Days of Infamy (23 page)

“You got 'em. It's safe. Come on!” The alluring Japanese voice came from ahead of him. This time, he sat tight. What
could
they do to that fellow if they caught him? He'd be even more fun to play with than an ordinary captive.

Soldiers were yelling, “Down! Stay down! It's a trick!” But Shimizu heard feet running through the field. He also heard the machine gun stutter to life. Curses and screams followed. So did the thuds of bodies crashing to the ground. Shimizu added his own curses to the din. Now he was swearing at his own men at least as hard as at the Americans. If that voice had fooled them once—well, they weren't expecting it. But if it fooled them twice . . .

“Stay down,
baka yaro!
” he yelled. Dumb assholes they were, almost dumb enough to deserve getting shot.

More mortar bombs fell around the machine-gun nest. “You can't hit a damn thing!” that lying Japanese voice jeered. Maybe, on the principle that everything it said was full of crap, the mortars really had put the American machine gun out of action. Maybe—but Corporal Shimizu didn't stick his head up to find out.

He didn't hear any signs that the men around him were trying to advance, either. He breathed a sigh of relief. Some of them could learn after all. The ones who couldn't had paid the price for their stupidity.

After a while, the machine gun started up again, this time sending a stream of bullets over to the left. When another machine gun there answered the fire, Shimizu did look out from his hole. A tank rumbled through the pineapple field, straight toward the American machine gun. Its bow gunner shot back at the Yankees. Enemy bullets clanged off its armor, now and then striking sparks but doing no harm.

The snorting mechanical monster stopped. The cannon in the turret bellowed. The shell burst just in front of the sandbags shielding the American gun. The enemy soldiers were brave. They kept right on shooting at the tank. It did them no good. The cannon spoke again. Sandbags flew. The machine gun kept firing even after that, but not for long. The tank's bow and turret-mounted machine guns had a clear shot at the Americans now.

Corporal Shimizu sprang from his new foxhole. “Come on!” he shouted. “Move fast! Maybe we can catch that Hawaii Japanese and give him what he deserves!” If anything would get the men out of their holes and advancing, that ought to do the trick.

And it did. They splashed through the creek and past the shattered machine-gun nest. Not many riflemen had backed up the machine gunners. The Japanese soldiers gained several hundred meters before enemy fire forced them to hit the dirt and dig in again. Shimizu was proud of the dash they showed. But the man who'd tricked them got away. He didn't know how lucky he was—or maybe he did.

L
IKE MOST NINETEEN
-year-olds in Honolulu, Kenzo Takahashi had Japanese friends and
haole
friends and Chinese friends and Filipino friends and friends who were a little bit of everything. Everybody was packed together with everybody else in school. A good many kids had parents who wished their friends came only from their own group. But that wasn't how things worked in Hawaii—which was why so many kids were a little bit of everything.

With his friends who weren't Japanese (and even, a lot of the time, with the ones who were), Kenzo was just Ken. That suited him fine; Ken was a good American name, and he was at least as American as he was Japanese. When he ate with his parents, he used
hashi
to shovel in rice and raw fish. When he wasn't with his parents, he was likely to order fried chicken or spaghetti and meatballs. He liked them better. So did Hiroshi.

Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, though . . . All of a sudden, his
haole
friends didn't want to know him any more. It wasn't just that he was spending most of his time out on the
Oshima Maru
, either. He was—he'd never worked so hard in his life—but that wasn't the point.

Going home from Kewalo Basin, he'd sometimes see people with whom he'd sat for four years in math and English and history and science classes. He'd see them . . . and, if they were white, they'd pretend they didn't see him. Sometimes they would even turn their backs so he couldn't possibly miss the point. That cut like a knife.

And he knew those
haoles
and their folks were lining up to buy the fish he and his father and brother brought in. They didn't mind doing that at all. Oh, no, especially not when the fish the sampans brought in was the only fresh food coming into Honolulu these days.

What really hurt was when Elsie Sundberg acted as if she'd never set eyes on him in her life. Thanks to the wonders of alphabetical seating, he'd had the desk right behind hers in just about all the classes they took together. The alphabet could have played plenty of worse tricks on him: Elsie was blond, blue-eyed, and curvy, a cheerleader for the football team. She got better grades in English and history; he was stronger in science and math. They'd spent a lot of time coaching each other. They'd gone to a few movies together, held hands. He'd kissed her once. He'd thought about asking her to the prom, but by the time he got up the nerve to do it the star halfback beat him to the punch. She'd sounded genuinely sorry when she told him no.

And now . . . now he was nothing but a lousy Jap to her. It made him want to cry, or else to go out and kick something or somebody.

“It's not right, goddammit,” he raged to Hiroshi later that evening. “I'm as much an American as she is.” The one advantage of having parents who'd never learned English was that he and his brother could use it without fear of eavesdropping.

His brother made a small production of lighting a cigarette. Only after a long, meditative drag did he answer, “It's tough, all right. Some of that same shit's happened to me, too.”

“Tough? Is that all you can say? What's the good of trying to be an American if the stinking
haoles
won't let you?” He pointed to the pack of Chesterfields. “Let me have one of those.”

Hiroshi did, and leaned close to give him a light. After they were both
smoking, Hiroshi said, “Well, what other choice have you got? Do you want to stand up and cheer for Hirohito the way Dad does?”

“Jesus Christ, no!” Kenzo exclaimed. “That's just embarrassing.”

“It's worse than embarrassing these days.” Hiroshi dropped his voice even though his and Kenzo's folks couldn't understand. “It's damn near treason.”

“Yeah. I know,” Kenzo said heavily. “But you can't tell him anything. He won't listen.” He sucked in smoke, then blew it out in a ragged cloud. What with the blackout and the radio being off the air almost all the time, the night was almost eerily quiet. That made it easy for him to hear the thunder in the middle distance—except it wasn't thunder. The boom of the guns got louder and louder, closer and closer, as the days went by. “What do we do if . . . our side doesn't win?”

“I don't know.” His brother smoked his cigarette till the butt got too small to hold between his lips. Some people were even using toothpicks or alligator clips to hold tiny butts and squeeze an extra drag or two out of them. Tobacco wouldn't last forever. Nothing in Honolulu would last forever. If Hawaii fell, nothing would last very long. Hiroshi stubbed out the remains of the Chesterfield and stared down at the ashtray. “What
can
we do? Try and keep our noses clean. Try and keep Dad from busting his buttons 'cause he's so proud.”

“It's a good thing the sampan's going out again,” Kenzo said. “If Dad's on the ocean, he can't be on the streets. Somebody'd knock his block off for him.”

“Or maybe not, depending on where he is,” Hiroshi said. “As long as he stays Ewa side of Nuuanu Avenue, he won't do too bad.”

Kenzo only grunted. That was a half truth. Older Japanese like his father often pulled for their native country. Most of the younger ones were as American as Hiroshi and himself. And none of the Chinese and Koreans and Filipinos who helped crowd Honolulu's Asian district had any use for Japan. That had sometimes led to fights even before Pearl Harbor. Now . . .

Off in the distance, the thunder that wasn't thunder rumbled again. Kenzo grunted again. “What do we do if . . . if the Japanese Army marches into Honolulu?” There. He'd said it.

“What
can
we do?” his brother said. Kenzo shrugged. He had no answer. He'd hoped Hiroshi would.

S
ABURO
S
HINDO LOOKED
down on Honolulu from his Zero. Even from his height, he could see olive-drab trucks rolling through the city. The time had come—as far as he was concerned, the time was long since past—to give the Americans a lesson. He wondered why his superiors had held off for so long. He'd heard a lot of Japanese lived in Honolulu. Maybe the powers that be hadn't wanted to hurt them, or hoped they could somehow get the Americans to give up. It hadn't happened. As far as Lieutenant Shindo was concerned, the best way to make somebody give up was to kick him in the teeth till he did.

Honolulu was about to get kicked in the teeth.

The place was defended. Puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft guns were already pocking the sky around the fighters Shindo led, and around the bombers flying above them. Antiaircraft guns were a nuisance. But they were only a nuisance. The Americans had next to no combat aircraft left. That was what really mattered.

Waggling his wings to the rest of the Zeros, Shindo dropped his fighter's nose and dove on the city below. The other planes followed. Those olive-drab trucks—and the cars, and the buildings past which they drove—swelled from ant size to toy size to the real thing. Now the antiaircraft fire was above his planes. He laughed. The Yankees couldn't depress their guns fast enough to stay with him.

As if trying to make up for that, small-arms fire reached for the Zeros. All the machine guns and rifles and pistols on the ground seemed to go off at once. Muzzle flashes and tracers sparked below Shindo. As usual, he ignored them. Odds were, all that stuff would miss him. Nobody could lead a speeding plane enough; people with small arms shot behind aircraft they aimed at. And if, by bad luck, this once they didn't . . . Ground fire had already winged Shindo's plane once. It could have been worse. But he couldn't do anything about it one way or the other.

Come to that, he'd had to learn to shoot at ground targets. He was pretty good at it now. He didn't know whether that truck convoy heading west through the center of town was carrying men or supplies or ammunition. He didn't care. He shot it up any which way.

Flames exploded from some of the trucks.
Gasoline
, he thought. The less the Americans had, the less good they could get out of their cars and trucks and tanks. He pulled up and went around for another pass. A bullet banged
through the Zero's fuselage, about a meter behind where he sat. Sure as sure, put enough rounds in the air and some would hit. The plane kept flying. This one hadn't hit anything important.

The truck convoy burned merrily. Soldiers scrambled out of some of the vehicles. Some of them fired into the sky. Others ran for cover. He shot up not only the convoy but as many cars on the street as he could. Now he wasn't just aiming to impede military traffic, though he wanted to do that. His orders were to make Honolulu howl. The louder the city howled, the likelier the American commanders were to raise the white flag.

As Lieutenant Shindo pulled up, acceleration and a contemptuous grin thrust his lips back from his teeth. Japanese officers wouldn't give a damn about how loud civilians howled. They'd fight to the last man, whatever the odds. But the Americans were soft, decadent, effeminate. They let extraneous factors like civilians affect even important things like war. Well, they would pay for it.

Shindo automatically checked six. A pilot who didn't do that all the time would regret it. Even though he didn't think the Americans could put any more fighters in the air, habit was unbreakable.

One of his Zeros went down. It sent a fireball and a column of black smoke up into the sky. The building it had hit was starting to burn, too. Even in death, the pilot did damage. Shindo nodded, saluting his courage. The dead man's spirit would go to the Yasukuni-jinja—the Shrine for Establishing Peace in the Empire—at Kudan Hill in Tokyo.

The Nakajimas and Aichis that flew with the fighters were bombing the city now. What civilian terror could do, it would do. Shindo hoped it would make the Americans give up. He was an economical warrior. He didn't believe in expending more on objectives than he had to.

Shindo spoke to his fellow fighter pilots on the all-planes circuit: “Mission accomplished. Now we return to the carriers.” They mostly weren't landing on carrier decks any more; still, security persisted.

Oahu was so small, it made the war seem a miniature painting. Even Haleiwa airstrip, on the north coast of the island, was less than ten minutes' flying time from Honolulu. The front wasn't that far north of the local capital and Pearl Harbor. The gap between the Waianae Range and the Koolau Range widened from north to south, which meant the Americans had to hold a longer line and stretch themselves thinner as they fell back. Japanese soldiers
might have been the best in the world at taking advantage of weak spots in the enemy's defenses. Other armies had more in the way of heavy equipment, yes. If Japanese pilots hadn't had complete control of the air and smashed up a lot of American heavy equipment before it got into action, this would have been a much tougher fight. But nobody could match the Japanese at infiltrating.