Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

When they got inside, instructors separated them. Joe’s raked him over the coals for not following the landing officer’s signals fast enough. The gimlet-eyed men aboard the Wolverine had wasted no time radioing their complaints back to the base. They never did.

Joe took the heat and tried not to show how it stung. Actually, he thought he’d done pretty well. He’d done his damnedest-he knew that. If it wasn’t good enough… He’d just have to try to improve. You couldn’t argue. You had no excuses for anything less than perfection. A couple of cadets had complained and alibied when instructors criticized them. Joe didn’t know where they were these days. He did know they weren’t cadets any more.

When his own reaming was done, his instructor barked, “Any questions?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe replied.

The instructor’s eyebrows rose. More often than not-much more often than not-that was the wrong answer. But the instructor couldn’t presume ahead of time. “Go ahead,” he said, his voice chilly as the weather.

“Sir, we’ve lost a lot of carriers in the Pacific,” Joe said. “My question is, when do we start getting replacements?”

“Ah.” The instructor relaxed. Joe had found a question he could safely ask: it wasn’t one about his own performance. Something approaching warmth entered the older man’s voice as he replied, “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you have to understand I don’t know a whole lot more than you do here-not officially, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said eagerly. “I do follow that. But you’re hooked into the grapevine, and I’m just a dumb cadet. I don’t get the time of day, let alone the juicy stuff.”

The instructor’s face crinkled into a wide smile. Joe hadn’t been sure it had room for that much amusement, but it did. The officer said, “We’re not talking weeks, but we’re not talking years, either.”

He caught himself. “I take it back. From what I hear, the first one is only weeks away. But we’re looking at next summer before we have enough hulls in the water to go back and take another shot at the Japs.”

“Next summer.” Joe weighed that. Normally, seen with the impatience of youth, it would have seemed a million miles away. But when he looked ahead at everything he still had to do to win a place on one of those carriers… “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HAD ALWAYS SLEPT LIGHTLY. Lately, he’d been dozing and catnapping more than really sleeping. He didn’t like that at all. Air raids came every few nights now, and he expected them even on nights when they didn’t come. Worry kept him awake when sirens didn’t.

Tonight, though, the alarm was real. “Zakennayo!” he snarled as he ran for a shelter trench. “What good is it to have this fancy electronic warning if we can’t shoot down the enemy airplane once we spot it?”

As if to mock him, a couple of antiaircraft guns near the Haleiwa airstrip started barking. Wasting ammunition, he thought scornfully: they had about as much chance of hitting that stinking flying boat as he did if he stood up and threw rocks at it.

Through the guns’ racket, he caught the steady purr of the floatplane’s engines. The Americans made good motors; by comparison, a lot of Japanese aircraft sounded like flying washing machines.

Crump! Crump! Bombs fell, not too far away. Yankee raiders hadn’t hit Haleiwa for a few nights. This was the least of the airstrips on Oahu, as it had been when the Americans held Hawaii. Maybe they thought they would catch us napping. Maybe they were right, too.

A few more explosions, these more distant. Shindo wanted to hop in his Zero and go after the enemy seaplane. But night fighting was a risky business only now beginning to get specialists even in Europe, where there’d been more of it than anywhere else.

If he took off here, he’d be flying blind. He wouldn’t have radar technicians who could guide him to his target, the way English and German night-fighter pilots did. He wouldn’t have a swarm of targets to go after, either: just one seaplane on a nuisance raid. And he’d have a devil of a time getting down again, too, with all the fields on Oahu blacked out at night.

No, he had to stay where he was and do a slow burn. That, no doubt, was what the Americans had in mind. They knew how to get what they wanted, damn them.

More bombs fell, somewhere far off in the distance. Schofield Barracks? Wheeler Field? Even Honolulu? But for those distant explosions, the night was eerily silent, as most Oahu nights were. Sound could carry a long, long way.

The all-clear sounded. Shindo went back to his tent. He was too angry and too disgusted to sleep. He thought he might have had a chance to doze off-but before he could, he thought about what the Army officers stationed in Haleiwa would say. He could hear them laughing behind their hands as they asked why the Navy couldn’t keep the Yankees away from Hawaii.

He’d heard those questions before. He knew what the answer was: the Pacific was too big to let anybody keep an eye on every square kilometer of it. The Americans had found that out in the biggest possible way almost a year earlier. Now they were impressing the same lesson on the Japanese.

Shindo shrugged. The Americans could be nuisances. They were nuisances. But they weren’t going to catch Japan napping with a major attack on Hawaii. That wouldn’t and couldn’t happen. By now, the Japanese had picket boats out facing the Panama Canal as well as the U.S. mainland. If the Americans wanted another crack at these islands, they would have to take it against defenders who were alert and ready.

But even that knowledge didn’t soothe Shindo enough to let him sleep. He fumed about tonight’s raid and tossed and turned till morning painted the eastern horizon golden. Then he went to the mess and got rice with bits of salt fish in it and a cup of tea. Like tobacco, tea was a precious import. Even Japanese military personnel below officer’s rank had trouble getting their hands on any.

Some of them had taken to coffee instead. That was locally grown, though not in large amounts. Shindo thought it was nasty. But it packed the same jolt as tea, or even more, so it had its uses.

A telephone call came in from Honolulu just after Shindo finished that early breakfast. Since he was expecting it, he sounded properly subordinate to Commander Fuchida. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We will make a sweep to the north… Oh, yes, sir. If we spot anything, we’ll do our best to shoot it down or sink it.”

“Good,” Fuchida said. “It would be excellent if we could show that we are making the Americans pay.”

“I understand, sir.” What Shindo understood was that Fuchida’s superiors were breathing down his neck. But Shindo, like any fighter pilot, did want to be up in the air going after the enemy.

He told the armorers to load a 250kg bomb on the rack he’d had installed under his Zero’s belly. If he met a submarine, he wanted to be able to punish it. The bomb wouldn’t handicap him against the lumbering American flying boats he was likely to meet in these waters. It would have against Wildcats, but he didn’t expect to run into Wildcats. Wildcats meant carriers close by, and there were no American carriers close by.

Away he went, up into the sky. Certain officers-not Fuchida, to his credit-complained about how much gas searches used up. They didn’t think enough about the cost of not searching.

As Shindo flew in a widening spiral over the Pacific, he breathed in oxygenated air with the taste of rubber. That taste and flying would always be linked in his mind. For some men, it was the smell of gasoline; for others, the throbbing roar of the engine. Not to Shindo. For him, that taste said it all.