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Joe wanted to claim he’d come down that way on purpose, but he hadn’t—and the flying instructor wouldn’t have cared it he had.
“As for your navigation . . .” Lieutenant Foster paused significantly.
“Sorry, sir,” Joe repeated, sounding as miserable as he felt. He’d struggled with navigation right from the start. A lot of the cadets at Pensacola Naval Air Station were college grads, or had at least some college. Joe had graduated from high school, but he was working in a San Francisco garage when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. He understood engines from the ground up, but his geometry and trig were barely enough to let him keep his head above water when it came to figuring out how to get from A to B and back again. And if he ever had to ditch in the vast, unforgiving Pacific, odds were he wouldn’t keep his head above water long.
“It could have been worse,” Foster allowed. “I’ve seen cadets try to head for Miami or New Orleans or Atlanta. But it could have been a hell of a lot better, too. If you want carrier duty, you’d better keep hitting the books hard.”
“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” Joe said fervently. Carrier duty—the chance to hit back at Japan as soon as he could—was the reason he’d signed up as a Navy flying cadet in the first place.
End of the Beginning Page 1