“I don’t know,” he said. “I think maybe the first knock put my tongue to sleep.”
Susie waggled a finger at him. “Oh, it better not have, sweetheart, or I’m gonna be real disappointed in you.” She exploded into gales of laughter. Oscar grinned back. He gave himself a mental pat on the back. Yeah, Susie could be as raunchy as all get-out… as long asshe was doing the leading. If he’d said something like that to her, it would have chilled her faster than a cold shower.
Oscar’s bed was crowded for two, but not too crowded, as long as they were friendly. His tongue, he discovered in due course, still worked fine. So did Susie’s. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, happy and more than a little sloshed.
FLETCHER ARMITAGE WAS AN OFFICER and a gentleman. That’s what they told him when he graduated from West Point. He’d gone right on believing it when he got assigned to the Twenty-fourth Division’s Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion, based at Schofield Barracks. Of course, officers in Hawaii were something like sahibs in British India, with plenty of natives to do the scutwork for them. If a gentleman was someone who seldom got his hands dirty, Fletch had qualified.
Even before the fighting started, things hadn’t been perfect for him. He’d been sleeping in the base BOQ; Jane had the apartment they’d shared in Wahiawa. The divorce hadn’t been final when the Japs hit. He didn’t suppose it had gone forward since the occupation, but so what? He wasn’t married any more, and he knew it.
So what was he, then? Another slowly starving POW, that was all. He wasn’t too far from Wahiawa himself right now. Some of the men in his gun crew had tried disappearing when the order to surrender went out. Fletch didn’t know what had happened to them. Maybe they’d blended in among the civilians. Maybe the Japs had caught them and shot them. Either way, they were liable to be better off than he was.
“Work!” a Japanese sergeant shouted, one of the handful of English words the man knew. The POWs under his eye moved a little faster. They were digging tank traps and antitank ditches. Putting prisoners to work on war-related projects like that violated the Geneva Convention. Putting officers to work at all without their agreement also violated the Convention.
Fletch laughed, not that it was funny. The Japs hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention, and didn’t give two whoops in hell about it. They figured the USA might try to invade Oahu again, and they were damn well going to be ready if the Americans did. They’d had God only knew how many thousands of POWs sitting around in Kapiolani Park at the edge of Waikiki, and they’d sent out an order-work or don’t eat. Nobody’d been eating much, but nobody had any doubts the Japs would be as good, or as bad, as their word.
Up went the pickaxe. Fletch had learned to let gravity do most of the work as it fell. He still wore the shirt and trousers in which he’d surrendered. They hadn’t been in good shape then, and they were rags now. He hung on to them even so. A lot of the Americans in the gang worked stripped to the waist. He didn’t want to do that; with his red hair and fair skin, he burned and burned, and hardly tanned at all.
Raise the pick. Let it fall. Raise the pick. Let it fall. A scrawny PFC with a shovel cleared the dirt Fletch loosened. Neither of them moved any faster than he had to. Slaves in the South must have found a pace like this: just enough to satisfy the overseer, and not a bit more.
Every so often, of course, the slaves would have slacked off too much. Then Simon Legree would have cracked his bullwhip, and things would have picked up again-till he turned his back, anyhow. The Jap sergeant didn’t have a bullwhip. He had a four-foot length of bamboo instead. He would swing it like a baseball bat whenever he felt the need. It left welts at least as bad as a bullwhip’s, and could knock a man off his feet.
About twenty feet away from Fletch, an American keeled over without having been walloped. “Man down!” Three or four POWs sang out at the same time. If somebody went down and they didn’t sing out, they’d catch it-the Japs would figure they were colluding in his laziness.
Two guards strolled over to the fallen man. One of them stirred him with his foot. The prisoner-one more bag of bones among so many-lay there unmoving. The other Jap kicked him in the ribs. He didn’t even curl up to protect himself. The Jap kicked him once more, harder. He still didn’t move. Maybe he was dead already. If he wasn’t, the guards took care of it. They bayoneted him, again and again.
“Too fucking cheap to waste ammo on him,” the PFC with the shovel said out of the side of his mouth.
“Hey, it’s more fun to stab the poor bastard,” Fletch said, also sotto voce . He wasn’t kidding; he’d seen the gusto with which the guards wielded their bayonets. This POW was too far gone to give them much sport. When they were satisfied they’d killed him, they thrust their bayonets into the dirt to get the blood off them. Tidy SOBs, Fletch thought disgustedly.
“Work!” the sergeant shouted again. Fletch worked-again, as slowly as he could get away with. His eyes kept going toward the dead man, who still lay in the hole the Americans were excavating. What did hard work get you here? What the luckless prisoner had got, nothing else. Of course, what did work that wasn’t so hard get you? The same damn thing, only a little slower.
FROM THE COCKPIT OF HIS NAKAJIMA B5N1, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida spotted an oil slick on the surface of the Pacific northwest of Oahu. Excitement shot through him, but only for a moment. That wasn’t the sign of a Yankee submarine, however much he wished it were. It was only fuel bubbling up from the Sumiyoshi Maru. An American sub had sunk her.
Now that Fuchida had found where she’d gone down, he flew his carrier-based bomber in a search spiral, looking for the boat that had done the deed. The Sumiyoshi Maru wasn’t the first Japanese freighter on the way to Oahu the Americans had sent to the bottom. She was, in fact, the second ship they’d got in the past two weeks. Japanese forces in Hawaii couldn’t well afford such losses. They needed food. They needed fuel. They needed aircraft to replace the ones they’d lost in the fight at the end of June. They needed munitions of every sort.
As long as everything went smoothly, the Japanese could just about keep themselves supplied. The locals had had a lean time of it-literally. Now, though, the islands were growing enough food on their own to keep people from starving. That was a relief. The American subs operating against Japanese shipping, though, were anything but.
Things would have been worse than they were if a couple of American torpedoes that squarely struck freighters hadn’t been duds. When planes from the Lexington attacked the Japanese task force north of Oahu just after the fighting started, a torpedo that hit Akagi had been a dud, too. Fuchida didn’t know what was wrong with the U.S. ordnance, but something clearly was.
For now, he kept scanning the Pacific. He’d been in overall charge of air operations for both the invasion of Hawaii and the defense against the U.S. counterattack. A lot of men with such exalted responsibilities wouldn’t have gone out on ordinary search missions themselves. Fuchida liked to keep his hand in any way he could.
He called to his bombardier on the intercom: “See anything?”
“No, Commander-san,” the rating answered. “Please excuse me, but I don’t. How about you?”
“I wish I did,” Fuchida told him. “That sub is probably fifty meters down and waiting for nightfall to surface and get away.”
“I’d do the same thing,” the bombardier said. “Why stick your neck out when you don’t have to?”
“We’ll search a while longer,” Fuchida said. “The sub skipper may not think the freighter got a radio message off before she went down. If he doesn’t, he might figure he’s home free and head back to the U.S. mainland on the surface.”