Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

When he came out of the undergrowth, he didn’t see any armorers working on those wing cannon.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

A man reloading one of his machine guns said, “So sorry, Pilot- san, but this has been an Army field for a while. Because Hayabusas don’t carry cannon, I don’t think we’ve got any 20mm ammunition.”

“Zakennayo!” Shindo exclaimed. He thought hard. “Wait a minute. You fly Donryus out of here, neh ?” The Ki-49-its name meant Dragon Swallower-was the Army’s counterpart to the Navy’s G4M bomber. It was faster, but had a much shorter range. Like the G4M, it mounted a 20mm cannon for defensive armament.

“I’m an idiot!” the armorer exclaimed. He clapped a hand to his forehead, then bowed. “Please excuse me, sir. We store ammunition for bombers separately from what fighters use.”

“I don’t care if you stow it up your back passage,” Shindo said. “Just get me some, and hurry about it.”

The armorer screamed at his colleagues. One of them dashed away. He came back fast enough to satisfy even the unhappy Shindo. No enemy airplanes had shown up, which was all to the good. Shindo wondered if he’d be able to take off again without nosing down into a hole in the ground. The run was bumpy, but he got airborne.

He would take off and land on highways if he had to. All he wanted to do was hit the Americans as hard as he could for as long as he could. But how would he get refueled if he had to land on a highway? How would the armorers reload his guns? He shrugged. For now, he had fuel and ammunition-and plenty of Americans to hit. He roared back toward the landing beaches.

JIRO TAKAHASHI STARED AT THE SCRIPT in front of him in dismay. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked up to Osami Murata in even greater dismay. “So sorry, Murata- san, but I can’t say this!”

“Why not?” the radio correspondent from Tokyo asked calmly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jiro echoed. He hoped Murata was joking, but feared he wasn’t. “It isn’t true, that’s what! How can you say-how can you have me say-all the Japanese in Hawaii support the Emperor against the USA?” Not all the Japanese in his own family supported the Emperor against the USA, as he knew too painfully well. He kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “Captain Iwabuchi has put up signs all over Honolulu that anyone who causes trouble will be shot. He’s put them up in English and Korean and Tagalog and Chinese and Japanese . He wouldn’t do that if he thought all the Japanese here were loyal.”

“Captain Iwabuchi has to fight.” Murata was patience personified. “That’s not your job. Your job is to persuade people to support the Emperor and Japan. You’ve been good at it, Takahashi- san. Now you have to keep on doing it. We need you more than ever, in fact.”

“Do you?” Jiro tried to keep the worry out of his voice. He probably ended up sounding like a machine. He knew why they needed him more than ever. The Americans were ashore on the north coast of Oahu. They hadn’t come very far yet, but they plainly ruled the air here. Japan had used that edge to win after her invasion. Couldn’t the United States do the same? He feared it could.

“Yes, we do.” Beneath his calm, beneath his good nature, Murata showed steel. “Are you sure you’re a loyal Japanese citizen yourself, Takahashi- san ?”

“I should hope I am!” Jiro said.

“Well, I should hope you are, too,” the radio man said. “But if you are, you’re going to have to prove it.” He tapped the script with an elegantly manicured fingernail. “With this!”

“Jesus Christ! Give me something I can read without wanting to go out and cut my throat afterwards!” Jiro said. “Hawaii isn’t better off under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere than it was before. Not all Japanese here love the Emperor. I wish they did, but they don’t. I don’t know what the Koreans are doing, but I don’t think they’re ‘flocking to volunteer along with their Japanese co-imperials.’ ” Koreans didn’t like being part of the Japanese Empire. The Koreans in Hawaii had made no secret of being glad they weren’t part of the Empire any more-except now they were again.

Murata waved Jiro’s complaints aside as if they came from a little boy. “We all have to do what we can, Takahashi- san, ” he said. “We’re fighting a war. It’s come here again. We didn’t want that to happen, but it did. We have to use every weapon we can get our hands on. Building morale, here and in the home islands, is one of the weapons we need. You’re scheduled to go on the air in a few minutes. Are you going to read what you’re supposed to read, or not? Reading it will help the Empire. If that doesn’t matter to you…”

He didn’t say what would happen then. By not saying, he let pictures form in Jiro’s mind. Jiro didn’t like any of those pictures. They started with bad things happening to him and went on to bad things happening to his sons and friends. None of those bad things would be hard to arrange, not at all. He played the last trump in his hand: “I’m going to complain to Chancellor Morimura.” If he reminded Murata who his friends were, maybe the man would back off.

Instead, Murata laughed uproariously. “Go ahead, Takahashi- san. Go right ahead. Who do you think wrote that script, anyway?”

“Not Chancellor Morimura?” Jiro said in something not far from horror.

With more than a little malicious glee, the broadcaster from Tokyo nodded. “The very same. Now, Takahashi- san, enough of this nonsense. Get on with it, and no more backtalk.”

Miserably, Jiro obeyed. He wondered how he could get through the program, but he’d done enough of them that he had no trouble reading the words set out before him. He thought his performance left something to be desired, but the engineer in the room next to the studio gave him a thumbs-up through the window that let the man see in.

When it was over, sweat drenched Jiro. He stumbled out of the studio. Murata waited in the hallway, all solicitude now that he’d got what he wanted. “Very good!” he said. “You see? That wasn’t so hard.”

“Whatever you say,” Jiro answered dully.

“Yes, whatever I say.” Murata had that elegant accent. He wore a fancy suit. And he had all the arrogance the Japanese conquerors had brought with them from the home islands.

Jiro had admired that arrogance when it was aimed at the local haoles. When it was pointed at him and fired like a gun… It felt different then. Amazing how different it felt. “Please excuse me, Murata- san . I’m going home.”

“So long,” Murata said, as if he and Jiro were still on friendly terms. As if we were ever on friendly terms, Jiro thought. Murata had used him, the way a man would use any tool that came in handy. I was too dumb to see it. I see it now, though. He didn’t intend to say anything about it. If he did, Hiroshi and Kenzo would only laugh at him. Hearing I told you so from his sons was the last thing he wanted.

The thick, nasty, greasy smell of burning fuel oil filled the air. He’d got used to that after the Japanese bombed the Pearl Harbor tank farms. Then, once the tanks finally burned dry, the stink went away. Now it was back. It wasn’t so strong this time, probably because Japan didn’t stow nearly so much fuel here as the USA had. But the Americans had hit what there was.

Men from the special naval landing forces and civilians worked together to build barricades and machine-gun nests at street corners. The civilians hadn’t volunteered for the duty, which didn’t mean they could get out of it. When a haole man didn’t move fast enough to suit one of the Navy men, he got the stock of an Arisaka rifle in the side of the head. Blood running down his cheek and jaw, the white man threw another chunk of rubble on the growing barricade, and then another.