Hiroshi pointed up into the sky. “One of them’s coming down!” he shouted in Japanese. Then he said what was probably the same thing in English.
Sure enough, a Japanese bomber trailing smoke and fire plummeted out of the sky, swelling enormously as it did. Jiro wondered about the men inside. Were they dead? If they weren’t, what were they thinking as they plunged to their deaths? Could they keep the Emperor in their minds? Or did bright panic swallow everything else?
Panic swallowed everything else in the voice of a woman by Jiro as she shrieked, “It’s coming down on us!”
Jiro wanted to call her a stupid idiot. He wished he could. But she was right. He started to scream himself when he thought the doomed bomber would smash into the building in whose doorway he huddled. It didn’t. It crashed into a laundry half a block away. A fireball erupted—the plane must have had almost a full load of fuel on board. Blazing fragments pinwheeled off and went flying along the street.
“Come on!” Now Jiro grabbed his sons instead of the other way around. “We can’t stay here. That fire will burn this whole block.”
They had to fight their way out of the doorway. Some people couldn’t think of anything but the moment’s shelter. But what good was staying in the roasting pan if it was about to go into the oven?
Bombs kept screaming down. The Takahashis weren’t safe in the street, either. But they had to get away from the spreading fire—if they could. “This whole part of town is liable to burn!” Kenzo shouted.
“We’d better get Mother out, if we can,” Hiroshi said. “I wish she’d been willing to get on the sampan with us.”
“So do I,” Jiro said. Fear for Reiko rose like a choking cloud within him. Some of it turned to fury. “And I wish the Americans had surrendered a long time ago. They can’t win. They can’t hope to win. They’re the ones who are making Japan do this to Honolulu.”
His sons looked at each other. Their shoulders went up and down in identical shrugs. Those could have said, He may be right. Jiro didn’t think they did. He thought they meant, He’s crazy, but what can you do? That only made him angrier. Before he could say anything more, though, Hiroshi said, “We can worry about that another time, Father. For now, let’s see if we can get back to the apartment and make sure Mother’s all right.”
Inside Jiro, the rage collapsed. The fear didn’t—it kept growing. He nodded brusquely. “Yes. Let’s do that.”
Kenzo had been right. The burning bomber hadn’t started the only fire in the Asian part of Honolulu. Streets and alleys were crowded here. People packed together far more tightly than they did on the haole east side. That didn’t bother Jiro; to him, it was water to a fish. If anything, Honolulu was less crowded than he remembered cities in Japan being. But once fires got going here, they had no trouble spreading. And the narrow streets and the rubble choking them made it hard for fire engines to come to the rescue.
Bombs kept on falling, too. Jiro ignored them. Some people, like his sons and him, were trying to push deeper into the city to find their loved ones. Others were fleeing toward the Pacific. There, if anywhere, they’d be safe from the spreading flames.
And some people simply lay where they had fallen, struck down by blast or flying fragments of bomb casing or falling debris. In a handful of horrible minutes, Jiro saw more ways the human body could be mangled than he’d ever imagined. He had to step over bodies and pieces of bodies. He had to step over writhing, howling, bleeding people who weren’t dead yet, too. Part of him wanted to help them, but he didn’t think he could do much for most. And if he’d tried, he never would have got back to the apartment. There were too many wounded, and they would have taken too much time.
He and his sons were getting close, but the flames and smoke up ahead were getting thicker. Somebody coming the other way shouted in Japanese: “Go back! You can’t go any farther. It’s all fire up ahead. You’ll just kill yourselves.”
Jiro and Hiroshi and Kenzo looked at one another. None of them said anything, or needed to. They plunged ahead with no more hesitation than that. Jiro knew a moment of somber satisfaction. The boys might not be everything he would have hoped for, but they were no cowards.
Courage, here, helped not at all. The shouting Japanese man proved right. Fire and smoke blocked the way forward. Jiro coughed and hacked as if he’d smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. Hiroshi and Kenzo were coughing, too. But their faces remained grim and determined. They were going to go forward even if it killed them.
And it was liable to. Jiro realized his sons would retreat only if he spoke first. He also realized he had to. “We can’t get through this way. Can we go back around and try from the side?”
“I think we’d better, Father.” Soot stained Kenzo’s face. Sweat streaked it. He didn’t seem to know he had a burn on his cheek. “We’d have more of a chance.”
They had no chance pushing straight ahead. Jiro could see that. He led the way. His sons followed. He went west, not east. The Japanese overhead were still bombing more heavily toward the east. That was where the haoles lived, where their enemies lived.
Or some of their enemies, anyway. A round-faced man with Oriental features sitting in the street cradled a dead woman in his arms. Tears ran down his face as he howled curses to the uncaring sky in singsong Chinese. He didn’t seem to notice when the Takahashis ran by, which might have been just as well.
The Chinese man would have hated Jiro just then. Jiro didn’t hate him. He felt a horrid sympathy for him and with him, in fact. That could be me, holding Reiko. He muttered to himself, trying to repel the evil omen.
Panting, he went around a corner—and dug in his heels to stop as fast as he could. Burning cars up ahead made the street an inferno. Heat blasted into his face. He went up another block, only to find another fire.
People were running away, not going toward the flames. Jiro scanned faces, hoping to see Reiko’s. He didn’t, which only made his fear worse. “Come away, baka yaro!” someone yelled at him. “You can’t do anything here!”
He looked to his sons. “What do you think?”
“We’ll get trapped if we stay much longer,” Hiroshi said. “But I’ll go on if you want to.” Kenzo nodded.
No, they weren’t cowards, even if they were . . . Americans. And Jiro’s older son had thrown the choice back on his shoulders. He’d hoped one of the boys would make it for him. No such luck. He ground his teeth. “We can’t go there,” he said. They didn’t argue with him. He wished they would have. Because they didn’t, he had to spell everything out himself: “If we can’t get there, we can’t do your mother any good. We have to hope the place isn’t burning, and that she got out, and we just haven’t seen her.”
His sons nodded. Kenzo cursed in English. He was cursing Japan, but Jiro didn’t try to stop him. It wouldn’t change anything anyhow.
Neither Kenzo nor Hiroshi made the slightest move to withdraw from the advancing flames. Jiro realized they were leaving that to him, too. Part of him wanted to rush forward, into the fire, and embrace oblivion. But Reiko might be all right—and, in any case, the boys needed someone to keep an eye on them and make sure they stayed out of trouble.
“We’d better get away, then,” he said. Only when he started back down toward the ocean did Hiroshi and Kenzo move. He reached up to put an arm around each of their shoulders. They weren’t everything he’d wanted in sons, but he could have done worse as well as better.
FLETCHER ARMITAGE SET a hand on the barrel of his 105. He felt like a cowboy saying good-bye to his favorite horse. He was out of ammunition for the gun. He had no idea where to get more, or how soon it might come up if by some miracle he found out.
After more than a month of fighting as hard as it could, the American Army was visibly starting to come to pieces now. It had done as much as flesh and blood could do—and that hadn’t turned out to be enough. Small-arms fire rattled in front of Fletch’s position, and off to the left flank, too. The end hadn’t come yet, but it was ge
tting closer.
He glanced over to the shiny Ford his infantrymen-turned-gun-bunnies had shanghaied. The car had three flats, the same as the De Soto had had a few days earlier. It wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe his merry men could commandeer another one. What point, when the gun had no shells?
If he’d had a horse and needed to deny it to pursuing Indians, he would have shot it. Instead, he took the breech block out of the 105. A stream ran down from the mountains not far from where the gun rested. He carried the heavy steel casting to the bank and threw it in the water. He’d picked a place where the flow was turbulent. As he’d hoped, bubbles and foam hid the breech block from prying eyes. The Japs might get their hands on that 105, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.
Wearily, he trudged back to what was now a Quaker cannon. His makeshift crew stood by the gun, waiting to see what happened next. Fletch wished he knew. He said, “Well, boys, I made artillerymen out of you for a while. Now it looks like I’ve joined the infantry.”
Clancy and Arnie and Dave looked at one another. Clancy talked more than either of the other two. “No offense, Lieutenant, but you picked a shitty time to go slumming.”
In spite of everything, Fletch laughed. “They say timing’s everything.” He reached up and touched the Springfield slung on his shoulder. “I haven’t quit fighting. I don’t intend to, either.”
As if to mock him, the rattle of gunfire from the left got louder. It also moved farther south, down toward the sea—makai, they said here, without seeming to know that wasn’t really an English word. The Japanese were pushing forward, the Americans falling back. That was how it had gone since the beginning. But the Americans couldn’t fall back any more, not if they were going to have any real chance of holding on.
They were falling back anyhow. No doubt that said they had no real chance. Fletch scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. He said, “We’d better move back toward Honolulu. Things are still holding together there, or they were the last I heard.”
“We’d better move back somewhere, that’s for damn sure,” Clancy said.
The other two enlisted men nodded. Arnie said, “If we don’t, the Japs are liable to cut us off.”
He stopped right there. He didn’t need to say another word. If advancing Japanese soldiers cut them off, they were liable to capture them. Nobody in his right mind cared to chance that.
“Come on,” Fletch said harshly. “Let’s get going.”
Off they went, retreating to the south and east. They weren’t the only ones—far from it. Singly and in small groups like theirs, other soldiers tramped along the side of the road or out in the middle of it. Clouds drifted overhead. A spatter of rain fell, though the sun never disappeared. The landscape was one of almost unearthly beauty: jungle-clad hills to the north, palm trees and blossoming hibiscus close at hand, mynahs and bluish-faced zebra doves pecking for whatever they could find, the sapphire sea visible to the south.
Where beauty failed, it failed because of man rather than nature. Ahead, Honolulu lay mired in smoke after the latest Japanese bombing attack. If Fletch turned his head to look west, he could see more ruin in Pearl Harbor. He didn’t. He was too stubborn.
But when he looked around, he saw the ugliness in his comrades and himself. They were scrawny and filthy and unshaven. They smelled bad. At least half of them had minor wounds. They all had the hangdog air of beaten men.
That was one more thing Fletch had no idea how to cure. He was sure he had that same hangdog air himself. Oahu was going to fall. It would fall sooner, not later, too. And what would the Japs do with all the soldiers they captured then? What would they do to them? Whatever they want to, Fletch thought, and shuddered.
Somewhere not far away, an officer was shouting frantically, trying to get men to form a defensive line. “Come on, you sorry bastards!” he howled. “We’ve still got a chance as long as we don’t quit!”
Fletch gathered up his erstwhile gun team by eye. “Let’s go,” he said.
They didn’t argue with him. They showed no great enthusiasm, but they went along. Maybe they were also wondering what would happen if and when they had to lay down their arms. That one gnawed at Fletch.
Because it gnawed at him, he shoved it to the back of his mind. He found the loud officer—a captain—behind a bougainvillea hedge. “What do you need, sir?” he asked.
“Fucking everything!” the captain exclaimed. Then he amplified that. Pointing north toward the hills overlooking Honolulu, he said, “We’ve got to stop the advancing enemy.”
“But, sir—” Fletch pointed west, the direction from which he’d come. “The Japs are over there.”
“I know that, goddammit,” the captain said impatiently. “But they’re sneaking down through the hills, too, to get on our flank and rear.”
Fletch didn’t know why he was surprised. If the Japs could get men over the Waianae Range, these lower, less rugged hills would prove no great challenge to them. But he couldn’t help asking, “Why didn’t we have men up there to stop them?”
“In that jungle? Who would have figured they could get through it?” the captain said, proving some people had trouble learning even from experience. It wasn’t the captain’s fault alone, of course. His superiors had to have the same attitude. Ostriches eventually pulled their heads out of the sand and ran, didn’t they? That only proved they were one up on the top brass in the Hawaiian Department.
“Uh, sir?” Fletch gestured for the captain to step aside with him for a moment. The other officer did. In a low voice, Fletch said, “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but if they’re coming at us from the north and from the west, we are really and truly screwed.”
The captain nodded. “Yes, I realize that. And so, Lieutenant? Have you heard an order to surrender?”
“No, sir,” Fletch said.
“Neither have I. That being so, we had better keep fighting, don’t you think?” As if to underscore the captain’s words, mortar bombs started whistling down not nearly far enough away. The captain and Fletch both threw themselves flat on the ground before the first one burst. Jagged fragments of steel hissed and whistled through the air. A soldier cried out, sounding startled and hurt at the same time. The captain started shouting again without raising his head more than a couple of inches: “Stay ready, men! They may try to follow this up with foot soldiers!”
“Christ!” Fletch said. “Are they down this far already?”
Before the captain could answer, Japanese rifle fire did it for him. The Arisaka rifle the Japs used sounded less robust than the Springfield. It was only .256 caliber, and didn’t have quite the stopping power of the bigger, heavier American round. The Arisaka had proved plenty good enough, though.
Men began slipping away from the captain’s makeshift line. He cursed them with weary hopelessness. Fletch understood that. It was exactly the way he felt himself.
CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU hadn’t known what to expect from Honolulu. It sprawled ahead of him now, hard by the Pacific. The buildings were large and solid, in the Western style. All the same, it couldn’t have held much more than half as many people as Hiroshima, the Japanese city closest to his farm.
Here and there, in little stubborn knots, the Americans still fought hard. But now that resistance began to feel like the last spasms of some dying thing. The Japanese could bypass the men who did keep battling, because in a lot of places there weren’t any. That let them surround the pockets of diehards and dispose of them at their leisure.
When Shimizu sent young Shiro Wakuzawa out to scrounge supplies for the squad as the sun sank in the west, the first-year soldier went off with a sigh. His squadmates murmured, “Hard work!” in sympathy. Shimizu didn’t care. Somebody had to do it. He’d done it himself often enough in China, before he got promoted.
Wakuzawa came back with a big burlap sack slung over his shoulder and an enormous smile on his face. “You look like the monkey who found the apple tree,” Shimizu said. “What have you got in th
ere?”
“Wait till you see, Corporal-san.” Wakuzawa let the sack down on the grass by the fire the Japanese had started. The fire was purely force of habit; Hawaiian nights didn’t come close to requiring one. As the youngster reached into the sack, he went on, “I came across a grocery store that hadn’t been looted empty.”
“Ahhh!” the whole squad said as one man. They said it again when Wakuzawa took out three cartons of mild, flavorful American cigarettes. Boxes of crackers followed, and then Wakuzawa’s triumph: can after can of meat, its pink glory displayed against a dark blue painted background. Big yellow letters told what it was, but Shimizu couldn’t read the Roman alphabet.
“Does anyone know what it says?” he asked.
“It’s called ‘Spam,’ Corporal,” Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa answered.
He’d always struck Shimizu as a bookish type. “How do you know?” the corporal asked.
“My father is a druggist in Hiroshima,” Furusawa said. “I was learning the trade till I got drafted. Some of the medicines he got came from the West, so I had to learn the characters the gaijin use.”
The Spam cans opened with keys conveniently soldered to them. The meat inside them looked just like the tempting illustration. The soldiers hacked it into rough slices with their bayonets and ate it on crackers. Some of them toasted the Spam over the fire first; others didn’t bother. Shimizu didn’t—he was too hungry to care. He wolfed down the meat.
“That’s one of the most delicious things I ever ate,” Senior Private Furusawa said with a sigh of pleasure.
“Hai. Honto,” Shimizu agreed; he’d been thinking the same thing. “Even better than sashimi, if you ask me. Why don’t we have things like this in Japan?” He took a pack from one of the cartons, opened it, and began to smoke. “This is better tobacco than we get at home, too. We’ve already found that out.”
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