He’d told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice-if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free… right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.
He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so… Better the jungle than the sharks.
Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who’d shot him down? One burst from the bastard’s machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.
Peterson waved back with a one-finger salute. Fortunately, the enemy flier either didn’t see it or didn’t know what it meant. He flew back into the fight instead of returning to wipe out the insult in blood.
Like bad-tempered dandelion fluff, Peterson floated down. He spilled air from the chute and swung his weight this way and that, fighting not to go into the drink. And he didn’t. He came down on the fairway of a golf course about a quarter of a mile from the sea.
Two gray-haired men advanced on him with upraised five-irons. “Surrender!” they shouted.
In spite of everything, he almost burst out laughing. Here he was, taller than either one of them, fairer than either one of them-and they thought he was a goddamn Jap because he came out of the sky. “Get me to a car and get me to an airfield,” he growled. “If they can find a plane for me, I’ve got some more fighting to do.”
The golfers gaped at him as if he’d started spouting Japanese. If they’d lived here a while, they might even have understood some Japanese. Did they understand English? “I think he’s an American, Sid,” one of them said, as if announcing miracles.
“You’re right, Bernie,” the other declared after cogitations of his own.
Peterson felt like murdering them both. Instead, they drove him back towards Ewa. To the east, the flames and smoke of the U.S. Navy’s funeral pyre climbed higher into the air every moment. Soot floated down like black rain.
IN HIS ZERO, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo watched Pearl Harbor go up in smoke below him. This was the blow Commander Fuchida had wanted to strike: the blow against the harbor’s great tank farms and repair facilities. Even if the invasion of Oahu failed by some accident, the Americans would have a devil of a time getting much use out of their forward base in the Pacific. The channel was plugged, too, with ships sunk trying to steam out and fight. The Japanese task force wouldn’t have to worry about sorties, not for a while.
Shindo flew at four thousand meters. The thick, black, greasy smoke had already climbed past him. How high would it go? How far would the pall spread? He couldn’t begin to guess. He also couldn’t see the ground as well as he would have liked, for the smoke obscured it. The very success of the attack was ruining reconnaissance.
“We were attacked by carrier-based aircraft flying in from the west,” Shindo said into the radio. He knew the carriers wouldn’t answer, but Admiral Nagumo, Commander Genda, and Commander Fuchida urgently needed to hear. “Repeat: attacked by carrier-based aircraft from the west. Approximate bearing 290 degrees from Pearl Harbor. Range unknown, but not likely to be far. Out.”
His lips curled up at the corners in the disciplined beginnings of a smile. He’d knocked down two Wildcats himself. The pilot of one had managed to get out and get his chute open; he thought he’d killed the other American flier in the cockpit. The enemy was brave-no doubt about that. But Shindo had quickly seen he and his men were better trained. And the Zero could fly rings around the slow, stubby Wildcat.
Shindo laughed softly. He knew how the Americans looked down their noses at Japan and what she made. Well, the arrogant white men had got themselves a little surprise today.
Back aboard the task force, they’d be launching a flight of Nakajima B5N2s. They’d held the torpedo bombers out of the third wave just in case American carriers showed up. Now at least one was on the board. Shindo would have bet there was only one, or the enemy would have thrown more fighters at his force.
The plan called for his planes to plaster Schofield Barracks after they’d finished with Pearl Harbor. But he knew he could fly along the bearing from which the Wildcats had come and have a good chance of finding the carrier that had launched them. The B5N2s would be coming from much farther away. They wouldn’t know where along that bearing the carrier might lie, so they’d have to waste time searching.
Shindo made up his mind. He pulled half a dozen Zeros and ten Aichi D3A1 dive bombers out of the Schofield Barracks attack and ordered them off to the west with him. If that carrier was there, he wanted to be in at the kill. Taking it out might be the most important thing the Japanese Navy did.
There was Ewa down below. Planes still burned on the runways, where they’d been lined up almost wingtip-to-wingtip: a perfect target. The Americans had a couple of antiaircraft guns up and working. They fired at Shindo’s detachment, but the shell bursts didn’t come close.
On he flew, out over the Pacific. It was so much bluer and more beautiful than it had been around Japan. The air above Oahu had smelled sweet and spicy before battle began. This was a wonderful place. It would make a fine addition to the Japanese Empire. But to make sure it did, where was that carrier?
If I’m on a wild-goose chase… Alone in the cockpit, Shindo shrugged. If he was, he was. He had to take the chance.
There was Kauai, off to the northwest of Oahu. The Garden Island, its nickname was. He’d run into that in an intelligence briefing. It was supposed to be even lovelier than Oahu. Shindo wondered if that were possible.
Then all thoughts of Kauai, all thoughts of beauty, vanished from his head. There south of the island were ships, their white wakes very visible as they steamed towards Oahu at full speed. Shindo’s heart thuttered with excitement. Now-was the U.S. carrier with them? Yes, that had to be it, there at the heart of the flotilla. The escorting ships-were those battleships, or only cruisers?
He couldn’t tell. He didn’t care, or not much. The carrier counted for more than all the others put together. He radioed its position to his own fleet and to the torpedo bombers that already had to be on the way.
Then he spoke to the pilots he led: “The carrier is your first priority. Attack it at all costs. Only after it is destroyed will you worry about any other ships. Banzai for the Emperor!”
Answering Banzai! s dinned in his earphones. The American ships swelled as he drew closer to them. Flame and smoke burst from the guns of the forward vessels. They’d spotted him, then. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky ahead. They hadn’t quite found the range. But they would. They would.
“Enemy fighters ahead!” a Zero pilot yelled.
Shindo swore, but only mildly. Of course the American carrier would have a combat air patrol overhead. Zeros orbited the Japanese task force, too-just in case. “Our job is to keep those fighters off our dive bombers,” he radioed to his comrades. “We are expendable. They are not. Let’s go.” He didn’t shout Banzai! again. He was not a showy man.
The Zero’s engine roared as he brought it up to full combat power. He and his fellow fighter pilots left the D3N1s behind as if they were nailed to the sky. There were the Wildcats, boring in on them. He’d already seen the American Navy fliers had courage and to spare.
What they didn’t have was enough in the way of airplanes under them. The Zeros slashed into the enemy planes. One Wildcat after another tumbled toward the Pacific. A Zero fell, too, and then another. The Japanese fighters were lighter and faster and more maneuverable than the Americans, but the Wildcats could take more punishment and keep flying.