Somehow, that memory joined with the way Mitch Kojima didn’t want to be Mitch any more to drive home to her that the Japanese were liable to hold Hawaii for a long time. What would people do as things from the States wore out and broke down? Could Japan supply replacements? On the evidence so far, Japan didn’t give a damn about supplying anything beyond a minimum amount of food-and the Japs grudged even that.
Sudden tears stung Jane’s eyes. She stood there in the middle of her plot, clutching the hoe handle till her knuckles whitened. She didn’t usually let things get to her. She went on from day to day, doing what she had to do to get by in this horribly changed world. Doing that kept her too busy and too tired to worry about anything more.
But she didn’t want to be out here tending turnips and digging weeds and killing bugs when she was thirty-five, or forty-five, or sixty-five, and she was damned if she could see what to do about it. Damned was the word, all right. If this wasn’t hell, it would do till she made the acquaintance of the genuine article.
Two Japanese soldiers strode by. Jane bowed and lowered her eyes to the ground. She didn’t want them noticing she was upset. She didn’t want them noticing her at all. Every once in a while, they would drag somebody into the bushes and do whatever they wanted with her-to her. Several women in Wahiawa went around with dead eyes and started to shiver whenever they saw a Jap.
If they came for her… If they came for her, she had to run. She would have liked nothing better than splitting their skulls with the hoe. But bayonets sparkled on their rifles. If she hurt them, they wouldn’t just rape her and they wouldn’t just shoot her dead. They’d kill her slowly, and they’d laugh while they did it. They might kill some other people, too, so nobody got any ideas above her station.
They kept walking. She breathed again. She always felt as if she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs when the Japs were close by. A man worked in the next plot. He also bowed to the soldiers, but he didn’t seem on the edge of panic. As long as he followed the rules they set, he was-probably-safe. No female between ten and sixty could say even that much.
The woman beyond him tensed, the same as Jane had. Having felt the tension in her own bones, Jane recognized it when she saw it. Again, the soldiers went right on past the woman as if she didn’t exist. As soon as she saw their backs, life returned to the way she stood.
Jane looked to the northeast. She wished a hundred, a thousand, American bombers were roaring toward her. At supper a few days before, somebody had whispered that the British had attacked a German town with a thousand bombers. Maybe somebody had access to a secret radio. Maybe the rumor was just wishful thinking.
Either way, the sky over Wahiawa stayed clear: bare of clouds, bare of bombers, bare of hope. Jane muttered something she’d learned from Fletch, something she never would have said even when she was all alone while she was married to him. Well, circumstances altered cases, by God. These days, she despised him much more for being part of the Army that hadn’t defended Oahu than she ever had for not being much of a husband.
A fly lit on her arm. She smashed it, wiped her hand on her dungarees, and went back to weeding.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO was not a happy man. Yes, bulldozers had repaired the airstrip at Haleiwa with commendable speed. Yes, more antiaircraft guns poked their camouflaged snouts into the sky around it now. As far as Shindo was concerned, the B-25s never should have got to Oahu in the first place.
He drove down to Honolulu to make his feelings known. Parts of the Kamehameha Highway were in excellent shape, set to rights not by bulldozers but by gangs of POWs. Shindo thoroughly approved of that. Since they’d surrendered, how were they better than any other draft animals? Why shouldn’t Japan use them-or use them up-as necessary?
Commander Genda and Commander Fuchida waited for him in Genda’s office. He saluted both of them, then came straight to the point, as was his way: “We should have done a much better job against the Americans. The warning we got was inaccurate, and lulled us into a false sense of security. We would have been better off with no warning at all.”
Had his superiors tried to deny that, he would have been very angry. He would have tried not to show it; a man without self-control would never progress in the Japanese Navy-or anywhere in Japan, come to that. But the feeling would have been there. He probably would have taken it out on his subordinates, as mothers-in-law got their own back for what they’d had to put up with when they were daughters-in-law.
But Mitsuo Fuchida only gave him a wry smile and said, “Hai. Honto. ”
“I think we can expect more trouble from the Americans, too, now that we’ve poked them in the snout as they poked us,” Minoru Genda added.
“I believe that. Bombing the mainland was well done.” Shindo didn’t have to disguise his envy as he eyed Fuchida. The commander had all the luck! Not only first over Pearl Harbor but first over San Francisco! Either one of those could make a man’s career. Both? To have both seemed downright unfair.
Fuchida was modest, too. “It was Genda’s idea,” he said.
That didn’t matter so much to Shindo. A lot of the Pearl Harbor plan had also been Genda’s. So what? Fuchida was the one who’d made it real.
With an effort, Shindo brought his thoughts back to the purpose for which he’d come down to Honolulu. “We need more air cover here,” he said. “I don’t just mean land-based. I mean carriers. Akagi by herself isn’t enough. That’s all the more true if you really do expect the Americans to pay us another call. I don’t want them to surprise us again. I want to be the one who goes hunting and finds them first.”
“That may not be as easy as you hope, Lieutenant,” Genda said. “They have something they call radar. We have the name from prisoners we have taken.” He went on to explain what the word meant.
The more Shindo listened, the less happy he got. “That’s terrible!” he exclaimed. “They can see us coming and guide their planes straight to us?”
“It seems so, when everything goes right,” Genda answered.
“They detected us coming in when we attacked Pearl Harbor,” Fuchida added.
“Zakennayo! ” Shindo said. “They are idiots, then. Why didn’t they scramble their planes? They could have hurt us badly.”
“For one thing, they were expecting a flight of B-17s along almost the same course. The bombers came in just a little later, and we shot them up on the ground,” Genda answered. He was the man with the facts at his fingertips. He went on, “And, for another, they didn’t really believe we would attack them.”
“In future operations, neither of these factors will hold true.” Commander Fuchida’s voice was dry.
“I should say not.” No matter how phlegmatic Shindo was, he had to fight to keep dismay from his voice. He gathered himself and did his best to think about tactical implications. After a moment, he nodded. “This only makes it more urgent that we reinforce the Akagi. If they have a technical edge, we’ll need the advantage in numbers all the more.”
“Our engineers in Japan were already working on radar,” Genda said. “We’ve flown some of the prisoners to Tokyo so they can give our people more information as that becomes necessary. The principles seem clear. We should be able to deploy sets of our own before long-in fact, we have some trial installations in place now.”
“Will we have working models before the Americans try hitting us again?” Shindo asked. Genda and Fuchida looked at each other. Their elaborately casual shrugs said it was unlikely. Shindo hadn’t expected anything else. He went on, “I’m just a flying officer. Nobody pays any particular attention to me, here or back in Tokyo. But the two of you, you have the ears of important people.” Nobody was more important than Admiral Yamamoto, for instance. “You can persuade them we really need more carriers here.”