End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  “Did you see that fucker?” asked the petty officer behind him. “You see the way he crashed that goddamn plane?”

  “I sure did,” Joe answered. The CPO who held the nozzle doused a burning Hellcat that might have been his. “If he’d done it a little earlier, he would have got me.” There. He’d said it. The sky didn’t fall. But he didn’t think he would ever have the feeling that nothing could happen to him, not any more. Now he was just another—what had some wise guy called it?—another fugitive from the law of averages, that was it.

  “He knew he was screwed, so he screwed us, too,” the petty officer said. “How the hell do you stop a guy who already knows he’s gonna buy a plot?”

  “We didn’t,” Joe said.

  “No shit!” the petty officer agreed. “Can you imagine what it would be like if a hundred o’ them Jap bastards tried to crash their planes into carriers and battlewagons all at once? They could fuck up the whole goddamn U.S. Navy.”

  Joe thought about it. The idea was scary, but only for a moment. He shook his head. “Never happen, buddy. No way in hell. Where you gonna find a hundred guys crazy enough to kill themselves like it was close-order drill? Not even the Nips are that nuts.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” the petty officer said after some thought of his own. “You’d have to be Asiatic to do somethin’ like that, and not even the Japs are Asiatic that kind of way.” He pointed to an escort carrier off to starboard. A column of smoke rose from that ship, too. “Bastard must have put a bomb into her—either that or another plane got her.”

  “Bomb, I think,” Joe said. “You can stick a bomb under just about any fighter. There was just the one plane, wasn’t there?”

  “Well, I thought so,” the rating answered. “Now I ain’t so sure. God, what a fucking mess this turned out to be.”

  He had that straight. Damage control was on the ball. They’d kept the fire from spreading, and now they just about had it out. But Bunker Hill’s flight deck was still a mess. They would have to shove six or eight planes over the side. They would have to repair the planking on the flight deck, too; some of it had caught fire. The air stank of gasoline and motor oil, of burnt paint and burnt rubber and burnt wood. And there was one more odor, too, one that made spit flood into Joe’s mouth before he realized what caused it, and then made him want to be sick. The smell of burnt meat would never be the same for him again.

  PLATOON SERGEANT LES DILLON CROUCHED in a shell hole just north of the Wheeler Field runways. The Japs had machine-gun nests on the other side of those battered cement strips. Before long, somebody who didn’t have to do it was going to order the Marines to cross that bare ground. And they would, too, or die trying. Les didn’t want to be one of the poor bastards who died trying.

  He heard the sweetest sound in the world: radial engines up in the air screaming their heads off. Hellcats strafed the Jap positions. He watched those .50-caliber rounds chew up the grass over there. Then he heard different engines: Louis Armstrong instead of Benny Goodman. The Dauntlesses put bombs down right on the money and then roared away to get more ordnance and do it again.

  Crossing the killing ground still wouldn’t be easy. Any Jap who wasn’t dead or maimed would be up and shooting the minute the Marines came out of their holes. Even the ones who were maimed would hang on to a rifle or a grenade. They weren’t about to let you take them alive. That was fine with Les Dillon. He didn’t want to take them alive anyhow.

  A whistle sounded. Les grimaced. This was it—the moment he hadn’t been waiting for. “Up, you bastards!” Captain Bradford yelled. “Are we Marines or not?”

  That flicked the men’s pride. The company commander had to know it would. Les sprang up and ran forward. He hunched over as low as he could and dodged from side to side. All of that did more good than snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away, but not a whole hell of a lot.

  And the planes hadn’t cleaned out all the Japs. He’d figured they wouldn’t. Marines fell. Others flopped down to fire back. An ice-blue tracer snapped past Dillon’s head. His first thought was of a firefly on benzedrine. His next was that the round had come much too close to punching his ticket. He should have thought that first, but your mind did crazy things sometimes.

  Then he was in among the Japs. Some of them were real infantrymen; others, by their clothes, groundcrew for airplanes. They all fought like madmen; the next Jap with any quit in him that Les saw would be the first. But the Marines had no quit in them, either. More of them rushed up to help their buddies. The Japanese didn’t get much in the way of reinforcements; Les had the feeling the ones fighting here were the last Japs standing for quite a ways.

  And then they weren’t standing any more. The Marines still on their feet finished off any of the enemy who still twitched. Word about the Opana POW massacre had got out. The Marines hadn’t been any more inclined to take prisoners than the Japs were to be captured even before it did. Now . . . Maybe they’d follow a direct order to try to capture some enemy soldiers for interrogation. Then again, maybe not. Had the Japs won the fight, Les knew a bullet through the head was the best he could hope for. Things went downhill from there, and in a hurry, too.

  Three Sherman tanks rumbled and snorted across the ruined runway. Les eyed them with a mixture of appreciation and disgust. He was glad to see them—he was always glad to see tanks, because they took so much pressure off the foot soldiers—but he would have been gladder if they’d shown up an hour earlier. They could have made taking this position a hell of a lot easier.

  He wasn’t the only one with that feeling, either. “Nice of you to join us, girls,” a Marine lisped, giving the tankers a limp-wristed wave.

  “They didn’t want to get their hair mussed,” another grimy, unshaven leatherneck added, even more swishily than the first one. Les started to giggle. He didn’t know why, but listening to tough guys acting like a bunch of fruits always broke him up. Some fairies got into the Marines. When they were found out, they left the Corps a lot faster than they’d joined it. He’d seen that happen a few times, in China and back in the States. Some of the men who got bounced were losers for other reasons, too. Others would have made pretty fair Marines if they weren’t queer.

  He laughed again, on a different note. For all he knew, there was a faggot or two in the company now. As long as a man didn’t advertise it—some did—how were you supposed to know?

  Even while such thoughts occurred to him, he got down in a hole some Jap didn’t need any more. You didn’t want to be on your feet and upright when the Japs could start taking potshots at you any second. The tank crewmen, meanwhile, yelled insults back at the Marines who fought on foot. One bow gunner wanted to jump out of his tank and kick ass. The driver on that tank restrained him. He was probably lucky: ground pounders were likely to be in better shape and meaner than guys who had armor plate to hold the war at bay.

  “Enough!” Les yelled. “Everybody—enough! We’ve got Japs to kill. You want to beat on each other, wait till we take Honolulu.”

  That name had enough magic to calm people down. Marines who’d been to Hawaii before thought of Hotel Street. Those who hadn’t didn’t, but what they had in mind was something like Hotel Street. Honolulu was the Holy Grail. There were all sorts of incentives for throwing out the Japs, booze and pussy not the smallest among them.

  “Where do we go now, sir?” someone asked Captain Bradford.

  “I don’t have more orders yet,” the company commander answered. “We did this. Now we wait and see what happens next.” The men knew what to do about that. They settled themselves in the entrenchments they’d just won. Here and there, they heaved Japanese corpses out of them. They lit cigarettes. Some of them opened K-ration cans. As long as they weren’t going anywhere right away, they’d make themselves as comfortable as they could. Hurry up and wait was supposed to be an Army joke, but the Marines lived by it, too.

  Dutch Wenzel came up to cadge a Camel from Les. “They don’t put cigars in the K
-rats,” Wenzel said mournfully. “You still alive? Hadn’t seen you for a while, so I started to wonder.”

  “Well, I was the last time I looked,” Dillon answered. “I wondered about you, too. Don’t see somebody for a coupla hours, you figure maybe he stopped one with his chest.”

  “These Japs . . .” Wenzel bent close for a light, sucked in smoke, and held it as long as he could. Les wondered if he was going to finish that after he finally blew it out. Then he decided it didn’t matter. Among the Marines, that was practically a complete sentence all by itself. Dutch exhaled a gray cloud and said, “You know, you can get damn near anything for cigarettes from the people here. They been without since they smoked the last of what they had. They go down on their knees to thank you if you give some away.”

  “Yeah?” Les leered. “You get one of these gals to go down on her knees for you? I heard of being hung like a horse, but I never heard of being hung like a Camel.”

  Wenzel made a horrible face, but he said, “I bet you could get sucked off for cigarettes, no shit. Tell you something—I think I’d rather get blown than lay most of these women. They’re so goddamn scrawny, it’d be like laying a ladder.”

  Les nodded. All the civilians on Oahu were skinny. Even the Japs were skinny, and they’d had better rations than the locals. Just the same . . . “You’ve heard about the prisoners at that Opana place, and the ones our guys rescued down by Honolulu? Those poor mothers weren’t just skinny. They were fucking starving to death for real. Goddamn Japs have a lot to answer for.”

  “Better believe it.” Dutch smoked the cigarette down to a butt. Then he took an alligator clip out of his pocket and went on smoking it even after it got too small to hold between his fingers. That was a good idea. Les reminded himself to scrounge his own clip off a radioman or a field-telephone operator or somebody else who messed around with wires. Wenzel went on, “There was supposed to be another camp somewhere, too, one where the Japs got even with guys who got their asses in a sling at the regular places. Scuttlebutt is, that one made the others look like a rest cure.”

  “I heard something like that, too,” Les said. “You keep hoping that crap isn’t so. And then you find out it is, and that it’s worse than anybody said it was, on account of nobody would’ve believed it if they tried to say how bad it really was.”

  Wenzel eyed the closest Japanese corpse. The Jap had taken one in the neck and one in the face. Either would have finished him. The one in the face had gone out through the back of his head and blown out most of his brains. Flies crawled over the blood-soaked grayish spatters. “He got it quick,” Dutch observed. “After what they did at Opana, I’d like to roast ’em all over a slow fire. Not half of what they oughta get, either.”

  “Gonna be that kind of war, all right,” Les agreed mournfully. “Back in 1918, the Germans fought hard, but they fought pretty clean. So did we, even if”—he chuckled reminiscently—“their machine gunners had a lot of trouble surrendering. Those bastards thought they could bang away till you were right on top of ’em and then put up their hands. They had more accidents. . . . But it’s all gonna be like that here, and we’re just starting out. Still a long way to Tokyo. Fuck, it’s still a long way to Midway.”

  “Sir?” the radioman called to Captain Bradford.

  The company commander listened and talked for a little while. Then he said, “Well, boys, we’ve got our orders now.” He waited for the expectant mutter to die away, then went on, “We’re going to do a left wheel and head for Honolulu with the rest of the guys moving south.”

  “What the fuck?” Les muttered. He’d figured they would keep driving straight south. He said, “Sir, what about Pearl City and Pearl Harbor?”

  “They’ll be taken care of, Sergeant, I promise,” Bradford said. “Only difference is, we won’t be the guys who do it.”

  “Right,” Les said. Somebody somewhere way the hell up the chain of command had had himself a brainstorm. Whether it would end up being the good kind or the other kind—well, everybody would have to wait and see how that turned out. “Honolulu.” Dillon tasted the word. He’d been thinking about Hotel Street not long before. He wondered what was left of it. If the damn Nips didn’t shoot him first, he’d find out.

  MINORU GENDA WAITED IN A HOTEL ROOM on Hotel Street. He’d brought his bicycle upstairs with him to the bare little cubicle. If he left it on the street, even chained to a lamppost, it would be gone by the time he came down. He’d paid too much for the room. He’d paid too much for the bottle of island gin he’d brought here, too. He shrugged. What did he have to do with his money now but spend it?

  A knock on the door. He jumped up from the bed—the only furniture in the room but for a battered chest of drawers. Hotels on Hotel Street had only one thing in mind.

  He opened the door. Queen Cynthia Laanui stood in the hallway. Probably the most recognizable woman in Hawaii, she’d taken pains not to be recognized. Her red hair was tucked up under a straw hat. Enormous sunglasses helped hide her face. She’d brought her bicycle upstairs, too. A cramped room with two bicycles in it amused Genda. Small things still could. Few big ones were amusing any more.

  Queen Cynthia walked the bicycle in when Genda stood aside. He closed the door behind her and locked it. Then he took her in his arms. They kissed greedily. When they broke apart, she said, “It’s not going to work, is it?” She didn’t sound bitter—only very tired.

  “No.” Genda wished he could lie to her. Back at Pearl Harbor, Japanese officers were still busy lying to one another. They kept on believing that if this went right, and if that went right, and if they caught the Americans napping here, they might still save Oahu. American officers must have danced that dance of delusion at the end of 1941 and the start of 1942. Before long, defeat stared them in the face even so. And it would stare the Japanese in the face, too. Genda went on, “We fight hard. We are brave. But, so sorry, we cannot win. The enemy is too strong.”

  Saying something like that brought vast relief. His colleagues might have arrested him for telling the truth. If you didn’t look at something, they were convinced, it would go away. But being convinced didn’t make it true.

  “What are we going to do, then?” Cynthia asked. “What can we do?”

  What did we mean here? The Empire of Japan and the soon to be extinguished Kingdom of Hawaii? King Stanley and herself? Genda and herself? All of those at once? That last was Genda’s guess. He said, “We all do the best we can.” His answer was as ambiguous as her question.

  She spotted the bottle on the chest of drawers. Two lithe strides took her to it. She yanked out the cork, swigged, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s nasty,” she said, coughing, and then drank again.

  Genda took a pull, too. It was every bit as bad as Cynthia said it was. But the only thing worse than rotgut liquor was no liquor at all. “You have courage, not to try to get away,” he said.

  Her laugh was all razors and barbed wire. “Where would I go? How would I get there? Wherever it is, somebody would know my face. Your propaganda people made sure of that. I’m on postage stamps, for crying out loud. And pretty soon I’ll be on post-office walls, too.” Seeing that that meant nothing to Genda, she explained, “That’s where we put posters of wanted criminals.”

  He kissed her again. “You are not a criminal to me, but you are wanted.” Paying compliments in English wasn’t easy for him. He hoped that one came out right.

  It must have, because she turned red. But she sounded no happier as she answered, “Yeah, and that only makes me a bigger villain to the USA. Like being Queen of Hawaii wasn’t bad enough, I fell for a Japanese officer. They won’t know whether to shoot me or hang me.”

  She was probably right. No, she was bound to be right. If the Americans came back, they would have debts to pay.

  He wished he could offer to take her to Japan. She deserved to escape such a fate. He didn’t think the two of them would last long as a couple once she got back to the home islands. King Stanley w
ould have to come, too. Genda’s liaison with a round-eyed woman would draw much more notice, and much more censorious notice, in Japan than it did in this easygoing place. The King and Queen of Hawaii would undoubtedly go on being used for propaganda purposes: brave heads of a government in exile. Genda could see it all now.

  What he couldn’t see was how to get Queen Cynthia—yes, and King Stanley—away from Oahu. If he’d known how to do that, he might have had some notion of how to get away himself. But no Japanese planes had been seen in these parts since the American fleet’s fighters and bombers smashed the fleet and then the land-based aircraft. An H8K flying boat might be able to sneak into Pearl Harbor. But the odds were long. As the Americans had shown by their landing at the Kapiolani Park POW camp, they controlled the sea and air all around Oahu, and their grip tightened by the day.

  Genda didn’t think Japan could scrape together enough carriers and other ships to challenge this armada, even if she abandoned the rest of the war—which she couldn’t very well do. Everything Admiral Yamamoto had said about what the United States could do if roused was coming true. From Honolulu, though, Tokyo was more than 6,000 kilometers away. Even now, Hawaii shielded Japan.

  Maybe a submarine could sneak in and out. None had come in, though. Genda didn’t know if any had tried. Which would be worse, knowing some had failed or knowing his superiors far to the west hadn’t dared risk any? One more question he hadn’t asked himself.

  “When . . . things go wrong, Japanese people often kill themselves, don’t they?” By the way Queen Cynthia asked the question, she knew the answer.

  “Yes, we do that.” Minoru Genda nodded. He didn’t go into details about seppuku. Women weren’t expected to disembowel themselves anyway, only to slit their throats. After the nod, he shook his head, trying to shove such unpleasant, unwelcome thoughts aside. It wasn’t the first time he’d had them. He said, “Too soon to worry about such things. Much too soon.” He sipped from the bottle on the dresser. If he drank enough of that, he wouldn’t worry about anything for a while.