End of the Beginning Read online

  Yamashita had dark, heavy eyebrows that gave him a fearsome frown. “All right, that’s what they’re trying. How in blazes do you stop them?”

  “I have some good news, sir,” replied Genda, who’d saved it as a miser saved gold.

  “Oh? What’s that?” General Yamashita sounded deeply skeptical.

  “One of our H8Ks on patrol northeast of the islands spotted a U.S. submarine cruising on the surface. The seaplane attacked with bombs and cannon and sank it. No possible doubt, the pilot reports.”

  Yamashita grunted. “All right, there’s one,” he admitted. “Even one is good news—I won’t try to tell you any different. But how many submarines have the Americans got in these waters? How many more are they building? And how many have we sunk?”

  Minoru Genda needed a distinct effort of will to hold his face steady. Those were all very good questions. He didn’t have precise answers for any of them. He knew what the approximate answers were, though: too many, too many, and not enough, respectively. “We are doing everything we can, sir,” he repeated. “Before long, we’ll have some of that fancy electronic rangefinding gear in the H8Ks. That should help our searches.”

  “While the enemy is on the surface, maybe,” Yamashita said. “What about when he’s submerged? How will you find him then? That’s when he does his damage, neh?”

  “Hai,” Genda said. “But subs are slow while submerged, and have only limited range on their batteries. They do most of their traveling surfaced.”

  “If the Americans come back here, how do we beat them back with no fuel for tanks or airplanes?” Yamashita demanded. “By the Emperor, how do we beat them back with no fuel for ships? Answer me that.”

  “Sir, we are making our best effort.” Genda said the only thing he could. “If we had not made our best effort here, we would be fighting the war now in the western Pacific, not between Hawaii and the American mainland.”

  All that got him was another grunt from the general. “I suppose the Army had nothing to do with the conquest of Hawaii,” Yamashita said with heavy sarcasm.

  The way Genda remembered things, the Army hadn’t wanted much to do with Hawaii. The Army was worried about Russia, and about keeping as many men as it could in the endless China adventure. Admiral Yamamoto had had to threaten to resign before the stubborn generals would change their minds. The benefits of their change of mind were obvious—now. And now, of course, they found new things to complain about.

  Genda knew only too well that he couldn’t explain that to General Yamashita. The other man not only outranked him but belonged to the service he would be maligning. What he did say once more was, “Sir we are doing everything we can do, everything we know how to do. If you can suggest other things we should be doing, we will be grateful to you.”

  That made Yamashita no happier. “Zakennayo!” he burst out. “You’re supposed to know what to do about submarines. If you ask me about tanks or artillery, I can give you a sensible answer. All I want to know is, why are you having a harder time now than you were against the American aircraft carriers?”

  “Aircraft carriers are easier to find than submarines, sir,” Genda answered. “And once we find them, we sink them. We’re better than the Americans are.”

  “Aren’t we better with submarines, too?” Yamashita asked pointedly.

  “With them? Probably,” Genda replied, though he wasn’t altogether sure of that. “At detecting them? At hunting them? Please excuse me, sir, but there the answer is less clear. The Americans have had more combat experience in those areas than we have, both in the last war and in this one.”

  “Faugh!” Yamashita said—more a disgusted noise than a word. “We’re getting the experience, all right—getting it the hard way. All I have to tell you, Commander, is that we’d better put it to good use.”

  “Yes, sir.” Recognizing dismissal when he heard it, Genda got to his feet and saluted. Yamashita sent him out of the Gold Room with an impatient wave.

  With more than a little relief, Genda left. Yamashita hadn’t really called him in to confer; he’d called him in to rake him over the coals. And, from the Army commandant’s point of view, he had every right to do so. The Navy was supposed to protect the supply line between Hawaii and the rest of the Empire of Japan. If it didn’t, if it couldn’t . . . Then we have a problem, a serious problem, here, Genda thought unhappily.

  He was heading for the koa-wood stairs to make his escape when someone said, “Commander Genda, isn’t it?”—in English.

  He stopped and bowed. “Yes, your Majesty,” he answered in the same language.

  “Why are you here today?” Queen Cynthia Laanui asked.

  “Military matters, your Majesty,” Genda said, which was true but uninformative.

  The redheaded Queen knew as much, too. She gave him an exasperated sniff. “Thank you so much,” she said, her sarcasm more flaying than Yamashita’s because it came from a prettier face in a softer voice. “Let me put it another way, Commander—what’s gone wrong this time? You never come to the palace when things are going well, do you?”

  “I should not discuss this,” Genda said.

  “Why not?” Now the Queen’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Why shouldn’t I know what’s going on? Isn’t Hawaii allied to Japan? If anybody ought to be kept informed, don’t you think my husband and I should?”

  “You—” Genda stopped. He couldn’t just come out and say, You’re an American. She was, of course: a fine, healthy specimen of an American, too. But if she was playing the role of Queen of Hawaii to the hilt . . .

  “I am the Queen. I could order you sent to the dungeons.” That dangerous flash again. Then, half a second later, Cynthia Laanui’s eyes flashed again, in an altogether different way. It happened so fast, Genda wasn’t sure the two flashes weren’t really one—wasn’t sure, in fact, that he hadn’t imagined both of them. Except he hadn’t. She repeated, “I could order you sent to the dungeons. . . .” Her nose wrinkled, and her laugh rang sweet as frangipani. “I could—except we haven’t got any dungeons, and nobody would follow the order if I was dumb enough to give it. Details, details.” She laughed again, on a slightly wrier note.

  Genda laughed, too, and surprised himself when he did it. He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, and meant it more than he ever had before with either of the Hawaiian puppet monarchs. He surprised himself again by telling her about the freighters that had gone down in the channel between Kauai and Oahu.

  “Oh, that,” Queen Cynthia said, and he could not doubt she already knew about it. As if to confirm as much, she went on, “That story’s all over Honolulu—probably all over Oahu—by now. You couldn’t keep it a secret if you tried, not when people on the island could see the smoke.” She leaned forward a little, not to be provocative—she was provocative enough just standing there—but as a friend would in conversation with another friend. “Or is the secret part that it bothers you more than you want to let on?”

  “Hai,” Genda said before he realized he should have answered, That’s none of your business. Then—realization piled on realization—he saw that wouldn’t have helped, either. Only an immediate, convincing denial would have done him any good, and he couldn’t give her one.

  “Is it so very bad?” she asked quietly.

  He shook his head. He wanted to shake himself, like a dog shaking off cold water. “No, not so very bad,” he answered, and searched for words—not because his English was bad, but because he wanted to be most precise. “Things are not quite so good as we would like, your Majesty. This is honto—it is true. But we fight a war. Things in a war go exactly how we want almost never. Do you see?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m not a child, Commander.”

  Genda bowed once more, not trusting himself to speak. Cynthia Laanui might be a great many things, but a child she definitely was not. The flowered sun dress she wore left no possible doubt of that.

  Just as he straightened, her nose wrinkled in amusement again. Only after that did her f
ace politely go almost expressionless. She knows what I’m thinking. That alarmed Genda, who did not want his Japanese colleagues—let alone a gaijin woman—able to read him like that.

  He occasionally visited officers’ brothels on and near Hotel Street. Like most of his countrymen, he was much more matter-of-fact about that than Americans were. What else was he supposed to do, here so far from home? But lying down with a whore was one thing. Lying down with a woman who might be interested in you for your own sake—that was something else again.

  And what would lying down with a Queen be like?

  Foolishness. Moonshine, he thought. Queen Cynthia Laanui hadn’t been much more than polite. If she was a friendly person, that didn’t mean she wanted to do anything but make conversation with him . . . did it?

  She said, “Thanks for leveling with me.” She paused for a moment to make sure he understood, then went on, “Do please let me know what’s going on from here on out. Things will work out better for everybody if you do.”

  “Do you think so?” Genda couldn’t have sounded more glum, more dubious, if he’d tried for a week.

  Queen Cynthia laughed once more, which only made his question seem gloomier than it had. “I’m not Mata Hari, Commander,” she said. “I’m not going to seduce your secrets out of you.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or should I?”

  How am I supposed to answer that? Genda wondered frantically. He bowed again. That was safe, it was polite (almost reflexively so for him), and it bought him time to think. Having bought it, he knew he had better use it wisely. “Whatever your Majesty wishes, of course,” he murmured.

  This time, Cynthia Laanui threw back her head and chortled. “Well, Commander, that proves one thing for sure,” she said, and her voice suddenly held no mirth at all. “You’ve never been a queen, or a king, either.”

  “No, your Majesty, I never have,” he said, and fled Iolani Palace faster than the American fleet had fled before the triumphant Japanese earlier in the year.

  KENZO AND HIROSHI TAKAHASHI took the Oshima Maru out of Kewalo Basin by themselves. Their father had another radio talk scheduled. His words would go back to Japan and all over the world. Kenzo wished more than anything else in the world that he would just keep quiet.

  Whatever Kenzo wished, he wasn’t going to get it. “Dad likes being a celebrity,” he said bitterly. He was at the rudder, Hiroshi trimming the sails. They would trade off later. By now, dealing with the sampan’s rigging and the way she went under sail was second nature to both of them, though neither had known anything about handling a sailboat before Oahu ran out of diesel fuel even for fishermen. Baptism by total immersion, Kenzo thought: not an idea that would have occurred to him had his father stayed in Yamaguchi Prefecture instead of coming to Hawaii.

  His brother only shrugged. “Dad’s made his choices. We’ve made ours. Right this minute, I have to say his look better.”

  Another measure of the choices he and Kenzo had made was that they both used English. Some men even of their father’s generation had become fluent in it, but Jiro Takahashi remained at home only in Japanese. In English, he understood yes and no and thank you and most obscenities. Except for throwing in an occasional Oh, Jesus Christ! and the like, he didn’t speak any, though.

  “We’re getting away,” Kenzo said. “Only thing is, I wish to God we didn’t have to come back again.”

  Hiroshi chuckled. “Can’t very well sail to San Francisco from here.”

  “I know.” Kenzo sounded as mournful as he felt. “I’ve thought about it. We might be able to catch enough fish to keep us going—we probably could. But she wouldn’t carry enough water to get us there.”

  Now Hiroshi stared at him. “You have thought about it.”

  “I said so, didn’t I?” Kenzo looked back over his shoulder. The faster Oahu receded behind him, the better he liked it. “I even went to the library to dope out which way the winds blow between here and there. But I’ll tell you what really put the kibosh on things for me.”

  “Yeah?” his brother said.

  “Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “You know what they’re doing with the Japanese on the mainland, right? They’re throwing ’em into camps.” How Imperial Japanese propaganda here in Hawaii thundered about that! At first, Kenzo had thought it was a lie. By now, he was only too sure it was true. “The U.S. Navy would probably sink us the minute they spotted us—we’re Japs, right? The Japanese don’t want Japs who think they’re Americans, and neither do the Americans.”

  A fairy tern, white as snow with big black eyes, glided along with the Oshima Maru. After a while, the bird perched at the top of the mast. “Damn hitch-hiker,” Hiroshi said.

  “Yeah.” Kenzo left it there. Hiroshi hadn’t tried to tell him he was crazy or to say the Navy would treat them fine if it found them sailing northeast. Kenzo wished his brother would have. In that case, he might have been wrong. The way things were, he knew damn well he was right.

  Land slowly slid under the horizon. When you traveled under sail, nothing happened in a hurry. But for the slap of waves against the hull and the sound of the wind in the sails and the lines, the Oshima Maru was ghost-quiet. It was as if time itself had been yanked back to some earlier, more patient century—and which one mattered very little. Men had been sailing like this for three thousand years, probably longer.

  The tern flew away. A frigatebird—by comparison, almost as big as a light plane—soared by overhead. Its red throat sac was small now, not full of air and big as a kid’s balloon: the bird was looking for lunch instead of a mate. Frigatebirds were pirates. If they had their druthers, they let other birds do the hard work of diving into the sea, then robbed them of their catch.

  Hiroshi’s head followed the frigatebird across the sky. “Thought for a second it was an airplane,” he said sheepishly.

  “Uh-huh.” Kenzo had made that same mistake himself a time or two. He almost let it go there. But he asked what he wanted to ask: “Whose?”

  “If it was a plane, I figured it would be Japanese and hoped it wouldn’t,” his brother replied. “You?”

  “Same thing. Not this time, though, ’cause I knew from the start it was just a bird.”

  Talk of planes brought Kenzo back into the middle of the twentieth century, but not for long. There were no planes overhead, so he forgot about them. All he saw now, but for the sea and the occasional bird, were a few masts from other sampans with rigs as new as the Oshima Maru’s—and as old as time.

  On he went, farther from Oahu than he would have needed to go before the war turned everything upside down. Back then, fish had been part of what Oahu ate. Now they were a vital part of what the island ate, and the sampans skimmed every fish they could from the Pacific. Even the ocean couldn’t keep up with that kind of fishing forever.

  What happens when we have to go so far out to sea that travel time really cuts into how much we can bring back? Kenzo wondered, not for the first time. As usual, only one answer occurred to him. We get even hungrier, that’s what.

  As his father had taught him—something he preferred not to remember—he looked for lots of boobies and other birds diving into the sea. That would tell him where the fish were likely to be. If that frigatebird was still anywhere in the neighborhood, no doubt it was doing the same damn thing.

  Hiroshi suddenly pointed to starboard. “What’s that?”

  “Huh?” Kenzo’s head had been in the clouds—except there were no clouds. He looked to the right himself. Something floated on the Pacific there. Gauging distance wasn’t easy—nor was telling how big that thing was. “Just looks like a piece of junk to me,” he said doubtfully.

  “I don’t think so.” Hiroshi shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Steer over that way, will you?”

  “Okay.” Kenzo did. The breeze, which had been remarkably strong and steady ever since they set out, didn’t fail now. He’d half expected it would, just from the innate perversity of the world. Hiroshi swung the boom to catch it to best advantage
.

  The approach didn’t happen in a hurry anyway. It was close to ten minutes later before Hiroshi said, “See?”

  “Yeah,” Kenzo answered.

  “That’s a life raft, or I’m a haole,” his brother said.

  “Yeah,” Kenzo repeated. He waited till they’d sailed a little closer, then cupped his hands in front of his mouth and yelled, “Ahoy, the raft! Anybody there?” God only knew how long it had floated, or where it had started out. It might hold a sun-shrunken corpse—or no one at all.

  He felt like cheering when a head popped up into sight. It was, he saw, a blond head. An American head, he thought, excitement tingling through him. “Who’re you?” the fellow croaked.

  “Fishermen out of Honolulu,” Kenzo answered. “We’ll do whatever we can for you.” He waited to see if Hiroshi would say anything different. Hiroshi said not a thing.

  The American flier—he couldn’t be anything else—said, “Thank God.” He had several days’ growth of beard; the stubble glinted red-gold in the sunshine. As the Oshima Maru skimmed closer, Kenzo saw his eyes get wider and more avid. And then they widened again, in a different way. The man ducked back down into the raft. This time, he came up holding a .45. “You’re Japs!” he yelled.

  “You stupid fucking asshole!” Kenzo screamed back. His brother stared at him in horror. At the time, he wondered why. Later, he realized cussing out a guy with a gun wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa. But, furious still, he went on, “We’re Americans, God damn you, or we will be if you fucking let us!”

  By then, they were within easy range even of a pistol. The man in the raft lowered the gun. “I think maybe you mean it,” he called across the narrowing stretch of water. “You couldn’t sound that pissed off if you didn’t.”

  “Right,” Kenzo said tightly. If he’d had a pistol, he wasn’t sure he could have kept himself from shooting the flier—he was that angry.

  He and Hiroshi helped the man into the sampan. The flier was more battered than he’d seemed from a distance. His coveralls were tattered and torn and bloody. He gulped water as if he’d thought he would never see it again. Maybe he had. When he spoke again, his voice had changed timbre. “Jesus!” he said, and then, “Thanks, guys. If there’s anything Burt Burleson can do for you, you got it.” He paused. “Who are you, anyway?”