End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

And if by some accident they got out of this, what would their lives be like? Jane tried to imagine wanting a man to touch her. The picture refused to form. And she tried to imagine a decent man wanting to touch her if he knew what the Japs had made her do. That picture wouldn’t take shape, either. She shook her head. What was left for her? Nothing she could see.

  Sometimes a woman broke down and sobbed here. Sometimes crying jags ran through them all, contagious as chicken pox. Not tonight, though. Maybe they were all trying to figure the odds.

  Artillery and small-arms fire through the night didn’t keep Jane from sleeping like a stone. One more thing nobody’d told her: screwing all day was hard physical labor. And it wore out the spirit much worse than the body.

  No rooster announced the dawn. As far as Jane knew, all the roosters in Wahiawa except one saved for stud were long since chicken stew. Since coming here, she’d wondered once or twice if he got sick of fucking strangers all day every day. She figured the odds were against it. After all, he was a goddamn male.

  Usually, the breakfast gong took the rooster’s place. The women woke for that. If they didn’t get breakfast, they couldn’t eat till suppertime. Today, though, just as the eastern sky was beginning to go pink, four 105mm shells slammed into the brothel.

  That got Jane out of bed—literally. She woke up on the floor, with one of the walls tilted sideways and with chunks of plaster falling on her head from the ceiling. Somebody was screaming, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Somebody else was just screaming, the agonized, unthinking cries of the badly wounded.

  Jane scrambled to her feet. She cut one of them on broken glass, but she hardly cared. She let the muumuu fall over her head, then rushed out the door. It had been locked from the outside, but the blasts blew it open.

  Beulah’s door had come open all by itself, too. Jane looked into the room. “Let’s get out of here!” she shouted. “We’ll never have a better chance!”

  “I guess not,” Beulah said—she must have been in another line when they were handing out brains. All she had on was a pair of panties. She didn’t stop for anything else. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so dumb.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Annabelle Chung stood in the corridor, hands on her hips. Jane wasted no time on conversation. She hauled off and belted her oppressor in the chops. The Chinese woman shrieked and staggered, but tried to fight back. Jane gave her a pretty fair one-two. Maybe she’d been listening after all when Fletch went on and on about Joe Louis and Hank Armstrong.

  The Chinese woman went down on hands and knees. When she started to get up, Beulah kicked her in the ribs. That wasn’t in the Marquis of Queens-berry rules, but it sure as hell worked. Annabelle Chung stayed down. “Way to go!” Jane shouted.

  The side of the building had a hole in it you could drive a bus through. Comfort women streamed out. Some wore muumuus like Jane; one or two were buck naked. Several of them were limping or bleeding. None of that mattered. Getting out did.

  Out in the open. Two Japs had stood nearby. Only the bottom part of one of them was left. The other had had his head almost blown off. Jane looked longingly at the Arisakas by the dead men. She knew how to use a bolt-action rifle. But lots of Japs still occupied Wahiawa. Even with a rifle, she couldn’t kill them all. Oh, but I want to! she thought. They could kill her, though, and they would if they saw her with an Arisaka in her hands. She hated to leave the rifles there, but she did.

  “Let’s get away!” she said. Her partners in misery didn’t need the advice. They were already scattering as fast as they could. Some of them would have friends and families to go back to. Would they still be friends, would the families stay loving, when they found out what the women here had had to do? Maybe. Some of them might, anyhow. The rest? Well, they couldn’t be worse than the Japs.

  Jane had nothing and nobody here. Fletch was a POW if he hadn’t died since she last saw him. For all practical purposes, he was an ex-husband, anyway. Would I take him back now? Jane laughed as she ran. That wasn’t the question, was it? Would he take me back now? She had no idea. Everything she’d done, she’d been forced to do. Everybody had to know that. Would anyone care, or would she stay soiled in the eyes of the world for the rest of her life?

  She’d worry about that later. All she wanted to do now was get away from the brothel, get away from the Japs, and let the world scorn her if it would.

  More artillery shells screamed in. Jane threw herself flat before they burst. Fletch had talked about that, too, and she’d seen it worked when the Japs came down from the north. Now her own country was doing its best to kill her. She forgave it. As she lay there in the gutter with fragments of sharp steel screeching by above her head, she cried tears of pure, unadulterated joy.

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HELPED MECHANICS gut wrecked Zeros and Hayabusas, salvaging machine guns and 20mm cannon for use against the Americans on the ground. He’d already gutted his own fighter. To his mortification, the Yankees had caught it on the ground and shot it up bad enough to keep it there for good. He’d wanted to die in the air, with luck taking a few more enemy planes with him. The kami in charge of such things paid no attention to what he wanted.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Japanese fighter in the air. The Americans ruled the skies now. Their fearsome planes roared over Oahu like flying tigers, shooting up anything that moved. When the Japanese landed here, Zeros dominated the air. Now Shindo was finding out how taking what he’d dished out felt. He would rather have stayed on the other end of it.

  “Pass me those tinsnips,” he said. The mechanic working with him did. He sliced away at the aluminum skin of a Zero’s wing. The fuselage had burned. The other wing had gone up with it. This one, by a freak of war, was pretty much intact. Put that cannon in some kind of improvised ground mount and it would make a few Americans sorry they’d ever been born.

  The thought had hardly crossed his mind before he heard a sound he’d come to hate: the roar of enemy engines in the air. American radials had a deeper note than their Japanese counterparts; anyone who’d heard both would never confuse the two. Shindo threw down the snips and ran for the nearest trench. The Japanese had dug lots of them when they thought they would still be able to fly out of Wheeler Field. That proved optimistic, but the trenches still gave people a place to hide when Yankee planes came over.

  A few soldiers fired at the fighters and dive bombers with rifles. So Americans had fired at Zeros when the war was new: furiously, but without much hope. The Americans had knocked down a couple of Japanese planes—put enough lead in the air and you would. Much good it had done them. No doubt the Japanese here would knock down a few American planes, too, and much good that would do them.

  In fact, the muzzle flashes told the Yankees where the trenches were. Shindo huddled in the damp-smelling dirt as heavy machine-gun slugs chewed up the ground all around him. Some of them struck home. Few men who were hit cried out, as they would have if a rifle-caliber round struck them. If a high-velocity bullet the size of a man’s thumb hit you, you were usually too dead to scream.

  Bursting bombs made the earth shake under him. The noise was tremendous, something beyond the normal meaning of the word. Shindo felt it through his skin as much as he heard it. Dirt rained down on him. Fragments of bomb casing howled past not nearly far enough over his head.

  And then, like a cloudburst, it was over—till the next time. Shindo looked at his wristwatch. He shook his head in slow wonder. All that horror, compressed into less than ten minutes? It was as abbreviated as air-to-air combat, and seemed even slower. In the air, he could have fought back. Here, he just had to take it.

  The Americans hadn’t gone back to the north. They’d flown south instead, to harry Pearl Harbor and Ewa. That meant they might hit Wheeler Field again on the way home to their carriers. Shindo shrugged stoically as he climbed out of the trench. If they did, they did, that was all. He couldn’t do anything about it. He could help the Army meet the U.S. invaders.


  Or he thought he could. When he got a look at the fighter he’d been cannibalizing, he wasn’t so sure any more. One bomb had landed right on it, another close by. One blast or the other had driven his tinsnips deep into the trunk of a palm tree, so deep he knew he’d need other tools to get them out. And the barrel of the cannon he’d been freeing had a distinct bend in it now. Nobody would use that weapon against the Yankees.

  Shindo’s shoulders slumped. How were you supposed to fight the enemy when he blocked things even before you did them? Again, the Americans must have been asking themselves something like that at the end of 1941. Now that it was Japan’s turn, Shindo found no better answers than they had then.

  JIM PETERSON STOOD AT ATTENTION WITH HIS FELLOW sufferers in the Kalihi Valley. Most of them were as skeletal as he was. Beriberi and dropsy swelled others past what was natural. A man like Charlie Kaapu, who was only gaunt, stood out as an extraordinary physical specimen.

  POWs had tried to get away from this hellhole before the Americans came back to Oahu. Now, with the hope of rescue in the air, escape attempts came more often. But sick, starving men couldn’t go very far very fast. They usually got caught. And when they did, they paid.

  This poor fellow looked like a rack of bones. The butcher’s cat would have turned up its nose at him even before the Japs beat the crap out of him. Now he was all over bruises and blood, too. They’d broken his nose. A couple of guards held him upright. He didn’t seem able to stand on his own.

  “What’ll they do to him?” Charlie Kaapu whispered to Peterson. He’d quickly mastered the art of speaking without moving his lips.

  “Don’t know,” Peterson whispered back. “That’s why we’re here, though—so they can make a show.”

  It wasn’t much of a show. The guards let the POW fall to his knees. A lieutenant swung his sword. Peterson had heard that samurai swords would cut through anything on the first try. One more lie—or maybe the Jap hadn’t taken good care of the blade. Any which way, he needed three hacks before the POW’s head fell from his neck. The body convulsed, but not for long. The head just lay there. If anything, it seemed relieved the ordeal was over.

  “Fuck,” Charlie Kaapu whispered. Under his swarthy skin, he turned green.

  He was a civilian. He hadn’t seen so much. Peterson only shrugged. The Japs had done plenty worse. The lieutenant let out a torrent of Japanese. A noncom who spoke fragments of English pointed to the emaciated corpse and the pool of blood soaking into the ground under it. “You run, you—” He pointed again. That got the meaning across, but Peterson suspected some of the lieutenant’s eloquence was lost in translation. Yeah, like I give a shit, he thought.

  Off in the distance, bombs burst and .50-caliber machine guns chattered: the unmistakable sounds of American planes giving the Japs hell. The guards resolutely pretended nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The POWs had to pretend the same thing. Men who grinned or laughed caught hell. Several of them had died from it—not as spectacularly as the beheaded man, but every bit as dead. The guards were jumpy, and getting jumpier all the time, no matter what they pretended.

  The sergeant with a little English pointed toward the mouth of the tunnel through the Koolau Range. “You go!” he yelled, and the POWs went.

  It was madness. Peterson knew it. Everybody knew it, prisoners and guards alike. The only reason the men were digging through the mountains’ bowels was so they could die from hard labor and bad food. Too many of them hadn’t needed any further abuse from the Japs. The routine was deadly enough.

  Besides that, even if there had been some point to all the man-killing labor, there wasn’t any more. The Japanese would never get a nickel’s worth of good out of the tunnel. By every sign Peterson could use to judge, they wouldn’t hold Oahu. The Stars and Stripes would fly here again. Everything the POWs in the Kalihi Valley did was an exercise in futility.

  They got driven to it even so. If anything, they got driven harder than ever now. The guards might have feared they would rise up if they weren’t worked to death and otherwise intimidated. They might have been right, too.

  Outside the tunnel mouth, Peterson grabbed a pick. Charlie Kaapu took a shovel. His face said he would sooner have bashed Japs with it than lifted chunks of rock. “Easy,” Peterson murmured. A machine-gun nest covered the tools. Anybody who got out of line would die fast. So would a lot of POWs who hadn’t done one damn thing.

  The hapa-Hawaiian growled, down deep in his throat. But he carried the shovel into the tunnel instead of braining the nearest guard. Light vanished. It would have been dark in there even if Peterson had been well nourished. Night blindness had advanced with his beriberi. He couldn’t see much at all.

  Lamps set into the wall here and there gave just enough light to let him keep moving forward. The sound of other POWs banging away at the living rock told him he was getting close. So did a Jap’s yell: “Hurry up! Faster!”

  Peterson wanted to ask why. The Jap would have answered with a beating or a bayonet or a bullet. Those answers were persuasive enough, too. How could you argue with them? You couldn’t, not unless you had a club or a rifle yourself. Peterson wished for a rifle. He wished for a machine gun, and the strength to fire it from the hip. You could do that in the movies. In the real world? He knew better.

  A Jap hit him with a bamboo swagger stick for no reason he could see. A pick was a weapon, too. He could have broken the bastard’s head. He could have, but he didn’t. He didn’t fear death himself, though he would surely die if he raised his hand to a guard. But the Japs would slaughter untold other POWs to avenge and punish. He didn’t want to die with that on his conscience.

  Instead of smashing the guard’s skull, the pick bit into the rock. Pulling it free took all his strength. So did lifting it for the next stroke. How many had he made? Too many. Far too many. That was all he knew.

  He grubbed rock out of the wall. Charlie Kaapu shoveled it up and dumped it into baskets. Some other poor, sorry son of a bitch carried away the spoil. Other POWs grubbed and shoveled and carried, too. The guards screamed at everybody to move faster. Dully, Peterson wondered what difference it could make. They weren’t that close to punching through, or he didn’t think they were. Even if they had been, what advantage could the Japs gain from moving men to the east coast? No fighting there. Could they get back over the mountains and hit the Americans in the flank? They’d done it in the west in their invasion, but they’d been up against a much weaker foe, and one who didn’t control the air. Peterson didn’t believe they could make it matter this time around.

  Every so often, one of the laborers keeled over. The guards weren’t about to put up with that—it was too much like resting on the job. They fell on the sufferers like wolves, trying to get them back on their feet with blows and kicks. Some of the POWs could be bullied upright again. Some were too far gone, and lay on the tunnel floor no matter what the Japs did. And some didn’t keel over because they were tired. Some keeled over because they were dead.

  The men who carried away rock also carried away corpses. That gummed up the works, because the rock accumulated. The Japs just screamed at them to move faster, too, and beat them when they didn’t—SOP for Imperial Japan.

  Hours blurred together into one long agony. At last, after the usual eternity, the guards let the POWs stumble out of the tunnel. They queued up for the little bit of rice the Japs grudgingly doled out. There was even less than usual today. Men grumbled—food they took seriously. The Japs only shrugged. One who spoke a little English said, “More not come. Blame Americans.”

  Had U.S. fighters (some of the ones Peterson had seen weren’t Wildcats, but new, plainly hot machines) shot up the rice on the way to the Kalihi Valley? Or had the Japs, with more important things to worry about than a bunch of damned—literally—POWs, just not bothered sending any? Either way, it made starving to death seem almost worthwhile.

  Almost.

  WHEN JIRO TAKAHASHI WALKED UP NUUANU AVENUE to the Japanes
e consulate, he was shocked not to see the Rising Sun flying in front of the compound. Then he noticed how many bullet holes pocked the buildings. The staff must have decided not to fly the flag to keep from giving a target to the American planes now constantly overhead.

  For most of the occupation, the guards in front of the consulate had been a ceremonial force. No more. They crouched in sandbagged machine-gun nests, the snouts of their weapons pointing up toward the sky. There were fewer of them than there had been. Some, Jiro supposed, would have gone up to the front. Others . . . With the buildings as battered as they were, some of those bullets would have found flesh, too.

  “It’s the Fisherman!” one of the guards called. The men who were left still knew Jiro. That made him feel good. The one who’d spoken went on, “You bring us some nice ahi, Fisherman, or even some mackerel?”

  Jiro laughed nervously. He was emptyhanded, as they could see. “Not today, gomen nasai,” he answered. He was sorry, too; in better times, he would have had fish for the consul and the chancellor and often the guards as well. “Is Kita-san in?” he asked.

  “I think so,” the talky guard answered. “Go on in any which way. They’ll be glad to see you. They’re glad to see anybody right now.” His laugh had a somber edge.

  With such gallows humor ringing in his ears, Jiro did. Even some of the secretaries had put down their pens and picked up Arisakas. One of the remainder, a gray-haired fellow who would have been useless on a battlefield, said, “Oh, yes, Takahashi-san, the consul’s here. I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you. Please wait a moment.” He hurried back to Nagao Kita’s office.

  Returning a moment later, he beckoned Jiro on. “Welcome, Takahashi-san, welcome,” Kita said after they exchanged bows. “Good to see you haven’t abandoned us.” His words showed spirit, but his round features were thinner and less jaunty than Jiro had ever seen them.

  Jiro bowed again. “I wouldn’t do that, your Excellency,” he said, though the thought had crossed his mind. The radio broadcasts full of lies he’d had to read still rankled.