Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

The rest of the U.S. task force-destroyers, cruisers, and battleships-lay close inshore, so their big guns could shell the Japanese. They went at it methodically. Why not? No one could hit back at them. Shindo didn’t intend to. These ships, however impressive (and they put the biggest Japanese fleet to shame), weren’t the ones that really mattered. He wanted the carriers.

They steamed farther offshore, to make sure nothing from Oahu could reach them. Lieutenant Shindo smiled again. Something from Oahu was heading their way anyhow.

There they were! They had destroyers around them to protect against submarines and to deliver antiaircraft fire. They must have long since picked him up on radar. Even if they had, though, they didn’t think he was hostile.

Then he muttered, “Zakennayo!” The carriers still had a combat air patrol overhead. Here came a Wildcat to look him over. Just in case, the pilot was bound to be thinking. Shindo could survive a lot of things, but not close visual inspection. He knew the moment when the enemy flier realized what he was. The Wildcat suddenly sped up and started jinking.

The American thought he could win a dogfight. A lot of Wildcat pilots made the mistake against a Zero. They hardly ever made it more than once. This Yankee wouldn’t. Shindo turned inside him, got behind him, shot him up, and sent him spinning down toward the Pacific.

But the Wildcat pilot must have radioed his buddies. They all swarmed toward Shindo. He’d just run out of leisure. Things would happen in a hurry now. He dove toward the closest carrier. The Americans still didn’t space them out as widely as they should have. If the Japanese could have organized a real attack, they might have mauled this task force. As things were, Shindo could only do his best.

Antiaircraft guns opened up on him as he dove. The ships down below had finally figured out he wasn’t one of theirs. The closest carrier wasn’t a big one. He didn’t care. If he could hit it, he would.

He pulled the bomb-release lever. The bomb fell free. It exploded on the flight deck. Shell fragments or machine-gun bullets slammed into the Zero as it zoomed away. The engine coughed. Smoke trailed from the plane.

“Karma,” Shindo said. Sure enough, this was a one-way mission. He would have been angrier and more disappointed if he’d expected anything else.

He flew on toward the next nearest carrier, hoping his plane wouldn’t go into the drink before he got there. A Wildcat dove on him. He did a snap roll and got away. That changed his direction. There was another carrier, not far ahead. It was landing planes, and had lots of them on the flight deck. Perfect.

He gained a little altitude, then dove as if landing himself. Inside the cockpit, he braced himself for the impact, not that that would do any good. “ Banzai!” he shouted as the flight deck swelled below him.

“Ban-”

JOE CROSETTI RAN FOR THE BUNKER HILL ’S island after scrambling out of his Hellcat. He wondered why some nearby ships were firing AA like it was going out of style. He wouldn’t have believed the Japs had any planes left.

What he believed didn’t matter worth a damn. He got his nose rubbed in that a moment later. A sailor pointed to starboard and screamed, “Holy fucking shit, it’s a Jap!”

And it was. The Zero was on fire. It skimmed low over the surface of the Pacific, straight for the Bunker Hill. Joe stared in helpless fascination. What the hell was that pilot thinking? He couldn’t be crazy enough to try to land on an American carrier, could he? He’d get shot to pieces before he could open the cockpit. And even if that weren’t so, he wasn’t lined up anyway.

He rose a little, then dove for the deck. Crosetti couldn’t believe he was going to crash his plane on purpose till he did it. The Zero went up in a fireball. So did half a dozen Hellcats.

“Fire!” Joe yelled. “Fire on the flight deck!”

A flightcrew man came running out of the inferno. His clothes were on fire-he might have been on fire, too. He screamed like a damned soul with devils sticking pitchforks into him.

“Down!” Joe shouted. “Down and roll!” That was what everybody got trained to do. Remembering the training when things hit the fan wasn’t so easy. Joe was still in his flight suit, with the heavy leather jacket. He wasn’t a big guy, but he dashed across the deck, tackled the flightcrew man, lay atop him and beat at the flames with his gloved fists. When most of the fire was out, somebody turned a hose on them for a few seconds. The man behind the hose had the sense to turn the nozzle to mist, not stream. Otherwise, the high-pressure water might have blasted them off the flight deck and into the drink.

Medics came up and hustled the burned man below. “How about you, buddy?” one of them asked Joe.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he answered dazedly. Gloves or not, he’d burned his hands. He had a burn on one cheek, too-he could feel it. But he was in one piece, nothing like the poor bastard who’d come out of that inferno.

The medic slapped ointment onto his cheek. It stung, then soothed. “You did good,” the guy said, then hustled away to look for more casualties.

He wouldn’t have to look far. That Jap had been a bastard, but a brave bastard. He’d done as much to the Bunker Hill as he could. Planes were still burning despite the ocean water the hoses poured on them. Burning gasoline and oil floated on top of the water, and had to be drowned or washed over the side.

If that Zero smashed down half a minute earlier… Joe shuddered. He would have been right in the middle of the fireball.

Now all he could do was help hang on to a hose that tried to defeat the flames. His burned hands screamed at him. He ignored them. The burns weren’t all that bad, and he didn’t think he was making them worse. He’d worry about it later any which way.

“Did you see that fucker?” asked the petty officer behind him. “You see the way he crashed that goddamn plane?”

“I sure did,” Joe answered. The CPO who held the nozzle doused a burning Hellcat that might have been his. “If he’d done it a little earlier, he would have got me.” There. He’d said it. The sky didn’t fall. But he didn’t think he would ever have the feeling that nothing could happen to him, not any more. Now he was just another-what had some wise guy called it? — another fugitive from the law of averages, that was it.

“He knew he was screwed, so he screwed us, too,” the petty officer said. “How the hell do you stop a guy who already knows he’s gonna buy a plot?”

“We didn’t,” Joe said.

“No shit!” the petty officer agreed. “Can you imagine what it would be like if a hundred o’ them Jap bastards tried to crash their planes into carriers and battlewagons all at once? They could fuck up the whole goddamn U.S. Navy.”

Joe thought about it. The idea was scary, but only for a moment. He shook his head. “Never happen, buddy. No way in hell. Where you gonna find a hundred guys crazy enough to kill themselves like it was close-order drill? Not even the Nips are that nuts.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” the petty officer said after some thought of his own. “You’d have to be Asiatic to do somethin’ like that, and not even the Japs are Asiatic that kind of way.” He pointed to an escort carrier off to starboard. A column of smoke rose from that ship, too. “Bastard must have put a bomb into her-either that or another plane got her.”

“Bomb, I think,” Joe said. “You can stick a bomb under just about any fighter. There was just the one plane, wasn’t there?”

“Well, I thought so,” the rating answered. “Now I ain’t so sure. God, what a fucking mess this turned out to be.”