End of the Beginning Read online

  Still, if you didn’t dream of roast beef, sleeping was better than staying awake. General anesthesia would have been better still. The only kind the Japs offered, though, was too permanent to suit him.

  When he didn’t dream of food, he often did dream of combat. Sometimes he and the U.S. Army triumphed over the Japs. Waking up after those hurt almost as bad as waking up after a dream of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Sometimes he got shot in the night or, worse, bayoneted. Returning to himself after those dreams came as close to relief as anything in the POW camp.

  He dreamt of combat tonight. It was artillery in his head, which could be as bad as bayonets. He’d commanded a 105; he knew too well what shellfire did to human flesh. If he hadn’t known before, what he’d seen in the fighting would have taught him plenty.

  And when he woke, he woke from a noisy dream of combat to . . . combat. Machine guns and rifles and mortars were going off much too close by. Tracers ripped through the prisoner camp, mostly from south to north. The tracers were red. Fletch needed a moment to remember what that meant. The Japs used ice-blue tracers. Red tracers meant . . . Americans!

  “Holy Jesus!” Fletch whispered. Tears filled his eyes. Maybe those were tears of weakness. He didn’t care. Somebody’d remembered he and his comrades in misery existed. Somebody was trying to save them.

  What might have been the voice of God but was more likely a Marine or sailor on a PA system shouted through the racket of gunfire: “Prisoners! U.S. prisoners! Move toward the beach! We’ll get you out!” As if to underscore that, a mortar round hit a guard tower. It went over with a crash. There was one machine gun that wouldn’t shoot back—and wouldn’t shoot any POWs, either.

  But the guards and soldiers around Kapiolani Park weren’t about to give up without a fight. As far as Fletch could see, the Japs never gave up without a fight—never gave up, in fact. They stopped fighting only when they died. Their cold-looking tracers spat out at the attacking Americans. And, as the POWs started moving toward their rescuers, automatic-weapons fire lashed the camp.

  Men died and fell wounded and screaming just as they were on the point of being rescued. The unfairness of that tore at Fletch. So did raw terror. He didn’t want to be one of those casualties, not now, not at this of all moments. But the prisoners couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. They had no place to hide. Bullets either nailed them or didn’t. It was all luck, one way or the other.

  A squad of guards rushed into the camp and turned their Arisakas on the POWs, too. They must have thought they could turn the Americans back. Instead, careless of whether they lived or died, the POWs surged toward them. Disciplined to the end, the Japs all emptied their clips at about the same time. As they were reloading, the Americans swarmed over them. The scene was straight out of Dürer or Goya: skeletons rising up to attack the living. The Japs screamed, but not for long. Fletch had always thought only artillery could tear a man to pieces. He found he was wrong. Bare hands did the job just fine.

  One by one, machine guns in the guard towers fell silent, knocked out by the attackers. “Move! Move! Move!” roared the big voice on the loudspeaker. “American prisoners, move to the south!”

  Tracerlight gave Fletch his first glimpse of the soldiers who’d hit the beach to liberate the POW camp. He needed a moment to recognize them for what they were. They wore dark uniforms—dark green, he thought—not the khaki that had been his color. Even their helmets were different: pot-shaped domes that covered more of the head than the British-style steel derbies Fletch and his comrades had used. For a heartbeat, he wondered if they really were Americans. But they had rifles and submachine guns in their hands, and they were shooting up the Japs. What else mattered? He would have kissed Orson Welles’ Martians if they turned their fearsome heat rays on those guard towers.

  These weren’t Martians. They were Americans, even if they wore funny clothes. “Haul ass, youse guys!” one of them yelled in pure New York. “We got boats on the beach waitin’ for youse. Shake a leg, already!”

  Fletch gave it all he could. He had the feeling a tortoise with a tailwind would have left him in the dust, but he couldn’t do anything about that. The Marines had landed with bulldozers with armored driver’s boxes to tear paths through the barbed wire. He stumbled out through one, stumbled across Kalakaua Avenue, and then fell down when he got to the sand.

  Not all the Japs were out of action. Falling down might have saved his life—a sniper’s bullet cracked past just over his head. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered on. The beach was alive with stick figures just like him.

  “This way! This way!” Marines and sailors with red flashlights steered POWs toward the boats that waited for them. “We got plenty for everybody. Don’t fight! Don’t trample!”

  Obeying that order came hard. How could anyone stand to wait another moment to be free? As he stood there, bullets still snapping and cracking past every so often, he got a look at the boats that would take him and his partners in misery away. He knew damn well that the U.S. military had owned no such slab-sided, front-mouthed machines before the war with the Japs started. Like the airplanes, like the uniforms, these had all been designed and built from scratch while he waited on the sidelines. A career officer, he wondered if he’d have any career left even after he got his strength back.

  While he was staring at the landing craft, the men who crewed them stared at the nearly rescued POWs. “You poor sorry sons of bitches,” one of them said. “We ought to murder every motherfucking Jap in the world for this.”

  Before Fletch could say anything, one of the other Americans on the beach beat him to the punch: “Sounds good to me.”

  One by one, the boats filled and waddled off the beach and into the water. They were every bit as ungainly there as they were on land. Fletch’s turn finally came. He climbed an iron ramp and got into a boat. A sailor was passing out cigarettes to the POWs. “Here ya go, pal,” he said, and gave Fletch a light. The first drag on the Chesterfield after so long made him dizzy and light-headed and sick to his stomach, as if he’d never smoked at all. It felt wonderful.

  Another sailor said, “You guys are so skinny, we can load more of you on each boat than we figured.” It only went to show there were advantages to everything, even starvation. Fletch would gladly have forgone that one.

  A motor started. Chains rattled. The ramp came up. Sailors dogged it shut. All of a sudden, it was the bow of the boat. Awkward as a drunken sow, the landing craft backed into the water. Beside Fletch, a man quietly started to bawl. “We’re free,” he blubbered. “We’re really free. I didn’t think we ever would be, but we are.”

  “Yeah,” Fletch said, and then he was crying, too, joy and weakness all coming out at once. Inside a couple of minutes, half the breathing skeletons in the boat were sobbing as if their hearts would break.

  Sailors dealt out more smokes. And they passed out open ration cans, too. Tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Everybody crowded forward, wanting his with a fierce and terrible desire. None of them would ever be the same about food again. Fletch was sure of that. Right now, they might have been hungry wolves in a cage. Not till his hands closed around a can did a low, unconscious growl die in his throat.

  He ate with his fingers. The can held greasy roast-beef hash. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate beef. Probably when his Army rations ran out. “My God,” he muttered, over and over again. “My God!” That such food was out there! Even his dreams hadn’t been anything like this. He cut his tongue licking the inside of the can to make sure he got every tiny scrap out of it.

  The boat’s motion and the rich food they weren’t used to made several men seasick. After some of the stinks Fletch had known lately, that one wasn’t so bad. His own stomach seemed to take the wonderful food for ballast. Nothing bothered him as the boat chugged away from Oahu. He didn’t think anything would ever bother him again. He might have been wrong, but he felt
that way.

  After a couple of hours, his landing craft and the others came up alongside ships that took the POWs aboard. That wasn’t easy. They couldn’t climb nets, the way sailors and Marines did. Sailors on deck lowered slings to the boats. The sailors there fitted them around the prisoners’ shoulders. The men on the ship hauled them up.

  Fletch felt more like a package than the daring young man on the flying trapeze. “Careful, buddy,” a sailor said as he came up over the rail. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “I’m out of that goddamn camp,” Fletch answered. “How could anything hurt me now?” As soon as he was safely up on deck, he asked, “Can I get some more food? Can I have a bath?”

  “We got saltwater soap, and those showers are going,” the sailor said. “Otherwise it’s a sponge bath—too many men and not enough fresh water. Food . . . Doc’s gotta say it’s okay before we give you much. Sometimes you eat too much too fast, you get sick.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Fletch knew he sounded like a whiny little kid. He couldn’t help it. When it came to food, he felt like a whiny little kid.

  He decided to take a shower. Even he didn’t believe how filthy he was. As he stripped off his rags, a sailor said, “You got anything in the pockets you need to keep? Otherwise we’re gonna deep-six all of this shit.”

  “No, there isn’t anything,” Fletch answered. He wasn’t used to being around well-fed Americans any more. Their fleshy bodies looked wrong, distorted. He knew the problem was in the way he looked at these strangers who’d rescued him and taken him in, not in the men themselves. Knowledge didn’t change perception.

  Saltwater soap was nasty stuff, but he needed something nasty to get a few layers of filth off. Lots of freed POWs scrubbed themselves in the showers. An ocean-temperature shower wasn’t too bad, not when the ocean was off Hawaii. He kept flicking glances toward the naked men in there with him. He could see every bone and every tendon in their bodies. That was how Americans were supposed to look. Next to them, the sailors and Marines seemed almost . . . inflated.

  After he came out of the shower and dried off, all he got in the way of clothes was a bathrobe. “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor who handed it to him. “We didn’t know you guys’d be in such miserable shape.”

  “It’s okay,” Fletch said. But for modesty, going naked in this climate was no hardship. The Hawaiians had done it all the time. And he didn’t need anybody else to tell him he was in miserable shape. He knew that himself.

  He didn’t actually see a doctor. A pharmacist’s mate looked him over. “You don’t seem too bad, all things considered,” the man said after a very quick, very cursory check. “Just don’t try to fatten yourself up all at once.” He picked up a spray gun. “Shed the robe.” He sprayed both Fletch and the garment.

  Fletch’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that stuff?” he asked. Whatever it was, it had a harsh, chemical tang. There were other kinds of bad smells besides those that sprang from filth and death.

  “Shit’s called DDT—and now you know as much as you did before, right?” the pharmacist’s mate said. “What you need to know is, it kills lice, mosquitoes, every kind of bug under the sun, kills ’em dead, dead, dead. You may not believe it, but you aren’t lousy any more.”

  “What about the nits?” Fletch scratched automatically.

  “Kills them, too,” the sailor said. “And if a louse does somehow hatch, what’s left of the DDT in your hair is plenty to make the little bastard buy the farm. I’m telling you, buddy, this shit is the straight goods.”

  “Yeah? What’s it do to people, then?” Fletch asked.

  “Diddly squat. Safe as houses. Greatest thing since sliced bread.” The pharmacist’s mate gave him back the robe. “Go feed your face. Not too much, though, you hear? Or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Fletch said, which made the other man laugh. He went on to the galley. They had biscuits there, with butter and jam. Flour had vanished from Oahu even before the American surrender. It all came from the mainland—and then it stopped coming. Butter and jam were only memories, too. “Thank you, Jesus!” somebody said: as short and sincere a grace as Fletch had ever heard.

  And then the cooks brought out platters of fried chicken. At the sight, at the mouth-watering smell, several POWs burst into tears. One of them said, “But what’s for all the other guys?” That got a laugh and defused the tension that had built at the presence of so much food. Fletch felt the fear—somebody else might get more than he did. He had to remind himself there was plenty for everyone. His head might know that, but his belly didn’t.

  He snagged a drumstick. The coating of batter crunched in his mouth. Then he was eating hot chicken. He wasn’t dreaming about it. It was real. Tears streamed down his cheeks. It was real. When he set the bone down, not the tiniest scrap of meat was left on it. No crumbs from the biscuits remained on his plate, either.

  He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t feel starved. He didn’t even feel hungry. He could hardly remember what that was like. “Wow!” he said.

  The man next to him grinned. “Right the first time, buddy.”

  A sailor came by to pick up plates. A POW stopped him, saying, “I was at the Opana camp for a while, up at the other end of the island. That place was as big as this one, maybe bigger. Have you gone after the guys there, too?”

  The sailor’s face clouded. “We can’t,” he said. “As soon as we got close to it, the Japs started shooting up the place. We weren’t ready for it then—we didn’t think anybody could act that bastardly. Shows what we knew.” He made as if to spit on the deck, then caught himself at the last second. “Don’t know for sure how many guys those fuckers murdered—gotta be thousands.”

  “Jesus!” The prisoner who’d asked the question crossed himself.

  Fletch was horrified but not surprised. Everything the Japanese had done since taking Hawaii showed POWs were nothing but a nuisance to them. They’d starved their captives, abused them, and worked them to death. Why wouldn’t they slaughter them to keep them from being rescued? It made perfect sense—if you fought the war like that.

  “Thanks for getting to us before they did the same thing at Kapiolani,” he said. The gob hadn’t had thing one to do with it, but Fletch had enough gratitude to spread around to anybody in the U.S. military right now.

  “Brass figured we’d better try,” the sailor said. “I’m gladder’n hell it went as well as it did.”

  How many Japanese machine-gun bullets had snapped by within a couple of feet of Fletch? How many scrawny, starving men had those bullets killed? He didn’t know. He wondered if anyone would ever know exactly. He knew who would, if anybody ever did: Graves Registration. And yet here he was, on an American ship, his belly full—really full!—of American food. He was gladder than hell the rescue had gone as well as it had, too.

  THE GUARDS IN THE KALIHI VALLEY WERE JUMPIER than ever. That made the prisoners tunneling through the Koolau Range jumpier than ever, too—those of them who kept the strength to worry. Jim Peterson still did. So did Charlie Kaapu. Peterson admired the hapa-Hawaiian’s strength and determination. He wished he could match them, but he’d been here much longer than Charlie, and he’d been in worse shape when he got here. His spirit was willing. His flesh? He had no flesh to speak of, not any more. He had skin, and he had bones, and only hunger between them.

  “We got to get out of here,” Charlie whispered to him one evening before exhaustion knocked them over the head. “We got to. Those fuckers gettin’ ready to do us all in. You can see it in their eyes.”

  Peterson nodded. He’d had the same thought himself. Every time artillery fire got closer, every time American fighters flew by overhead, they might have been twisting a knife in the Japs’ guts. The guards would lash out then, the way a kid who’d just lost a schoolyard brawl might kick a dog. They didn’t have any dogs to kick, though. They had POWs instead, and kicking was the least of what they did to them.

  At the same time, Peterson shook his h
ead. Even that took effort. “Go ahead, if you think you can get away. I’d just hold you back.”

  “You can do it, man,” Charlie said. “Gotta be tough. Get back to Honolulu, you be okay.”

  He might be okay if he got back to Honolulu. Flesh melted off him day by day, but he still had some. The first Jap who saw Peterson would know him for what he was—he didn’t think he weighed a hundred pounds any more. And that would be all she wrote. The outskirts of Honolulu weren’t more than three or four miles away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the good that did Peterson.

  “I’m done for,” he said. “Not enough left of me to be worth saving.”

  “Shit,” Charlie said. “Don’t you want to get your own back? Don’t you want to watch these assholes get what’s coming to ’em? How you gonna do that if you lay down and die?”

  “I’m not laying down,” Peterson said, remembering how fiercely he’d sworn revenge back when captivity was new. “I’m not laying down, dammit, but I can’t go anywhere very far, either. Look at me.” He held out his arm: five knobby pencils attached to a broomstick. “Look. How am I going to run if we get spotted?”

  Charlie Kaapu looked. He swore, his words all the more terrible for being so low-voiced. “I’ll go. I’ll bring back help. Bet I find American soldiers in Honolulu.”

  Maybe he would. There’d been a hell of a lot of shooting from somewhere down that way a few nights earlier. Whatever it was all about, the guards had been even nastier since. Peterson wouldn’t have imagined they needed an excuse for that, but they seemed to. He said, “If you make it, tell ’em we’re up here. Far as anybody knows, I bet we’ve fallen off the edge of the world.”

  “I’ll do it,” Charlie said. “You really can’t come, man?” Peterson shook his head again. The hapa-Hawaiian reached out in the darkness and set a hand on his bony shoulder. “Hang on, brother. I’m gonna get away. I’m gonna bring help.”