“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” He crossed the road and headed down the beach toward the water. Charlie Kaapu followed.
Oscar had a couple of good rides in. The second time, Charlie went off his board. He had a scowl on his face when he recaptured it. He stood there at the edge of the sea, dripping and fuming. Then he frowned, looking north. “What’s that noise?”
After a moment, Oscar heard it too: a distant drone that put him in mind of mosquitoes. He also looked north. He pointed. “There they are. That’s a hell of a lot of airplanes. The Army or the Navy must be up to something.”
The airplanes flew in several groups. Some went south through the central valley. Others took a more southwesterly course. They were plenty high enough to make it over the Waianae Range. Oscar briefly wondered why they were all coming off the ocean. Then he shrugged again. What the military did wasn’t his worry. He and Charlie went back to their surf-riding.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO piloted his Zero back toward the Akagi. Exultation filled the commander of the second wave’s fighters. The first two attacks had heavily damaged the ships at Pearl Harbor and punished the airfields on Oahu. Now, Shindo thought, now we finish the job.
There was the carrier, with some of the fleet’s screen of destroyers and cruisers and battleships. And there were the transports, steaming south towards Oahu as fast as they could go. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. He was usually on the phlegmatic side. Not today. Today he felt like a tiger. And by tomorrow morning, the Japanese would be landing on the island.
Meanwhile, he had to land on the Akagi. Another Zero came in just ahead of his. The deck crew manhandled the plane to one side. The landing officer signaled for Shindo to continue his approach. He did, concentrating on the man’s signals to the exclusion of everything else. The carrier’s deck was pitching and rolling in front of him. The man on it could gauge his path better than he could himself. Learning that lesson was the hardest thing any Navy flier did.
Down went the flags. Shindo dove for the Akagi ’s deck. The arrester hook caught a wire. His Zero jerked to a stop. He shoved back the canopy, scrambled out of the plane, and ran for the carrier’s small portside island. “Admiral Nagumo!” he called. “Admiral Nagumo!”
Admiral Chuichi Nagumo came out onto the deck to meet him. He was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, with a round face, two deep vertical lines between his eyes, and thinning hair cropped close to his skull. He was a big-gun admiral, not a flying man, which sometimes worried Shindo. He’d got command of the Pearl Harbor expedition by seniority: the usual Japanese way. So far, though, he’d handled things as smoothly as anyone could have.
“All is well?” he asked now. Tension stretched his voice taut.
“All is very well!” Shindo flashed a grin at Minoru Genda and Mitsuo Fuchida, who’d come out onto the flight deck behind Nagumo. Fuchida, the air commander, was a couple of years older than Genda, taller, with long, horsey features. Shindo pulled himself back to the admiral’s question: “Yes, sir, all is very well. We need to launch the third wave right away, to smash the dock facilities and the fuel tanks and to hit Schofield Barracks for the Army’s benefit.”
“Where are the American carriers?” Nagumo demanded.
That was the one fly in the ointment. They hadn’t caught any of the carriers in port. Shindo gave the only answer he could: “Sir, I don’t know.”
Those lines between Admiral Nagumo’s eyes got deeper yet. “You are thinking about what happens to Hawaii,” he said heavily. “I am thinking about what happens to my fleet. What if the Americans strike us while we linger here?”
From behind him, Commander Genda said, “Sir, we have six carriers. At most, the Americans have three, and they probably aren’t concentrated. We have the best fliers in the world. They have… less than the best. If they find us, they will be the ones to regret it.”
“So you say.” Nagumo still sounded anything but happy. Shindo had yet to hear him sound happy since the fleet sailed from Japan. Even the astounding damage the first two waves of attackers had caused did nothing to cheer him. He went on, “I tell you, gentlemen, if it were not for the landing forces accompanying us, I would turn around and sail for the home islands now.”
Commander Fuchida couldn’t hide his horror. “Sir, we have a job to finish!” he exclaimed.
“I know,” Nagumo answered. “And I will stay, and I will carry it through. Those are my orders, and I cannot abandon the soldiers. But what I told you is no less true. We are in danger here.”
“So are the Americans,” Shindo said. Genda and Fuchida both nodded. At last, reluctantly, so did Admiral Nagumo.
II
THE MESSAGE CAME in to the Enterprise from one of the scouts just after eight in the morning: “White 16-Pearl Harbor under attack! Do not acknowledge.”
Aboard the carrier, rage boiled. “Those little slanty-eyed cocksuckers want a war, they’ve got one!” Lieutenant Jim Peterson shouted to whoever would listen.
“You were the one who said they wouldn’t fight.” Three people reminded Peterson of that at the same time.
He was too furious to get embarrassed at being wrong. “I don’t give a shit what I said,” he snarled. “Let’s knock the yellow bastards into the middle of next week.”
But that was easier said than done. Everyone knew the Japanese were somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands-but where? Had they come down out of the north or up from the south? The Enterprise couldn’t even ask the harried men at Pearl Harbor what they knew. As soon as that horrifying message came in, Admiral Halsey slapped radio silence on the whole task force. No Japs were going to spot the carrier and her satellites by their signals.
In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese-and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who’d shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.
The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They’d been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news-about seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose-far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.
As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the Enterprise. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary-people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too-but what trickled in didn’t sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row’s taken a hell of a licking.”
“That won’t end the world,” Peterson said. “The Navy’s needed to get rid of those wallowing tubs for years.” He spoke like what he was: a carrier fighter pilot. Billy Mitchell had proved battleships obsolete twenty years earlier. Nobody’d paid any attention then. It sounded as if the Japs were driving home the lesson. Would anybody pay attention now?
“You’re a coldhearted bastard, Peterson,” a lieutenant named Edgar Kelley said. “It’s not just ships, you know. It’s God knows how many sailors, too.”
“Yeah? So?” Peterson scowled at the other pilot. “If they didn’t get it now, they sure as hell would when they took their battlewagons west to fight the Japs. Carrier air would take ’em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn’t think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren’t a realist about the way the world worked, you’d take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.