Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

A soldier gestured with his rifle at Takahashi. “Hey, you! Hai , you there! Get over here and give the Emperor a hand!”

“Please excuse me, but I just did,” Jiro answered. “I just finished broadcasting for Murata- san .”

“Now tell me one I’ll believe,” the Navy man said scornfully.

But one of his pals said, “Hang on-I know this guy’s voice. You’re the one they call the Fisherman, aren’t you? I listen to you whenever I can.”

“That’s me,” Jiro said. A few minutes before, he’d hated his connection to the Japanese radio. Now he used it, even if he did hate it. He shook his head. Life was stranger and more complicated than anyone could imagine till he’d put a good many miles under his keel.

“Let him go,” the second soldier urged the first. “He’s done his bit, and we’ve got plenty of warm bodies here.”

“All right. All right. Have it your way.” The first man from the special naval landing forces sounded disgusted, but he didn’t argue any more. “Go on, you,” he told Jiro. “You better keep your nose clean.”

“Domo arigato. I will, thank you.” Jiro got out of there in a hurry.

The Americans hadn’t fought much inside Honolulu. They’d surrendered when driven back to the city’s outskirts. That spared the civilian population. But surrender wasn’t in the Japanese soldier’s vocabulary. The special naval landing forces looked to be getting ready to battle it out house to house. Would anything be left standing by the time the battle was through? More to the point, did anybody on either side care?

JOE CROSETTI GULPED COFFEE IN THE BUNKER HILL ’S WARDROOM. If not for java, he didn’t know how the hell he would keep going. He’d heard the pharmacist’s mates were giving out benzedrine tablets to pilots who asked for them. He hadn’t tried to find out, not yet. He didn’t think he needed that big a kick in the pants. It had occurred to him, though.

In the seat next to his, Orson Sharp slurped from a bottle of Coke. He was serious about staying away from the “hot drinks” that were forbidden to him, but he needed a jolt, too. A couple of empties sat by his feet.

“You’re gonna be pissing like a racehorse,” Joe said. “What do you do if you’re up in your Hellcat and you gotta whizz?”

Sharp smiled what looked like a very secular smile. “Ever hear of a streetcar driver’s friend?” he asked. When Joe shook his head, his buddy explained the gadget. “Son of a bitch!” Joe said. “That’s a great idea. But what if it comes loose when you’re pulling a lot of g’s? You’ll have piss all over the inside of your flight suit, maybe all over the inside of the cockpit.”

“Hasn’t happened yet,” Sharp answered, “and I’ve flown that plane every which way but inside out. I’m thinking of writing a testimonial for the company.”

“Jeez Louise, I don’t blame you,” Joe said. “But what about your John Henry? How does it like the ‘friend’ when you weigh four times as much as you’re supposed to?”

“Everything hurts then,” Orson Sharp said matter-of-factly, which was true enough. “He’s not bruised or anything-I’ll tell you that.”

“Okay. I wish I’d thought of it myself,” Joe said. “Can you get ’em on the ship, or did you bring it aboard?”

“I brought mine, so I don’t know if you can get them or not. You’d probably do best asking the toughest-looking CPO you can find. If he can’t tell you, nobody can.”

“Makes sense. CPOs know everything-or if they don’t, they sure think they do,” Joe said. That had been a revelation to him since boarding the carrier. When he was in flight training, almost all his instructors were officers. He’d dealt with petty officers only when navigating the maze of Navy bureaucracy. Now he saw the senior ratings were the men who held things together. They might be able to run the ship better without officers than officers could without them.

A plane roared in and landed, up above their heads. The ship shook a little, but only a little. An Essex — class carrier displaced upwards of 27,000 tons; a few tons of airplane weren’t much next to that. Joe and Orson Sharp both said, “Dauntless,” at the same time. Engine noise was a dead giveaway-if you knew what you were listening for. By now, they both did.

“How does it feel, being a veteran?” Sharp asked.

Joe considered. A yawn interrupted his consideration. “Tired,” he said.

His friend nodded. “That’s the truth.” He took another swig from the wasp-waisted green glass bottle, then burped softly. “Excuse me.” His politeness was automatic; he’d been a gentleman before he became an officer. After one more swig, he went on, “We’re doing what we’ve got to do, though.”

“Oh, hell, yes.” Joe nodded vigorously. The Marines and Army men were on the ground in Oahu, and fighting their way south from the invasion beaches. It wasn’t easy or cheap- quit didn’t seem to be in the Japs’ vocabulary-but they were doing it. Some Japanese submarines still prowled around, but the enemy’s surface fleet in these waters had taken a KO. And enemy air power was on its last legs. Japan had proved naval air could beat the land-based variety. Now the USA was extending the lesson.

“Some of their pilots are awful good,” Sharp said. “I ran into this guy in an Oscar the other day. He could make that little plane sit up and beg and darn near”-he might have been the only man on the carrier who would have said darn near -“wag its tail. I had two more Hellcats with me, and we couldn’t touch him. He got out of stuff you couldn’t get out of. We never laid a glove on him-and I landed with a hole in my prop.”

“They can leave you talking to yourself, all right,” Joe agreed. “With those two little machine guns, though, they have a devil of a time hurting you, and you can get away from ’em easy as pie. As long as you don’t dogfight ’em, you’re okay.” He paused. “Did they patch you up or put a new propeller blade on?”

“New blade,” Sharp told him. “I could’ve flown without the repair if I had to-it’s only a.30-caliber hole-but why take chances? We’ve got the spares, and that’s what they’re here for.”

“Better believe it,” Joe said. “And pretty soon the Japs won’t have any planes left, or anywhere to fly them out of if they do. I don’t care how sweet a pilot you are. If you can’t get off the ground, you might as well pick up a rifle and go fight with the infantry.”

Before answering, Orson Sharp finished the Coke and set the bottle down by the other dead soldiers.

“That’s probably what happened to some of our guys after December 7.” His voice was grim.

“Yeah, it probably is.” Joe didn’t like to think about what had happened to American servicemen of any sort since Hawaii fell, but that would have been an extra humiliation on top of all the others. Not to be able to fight the way you’d trained so hard to do… “Time to pay ’em back.”

An hour later, he was in the cockpit again, buzzing towards Oahu. Orson Sharp was up there with him. Their orders were looser than they had been at the very start of the land campaign. They were supposed to shoot up anything that moved on the ground, knock down any planes that came up against them, and especially make sure the enemy didn’t have the chance to repair his airfields.

One of those fields, the one at Haleiwa, had already fallen into U.S. hands. As Joe flew above it, he saw bulldozers and steamrollers swarming over the strip to put it back in commission. He also saw artillery coming down nearby. The field wasn’t ready to use, not by a long shot. He preferred flying off a carrier deck to shellfire. Hellcats were well-protected planes, but nothing on God’s green earth would save you if you stopped a 75mm round.