One of the American tankers cut him down with half a dozen rounds from the submachine gun he carried as a personal weapon. The grenades went off: two muffled thumps inside the big steel box. An instant later, much bigger booms followed-the grenades must have touched off the tank’s ammunition. The big machine ground to a halt. A thick column of greasy black smoke rose from it.
Five men and a traveling fortress slain. The corporal’s spirit would have a lot to be proud of as it took its place with so many others in Yasukuni Shrine. Furusawa admired the man’s bravery, and admitted to himself he couldn’t match it.
Seeing the tank go up in flames made the Yankees hesitate. It filled the Japanese with new spirit, at least for a little while. Another soldier used a bottle full of burning gasoline to disable a second tank, though Furusawa thought some of that crew got away. He hoped the new loss would make the Americans draw back. It didn’t. They might have lacked the stubborn stoicism of Japanese troops, but they were brave, tough men.
“Give up!” someone shouted in Japanese. “You won’t be harmed after surrender! You’ll be fed and treated well.”
Only a long burst of machine-gun fire answered that call. The Americans must have found a local Japanese to do their talking-to do their lying-for them. They’d done that when the American Army was advancing, too. You listened to those wills-o’-the-wisp at your peril. Furusawa had seen men do what they said and then get shot down.
Another call came from behind him: “Back here! We’ve got another line set up!” That was a Tokyo man talking. He didn’t have the Hiroshima accent of the men from Furusawa’s regiment-and of most Japanese settlers in Hawaii. That made Furusawa believe him. It also gave the senior private an excuse to retreat with his honor more or less intact.
He seized the chance, scrambling and scurrying and scuttling. Bullets whipped by him, but none bit. He flopped down into a hole deeper and much better made than the one in which he’d sheltered. This had to be a position American POWs had prepared in advance. He nodded to himself. Good. Now the Army would get some use out of all that digging.
A U.S. FIGHTER PLANE ROARED LOW OVER THE VAST POW CAMP in Kapiolani Park. Fletcher Armitage stood in line for the evening meal-whatever rice and weeds the Japs cared to give their prisoners. The plane’s pilot waggled his wings as he zoomed away. When American fliers first started doing that, some of the prisoners had waved back. After the beatings the Japanese guards handed out, that stopped in a hurry.
One of the guard towers sent a stream of bullets after the fighter, but it was long gone. The machine guns in the towers bore on the camp. When the towers went up, the Japs hadn’t figured those guns would need to shoot down U.S. planes. Too bad, you bastards, Fletch thought.
A man in front of him said, “I wonder what the hell they call that aircraft. Sure as hell didn’t have anything like it when we got took.”
He was right about that. It looked more businesslike than any plane Fletch had known in 1941, and its business was death.
The line snaked forward. When Fletch got up to the cooks, one of them plopped a ladleful of overcooked, gluey rice and green stuff in his bowl. The ladle was small. For all he knew, the greens were lawn trimmings. He didn’t care. For one thing, he didn’t get enough to matter. For another, he would have eaten all he did get. If the Japs had cooked grubs in with the gruel, he would have eaten those, too.
He savored what little he got. For a couple of hours, he wouldn’t feel like a man starving to death-which he was. He would just be very hungry. To a POW in Hawaii, very hungry seemed wonderful.
Two emaciated prisoners carried an even more emaciated body to the disposal area near the perimeter. Several others lay there, some scrawnier yet. Men who should have been in the prime of life died here every day, and not a few of them. Fletch glanced warily toward the guard towers. If the Japs in them decided to open up, men inside the perimeter would die by the hundreds, by the thousands. And they were thinking about it. He could feel the tension in the air. If anything, those American fighters made it worse. The Japs were losing the fight for Oahu. The distant rumble of artillery fire and bombs going off wasn’t so distant any more. If the guards wanted to take a last revenge on the POWs in their hands and under their machine guns, they could.
If they did, the Americans would avenge themselves in turn. That was obvious. It might have restrained Americans guarding Japanese prisoners. Fletch could tell the Japs didn’t give a shit. They intended to fight to the death any which way. If they could get rid of men who might recover and fight them again-or just men who’d fought them in the past-they would do it, and then die with smiles on their faces.
I’ll give you something to smile about, you slant-eyed mothers. Fletch’s hands balled into fists. He’d had that fantasy so many times. And he couldn’t do one goddamn thing to make it real. Not one. The Japs were on the right side of the wire and he was on the wrong side. He didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting out, either. Hell, a Chinaman would have had a better chance than he did. A Chinaman might have been able to fool the guards into thinking he was another Jap. Tall, thin, freckled, and auburn-haired, Fletch made a most unconvincing Japanese.
He did what most of the POWs did most of the time: he lay down and tried to rest. The laughable rations gave them next to no energy. The less they used, the better off they were. He shook his head when that occurred to him. The less energy he used, the longer he’d last. Whether that made him better off was a long way from obvious.
But sleep had dangers of its own. When he slept, he dreamt of… food. He burned too low for sex to mean anything to him. But food-food was a different story. Those dreams never went away. If anything, they got worse as he got weaker. Steaks smothered in onions danced in his dreams. So did mashed potatoes and string beans. Bacon and eggs. Pancakes-mountains of pancakes smothered in melted butter and maple syrup. Cherry pie a la mode. Not slices-whole pies, with quarts of vanilla ice cream plopped on top. Coffee with cream and sugar. Beer. Brandy. Whiskey.
And when he woke up, the dreams would seem so vivid, so real. He’d be just about to dig in, just about to make up for more than a year and a half of tormenting hunger-and then he’d have his food snatched away by cruel consciousness. When a man cried in Kapiolani Park, he most likely cried after a dream of food.
Still, if you didn’t dream of roast beef, sleeping was better than staying awake. General anesthesia would have been better still. The only kind the Japs offered, though, was too permanent to suit him.
When he didn’t dream of food, he often did dream of combat. Sometimes he and the U.S. Army triumphed over the Japs. Waking up after those hurt almost as bad as waking up after a dream of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Sometimes he got shot in the night or, worse, bayoneted. Returning to himself after those dreams came as close to relief as anything in the POW camp.
He dreamt of combat tonight. It was artillery in his head, which could be as bad as bayonets. He’d commanded a 105; he knew too well what shellfire did to human flesh. If he hadn’t known before, what he’d seen in the fighting would have taught him plenty.
And when he woke, he woke from a noisy dream of combat to… combat. Machine guns and rifles and mortars were going off much too close by. Tracers ripped through the prisoner camp, mostly from south to north. The tracers were red. Fletch needed a moment to remember what that meant. The Japs used ice-blue tracers. Red tracers meant… Americans!