End of the Beginning Read online

  The whole country . . . A slow smile spread over Jiro’s face. “Being part of Japan again feels good.”

  Osami Murata smiled, too. “It ought to,” he said, and set a hand on Takahashi’s shoulder. “You don’t want to be an American, do you?”

  “I should hope not,” Jiro said quickly. Hiroshi and Kenzo had other ideas, but at least he hadn’t had to come out and say so on the radio.

  WHEN JIM PETERSON LOOKED AT THE JUNGLE-COVERED Koolau Range from a distance, he’d always thought how lush the mountains seemed. Now, up at the end of the Kalihi Valley to drive a tunnel through them, he had a different view of the jungle.

  Green hell.

  When he thought of a jungle, he thought of trees full of tasty fruit, of animals making a racket and common enough to be easily caught. What he thought of and what he got in the Kalihi Valley were two different things. Nobody had done much with the valley till the Japs decided to drive a road up through it and to tunnel through the mountains. Almost all of the trees in the valley were Oahu natives, and they didn’t have much in the way of fruit.

  As for the animals, he’d seen a few mongooses—mongeese?—skulking through the ferns. Every now and then, he spotted a bird up in the trees. And that seemed to be it. He and his companions in misery had little chance to supplement the tiny rice ration the guards doled out. It was live on that or die.

  Actually, it was live on that and die. A man couldn’t possibly do hard physical labor on what the Japanese fed him, not if he was going to last very long. Of course, if a man didn’t do hard physical labor on what they fed him, they’d kill him on the spot. That put the POWs in the Kalihi Valley in an interesting position.

  Green hell, again.

  It rained a lot of the time up in the mountains. When it didn’t rain, water dripped from the trees. Peterson’s clothes started to rot and fall apart even faster than they had when he was in a less muggy part of the island. Some of the men he worked with, men who’d been in the valley longer, were next to naked. Odds of getting anything from the Japs? Two chances—slim and none.

  The prisoners slept in bamboo huts thatched with whatever leaves and branches they could throw on top. It was about as wet inside the huts as outside. The bunks were better than lying in the mud, but only a little. “Jesus!” Peterson said, looking down at his hands as light leached out of the sky. They’d been battered and callused before he got here. They were worse now. The Japs here pushed POWs harder than they had anywhere else. This was punishment work, what prisoners did if the occupiers decided not to shoot them. Whether that was a mercy was an open question.

  Somebody got up and shambled off toward the latrine trench. Most of the men who’d been here for a while had dysentery. Some of the new fish had already come down with it. Peterson hadn’t yet, but figured it was only a matter of time.

  “Jesus!” he said again, and then, “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”

  “Amen,” said Gordy Braddon, who came from his shooting squad. “And if that son of a bitch was in hell screaming for water, I’d give him gasoline to drink. Ethyl, no less.”

  “Yeah,” Peterson said savagely. “Wasn’t for him, we’d be. . . .” His voice trailed away. Even without London’s escape, their predicament wouldn’t have been anything wonderful. But it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.

  He’d had that thought before. He’d had it several times since the surrender, in fact. Every damn one of them, he’d been wrong. If he turned out to be wrong again . . . I’m a dead man, he thought.

  He might easily end up a dead man even if there was nothing worse than this. He knew that, too. And when he flopped back onto the bunk and closed his eyes, he sure as hell slept like a dead man.

  A Jap banging a shell casing with a hammer made him pry his eyes open the next morning. Groans rose in the hut from those with the energy to give them. Not everybody sat up despite the racket of iron smashing against brass. The Japs came in and started kicking people. That got most of the POWs up and moving. One scrawny fellow just lay there. The guard who’d been shouting at him and booting him gave him a yank. He fell on the ground—plop.

  The guard felt of him, then straightened up. “Shinde iru,” he said, and jerked a thumb toward the door, as if to add, Get rid of the carrion.

  “Poor Jonesy,” said somebody behind Peterson. “He wasn’t a bad guy.”

  Although the dead Jonesy couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, four POWs carried him out. Peterson was one of them. They were all just shadows of their former selves, and fading shadows at that. The graveyard didn’t have individual graves, just big trenches. Flies buzzed around them, even though the Japs did put down quicklime after a fresh corpse went in.

  Thump! In fell the dead Jones. They tried not to put him on top of anybody else, but the trenches were filling up. Despite the lime, the stench was bad. “Could be one of us next,” a bearer said.

  Stubbornly, Jim Peterson shook his head. “As long as we’re strong enough to carry, we won’t die right away. I aim to last till the US of A comes back.”

  “How long do you figure that’ll be?” the other man asked him. He didn’t say, Ever?—which was something.

  Peterson shrugged. “Damfino. I’m gonna stick it out, that’s all. The Japs are putting us in graves, but I’m gonna spit on one of theirs, by God.”

  Even saying that was taking a chance. If one of the other three corpse-haulers ratted on him to the Japs, they might kill him out of hand. But they probably wouldn’t. He couldn’t do anything to them, no matter what he said. Odds were they’d just beat him up and put him back to work till he couldn’t work any more.

  “We better get back,” he said. “If we aren’t at the lineup, they won’t feed us.”

  That got his companions in misery moving. Losing out on food was the worst thing that could happen to you here, worse even than a beating. Food kept your motor turning over. Assuming you wanted to go on living, that was good. As Peterson and the other three walked back, men from another hut came past them with a dead body even skinnier than Jonesy’s had been. Peterson heard the final thud as it went in. He didn’t look back.

  The count for his hut was fouled up, as it often was when somebody died. The Japs always got all hot and bothered when they saw fewer men than they expected. They knew Jonesy was dead, but that somehow didn’t seem to matter. They had to fuss and fume and gabble and wave their hands till they remembered that so many live guys minus one dead guy equaled the number of guys swaying in front of the hut.

  Rain started coming down when the POWs finally trudged off to get their morning rice. This wasn’t “liquid sunshine.” Up here in the mountains, when it rained it rained like a son of a bitch. Peterson’s shoes squelched in the mud. It leaked in through growing gaps between uppers and soles. Pretty soon, those shoes were just going to fall apart. He didn’t know what he’d do then. No, actually he did know: he’d damn well go barefoot.

  For the first few minutes after food hit his stomach, he felt almost like a human being. He headed for the tunnel site.

  Gangs who’d got there before him had built the road up to the mountains. It wasn’t paved, but it was heavily graveled—usable in all weather, without a doubt. If the tunnel ever went through, the Japs would have a shortcut between Honolulu and Kaneohe on the east coast of Oahu.

  Did they care? Were the POWs working on the tunnel for its sake or just to work on something till they dropped? Some of each, was Peterson’s guess. From his point of view, it hardly mattered. Whether the Japs cared about the tunnel or not, the POWs were going to work till they dropped.

  Guards didn’t carry picks and shovels. They carried rifles and, sometimes, axe handles. If they didn’t like the way a POW was moving, they’d whack him with one or the other, or sometimes haul off and kick him. A prisoner couldn’t strike back. If he did, the guards would bayonet him and let him die slowly. They knew which wounds would kill in a hurry, and avoided those.
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  There weren’t that many guards. Peterson sometimes thought a concerted rising here might succeed. If it did, though, so what? The prisoners would still be stuck at the ass end of the Kalihi Valley, and the Japs could easily seal off the outlet . . . whereupon everybody here would starve, since living off the land was impossible. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, he thought.

  They did—and they were damned. Peterson grabbed a pick and shouldered it like a Springfield. Torches and candles threw the only light once Peterson and his gang got into the tunnel. Shadows swooped and leaped as men trudged past the flickering flames. Roman slaves sent to the mines must have looked on scenes like this. Peterson wondered whether anyone since had.

  The sound of picks biting into volcanic rock drew him onward. Shovelers loaded the chunks the pickmen loosened into wicker baskets. Haulers lugged the spoil out of the tunnel, one basketload. The POWs argued about which job was worst. Because they argued, they switched off every so often.

  There was the face of the excavation. Peterson swung up his pick and brought it forward. When he pulled it loose, basalt or granite or whatever the hell this stuff was came with it. A shoveler used his spade to get the stuff away from Peterson’s feet. Peterson swung up the pick again.

  As it did on a road gang, work had a pace here. Prisoners growled at anybody who worked too fast. They had reason to growl: if one guy did it, the Japs would expect everybody else to. Why give the slant-eyed monkeys the satisfaction of busting your balls for their lousy tunnel? Besides, a lot of POWs couldn’t do anything more than they were doing. If the Japs made them work harder, they’d die sooner than they would have otherwise.

  Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward. Thunk! . . . After a while, the work, like a lot of work, developed its own rhythm. Peterson fell into the almost mindless state any endlessly repetitive labor can bring on. Not thinking was better. If time just went by, he didn’t dwell on how tired or how hungry or how filthy he was.

  And then he brought himself up short, so suddenly that he almost slammed the pick down on his own foot. Aside from the self-inflicted wound, that would have earned him a thumping from the guards. To them, anybody who hurt himself was trying to shirk, and they made would-be shirkers sorry.

  But if they were serious about wanting this tunnel to Kaneohe, wouldn’t they be using a lot more dynamite and maybe jackhammers and a lot less of this hand labor out of ancient days? Of course they would. Anybody with an ounce of sense would. The Japs didn’t have a lot of their own bulldozers, but they sure used the ones they’d captured here to fix up airstrips and to dig out field fortifications. They were bastards, yeah, but they weren’t stupid bastards.

  Which meant the tunnel was—had to be—designed first and foremost to work POWs to death. That made perfect sense, and nothing else did, and if he hadn’t been so weary and starved he would have seen it right away.

  It also made no damn difference, not in what he had to do. The air stank of sour sweat and rock dust and burning fat. The rubble on the tunnel floor poked and gouged his feet through the soles of his shoes. What would happen when the shoes gave up the ghost? Things would get even nastier, that was all.

  Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward . . .

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO LOOKED OUT across the airstrip at Haleiwa. It was beautiful, no doubt about that: green grass, a creamy beach, and then the blue, blue Pacific. What worried him were the things the blue, blue Pacific hid.

  He forgot about the view and glowered at the mechanics he’d summoned. “Don’t tell me it isn’t an authorized modification,” he snapped. “I want a bomb rack on my Zero, and I want a bomb rack on every Zero at this airstrip. Wakarimasu-ka?”

  “Yes, of course we understand, Lieutenant-san,” one of the mechanics answered. “But think of the drawbacks. What happens if you get into a dogfight with an American plane? Think how much the weight and drag of a bomb would hurt you.”

  “If I run into an American, I can dump the bomb,” Shindo said. “But I need something to let me go after submarines—or surface ships, if the Yankees stick their noses into these waters again. You’re not going to tell me the bomb rack will slow me down much by itself, are you?” His glare warned that they’d better not tell him any such thing.

  And the chief mechanic shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. But what about a malfunction? How could you land on a carrier with an unreleased bomb?”

  “Carefully, I suspect.” Shindo’s voice was dry.

  Had the mechanic been an officer, he would have had plenty to say. His face made that very plain. Since he was only a rating, “Sir, that’s not funny” had to suffice.

  “I didn’t say it was,” Shindo answered. “What other way would you expect me to land after those conditions? And after I get down—because I will get down—the first thing I will do is come after the thumb-fingered idiots who mounted a malfunctioning piece of equipment on my plane. So it had better work, the first time and every single time after the first. Do you understand that ?”

  The mouthy mechanic bowed. So did all his friends. They had to know Shindo wasn’t kidding. If something went wrong with the bomb rack, he would come after them, probably with his sword. And no Japanese military court was likely to convict an officer for anything he did to ratings.

  “Good.” Shindo nodded coldly to them. “You can’t tell me there’s no scrap metal to do the job, either. Hawaii has more scrap metal than a dog has fleas.”

  They bowed again. Their faces showed nothing, nothing at all. Shindo knew what that meant. They hated his guts, but discipline kept them from showing it. For a moment, that tickled him—but only for a moment. A mechanic who didn’t like a pilot had a million ways to take his revenge. Planes broke down a million ways. If an accident wasn’t quite an accident . . . who’d know? Yes, who’d know, especially if the evidence, if there was any evidence, lay at the bottom of the Pacific?

  Shindo bowed back. It went against his grain, but he did it. The mechanics flicked glances at one another. “Domo arigato,” he said. Their eyebrows sprang up like startled stags. Superiors were not in the habit of thanking inferiors so warmly. He went on, “We all serve the Empire of Japan, and we should always do everything we can to help her.”

  “Hai.” Several of the stolid men in coveralls spoke up. The word could have been no more than acknowledgment, but he thought it was also agreement. They did love the Empire, no matter what they thought of him. And they had to know he felt the same way about his country.

  “Good,” he told them. “Very good. Take care of it. We never can tell when the Americans will come sneaking around again.”

  They did what he told them. If they did it more for Japan than for him, he didn’t mind. If anything, that made it better. If they did it for Japan, they were likelier to forget their anger at him.

  A couple of days later, though, he did get a telephone call from Commander Fuchida. “What’s this I hear about fitting bomb racks to your fighters up there?” Fuchida asked.

  Shindo slowly nodded to himself. I might have known, he thought. Mechanics had more ways than sabotage to make their displeasure felt. Gossip could be just as dangerous. “It’s true, sir,” Shindo told the senior air officer. “I want to be in a position to kill a submarine if I spot one. I can’t dive like an Aichi, but I’ll get the job done.”

  He waited. If Fuchida said no, to whom could he appeal? Commander Genda? Not likely, not when Genda and Fuchida were two fingers of the same hand. Captain Toda? Would he overturn a ruling his air experts had made? Again, not likely. Admiral Yamamoto? Shindo was not the least bold of men, but he quailed at that. Besides, Yamamoto was back in Japan, and would surely defer to his men on the spot.

  But Fuchida said, “All right, Shindo-san, go ahead and do it. The more versatility we can give our aircraft here, the better off we’ll be.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Shindo said in glad surprise. “I had the same thought myself.” He hadn’t, not really; his own ideas centered
on finding new ways to strike the enemy. Keeping a superior sweet never hurt, though, especially when he’d just given you what you wanted.

  “I’ve been sub-hunting myself, but I haven’t had any luck. Nobody’s had a whole lot of luck hunting subs, and the Army isn’t very happy with us on account of that,” Fuchida said. “Anything that gives a plane that spots a sub a chance to sink it sounds good in my book.”

  “We agree completely.” This time, Shindo was telling the truth. He and Fuchida talked a little while longer before the senior officer broke the connection.

  A smile of satisfaction on his face, Shindo hung up, too. He started to get up and throw the news in the mechanics’ faces. So they thought they could go behind his back, did they? Well, they had another think coming!

  After a couple of steps, Shindo checked himself. He laughed an unpleasant laugh. Better if he kept his mouth shut. Let the mechanics find out for themselves that Fuchida had come down on his side. They would, soon enough. Then they would spend some time worrying about whether he knew what they’d done. He laughed again. Yes, letting them stew was better.

  He could tell when they learned what Fuchida had said. They’d worked on the bomb racks before that, but in slow motion. All at once, they got serious about the project. Things that shouldn’t have taken very long suddenly didn’t take very long. Only a few days later than they would have if they’d worked flat-out from the start, they had the racks on every Zero at Haleiwa.

  Shindo was the first man to test one. He didn’t want any of the people he led doing something he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself. He had the armorers load a light practice bomb into the rack and took his Zero up. It did feel a little sluggish with the bomb attached; the mechanics were right about that. The problem wasn’t bad, though.

  He picked a target not far from the airstrip; a boulder poking up through the grass did duty for a surfaced submarine. He thumbed the new button the mechanics had installed on the instrument panel. The bomb fell free.