End of the Beginning Read online

  Then he ran for the revetment that sheltered his Zero. Two planes nearby were burning, but his survived. He glanced back toward the runway. His mouth twisted. It was as cratered as the surface of the moon. The bulldozer that could have set things right in a hurry burned beside the runway. No one had thought to move it. Not even me, Shindo thought bitterly. And yet a bulldozer was, or should have been, as much a weapon of war as an airplane.

  With or without the big, brutal machine, though, they had to get the airstrip ready as fast as they could. “Prisoners!” he shouted. “Have we got a gang of prisoners anywhere close by?”

  TAKEO SHIMIZU HAD RAPIDLY grown to hate the American rifle he carried. It wasn’t just that the Springfield was too long and too heavy for comfort. But he’d got used to all the places where his old Arisaka bumped his back when he carried it along. The Springfield hit none of them. It had its own places, and they drove him crazy—especially the one just above his kidney.

  All the soldiers in his squad groused about their Springfields. He let them. If anything, he encouraged them. It gave them something to do as the northbound kilometers went by. People working in the rice paddies that had replaced sugarcane and pineapple fields paused to stare as the Japanese soldiers tramped by. The laborers—Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, whites—had to know what the big bombing attack meant, but no one had the nerve to do anything but stare. An open jeer, here, might have touched off a massacre.

  Shimizu’s squad—and the rest of the regiment of which it was a part—were north of Wahiawa when he heard aircraft engines. His head came up like that of a hunting dog taking a scent. So did Senior Private Furusawa’s. “Now,” Shimizu said, “are those our planes or the enemy’s?”

  Furusawa nodded. A moment later, he said, “The enemy’s! The roar is deeper than ours!”

  They came out of the north. From the sea, of course, Shimizu thought. One second, they were tiny in the distance. The next . . . Shimizu just had time to shout, “Take cover!” before the big, blunt-nosed fighters opened up on the column of marching men.

  There wasn’t much cover to take. Shimizu threw himself flat by the side of the road and hoped for the best. Bullets rattled off asphalt, thudded into the ground . . . and made wet, splashy noises when they struck flesh. When a couple of them struck flesh too close to the noncom, he decided any cover was better than none. He jumped into the closest rice paddy.

  Even as he crouched in the water, he unslung the Springfield and held it up to keep the muddy water from fouling the rifle. Considering how much he disliked it, that proved how thoroughly orders about maintaining a clean weapon at all times had been beaten into him.

  He was far from the only soldier who went into the paddies. Not all the men were as fastidious about their rifles as he was. Some even ducked their heads under the water as planes flew by at treetop height, guns blazing. Shimizu understood that, but he wouldn’t have wanted to do it himself. He assumed they fertilized the paddies here with night soil, the way they did in Japan and China.

  Combat always seemed to last forever, even if in truth it was usually over in a hurry. This was hardly combat at all. Shimizu admired the handful of men who stood there and fired at the American planes. He admired them, yes, but without wanting to imitate them. The enemy here had things all his own way—and then he was gone, off to make misery somewhere else on Oahu.

  Dripping and filthy, Shimizu dragged himself out of the rice paddy. Soldiers who’d flattened out and lived were getting to their feet, many of them with dazed expressions on their faces. Not all the men on the highway and by it were getting up again, though. Too many never would. The iron smell of fresh blood and the latrine stench of punctured bowels fouled the tropical air. Wounded men moaned. Bodies and pieces of bodies sprawled in ungainly postures. What had the Americans been firing? When one of those bullets hit a man, it tore him to pieces. The regimental physicians, those of them left alive, ran from one writhing soldier to another, doing what they could. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be enough.

  “Forward!” called Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander. “We have to move forward! Are we going to defend this island against the American invaders or not?”

  “Hai!” It was a ragged, shaken chorus, but a chorus nonetheless. Takeo Shimizu tried to ignore the wobble in his own voice when he joined it.

  The American fighters strafed them again half an hour later, this time from behind. The Americans had to be flying home, back to the carriers that had brought them so close to Oahu. Where are our carriers? Shimizu wondered again. What’s happened to them? The enemy planes roared off to the north, leaving many more dead and maimed behind them. Wasn’t that answer enough?

  Shimizu had come ashore on a north-facing beach, not two years earlier. Now he would have to keep the Yankees from doing the same. He didn’t think he would have to wait for them very long, either.

  AFTER THEYUKIKAZEGOT INTO PEARL HARBOR, Commander Minoru Genda demanded a car to take him to Iolani Palace. The officers there laughed in his face. American bombers had left the harbor a shambles. If there were any running motorcars, they were reserved for people more important than a mere commander off a sunken ship.

  He’d had to pull strings to get his hands on a bicycle. Pedaling hurt, but the ankle wasn’t broken. The Yukikaze’s doctor had assured him of that much, anyhow. With it tightly wrapped, he could manage. As he rolled east, he saw what the American bombers had done to Hickam Field. Many of the airplanes flying off it still survived, but the runways themselves were cratered wastelands that reminded him of the worst photos he’d seen of First World War battlefields. How soon before Japan could get those planes flying again? Soon enough to attack the enemy invasion fleet that was bound to come? He dared hope so, anyhow.

  Hope, at the moment, was as much as he could do. Admiral Yamamoto had warned about this kind of U.S. response all along. The summer before, the Americans had tried to do it on the cheap, and they’d paid. And, all too plainly, they’d learned, and they’d worked. Had any of their factories and shipyards stood idle for even a moment from that day to this? Genda feared—yes, feared—not.

  Honolulu itself hadn’t been hit so hard. Genda pedaled past a battered barracks hall, but the bombers hadn’t tried to knock the city flat. Had they wanted to, they could have done it. They’d spent their bombs more wisely, though—and then they’d flown off to Kauai! Somehow, somewhere, the Americans had managed to carve out a landing strip on the island right under Japan’s nose. With Oahu secured, the Japanese hadn’t worried much about the other main Hawaiian islands. That turned out to have been a mistake.

  We can’t afford mistakes against the Americans, Genda thought unhappily. They’re liable to beat us even if we don’t make any. He didn’t think Rear Admiral Kaku had made any mistakes in the naval battle just past. That hadn’t kept Akagi and Shokaku from going down. Overwhelming numbers and munitions could defeat even the finest tactics. If we’d had twice as many carriers—Genda broke off. He knew the answer to that. We would have hurt the enemy more and lost all our ships anyhow.

  Maybe—probably—the fundamental mistake had been going to war against the USA in the first place. But what else could Japan have done? Let FDR dictate what she could and couldn’t do in China? For a proud and touchy empire, that would have been impossible. He sighed. Sometimes a problem had only bad solutions.

  Soldiers drilled on the Iolani Palace grounds. Some were King Stanley Laanui’s Hawaiians. Genda eyed them with more than a little worry. Would they really fight against the Americans? If they didn’t, they might prove dangerous. Maybe giving the puppet King of Hawaii even a toy army hadn’t been such a good idea.

  Most of the men on the smooth green grass were Japanese, though. They weren’t Army men; they belonged to the special naval landing forces, and wore greenish uniforms rather than khaki and black leather rather than brown. “What will we do to the Americans?” shouted the Navy captain leading their exercises.

  “Slaughter them!” t
he soldiers yelled back.

  “Do our lives matter?” the officer asked.

  “No, Captain Iwabuchi!” the men replied. “Our lives mean nothing! Dying gloriously for the sacred Emperor means everything!”

  Genda was relieved to pull up in front of the entrance and let down the bike’s kickstand. It wasn’t that Captain Iwabuchi and his men were wrong—far from it. But Genda had more subtlety in him than the man in charge of the special landing forces. He sighed. Much good that subtlety had done him.

  The Hawaiian guards at the bottom of the stairs and the Japanese at the top saluted him as he slowly and painfully ascended. “I must see General Yamashita and the king,” he told the Army lieutenant in charge of his countrymen. “At once.”

  “Yes, sir.” The lieutenant had seen him before, and knew who he was. He sent one of his men into the palace. The soldier returned a moment later. He nodded. So did the lieutenant. “Go on up to the general’s office, then.”

  “Arigato gozaimasu.” After thanking the junior officer, Genda climbed the koa-wood staircase to the second story. He limped into the Yellow Room, where Tomoyuki Yamashita supervised the Japanese occupation of Hawaii.

  Yamashita looked up from his paperwork. “Welcome, Genda-san,” he said. “Sit down—I can see you’re hurting. Tell me how bad it is.”

  Genda gratefully sank into a chair. He gave the general a straight answer: “Sir, I don’t see how it could be any worse. We lost both carriers we sent against the enemy, and most of the supporting ships. The Americans will invade. The Army—and the special naval landing forces—will have to defeat him on the ground.” The cries of the special naval landing forces floated in through the open window. The soldiers sounded ferocious. What difference, if any, that would make . . .

  Yamashita grimaced. “What went wrong, Commander? We won a great victory the last time the Yankees appeared in these waters.”

  “Yes, sir—and we had one more carrier, and they had many fewer.” The sheer size of the aerial strike force that sank Akagi and Shokaku still stunned Genda. What it said about the fleet that sent it forth was even more intimidating. And the troopships behind that . . .

  “Very well, Commander. We will do what we can to hold this island,” Yamashita said. “I am sure your Navy forces will help us. Captain Iwabuchi is nothing if not, ah, intrepid.” More shouts rang out from the special landing forces.

  As far as Genda could tell, Iwabuchi was a bloodthirsty fanatic. Of course, even if he was, that wasn’t necessarily a drawback in a fighting man. “Between us, sir, can we beat back the Americans?”

  “I don’t know. I intend to try,” Yamashita answered calmly. “Whatever we do, we buy time for our positions farther west to strengthen themselves. That was the whole point of this campaign in the first place, neh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Genda said. “I’m afraid this won’t be as easy as fighting the Americans was the first time around.”

  “We may fail,” Yamashita said. “Success or failure is karma. But no one will ever say we did not do everything we could to succeed.”

  Genda didn’t see what he could say to that. He struggled to his feet and saluted. “Yes, sir. I had better go across the hall and brief his Majesty.” He spoke without audible irony; King Stanley might have someone who understood Japanese listening. You never could tell. Genda did ask, “How is morale among the Hawaiian troops?”

  “It seems all right so far,” Yamashita replied. “We will use them in ways that appear most expedient.” Genda understood what that meant, though a listening snoop might not have. Yamashita planned to throw the Hawaiians into the meat grinder, to use them in place of Japanese soldiers where things were hottest. That would let the Japanese last longer and stretch further. Reinforcements from the home islands were, to put it in the most optimistic terms, unlikely.

  King Stanley Laanui used King David Kalakaua’s library as his office. Now he sat behind the dreadnought of a desk that Genda had used with Mitsuo Fuchida and two Army officers to pick a sovereign to revive the Kingdom of Hawaii. (So far as Genda knew, none of the Japanese support ships had rescued Fuchida. He was gone, lost. He had to be. The certainty of it ate at Genda.)

  The King of Hawaii looked up from whatever papers he’d been shuffling—or pretending to shuffle. Stanley Laanui was far from the most diligent administrator in the world. His eyes had always had heavy, dark pouches of flesh under them. Now they were bleary and tracked with red. When he said, “Hello, Commander Genda,” his breath was sweet-sour with the reek of the fruit spirit people here insisted on calling gin.

  “Good day, your Majesty.” Speaking English, Genda had to be formal. He gave King Stanley a stiff, precise bow, refusing to show that the ankle troubled him.

  “How bad is it?” the king asked. “It can’t be good, by God. You look like a cement mixer just ran over your puppy.”

  “It . . . could be better, your Majesty.” Genda tried to hide how shocked he was. He’d willed his face and eyes to reveal nothing. That he’d failed so badly said how much he’d been through—and probably also said the King of Hawaii was shrewder than he looked. For a man having an affair with the king’s wife, that was less than welcome news.

  King Stanley barked bitter laughter now. “If you say it could be better, it’s even worse than I thought. When are the Americans landing?”

  “In the next few days, I think. So sorry.” One shock after another for Genda. If the king hadn’t taken him by surprise, he wouldn’t have answered so frankly.

  “Christ!” Stanley Laanui burst out. “I thought I was kidding!” Those bloodshot eyes flicked back and forth like a hunted animal’s. “Can you beat them? Uh—can we beat them?”

  “All we can do, we will do,” Genda said—a reply that sounded more promising than it was.

  King Stanley, unfortunately, understood as much. “Jesus! What’ll they do if they catch me?” He put a fist by his neck and jerked it upward, turning his head to the side as if hanged.

  Genda did his best to look on the bright side of things: “No American soldiers are here yet. Maybe we will beat back the landing. Maybe we will beat them on the ground here. Japanese soldiers are very brave.”

  “Yeah, sure, Commander. I know that,” King Stanley said. Under his breath, he muttered something that sounded like, If pigs had wings . . . If that was a proverb, it wasn’t one Genda knew. The king gathered himself. “All right. We’ll do what we can to give you a hand. After all, it’s our necks, too, if the USA comes back.”

  “Thank you, your Majesty. I knew you would stand by us.” Genda bowed his way out of the office. The really worrisome thing was that he was grateful for the sen’s worth of support the King of Hawaii had to give. Any port in a storm. That was an English proverb Genda did know.

  As he stood in the hallway, a tiny Chinese cleaning woman, easily ten centimeters shorter than he was, slipped a little piece of paper into his hand. She was smooth as a stage magician; she didn’t even break stride as she walked past him. He opened it as he limped down the stairs. It had a number, nothing more. He folded it up and stuck it in a trouser pocket.

  He got on the bicycle he’d managed to lay his hands on and rode around to the back of Iolani Palace. The guards at the stairs that led up and down there also saluted him. He absently returned the gesture as he went down into the basement.

  The door that matched the number on the slip had a window set with wire-strengthened glass. Genda sighed to himself. Queen Cynthia wasn’t going to take any chances today. He didn’t suppose he could blame her, but he wished she would have. At least he would be able to speak freely behind the closed door. That too was release of a sort, though not the kind he craved.

  Cynthia Laanui was more conscientious than her husband as well as more decorative. All the charities that moved food and medical supplies from hither to yon and tried to extract more ran through her. She really had done good work—and here she was, doing more. But she closed her fountain pen when Genda walked into her little office
. As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, she exclaimed, “I was afraid you weren’t coming back!”

  So was I. But that was not a thought Genda would have shared with any woman—or with any man, unless he got drunk with a friend who’d gone through the same thing. “Here I am,” he said, bowing.

  “Yes—here you are . . . and you came here in a destroyer.” Like any proper queen, Cynthia obviously had her spies. “Where is the Akagi?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes things go your way. Sometimes they go the enemy’s way.”

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  He couldn’t tell whether she meant him alone or the Japanese as a whole. The answer was the same either way: “Fight.”

  Queen Cynthia’s gingery eyebrows leaped. “Can you win?” If they couldn’t win, she would face whatever the Americans chose to dish out to her husband and her. Whatever that was, Genda didn’t think it would be pretty. King Stanley could at least claim he was a Hawaiian trying to regain his country’s independence after half a century of U.S. occupation. It wouldn’t help, but he could claim it. His wife, pure haole, couldn’t even offer that excuse. If the Americans won, they would probably reckon her a traitor to her race.

  “We will do our best. We have won before,” Genda said: almost exactly what he’d told her husband.

  “You’d better,” she said fiercely. If she led the little Hawaiian Army, it might well fight harder than it would under King Stanley.

  Genda shrugged again. “Karma, neh?” After that, he found only one thing left to say: “Karma too that we fell in love, neh?”

  “Yes,” Cynthia Laanui answered, and looked down at the desk. Was she remembering she was an American? She’d been willing, even eager, to forget when things were going better for Japan. Now . . . She looked up again. “What are we going to do? What can we do?”

  He shrugged. “I do not know. Everything we can.” His own chances of living through the fighting ahead were anything but good. He didn’t tell her that—what was the point? No doubt she could see it for herself anyway. If he didn’t live, her chances were better if no one knew she’d been sleeping with the enemy. Of course, as queen to the Japanese puppet King of Hawaii, she faced long odds, too. He got to his feet to go, and bowed once more. “Good luck.”