Half his attention was on the ground as he looked for more strongpoints to shoot up. The other half was in the air. Every so often, the Yankees sent up some of their few surviving fighters. They weren’t much if you knew they were coming, but they could give you a nasty surprise if they got on your tail before you knew it. The pilot who didn’t learn to check six in a hurry usually didn’t last long enough to learn at his leisure.
Shindo didn’t spot any trouble this time. As usual, the Japanese had the skies over Oahu to themselves. All he had to worry about was ground fire. That didn’t bother him much. He had its measure.
A column of olive-drab trucks was heading north up the highway that ran through the center of the island. The column wasn’t moving anywhere near so fast as it might have. Southbound refugees, some on foot, others in automobiles, clogged the road. Shindo laughed. He’d seen that before. Americans had no discipline. They refused to keep refugees off the road by whatever means necessary, as Japanese soldiers surely would have. And they paid the price for their softness, too.
Radial engine roaring, the Zero dove on the road. Shindo cut loose with the fighter’s machine guns and cannons. It was like stamping on an anthill. People down there scattered in what seemed like slow motion-far too slowly to evade bullets and shells.
Fire and smoke erupted from truck and automobile engines. The plume was tiny compared to the one rising from Pearl Harbor, but every little bit served its purpose. Those soldiers wouldn’t get where they were going when they wanted to get there. That ought to help the Japanese move forward.
On the way back to Haleiwa, Shindo spotted an American machine-gun nest spitting tracers at Japanese foot soldiers. A tank would have taken care of it, but none seemed close by. The pilot felt as if he were looking for a policeman when he really wanted one. He had to do the job himself. And he did, swooping down on the gunners from behind. They might have died before they even knew they were under attack.
Behind the Japanese lines, commandeered cars carried soldiers here and there. Again, Shindo’s side took advantage of the enemy’s wealth. He wished his own country had a larger share of wealth for itself. Getting that larger share, of course, was what this war was all about.
Shindo was used to coming in on the rolling, pitching deck of a carrier. Landing at a strip on dry land felt ridiculously easy, as if he were back in flight school. The only thing the signalman had to do was guide him into one of the earth-banked revetments engineers had made with the bulldozers. They kept his plane safe from anything but a direct hit. As soon as the Zero was in the U-shaped shelter, camouflage nets covered it. The Yankees wouldn’t spot it from the air.
“How did it go?” a groundcrew man asked after Shindo climbed out of the fighter.
“Routine,” he answered. “Just routine.”
MACHINE-GUN BULLETS STRUCK flesh with wet slaps. The noise reminded Fletcher Armitage of the last few fights he and Jane had had before she threw him out of the apartment. When she slapped him, though, his head had only felt as if it would fly off his shoulders. When a real machine-gun bullet hit…
The Zero roared away to the south, bound for more mischief. It was low enough to the ground to kick up dust. Fletch fired a last futile shot at it. The fellow piloting it was an artist, which didn’t keep Fletch from hoping he’d burn in hell, and soon, too.
He had more immediate things to worry about, though. Two of his precious, irreplaceable gunners were down, one clutching his leg and moaning, the other ominously still. A quick glance told Fletch nobody could help the second man this side of Judgment Day. He’d caught a slug in the back of the head, and spilled his brains out in the dirt. The only good thing you could say about such an end was that it was quick. He’d never known what hit him.
The artilleryman with the leg wound, by contrast, screamed about God and his mother and shit, all of which amounted to the same thing: he was in pain and didn’t like it. “Hold still, Vic,” Fletch said, kneeling beside him. “I’ll get a bandage on you.” A week earlier, he might have lost his lunch trying. Not any more. He’d had practice. What was that line from Hamlet?Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness, that was it. Old Will had known what he was talking about there, sure as hell.
“Hurts. Hurts like shit,” Vic said.
“Yeah, I know.” Fletch used his bayonet to cut away the khaki cloth of the other man’s uniform-one of the few things a bayonet was actually good for. He could see the artery pulsing inside the wound. It looked intact. If it weren’t, Vic probably would have bled to death.
Fletch dusted the gash with sulfa powder. He couldn’t sew it shut, but fumbled in one of the pouches on his belt and produced three safety pins. They’d help hold it closed, anyhow. He got a bandage over the wound, then stuck Vic’s syringe of morphine into his thigh and pressed down on the plunger.
A couple of minutes later, Vic said, “Ahh. That’s better, sir.” He sounded eerily calm. The drug had interposed a barrier between his torment and him.
“We’ll take him now, sir,” someone behind Fletch said.
He looked up. There were two corpsmen, Red Crosses prominent on their helmets and on armbands. “I wish you guys got here sooner,” he said.
The man who’d spoken gave back a shrug. “It’s not like there’s nothing going on for us, sir.” He looked weary unto death.
His buddy nodded, adding, “Goddamn Japs shoot at us regardless of these.” He tapped the Red Cross emblems. “Bastards don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention.”
“Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. The memory of the American soldier the Japanese had captured rose in him again. His stomach churned. “You don’t want to let yourselves get caught,” he told the corpsmen.
They nodded in unison. “Yeah, we already know about that,” one of them said. They got Vic onto a stretcher and carried him away. “Come on, buddy-the docs’ll fix you up.”
That left Fletch to figure out how to fight his gun without two more trained men. He had untrained infantrymen jerking shells now. His gun wouldn’t shoot as fast as it had before, but he could still get out two or three rounds a minute. If he had to lay the gun by his lonesome… then he did, that was all.
He muttered to himself. Even from here, the piece could reach all the way to the north shore and into the Pacific. And how was it being used? As a direct-fire gun, banging away at whatever targets he could see. He had no idea where the rest of the 105s in the battery were. The two guns close by belonged to another outfit. They’d been shot up worse than his crew. And that was par for the course. If anything, it was better than par for the course. He’d taken everything the Japs could throw at him, and he was still in the fight. A hell of a lot of people weren’t.
In the sugar fields off to the northeast, a Japanese machine gun started hammering away. The Japs were aggressive with their automatic weapons. They pushed them right up to the front and went after U.S. infantry with them. He didn’t care to think what they would have done with Browning Automatic Rifles. So far, they hadn’t shown any signs of owning weapons like those. He thanked God for small favors.
Aiming the gun at a target by himself was only a little faster than dying of old age. And he hadn’t finished the job before shouts of, “Tank! Tank!” from right in front of him made him give it up.
From everything he’d heard, the U.S. M3 wasn’t anything special compared to what the Germans and the Russians were throwing at each other these days. M3s could usually make the Jap machines say uncle, though. That truth would have pleased Fletch more if any of those U.S. tanks were in the neighborhood. They weren’t. If anything was going to stop this snorting Jap beast from running roughshod over the infantrymen, it was his gun.