Days of Infamy (4 page)

But Peterson remained unquelled and unconvinced. “I think he put it out just to keep us on our toes,” he said. “What the hell could the Japs do to us?”

“Halsey's worried about submarines,” Drucker said. “One torpedo amidships can put a pretty fair crimp in your plans.”

“Yeah, but why would they do anything like that?” Peterson demanded. “It makes no sense. They couldn't sink enough of our ships to hurt the Pacific Fleet very much—and then they'd be eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and we'd be all pissed off.”

“They're already pissed off at us.” Lieutenant Carter Higdon had a Mississippi drawl thick enough to slice. Despite it, he was the brains of the squadron. When he was off duty, he was working his way through a beat-up copy of
Ulysses
. He went on, “We've cut off their oil. We've cut off their scrap metal. Somebody tried doing that to us, how would we like it?”

“I'd kick the son of a bitch right in the slats,” Peterson said.

“I think you just shot yourself down, Jim,” Drucker said, a split second after Peterson realized the same thing.

He got out of it as best he could: “But I'm an American, goddammit. Those slant-eyed bastards haven't got the balls for anything like that.”

“Here's hopin' you're right,” Higdon said. “But I reckon we'll be steamin' west for real before too long, get the war going in the Philippines or somewhere like that. If they don't get their oil from us, where will they get it? Only other place is the Dutch East Indies—and if they go there, they'll go loaded for bear.”

Several pilots nodded. The Dutch East Indies had hung like ripe fruit waiting to be picked ever since the Germans overran Holland the year before. And Vichy France, also under the Nazis' thumbs, had given Japan the right to base troops in French Indochina. Of course, if Vichy had said no, the Japs would have gone in anyhow. This way, France maintained a ghostly sort of sovereignty over the area. Peterson wondered how happy that made the froggies.

“You think we ought to fight if the Japs do go into the East Indies?” Drucker asked Higdon. “Me, I'll be damned if we ought to pull the Dutchmen's chestnuts out of the fire.”

“If they do get that oil, it's us next,” Higdon said, turning
next
into a two-syllable word. “We're the only ones who can worry them. Holland and France are down for the count, and England's got bigger worries closer to home. If Hitler takes Moscow and knocks the Russians out this winter, he'll turn on England with everything he's got next spring.”

The argument went on and on. Sometimes it was arguing in the wardroom, sometimes a poker game, sometimes argument
and
poker. Finally, Peterson got tired of it and went up onto the flight deck. His shoes thumped on the six-inch wooden planks. When the
Enterprise
was abuilding, there'd been talk about armoring the flight deck as the British were doing, but it hadn't come to anything.

Color-coded cotton jerseys and cloth helmets told off the deck crew by function. Sailors in blue handled parked planes, those in yellow directed them while they moved, while those in red were the repair and crash crews. A couple of fire watchmen in suits of fuzzy white asbestos moved among them, looking like snowmen out for a stroll. Peterson wouldn't have wanted that job for beans, especially not in warm weather.

Of course, when the fire watchmen went to work, they had more heat to worry about than what they got in the tropics. They watched the world through thick panes of smoked glass. Diving suits might have been heavier and more restrictive than what they wore. Peterson couldn't think of anything else that came close. No, he wouldn't have swapped jobs with them for anything.

One of them waved a gauntleted hand. Automatically, Peterson waved back. The fire watchman's head was turned in his general direction, so he assumed the wave was for him. He might have been wrong. Trying to judge what a man meant when you couldn't see his face wasn't easy.

He laughed out loud. “What's funny, sir?” asked a repair-crew man in a red jersey.

“I was just thinking I'd like to wear one of those goddamn fire suits the next poker game I get into,” Peterson answered. “Long as I keep the faceplate closed, who's gonna know I'm raising on a busted flush?”

The sailor contemplated that, then grinned. “Don't tell those firewatch bastards. They'd up and do it.”

“Who'd play with 'em if they did?” Peterson asked.

“Sir, we got us somewhere close to three thousand men on board,” the sailor replied. “You don't figure some of 'em are suckers?”

“Well, yeah, but you're not supposed to say so out loud. Otherwise, you
will
keep 'em out of the games,” Peterson said. They grinned at each other.

Peterson looked out to sea. A fresh breeze blew his sandy hair back from his face. The air was the freshest in the world. He didn't consciously notice the salt tang of the sea, but it braced him even so. Off to port, a cruiser kept station with the
Enterprise
. A couple of destroyers prowled ahead, alert for periscopes—and, with their listening gear, for subs lurking below the surface.

A couple of gooney birds glided by on wings that seemed almost as long as a Wildcat's. The big birds bred on Midway and some of the other islands in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian chain. In the air, they were nonpareils. On land . . . They came in as if they'd blown both tires and had a wheel go out from under them. They were almost as ungainly taking off, too. They needed a headwind and a long running start. Otherwise, they couldn't get airborne at all.

More destroyers followed the carrier at the heart of the task force. Peterson turned and peered over the
Enterprise
's stern. That pointed him more or
less in the direction of Japan. What
were
Tojo's boys up to? Could they really be contemplating war with the USA? Peterson still had trouble believing it. Wasn't all their tough talk just a bluff? With the America Firsters and the other isolationists running around loose and making a big noise in the papers and on the radio, weren't the Japs trying to scare FDR into giving them what they wanted?

“Dammit, that's still the way it looks to me,” Peterson muttered. If the President just stood firm, Japan would pull in its horns. The Japs had a million soldiers bogged down in China, for Christ's sake. Why would they take on another country that was bigger than they were? It made no sense.

“Prepare to land a plane!” blared from the loudspeakers, and then, “Landing a plane!”

The squat F4F Wildcat came in from astern. The landing officer stood facing it. He held out the wigwag flags so they and his arms made a straight line out from his shoulders. He dipped to the right; the Wildcat straightened up. Jim Peterson laughed. If that wasn't Ike Greenwald coming in, he'd eat his socks. Ike always carried one wing low. The landing officer straightened and moved the flags in small circles. The fighter sped up. The landing officer dropped the flags to his sides. The plane dove for the deck.

Tires smoked as they struck. The tailhook caught an arrester wire. The pilot killed the roaring engine. The stinks of sizzling rubber and exhaust ruined the clean air for a moment. The man in the cockpit rolled back the canopy and climbed out. Sure as hell, it was Greenwald. Nobody else on the
Enterprise
was built quite so much like a soda straw. People said he could sleep in the barrel of a five-inch gun. That wasn't fair, though he might have managed in an eight-incher.

“Nice landing,” one of the sailors on the flight deck called to him.

He grinned sheepishly. He never knew what to do with praise. Peterson would have milked it for all it was worth. Greenwald just said, “I didn't crash the crate, and I didn't smash me. I'll take it.”

Another Wildcat roared off to keep the combat air patrol at full strength. The plane dropped toward the Pacific as it sped off the flight deck, then steadied and began to climb. Peterson watched it with affection. The Wildcat was a pretty good machine. It measured up fine against land-based American fighters. That had to mean the Japs didn't have anything that even came close.

O
SCAR VAN DER
K
IRK
was a bum. He knew it. He was proud of it, as a matter of fact. He was a big blond man in his late twenties, his hair bleached even paler by constant exposure to sun and sea, his hide tanned almost as brown as a Hawaiian's.

He hadn't intended to turn into a bum. He'd graduated from Stanford in 1935: an English major with a history minor. His folks thought he should have studied accounting instead. But he was a second son, a kid brother, and Roger showed plenty of aptitude and eagerness for the family construction business when—if—Dad ever decided to retire. So, while disappointed, Oscar's folks weren't furious. They let him do what he wanted.

It was hard to be furious at Oscar anyhow. He had not a mean bone in his body. An aw-shucks smile made girls' hearts melt. He'd studied coeds at least as much as Chaucer and Herodotus, and he'd got good grades in them.

As a graduation present, his folks gave him a trip to Hawaii. They booked him into the Royal Hawaiian, right on Waikiki Beach. The grounds were splendidly landscaped, with coconut palms and banyan trees insulating the great pink pile from the encroachments of the outside world. The room ran twenty dollars a day—this when millions would have got down on their knees and thanked God to make twenty dollars a week. Oscar had never had to worry about money—and he didn't worry about it now.

Next door to the Royal Hawaiian stood the Outrigger Club, which since 1908 had been dedicated to the art and science of surf-riding. The proximity of club to hotel was the reason Oscar went from new-minted baccalaureate to bum in the course of two short weeks. He watched in open-mouthed awe the first time he saw men glide the big surfboards over the waves and up onto the white sand of the beach.

“By God, I'm going to try that!” he said. Nobody at the Royal Hawaiian took any particular notice of the remark. Quite a few visitors said they wanted to learn to ride the surf. A good many of them actually did it. A handful did it enough to start to know what they were doing.

The next morning, Oscar was out in front of the Outrigger Club half an hour before sunup. It didn't open till eight. The man who let him in smiled and said, “Hello,
malihini
. You look eager.”

Malihini
meant stranger or tenderfoot. Without the smile, it might have
been an insult. Oscar wouldn't have cared if it were. He nodded to the man, who was then the same shade of brown he would later become himself. “Teach me!” he said.

He learned to ride the surfboard on his belly, and then kneeling, and then, at last, standing. Skimming over the waves was like nothing he'd known in all his life. It was as if God had given him wings. Was this how angels felt? He didn't know about angels. He did know this was what he was meant to do.

He was supposed to go home in two weeks. He cashed in his return ticket instead, and moved to digs much less impressive—and much less expensive—than the Royal Hawaiian. He stretched his money as far as it would go, to stay in Hawaii as long as he could. His only luxury (though to him it was a necessity) was more surf-riding lessons.

When the money he got from the ticket ran out, he worked on the docks for a while, and surfed almost every waking minute when he wasn't working. Before long, he didn't need to take lessons any more. Before much longer, he was giving them. By the time winter came, he was as good as men who'd been riding the waves as long as he'd been alive.

That was what he thought, anyway, till he followed the Outrigger Club members' winter migration to the north shore of Oahu. There he found waves like none he'd seen, like none he'd imagined, near Honolulu. They rolled down across the North Pacific all the way from Alaska. And when they came ashore at Waimea and some of the other spots the club members knew, some of them were as tall as a three-story building.

Riding waves like that wasn't just sport. If it went wrong, it was like falling off a cliff—except then the cliff fell on you. More than once, he came to the surface gasping and gouged and scraped from a tumble against the sand. He lost two front teeth when somebody else's surfboard hit him in the face. That was, if anything, a membership pin. Half the really accomplished surfers at the Outrigger Club sported either bridgework or a space where their incisors had been.

He never did go back to northern California. His family wrote anguished letters for a while. He assured them he was fine. After a while, they gave up and stopped writing. He dropped them little notes every so often—whenever he happened to think of it. He
was
a good-natured fellow. As time went by, though, he thought about anything outside of Oahu less and less often.

He acquired a nickname: Smooth Oscar. He acquired a scar on his leg
from a jagged chunk of coral. He acquired a series of lady friends from among the tourists who came from Seattle or St. Louis or Savannah to learn to ride the surf. The lessons were intimate enough to start with, and often got more so after the sun went down. The ladies, almost all of them, went home happy. Oscar smiled a lot.

When times were good, he got enough money from the lessons to make ends meet. When they weren't so good, he went back to the docks or washed dishes in one of Honolulu's nine million greasy spoons or worked in the cane and pineapple fields that filled the middle of the island. When he wasn't out on the ocean, he didn't much care what he did.