Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

As if to remind him of that, puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft shells burst all around him. The Japs put up as much flak as they could. This wasn’t nearly so heavy as it had been when he flew over the Japanese carriers and their escorts, though. That had been almost thick enough to walk on. It had scared him, too. Now he had its measure. You jinked a little. You sped up and slowed down. You tried not to give them a straight shot at you. Once you’d done that, you went on with your mission. Every so often, somebody got shot down. You just hoped your number wasn’t up that particular day.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind when a Hellcat, trailing smoke, fell out of the sky and crashed into a rice paddy down below. No way the pilot could have got out-it happened too fast. “Oh, you poor, unlucky son of a bitch,” Joe said. The flak must have murdered his engine-or murdered him, so he had no chance to pull up or bail out.

A machine gun turned its winking eye Joe’s way. Those coldly frightful ice-blue Japanese tracers zipped past the Hellcat. Joe’s thumb stabbed the firing button. Red American tracers jumped out ahead of the fighter. He had six machine guns, all of them firing heavier slugs than the Jap’s weapon. Joe wouldn’t have wanted to catch a.50-caliber round. If the wound didn’t kill you, the sheer shock of getting hit was liable to.

Only a handful of Oscars and Zeros rose against the Hellcats. So did one sharp-nosed fighter of a type he hadn’t seen before. That had to be a Tony, an Army machine with an engine based on the Messerschmitt-109’s liquid-cooled in-line powerplant and not the radial engine that powered both other Japanese fighters. Tonys were supposed to be fast and well-armed. This one, beset by half a dozen Hellcats, didn’t last long enough for Joe to tell much, though it survived more battle damage before going down than other enemy planes Joe had met.

If there were more of those, they could be a royal pain, he thought. The Tony looked a hell of a lot like an Me-109. Part of that, no doubt, was the engine, which dictated the shape of the plane’s front end. But he still wondered whether some German engineers had stepped in and given the Japs a hand.

That wasn’t his worry. He and the other Hellcat pilots took turns shooting up Hickam Field, down by Pearl Harbor. Watching Japs sprint for cover was fun. Watching some of them not make it was even more fun. It didn’t feel as if he’d just shot men, any more than it had when he downed enemy airplanes. They were just… targets, and he was glad he’d hit them.

Someone else had set a bulldozer on fire. Joe admired the column of smoke that rose from it. As long as the Hellcats kept coming back, the Japs could only repair the runways at night. And early-morning visits by Dauntlesses made sure they’d have new damage to fix the next night.

You didn’t see Japanese soldiers marching along highways by regiments any more. To Joe, that was a damn shame. They’d been awful easy to shoot up then. But they weren’t fools. They’d learned better in a hurry. These days, they traveled by squads and platoons, and they stayed off the roads whenever they could. That did make it harder to strafe them. Of course, it also made it harder for them to move and to fight, which helped the gyrenes and dogfaces on the ground.

Joe looked for gun emplacements. Strafing artillery pieces was always worth doing. People said shellfire killed and wounded a lot more men than all the rounds from rifles and machine guns put together. Joe didn’t know if that was true, but he’d heard it more than once.

A lot of the Japs’ gun pits were in the jungle-covered mountains, and camouflaged with fastidious attention to detail. He spotted one gun only because he saw the muzzle flash. If not for that, he never would have known where it was. How they’d manhandled it up there was beyond him.

When he ran low on ammo, he flew back toward the Bunker Hill . One by one, his fellow pilots were breaking off, too. He laughed a little. He’d had all this training in formation flying, and here he was on his own. The Japs didn’t have enough planes in the air to make neat formations necessary any more.

A destroyer was on fire, a few miles off the coast of Oahu. Some enemy pilot had managed to get through the CAP overhead. The Japs were still giving it everything they had. They didn’t seem to realize they were fighting out of their weight-or else they just didn’t give a damn.

Destroyers and their bigger buddies needed to stay close to shore so they could pound enemy positions with their guns. The carriers cruised farther north-with luck, farther out of harm’s way. Joe didn’t see any of them in trouble, and was glad not to.

He found his own ship and lined up on her stern. After that, he did exactly what the landing officer told him to do. Not making his own decisions never failed to rattle him. That was what he was supposed to do when he was in the air. But he had to obey here. He’d seen that ever since he first tried putting down on the placid old Wolverine on Lake Erie. He believed it. He just didn’t like it.

The landing officer straightened him up, got his approach angle a little gentler, and then dropped the wigwag flags. Joe shove the stick forward. The Hellcat dove for the carrier’s deck. The tailhook missed the first arrester wire, but caught the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Joe scrambled out. The deck crew got the plane out of the way so the next Hellcat in line could land.

“Anything special she needs, sir?” one of the ratings asked.

“Ammo’s run dry,” Joe answered. “Fuel’s still okay. Engine’s behaving.” The petty officer waved and grinned and nodded.

Joe trotted across the planking to the island, and then down to the wardroom for debriefing. He looked around. Most of the fliers who’d gone out were back, but… “Where’s Sharp?” he asked.

“Didn’t you see?” somebody said. “He took a flak hit and went down. Nobody spotted a chute, so he bought the farm for sure, poor sucker.”

“Oh… That was him?” It felt like a blow in the belly.

“You okay, man?” the other flier asked. “You look a little green.”

Numbly, Joe shook his head. He tried to put some of what he felt into words: “We were roomies at the start of training. We were buddies all the way through. He was always better in class than I was. He was always better in a plane than I was, too. And now I’m here and he’s… gone?” He wouldn’t say dead, dammit. He shook his head again, and stared down at the deck so the other pilot wouldn’t see tears in his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

“That’s tough.” The other man-a guy Joe hardly knew, not the way he knew Orson Sharp (had he known anybody but his kid brother the way he knew Sharp?)-spoke with rough sympathy. “We’ve all lost friends. Fuckin’ war’s a fuckin’ mess. But what can you do? You gotta pick it up. You gotta suck it up. If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit.”

“Yeah.” Every word of that was true. None of it helped. Joe felt even more empty than he had when the Japs bombed Uncle Tony’s house. He’d got that news secondhand, after it happened. This? Hell, he’d seen Sharp go down. He hadn’t known who it was, though. Knowing would have been even worse, because it wasn’t as if he could have done anything about it.

“Just bad luck,” the other pilot said. “We’ll pay ’em back, though. We’ll pay ’em back, and then some.”

“Sure.” Joe stared down at the deck again. He imagined a house in Salt Lake City (in his imagination, it looked a lot like his house, though he knew it probably wouldn’t for real). He imagined a Western Union messenger getting off a bike or out of a car-probably off a bike, with gasoline so hard to come by these days-and going to the door with a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. And he imagined the lives of his buddy’s parents and brothers and sisters-he had a big family-turned upside down and inside out.