Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He’d hoped his old man could do something about that-find out who the soldiers were, get them in trouble, something. No such luck. The way his father looked at things, the beating was his own damn fault. If he hadn’t got the soldiers mad at him, they would have left him alone. That they’d wanted to gang-rape his girlfriend had nothing to do with anything.

“Pay attention,” Hiroshi said again. “We’re not just running before the wind this time.”

“I know. I know.” Kenzo couldn’t very well help knowing. They had the wind to starboard. They were sailing west to try their luck in the Kaieiewaho Channel, between Oahu and Kauai. They hadn’t caught much sailing south lately; those waters were getting fished out. Not so many sampans headed this way: that was what Hiroshi had concluded after listening to a good deal of fishermen’s gossip. Kenzo hoped his brother turned out to be right.

“What’s going on there?” Hiroshi pointed north, towards Oahu.

“Huh?” Kenzo had been thinking about Elsie again. His eyes followed Hiroshi’s forefinger. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

A swarm of Japanese planes was rising from what had been Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor. As the two Takahashi brothers watched, they shook themselves out into formation and flew north.

“Some kind of drill?” Kenzo hazarded.

“Maybe.” Hiroshi didn’t sound convinced. “They’re always grousing about how they don’t have a hell of a lot of gasoline, though. That’s a lot of planes to send up on an exercise.”

“Yeah. But what else could it be?” Kenzo answered his own question before his brother could: “Maybe the good guys are getting frisky again.” The good guys. He’d thought of the USA that way even before the Japanese soldiers literally jumped on him with both feet, of course. Now his feelings for the country in which he was born had doubled and redoubled. So had his fear that he wouldn’t get credit for those feelings no matter what. If the Americans came back to Hawaii-no, when they came back-what would he be? Just another Jap, and one whose father was a collaborator.

For now, he needed to remember he was a fisherman first and foremost. The winds got tricky as the Oshima Maru rounded Barbers Point, at the southwestern corner of Oahu, and even trickier once they passed Kaena Point, the island’s westernmost extremity. By then it was late afternoon.

“Don’t you think we ought to get more out into the middle of the channel before we drop our lines?” Kenzo asked.

Hiroshi shook his head. “That’s what everybody else does.”

As far as Kenzo could see, everybody else did it for a perfectly good reason, too: the fish were most likely to be there. But he didn’t argue with his brother. He’d argued with too many people over too many things lately. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Have it your way.” They were sure to catch enough to keep themselves eating. If they didn’t catch more than that, Hiroshi would have to go out into the middle of the channel… wouldn’t he?

He dumped bait-minnows and offal-into the Pacific. He and Kenzo lowered the lines into the blue, blue water. “Now we wait,” Hiroshi said, a sentence that could have passed from one fisherman to another anywhere in the world since the beginning of time.

A mackerel leaping out of the water not far from the sampan told Kenzo catchable fish swam nearby. It told Hiroshi the same thing; he looked as smug as their father did when Japan figured out some new way to make things tough on the USA. Kenzo damn near told him so, but that would have started an argument, too.

When they hauled up the lines, they brought in ahi and aku and mahi-mahi -and some sharks with them. The next little while was the frantic part of the operation. They gutted fish and got them in the storage hold as fast as they could. One of the sharks, about a three-footer, almost bit Kenzo and kept flopping and thrashing even after he’d torn out its insides.

“Damn things really don’t die till after sundown,” he said.

“You’d better believe it. They-” Hiroshi broke off. He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”

“I don’t hear anything.” Kenzo paused-he’d just made a liar of himself. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I do. Sounds like thunder.”

Hiroshi snorted, and with reason: the day was fine and clear, with hardly a cloud in the sky. “Pick something that makes sense, why don’t you?”

“Okay. Maybe it’s bombs.” Kenzo said the first thing that popped into his mind. Once he’d said it, though, he realized how much sense it made. The low rumbles were coming from the direction of Oahu, sure as hell. Hope tingled through him. “Maybe the Americans are really paying a call.”

“It’d be a big one if they are,” Hiroshi said, which was true, for the noise went on and on. Since neither one of them could do anything about it, they both went back to gutting fish.

A few minutes later, Kenzo looked east again. When he didn’t return to work right away, Hiroshi looked that way, too. They whistled softly at the same time. Thick columns of black, greasy-looking smoke were climbing up over the Waianae Range. “That is an air raid, a damn big one,” Kenzo said. After gauging the position of the smoke plumes, he added, “Looks like they’re pounding the crap out of Schofield and Wheeler.”

“Looks like you’re right,” Hiroshi said once he’d made the same calculations. “They’ve got to be hitting other places, too, only we can’t see those from where we’re at.”

“Yeah.” Kenzo hadn’t thought of that, but his brother was bound to be right. Wheeler Field was one of the most important airstrips on Oahu. If the Americans hit that one, they’d hit Hickam and Ewa and Kaneohe and the others, too. And if they were hitting airstrips like that… “Maybe the invasion’s really on!”

“Maybe. Jesus Christ, I hope so,” Hiroshi said. “About time, if it is.”

The intermittent thunder of explosions ceased. But the rumble from the east didn’t. If anything, it got louder. Kenzo suddenly pointed. “Will you look at that?”

“Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, this time in tones approaching real reverence. The sky was full of planes, streams of them, and they were flying west, from Oahu toward Kauai. That took a lot of them right over the Oshima Maru.

Kenzo and Hiroshi stared up in open-mouthed awe. Kenzo had seen pictures of B-17s before the war started. Some of the big four-engined bombers matched what he remembered of those pictures. Others were a new breed, with longer, narrower wings and tails with twin rudders. The roar of the engines overhead seemed to make the sampan vibrate.

“Where are they going to land?” Hiroshi whispered.

“Beats me,” Kenzo answered. He hadn’t known Kauai had an airstrip long enough to land planes that big. Maybe the Japanese had built one, although he thought they’d done as little as they could on all the islands except Oahu. Still, he didn’t figure that swarm of bombers would have headed for Kauai if they didn’t have somewhere to put down.

“We’ll tell our grandchildren about this day,” Hiroshi said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “Let’s just hope we live to have ’em.”

WHEN CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU HEARD THE AIR-RAID sirens go off, he didn’t worry much. Another American nuisance raid, he thought. The Americans sent seaplanes over Hawaii the way Japan sent them over the U.S. West Coast. They’d drop a few bombs, and then they’d either get shot down or go away.

But orders were orders. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Out of the barracks and into the trenches. Put the cards and the go boards away. You can pick up the games when you come back.”