Days of Infamy (29 page)

Jiro nodded. That made more sense than he wished it did. “What am I going to do now?” he asked, not so much of old man Okamoto as of the whole uncaring world around him. “How am I supposed to take the
Oshima Maru
out if I can't get fuel for her?”

“Weren't you talking about knowing somebody who could fit her out with a mast and sail, Father?” Hiroshi said. “It's about time.”

“Yes, I was talking about that,” Jiro said. “But I don't know how long it will take. I don't know how much it will cost. Jesus Christ!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “I don't even know if that Doi fellow is still alive.”

“If he isn't, it'll take longer,” Kenzo said.

Hiroshi laughed. Even old man Okamoto laughed. Jiro glared at his younger son. What kind of a joke was that? An
American
joke, that was what. Jiro didn't think it was funny (though he might have if Okamoto had told it). It was just annoying to him.

“Eizo Doi, the handyman fellow?” Okamoto asked. Jiro nodded. Okamoto said, “He's still around—at least, I saw him three or four days ago. You think he can put a sail on a sampan?”

“I don't know for sure. He's talked about it,” Jiro answered. “If he can, I'm still in business, whatever business there is. If he can't . . .” The fisherman spat on the sidewalk. “If he can't, I have to find something else to do.”

“Like what?” Okamoto asked with interest. Jiro only shrugged. Except for his stint in the fields, he'd been a fisherman all his life. He didn't know anything else. He didn't want to know anything else.

“What are we going to do if we can't put to sea today?” Hiroshi asked.

Jiro shrugged again. Again, he had no idea. Reiko would be surprised to see him and their sons home so early. Whether she'd be happy to see them . . . That was liable to be another story.

Hiroshi and Kenzo and he had just started back from old man Okamoto's when Japanese bombers appeared overhead. The air-raid sirens didn't begin to wail until after antiaircraft guns opened fire and bombs started whistling down. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed in dismay. His sons both swore in English.

He wasn't so frightened as he might have been. The Japanese planes had been in the habit of dropping most of their bombs farther east, on the
haole
part of town. The ones that had hit around here had seemed like accidents—to everyone except the people they landed on, of course.

But things were different this morning. This morning, bombs rained down all over Honolulu. When one burst a couple of hundred yards ahead, it sounded like the end of the world. If it had burst any closer than that . . .

Kenzo grabbed him by the arm. “We've got to find some cover, Father!”

He was right. Jiro could see that. But where? Farther east, where things were more open, they'd dug air-raid trenches. Not many of those here, not with concrete and asphalt covering so much of the ground. Not many cellars to huddle in, either; hardly any buildings in Honolulu had them.

His younger son pointed to a deep doorway. That would have to do. It would, unless a bomb burst right in front of them—or unless the building came down on top of them. Jiro did his best not to think of such things.

More and more people crowded into the doorway. Women screamed when bombs burst close by. So did several men. Others cursed in a variety of languages. So did several women. Neither the men's screams nor the women's curses affronted Jiro the way they would have under different circumstances. He was almost frightened enough to piss himself. Why should anyone else be different?

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.

F
LETCHER
A
RMITAGE 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 getting 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.”