Days of Infamy (40 page)

Joe eyed blown-up photos and drawings with something less than his usual attention. He kept thinking about the question he'd asked himself between classes.
How do you identify and recognize a genuinely good person?
It wasn't as if that were something he had to worry about every day. He knew too well that
he
didn't fill the bill. Orson Sharp might.

Despite absentmindedness, he got out of the class without embarrassing himself again. Along with the other cadets, he trooped over to the cafeteria—now styled the galley in deference to the influx of Navy fliers—for lunch. The choice was between chicken à la king (which the cadets universally called
chicken à la thing
) and creamed chipped beef on toast (which had an older and earthier nickname). Joe chose the chicken. Sharp filled his plate with the beef.

At every table, some wit tapped out
dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot
, the Morse for SOS. People snorted. Orson Sharp looked puzzled. “What's going on?” he asked.

Pointing to Sharp's plate, Joe said, “You know what they call that stuff.”

“No. What?” The kid from Utah seemed more confused than ever.

As the pseudo-distress calls went on and on, Joe fought not to roll his eyes. Sharp really had led a sheltered life. Patiently, Joe spelled it out for him: “Shit on a shingle. S-O-S.”

“Oh.” A light went on in Sharp's eyes. “No, I didn't know that. Well, at least it makes sense now.” He dug in. “I don't care what they call it. I think it's good.” As usual, he didn't let being different from the other cadets faze him. He had his own standards, they suited him, and he stuck to them.

After lunch came athletics. Orson Sharp knocked people into next week on the football field. Joe played offensive end and defensive back. Bigger guys
tried to run over him. He tried not to let them. Along with everybody else, they both got knocked around by the dirty-fighting instructors. Swimming felt strange to Joe. He already had a pretty good crawl, but they wanted him to use a modified breaststroke because it kept his head out of the water better. He did his best to learn it. He'd gained five pounds since coming to Chapel Hill, all of it muscle.

And when the lights went out at half past nine, he fell asleep as if he'd been clubbed.

A
CCELERATION PRESSED
L
IEUTENANT
S
ABURO
S
HINDO
back into his seat as he roared off the
Akagi
's flight deck. He'd had the mechanics install steel plates in the back and bottom of the seat. A lot of Japanese pilots disdained the extra weight: it made their Zeros slower and less maneuverable. The Americans had carried much more armor than he did. It had saved a lot of pilots, or at least let them bail out. It hadn't saved Hawaii, but he still thought it was a good idea.

Surrounded by a screen of destroyers,
Akagi
patrolled northeast of Oahu. The Japanese had also commandeered some big fishing sampans, mounted radios on them, and posted them in a picket arc close to a thousand kilometers out from the Hawaiian Islands. No carrier-based bomber could fly that far and return to the ship that had launched it. The United States wasn't going to catch Japan napping, the way Japan had caught the USA.

Just in case the boats in that picket arc had missed something, Shindo watched the sky like a hawk. Some people slacked off when they didn't expect to run into trouble. Shindo wasn't one of those. Routine meant routinely capable, routinely excellent, to him.

He also glanced down at the ocean every now and again. Losing the
Bordeaux Maru
was a wake-up call for the Japanese Navy. That had happened more than three weeks ago now. The submarine that got the freighter was bound to be long gone. That didn't mean others hadn't come to take its place, though. Shindo couldn't sink one if he spotted it on the surface: the Zero
didn't carry bombs. But he could shoot it up. If his machine guns and cannons filled it full of holes, it couldn't submerge. Then it would be easy meat for bombers or destroyers.

Here, though, nothing marred the Pacific but the ships of the Japanese flotilla and their wakes. The rest of the ocean seemed glassy smooth. There was hardly any chop; the wind was the next thing to a dead calm. No big swells were rolling down out of the north, either, as they had been when the task force moved on Hawaii. Had those been much worse, the barges would have had trouble landing, and the invasion might have turned into a fiasco. Admiral Yamamoto had bet against the
kami
of wind and wave, and he'd won.

Shindo called the other fighter pilots flying combat air patrol: “Anything?”

A chorus of “No”s resounded in his earphones. Some pilots were even tempted to take the radio out of a plane to save weight. Shindo had issued stern orders against that. As far as he was concerned, staying in touch counted for more than the tiny bit of extra speed and liveliness you might gain from saving the kilos the radio weighed. Some people had grumbled about it, but he'd stood firm.

A sudden spurt of steam down below, foam and spray everywhere as a great bulk heaved itself out of the water. Excitement coursed through Shindo. Was that a broaching submarine? A few seconds later, the Japanese flier started to laugh. That was no submarine—it was a breaching whale. The war between Japan and the USA meant nothing to it. To it, the ocean mattered only for krill. Men had other ideas, though. One of those ideas had put Shindo in a fighter plane and taken him far from home.

He listened to excited radio calls from the other pilots who'd seen the whale. “I was going to dive on it and shoot it up,” somebody said.

“Shame to waste all that meat without a factory ship close by,” someone else replied.

That made people laugh. Shindo smiled a thin smile inside his cockpit. Better when the men were happy and laughing. They paid closer attention to what was going on around them. Right here, right now, that probably didn't matter. No Yankees were likely to be within hundreds of kilometers. But you never could tell.

Throttled back, a Zero could stay in the air for more than two hours. Shindo and his comrades buzzed along in great spirals around the
Akagi
and the destroyers that covered her. The whale was the most interesting thing any of them
saw. Shindo didn't yawn as he flew—he was far too professional to let down on the job—but it was a long way from the most exciting patrol he'd ever led.

He took the flight back to the carrier after its replacements had risen into the air. Nobody felt like yawning landing on a rolling, pitching flight deck. Shindo made himself into a machine, automatically obeying the signals of the landing officer at
Akagi
's stern. The man on the ship could judge his course better than he could. He knew that, however little he cared to admit it even to himself.

When the landing officer's wigwag flags went down, Shindo dove for the deck. He bounced when he hit, so that the Zero's hook missed the first arrester wire. But it snagged the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Shindo pushed back the canopy and scrambled out. The deck crew took charge of the Zero, shoving it to one side, away from the path of the incoming planes behind it. Shindo sprinted for the island. The motion of the deck under his feet seemed as natural as the motion of air in his lungs.

Commander Genda greeted him just inside. “Anything unusual?” he asked.

“No, sir.” Shindo shook his head. “About the most interesting thing we saw was a whale. We wondered if it was a Yankee sub, but it was only a whale.”

“All right,” Genda said. “The splash the big ones make when they come to the surface can confuse you at first. But the Americans don't build subs with fins and flukes.” He chuckled.

Shindo managed another thin smile. Fins and flukes . . . Where did Genda come up with such nonsense? The smile didn't last long; Shindo's smiles seldom did. He said, “Forgive me for saying so, sir, but I'm afraid this patrol is costing us more fuel than it's worth. How likely are we to encounter the enemy?”

Genda only shrugged. “I don't know, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, you don't know, either. That's why we're here: to help find out how likely we are to run into the Americans sticking their long noses where they don't belong. We learn something if we meet them . . . and we learn something if we don't.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo said, an answer a subordinate could never go wrong in giving to his superior. His own opinion he kept to himself. If Genda wanted it, he would ask for it.

He didn't. He just said, “Prepare your report. We'll put it together with all the others and see what kind of picture it makes.”

“Yes, sir,” Saburo Shindo said again, and gave Genda a salute as mechanically perfect as his landing a few minutes before. As he had then, he followed
someone else's will rather than his own. He shrugged, if only to himself. A lot of military life involved following someone else's will.

T
HE SUN SANK
toward the Pacific. Jim Peterson took a nail out of his mouth and used it to fasten a plank to a two-by-four. He wished he were using his hammer to smash in a Jap's skull instead. The guards, though, were on the other side of the barbed wire as the POW camp rose near Opana—about as far north as anyone could go on Oahu. From there, it was nothing but ocean all the way up to Alaska. Peterson could look up and see waves rolling onto the beach.

He drove another nail to make sure the plank stayed securely fastened. He might have to stay in the barracks he was building. He wanted to make sure the building kept off the rain. He didn't have to worry about making sure the place was warm, the way he would have on the mainland. A good thing, too, because the Japs couldn't have cared less if their prisoners froze.

He fastened another plank, and another, and another. He worked till a Jap outside the wire blew a horn. The bastard must have thought he was Satchmo Armstrong; he put some Dixieland into the call that let the POWs knock off for the day. And wasn't that a kick in the nuts—a Jap who liked jazz? Peterson had run into some crazy things in his time, but that might have taken the cake.

The prisoners lined up to return their tools. The guards kept track of every hammer and saw and chisel and axe and screwdriver and pliers they issued each morning. If the count didn't add up when the tools came back, there was hell to pay. They'd beaten the crap out of a guy who tried to stick a chisel in his pocket and walk off with it. You had to be nuts to think you'd get away with something like that, but young Einstein had taken a shot at it. He'd paid for his stupidity, too; he was still laid up in the infirmary.

Peterson turned in the hammer without any fuss. No matter what he wanted to do with it, he couldn't, not with armed Japs ready to kill him if he got cute with the sergeant in charge of checking off the tools on a chart full of incomprehensible squiggles.

Prez McKinley stood a couple of men behind Peterson in line. He gave the Jap sergeant his saw. Then he and Peterson got bowls and spoons from their tent and headed for the chow line. The march up to Opana had taught them sticking with a buddy was a good idea. The Japanese had hardly bothered to feed the POWs on the trek across the island. What the guards did give out, the
strong had tried to snatch from the weak. Two men together were stronger than any lone wolf could be. Nobody had robbed the two of them. They'd got to Opana in fair shape. Some of the weaker, hungrier men had lain down by the Kamehameha Highway and, too weary to go on, let the Japs do them in.

Here at the camp, having a buddy proved even more important than it had on the road. A buddy could hold your place in line if nature called or if you were busy trying to make some scheme pay off. A buddy might help you escape, too. Prisoners were duty-bound to try to get away. Nobody seemed hot to try it, though. Even under the Geneva Convention, the power holding prisoners could punish would-be escapees who failed. Since the Japs hadn't signed the convention, no one was eager to find out what they'd do.

“I wonder what sort of gourmet treat we'll have tonight,” Peterson said. “The pheasant under glass, do you think, or the filet mignon?”

“Shut the fuck up,” said somebody behind him in line.

“Hey, I can dream, can't I?” Peterson tried to stay pleasant.

“Not while I gotta listen to you, goddammit.” The other prisoner didn't bother.

It could have turned into a brawl. The main reason it didn't was that Peterson was too worn and hungry to take it any further. He told McKinley, “Some people can't take a joke,” but he didn't say it loud enough for the angry POW in back of them to hear.

“Filet mignon . . . Hell, I didn't know whether to laugh or to want to deck you myself,” McKinley answered. “Your belly's empty, you take food serious.”

Peterson decided he must have stepped over a line if that was the most backing his friend would give him. Joking about steak and pheasant here felt like joking about somebody's mother on the outside. You were asking for trouble if you did. But if you couldn't joke, wouldn't you start going nuts?

Such thoughts vanished from his mind when the chow line started snaking forward. His belly growled like a wolf. He had to clamp his lips together to keep drool from running down his chin. The spit flooding into his mouth reminded him that he took food as seriously as Prez McKinley, as seriously as the son of a bitch who'd resented what he'd said, as seriously as all the other sorry bastards cooped up here with him. The most beautiful prisoner-of-war camp in the world—but who gave a damn?

He looked down at his bowl. It was cheap, heavy earthenware, glazed white. It had probably come from a Chinese restaurant. He'd eaten chop suey out of
bowls just like it plenty of times. Thinking about chop suey made him want to drool, too.
I really
was
out of line with that crack
, he decided.

Cooks slapped stuff into POWs' bowls. Peterson wondered how they'd landed the job. Had they been cooks before the surrender, or had the Japs just pointed and said, “You, you, and you”? Either way, he was jealous of them. If anybody here came close to getting enough to eat, it had to be the cooks.

Plop!
A ladleful of supper went into a bowl.
Plop!
Another ladleful, one man closer to Peterson.
Plop!
Another.
Plop!
Another. And then
plop!
—and it was his turn.

He stared avidly at the bowl as he carried it away from the chow line. Just behind him, McKinley was doing the same thing. Rice, some broth, some green things. He didn't think the green came from proper vegetables. Some of it looked like grass, some like ferns, some like torn-up leaves boiled in with the rice. He didn't care, not one bit. He drank every drop of the broth and made sure he ate every grain of rice and every bit of greenery—whatever the hell it was—the cook doled out to him.

He was still hungry when he finished—hungry, yes, but not
hungry
. Even partial relief might have been a benediction from on high. “Jesus!” he said. “That hit the spot.”

“Hit part of the spot, anyway,” McKinley answered. His bowl was as perfectly empty and polished as Peterson's. “Give me about three of those, and some spare ribs to go with 'em. . . .” Before the surrender, he wouldn't have talked so reverently about anything but women. People had taken food for granted then, fools that they were.

The two men carried their bowls over to what looked like a horse trough. For all Peterson knew, it had been a horse trough once upon a time. He sloshed his bowl in the water, and his spoon, too. You did want to keep things as clean as you could. Otherwise, you were asking for dysentery. With so many men packed so close together, you might come down with it anyhow, but you were smart to try not to.