Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“Here,” he said, and thrust a typed sheet of paper at each of them.

Kenzo looked down at his. It stated that he’d been certified loyal and had full privileges of citizenship in spite of his race and national origin. “Oh, boy,” he said in a hollow voice. Hiroshi looked as thrilled as he sounded.

“What’s the matter? You’ve got what you wanted, don’t you?” the lieutenant said.

“What I want is for people to think I’m loyal till I do something that makes ’em think I’m not,” Kenzo answered. “That’s what America’s supposed to be about, right? This says you thought my brother and me were disloyal till we showed you we weren’t. See the difference?”

“Maybe.” If the officer saw, he didn’t care. “Maybe it’ll work that way one of these days. I don’t know. What I do know is, there were local Japs who played footsie with the occupation. Your father did. Okay, so it looks like you didn’t. Terrific. You’re free to go. If you want a medal for doing what any loyal American was supposed to do, forget about it.”

“What do we do now?” Hiroshi asked.

“Whatever you want. Like I said, you’re free to go. If you’re smart, though, you’ll hang on to those letters and show ’em whenever you have to.” The lieutenant jerked a thumb toward the tent flap. “Go on, get out of here. Beat it.”

Out they went. The guards outside started to lead them back into the internment camp. Kenzo displayed his letter. The corporal in charge of the guards read it, moving his lips. He grudgingly nodded. “I guess they’re legit,” he told his men.

“Fuck ’em. They’re still Japs,” one of the soldiers said.

“Yeah.” The corporal scowled at Kenzo and Hiroshi. “I don’t know how you conned your way into those papers, but you better find somewhere else to be, and I mean now.”

They left as fast as they could. Hiroshi grimaced against the pain in his leg, but he didn’t let it slow him down. Kenzo looked out at the wreckage of the city where he’d lived his whole life. He had to glance toward Diamond Head to get a notion of just where he was. Not enough still stood in these parts to tell him.

Later, he supposed, he would go over to the Sundbergs’ and see how Elsie was doing. He wondered how often he would have to display his loyalty letter between here and there.

“Free,” he said tightly. “Right.”

LES DILLON’S PLATOON CAMPED on the cratered ground outside Iolani Palace. Even now, they kept sentries out. A few Japanese snipers were still running around loose. Just the other day, one of them had wounded a guy near what was left of Honolulu Hale before the Marines hunted him down and sent him to his ancestors.

The stench of death lingered in the air. A lot of bodies remained in the wreckage. Sooner or later, bulldozers would knock things down and either get them out or cover them up. It hadn’t happened yet.

Somebody in a clean new uniform approached the perimeter. Seeing unfaded, untorn, unstained olive drab automatically roused Les’ suspicions. Another worthless replacement for a Marine who’d known what he was doing but hadn’t been lucky? But this guy walked up with an air of jaunty confidence and had a cigar clamped between his teeth.

“Dutch!” Les shouted. “You son of a bitch!”

“Yeah, well, I love you, too, buddy,” Dutch Wenzel answered. His hand was still bandaged, but he showed he could open and close his fingers. “They decided not to waste cargo space shipping me back to the mainland, so here I am.”

“Good to see you. Good to see anybody who knows his ass from third base,” Les said. “Some of what we’re getting to fill casualty slots…” He shook his head, then laughed. “They must’ve been saying the same crap about me when I went into the line in 1918.”

“They were right, too, weren’t they?” Wenzel said. Les affectionately cuffed him on the side of the head. Wenzel looked around. “Boy, we liberated the living shit out of this place, didn’t we?”

“Bet your ass,” Dillon said, not without pride. Iolani Palace would never be the same. Half of it-maybe more than half-had fallen in on itself. Somebody’d put up a flagpole on the ruins, though. The Stars and Stripes flew from it. Les figured he would start selling sweaters in hell before the old Territorial flag showed up again. Nothing like being used by a collaborator king to turn it unpopular in a hurry.

Over to the east, Honolulu Hale was in even worse shape. Being a modern building, the city hall was more strongly made than the old royal palace. That meant the Japs had used it for a fortress. After gunfire from tanks and artillery pieces leveled it, Marines and Army troops had to clear out the surviving Japs with flamethrowers and bayonets. The Stars and Stripes flew over that pile of wreckage, too. Les was proud to see the Star-Spangled Banner waving, but he wasn’t sorry to have missed that fight. He’d been in enough of them, and then some.

The rest of Honolulu wasn’t in much better shape. Even the buildings that still stood had pieces bitten out of them. The Japs had made a stand, or tried to, in just about every stone or brick building in town. They’d taken it out on civilians, too, which only added to the stench in the air.

Les sighed, thinking of what was left of the honky-tonks on Hotel Street: not bloody much. “This town is never gonna be the same,” he said.

“This whole island is never gonna be the same,” Dutch Wenzel said. “Pineapples? Sugar cane? All that crap’s down the drain now. Nothin’ but fuckin’ rice paddies left. The Doles’ll be on the dole, by God.” He laughed at his own wit.

So did Les. “Who’s gonna worry about any of that for a while?” he said. “Who’s gonna worry about cleaning up this mess here, either? Only thing anybody’s gonna give a damn about is getting this place ready to fight from. Hickam and Wheeler are up again, so the carriers don’t all have to hang around, but Christ only knows how long it’ll be before we can use Pearl again.”

“Tell me about it,” Wenzel said. “More wrecks in there-ours and the Japs’-than you can shake a stick at. All the fuel burned or blown up, the repair yards smashed to scrap… It’ll be a while yet.”

“Reckon so.” Les lit a cigarette, partly to fight the stink from his friend’s cigar. He looked north and west.

“Even before then, we’ve gotta clear those bastards off of Midway and Wake-especially Midway. I won’t be sorry to get rid of Washing Machine Charlie.” Bettys from Midway could reach Oahu. Every few nights, a handful of them would buzz overhead, drop their bombs, and then head for home. They were only an annoyance… unless one of those bombs happened to come down on you.

Wenzel nodded. “Yeah, the sooner that starts, the better. And after we take care of those places-well, it’s wherever we go next, that’s all.”

“Wherever the fuck it is, they’ll need Marines,” Les said positively. Dutch Wenzel nodded again. Both of them looked west, towards islands whose names and dangers they didn’t know. Les blew out a cloud of smoke. “Wonder how many of us’ll be left by the time it’s all over. Enough, I expect.” Dutch nodded one more time.

ONLY A FEW HUNDRED JAPANESE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS had been captured in the downfall of Oahu. The Americans kept them in a camp not far from Pearl City, near the northern tip of Pearl Harbor.

Yasuo Furusawa suspected one reason the Americans did that was to let their prisoners watch them at work. Getting Pearl Harbor usable again would have taken Japan years, if the Japanese had tried at all. Furusawa would have judged it an impossibly big job. The Americans threw more machines at it than he would have guessed there were in all the home islands put together. They had plenty of fuel, too, even if they were bringing every liter of it from the mainland.