Les ran for a doorway. Dutch Wenzel ran for one a couple of houses farther on. He stopped halfway there, yelped, and said, “Aw, shit!” His rifle fell to the pavement.
“What happened, Dutch?” Les called.
“Got one right through the hand,” the other noncom answered. “Hurts like a son of a bitch. I never got shot before.”
“Welcome to the club.” Les wouldn’t have joined if he had any choice. But an injury like Wenzel’s . . . “Sounds like you got a million-dollar wound. You did your bit, it won’t kill you, it’ll probably heal good, and you’re out of the fight for a while.”
“Yeah, I already thought of that,” Wenzel said. “But you know what? I’d sooner stay here with the rest of you guys. I feel like I’m getting thrown out of the game just after we went and scored six runs in the eighth.”
“Stay there till we push forward some more,” Les said. “Then you can get to the rear without worrying a sniper’s gonna get you.” Without worrying so much, he thought.
“Yes, Granny dear,” Wenzel said. Les laughed. Like him, the other platoon sergeant was more used to giving orders than taking them.
Then the laughter died in his throat, because the door he was standing in front of opened. Had the Jap behind it been a soldier, Les would have died in the next instant. Instead, he was a skinny eight-year-old kid in ragged shorts. “Watcha doin’, Mister?” he asked.
“Jesus!” Les exploded. “I almost shot you, you dumb little—” He broke off when he saw how skinny the kid was. Fumbling through the pouches on his belt, he found a K-ration can. “Here. This is chopped ham, I think. Bet you like it a hell of a lot better’n I do.”
The kid’s eyes got big as gumdrops. “Wow!” he breathed, as if Les had just given him the Hope Diamond. “Thanks, Mister!” He disappeared, yelling, “Mom! Mom! Guess what I got!”
You almost got a .30-caliber round in the teeth, that’s what. Les’ heart still thuttered. All kinds of bad things happened during a war. Even so, how could you make yourself forget you shot a little kid? Les knew he had lots of things to worry about, but that, thank God, wasn’t one of them.
NO MORE TAKING A SAILBOARD OUT from Waikiki Beach. The Japs had put down barbed wire and machine-gun nests and mines. Years after they were gone, some damnfool tourist would probably blow his foot off on one everybody missed till he found it the hard way.
Oscar van der Kirk wasn’t especially worried about some imaginary tourist. He just didn’t want to blow off his own foot crossing Waikiki Beach. He did want to live long enough to have the chance to cross it again.
Because of the fish he’d brought home, Oahu’s hunger hadn’t pinched him and Susie as much as it had most people. Now they had to do without, and it hurt. And they had Charlie Kaapu with them, so it hurt even more.
The only way to get food now was to go out and work. The only work was helping the Japs build more roadblocks and barricades and pillboxes to hold back the U.S. Marines and Army. Oscar thought it was a lot of work for precious little rice. Charlie started going out with him after a few days. Oscar wondered if he was strong enough to do the hauling and lifting, but he took them in stride.
“No huhu,” he said when he and Oscar didn’t happen to be close to any Japs. “Up in the goddamn tunnel, I did twice this much on a quarter the food. Everybody did.”
Remembering what he’d looked like when he came out of the Kalihi Valley, Oscar believed him. He did ask, “How?”
“They’d kill you if you didn’t,” Charlie answered. “That whole setup was made to kill people. Either the work would do you in or the guards would. I hope our guys gutshoot every one of those bastards. They deserve it.” He was normally an easygoing fellow. Not here. Not now. He meant every word of it.
But he knew how to bow and smile at the Japanese riflemen and machine gunners when he got anywhere near them. Oscar knew how to do that, too, but Charlie’d had the advanced course. Oscar could satisfy the Japs. Charlie could make them smile back and even laugh.
Sometimes he would cuss them in friendly tones while he smiled. He took his life in his hands every time he did it: some of the Japs had picked up bits and pieces of English. Oscar kept trying to warn him. And Charlie would say, “Yeah, Oscar. Sure, Oscar,” and he’d go right on doing it. It was as if he had to take his revenge on them no matter what it cost him.
Off to the west, the battle for Honolulu ground on. The Americans had the artillery. They had the tanks. They had the airplanes. They even brought Navy ships off the south coast of Oahu, to blast the city with big guns. All the Japs had were the rubble and their weapons and their stubborn courage. Those were plenty to make the American reconquest a long, slow, bloody job.
“I hope they all die,” Charlie said with a big grin on his face. “I hope they all die slow, and I hope they hurt all the time while they’re doing it. Yes, you, too, Sergeant-san,” he added to a Japanese noncom who walked by after fiddling with the sight on a machine gun. Hearing only the title of respect, the sergeant grinned and returned Charlie’s bow.
“Ohhh, Charlie,” Oscar said.
“Right, Oscar,” Charlie said, and Oscar shut up.
So far, Waikiki had been only at the edges of the fight. A few overs from the U.S. bombardment of the rest of Honolulu came down there. The big raid on the POW camp in Kapiolani Park had been just east of the main part of Waikiki. Oscar began to hope his district would come through without much damage.
Artillery didn’t shatter that hope. Planes from one of the carriers somewhere out in the Pacific did. In the abstract, Oscar didn’t suppose he could blame the pilots. They wanted to soften up the Japs so that, when the American foot sloggers finally ground this far east, they wouldn’t have to work so hard.
Oscar had got used to the roar of planes overhead. He’d even got used to the deeper tones of the new U.S. aircraft. They made Japanese aircraft sound like flying sewing machines. But the sound of dive bombers falling out of the sky straight toward him was new and altogether terrifying.
The Japs reacted before he could. Some of them dove for cover. Others either manned their machine guns and blazed away at the dive bombers or fired their rifles at them. Oscar could admire that kind of bravery without wanting to imitate it.
“Get down, you damn fool!” Charlie Kaapu yelled at him as the first bomb screamed down.
“Huh?” Oscar said brilliantly. Looking back, he had to admit it wasn’t his finest hour. Charlie used the handle of his shovel to knock Oscar’s legs out from under him.
Before Oscar could even squawk, the bomb hit. Blast sucked the air out of his lungs. Had the bomb burst a little closer, it would have torn them to pieces from the inside out so he drowned in his own blood. Chunks of casing screeched through the air, some of them not nearly far enough over his head.
And that bomb was only the first of eight or ten. Somebody in the Bible had wrestled with God and prevailed. Oscar felt as if he were wrestling with God and getting the crap slammed out of him. He got bounced and slapped around, and ended up all bruised and battered. He stopped complaining, even to himself, when he fetched up against the Japanese sergeant’s head. The man’s body was nowhere in sight. Oscar almost lost his meager breakfast.
The work he and Charlie and the rest of the Japs’ forced laborers had done was smashed to hell and gone. So were a lot of Japanese soldiers and special naval landing force troops and luckless locals dragooned into working for them. And the dive bombers were only the opening act of the show. As soon as they roared away, fighters swooped low and started spraying the landscape with bullets.
Oscar watched a Jap hit by a burst literally get cut in half. The worst part was, the man’s top half didn’t die right away. Even though blood spilled from it—and from the rest of him—like water from a hose, he yammered something in his own language, tried to lever himself upright, and even looked around for the rifle he’d dropped. Only after most of a dreadful minute did the expression drain from his face. He slumped over again, finally se
eming to realize he was dead.
“Jesus!” Oscar turned away, clapping a hand to his mouth. He’d already seen a lot of things he never wanted to see again. That one, though . . . That one topped the list.
Charlie Kaapu watched the Jap with a face that might have been carved from the basalt underlying the islands. “Serves him right,” he said.
“But—” Oscar didn’t have time for any more than that. Another fighter roared in, its machine guns winking fire. He folded himself into the smallest ball he could and prayed he didn’t get chewed up the way the Jap had. Charlie Kaapu lay on the ground beside him, also doing his best to imitate a sowbug.
Bursts of fire from Japanese machine-gun nests answered the hail of lead from the sky. The Japs had nerve, even if Oscar thought they were short on brains. Then one of the American planes slammed into the ground and went up in a high-octane fireball. The Japs yelled like men possessed. Oscar had a hard time blaming them, too. They’d just proved they could hit back.
Both at the start of the Japanese invasion of Hawaii and now at the end of their tenure here, his own countrymen came closer to killing him than the Japs ever had. He waited for those fighters to come back and shoot up some more Japanese positions—positions, he hoped, a little farther away from him.
“SHIT!” Joe Crosetti exclaimed when another Hellcat crashed and exploded in flames in Waikiki. He knew that could happen to him, too. He hated being reminded. Somebody wasn’t going home to his mom and dad and brothers and sisters—maybe to his wife and kid. Some clerk in the War Department—some bastard thousands of miles away from the fighting and snug as a bug in a rug—would have to send out a Deeply Regrets telegram. And some family’s life would turn upside down.
As Joe’s thumb found the firing button and he raked the Japs below with .50-caliber slugs, he never once thought that they had moms and dads and brothers and sisters and maybe wives and kids, too. They were just . . . the enemy to him. They weren’t people, the way the guys on his own side were.
And they were still doing their goddamnedest to kill him. Their pale, cold-looking tracers spat from machine guns down on the ground and probed for his fighter, trying to knock him out of the sky like that poor luckless son of a bitch who’d just bought the farm. Something clanged into the Hellcat. As always, Joe quickly scanned the instruments. Everything looked okay. The engine kept running. He reached out and patted the side of the cockpit. “Attababy!” he told the plane. They weren’t just whistling Dixie when they said a Hellcat could take it.
Down on the ground, the Japs were sure taking it. More fires than the one from that other plane’s funeral pyre were rising from Waikiki. See how you like it, you bastards, Joe thought. He hoped there weren’t too many civilians down there. If there were, it was their tough luck. They were almost as abstract to him as the enemy. He wished the Japs would just throw in the sponge, the way some lousy pug’s handlers would after Joe Louis beat the snot out of their pride and joy.
Sometimes, though, a pug stayed in there and went toe-to-toe with the champ till he got KO’ed. If the Japs wanted to do that against the USA, by God, they’d get carried out of the ring, too. Yeah, they’d landed a sucker punch at the start of the fight, but you only got one of those. And when you were up against the heavyweight champion of the world, one wasn’t enough.
Joe sprayed Waikiki with bullets as big as his thumb till his guns ran dry. Then he got on the radio to his squadron leader: “Going home for more ammo.”
“Roger that,” the other pilot answered. “We’ll keep ’em busy while you’re otherwise occupied, Admiral.”
“Out,” Joe said with a snort. Admiral! He still aspired to a lieutenant, j.g.’s, stripe and a half on his sleeve.
A few more tracers came up at him as he flew north: Japanese holdouts still doing their damnedest to make trouble. They still held a few pockets in central Oahu where they’d been encircled and bypassed. Sooner or later, soldiers and Navy fliers would clean out those pockets. It wasn’t as if the Japs could retreat to the jungle here and fight a long guerrilla war. Oahu had plenty of jungles. The only trouble, from what Joe’s briefings said, was that you’d starve if you tried playing Tarzan in them.
Five minutes after he left Waikiki behind, he was out over the ocean again. Unless you flew over Oahu, you didn’t realize what a small island it was. He waggled his wings as he flew past the destroyers and cruisers and battleships still firing from the north. Some of them had come around the island to hit targets near Pearl Harbor and Honolulu.
None of the ships shot at him. None of them had shot at that crazy Jap who crashed his Zero into the Bunker Hill, either. Bastard had extracted a high price for his worthless neck, too. He’d hurt that baby flattop along with the big fleet carrier.
Combat air patrol came by to give Joe a look-see. They hadn’t done it soon enough with that Jap. Joe, of course, was harmless, at least to U.S. ships. He and the CAP planes exchanged more wing waggles and some raunchy banter over the radio. Then he flew on toward his carrier.
He still didn’t like carrier landings. He didn’t know a single pilot who did. He suspected there was no such animal. Like them or not, he did exactly what the nice gentleman with the wigwag flags told him to do. It worked: the landing officer didn’t wave him off. When the flags dropped, so did Joe’s Hellcat. His teeth clicked together as the wheels hit the flight deck. The tailhook caught. The fighter jerked to a stop.
Joe shoved back the canopy and scrambled out of the cockpit. He ran for the island as soon as his feet hit the deck planking. The faster you got away from the plane, the better off you were. The briefings had that one right. As if Joe needed the reminder, the Jap suicide pilot drove home that lesson.
“Over Waikiki, Crosetti?” the briefing officer said when Joe reported.
“Yes, sir.”
The other officer—a regular and an older man—smiled. “Not the way you expected to get there, I bet.”
“Sir, till the war started, I never figured I’d get there at all,” Joe answered.
“Well, since you did, suppose you tell me what you saw,” the briefing officer said.
“Aye aye, sir,” Joe said, and he did.
AT BREAKFAST ONE MORNING on the hospital ship, Fletch Armitage realized he was making progress. Breakfast, like most breakfasts on the Benevolence, was scrambled powdered eggs, fried Spam, and hash browns. Nothing was wrong with the hash browns. They had crunch over greasy softness, and you could pour on the salt till they tasted just the way they were supposed to.
The powdered eggs and Spam, on the other hand . . . Up till that morning, Fletch had shoveled them into his face with reckless abandon, like a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation. He damn well was a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation, and he wanted to claw back from that edge just as fast as he could. He made a pig of himself at lunch and dinner and snacks in between times, too.
Some of the rescued POWs had eaten themselves right into stomach trouble. The only trouble Fletch had was gaining weight back fast enough to suit him.
This particular morning, he took a big gulp of coffee with plenty of cream (well, condensed milk) and sugar and tore into breakfast. He ate a mouthful of Spam and eggs, then paused with the oddest expression on his face. “You know what?” he said to the guy next to him in the galley.
“No,” the other ex-prisoner said. “What?”
“These eggs and this meat—they’re really lousy.” Fletch knew he sounded astonished. He had all the food he wanted. Now he’d got to the point where he didn’t just want food. He wanted good food. Wanting it on a hospital ship was probably optimistic, but even so. . . .
“You’re right.” The other man sounded as astonished as Fletch had. “I didn’t even notice up till now.”
“Neither did I,” Fletch said. The guy to his left was just as skinny as he was. Some of the poor bastards from Kapiolani Park had actually starved to death before the U.S. Navy could throw enough food into them to keep them goin
g. Fletch hadn’t been in that boat, but he’d been in the one tied up right next to it.
“Take your plate, sir?” a Filipino mess steward asked. Fletch nodded. Good, bad, or indifferent, every scrap of food in front of him had vanished. He wondered if he would ever leave anything uneaten again. The way he felt now, he wouldn’t bet on it.
As the steward also took the other former prisoner’s plate, Fletch asked, “Any chance of getting fresh eggs and real ham around here?”
“Yeah,” the other former POW said. Several other scrawny men nodded.
The Filipino beamed at them like a proud mother just after Junior’s first steps. “Oh, my friends!” he said. “You feel better! I am so happy for you!”
“Does that mean we don’t get the fancy grub?” asked the guy on Fletch’s left.
“Probably,” the mess steward answered, not beaming so much now. “Two thousand miles from the mainland, remember. You eat better than other people out here.”
“We’ve earned it,” Fletch said. He didn’t quite feel as if he were made of pipe cleaners any more. He’d graduated to pencils—gnarled, knotty pencils, but pencils all the same. He wondered what would come next in his gradual reinflation.
What came next that day was an examination by one of the doctors on the Benevolence. Fletch got weighed. He had his blood pressure taken. The sawbones looked pleased. “You’re getting there, Captain.”
“I’m just a lieutenant,” Fletch said.
“Nope.” The doctor shook his head. “If you weren’t a POW, you would’ve got the promotion by now. And so—you did.”
“Thanks, Doc!” Fletch would rather have heard it from somebody besides an M.D., but he wasn’t going to complain any which way. Instead of complaining, he asked, “When can I go ashore?”
“When we decide you’re strong enough, and when it seems safe,” the doctor answered. “I know you’re feeling better—you were one of the men bitching about chow this morning, weren’t you? That’s a good sign. But you’re not fit for active duty yet, and Oahu’s no place for tourists right this minute.”
End of the Beginning Page 49