Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  “I like the way you think—among other things,” she said. “Okay, we’ll do that.”

  And they did. By the end of the lesson, she was kneeling unsupported. She did fall off on one run, but struck out strongly for the shore. When the lessons were done, she gave Oscar her room number. He took the board back to the Outrigger Club, then went over to the hotel.

  If he’d gone in with her, the house detective would have had to notice. This way, the fellow just tipped him a wink and looked in the other direction. All along Waikiki Beach, the house dicks and the surf-riding instructors had their informal understandings. A few dollars every now and then, a few drinks every now and then, and nobody got excited about anything. No huhu, Charlie Kaapu would have said.

  Oscar knocked on the door. “It’s open,” Susie called. He turned the knob. She lay on the bed, naked and waiting.

  “Jesus!” he said. “What if I’d been the plumber or something?”

  Those blue eyes went wide in some of the phoniest innocence he’d ever seen. “That depends,” she said throatily. “Is the plumber here good-looking?” Oscar’s jaw dropped. Susie’s laugh was pure mischief. “Since it’s you, how’s your plunger?”

  “Let’s see,” he managed, and slipped off his trunks. By the way she eyed him, he passed muster. He got down on the bed beside her. She slid toward him. He rapidly discovered she had no inhibitions hidden anywhere about her person. Once she got back to the mainland, she’d probably rediscover them. He’d known more than a few other women who left them behind in San Pedro or San Francisco or Seattle. This one seemed an extreme case—not that extremes couldn’t be extremely enjoyable.

  He was poised to find out just how enjoyable she could be when sirens started wailing and bells started clanging. “What the hell is that?” Susie exclaimed, and then, “Whatever it is, for God’s sake don’t stop now.”

  But Oscar said, “That’s the air-raid siren. We’d better get in the trenches.” Having been under fire once, he didn’t care to repeat the experience. He’d helped dig some of the trenches that marred the greenery around the hotel buildings.

  Susie stared at him. “Don’t be silly. They wouldn’t bomb Waikiki. We’re civilians.” She spoke the last word as if it were a magic talisman.

  “Maybe they wouldn’t, not on purpose,” Oscar said, though he wasn’t convinced. “But Fort DeRussy’s just Ewa from the Waikiki hotels.” She sent him a blank look. “Just west,” he explained impatiently, adding, “If they bomb that and they miss . . .”

  Susie reached out and gave him a regretful squeeze. “Okay, I’m sold,” she said, all the kitten gone from her voice. “The trenches.” She ran for the bathroom, and emerged in her bathing suit by the time Oscar had his on again.

  They weren’t the only scantily dressed people hurrying down the hallways. The sharp, flat boom! of a bomb bursting not far away made several people—not all of them women—scream and made everybody hurry faster. More bombs went off as Oscar and Susie raced across the lawn and scrambled down into a trench.

  Antiaircraft guns at the fort added to the din. Sure enough, DeRussy was what the Japs were after. Most of their bombs fell on it—most, but not all. When a bomb burst on the hotel, it made a noise like the end of the world. Sharp fragments of hot metal hissed and screamed by overhead. The ground shook, as if at an earthquake. Blast stunned Oscar’s ears. As if from very far away, he heard Susie say, “Well, you were right.” She kissed him—more, he judged, from gratitude than passion.

  And then an armor-piercing bomb, or maybe more than one, penetrated the reinforced concrete protecting the coast-defense guns in the fortress and their magazines. The explosions that followed made the ones from the bombs themselves seem like love pats. Chunks of cement and steel rained down out of the sky. Shrieks said some of them came down in trenches. Oscar wondered how many men Fort DeRussy held—had held, for they were surely dead now.

  The raid lasted about half an hour. The antiaircraft guns kept firing for five or ten minutes after bombs stopped falling. Shrapnel pattered down out of the air along with debris from the fort. Oscar wished for a helmet. That stuff could smash your skull like a melon.

  Despite the secondary explosions, people started climbing out of the trenches. “Christ, but I want a drink!” somebody said, which summed things up as well as Edward R. Murrow or William L. Shirer could have done.

  Susie let out a wordless squawk of dismay. She pointed at what had been her room and was now nothing but smoking rubble. Oscar gulped. If they’d ignored the sirens and gone on with what they were doing, they might have died happy, but they sure would have died.

  Then Susie found words: “What am I going to do? All my stuff was in there. God damn the dirty Japs!”

  Oscar heard himself say, “You can move in with me for a while if you want to.” He blinked. He’d taken in stray kittens before, and once a puppy, but never a girl. It wasn’t even that he was all that crazy about Susie. If it hadn’t been for the war, they’d have screwed each other silly for a few days and then gone their separate ways. But he didn’t see how he could leave her stranded here with nothing but the bathing suit on her back.

  By the way she eyed him, she was making some calculations of her own. “Okay,” she said after a few seconds. “But it’s not like you own me or anything. Whenever I want to walk out, I’m gone.”

  “Sure,” Oscar said at once. “I don’t have any trouble with that. If you start driving me nuts, I’ll hold the door open for you. In the meantime, though . . .” He stuck out his hand. “Uh, what’s your last name?”

  “Higgins,” she said as she shook it. Her hand almost got lost in his, but she had a pretty good grip. “What’s yours?” He told her. “Van der Kirk?” she echoed, and started to laugh. “You’re so brown, I would’ve figured you for a dago.”

  He shrugged. “I’m out in the sun all the time. That’s one of the reasons I like Hawaii. You want to see the place? It’s only a few blocks mauka from here.” Susie Higgins looked blank again. “North. Toward the mountains,” Oscar told her. Hawaiian notions of directions had baffled him, too, when he first got to Oahu. Now he took them for granted. But he was on his way to becoming a kamaaina—an old-timer—here; he wasn’t a just-arrived malihini any more, the way Susie was. “Come on,” he said, and she went with him.

  The apartment building plainly didn’t impress her. Well, it didn’t much impress Oscar, either. She did seem surprised when he opened his door without a key. Once she walked in, she said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t bother to lock it because you don’t have anything worth stealing.”

  “Only things I own that are worth anything are my car and my surfboard, and my car isn’t worth much,” Oscar answered with another shrug. “You don’t need much to live here.”

  Susie didn’t say anything about that. Even so, he got the idea she wasn’t going to stay there forever, or even very long—she was a girl who liked things. He could tell. What she did say was, “You want to lock the door now?”

  “How come?” he said, and then, “Oh.”

  She laughed at him. He deserved it. He laughed, too. She said, “We were doing something or other when that air raid started.” As if to remind him what, she peeled off her bathing suit.

  The bed was narrow for two, but not too narrow. Things were going along very nicely when a great roar made the walls shake and the window rattle—it was a miracle the window didn’t break. Susie squealed. Oscar needed a bit to recover. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have needed a moment to recover after that. He’d just started again when another identical roar made Susie squeal again.

  This time, though, it didn’t unman him, for he’d realized what it was: “More things blowing up at Fort DeRussy, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?” Susie exclaimed. “Jesus!”

  Oscar didn’t answer, not with words. After a while, he managed to distract her, which he took as a compliment to himself—distracting somebody from the thunder of those explosions was no mean f
eat. Susie’s gasp said he hadn’t just distracted her—he’d got her hot. A moment later, Oscar exploded too. He stroked his cheek. “Not so bad,” he said, and tried to believe it. What the hell had he got into, getting into Susie? Well, he’d find out.

  AN AMERICAN SOLDIER showed himself. Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s rifle jumped to his shoulder. He steadied on the target, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. Just like a drill, he thought as the Arisaka rifle kicked. The American crumpled. Shimizu ducked down deep into his foxhole in the pineapple field outside of Wahiawa.

  He didn’t feel particularly proud of himself for shooting the enemy. The Americans were brave. He’d seen that since coming ashore. They were braver than he’d expected, in fact, even if some of them did try to surrender instead of fighting to the death. That made for amusing sport.

  But shooting them hardly seemed fair. Hadn’t anyone taught them anything about taking cover? He was one of the veterans in his regiment who’d fought in China. You never saw the Chinese bandits till one of them put a bullet between your eyes. They didn’t have a lot of rifles, and even less in the way of heavy weapons, but they made the most of what they had, and of the ground on which they fought.

  The Yankees, by contrast, were very well armed—better than Shimizu’s own men, probably. If their air power hadn’t been knocked out, they would have been tough to shift. But they didn’t seem to know what to do with what they had—and they paid the price for it, again and again.

  Machine-gun bullets snarled over Shimizu’s head. He laughed. The Americans must have thought he’d stay upright waiting to get shot. They were like someone who covered his belly when you hit him there, then covered his face when you hit him there. They didn’t know what was coming next, and they didn’t think their foes did, either. And they paid the price for being so naive.

  Behind Shimizu, a mortar started going pop-pop-pop. The bombs came down around the machine-gun position the Yankees had incautiously revealed. Shimizu hoped they knocked out the gunners. Even if they did, though, they were unlikely to put the gun out of action. A machine gun wasn’t so complicated that ordinary soldiers couldn’t handle it.

  Lieutenant Yonehara crawled up to Shimizu’s foxhole. Yonehara had pineapple leaves fixed to his helmet to make him harder to spot. His belly never came up higher off the ground than a snake’s. He pointed south. “Do you see that white frame house, Corporal?”

  Shimizu warily raised his head for half a heartbeat. Then he ducked back down again. “Yes, sir. I see it. The one about a hundred meters behind the enemy line?”

  “Hai,” Yonehara said. “That is the one. It’s on high ground. Our company has been ordered to seize it. You will prepare your men to take part in the attack.”

  “Yes, sir,” Shimizu said: the only thing he could say when he got an order like that. No, not quite, for he did add a few words that expressed his opinion of the order: “Hard work, sir.”

  “Yes, hard work,” Yonehara agreed, his voice not without sympathy. “Colonel Fujikawa feels it is necessary, however. I will lead the attack. We will use the sword and bayonet if that is what it takes to clear the Americans from their positions.”

  A bayonet made a handy tool for gutting a chicken. If you stabbed it in the ground, the socket held a candle. Shimizu had yet to fight with his. But if the lieutenant led, he would follow. “Yes, sir,” he said. And if the Americans didn’t run, he would give them the bayonet—unless he shot them from close range instead.

  “At my order,” Yonehara said, and crawled away. Shimizu passed the news to his men.

  Mortar fire picked up. From farther back of the line, field guns started pounding the American position. When Lieutenant Yonehara shouted, “Forward!” Shimizu jumped out of his foxhole and ran toward the American line.

  “My squad, with me!” he yelled. They too came out of their holes. Pride filled him. Truly he sprang from a warrior race. How could the Americans hope to stop his comrades and him?

  He got the answer to that sooner than he wanted. The Americans hoped to stop them with sheer firepower. The machine gun that had been shooting at him opened up again. So did others that had been silent till then. Onrushing Japanese soldiers fell as if scythed. A bullet tugged at Shimizu’s sleeve, as if to tell him he had to go back or go down.

  He kept going forward nonetheless. The platoon commander had given the order, and he had to obey. Lieutenant Yonehara had drawn his katana. The sword blade shone in the sun. It could lop off an arm, or a head—if Yonehara ever got close enough to use it. No sooner had that thought crossed Shimizu’s mind than a bullet caught the lieutenant in the face and blew out the back of his head. He crumpled as if all his bones had turned to water.

  Seeing him fall was like waking from a fevered delirium. Corporal Shimizu looked to his right and to his left. A lot of the company was down. Like him, the men still on their feet wavered. If they kept on advancing, they wouldn’t waver. They would die. Shimizu could see that perfectly well. Machine-gun bullets didn’t care whether you were a warrior. They’d kill you any which way.

  But the soldiers had been ordered to advance. Shimizu wondered how to change that. The officer who’d given him the order was dead, but the thing itself remained very much alive. Bullets couldn’t slaughter an order, only the soldiers who tried to obey it. No one had ever trained Shimizu or any other Japanese soldier in retreating. If he ordered the survivors to fall back, they might not obey him.

  All that ran through his head in less than a heartbeat. And then, fast as lightning, he found the answer. “Men, we’re going to recover our positions!” he shouted. That didn’t say a word about retreat. It got the message across even so. And it gave the soldiers an honorable way to get back to the foxholes and trenches from which they’d emerged.

  They took advantage of it, too. Shimizu might not have called it a retreat, but a retreat was what it was. They dragged the wounded back with them and left the dead where they had fallen. American fire stung them all the way back to their starting point.

  A private jumped into Shimizu’s foxhole with him. Akira Murakami was a first-year soldier, still wet behind the ears—or he had been till combat started. Nobody who’d landed on Oahu was wet behind the ears any more, not like that. But Murakami’s eyes were wide and staring as he asked, “What will they do to us for . . . for coming back?” He wouldn’t say retreat, either.

  “We tried our best,” Shimizu said. “Maybe a tank could take that house. Infantry can’t, not by itself.” Murakami only shrugged. He didn’t dare contradict a corporal, but he didn’t believe him, either. Shimizu went on, “Besides, what can they do to us that the Yankees’ machine guns wouldn’t have?” That got home. The young soldier shivered and nodded.

  No one ever said a word about the retreat. An hour and a half later, Aichi dive bombers screamed down out of the sky. They pulverized the position the luckless company hadn’t been able to overrun. The order to advance went out again. With the defenses shattered, the Japanese had no trouble pushing forward toward Wahiawa.

  Why didn’t they send in the bombers before the Americans chewed us up? Shimizu wondered. But he had no one he could ask that question. It stayed unspoken. The fight went on.

  HAVING GOT WHAT he’d asked for, Lieutenant Jim Peterson quickly discovered it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Since he was still a young man, he fondly imagined this discovery to be unique to himself. Everyone around him was too busy trying to stay alive to tell him any different.

  The Navy might have been willing to slap a tin hat on his head, toss him a rifle, and send him off to the front. Once he got there, the Army showed itself less than delighted to have him. A sergeant looked at him and said, “Sir, you’re going to have to shed those captain’s badges before you get a bunch of people killed.”

  “Captain’s . . . ? Oh.” A Navy captain—which had been Peterson’s first thought—was the equivalent of a bird colonel in the Army. But the two silver bars of a Navy lieutenant matched an Army captain’s rank
emblem. Peterson said, “I didn’t come here to command a company.”

  “Damn good thing,” the sergeant said. Put him in Navy blue and he’d have made a good CPO. He paused to light a King Sano, then went on, “Up here, your rank don’t mean shit—pardon my French—on account of you don’t know anything. If you were a Marine . . . But you’re not. Tell you the truth, what’s likely gonna happen is that you’ll get shot for nothing.”

  “If I can take out a couple of Japs first, it won’t be for nothing,” Peterson said savagely. “I’m no infantry officer, but I can shoot. I know how to take orders, too.”

  For the first time, the sergeant looked at him as if he were something more than a fly in the soup. Peterson realized he’d said the right thing, even if it was at least half by accident. After blowing a meditative smoke ring, the sergeant said, “Okay, sir. That’s fair enough. As of now, you’re Private, uh”—he looked down to check the paperwork in front of him—“Private Peterson. That suit you?”

  “You bet!” Peterson said. The sergeant looked at him. He realized something more was expected. “Uh, yes, Sergeant!” This man was suddenly his superior.

  “Okay.” The noncom nodded. “Now, then, like I told you, get rid of those silly-ass silver bars.”

  That was an order. He’d claimed he knew how to take them. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said again, and removed them. He felt younger with them in his pocket, as if nothing that had happened since Annapolis counted any more. In some pretty basic ways, it didn’t. He also felt weaker, which made sense. Everybody could tell him what to do now. It was like his first year at the Naval Academy, only worse. Then he’d been bound for officer’s status. Now he’d chucked it out the window.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do,” the sergeant said meditatively. “I’m going to send you to the garrison guarding Kolekole Pass, off to the west of Schofield Barracks. That’ll help me peel some trained soldiers out of there and put ’em in a part of the line where there’s more going on.”