Days of Infamy (27 page)

If it got shoved off the hills here, the next stops were Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Fletch wondered if he'd have to aim his 105 up Hotel Street at the advancing Japanese. Soldiers and sailors would fight like madmen to hang on to the red-light district . . . wouldn't they?

He heard more airplane engines. These weren't droning—they were screaming. Fletch dove for a hole in the ground. He hadn't been on the receiving end of a dive-bomber attack for a while. He could have done without the honor now, too. The Japs cared for his opinion as much as they usually did.

One of the planes shot by overhead almost low enough for him to reach up and snag the fixed landing gear. The bomb went off much too close. It slammed his face down into the dirt. He spat mud, and tasted blood when he did it. That didn't surprise him. He was probably also bleeding from the nose and ears. He counted himself lucky: he was still breathing.

And, with luck, he still had his gun crew. Clancy and Dave and Arnie were off scrounging tires. Fletch climbed out of the hole. His dive left him even filthier than he had been a minute before.
They said it couldn't be done
, he thought vaguely. He felt vague, all right, as if he'd just taken a Joe Louis right to the jaw. Blast could do that to you.

Then, looking around, he couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry. The bomb had flipped the commandeered De Soto over on its back like a turtle, except turtles didn't catch fire when that happened to them. With or without new tires or wheels, it wasn't going anywhere ever again. That was almost funny.

But the bomb had also knocked his gun over on its side. The 105 weighed almost two and a half tons on its carriage. That hadn't been enough to keep it upright. One wheel still spun lazily. Fletch wanted to kick the piece. He couldn't fire it. He couldn't move it.

“I can't do shit,” he said, and heard himself as if from very far away.

Then he remembered the De Soto had been carrying ammunition. He yelped, sprang back into the hole in the ground, and flattened himself out again. Sure as hell, the shells started cooking off one after another as the flames got to them. That probably made for a spectacular fireworks display, but you wouldn't have wanted to watch from too close. Fletch, hugging the ground as shell fragments screeched past overhead, was much too close.

When the booming stopped, he cautiously looked up from the hole. He might have been a groundhog, curious about his shadow. What he was curious
about was the De Soto, and whether any pieces of it bigger than a bobby pin were left. As far as he could tell, the answer was no.

Ten minutes later, the men from the gun crew came back, each of them rolling along a wheel with tire and inner tube on it. They stared at the overturned gun and at what was left of the car that had drawn it. “Fuck, Lieutenant,” Clancy said, “why didn't you tell us to bring back a whole automobile?”

“Please accept my apologies, gentlemen,” Fletch said with what he thought was commendable dignity. “If you can get one, please do. Some rope would be nice, too. Maybe we can get the gun back on its wheels.” He thought he would need to do that pretty damn quick if he was going to do it at all. It wasn't just that he wanted to keep shooting at the Japs, though he did. But it looked as if the Army was going to retreat again, and he wanted to hang on to the gun if he possibly could. He'd brought it this far, after all.

What went through his head was,
Yeah, and a hell of a lot of good it's done me
. What had he accomplished with the 105? Oh, he'd blown up a tank. And he'd probably killed or maimed a bunch of Japanese soldiers he'd never seen. But so what? If he'd done anything really worth bragging about, would the U.S. Army have been down here on the outskirts of Honolulu? If everybody'd done something really worth bragging about . . .

If that had happened, some scout plane would have spotted the Japanese carriers and the invasion force before they plastered Oahu. The carriers would have been attacked and driven off or sunk. If the landing force had managed to hit the beach, it would have been slaughtered right there. As soon as the Japs wrecked the fleet and, worse, wrecked the local U.S. air power, that was the ballgame right there.

Clancy and Dave and Arnie didn't worry about such things—or if they did, they didn't show it. “We'll find you a ride, Lieutenant,” Dave said. “Ain't nothin' to get all hot and bothered about.” He nudged his pals. “Come on, guys. Let's get it done.” Off they went, with as much swagger as if they were still fighting at Waimea.

Fletch wearily shook his head. He wished he could keep his pecker up like that. Japanese artillery started pounding the positions in front of him. The Jap guns were poorly sited; he could see their muzzle flashes. If he'd had anything to shoot back with, he would have made them sorry. But all he could do right now was watch. Few of their shells came back far enough to get close to him. None came close enough to make him dive for cover. He would have for
some of them when the war got started. Misses that would have terrified him then he took for granted now.

What he didn't take for granted were men straggling away from the line the Japs were shelling. They looked as if they'd had themselves a bellyful of war and didn't want any more. “Get back to your positions!” he shouted at them. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Some of them just kept walking. They weren't running, but they weren't going to fight any more, either. One man said, “It don't make no fuckin' difference now. Shit, we're licked.” Two or three others nodded.

“Get back to your positions,” Fletch snapped. “That's an order, goddammit.”

They ignored him. He didn't know what to do. If he picked up his rifle and tried giving that order again . . . Quite a few of them had rifles, too. They might not want to use them against the Japs any more, but he didn't think they'd be shy about turning them on him.

What was an army when soldiers stopped obeying officers? It wasn't an army any more, that was for damn sure. It was just a mob. That had happened to the Russians and the Germans at the end of the last war. Now Fletch saw it here.

The soldiers trudged past him. More followed in their wake. The Americans had done everything they could here. Now some of them—a lot of them—were deciding they couldn't do any more, and might as well save their own skins.

Was anybody still
at
the front? Would the Japs be along in another ten minutes? Fletch didn't want to meet them by himself. Unlike a lot of his countrymen, though, he didn't want to run away from them, either. He stood irresolute, peering north and west.

A shiny maroon Ford convertible drove up against the tide of retreating men. Clancy waved to Fletch. “Ain't this some snazzy hot rod?” he yelled from behind the wheel.

“It'll do,” Fletch said, grateful his merry men hadn't got the hell out of there in that snazzy hot rod. “You have rope?”

Dave and Arnie hopped out of the Ford. Dave displayed a coil. He and Fletch fixed it to the gun, while Arnie tied the other end to the car's front bumper. Fletch waved to Clancy, who put it in reverse. The rope came taut. The tires spun, kicking up dust. Fletch figured either nothing would happen
or the dead weight would pull the Ford's bumper off. But when the 105 stirred a little, hope also stirred in him.

He rushed to the gun and started pushing with all his might. “Come on, goddammit!” he yelled to Arnie and Dave. They joined him, grunting and straining. “We can do it!”
Maybe we can do it
. “Put your backs into it!”

“Give us a hand, you lazy bastards,” Arnie growled at three retreating soldiers. For a wonder, they did. For an even bigger wonder, the gun thumped over into its wheels.

Sweat ran down Fletch's face. He'd pulled something in the small of his back. He didn't give a damn. “That's the way,” he panted. “Let's get her hitched up and. . . .” He stopped. After that, what else could he do but retreat, too?

T
HIS IS THE
way the world ends
, Jim Peterson thought. T. S. Eliot hadn't known a thing about it. When the British surrendered to the American colonists at Yorktown, their band had played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Peterson's world was turning upside down under his feet. The little yellow men from Tokyo were walloping the tar out of their American foes. That wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't supposed to be possible. But it was real, real as the stink that rose from him because he hadn't bathed in he couldn't remember how long.

Pearl City lay just north of Pearl Harbor. It housed sailors who'd been stationed there and civilians who'd worked there. It had been a pleasant little town. Now it was on the front line. Palm trees and Norfolk Island pines lay in the streets, uprooted by bombs and shells. What had been nice little homes were now smoldering, bullet-pocked rubble. As far as fighting went, rubble wasn't so bad. It gave better cover than it would have before it got smashed.

“Hey, Peterson,” said the sergeant who'd given him his stripes. The man's name was Bill McKinley, and he answered to Prez.

Peterson just grunted. They crouched in a wrecked kitchen, peering out through the glassless window toward the north. A hole in the roof about the size of a cow let in sun and rain—sometimes both at once.

McKinley went on, “You take any money or any other shit off a dead Jap?”

“Nope.” Peterson shook his head. “How come?”

“On account of if you did, I was gonna tell you to ditch it,” the sergeant
answered. “The Japs catch you with any of that stuff, they figured you killed one of their boys. They're even worse on you then than they are any other time.”

“Not me.” Motion up ahead made Peterson's finger tense on the trigger. Then he relaxed. It was just a mynah bird, hopping across a lawn looking for worms and bugs. The birds had no idea what war was all about. Peterson wished he didn't. He shot McKinley a sidelong glance. “You figure the Japs are going to catch us?”

“Don't get me wrong—I'm still fighting,” McKinley said hastily. “But I don't see the cavalry riding over the hill in the last reel. Do you?”

Before Peterson could say anything, a gunshot made him flinch. He hated doing that, but couldn't help it. His only consolation was that almost everybody else did it, too. He said, “Looking at where we're at, I'd say we could use the goddamn cavalry right about now.”

“Bet your ass,” Sergeant McKinley said. “But if we ain't got it . . .”

That motion behind a hibiscus bush wasn't a mynah. Peterson brought up his rifle, fired, and ducked away from the window, all in one smooth motion. He worked the bolt to chamber a fresh round. The brass cartridge from the last one clinked on the linoleum at his feet.

“You're getting pretty good at this shit, Navy,” McKinley said. By now, he knew about Peterson's disreputable origins.

“Up yours, Prez,” Peterson said mildly. “You can't say I haven't had practice.”

“You're still breathing, so you musta done something right.” The sergeant laughed. “If you were in your right uniform, you'd be tellin' me what to do instead of the other way round.”

“Damn near makes it worth my while,” Peterson said, and McKinley laughed again. An American machine gun a couple of houses over fired a short burst, then a longer one. Very cautiously, Peterson went to the window and peered out. If the Japs were up to something, he wanted to find out what it was. Some men in the dark khaki that they wore were moving a few hundred yards to the north, but he didn't have a clear shot at them. He ducked away again.

“Well?” McKinley asked.

“Nothing much, I don't think,” he answered. “I wish to hell this kitchen had two windows so we could look out from more than one place. Way things are, if a Jap sniper draws a bead on that one, he's liable to punch our tickets for us.”

“You want to move? It's okay by me,” McKinley said.

Before Peterson could answer, he heard freight-train noises in the air. He threw himself flat before the first shells started bursting. Japanese artillery was probably after that machine gun, but that meant it was coming down on his head, too. He was glad McKinley hadn't spoken sooner. If there was anything worse than being upright and out in the open when shellfire started coming in, he didn't know offhand what it might be.

“Just their lousy three-inch popguns,” McKinley shouted through the din.

“Yeah, I know,” Peterson answered. “But where's
our
artillery?” Most of it had been wrecked, and most U.S. artillerymen were likely dead. Jap fighters and dive bombers had gone after the American guns with everything they had. It made sense. Rifles and machine guns were just nuisances on the battlefield. Artillery killed.

Artillery also pinned down U.S. infantry so Japanese foot soldiers could advance. If you rose up to shoot at the Japs, you asked to get flayed by flying fragments. If you didn't, you had the enemy sliding around your flank.

Peterson and McKinley both rose up. You could take your chances with shellfire. Sometimes you had to. But if the Japs flanked them out of this position, where would they go? Into the Pacific, that was where. They had next to no place left to retreat.