Days of Infamy (35 page)

Elsie squared her shoulders. She kept walking. When she came to where Kenzo was working, she nodded and said, “Hello, Ken. How are you?”

He felt like cheering. Instead, he nodded back. “I'm okay. How are you? Is your family all right?”

“I'm . . . here,” she answered. That could have meant anything. “My family's safe, yes. How about you? I see your brother's here.”

“Yes.” Kenzo nodded jerkily. “And my father's fine. My mother . . .” He didn't go on. His face twisted.
I won't cry in front of her. I won't
, he told himself, and somehow he didn't.

“Oh, Ken! I'm so sorry!” All of a sudden, Elsie sounded like the girl he'd known for so long, not the near-stranger who thought he was nothing but a Jap.

One of the girls she was with, a brunette named Joyce something who'd graduated a couple of years ahead of her and Kenzo, said, “I didn't know the Japs did anything to their own.”

He gripped the handle on the shovel very tightly.
She probably hasn't got any brains to knock out
, he told himself. He made himself hold still. It wasn't easy. Neither was holding his voice steady as he answered, “I'm not a Jap. I'm an American, just as much as you are—or I would be if you'd let me.”

By the way Joyce looked at him, he might as well have spoken to her in
Japanese. Elsie's other friend rolled her eyes, as if to say she'd heard it before and didn't believe a word of it. Kenzo waited to see what Elsie would do. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. In a way, maybe she was. She said, “Take care of yourself. I've got to go.”

And she did. Joyce wagged a finger at her. She just shrugged. The straw boss yelled, “You work, Takahashi, you lazy
baka yaro
!” Kenzo did. Maybe the world wasn't such a wretched place after all.

L
IEUTENANT
S
ABURO
S
HINDO
strode along the runway at Wheeler Field. His boots clumped on concrete. The wreckage of American warplanes caught on the ground had been bulldozed off to the grass alongside the runways. Japanese technicians attacked the wrecks with pliers and wrenches and screwdrivers and wire-cutters, salvaging what they could. A lot of Japanese flight instruments were based on their American equivalents. In a pinch, the American ones might do. And spare parts, wherever they came from, were always welcome.

Turning to Commander Fuchida, Shindo said, “The Americans had so much here!”

“
Hai
.” Fuchida nodded. “We knew that before we started this.”

“We knew it, yes, but did we
know
it?” Shindo said. “Did we feel it in our bellies? I don't think so. If we had
known
how much they had, would we have had the nerve to try what we tried?”

This time, Fuchida shrugged. “What you have is one thing. What you do with it is something else. And we had the advantage of surprise.” He waved to the shattered hulks of airplanes. “Once we caught them on the ground, they never had the chance to recover.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo said. “That was the point of the exercise, all right.”

Fuchida turned away, toward the northeast. “Now we make them come to us. If they want to fight a war in the Pacific from their own West Coast, they're welcome to try.” He paused, then resumed: “Commander Genda was
right. If we'd struck the fleet and gone away, they would have used
this
for their advance base, not San Francisco, and who knows what they might have interfered with? But Hawaii shields everything we're doing farther west.”

“Oh, yes. We make good progress in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, they say.” Shindo paused, for the first time really hearing something. “Commander Genda, sir?”

“That's right,” Fuchida answered, a small smile on his face.

“But I thought the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor came from Admiral Yamamoto,” Shindo said.

“And if you ask Genda-
san
about it, you'll go right on thinking the same thing,” Fuchida told him. “I sometimes think Genda is much too modest for his own good. But I happen to know he was the one who persuaded Yamamoto to follow up the air strike with an invasion. He'll say Yamamoto was the one who persuaded the Army, and that was what counted. But he gave Yamamoto the idea.”

“I had no idea,” Shindo murmured. “Genda has said not a word of this.”

“He wouldn't. It's not his style,” Fuchida said.

From what Shindo knew of Genda, that was true. To Genda, the operation counted for more than anything else, including who proposed it. Shindo suddenly snapped his fingers: an unusual display for him. “Something I've been meaning to ask you, sir—have the technicians made any more sense of the wreckage we found at that Opana place?”

“Not so much as I'd like,” Fuchida answered. “Whatever it was, the Americans didn't want us to know anything about it. They did a good, thorough job of destroying it after we landed.”

“I can make a guess,” Shindo said. Fuchida gestured for him to go on. He did: “When we attacked the first American carrier—the one that turned out to be the
Enterprise
—she had fighters up and waiting for us before we got there. We didn't see any American patrol planes as we flew toward her. I don't think there were any. I think the Americans have instruments that let them spot planes at some very long distance.”

Fuchida frowned thoughtfully. “And you think the Opana installation is one of these?”

“Opana is a logical place for one,” Shindo replied. “It's as far north as you can go on Oahu, near enough. Any attack was likeliest to come from the
north. And the Yankees would do a good job of destroying something that important.”

“If they had that kind of device there, why didn't it find our first attack wave?” Fuchida asked. “It didn't, you know. Our surprise was complete.”

Lieutenant Shindo shrugged this time. “Maybe something went wrong with it. Maybe the Americans just didn't pay any attention to it. They were like those big birds that stick their heads in the sand.”

“Ostriches,” Fuchida supplied. “They don't really do that, you know.”

“So what?” Shindo shrugged once more. “The Americans did, and that's what counts.”

“Yes.” Fuchida turned toward the northeast once more. “They did a bad job of scouting, and it cost them. We'd better not imitate them, or it will cost us, too. We'll need long-range patrols to make sure they don't try to cause trouble.”

“Can we afford the fuel to do a proper job of it?” Shindo asked.

“The cost of using up the fuel is one thing. The cost of
not
using it up is liable to be something else again,” Fuchida said. “Or do you think I'm wrong? If you do, don't be shy.”

Lieutenant Shindo was seldom shy. He was, if anything, unusually forthright for a Japanese. Because he didn't ruffle easily, he didn't think anyone else should, either. But he shook his head now. “No, sir, you're not wrong. It's just one of the things we've got to think about.”

“Oh, yes.” Fuchida mimed letting his shoulders sag, as if the weight of the world lay heavy upon them. But then he gestured, not just at the technicians stripping U.S. airplanes but at all of Wheeler Field. “So many things to think about. And this would be much harder if not for everything we've captured from the Americans.”

“I've thought the same thing ever since I saw the bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment we used to fix the airstrip up at Haleiwa,” Shindo said.

“And that was just civilian stuff: what the local builders used,” Fuchida said. “The military gear is even better, though a lot of it got ruined in the fighting and the Americans sabotaged what they could of the rest.”

“By what I've seen, they might have done a better job with that,” Shindo said.

Now Commander Fuchida shrugged again. “They're rich,” he said, and said no more. Lieutenant Shindo inclined his head in silent agreement. He
understood exactly what his superior meant. Because the Yankees had so much, they didn't seem to realize how valuable even their scraps and leavings were to the Japanese. Along with the earth-moving machinery, they'd left plenty of automobiles behind as they fell back from the northern part of Oahu, and they hadn't torched all the filling stations, either. The Japanese had made good use of both the cars and the precious gasoline.

The same held true elsewhere. Hawaii had an astonishing telephone network: there was a phone for every ten people in the islands. In Japan, the figure was more like one for every sixty people; outside of Tokyo, it wasn't far from one for every hundred people. You could talk to anyone here, or any place on the islands, almost instantly. The Americans took that so much for granted, they hadn't bothered to destroy the phone lines or the switching system. That would make it much easier for Japan to defend its conquests. Japanese soldiers slept in U.S. barracks that hadn't been blown up to deny them to the invaders. They lived softer than they would have at home. The list went on and on.

Fuchida kept looking toward the American mainland. “Sooner or later, they will try to come back,” he predicted.

“Let them try,” Shindo said. “We'll give them a set of lumps for their troubles, and then they can try again.” He and Fuchida smiled at each other. The sun shone down brightly. It was a perfect morning. But then, what morning wasn't perfect in Hawaii?

O
NCE UPON A
time, in the dim and vanished days before the war came to Oahu, Kapiolani Park had been a place where tourists and locals could get away from the frenzy of Waikiki for a little while. Lying by the road out to Diamond Head, the expanse of grass and trees had featured, among other things, a fancy band shell where the Royal Hawaiian Band played on Sunday afternoons.

Now, barbed wire and machine-gun towers ringed Kapiolani Park. Japanese soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In the park itself, tents sprouted like a swarm of toadstools. This was what being a prisoner of war meant.

A mynah hopped along the grass between the tents, head cocked to one side as it studied the ground for worms and grubs. Fletcher Armitage studied the mynah the same way the bird studied the ground, and with the same hunger. He had a rock in his hand.

He also watched his fellow captives. If he knocked the bird over, could one of them grab it before he did?

That was an important question. Everybody on Oahu was going to get hungry by and by. Fletch had seen as much before the surrender. For POWs, though, by and by was already here. The Japanese fed them a little rice or noodles every day. Sometimes green leaves of one sort or another were mixed in with the mess. More rarely, so were bits of fish. Even when they were, the day's ration wouldn't have kept a four-year-old healthy, let along a grown man.

“Come a little closer, you stupid bird,” Fletch murmured. Mynahs took people pretty much for granted. Why not? People had always let them alone. People had . . . till they started getting hungry.

Fletch's belly growled at the thought of mynah meat. He'd never been fat. He was getting skinnier by the day. He'd traded his belt for a length of rope and half a dozen cigarettes. He'd smoked all the cigarettes the day he got them. The rope would go on holding up his pants after he got too skinny for the belt to do him any good.

Closer came the mynah, and closer still, till it got within about six feet of him. Then it paused, tilting its head to one side and watching him with a beady black eye. It was fairly tame, yes, but not suicidally so like a zebra dove.

“Come on,” Fletch crooned. “Come on, baby.” The mynah bird kept on casing him. It came no closer. He crooned curses when he decided it wasn't going to. He'd just have to take his best shot.

He let fly with the rock. The motion of his arm startled the bird. It was already on the wing and squawking when the rock thudded down somewhere close to where it had been. Would he have hit it if it hadn't taken off? Maybe. Maybe not, too.

Coming out with some curses that weren't crooned at all, Fletch turned away in disgust. “Too bad, buddy,” said a soldier in a tent across the narrow track. “Woulda been good, I bet.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said. “It would've been.” The rest of the day looked black and gloomy. If he'd made the kill, he could have had a few bites of real meat, even if mynahs weren't anything to make you forget fried chicken. Now he'd have to get by on rations alone. The only trouble with that was, a man couldn't possibly do it.

He went over and picked up the rock before somebody else got hold of it.
It was a good size for clouting birds. Some time before too long, he'd get another chance.
Don't blow it
, he told himself sternly.

How smart were birds? How long would they take to figure out that they'd suddenly become fair game? How long before they started staying away from Kapiolani Park? If they did, that would be very bad.

The Japs didn't bother bringing drinking water into the park. They just left the drinking fountains in place.
Generous of them
, Fletch thought sourly. If a man had to stand in line for an hour just to wet his whistle . . . well, so what? That was no skin off the Japs' noses.

Anyone who wanted to wash had to do it at the drinking fountains, too. That meant anything resembling real washing was impossible. Fletch noticed the stink less than he'd thought he would. When everybody smelled, nobody smelled. And everybody sure smelled here.

Rank had no privileges in line. As far as Fletch could see, rank had no privileges anywhere in the camp any more. If enlisted men obeyed officers, it was because they respected them or liked them, not because they thought they had to. And if they didn't, what could the officers do about it? Not much. The Japs wouldn't back them up. The Japs didn't care what happened here.

Slowly, slowly, the line snaked forward. Fletch sighed. He was thirsty. He was tired. And he was hungry. Anyone who was hungry enough to want to eat a mynah bird was hungry, all right. Unless he caught a mynah or a dove, he'd stay hungry till he got supper. He shook his head. He'd stay hungry after he got supper, too, because it wouldn't be nearly enough.

His turn at the water fountain finally came. He drank and drank and drank. If he drank enough, he could trick his belly into thinking he was full, at least for a little while. He splashed water on his face and hands, too.

“Come on, buddy. Shake a leg,” the soldier behind him growled. Reluctantly, Fletch moved away from the fountain. The breeze off the ocean a few hundred yards away dried the water on his face. As usual, the weather was perfect: not too hot, not too cold, moist but not too humid. Diamond Head towered in the middle distance. The inside of the dead volcano was supposed to be honeycombed with tunnels, fortified beyond belief. When the rest of Oahu was hostage to the Japs, though, that hadn't turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot.

A bunch of things everybody had thought would be important hadn't turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot. The innate superiority of the white
man to the Oriental was one that occurred to Fletch. Here in this POW camp, he didn't feel very goddamn superior.