The carriers fell away behind him. So did the destroyers and cruisers screening them. He came up on the warships bombarding Oahu. Their guns thundered below him. Flame and smoke belched from the muzzles. The ships heeled in the water at the recoil. Some dug-in Japs would be catching hell.
Fewer bombardment ships remained north of Oahu. A good many had steamed around the island to pummel Pearl Harbor. Joe and his fellow fliers were on their way there, too. He’d shot up the harbor before, plenty of times. Things were different today. Marines and dogfaces were landing. They were going to take the base away from the Japs. Just about all the Japanese soldiers were at the front. What kind of fight could sailors and other odds and sods put up?
“We’ll fix ’em, goddammit,” Joe said. A second front here would do almost as much good as the second front in Europe Stalin kept shouting for. Catch the enemy between hammer and anvil and smash him flat.
“Yeah,” Joe muttered. “Yeah.”
One thing the Japs had already made very plain-they had no quit in them. All the antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out were banging away like nobody’s business. Flying past a near miss was like driving a car over a hole in the road. You went down and then you went up again, sometimes hard enough for your teeth to click together. But you didn’t pick up shrapnel from a hole in the road unless somebody’d stuck a land mine down there.
Something clanged against the new Hellcat’s fuselage. Joe automatically checked the gauges. Everything looked good. These babies could take it. Hit a Zero or an Oscar with a good burst of.50-caliber bullets, and it’d break up in midair. The Army fighter the Americans called the Tony was a tougher bird, but nowhere near as tough as a Hellcat.
Orders were to shoot up anything Japanese at Pearl that might shoot back. Joe went in at not much above treetop height, machine guns blazing. He wondered if the place was worth taking away from the Nips. Two campaigns inside of two years had turned it into a pretty fair approximation of hell on earth. The water had a greasy sheen. He was so low, the odor of spilled fuel oil got into the canopy. Wrecked American and Japanese ships lay side by side, brothers in death. Before the war started, nobody except a few aviation-minded cranks had really believed airplanes could sink capital ships all by themselves.
“I believe! Oh, Lord, I believe!” Joe sounded like a Holy Roller preacher. How many hundred thousand tons of twisted steel lay below him? The last two times the U.S. and Japanese fleets clashed, neither side’s ships had set eyes on the other’s. Planes did all the dirty work.
Once upon a time, Ford Island, there in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been a tropical paradise, all palm trees and bougainvillea and frangipani. Nothing green was left now, just dirt and char marks and the wreckage of buildings-and antiaircraft guns among the wreckage. Joe squeezed the firing button on top of the stick. His six.50s hammered away. The recoil made the Hellcat jerk in the air. Japs scrambled for cover. He might have been playing pinball, except those were real people down there. Real people I hope I kill, he thought.
Out at the edge of the harbor, landing craft were coming ashore. Some of the AA guns were firing at them instead of at the airplanes overhead. That wasn’t so good. A three-inch gun could do horrible things to a boat that was meant to be equally awkward by land and sea. Joe strafed a gun from behind. He didn’t think its crew heard him coming. What.50-caliber slugs did to human flesh was even worse than what antiaircraft guns did to landing craft.
Some of the ugly, boxy boats came right up the channel. Wrecks blocked bigger ships from getting in, but the landing craft scraped past them. Joe wagged his wings in salute as he shot at a Japanese machine-gun nest.
A Hellcat trailing smoke plunged into the water of the West Loch. Joe looked around. He didn’t see a parachute. Maybe the poor bastard inside the plane was lucky not to get out. He would have come down in the middle of a big swarm of Japs, with a piss-poor chance of getting away. What they would have done to him before they let him die… Compared to that, going straight into the drink looked pretty good.
Joe made pass after pass, firing short bursts so he wouldn’t overheat his guns and burn out the barrels. Finally, his ammo ran dry. He still had plenty of fuel, but so what? Unless he wanted to imitate that Jap and see how big a fire he could start, it didn’t do him much good here.
It would take him home, though. He flew back over Oahu toward the Bunker Hill. The Japs shot at him several more times, and missed every one. Hitting a fast-moving airplane wasn’t easy. Frustrated gunners on both sides could testify to that.
A few more puffs of black smoke around him, and then he was out over the Pacific. He hoped none of the American ships would fire on him. If one did, they all would, and they threw up a lot of shells and bullets. They might not get him anyway, but why take chances?
He ran the gauntlet. A CAP fighter came over to have a look at him, but it pulled away when the pilot recognized he was in a Hellcat. It waggled its wings as it went. He returned the courtesy.
As always, landing on the Bunker Hill meant turning off his own will and doing exactly what the landing officer told him to. Fighter pilots were a willful breed. He hated surrendering control to somebody else. But the easiest of the many ways to kill yourself on carrier duty was to think you knew better than the landing officer. However little Joe liked it, he believed it.
At the officer’s signal, he shoved the stick forward and dove for the deck. “Jesus!” he said as he slammed home. His tailhook caught the second arrester wire. The Hellcat jerked to a stop.
Flightcrew men came running up as Joe opened the canopy and got out. “How’d it go, Mr. Crosetti?”
one of them called.
“Piece of cake,” Joe answered. “I need ammo. Then I can go back and give ’em some more. We’re going to take Pearl Harbor back from those bastards-you better believe we are.”
The sailors cheered. “We’ll have you back in the air in nothin’ flat, sir,” an armorer said. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“Not me,” Joe said. “That’s for the guys with lots of gold braid.” As an ensign, he outranked all the ratings around him. He was an officer, of course. But he felt he was barely an officer. Just about all the others on the ship were entitled to give him orders.
That was a worry for another day. Now all he wanted to do was hit the Japs another lick. What would end up happening to Pearl Harbor once the Americans took it back-was also a worry for another day, and not for the likes of him.
FIGHTING WAS GETTING CLOSE to Honolulu now. The roar of battle from Pearl Harbor never went away, no matter how much Jiro Takahashi wished it would. He’d made a bet not long after the Japanese conquered Hawaii. He’d bet they were the winning side. For a while, that bet looked pretty good. It didn’t any more.
He wished his sons would give him a harder time about it. He deserved a hard time for his foolishness. But they treated him sympathetically, as if he were an old rake coming back to earth after a spree with a young floozy who took him for everything but the gold in his teeth.
“Shigata ga nai, Father,” Hiroshi said. “When the Americans come back, we just have to try to keep you out of trouble if we can.”
“They can’t get him for treason.” Kenzo spoke as if Jiro weren’t in the tent in the botanical garden. “He’s not a U.S. citizen. He was just helping his own country.” No matter how dumb he was. He didn’t say that. He didn’t need to say it. Everything that had happened since the Americans came back shouted it for him.
“Do you think they’ll care?” Hiroshi asked. “To them, he’ll be a Jap who helped the other Japs.” The hateful key word was in English. His older son went on, “They’ll probably deal with all the people like that, so we’d better have some good reasons why they shouldn’t.”