End of the Beginning Read online

  The Japanese had chased the fishermen off the beach, but they let Oscar paddle out to sea. They were used to him, and didn’t think he was heading out to a submarine or anything like that. Only he knew about the submarine he’d met. He hadn’t even told Susie, though he had asked the sub’s skipper to get word to her family on the mainland that she was all right.

  He ran up his mast, rigged the sail, and scooted out to sea on the breeze from off the hills in back of Honolulu. Even as the land receded, he could still hear the rumble of artillery off in the distance. It made him think about things in a way he hadn’t for quite a while. If his countrymen took over again, could he patent the sailboard? If he could, there was probably money in it. He’d done without much money for a long time. Having some might be nice.

  He’d got out far enough to think about dropping his hooks into the Pacific when he spotted something floating on the water. It was too small to be a boat, and it wasn’t going anywhere, just bobbing on the swells. Curious, he swung the sailboard towards it.

  He’d just realized it was a rubber raft when a head popped up out of it. “Hey, mac, what the hell you call that thing you’re on?” the head’s possessor asked in purest Brooklynese.

  “A sailboard,” Oscar answered automatically. He had questions of his own: “Who are you? Are you okay? How’d you get here? Want me to help you get to land?”

  “A sailboard? Ain’t that somethin’? What’ll they think of next?” The guy in the raft jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Name’s Nick Tversky. Yeah, I’m jake—not a fuckin’ scratch on me. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good, ya know? Goddamn Nip flak tore hell outta my engine, but the shit all missed me. Can you get me ashore without letting everybody from Tojo on down in on where I’m at?”

  “Uh . . .” Oscar paused. That would have been easy before the Americans came to Hawaiian waters. The Japs hadn’t been so antsy then. They sure as hell were now. “Don’t know for sure if I can sneak you in.”

  “Okay. Don’t get your ass in an uproar about it.” The downed pilot sounded a lot more cheerful than Oscar would have in his little rubber boat. He explained why: “They got PBYs doin’ search and rescue. Figure I got a better chance of getting picked up than I do sneakin’ past the fuckin’ slanteyes. If I have to try it, I guess I can paddle that far.”

  “Okay,” said Oscar, who was dubious. “You want me to give you a line and some hooks? You might catch something.” He’d been about to start fishing himself before he spotted the life raft.

  “That’s white of you, buddy, but honest to God, I think I’ll be fine,” Nick Tversky said. He hadn’t been out here long. He wasn’t badly sunburned, and he hardly needed a shave. Plainly, he wasn’t too thirsty, either.

  Oscar didn’t know what to do or what to tell him. Meeting a downed pilot was something he’d thought about now and again. Meeting a foulmouthed downed pilot who didn’t want to be rescued? That was a different story. “Awful good to see the USA coming back here,” he tried, adding, “About time.”

  “Hey, I ain’t the brass. I can’t do nothin’ about that,” Nick Tversky said. “But speakin’ of brass, I figure we didn’t try it for a while after we screwed the pooch the first time on account of we wanted to make sure we had the brass knucks on.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Oscar said. “We sure missed you, though.”

  “What can you do? Sometimes you just gotta stand the gaff.” Tversky obviously had no idea what Oahu had been through since December 7, 1941. On the other hand, Oscar had no idea what getting shot down in a fighter plane was like. Did the two balance out? He couldn’t have said, not like the scales of justice, but they probably belonged somewhere in the same ballpark.

  “Good luck to you,” Oscar said uncertainly, afraid he was leaving Tversky to a fate much worse than the pilot imagined.

  But then Tversky let out a whoop and pointed off to the east. “There’s my goddamn taxi, if I can flag it down!” Oscar looked that way. A speck in the sky swelled rapidly. It was a flying boat, all right. Was it an American flying boat? The Japs had ’em, too. Nick Tversky seemed in no doubt. He waved like a man possessed. He pulled out what looked like a pistol and fired it straight up. It turned out to be a flare gun. The flare was much less impressive than it would have been at night: a small red ball of fire. But either it or the pilot’s gesticulating—he damn near capsized the raft—did the trick. The flying boat swung its blunt nose toward him. He whooped again, louder and more ferocious than an Indian in a two-reeler Western.

  The PBY, if that was what it was, splashed down onto the Pacific and rumbled toward him. Somebody leaned out of a hatch—Oscar was hazy on the right name—and yelled, “What’s this? Old home week?”

  “He’s my buddy,” Tversky yelled back, and then, more quietly, “What the hell you say your name was?”

  “Oscar,” Oscar answered.

  “Oscar here’s good luck,” the pilot went on. “He shows up, and then you show up.”

  “What the hell kind of a name for a Hawaiian is Oscar?” said the guy on the PBY.

  “I’m from California,” Oscar said dryly. “I’ve lived here eight years or so.”

  “Fuck me,” the flier said. They took Tversky aboard the flying boat. The engines roared back to life. The big, clumsy-looking airplane lumbered over the Pacific, graceless as a goose running across the surface of a lake to take off. When it finally got airborne, it didn’t seem so splendidly suited to the new medium as a goose. But it flew well enough. It kept on going in the direction it had been heading when its crew spotted the downed flier.

  That left Oscar alone on the water with an empty rubber raft. “Score one for our side,” he said. He’d first set eyes on Tversky less than half an hour earlier. Now the pilot was gone. In a day or so if not in mere hours, he’d be back in the war. As for Oscar . . . I’ve got fish to catch, he thought, and sailed out a little farther before dropping his lines into the sea.

  He’d hoped running into Tversky would bring him good luck, but it didn’t. His catch was average or slightly below. But you took what you could get. Maybe not for too much longer. Maybe things will get back to the way they used to be. He could hope, anyway.

  He brought the sailboard back to Waikiki Beach with automatic skill he could hardly have imagined when he first thought up the gadget. As with anything else, practice made pretty darn good. Charlie Kaapu had been every bit as smooth as he was. What the devil had happened to Charlie? Oscar scowled as he took the sailboard over the breakers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything he could fix. He’d put his own neck on the line trying. That consoled him . . . not very much.

  Some of the Japs on the beach actually applauded when he came ashore. He would have liked that better if he hadn’t been thinking about Charlie. He would have liked it better if he hadn’t had to cough up a couple of fat mackerel to keep their goodwill, too. Cost of doing business, he thought. That did console him—some, anyway.

  When he got back to the apartment, he found Susie there. By all the signs, she’d been there quite a while. She was falling-down drunk; the place reeked of the horrible fruity stuff they called gin these days. She’d never done anything like that in all the time he’d known her. “What happened?” he blurted.

  She looked up from the beat-up old sofa. Her eyes didn’t want to track him. “Oscar!” she said. “Thank God!” After a moist hiccup, she added, “It could’ve been me.”

  “What could have?” he asked. “What happened, babe?” He wished he had some coffee in the place, but it was harder than hell to come by these days. He’d lost the habit.

  “I was going to work. To work,” Susie repeated, maybe forgetting she’d just said that. “And these Japsh—Japs—at one of the barricades.” She had to try three times before she got the word right. “These Japs, they had a girl down in the middle of the street, and they. . . . They all . . .” She didn’t go on. Tears started running down her face. “It could have been me!”

  “Hey,” Oscar sa
id softly. “Hey.” He might have been gentling a spooked horse. I told you so, came to the tip of his tongue and died there, which was probably lucky for him. He’d heard that these sailor-soldiers did things like that, which was why he hadn’t been thrilled when Susie headed for work in the morning. He went over and cautiously put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but only a little. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he told her. She’d earned the right to get smashed, sure as the devil.

  “It could have been me,” she said one more time. Then she clung to him and cried her heart out. He hadn’t seen many tears from her before. “What am I gonna do?” she asked after the storm passed.

  “I think you better stay in here, not let those bastards spot you,” Oscar answered.

  “I’ll go nuts,” she said. “I’ll lose my tan.” Snockered as she was, that seemed to matter a lot to her. But then she shuddered, remembering what she’d seen. “I’ll do it.”

  “Okay,” Oscar said. “For now, just settle down. Get some sleep if you can. You’ll feel it when you wake up, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not drunk!” she said irately.

  “Sure, babe. Sure.” Oscar lied without hesitation. The things you do for love, he thought with a wry smile. Then he stopped cold; as usual, the word brought him up short. But he nodded to himself. Whether the word made him nervous or not, it talked about something real. He gave Susie a kiss.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “Just because,” he said. “Just because.”

  GUARDS HUSTLED AMERICAN POWS SOUTH, away from the American soldiers who’d landed to bring Oahu back under the Stars and Stripes. Like most—probably all—of his buddies, Fletch Armitage would sooner have run toward the Americans than away from them, shooting squads or no shooting squads. The guards might have been bastards, but they weren’t stupid bastards. They could figure that out for themselves. The minute anybody got the slightest bit out of line, they opened fire. Dead prisoners marked the road back toward Honolulu.

  Men slipped away anyhow, especially at night. Fletch got no sleep. Every few minutes, a rifle or a light machine gun would bark. Screams from the wounded punctuated the time between bursts of gunfire. Sometimes the Japs would let wounded men howl. Other times, they would go out and finish them off with rifle butts or bayonets. Fletch couldn’t decide which noises were more horrible.

  But the noises weren’t what made him sit tight. A cold calculation of the odds was. Could he get away from the guards? Possible, but not likely. Once he did, could he sneak through the Japanese lines without getting murdered by ordinary enemy soldiers? Also possible, but even less likely. Put the two together, and he figured his chances were much less than drawing the king of spades to fill out a royal flush.

  When the sun came up, he saw how many Americans had died trying to get away, and how many hadn’t died—yet. Had he had anything in his stomach, he might have thrown it up. The Japs hadn’t bothered feeding the POWs, though. It didn’t look as if they were going to start now, either.

  Curses and kicks got the prisoners on their feet. The guards bayoneted one man who had trouble. After that, the stronger Americans helped their weaker buddies up. “Isogi!” the guards shouted. How they expected the POWs to hurry was beyond Fletch, but they did.

  “Bastards,” somebody said. Fletch nodded. The Japs were also bastards who’d eaten; they’d brought rice along for themselves.

  Before long, clouds drifted over the marching—actually, shambling—men. It started to rain. In the blink of an eye, everybody threw his head back and opened his mouth as wide as it would go. Men fell down because they couldn’t see where they were going. Nobody gave a damn. Fletch got a couple of swallows before the sun came out again.

  By the afternoon of the second day, they reached the outskirts of Honolulu. Fewer men had tried to run off than had the day before. They were farther from the front, and they had the horrible examples of the day before still fresh in their memories. Honolulu looked fortified to a fare-thee-well. The Americans hadn’t fought in the city. They’d surrendered before drawing a couple of hundred thousand defenseless civilians into the battle. By all the signs, the Japs cared no more about civilians than they did about POWs. Fletch didn’t know what would make them surrender. He couldn’t think of anything that seemed likely to.

  The POWs did get fed, after a fashion. They were marched past a pot of rice. Each man got a spoonful, shoved straight into his mouth by a cook who looked as if he hated them all. Everybody got the same spoon. Fletch didn’t care. By then, he would have eaten rice off a cowflop. He would have thought about eating the cowflop, too.

  Hardly any locals were on the street. The ones who were seemed to cling to the sides of buildings and to do their best not to make themselves conspicuous in any way. They watched the prisoners with frightened eyes.

  Through Honolulu. Through Waikiki. Fletch had a pretty good notion of where they were going by then. When he turned out to be right, he started to laugh. The POW next to him must have thought he was nuts, and might not have been so far wrong. “What’s so goddamn funny?” the man demanded.

  “This is where I came in,” Fletch answered.

  Back to Kapiolani Park and the POW camp there. Back through the barbed-wire gates that had let him out when the Japs decided they’d sooner get work from their prisoners than leave them sit around idle and starving. As long as they were going to starve us, they could use us while we wasted away. Oh, yeah. That’s what you call efficiency.

  Fletch wondered why the Japanese were bringing prisoners back here now. To keep them from running off to the Americans? That was bound to be one reason. To keep the Americans from shooting them up by mistake? In spite of his misery, he laughed again. The next sign the Japs showed of worrying about what happened to POWs would be the first. To gather a lot of prisoners together in one place so they could be massacred more easily? He looked at the machine guns in the towers out beyond the barbed wire. That seemed alarmingly likely.

  And what could he do about it? Not one single, solitary thing, not that he could see. The gate shut behind his gang of POWs.

  He looked around. The camp wasn’t so insanely crowded as it had been the last time he was here. That would have encouraged him if he hadn’t feared most of the missing men were dead.

  His old tent had been right about . . . here. It was gone. Somebody else had the spot now, and had run up a lean-to that looked as if it would stop leaning and start collapsing any minute now. The barracks still stood, but he didn’t want anything to do with them. Any place where POWs congregated in large numbers was liable to be a place where the Japs could get rid of them in large numbers.

  He didn’t mind sleeping on the ground. Why should he? He’d done enough of it lately. There was bound to be canvas to scrounge, and sticks as well. Before long, he could rig some kind of shelter to keep off the rain. Till then, he wouldn’t worry about it, not in this weather. Getting wet mattered much less than it would have on the mainland. He did head for the one water fountain in the park. The march down had left him dry as a bone.

  Because the POW camp wasn’t so crowded, the line at the fountain was shorter than it had been in days gone by. Even so, while he waited another gang of POWs came in. He finally got to the water, and drank and drank and drank.

  “Been through the Sahara, buddy?” asked the guy behind him.

  “Feels like it.” Fletch splashed some water on his face, too. It felt wonderful. At last, reluctantly, he gave up his place.

  Still more prisoners came into the camp. Fletch remembered what some crazy Roman Emperor had said, a couple of thousand years earlier. It went something like, I wish all humanity had a single neck, so I could cut off the head at one blow. He wished that hadn’t come back to him from whatever history class he’d heard it in. It described what the Japs looked to be doing here much too well.

  THE TROUBLE WITH MORTARS was, you could hardly hear the bombs coming in before they burst. Les Dillon caught a faint hiss in the air and
threw himself flat just in time. The fragments from the mortar round snarled past above him. He allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. The Japs had a particularly nasty little weapon the Americans called a knee mortar. It wasn’t fired off anyone’s knee, but one man could serve it, and every other Jap infantryman seemed to carry one. One of those bombs had almost punched his ticket.

  Schofield Barracks lay not far ahead. Bombers had largely leveled the barracks halls. The Japanese didn’t seem to care. They were as ready to defend rubble to the death as they would have been to save Hirohito’s crown jewels.

  A machine gun fired several quick bursts from the direction of the barracks—a reminder to Les to keep his head down, as if he needed one. The Japs were even tougher than he’d figured they would be. Logically, they didn’t have a prayer. They had no air cover left. They had next to no armor, and what they did have wasn’t good enough. If he were their CO, he would have dickered a surrender on the best terms he could get.

  They didn’t think that way. They didn’t surrender, period. The only Japs who’d been captured were men either knocked cold or too badly hurt to get away or to kill themselves. They also took no prisoners. God help you if you tried to surrender to them. Sometimes their wild counterattacks would overrun U.S. forward positions. Les had helped recapture one or two of those. The American corpses he’d seen made him hate the enemy instead of just being professionally interested in getting rid of him, the way he had been with the Germans in 1918. After that, he wouldn’t have let any Japs give up even if they’d tried.

  One of the green young Marines in his platoon, an open-faced Oklahoma kid named Randy Casteel, hunkered down near him and asked, “Sarge, how come the Japs do shit like that? Don’t they know it just makes us want to fight ’em even harder?” His drawl only made him sound more horrified and more bewildered than he would have without it.