Lieutenant James Peterson thought all the extra excitement was just a bunch of hooey. He wasn’t shy about saying so, either. The fighter pilot, a rangy six feet two, was rarely shy about saying anything. “Anybody who thinks the Japs have the nerve to try us on for size has to be nuts,” he declared, swigging coffee with some of the other pilots. “We’d kick their ass from here to Sunday. They aren’t a bunch of dummies. They’ve got to know that as well as we do.”
“The Bull thinks they’re up to something,” said another pilot, a j.g. named Hank Drucker. “He wouldn’t have put out that Battle Order if he didn’t.” Several men nodded at that. If Halsey thought something, they were convinced it had to be true.
But Peterson remained unquelled and unconvinced. “I think he put it out just to keep us on our toes,” he said. “What the hell could the Japs do to us?”
“Halsey’s worried about submarines,” Drucker said. “One torpedo amidships can put a pretty fair crimp in your plans.”
“Yeah, but why would they do anything like that?” Peterson demanded. “It makes no sense. They couldn’t sink enough of our ships to hurt the Pacific Fleet very much-and then they’d be eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and we’d be all pissed off.”
“They’re already pissed off at us.” Lieutenant Carter Higdon had a Mississippi drawl thick enough to slice. Despite it, he was the brains of the squadron. When he was off duty, he was working his way through a beat-up copy of Ulysses. He went on, “We’ve cut off their oil. We’ve cut off their scrap metal. Somebody tried doing that to us, how would we like it?”
“I’d kick the son of a bitch right in the slats,” Peterson said.
“I think you just shot yourself down, Jim,” Drucker said, a split second after Peterson realized the same thing.
He got out of it as best he could: “But I’m an American, goddammit. Those slant-eyed bastards haven’t got the balls for anything like that.”
“Here’s hopin’ you’re right,” Higdon said. “But I reckon we’ll be steamin’ west for real before too long, get the war going in the Philippines or somewhere like that. If they don’t get their oil from us, where will they get it? Only other place is the Dutch East Indies-and if they go there, they’ll go loaded for bear.”
Several pilots nodded. The Dutch East Indies had hung like ripe fruit waiting to be picked ever since the Germans overran Holland the year before. And Vichy France, also under the Nazis’ thumbs, had given Japan the right to base troops in French Indochina. Of course, if Vichy had said no, the Japs would have gone in anyhow. This way, France maintained a ghostly sort of sovereignty over the area. Peterson wondered how happy that made the froggies.
“You think we ought to fight if the Japs do go into the East Indies?” Drucker asked Higdon. “Me, I’ll be damned if we ought to pull the Dutchmen’s chestnuts out of the fire.”
“If they do get that oil, it’s us next,” Higdon said, turning next into a two-syllable word. “We’re the only ones who can worry them. Holland and France are down for the count, and England’s got bigger worries closer to home. If Hitler takes Moscow and knocks the Russians out this winter, he’ll turn on England with everything he’s got next spring.”
The argument went on and on. Sometimes it was arguing in the wardroom, sometimes a poker game, sometimes argument and poker. Finally, Peterson got tired of it and went up onto the flight deck. His shoes thumped on the six-inch wooden planks. When the Enterprise was abuilding, there’d been talk about armoring the flight deck as the British were doing, but it hadn’t come to anything.
Color-coded cotton jerseys and cloth helmets told off the deck crew by function. Sailors in blue handled parked planes, those in yellow directed them while they moved, while those in red were the repair and crash crews. A couple of fire watchmen in suits of fuzzy white asbestos moved among them, looking like snowmen out for a stroll. Peterson wouldn’t have wanted that job for beans, especially not in warm weather.
Of course, when the fire watchmen went to work, they had more heat to worry about than what they got in the tropics. They watched the world through thick panes of smoked glass. Diving suits might have been heavier and more restrictive than what they wore. Peterson couldn’t think of anything else that came close. No, he wouldn’t have swapped jobs with them for anything.
One of them waved a gauntleted hand. Automatically, Peterson waved back. The fire watchman’s head was turned in his general direction, so he assumed the wave was for him. He might have been wrong. Trying to judge what a man meant when you couldn’t see his face wasn’t easy.
He laughed out loud. “What’s funny, sir?” asked a repair-crew man in a red jersey.
“I was just thinking I’d like to wear one of those goddamn fire suits the next poker game I get into,” Peterson answered. “Long as I keep the faceplate closed, who’s gonna know I’m raising on a busted flush?”
The sailor contemplated that, then grinned. “Don’t tell those firewatch bastards. They’d up and do it.”
“Who’d play with ’em if they did?” Peterson asked.
“Sir, we got us somewhere close to three thousand men on board,” the sailor replied. “You don’t figure some of ’em are suckers?”
“Well, yeah, but you’re not supposed to say so out loud. Otherwise, you will keep ’em out of the games,” Peterson said. They grinned at each other.
Peterson looked out to sea. A fresh breeze blew his sandy hair back from his face. The air was the freshest in the world. He didn’t consciously notice the salt tang of the sea, but it braced him even so. Off to port, a cruiser kept station with the Enterprise. A couple of destroyers prowled ahead, alert for periscopes-and, with their listening gear, for subs lurking below the surface.
A couple of gooney birds glided by on wings that seemed almost as long as a Wildcat’s. The big birds bred on Midway and some of the other islands in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian chain. In the air, they were nonpareils. On land… They came in as if they’d blown both tires and had a wheel go out from under them. They were almost as ungainly taking off, too. They needed a headwind and a long running start. Otherwise, they couldn’t get airborne at all.
More destroyers followed the carrier at the heart of the task force. Peterson turned and peered over the Enterprise ’s stern. That pointed him more or less in the direction of Japan. What were Tojo’s boys up to? Could they really be contemplating war with the USA? Peterson still had trouble believing it. Wasn’t all their tough talk just a bluff? With the America Firsters and the other isolationists running around loose and making a big noise in the papers and on the radio, weren’t the Japs trying to scare FDR into giving them what they wanted?
“Dammit, that’s still the way it looks to me,” Peterson muttered. If the President just stood firm, Japan would pull in its horns. The Japs had a million soldiers bogged down in China, for Christ’s sake. Why would they take on another country that was bigger than they were? It made no sense.
“Prepare to land a plane!” blared from the loudspeakers, and then, “Landing a plane!”
The squat F4F Wildcat came in from astern. The landing officer stood facing it. He held out the wigwag flags so they and his arms made a straight line out from his shoulders. He dipped to the right; the Wildcat straightened up. Jim Peterson laughed. If that wasn’t Ike Greenwald coming in, he’d eat his socks. Ike always carried one wing low. The landing officer straightened and moved the flags in small circles. The fighter sped up. The landing officer dropped the flags to his sides. The plane dove for the deck.
Tires smoked as they struck. The tailhook caught an arrester wire. The pilot killed the roaring engine. The stinks of sizzling rubber and exhaust ruined the clean air for a moment. The man in the cockpit rolled back the canopy and climbed out. Sure as hell, it was Greenwald. Nobody else on the Enterprise was built quite so much like a soda straw. People said he could sleep in the barrel of a five-inch gun. That wasn’t fair, though he might have managed in an eight-incher.