His lungs hadn’t quite reached the bursting point when he managed to grab a breath, but they weren’t far away, either. Then another mountain of water fell on him. No half-drowned pup was ever more draggled than he was when he staggered up onto blessedly dry land.
Charlie Kaapu was trotting down the beach to capture his truant surfboard. “Some wipeout, buddy,” Charlie called. “You crashed and burned.”
“Tell me about it,” Oscar said feelingly. He looked down at himself. “Man, I’m chewed up.”
“Wanna quit?” Charlie asked.
Oscar shook his head. “You nuts? This is part of what we came for, too. Thanks for snagging my board.”
“Any time,” Charlie said. “Not like you haven’t done it for me. Not like maybe you won’t very next wave.” He came up and slapped Oscar on the back, being careful to pick an unabraded spot. “You’re okay, ace. You’re a number-one surf-rider.”
“Waste time,” Oscar said, trying to disguise how proud he was. “Let’s go.”
The Pacific stung his hide when he went out again, as if to remind him what it could do. He didn’t care. He was doing what he wanted to do—Charlie was right about that. They rode the waves till they got too hungry to stand it, then went into Waimea. The little siamin place where they’d eaten on December 7 was still open. The local Jap who ran it spoke no more English than he had then. The soup had changed a bit. The noodles were rice noodles now, and the siamin was loaded with fish instead of pork. It was still hot and filling and cheap and good.
Once they’d eaten, they went back out to the ocean. They rode the surf till sundown, then went back for more siamin. Three days passed like that. Then, not without regret, Oscar said, “I better head back.”
He waited for Charlie to tell him how pussy-whipped he was. But his friend just pointed west and said, “Let’s sail all the way around. We can ride the surf other places, too.”
“Deal,” Oscar said gratefully. Not only was it a deal—it sounded like fun. And he hadn’t looked forward to beating his way back along the windward coast, anyhow.
Kaena Point, in the far west, had been the only part of Oahu where roads didn’t reach, though the island’s narrow-gauge railroad did round the point. As Oscar and Charlie sailboarded by, they watched POWs slowly and laboriously building a highway there. “Poor bastards,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded. They were doing it all with hand tools. That had to be killing labor.
Oscar wasn’t sorry to leave the prisoners behind. They reminded him how bad things really were in Hawaii these days. Being able to catch his own food, being out on the ocean so much, had shielded him from the worst of it. So had having a girlfriend at least as self-reliant as he was.
He and Charlie had made it down the coast almost as far as Waianae when they got another reminder of the war—this one, to Oscar’s surprise, by sea instead of by land. A convoy of several nondescript, even ugly, Marus shepherded along by two destroyers chugged past them well out in the Pacific, plainly bound for Honolulu.
Those dumpy freighters might have been carrying anything: rice, ammunition, spare parts, gasoline. For all Oscar knew, they might have been crowded with soldiers. They were too far away for him to tell. He watched them for a while. So did Charlie. Neither said anything. What could you say? Those ships showed how times had changed.
And then times changed again. One of the freighters blew up—a deep, flat crump! that carried across the water. A great cloud of black smoke sprang up from the stricken Maru. Perhaps half a minute later, another ship got hit. Smoke also rose from that one, though not so much.
“Did you see that?” “Holy Jesus!” “There’s a sub out there—there must be!” “Eeeyow!” Oscar and Charlie were both making excited noises so fast, Oscar didn’t know which of them was saying what.
The Japanese destroyers went nuts. They had been sheep dogs. Now they were wolves, on the prowl for a snake in—or rather, under—the grass. They darted this way and that. One of them fired a gun—at nothing that Oscar could see.
Both torpedoed freighters settled in the water, one quickly, the other more sedately. Planes with meatballs on the wings and fuselage buzzed off Oahu and around the convoy, also searching for the American submarine. They had no better luck than the warships did.
“That freighter’s still burning,” Oscar said after a while.
“Oil or gas,” Charlie said. “Oil, I bet—gas and it would really have gone sky-high. That’s no skin off my nose. The Japs would’ve kept it all themselves anyway.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Nice to see the United States hasn’t given up. I mean, we know that, but it’s nice to see.”
Charlie nodded. “I want to see ’em blow King Stanley”—he laced the title with contempt—“out of one of his own guns. Serve him right.”
A Zero buzzed low over the two of them. The pilot could have shot them up if he wanted to, either because he thought they had something to do with the torpedoed freighters or simply for the hell of it. But he didn’t. He just kept going. Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. He and Charlie kept going, too, though much more slowly, on toward Honolulu.
PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON looked around with a distinctly jaundiced eye. “Well, here I am at this goddamn Camp Pendleton place, and I didn’t make gunny to get here,” he said.
Dutch Wenzel nodded gloomily. “Me, too, and I got the same beef. You know what happened, Les? We got screwed, and we didn’t even get kissed.”
“Damn straight we didn’t,” Dillon said. “ ’Course, the whole Navy got screwed. Wasn’t just us.”
A second look around the enormous new Marine base did little to improve it in his eyes. Camp Elliott had been crowded as a sack full of cats, no doubt about it. But Camp Elliott had been right down in San Diego, not far from the ballpark, not far from the movie theaters, not far from the ginmills, not far from the whorehouses. Once you got off the base, you could have yourself a good time.
“What are we going to do for fun around here?” Les asked mournfully.
“Beats me,” Dutch said. “Got a butt on you? I’m out of White Owls.”
“Sure.” Dillon handed him the pack, then stuck a Camel in his own mouth. Tobacco smoke soothed, but not enough. The powers that be had carved Camp Pendleton out of the northwesternmost part of San Diego County. Another name for what they’d carved it out of was the middle of nowhere. San Clemente lay a little way up the coast, Oceanside a little way down the coast. Neither could have held more than a couple of thousand people; both were towns where they rolled up the sidewalks at six o’ clock. After blowing a sorrowful smoke ring, Dillon asked, “How many divisions of Marines they gonna put in here?”
“Who you think I am, FDR?” Dutch said. “They don’t tell me shit like that any more’n they tell you.” Having established his lack of credentials, he got down to seriously guessing: “Sure looks like it’s big enough for three easy, don’t it?”
Les nodded. “About what I was thinking.” He tried to imagine somewhere between forty and fifty thousand horny young men with greenbacks burning a hole in their pocket descending on San Clemente and Oceanside. The picture refused to form. There was a limerick about a little green lizard that bust. That was what would happen to those quiet seaside towns. He laughed, not that the locals would think it was funny. “The Japs invaded Hawaii, and now we’ve invaded California.”
“Heh,” Wenzel said. “Well, if the guys who grow flowers and the little old ladies with the blue hair don’t like us, tough beans. Let ’em go clean out those slanty-eyed bastards by themselves.”
A flying boat sailed past, out over the Pacific. Les Dillon took a long look to make sure it was an American flying boat. The Japs had paid the West Coast a few unwelcome calls. But he recognized the silhouette. Nothing to get excited about . . . this time.
“This whole campaign is a bastard,” he said, grinding out his cigarette under the heel of his boot.
“How come? Just ’cause we’ve gotta go a couple thousand miles before w
e can get hold of Hirohito’s finest?” Dutch said.
“Good start,” Les agreed. “But even getting there isn’t enough. We’ve got to find some kind of way to beat down their air power. Otherwise, we’re screwed again. We can’t even land if we don’t—or I wouldn’t want to try it if they’ve got planes and we don’t.”
“Fuck, neither would I,” Wenzel agreed. “That’d be a mess, wouldn’t it? They’d make waddayacallit—sukiyaki—out of us.”
“Yeah.” Dillon watched a car roll south down Pacific Coast Highway. Idly, he wondered who had the clout to get gasoline. The highway was pretty quiet these days. He looked past it to the beach and the ocean. “How many times you figure we’re gonna invade this goddamn place?”
“Till we get it right,” his buddy answered, which drew a grunt and a laugh and a nod from Dillon. Wenzel added, “Thing is, when we do it for real, we only get the one chance.”
That wasn’t strictly true. If a U.S. landing on Oahu failed, the Americans could always lick their wounds and try again. The country could, yeah. But the Marines who got ashore in that failed effort would never try anything again afterwards. Les didn’t want to think such gloomy thoughts. To keep from thinking them, he said, “Let’s go over to the NCOs’ club and have a beer.”
“Twist my arm.” Dutch Wenzel held it out. Les gave it a yank. Dutch writhed in wrestling-ring agony. “Son of a bitch—you talked me into it.”
All the buildings here had the sharp-edged look of brand new construction. Most of them still had the fresh, almost foresty smell of wood newly exposed to the air, too. Not the NCOs’ club, not any more. It smelled the way it was supposed to: of beer and whiskey and sweat and, mostly, of tobacco. Cigarette smoke predominated, but pipes and cigars had their places, too. The blue haze in the air was also comforting and infinitely familiar.
Noncoms sat at the bar and at tables and talked about the things that had been on noncoms’ minds since the days of Julius Caesar, if not since those of Sennacherib: how their families were doing, where they were going next and how tough it was likely to be, what idiots the brass were (those last two not entirely unrelated), and how new recruits were obviously the missing link between apes and men that Darwin had sought in vain.
A gunny whose fruit salad went all the way back to the blue, yellow, and green ribbon commemorating the Mexican campaign and the occupation of Veracruz was expatiating on the latter topic. “Sweet Jesus Christ, boots nowadays don’t know enough to grab their ass with both hands,” he said, gesturing with a highball glass in which ice cubes clinked. “I swear to God, the Army wouldn’t want some of these pissweeds. And we’re supposed to turn ’em into Marines?”
He didn’t bother keeping his voice low. Heads bobbed up and down all over the club, Les’ among them. Nobody except another gunnery sergeant of equally exalted status could have presumed to disagree with him. Dillon, who came close both in rank and in years, wouldn’t have thought of it for a moment. As far as he was concerned, the gunny was only speaking gospel truth.
But another veteran noncom said, “Gonna need to put a lot of Marines on the beach if we’re gonna do the job. Up to us to make these damnfool boots into the kind of Marines they need to be.”
“Some of them won’t make the grade, though,” said the gunny who’d been around since dirt. “Some of them can’t make the grade.”
“We’ll run them off. There won’t be that many,” the other man said. “The rest’ll do the job. Even as is, we’re gonna have the damn Army landing right behind us, or maybe even with us.”
Everyone bristled at that, though it was too likely to be true. From what Les had heard, the Japs had four or five divisions in Hawaii. Defenders needed fewer men than invaders. He’d seen that for himself when he bumped up against the krauts in the Great War. There just wouldn’t be enough Marines to go around.
“So much for Germany first,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t care what FDR says—I think the Japs screwed that one the first time they bombed San Francisco.”
Les was inclined to agree with him. By the nods and the grim silence that followed, so was everybody else in the NCOs’ club. No matter what the President might want, it was personal now between the USA and Japan. Hitting Hawaii was one thing, and bad enough. But killing people on the mainland—no overseas enemy had done that since the War of 1812. Everybody was hot and bothered about it. Not even a President as powerful as Franklin Delano Roosevelt could afford to ignore 130,000,000 Americans screaming their heads off.
“If those Navy pukes can just get us to Hawaii this time, we’ll do the rest of the job,” Les said. “Put us on the beach, and we’ll take it from there.”
Nobody argued with him, either.
SAILBOARD UNDER HIS ARM, Oscar van der Kirk let himself back into his own apartment. He didn’t yell, “Honey, I’m home!” It was half past three in the afternoon; Susie would be at her secretarial job. The only question was whether she still lived here.
Oscar looked in the closet. Her clothes still hung there. He nodded to himself—that was good. But then he realized it wasn’t the only question after all. When she came back, would she bring anybody with her? She wouldn’t know he was here. That could prove . . . interesting.
“Hell with it,” Oscar said. If he’d been the sort to borrow trouble, he wouldn’t have spent most of his time since graduating from college as a beach bum. Whatever happened would happen, and he’d figure out what to do about it when it did, if it did.
Instead of borrowing trouble, he hopped in the shower. He had more salt on him than an order of cheap french fries. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had an order of fries, cheap or not. They were growing potatoes—he knew that. Salt was not a problem—one of the few things that weren’t. But he didn’t want to think about what they might use for grease these days.
The water was cold. He didn’t care. He’d got used to that. It just meant he didn’t dawdle, the way he would have back when things were easy. He hopped in, sluiced himself off, and got out.
Putting on clothes he hadn’t worn too often lately felt good, too. He sat back on the edge of the bed to wait for Susie.
He didn’t remember going from sitting to lying. He didn’t hear her key in the lock. Next thing he knew, she was shaking him. “Hey,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in. So you made it back, did you?”
“Yeah.” He yawned, then gave her a kiss. Her lips were red, and tasted of lipstick. Somehow, she kept getting her hands on the stuff.
“Did you and Charlie have a good time?” She sounded amused. She might have been a mother talking to an eight-year-old boy.
Oscar nodded anyway. After another yawn—he hadn’t realized how tired he was—he said, “Yeah,” again. This time, he added, “The best part was off the west coast, on the way back. We got to watch an American sub blow two Jap freighters to hell and gone.”
Susie’s eyes lit up. “That is good,” she said. “It didn’t make the papers here—why am I not surprised?” She wrinkled her nose and looked like a kid—a happy kid. “Hasn’t even made the rumor mill yet,” she went on, “and that’s a little more surprising.”
“How have you been?” Oscar asked. “It’s damn good to see you again.”
“I’m okay,” she answered. “I missed you.” She wrinkled her nose again, in a subtly different way this time, as if annoyed at herself. “I missed you more than I thought I would—and what kind of jerk am I for telling you something like that?”
“I missed you, too,” Oscar admitted. “Must be love.” He said the word lightly; he didn’t want to leave himself open for one of the snippy comebacks she was so good at. Lightly or not, it was the first time either one of them had said that word.
Susie looked. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Must be.” She leaned toward him. This time, the kiss went on and on.
Some time a good deal later, Oscar remarked, “This is how we said good-bye, and now it’s how we say hello. Good thing it doesn’t get bori
ng.”
Susie poked him in the ribs. “It better not, Buster.” And, not too long after that, he showed her it hadn’t.
EVEN THOUGH HAWAII WAS NOMINALLY an independent kingdom once more, General Tomoyuki Yamashita hadn’t given up his office in Iolani Palace. If King Stanley Laanui didn’t care for that—well, too bad. That was Yamashita’s attitude, anyhow.
The commanding general could not only outface the King of Hawaii, he could also summon a mere Navy commander like Minoru Genda whenever he pleased. Both the Hawaiian palace guards and their Japanese opposite numbers came to attention and saluted as Genda went up the front stairs and into the palace. He outranked them, anyhow.
General Yamashita was working in the Gold Room in the second floor. Not even he had had the crust to keep for himself either the library or the royal bedchambers once King Stanley and Queen Cynthia got settled into the palace. The Gold Room, which looked over the front entrance, had been the palace music room. Whatever instruments had been in there were long gone, replaced by utilitarian office furniture that seemed dreadfully out of place in such a splendid setting.
Yamashita’s scowl seemed out of place in that sunny room, too. As soon as Genda came in, the general growled, “Those stinking Yankee submarines are starting to pinch us. This time they cost us oil and rice. And what is the Navy doing about them? Not a stinking thing, not that I can see.”
“We are doing everything we can, sir,” Genda replied. “We are doing everything we know how to do. If hunting submarines were easy, they wouldn’t be such dangerous weapons.”
That only made Yamashita more unhappy still. “How are we supposed to defend those islands if we can’t supply them?” he exclaimed.
“Sir, the Americans aren’t doing exactly what we expected them to.” Genda didn’t sound happy, either. “We looked for them to go after our principal warships. Instead, as you say, they’re trying to hurt us economically, the way the Germans are trying to strangle England.”
End of the Beginning Page 13