Days of Infamy (19 page)

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 feat. 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.

A
N
A
MERICAN 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.

H
AVING 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.”

Peterson realized he'd just been handed the Army equivalent of the coast
defense of South Dakota. He started to say that he'd come up here to fight, not to make it easier for somebody else to. The words didn't pass his lips. Privates didn't get to make protests like that. The sergeant undoubtedly knew more about how things were going than he did. He managed a nod. “All right, Sergeant.”

“There you go,” the noncom said. “That's almost always the right answer. Truck full of beans and stuff heading over there pretty soon. You hustle, you can scrounge a lift. And you better hope you don't see too many Japs there. You do, we're in deep shit. Go on, scram. I got more things to worry about besides you.”

Off Peterson went. He did catch the truck, and rode in the cab with the driver. The kid behind the wheel was named Billy Joe McKennie, and hailed from somewhere deep in the South. He said, “If'n them Japs”—it came out
Jayups
, the first time Peterson had ever heard it as a two-syllable word—“try comin' over the Waianae”—a name that had to be heard to be believed—“Mountains, they'll have to come through us'ns, an' I don't reckon they kin.”

“How do you know they won't try somewhere else?” Peterson asked.

McKennie might not speak much real English, but he understood it. He looked at Peterson as if he were crazy. “On account of a goat'd have trouble gittin' over them mountains, let alone a lousy Jap.”

The truck rumbled through Schofield Barracks. The east-west road that cut the immense base in half remained intact. The barracks, and all the other buildings around the facility, had taken a hell of a beating. Burned-out cars and trucks had been hastily dragged off the road. They sprawled alongside it, a terrible tangle of twisted metal. Peterson didn't like to think about the men who'd been inside them when they were hit.

West of the base, the land began climbing toward the mountains. The closer Peterson got to them, the more he started to think Billy Joe McKennie had a point. They weren't especially tall, but they rose swift and steep. And they were covered with the thickest, most impenetrable-looking jungle he'd ever seen. He couldn't have named half the plants—hell, he couldn't have named any of them—but he wouldn't have wanted to try pushing through that maze of trees and ferns and thorny bushes.

Halfway through Kolekole Pass, the road stopped. The mountains loomed up on either side. The American detachment faced west. It boasted some field
guns, several nicely sited machine guns, and a couple of command cars—soldiers called them peeps—with pintle-mounted machine guns of their own for mobile firepower.