Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

In spite of everything, Jim Peterson smiled. “Just like in the movies.”

“Fuckin’-A, man!” Charlie said. “Just like in the movies!”

“Well, if you’re gonna do it, do it fast,” Peterson said. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last, and God only knows how long the Japs’ll let anybody last.”

“Cover for me at roll call in the morning,” Charlie Kaapu said.

“Will do,” Peterson answered, though he feared the Japs would notice Charlie was missing even if their count came out right. They had trouble telling one emaciated white man from another, yeah. All Occidentals look alike to them, Peterson thought, and damned if he didn’t smile again. But Charlie was only half white-and only half emaciated, too, which counted for more. He stood out. He had as much life in him as half a dozen ordinary POWs put together. He…

As if to prove his own point, Peterson fell asleep then, right in the middle of a thought. He woke up some time later-he didn’t know how long. Charlie Kaapu wasn’t lying beside him any more. Good luck, Charlie, he thought, and then he fell asleep again.

Three men died during the night. The POWs who lived on carried the corpses out with them so the guards could keep the precious count straight. And those living POWs did what they could to keep the guards from noticing one of their number wasn’t there and wasn’t dead. They shifted around in the ranks that were supposed to be still and unmoving. The Japs clouted several of them. The guards would do that without an excuse. When they had one, they did it even more.

But they were stupider than Peterson had figured them for. He thought the Americans were going to get away with their deception, and wondered how the Japs could fail to miss what wasn’t right in front of their noses. The answer wasn’t all that hard to find. Their officers didn’t want smart bastards here. They wanted mean bastards-and what they wanted, they got.

Still and all, the Japs would have had to be dumber than a pile of pebbles not to notice pretty damn quick that Charlie Kaapu wasn’t there. They were just about to let the POWs queue up for the miserable breakfast when a corporal let out a yelp, as if somebody’d poked him with a pin: “Kaabu!” When the Japs tried to say p, it mostly came out as b. Peterson had got used to being called Beterson.

Naturally, Charlie didn’t answer. The guards had the conniptions they should have had twenty minutes earlier. They started beating people in earnest, with swagger sticks, with rifle butts, and with their fists. They kicked men who fell, too. They were even more furious than Peterson had figured they would be.

And they weren’t just mad at the POWs. They also screamed at one another. The men who’d been on watch during the night would surely catch holy hell. That didn’t break Jim Peterson’s heart. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

The prisoners didn’t get breakfast that morning. They got marched straight into the tunnel instead. The Japs cut them no slack. If anything, the guards worked them even harder than usual. Anyone who faltered got beaten or kicked without mercy. Along with taking out endless buckets of rock, the POWs dragged out several corpses.

They got no supper that night, either. Nobody dared say a word. If the Japs kept that up for another few days, they wouldn’t need to worry about escapes from the Kalihi Valley any more. All the POWs here would be dead.

A few months earlier, mistreatment like this might have prompted lots of men to try to escape. No more. Next to nobody had the strength. And the guards would be shooting at their own shadows now. The prisoners went nowhere. The timing was bad.

Just before sunup the next morning, two trucks came up to the camp in the Kalihi Valley from Honolulu below. Jim Peterson and the other prisoners stared in amazement. The trucks themselves were ordinary: U.S. Army vehicles the Japs had commandeered, painting over the white star on each driver’s-side door. But their being here wasn’t ordinary. They were the first trucks Peterson had seen since coming to the punishment camp.

And, instead of getting the prisoners to do the work for them the way they almost always did, the Japs unloaded the trucks themselves. The contents seemed harmless enough: crates with incomprehensible Japanese squiggles on the sides. The guards lugged them over to the mouth of the tunnel. Then they set up another machine-gun position nearby, and posted several riflemen next to the crates, too.

“They treat that shit like it’s the Hawaiian crown jewels,” another prisoner remarked to Peterson.

“How do you know it’s not?” he said. “If their side’s losing, this is a hell of a place to stash ’em.”

He got a lesson in the way rumors worked. By the time the POWs assembled for roll call half an hour later, everybody was convinced the Japs were going to stow the Hawaiian crown jewels in the tunnel. No one had any evidence that that was so, but nobody seemed to need any, either. In nothing flat, a chance comment swelled into one of those things everybody knew.

Another thing everybody knew was that the Japs were going to be double tough on the count this morning. Peterson and the other POWs had only been guessing about the crown jewels. What everybody knew turned out to be dead right this time. No one presumed even to twitch as the guards stalked along the prisoners’ ranks. One luckless fellow who sneezed with a guard right behind him got beaten and kicked till he lay on the ground, all bloody and groaning.

Peterson shuddered to think what would happen if the Japs screwed up the count even though the prisoners were cooperating. For a wonder, the guards didn’t. For what felt like an even bigger wonder, they let the POWs line up for breakfast. As always, it wasn’t much and it wasn’t good. After a day and a half of emptiness and brutal labor, anything at all in Peterson’s belly seemed wonderful. He knew he was still a starving man. But he wasn’t starving quite so fast.

After the prisoners ate, the guards pointed toward the tunnel mouth. “All go! All go!” they shouted, and, “Speedo!”-the English they used for, Make it snappy, Mac! Of course, a clout in the head with a rifle butt or a length of bamboo was as much a part of a universal language as a smile or a caress. Somehow, the poets had never got around to singing the praises of a good, solid wallop.

When the Japs said, “All go!” they weren’t kidding. They routed out the cooks and sent them into the tunnel, too. And they made the healthier prisoners-health being very much a relative term here-carry the men who were too sick to walk but not yet dead into the shaft. “American bomber!” they said. That made Peterson wonder. For one thing, the American attackers had shown exactly no signs of caring about the Kalihi Valley. For another, up till now the Japs had shown exactly zero interest in their prisoners’ safety. No, that wasn’t quite true. The Japs sometimes went out of their way to decrease safety for the POWs. Improving it was another story.

More or less fortified by his more-or-less meal, Peterson attacked the rock face with a pick. Other prisoners scooped up the rock he’d torn loose, loaded it into baskets, and carried it away. Peterson heard gunshots from the direction of the tunnel mouth. He didn’t think much of it-the Japs often got a wild hair up their ass-till a POW came staggering back toward the excavators. “They’re killing us!” he shouted. “They’re shooting us!” Then he fell over. Peterson marveled that he could have come so far so fast shot through the chest.

Work came to a ragged halt. One by one, picks and shovels fell silent. No guards lashed out with clubs or shouted, “Speedo!” and “Isogi!” In fact, no guards seemed to be in the tunnel at all.