End of the Beginning Read online

  Men from the special naval landing forces and civilians worked together to build barricades and machine-gun nests at street corners. The civilians hadn’t volunteered for the duty, which didn’t mean they could get out of it. When a haole man didn’t move fast enough to suit one of the Navy men, he got the stock of an Arisaka rifle in the side of the head. Blood running down his cheek and jaw, the white man threw another chunk of rubble on the growing barricade, and then another.

  A soldier gestured with his rifle at Takahashi. “Hey, you! Hai, you there! Get over here and give the Emperor a hand!”

  “Please excuse me, but I just did,” Jiro answered. “I just finished broadcasting for Murata-san.”

  “Now tell me one I’ll believe,” the Navy man said scornfully.

  But one of his pals said, “Hang on—I know this guy’s voice. You’re the one they call the Fisherman, aren’t you? I listen to you whenever I can.”

  “That’s me,” Jiro said. A few minutes before, he’d hated his connection to the Japanese radio. Now he used it, even if he did hate it. He shook his head. Life was stranger and more complicated than anyone could imagine till he’d put a good many miles under his keel.

  “Let him go,” the second soldier urged the first. “He’s done his bit, and we’ve got plenty of warm bodies here.”

  “All right. All right. Have it your way.” The first man from the special naval landing forces sounded disgusted, but he didn’t argue any more. “Go on, you,” he told Jiro. “You better keep your nose clean.”

  “Domo arigato. I will, thank you.” Jiro got out of there in a hurry.

  The Americans hadn’t fought much inside Honolulu. They’d surrendered when driven back to the city’s outskirts. That spared the civilian population. But surrender wasn’t in the Japanese soldier’s vocabulary. The special naval landing forces looked to be getting ready to battle it out house to house. Would anything be left standing by the time the battle was through? More to the point, did anybody on either side care?

  JOE CROSETTI GULPED COFFEE IN THEBUNKER HILL’S WARDROOM. If not for java, he didn’t know how the hell he would keep going. He’d heard the pharmacist’s mates were giving out benzedrine tablets to pilots who asked for them. He hadn’t tried to find out, not yet. He didn’t think he needed that big a kick in the pants. It had occurred to him, though.

  In the seat next to his, Orson Sharp slurped from a bottle of Coke. He was serious about staying away from the “hot drinks” that were forbidden to him, but he needed a jolt, too. A couple of empties sat by his feet.

  “You’re gonna be pissing like a racehorse,” Joe said. “What do you do if you’re up in your Hellcat and you gotta whizz?”

  Sharp smiled what looked like a very secular smile. “Ever hear of a streetcar driver’s friend?” he asked.

  When Joe shook his head, his buddy explained the gadget. “Son of a bitch!” Joe said. “That’s a great idea. But what if it comes loose when you’re pulling a lot of g’s? You’ll have piss all over the inside of your flight suit, maybe all over the inside of the cockpit.”

  “Hasn’t happened yet,” Sharp answered, “and I’ve flown that plane every which way but inside out. I’m thinking of writing a testimonial for the company.”

  “Jeez Louise, I don’t blame you,” Joe said. “But what about your John Henry? How does it like the ‘friend’ when you weigh four times as much as you’re supposed to?”

  “Everything hurts then,” Orson Sharp said matter-of-factly, which was true enough. “He’s not bruised or anything—I’ll tell you that.”

  “Okay. I wish I’d thought of it myself,” Joe said. “Can you get ’em on the ship, or did you bring it aboard?”

  “I brought mine, so I don’t know if you can get them or not. You’d probably do best asking the toughest-looking CPO you can find. If he can’t tell you, nobody can.”

  “Makes sense. CPOs know everything—or if they don’t, they sure think they do,” Joe said. That had been a revelation to him since boarding the carrier. When he was in flight training, almost all his instructors were officers. He’d dealt with petty officers only when navigating the maze of Navy bureaucracy. Now he saw the senior ratings were the men who held things together. They might be able to run the ship better without officers than officers could without them.

  A plane roared in and landed, up above their heads. The ship shook a little, but only a little. An Essex-class carrier displaced upwards of 27,000 tons; a few tons of airplane weren’t much next to that. Joe and Orson Sharp both said, “Dauntless,” at the same time. Engine noise was a dead giveaway—if you knew what you were listening for. By now, they both did.

  “How does it feel, being a veteran?” Sharp asked.

  Joe considered. A yawn interrupted his consideration. “Tired,” he said.

  His friend nodded. “That’s the truth.” He took another swig from the wasp-waisted green glass bottle, then burped softly. “Excuse me.” His politeness was automatic; he’d been a gentleman before he became an officer. After one more swig, he went on, “We’re doing what we’ve got to do, though.”

  “Oh, hell, yes.” Joe nodded vigorously. The Marines and Army men were on the ground in Oahu, and fighting their way south from the invasion beaches. It wasn’t easy or cheap—quit didn’t seem to be in the Japs’ vocabulary—but they were doing it. Some Japanese submarines still prowled around, but the enemy’s surface fleet in these waters had taken a KO. And enemy air power was on its last legs. Japan had proved naval air could beat the land-based variety. Now the USA was extending the lesson.

  “Some of their pilots are awful good,” Sharp said. “I ran into this guy in an Oscar the other day. He could make that little plane sit up and beg and darn near”—he might have been the only man on the carrier who would have said darn near—“wag its tail. I had two more Hellcats with me, and we couldn’t touch him. He got out of stuff you couldn’t get out of. We never laid a glove on him—and I landed with a hole in my prop.”

  “They can leave you talking to yourself, all right,” Joe agreed. “With those two little machine guns, though, they have a devil of a time hurting you, and you can get away from ’em easy as pie. As long as you don’t dogfight ’em, you’re okay.” He paused. “Did they patch you up or put a new propeller blade on?”

  “New blade,” Sharp told him. “I could’ve flown without the repair if I had to—it’s only a .30-caliber hole—but why take chances? We’ve got the spares, and that’s what they’re here for.”

  “Better believe it,” Joe said. “And pretty soon the Japs won’t have any planes left, or anywhere to fly them out of if they do. I don’t care how sweet a pilot you are. If you can’t get off the ground, you might as well pick up a rifle and go fight with the infantry.”

  Before answering, Orson Sharp finished the Coke and set the bottle down by the other dead soldiers. “That’s probably what happened to some of our guys after December 7.” His voice was grim.

  “Yeah, it probably is.” Joe didn’t like to think about what had happened to American servicemen of any sort since Hawaii fell, but that would have been an extra humiliation on top of all the others. Not to be able to fight the way you’d trained so hard to do . . . “Time to pay ’em back.”

  An hour later, he was in the cockpit again, buzzing towards Oahu. Orson Sharp was up there with him. Their orders were looser than they had been at the very start of the land campaign. They were supposed to shoot up anything that moved on the ground, knock down any planes that came up against them, and especially make sure the enemy didn’t have the chance to repair his airfields.

  One of those fields, the one at Haleiwa, had already fallen into U.S. hands. As Joe flew above it, he saw bulldozers and steamrollers swarming over the strip to put it back in commission. He also saw artillery coming down nearby. The field wasn’t ready to use, not by a long shot. He preferred flying off a carrier deck to shellfire. Hellcats were well-protected planes, but nothing on God’s green earth would save you if y
ou stopped a 75mm round.

  As if to remind him of that, puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft shells burst all around him. The Japs put up as much flak as they could. This wasn’t nearly so heavy as it had been when he flew over the Japanese carriers and their escorts, though. That had been almost thick enough to walk on. It had scared him, too. Now he had its measure. You jinked a little. You sped up and slowed down. You tried not to give them a straight shot at you. Once you’d done that, you went on with your mission. Every so often, somebody got shot down. You just hoped your number wasn’t up that particular day.

  That thought had hardly crossed his mind when a Hellcat, trailing smoke, fell out of the sky and crashed into a rice paddy down below. No way the pilot could have got out—it happened too fast. “Oh, you poor, unlucky son of a bitch,” Joe said. The flak must have murdered his engine—or murdered him, so he had no chance to pull up or bail out.

  A machine gun turned its winking eye Joe’s way. Those coldly frightful ice-blue Japanese tracers zipped past the Hellcat. Joe’s thumb stabbed the firing button. Red American tracers jumped out ahead of the fighter. He had six machine guns, all of them firing heavier slugs than the Jap’s weapon. Joe wouldn’t have wanted to catch a .50-caliber round. If the wound didn’t kill you, the sheer shock of getting hit was liable to.

  Only a handful of Oscars and Zeros rose against the Hellcats. So did one sharp-nosed fighter of a type he hadn’t seen before. That had to be a Tony, an Army machine with an engine based on the Messerschmitt-109’s liquid-cooled in-line powerplant and not the radial engine that powered both other Japanese fighters. Tonys were supposed to be fast and well-armed. This one, beset by half a dozen Hellcats, didn’t last long enough for Joe to tell much, though it survived more battle damage before going down than other enemy planes Joe had met.

  If there were more of those, they could be a royal pain, he thought. The Tony looked a hell of a lot like an Me-109. Part of that, no doubt, was the engine, which dictated the shape of the plane’s front end. But he still wondered whether some German engineers had stepped in and given the Japs a hand.

  That wasn’t his worry. He and the other Hellcat pilots took turns shooting up Hickam Field, down by Pearl Harbor. Watching Japs sprint for cover was fun. Watching some of them not make it was even more fun. It didn’t feel as if he’d just shot men, any more than it had when he downed enemy airplanes. They were just . . . targets, and he was glad he’d hit them.

  Someone else had set a bulldozer on fire. Joe admired the column of smoke that rose from it. As long as the Hellcats kept coming back, the Japs could only repair the runways at night. And early-morning visits by Dauntlesses made sure they’d have new damage to fix the next night.

  You didn’t see Japanese soldiers marching along highways by regiments any more. To Joe, that was a damn shame. They’d been awful easy to shoot up then. But they weren’t fools. They’d learned better in a hurry. These days, they traveled by squads and platoons, and they stayed off the roads whenever they could. That did make it harder to strafe them. Of course, it also made it harder for them to move and to fight, which helped the gyrenes and dogfaces on the ground.

  Joe looked for gun emplacements. Strafing artillery pieces was always worth doing. People said shellfire killed and wounded a lot more men than all the rounds from rifles and machine guns put together. Joe didn’t know if that was true, but he’d heard it more than once.

  A lot of the Japs’ gun pits were in the jungle-covered mountains, and camouflaged with fastidious attention to detail. He spotted one gun only because he saw the muzzle flash. If not for that, he never would have known where it was. How they’d manhandled it up there was beyond him.

  When he ran low on ammo, he flew back toward the Bunker Hill. One by one, his fellow pilots were breaking off, too. He laughed a little. He’d had all this training in formation flying, and here he was on his own. The Japs didn’t have enough planes in the air to make neat formations necessary any more.

  A destroyer was on fire, a few miles off the coast of Oahu. Some enemy pilot had managed to get through the CAP overhead. The Japs were still giving it everything they had. They didn’t seem to realize they were fighting out of their weight—or else they just didn’t give a damn.

  Destroyers and their bigger buddies needed to stay close to shore so they could pound enemy positions with their guns. The carriers cruised farther north—with luck, farther out of harm’s way. Joe didn’t see any of them in trouble, and was glad not to.

  He found his own ship and lined up on her stern. After that, he did exactly what the landing officer told him to do. Not making his own decisions never failed to rattle him. That was what he was supposed to do when he was in the air. But he had to obey here. He’d seen that ever since he first tried putting down on the placid old Wolverine on Lake Erie. He believed it. He just didn’t like it.

  The landing officer straightened him up, got his approach angle a little gentler, and then dropped the wigwag flags. Joe shove the stick forward. The Hellcat dove for the carrier’s deck. The tailhook missed the first arrester wire, but caught the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.

  Joe scrambled out. The deck crew got the plane out of the way so the next Hellcat in line could land. “Anything special she needs, sir?” one of the ratings asked.

  “Ammo’s run dry,” Joe answered. “Fuel’s still okay. Engine’s behaving.” The petty officer waved and grinned and nodded.

  Joe trotted across the planking to the island, and then down to the wardroom for debriefing. He looked around. Most of the fliers who’d gone out were back, but. . . . “Where’s Sharp?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you see?” somebody said. “He took a flak hit and went down. Nobody spotted a chute, so he bought the farm for sure, poor sucker.”

  “Oh . . . That was him?” It felt like a blow in the belly.

  “You okay, man?” the other flier asked. “You look a little green.”

  Numbly, Joe shook his head. He tried to put some of what he felt into words: “We were roomies at the start of training. We were buddies all the way through. He was always better in class than I was. He was always better in a plane than I was, too. And now I’m here and he’s . . . gone?” He wouldn’t say dead, dammit. He shook his head again, and stared down at the deck so the other pilot wouldn’t see tears in his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

  “That’s tough.” The other man—a guy Joe hardly knew, not the way he knew Orson Sharp (had he known anybody but his kid brother the way he knew Sharp?)—spoke with rough sympathy. “We’ve all lost friends. Fuckin’ war’s a fuckin’ mess. But what can you do? You gotta pick it up. You gotta suck it up. If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit.”

  “Yeah.” Every word of that was true. None of it helped. Joe felt even more empty than he had when the Japs bombed Uncle Tony’s house. He’d got that news secondhand, after it happened. This? Hell, he’d seen Sharp go down. He hadn’t known who it was, though. Knowing would have been even worse, because it wasn’t as if he could have done anything about it.

  “Just bad luck,” the other pilot said. “We’ll pay ’em back, though. We’ll pay ’em back, and then some.”

  “Sure.” Joe stared down at the deck again. He imagined a house in Salt Lake City (in his imagination, it looked a lot like his house, though he knew it probably wouldn’t for real). He imagined a Western Union messenger getting off a bike or out of a car—probably off a bike, with gasoline so hard to come by these days—and going to the door with a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. And he imagined the lives of his buddy’s parents and brothers and sisters—he had a big family—turned upside down and inside out.

  Christ! They wouldn’t even get to bury him. There probably wasn’t enough left to bury.

  If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit. There was the war, in one profane sentence. But with Orson Sharp dead, another thought filled Joe’s mind. Even if they did kick the Nip
s’ yellow asses, did any of this mean shit?

  KENZO TAKAHASHI APPROACHED THE BARRICADE with more than a little trepidation. Seeing a machine gun aimed at your belly button would do that. “Who are you?” demanded one of the men behind the gun. “Why should we let you by?” Like most of the soldiers from the special naval landing force, he was both meaner and jumpier than the Army men they’d supplanted in and around Honolulu.

  After giving his name, Kenzo added, “I’m Jiro Takahashi’s son. Do you listen to him?”

  And that did the trick, and not for the first time, either. The scowling soldier at the machine gun suddenly grinned—and all of a sudden he was a friendly kid, no older than Kenzo. “You’re the Fisherman’s son? You must be all right, then. Come ahead.” He even gave Kenzo a hand to help him scramble up over the barricade.

  It made Kenzo want to laugh and cry at the same time. He wasn’t all right, not the way the soldier meant. He was rooting for the USA, not for Japan. He hated trading on his father’s celebrity among the occupiers. However much he hated it, he did it, because it worked. He felt as if he were getting away with passing counterfeit money every time.

  On he went. The soldiers at the next barricade, seeing that he’d passed the one before, didn’t give him any trouble. That was a relief. Everybody in Honolulu, locals and occupiers alike, was nervous these days. With American planes in the air, with American troops ashore, plenty of people who’d sucked up to the Japanese were trying to figure out how to explain what they’d been up to since December 7, 1941.

  The occupiers knew that perfectly well. They might be bastards, but they weren’t fools. They trusted next to nobody now, and often showed mistrust by opening fire. And the way they treated locals showed no signs of getting better—if anything, it was getting worse.

  Kenzo talked his way past two more barricades before he made it to Elsie Sundberg’s neighborhood. No soldiers were on her street, which relieved him. Nobody else was out and about, either. That struck him as smart. This was the haole part of town, and the Japanese trusted whites even less than they trusted anybody else. Farther west, the occupiers had plastered up propaganda posters saying things like ASIANS TOGETHER AGAINST IMPERIALISM! in several languages. They didn’t bother here. The haoles lay low and hoped neglect wouldn’t turn to massacre.