Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He could tell when they learned what Fuchida had said. They’d worked on the bomb racks before that, but in slow motion. All at once, they got serious about the project. Things that shouldn’t have taken very long suddenly didn’t take very long. Only a few days later than they would have if they’d worked flat-out from the start, they had the racks on every Zero at Haleiwa.

Shindo was the first man to test one. He didn’t want any of the people he led doing something he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself. He had the armorers load a light practice bomb into the rack and took his Zero up. It did feel a little sluggish with the bomb attached; the mechanics were right about that. The problem wasn’t bad, though.

He picked a target not far from the airstrip; a boulder poking up through the grass did duty for a surfaced submarine. He thumbed the new button the mechanics had installed on the instrument panel. The bomb fell free.

He didn’t hit the boulder, but he frightened it. A sub made a much bigger target, and he would have been carrying a much bigger bomb. If he’d put that bomb so close to a submarine, he was sure he would have hurt it.

Back to the airstrip he went; there wasn’t a lot of fuel for practice. Groundcrew men guided his plane back to its camouflaged revetment. In spite of the fuel shortage, he told his pilots, “I want all of you to get as much practice as you can. This is important. The better you get when it doesn’t count, the better you’ll do when it does.”

The pilots nodded, almost in unison. Most of them were veterans of the Pearl Harbor strikes that had opened the war in the Pacific. They knew what meticulous planning and preparation were worth.

Let me find a submarine, Shindo thought. Let me find one, and I’ll give it a nasty surprise.

WERE THOSE THE CRATERS of the moon down there? Joe Crosetti knew better, but the bombing range had sure as hell taken a beating. He held the Texan in a dive, watching height peel off the altimeter. When he got down to 2,500 feet, he released the bomb that hung beneath the trainer.

The Texan wasn’t a dive bomber, any more than it was a fighter. But it could impersonate either. Joe pulled back hard on the stick to bring the plane’s nose up and get it out of the dive. When you were down to half a mile off the ground, you didn’t have much margin for error, even in a plane a lot more sedate than one you would take into combat.

“Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said-about as much praise as he ever gave. “Take her back to the base and land her.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Joe had to look around to figure out where he was and in which direction Pensacola Naval Air Station lay. That didn’t matter much here-he had plenty of landmarks to guide him back. With only ocean between his plane and a carrier, it might not be so good.

Some guys seemed to have a compass between their ears. They always knew right where they were and how to get where they were going without fuss, muss, bother, or visible calculation. Joe suspected Orson Sharp was like that. His roomie was a strange bird, but a damn capable one. He wished he could find home as automatically as he reached into his pocket for a half-dollar. But navigation didn’t come easy for him.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t navigate, only that doing it was hard work. He put the Texan down in a landing he was proud of. If he’d been that neat when he soloed in it… But he had more experience now. The more experience he got, the more he realized how much it mattered.

“I know you want to be a fighter jockey,” the instructor said as they climbed out of the Texan.

“Yes, sir,” Joe agreed.

“That’s fine,” the older man told him. “But if you don’t get what you want, you can strike at the enemy in a dive bomber, too. If anything, you can strike harder. Fighters fight other airplanes. Dive bombers fight the ships that carry airplanes.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said again. It wasn’t that the other officer was wrong-he wasn’t. But Joe had had his heart set on flying a fighter since before he volunteered for the naval aviation program. Oh, sure, a Dauntless could make a Jap battlewagon or carrier very unhappy-but it was such a lumbering pig in the air next to a Wildcat!

“Okay.” The instructor sounded wryly amused. No doubt he knew just what Joe was thinking. Fighter pilots got the glory, and glory could look mighty good to a kid getting close to finishing flight school.

Joe hustled back to his dorm room to work on trig problems he’d have to turn in that afternoon. No, navigation wasn’t easy for him. That just meant he had to sweat it out the hard way.

The door flew open. In burst Orson Sharp. Joe stared at him. Joe, in fact, dropped his pencil. His roommate looked excited, and Sharp was usually cool as a cucumber. “What’s up?” Joe asked.

“You haven’t heard?” Sharp demanded.

“Nope.” Joe shook his head. “If I had, would I be asking you?”

“No, I guess not.” The kid from Utah nodded to himself. “Word is, we’re going to have one of the pilots off the Yorktown talk to us this afternoon.”

“Wow!” Joe forgot all about trigonometry. This was bigger news than any navigation problem. The Yorktown lay at the bottom of the Pacific, somewhere north of Hawaii. The Japs had sunk her in the failed U.S. attack against the islands. “Not many of those guys left.”

Orson Sharp nodded. “I should say not. They had to ditch in the ocean and hope a destroyer would pick them up.” That wasn’t the only reason there weren’t many Yorktown pilots left. Japanese fliers had taken a savage toll on them. Sharp didn’t mention that, and Joe didn’t dwell on it.

Cadets weren’t in the habit of ditching classes anyhow, but the hall where the pilot would speak was packed tighter than a cable car with a tourist convention in town. The navigation instructor, whose class the pilot was taking, was a dour lieutenant commander named Otis Jones. He’d pulled every string he knew how to pull to get sea duty, but he was still here. That no doubt helped make him dour. All the same, Joe was convinced he’d been born with a lemon in his mouth.

Now he said, “Gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you Lieutenant Jack Hadley, formerly of the USS Yorktown, soon to return to one of the carriers now building. Lieutenant Hadley!”

Hadley came out and saluted Jones. The cadets gave the fighter pilot a standing ovation. He eyed them with an aw-shucks grin. He wasn’t much older than they were; some of them might have been older than he was.

“Thanks, guys,” he said. Like his clean-cut blond good looks, his flat vowels said he came from somewhere in the Midwest. Being around cadets from all over the country had made Joe way better at placing accents than he’d ever needed to be back in San Francisco. Hadley went on, “Why don’t all of you sit down again? And if you don’t mind too much, I’m gonna do the same thing.”

No matter what Lieutenant Commander Jones said, Hadley wasn’t going back to sea right away. He walked with a pronounced limp and carried a cane. A nasty burn scar showed below his left shirt cuff; Joe wondered how far up his arm it went, and what other wounds his summer whites concealed. When Jones brought him a chair, he sank into it rather stiffly, and sat with his left leg, the bad one, out straight in front of him.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Jones, who nodded brusquely and sat down himself at a front-row desk he’d saved with a homemade RESERVED sign. Jack Hadley looked out at the crowded room again. “You’ve got to remember, gentlemen: I don’t have a whole lot of experience against the Japs myself. But what I’ve got is more than most Americans have, so here’s how it looks to me.