Days of Infamy doi-1 Page 10

  LIEUTENANT FLETCHER ARMITAGE supposed he was lucky to be alive. That was about as much luck as he could find in the situation. He shook his head wearily. One hand scrabbled through his pockets, looking for a pack of cigarettes. He found it. He still had his gun, too. Compared to what a lot of his fellow artillerymen had gone through, he was a lucky fellow.

  He pulled out the Chesterfields. He couldn’t come up with a Zippo or matches, but that didn’t matter. He sprawled in front of a little fire somewhere not far south of Haleiwa. He got the cigarette going from that and sucked harsh smoke into his lungs.

  “Can I scrounge one of those off you, Lieutenant?” asked a sergeant who sounded every bit as exhausted as Fletch felt.

  “Why the hell not?” Fletch held out the pack.

  “Thanks.” The sergeant lit his cigarette, too. In the red, flickering firelight, he looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. That was impossible, as he proceeded to prove: “Was it just yesterday morning when the Japs started jumping on us?”

  “Yeah.” Out of somewhere deep inside him, Fletch dredged up a raspy chuckle. “Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?”

  “Boy, no kidding.” The sergeant took another drag and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I never figured we’d get up to Waimea Bay, and then I never figured we’d get off the goddamn beach, either.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Armitage agreed. “Nobody ever said anything about what a high old time you have when the other bastard’s got air support and you don’t.”

  The Japs had strafed the detachment twice more on the way up to Waimea Bay. By the time they were done, hardly any trucks would still move. That reduced the Army to going on foot or commandeering cars from motorists coming up Kamehameha Highway, motorists who had no idea there was a war on till they drove straight into it. Some of them hadn’t been very happy about giving up their automobiles. Rifles and bayonets, though, turned out to be mighty good persuaders. Pack as many soldiers into a car as it would hold-and then a couple of more-and tie a cannon to the rear bumper and you could go. The car’s motor and transmission and suspension might not be worth much afterwards, but who gave a damn?

  Of course, bomb craters and the wrecks of shot-up cars in the road north hadn’t made things any easier. And they were coming up past the Dole plantation, where the pineapples grew right to the side of the road. Getting by on the shoulder wasn’t easy, because most places there wasn’t any shoulder to speak of.

  Some of the workers in the fields were Filipinos. Fletch hadn’t worried about them. They were on his side. But what about the Japs who stared impassively at the Army men from under their broad-brimmed straw hats? What were they thinking? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was, he didn’t want to turn his back on them. Maybe that was foolishness. Maybe they were as American as hot dogs and apple pie. And maybe he didn’t feel like taking chances, just in case they weren’t.

  Nobody’d counted on having to do part of the way from Schofield Barracks to Waimea Bay in the dark. Now that Armitage looked back on it, nobody’d counted on quite a few things. Almost all the drills he’d been through had made the unconscious assumption that everything would go pretty much according to plan. When things turned out not to go that way, a lot of people had no idea what to do next.

  Fletch smoked his Chesterfield down to a tiny little butt, then crushed it out. He laughed, not that there was anything much to laugh about. Things were going according to plan, all right. The only trouble was, the plan had been drawn up in Tokyo, not Honolulu or Washington.

  Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun fired off a burst. It wasn’t an American machine gun; it sounded different. Of its own accord, Fletch’s hand started for the.45 on his right hip. “It ain’t so bad, sir, when you hear shit going off ahead of you,” the sergeant said. “When it’s on your flank, that’s when you’ve got to look out for your ass.”

  Armitage considered that. After a moment, he nodded. “Makes sense.” He laughed again, this time with something approaching genuine amusement. “Remember those two goddamn beach bums, stuck in the water between us and the Japs?”

  “I’m not likely to forget ’em,” the sergeant answered. “Poor sons of bitches didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  Caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea was what Fletch had been thinking, but it boiled down to the same thing. And the surf-riders had been on the deep blue sea. With the Americans and the Japs both shooting at them and past them at each other, he didn’t know how they’d missed getting chopped into hamburger, but they had. They’d even managed to disappear in their jalopy. There were plenty of times over the past day when Fletch wished he could have done the same.

  He supposed the main reason the beach bums were still breathing was that Japanese planes had come overhead just then. Getting bombed and strafed had distracted the Americans from the surf-riders-and, rather more to the point, from the barges full of Japs wallowing toward shore just then.

  Had all the Americans been in position as planned, and had the Japs not been plastering them from the skies, they would have massacred the invaders before the barges ever got to the beaches. As things were…

  As things were, they’d done their best. They’d hurt the Japs. Fletch had planted a shell right on a barge carrying a field gun and watched it turn turtle. But a Japanese bomb had upended the gun right next to his and blown its whole crew to red rags, while a strafing fighter coming in at treetop height had put more artillerymen out of action.

  And then the Japanese soldiers had got onto the beach. That wasn’t supposed to happen. In all the drills, the invaders were repelled. Whoever’d worked out those drills had been an optimist. The Japs got on the beach, and then they were running up off the beach, shooting rifles and light machine guns and whatever else they had with them.

  They’d even had a tank or two clatter down off a big barge. Their tanks didn’t look very impressive-they weren’t a patch on the M3s the Forty-first Tank Company at Schofield Barracks had. But they were where they needed to be, and the M3s weren’t. Machine-gun bullets bounced off them. Their cannons were popguns, but they could take care of machine-gun nests and shell unprotected field guns. And Fletch had discovered it was damned hard to hit a moving target with a 105mm gun.

  He lit another Chesterfield. God only knew where he’d get more after the pack was empty, but he’d worry about that later. Now he needed the smoke. “We did everything we could,” he said. “I really think we did.” He sounded dazed and disbelieving even to himself.

  “Yeah.” The sergeant nodded. “I guess maybe we did. It wasn’t enough, though. Those fuckers are on the island now. How the hell we gonna kick ’em off?”

  “Beats me.” Armitage yawned. “All I know is, I’m falling asleep sitting up.”

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant. I’ll shake you in a couple of hours so I can get some shuteye, too,” the noncom said. “Or maybe I’ll shake you sooner, in case we gotta fall back again.”

  He didn’t say anything about shaking Fletch if the Americans started advancing. Plainly, he didn’t think they would. Fletch knew he should have reproved him. But he didn’t think the Americans would start advancing in the middle of the night, either. They hadn’t quite come to pieces when the Japs got ashore, but some of them had sure retreated at a pace faster than a walk.

  Yawning again, Fletch finished the cigarette and stretched out by the fire. Back on the mainland, it would be cold. A lot of places, it would be snowing. He didn’t even worry about a blanket here. He closed his eyes and let sleep club him over the head.

  He didn’t know how much he’d had when a hard hand on his shoulder prodded him back to consciousness. He did know it wasn’t nearly enough. “What the hell?” he asked muzzily. He felt slow and stupid, almost drunk.

  “Sorry, sir.” The sergeant didn’t sound very sorry. “There’s shit going on off to our left. If the Japs turn our flank and get on the road behind us-”

  “We’re screwed,” Fletch finished f
or him. The sergeant nodded. The fire had died down to crimson embers: barely enough to let Fletch make out the other man’s face. If the Japs got on the road behind them, they might escape through the fields. Their precious gun, though, would be lost. Right now, Fletch wouldn’t have parted with that gun for all the gold in Fort Knox. He didn’t know how many others were left. He didn’t know for sure if any others around here were left. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll pull back.”

  What they had to pull back with was a 1935 De Soto, taken at gunpoint from a Japanese family out for a drive. Compared to the snorting truck that had hauled the gun partway north, it was ridiculously underpowered. But compared to a horse or a dozen poor bloody infantrymen, it was a miracle of rare device.

  The miracle’s engine coughed into life when Fletch turned the key. He wondered if the noise would bring a volley of gunfire his way, but it didn’t. Shells as long as a man’s arm clattered and clanked on the floorboards. The car couldn’t pull the gun and the limber both. Artillerymen put their feet on the ammo. As Fletch put the De Soto in gear, he tried not to think about what would happen if a Jap fieldpiece hit the car. Boom! Right to the moon! was what occurred to him.

  He reached for the light switch, then jerked his hand away as if the switch were red-hot. Now that would have been Phi Beta Kappa! “The Japs are trying to kill you, Fletcher my boy,” he muttered. “You don’t have to try and kill yourself, too.”

  He couldn’t go faster than about ten miles an hour, not if he wanted to stay on the road. Of course, even ten miles an hour would have taken him all the way down to the south coast in a little more than two hours. He didn’t get that far, or anywhere close. After ten minutes or so, he came to a roadblock manned by some nervous infantrymen. They seemed glad to see he had the gun-and even gladder that he wasn’t a Jap.

  Fletch was pretty goddamn glad they weren’t Japs, too, only he did his best not to let on. He and his men piled out of the De Soto and added the gun to the roadblock’s strength. By sunup, if not sooner, he figured he’d be in action again.

  MARTIAL LAW! SHOUTED posters all over Honolulu. Jiro Takahashi didn’t read English. His sons made sure he understood. “It means the Army’s in charge,” Kenzo said at breakfast Monday morning. “It means you have to do whatever soldiers tell you to do.”

  “It means we’re going to land in trouble for being Japanese,” Hiroshi added.

  “When have we not been in trouble for being Japanese?” Jiro asked. If his son was bitter, so was he.

  “They attacked the United States. They hit us when we weren’t even looking.” Kenzo sounded furiously angry at Japan.

  Jiro felt furiously angry at his younger son. Kenzo had everything backwards. As far as Jiro was concerned, Japan was we and the Americans were they. Jiro looked to his wife for support. He didn’t have to look far for Reiko. The tiny kitchen of their cramped apartment barely held the four of them. Reiko just said, “Eat your noodles, all of you. Drink your tea. Whether it’s war or whether it’s peace, work doesn’t stop. You’ve got to go to the sampan.”

  She was right. Her refusal to come right out and take Jiro’s side left him punctured anyway. She’d been born in Oshima County, just as he had; her home village was only about fifteen miles from his. Surely she felt as Japanese as he did. What difference did it make that they’d lived in Hawaii for decades and probably never would go back to the old country? None-not as far as he could see. But Reiko didn’t want to quarrel with the boys, no matter how foolishly they behaved.

  Hashi flying, Jiro finished the soba noodles. He’d been surprised to discover there were Americans who ate buckwheat groats, but he didn’t know of any who made them into noodles. He drank some of the hot water in which the noodles were boiled; it was supposed to be very healthy. And he gulped his tea. Then he jumped to his feet. He barked at his sons: “Come on! We haven’t got all day!”

  To his dismay, they got done no more than a few seconds after he did. When they rose, they loomed over him. How could he feel he was in charge when he had to look up at them to tell them anything? But all Hiroshi said was, “We’re ready, Father.”

  Down to the street they went. When they got there, Jiro coughed as if he’d smoked a pack of Camels all at once. Horrible, choking black smoke swirled through the air. For all he could see, it might as well have been nighttime. The smoke made his eyes burn and sting, too. It left greasy soot everywhere it touched.

  His sons made almost identical disgusted noises. They pulled bandannas out of their pockets-Hiroshi’s red, Kenzo’s blue-and tied them over their mouths. That struck Jiro as a good idea. All he had was a dirty white handkerchief. He used it. Everything would be dirty in short order. Maybe the hankie kept some of the nasty smoke out of his lungs. He could hope so, anyhow.

  The streets were crowded. It was Monday morning, after all. But people moved as if in slow motion. In the black, stinking murk, you had to. Otherwise, you’d get run into on the sidewalk or run over in the street. Cars had their lights on, but the beams didn’t pierce more than a few feet of haze.

  “Go to hell, you goddamn Japs!” somebody yelled in English. Jiro understood the sentiment well enough. He squared his shoulders and kept walking. Above the bandannas, his sons’ eyes blazed. He wasn’t even sure the curses had been aimed at them. They were far from the only Japanese on the streets.

  A lot of intersections had policemen posted to keep traffic moving. Honolulu’s cops sprang from every group in the islands: haoles, Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans (which Jiro found revolting, but Koreans weren’t subject to Japanese authority here). Normally, the police got obeyed because they were the police. Now people who weren’t Japanese swore at the Japanese cops-and sometimes, if they were ignorant, at the Chinese and Koreans, too. When the cursers guessed wrong, the policemen angrily shouted back. Stoic as samurai, the officers who were Japanese ignored whatever came their way.

  Some of the intersections that didn’t have cops had soldiers. They wore helmets and carried bayoneted rifles, and looked nervous enough to shoot or skewer anybody who rubbed them the wrong way. They were cursing Japanese as loudly as any civilians. Jiro pretended not to hear; arguing with armed men struck him as suicidal madness. His sons muttered to themselves, but not loud enough to draw notice.

  The Aala Market was half deserted. That shook Jiro. He hadn’t thought anything could keep the dealers away. Only the smell of fish lingered at full strength.

  He and Hiroshi and Kenzo went on to Kewalo Basin. But more soldiers waited, along with a few fishermen who’d arrived ahead of the Takahashis. Some of them, the younger ones, were talking with the soldiers in English. Jiro’s sons joined the discussion. After a little while, Hiroshi’s voice rose in anger. One of the soldiers aimed a rifle at his chest. Jiro sprang forward to push his son out of harm’s way. But Hiroshi took a step back on his own, and the soldier lowered the Springfield. He and Hiroshi went on speaking English, not quite so furiously.

  “What’s going on?” Jiro asked. The soldier scowled at him, probably for speaking Japanese. He ignored the man. It was the only language he could speak, and he needed to know.

  “We can’t go out.” Hiroshi’s voice was hard and flat.

  “What? Why not?” Jiro exclaimed. “How are we supposed to make a living if we can’t go out? Are the Americans crazy?” As he always did, he used the word to label other people. It didn’t apply to him or, as far as he was concerned, to his family.

  “We can’t go out because the Army doesn’t trust us,” Hiroshi answered. “It doesn’t trust any Japanese. Didn’t you see that yesterday, when the airplane shot up that other sampan? It could have been us just as easily. The soldiers are afraid we’ll go out and tell the Japanese Navy what’s going on here, or maybe that we’ll go out and bring back Japanese soldiers.”

  “That’s…” Jiro’s voice trailed away. He couldn’t say it was mad or impossible, for it was neither. He hadn’t thought about actually helping Japan against the United States, b
ut the idea didn’t disgust him. Maybe some other fishermen had thought about it. How could he know? If they had, they would have kept their mouths shut. That was only common sense.

  And some sampans, bigger than the Oshima Maru, could range out five hundred miles, maybe even more. They could surely find the Imperial Navy. They could bring back soldiers, too, if their skippers were so inclined. If a boat could carry tons of fish, it could also carry tons of men, and each ton was ten or twelve fully equipped soldiers.

  “That’s an insult, that’s what it is,” Kenzo said. “I’m loyal, you’re loyal, we’re all loyal.” He raised his voice: “We’re all loyal! ” Then he spoke in English, probably repeating the same thing.

  The fishermen nodded. Some of them said, “Hai! ” Others said, “Yes!” More protests in English followed.

  For all the good those protests did, the Japanese men might have been talking to a bunch of stones. The American soldiers glared at them and shook their heads. One, an older man with stripes on his sleeve, made pushing noises with both hands. Go away, he was saying. Even Jiro had no trouble understanding that.

  Fishermen who spoke English kept arguing. Jiro started to turn away. He saw they could argue till they turned blue in the face without persuading the men in uniform. Then another soldier ran up shouting something in English. Jiro could make out Japs, but nothing more. All the soldiers exclaimed, some of them hotly. So did the fishermen.

  “What does he say?” Jiro asked. Most of the time, not knowing English didn’t bother him. Every once in a while, he felt the lack.

  Grimly, Kenzo answered, “He says Japanese soldiers have landed on the northern beaches. We’ve been invaded.”

  “Oh.” Jiro took the news in stride. “It’s part of war, neh? If America could, she would invade Japan, wouldn’t she?” But, as he knew very well, America couldn’t. If that didn’t show which country was mightier…