“I want to go out there and stab some of those little monkeys,” Charlie said. “What I owe them-” He carried a little more weight than he had when he came out of the Kalihi Valley-a little, but not a lot. You couldn’t put on a lot of weight in Hawaii these days no matter how you tried.
“Don’t be dumb,” Oscar said. “The Army and the Marines are giving you your revenge.”
“And the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill,” Susie added. “How can you beat a deal like that?”
“How? It’s personal, that’s how,” Charlie growled. As if to tell him nobody gave a damn about personal reasons, a bullet came in through the open window, cracked past the three of them, and punched a hole in the far wall. The wall already had several. All Oscar and Charlie and Susie could do was huddle here and hope they didn’t get shot or blown up.
Oscar looked from Charlie to Susie and back again. As far as he knew, they hadn’t fooled around on him. He was a little surprised-Susie had a mind of her own, and Charlie was a born tomcat-and more than a little glad. He’d been looking for answers. Sometimes negative ones were better than positive.
Another bullet came in through the wall. This one tore a hole in the couch. Susie yelped. So did Oscar. The U.S. taxpayer was liable to be footing the bill for wiping him off the face of the earth. “Hey!” he said.
“What?” Susie and Charlie said at the same time.
“Not you,” Oscar told his buddy. He turned back to Susie. “If we get out of this in one piece, you want to marry me?”
She didn’t hesitate. She rarely did. “Sure,” she said. “It’s not like we haven’t been through a little bit together, is it?”
“Not hardly,” Oscar said. Charlie whistled the Wedding March, loudly and way off tune. Oscar made as if to throw something at him. He and Charlie both laughed. Susie astonished him by starting to cry. If the war hadn’t started, she would have gone back to Pittsburgh after her little fling. Oscar probably would have forgotten her by now, the way he’d forgotten a lot of girls. You never could tell how things would work out.
JOE CROSETTI SHOT UP WAIKIKI. The Japs down there stubbornly kept shooting back. It wouldn’t matter much longer, though.
Enemy troops were running around the hotels by Waikiki Beach and on the beach itself, taking positions to try to defend against the landing craft coming in from the Pacific. I’ve watched three invasions now, Joe thought. How many people can say that?
Naval guns pounded the expensive beachfront property. A long round smashed an apartment house to smithereens a few blocks inland. Joe would have thought nothing could survive the assault from the sea and the sky.
He would have been wrong. He’d thought that before, and he’d been wrong every time. As soon as the landing craft came into range, the Japanese raked them with machine-gun fire. A field gun in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel pumped rounds at the ugly boats struggling toward the beach. Joe saw splashed from near misses, and then a boat caught fire, turned turtle, and sank, all in the wink of an eye.
“You bastards!” Joe exclaimed. He swung his Hellcat out over the ocean-and one of the landing craft opened up on him with its.50-caliber machine gun, mistaking him for a Zero. “You bastards!” he said again, this time on an entirely different note. Fortunately, the sailor with the itchy trigger finger couldn’t shoot worth a damn.
And Joe spotted what he’d been looking for: the muzzle flash from the field gun. They’d put it right inside the wreckage of that big pink pile. He dove on it. His finger stabbed the firing button. Six tongues of flame flickered in front of the Hellcat’s wings. As always, the fighter staggered in the air; all at once, the engine had to fight the recoil from half a dozen guns banging away like sons of bitches. Joe controlled the plane through the rough part with a touch honed by practice.
G-force shoved him down hard into his seat as he came out of the dive. The bastard of it was, he couldn’t see what the hell he’d done, or even if he’d done anything. Every ten seconds took him another mile from the Royal Hawaiian.
Clang! A bullet slammed into the Hellcat. “Fuck!” Joe exclaimed. Yeah, the Japs were still doing everything they could-or maybe that was an American bullet running around loose. Either way, it was doing its best to kill him. Either way, its best didn’t seem good enough. “Way to go, babe,” Joe murmured affectionately, and patted the seat the way he would have patted a reliable horse’s neck.
He made one more pass over Waikiki. By the time he finished that one, only two of his guns still held ammo. Time to head for home. He flew back toward the Bunker Hill. They’d gas him up, the armorers would reload the guns, and then he’d be off again. It was almost like commuting to work. You could get killed in a traffic smashup, too.
You could, yeah, but the jerk in the other car was just a jerk. He wasn’t trying to kill you on purpose. The enemy damn well was. It made a difference. Joe was amazed at what a difference it made.
Twenty minutes later, his teeth slammed together as the Hellcat jounced home. At least he didn’t bite his tongue; every once in a while you’d see a guy get out of his plane with blood dripping down his chin. Joe ran across the flight deck and down to the wardroom to debrief. Things had become routine, or pretty close, but the powers that be still wanted as many details as pilots could give.
“Did you radio the position of that field gun so a dive bomber could pay it a visit?” the debriefing officer asked.
“Uh, sorry, sir, but no.” Joe thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Christ, I really am an idiot!”
“Well, you did have other things on your mind,” the debriefing officer said generously. “Speaking of which, you need to see Commander McCaskill in his office right away-‘On the double,’ he said.”
“I do?” Joe yelped. Was he in trouble for not making that radio call? He didn’t think he ought to be in enough trouble for the Bunker Hill’s commander of air operations to ream him out in person. “What for, sir?”
“He’d better be the one to tell you that,” the debriefing officer answered.
Apprehensively, Joe went up to the carrier’s island. He found the door to Commander McCaskill’s office open. McCaskill, a craggy, gray-haired man in his early forties, looked up from his desk. “Ensign Crosetti reporting, sir,” Joe said, fighting not to show the nerves he felt.
“Come in, Crosetti,” the air operations commander said. “I’ve got something for you.” Joe couldn’t read anything in his voice or on his face; he would have made-probably did make-a formidable poker player.
“Sir?” Joe approached as reluctantly as a kid about to get a swat from the principal.
McCaskill reached into a desk drawer and pulled out two small boxes. He shoved them at Joe. “Here. These are yours now.” Joe opened them. One held two silver bars, the other two thin strips of gold cloth. McCaskill’s face had more room for a smile than Joe would have guessed. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Crosetti!” he said.
“My God, I made j.g.!” Joe blurted. It almost came out, Holy shit! Now that would have been something. He wondered if anybody ever had said something like that. He wouldn’t have been surprised.
Still smiling, the older man nodded. “You earned it, son. You’ve done well.”
“I wish Orson hadn’t bought the farm,” Joe said, suddenly sobered. “He would’ve got these way before I did.”
“Oh.” Commander McCaskill also sobered. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I don’t think you’ll find anyone on this ship without absent friends.” Now Joe nodded; that was bound to be true. McCaskill went on, “If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Sharp did win his promotion-posthumously.”
“Maybe a little, sir.” Joe knew he had to be polite. Yelling, Not fucking much! would have landed him in the brig. He wondered how much consolation that promotion was for Sharp’s folks back in Salt Lake. They would sooner have had their son back. Joe would sooner have had his buddy back. “Absent friends,” he muttered, and then, “This is a nasty business.”