“Get down, you damn fool!” Charlie Kaapu yelled at him as the first bomb screamed down.
“Huh?” Oscar said brilliantly. Looking back, he had to admit it wasn’t his finest hour. Charlie used the handle of his shovel to knock Oscar’s legs out from under him.
Before Oscar could even squawk, the bomb hit. Blast sucked the air out of his lungs. Had the bomb burst a little closer, it would have torn them to pieces from the inside out so he drowned in his own blood. Chunks of casing screeched through the air, some of them not nearly far enough over his head.
And that bomb was only the first of eight or ten. Somebody in the Bible had wrestled with God and prevailed. Oscar felt as if he were wrestling with God and getting the crap slammed out of him. He got bounced and slapped around, and ended up all bruised and battered. He stopped complaining, even to himself, when he fetched up against the Japanese sergeant’s head. The man’s body was nowhere in sight. Oscar almost lost his meager breakfast.
The work he and Charlie and the rest of the Japs’ forced laborers had done was smashed to hell and gone. So were a lot of Japanese soldiers and special naval landing force troops and luckless locals dragooned into working for them. And the dive bombers were only the opening act of the show. As soon as they roared away, fighters swooped low and started spraying the landscape with bullets.
Oscar watched a Jap hit by a burst literally get cut in half. The worst part was, the man’s top half didn’t die right away. Even though blood spilled from it-and from the rest of him-like water from a hose, he yammered something in his own language, tried to lever himself upright, and even looked around for the rifle he’d dropped. Only after most of a dreadful minute did the expression drain from his face. He slumped over again, finally seeming to realize he was dead.
“Jesus!” Oscar turned away, clapping a hand to his mouth. He’d already seen a lot of things he never wanted to see again. That one, though… That one topped the list.
Charlie Kaapu watched the Jap with a face that might have been carved from the basalt underlying the islands. “Serves him right,” he said.
“But-” Oscar didn’t have time for any more than that. Another fighter roared in, its machine guns winking fire. He folded himself into the smallest ball he could and prayed he didn’t get chewed up the way the Jap had. Charlie Kaapu lay on the ground beside him, also doing his best to imitate a sowbug.
Bursts of fire from Japanese machine-gun nests answered the hail of lead from the sky. The Japs had nerve, even if Oscar thought they were short on brains. Then one of the American planes slammed into the ground and went up in a high-octane fireball. The Japs yelled like men possessed. Oscar had a hard time blaming them, too. They’d just proved they could hit back.
Both at the start of the Japanese invasion of Hawaii and now at the end of their tenure here, his own countrymen came closer to killing him than the Japs ever had. He waited for those fighters to come back and shoot up some more Japanese positions-positions, he hoped, a little farther away from him.
“SHIT!” Joe Crosetti exclaimed when another Hellcat crashed and exploded in flames in Waikiki. He knew that could happen to him, too. He hated being reminded. Somebody wasn’t going home to his mom and dad and brothers and sisters-maybe to his wife and kid. Some clerk in the War Department-some bastard thousands of miles away from the fighting and snug as a bug in a rug-would have to send out a Deeply Regrets telegram. And some family’s life would turn upside down.
As Joe’s thumb found the firing button and he raked the Japs below with.50-caliber slugs, he never once thought that they had moms and dads and brothers and sisters and maybe wives and kids, too. They were just… the enemy to him. They weren’t people, the way the guys on his own side were. And they were still doing their goddamnedest to kill him. Their pale, cold-looking tracers spat from machine guns down on the ground and probed for his fighter, trying to knock him out of the sky like that poor luckless son of a bitch who’d just bought the farm. Something clanged into the Hellcat. As always, Joe quickly scanned the instruments. Everything looked okay. The engine kept running. He reached out and patted the side of the cockpit. “Attababy!” he told the plane. They weren’t just whistling Dixie when they said a Hellcat could take it.
Down on the ground, the Japs were sure taking it. More fires than the one from that other plane’s funeral pyre were rising from Waikiki. See how you like it, you bastards, Joe thought. He hoped there weren’t too many civilians down there. If there were, it was their tough luck. They were almost as abstract to him as the enemy. He wished the Japs would just throw in the sponge, the way some lousy pug’s handlers would after Joe Louis beat the snot out of their pride and joy.
Sometimes, though, a pug stayed in there and went toe-to-toe with the champ till he got KO’ed. If the Japs wanted to do that against the USA, by God, they’d get carried out of the ring, too. Yeah, they’d landed a sucker punch at the start of the fight, but you only got one of those. And when you were up against the heavyweight champion of the world, one wasn’t enough.
Joe sprayed Waikiki with bullets as big as his thumb till his guns ran dry. Then he got on the radio to his squadron leader: “Going home for more ammo.”
“Roger that,” the other pilot answered. “We’ll keep ’em busy while you’re otherwise occupied, Admiral.”
“Out,” Joe said with a snort. Admiral! He still aspired to a lieutenant, j.g.’s, stripe and a half on his sleeve.
A few more tracers came up at him as he flew north: Japanese holdouts still doing their damnedest to make trouble. They still held a few pockets in central Oahu where they’d been encircled and bypassed. Sooner or later, soldiers and Navy fliers would clean out those pockets. It wasn’t as if the Japs could retreat to the jungle here and fight a long guerrilla war. Oahu had plenty of jungles. The only trouble, from what Joe’s briefings said, was that you’d starve if you tried playing Tarzan in them.
Five minutes after he left Waikiki behind, he was out over the ocean again. Unless you flew over Oahu, you didn’t realize what a small island it was. He waggled his wings as he flew past the destroyers and cruisers and battleships still firing from the north. Some of them had come around the island to hit targets near Pearl Harbor and Honolulu.
None of the ships shot at him. None of them had shot at that crazy Jap who crashed his Zero into the Bunker Hill, either. Bastard had extracted a high price for his worthless neck, too. He’d hurt that baby flattop along with the big fleet carrier.
Combat air patrol came by to give Joe a look-see. They hadn’t done it soon enough with that Jap. Joe, of course, was harmless, at least to U.S. ships. He and the CAP planes exchanged more wing waggles and some raunchy banter over the radio. Then he flew on toward his carrier.
He still didn’t like carrier landings. He didn’t know a single pilot who did. He suspected there was no such animal. Like them or not, he did exactly what the nice gentleman with the wigwag flags told him to do. It worked: the landing officer didn’t wave him off. When the flags dropped, so did Joe’s Hellcat. His teeth clicked together as the wheels hit the flight deck. The tailhook caught. The fighter jerked to a stop.
Joe shoved back the canopy and scrambled out of the cockpit. He ran for the island as soon as his feet hit the deck planking. The faster you got away from the plane, the better off you were. The briefings had that one right. As if Joe needed the reminder, the Jap suicide pilot drove home that lesson.
“Over Waikiki, Crosetti?” the briefing officer said when Joe reported.
“Yes, sir.”
The other officer-a regular and an older man-smiled. “Not the way you expected to get there, I bet.”