End of the Beginning Read online

  “Yeah,” Kenzo said. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Elsie. Going to bed with a girl would do that. He wasn’t likely to forget the set of lumps those Japanese soldiers had given him, either. If that had turned out even a little different, they would have kicked him to death.

  He’d hoped his old man could do something about that—find out who the soldiers were, get them in trouble, something. No such luck. The way his father looked at things, the beating was his own damn fault. If he hadn’t got the soldiers mad at him, they would have left him alone. That they’d wanted to gang-rape his girlfriend had nothing to do with anything.

  “Pay attention,” Hiroshi said again. “We’re not just running before the wind this time.”

  “I know. I know.” Kenzo couldn’t very well help knowing. They had the wind to starboard. They were sailing west to try their luck in the Kaieiewaho Channel, between Oahu and Kauai. They hadn’t caught much sailing south lately; those waters were getting fished out. Not so many sampans headed this way: that was what Hiroshi had concluded after listening to a good deal of fishermen’s gossip. Kenzo hoped his brother turned out to be right.

  “What’s going on there?” Hiroshi pointed north, towards Oahu.

  “Huh?” Kenzo had been thinking about Elsie again. His eyes followed Hiroshi’s forefinger. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

  A swarm of Japanese planes was rising from what had been Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor. As the two Takahashi brothers watched, they shook themselves out into formation and flew north.

  “Some kind of drill?” Kenzo hazarded.

  “Maybe.” Hiroshi didn’t sound convinced. “They’re always grousing about how they don’t have a hell of a lot of gasoline, though. That’s a lot of planes to send up on an exercise.”

  “Yeah. But what else could it be?” Kenzo answered his own question before his brother could: “Maybe the good guys are getting frisky again.” The good guys. He’d thought of the USA that way even before the Japanese soldiers literally jumped on him with both feet, of course. Now his feelings for the country in which he was born had doubled and redoubled. So had his fear that he wouldn’t get credit for those feelings no matter what. If the Americans came back to Hawaii—no, when they came back—what would he be? Just another Jap, and one whose father was a collaborator.

  For now, he needed to remember he was a fisherman first and foremost. The winds got tricky as the Oshima Maru rounded Barbers Point, at the southwestern corner of Oahu, and even trickier once they passed Kaena Point, the island’s westernmost extremity. By then it was late afternoon.

  “Don’t you think we ought to get more out into the middle of the channel before we drop our lines?” Kenzo asked.

  Hiroshi shook his head. “That’s what everybody else does.”

  As far as Kenzo could see, everybody else did it for a perfectly good reason, too: the fish were most likely to be there. But he didn’t argue with his brother. He’d argued with too many people over too many things lately. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Have it your way.” They were sure to catch enough to keep themselves eating. If they didn’t catch more than that, Hiroshi would have to go out into the middle of the channel . . . wouldn’t he?

  He dumped bait—minnows and offal—into the Pacific. He and Kenzo lowered the lines into the blue, blue water. “Now we wait,” Hiroshi said, a sentence that could have passed from one fisherman to another anywhere in the world since the beginning of time.

  A mackerel leaping out of the water not far from the sampan told Kenzo catchable fish swam nearby. It told Hiroshi the same thing; he looked as smug as their father did when Japan figured out some new way to make things tough on the USA. Kenzo damn near told him so, but that would have started an argument, too.

  When they hauled up the lines, they brought in ahi and aku and mahi-mahi—and some sharks with them. The next little while was the frantic part of the operation. They gutted fish and got them in the storage hold as fast as they could. One of the sharks, about a three-footer, almost bit Kenzo and kept flopping and thrashing even after he’d torn out its insides.

  “Damn things really don’t die till after sundown,” he said.

  “You’d better believe it. They—” Hiroshi broke off. He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t hear anything.” Kenzo paused—he’d just made a liar of himself. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I do. Sounds like thunder.”

  Hiroshi snorted, and with reason: the day was fine and clear, with hardly a cloud in the sky. “Pick something that makes sense, why don’t you?”

  “Okay. Maybe it’s bombs.” Kenzo said the first thing that popped into his mind. Once he’d said it, though, he realized how much sense it made. The low rumbles were coming from the direction of Oahu, sure as hell. Hope tingled through him. “Maybe the Americans are really paying a call.”

  “It’d be a big one if they are,” Hiroshi said, which was true, for the noise went on and on. Since neither one of them could do anything about it, they both went back to gutting fish.

  A few minutes later, Kenzo looked east again. When he didn’t return to work right away, Hiroshi looked that way, too. They whistled softly at the same time. Thick columns of black, greasy-looking smoke were climbing up over the Waianae Range. “That is an air raid, a damn big one,” Kenzo said. After gauging the position of the smoke plumes, he added, “Looks like they’re pounding the crap out of Schofield and Wheeler.”

  “Looks like you’re right,” Hiroshi said once he’d made the same calculations. “They’ve got to be hitting other places, too, only we can’t see those from where we’re at.”

  “Yeah.” Kenzo hadn’t thought of that, but his brother was bound to be right. Wheeler Field was one of the most important airstrips on Oahu. If the Americans hit that one, they’d hit Hickam and Ewa and Kaneohe and the others, too. And if they were hitting airstrips like that . . . “Maybe the invasion’s really on!”

  “Maybe. Jesus Christ, I hope so,” Hiroshi said. “About time, if it is.”

  The intermittent thunder of explosions ceased. But the rumble from the east didn’t. If anything, it got louder. Kenzo suddenly pointed. “Will you look at that?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, this time in tones approaching real reverence. The sky was full of planes, streams of them, and they were flying west, from Oahu toward Kauai. That took a lot of them right over the Oshima Maru.

  Kenzo and Hiroshi stared up in open-mouthed awe. Kenzo had seen pictures of B-17s before the war started. Some of the big four-engined bombers matched what he remembered of those pictures. Others were a new breed, with longer, narrower wings and tails with twin rudders. The roar of the engines overhead seemed to make the sampan vibrate.

  “Where are they going to land?” Hiroshi whispered.

  “Beats me,” Kenzo answered. He hadn’t known Kauai had an airstrip long enough to land planes that big. Maybe the Japanese had built one, although he thought they’d done as little as they could on all the islands except Oahu. Still, he didn’t figure that swarm of bombers would have headed for Kauai if they didn’t have somewhere to put down.

  “We’ll tell our grandchildren about this day,” Hiroshi said.

  “Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “Let’s just hope we live to have ’em.”

  WHEN CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU HEARD THE AIR-RAID sirens go off, he didn’t worry much. Another American nuisance raid, he thought. The Americans sent seaplanes over Hawaii the way Japan sent them over the U.S. West Coast. They’d drop a few bombs, and then they’d either get shot down or go away.

  But orders were orders. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Out of the barracks and into the trenches. Put the cards and the go boards away. You can pick up the games when you come back.”

  Grumbling, the soldiers followed him outside. Grumbling even more, they scrambled down into the trenches they’d dug in the lawn in front of the stucco building. People who stained their uniforms swore. Sure as sure, they’d get gigged for dirty clothe
s at roll call tomorrow morning.

  When Shimizu heard aircraft engines overhead, he was relieved at first. “Hear how many there are?” he said. “Those must be our bombers coming back from the practice run they were on.”

  “I don’t think so, sir, please excuse me,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “This is a deeper noise. Our engines have a higher pitch.”

  Shimizu listened a little longer. The noise did seem different. Still . . . “Sounds like a lot of planes to me, not the ones and twos the Yankees send. They don’t usually come by daylight, either. Are you saying—?”

  Before he could finish, antiaircraft guns started banging. The gunners didn’t think the planes overhead were Japanese. And Shimizu heard the flat, harsh crump! crump! crump! of bursting bombs. He heard more of those explosions than he ever had when the Japanese were conquering Hawaii.

  He looked up into the sky. His jaw dropped. Those weren’t American seaplanes. He’d grown familiar with their big-bellied lines. Those were bombers, monster bombers, swarms of them. Most flew to the west, in the direction of Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor. But some came right over Honolulu. And the likeliest reason they came right over Honolulu was . . .

  Bombs fell from their bellies. He could see them, tumbling down through the air. And they all seemed to be falling straight toward him. “Duck!” he shouted, and threw himself facedown in the dirt. All of a sudden, he had more important things to worry about than getting dirt on his uniform.

  The bombs’ rising whistling scream made him want to scream, too. Then they hit, and he did scream. It didn’t matter. Nobody could hear him through that thunder. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake. He’d been through some bad quakes in Japan. This was worse than any of them. When things rained down on him, he wasn’t sure if he’d be buried alive.

  While you were on the receiving end of a bombardment, it seemed to go on forever. At last, after what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of real time, the bombs stopped falling. At least they did close by—he could still hear explosions off to the west. They were just paying us a social call, Shimizu thought dazedly. They really wanted to visit the airstrip and the harbor.

  Like a ground squirrel looking to see if the fox had really gone, he stuck his head out of his hole. The barracks had been shelled before. They’d been leveled this time. Craters were strewn over the ground around the building. So were bodies, and pieces of bodies. Other buildings nearby were smoking ruins.

  Yasuo Furusawa came up beside him. The druggist’s son looked around with the same horror on his face as Shimizu felt. “Oh,” Furusawa said softly, and then again, “Oh.” It didn’t seem enough, but what else was there to say?

  “Help the wounded!” officers screamed. “Get ready to move! Get ready to fight!” Shimizu didn’t know how he was supposed to do all those things at once. He didn’t know how he was supposed to get ready to fight at all. His rifle was in the barracks, which had started to burn. Looking down the trench, he didn’t see anyone else who had a rifle with him, either.

  He could do something for injured men, but not much. He bandaged wounds. He helped get people out of the trenches, and helped lift rubble so others could move them. The doctor who showed up after a few minutes quickly looked overwhelmed.

  A fire engine screeched to a stop in front of the barracks. The crew—locals—started playing water on what was left of the building. That wouldn’t do the rifles in there any good. It might keep the ammunition with them from cooking off, though, which would save some casualties.

  Private Shiro Wakuzawa pointed west. “Look!” he said.

  Shimizu did. Smoke was rising from the direction of the airfield, and from Pearl Harbor just beyond it. The American bombers had indeed hit that area harder than they’d hit Honolulu. A lieutenant started shouting at the firemen: “Don’t worry about this place! Go there! There, do you hear me?” He pointed west, as Wakuzawa had.

  The firemen answered him—in English. A couple of them looked Japanese, but nobody admitted to knowing the language. The officer jumped up and down, getting madder and madder. That did him no good at all. He pulled his katana from its sheath. The firemen backed away from him. Almost apoplectic by then, he put it back. He could kill the locals, but he couldn’t get them to understand what he was talking about, and that was what he needed to do.

  Other officers started screaming then. “Zakennayo! The rifles!” one of them howled. “How are we supposed to fight the Americans if our rifles are in there?” He pointed at the smoldering, dripping wreckage of the barracks.

  Just when all the men with more gold than red on their collar tabs seemed to have lost their heads, a major said, “We have plenty of captured American rifles and ammunition at armories here in Honolulu. We can use them if there aren’t any Arisakas handy. They have better stopping power than our rifles anyway.”

  Someone else who’d kept his wits about him added, “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. Night is coming, and that will make things harder. Plainly, the Yankees are going to try to invade. We’ll need to be ready to march first thing in the morning.”

  That was how Shimizu and his squad found themselves the not too proud possessors of American Springfields. He didn’t much care for his. It was larger and heavier than the Arisaka he was used to: plainly a weapon made for a bigger soldier than the average Japanese.

  Yasuo Furusawa worked the bolt on his Springfield a few times. “Smooth—it’s well made,” he said grudgingly.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu said. “It will kick like a donkey, though.”

  “Shigata ga nai, Corporal-san,” Furusawa said, and Shimizu had to nod.

  Not getting supper couldn’t be helped, either. The officers had worried about weapons first and everything else only afterwards. Shimizu was sure the regiment would start marching for its position in the northern part of Oahu as soon as it grew light, too. He wondered if he and his men would get breakfast before they set out.

  As it happened, they did: rice cooked somewhere else and brought in by horse-drawn wagon. And then, some of the regiment with Arisakas and others with Springfields, all of the men in dirty, often bloodstained, uniforms, they started marching toward the positions prepared for them before the last attempted enemy invasion.

  “We should have trucks,” Senior Private Furusawa grumbled. “We could get there in an hour or two if we had trucks.”

  But they didn’t—or rather, they had no fuel for them. That fire engine had been the first motorized vehicle—except for airplanes—Shimizu had seen in operation in weeks. And so . . . they marched.

  To get to the Kamehameha Highway, they had to tramp past Hickam Field. A lot of airplanes remained unharmed in their revetments. The only trouble was, at the moment that did them no good at all. The American bombers had plastered the runways for all they were worth. Snorting bulldozers and swarms of men with picks and shovels—POWs, locals forced into labor gangs, and even Japanese—were doing their best to make the field usable again. Their best wasn’t good enough yet.

  Shimizu didn’t like what he saw. How were the Japanese going to attack American ships if their planes couldn’t get off the ground? For a moment, fear made his strides light. Then he remembered the aircraft carriers that had let his country conquer Hawaii in the first place. They would take care of the Yankees.

  He marched on, feeling better.

  JIM PETERSON WAS DEEP in the bowels of the Koolau Range when he heard explosions outside the tunnel mouth. He leaned on his pick for a moment, trying to catch his breath. Any excuse to pause for a little while was a good one. Every time he lifted the pick and bit into the mountainside with it, he wondered if he could do it again. The question was altogether serious. Men quietly fell over and died every day. He’d helped carry Gordy Braddon to a grave—after his usual shift was over, of course. If your knees were bigger around than your thighs, as Gordy’s had been for quite a while, you weren’t a prime physical specimen. By now, there were damn few prisoners in the
Kalihi Valley of whom that wasn’t true. It was sure as hell true of him.

  The Japanese cared less about the tunnel than they did about working the POWs to death—or beating them to death or shooting them at the slightest excuse or just for the fun of it. The only way they might have got rid of the prisoners faster was by building a railroad through the jungle. Unlike the tunnel, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere, but that might not have stopped them.

  More explosions. “What the hell?” Charlie Kaapu said. He stood out in the mob of tunnel rats, because he was twice as strong as most of them. He hadn’t been there long enough to deteriorate badly. And he’d been a civilian before, not a POW, so he’d just gone hungry; he hadn’t been on a starvation diet.

  “Sounds like bombs,” Peterson said.

  “Lots of bombs, if that’s what it is,” Charlie said, and Peterson had a hard time disagreeing. U.S. raids on Hawaii hadn’t amounted to anything but annoyances up till now. Still more distant booms came echoing up the shaft. Whatever they were, they were too big to be just an annoyance.

  The same thought occurred to somebody else. “Can’t be bombs,” a weary but authoritative voice said. “Wish it could, but there’s too damn many of ’em. How could the USA get that many bombers over Oahu? No way, nohow. Gotta be the Japs blowing something up.”

  “They can blow themselves up—or just blow themselves. Don’t make no difference to me,” somebody else chipped in.

  When the men with picks paused, the men with shovels couldn’t load rubble for the men with baskets to carry out of the tunnel: there wasn’t any rubble to load. And when the men with baskets didn’t come staggering out of the tunnel at intervals short enough to suit the Japanese, guards came in to find out what the hell was going on. A POW near the tunnel mouth called, “Heads up!” to warn the men at the end of the shaft.

  With a groan, Peterson lifted the pick. It seemed to weigh sixteen tons. He swung it back and brought it forward. It bit into the volcanic rock. Grunting, he pulled it free and swung it again.