Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

How long before Japan could muster even one? That, he feared, would take much longer.

Admiral Yamamoto had foreseen all this. Even back when they were first beginning to plan the Pearl Harbor operation and the assault on Hawaii, Yamamoto had feared these blows wouldn’t be enough. Their success had bought Japan almost two years to conquer and consolidate. Genda hoped his country had done enough in that time to ready itself for the blows that lay ahead.

He hoped so, yes, but he doubted he would be around to see one way or the other. “Karma, neh ?” he said to Yamashita. “Shigata ga nai.” He was here because of a plan he’d offered to Admiral Yamamoto. Without it, the Japanese fleet would have struck at Oahu and then withdrawn. Genda shook his head. Bad as this was, that would have been worse. The Americans would have kept this excellent base. They would have caused Japan trouble far sooner than they were able to here in the real world.

“Things do not always happen as we wish they would,” Yamashita said. “Our troubles here, the difficulties Germany is having in Russia…”

“Yes,” Genda said. And there was another irony. Japan and the USSR were neutral. Soviet freighters could and did travel across the Pacific from Vladivostok to the U.S. West Coast and pick up arms and munitions to use against Japan’s European allies. No one interfered with them in any way. War and diplomacy were curious businesses.

Antiaircraft guns started booming. Genda didn’t hear American fighters roaring in at treetop height to shoot up anything that moved. Instead, the rumble of engines was deeper and quieter at the same time: the planes making the racket were flying high. To Genda’s embarrassment, Yamashita realized what was going on before he did: “Their damned bombers are back!”

He moved not a muscle. When he didn’t seek shelter, Genda could hardly do so, however much he wanted to. While they could still get planes off the ground, the Japanese had sent bombers of their own to Kauai to strike back at the planes that had dealt their airfields such a devastating blow. The pilots had reported wrecking a lot of them. Plainly, they hadn’t wrecked enough.

Just as plainly, the American logistical push was even more impressive than Genda had thought. Those U.S. heavy bombers must have got to Kauai as near dry as made no difference. The Americans had brought along enough fuel to get a lot of them airborne again, along with bombs for them to carry.

Maybe we should have put bigger garrisons on the other islands, Genda thought. But Oahu was the one that really counted. Either Japan would have had to pull men from here or brought in more troops overall, which meant more mouths to feed. It hadn’t seemed worthwhile.

The ground shook under Genda as bombs burst only a few hundred meters away. Yamashita sat, impassive, in front of the map. Maybe he’d already resigned himself to death, now or before too long. Genda supposed he ought to do the same. A warrior had to, after all. But achieving that indifference, he found, came harder than it should have.

“YOU SURE YOU OUGHT TO GO TO WORK?” OSCAR VAN DER KIRK ASKED SUSIE.

“These Japs in town nowadays, they’ve got blood in their eye.”

“I’ll be okay.” Susie was wearing the frumpiest dress she owned, but nothing on God’s green earth would make her look like Margaret Dumont. She went on, “They’re not going to shoot me any which way,” and batted those cat-blue eyes at him.

There were times when he didn’t know whether to laugh or to pop her one. He ended up laughing now, because she would have hit back or thrown things if he did try to pop her. “You’ve got to worry about the other, too,” he said stubbornly. “Some of the things I’ve heard about those bastards-”

Susie made an impatient gesture. “We’ve heard that stuff about the Japs ever since they got here.”

“Some of it’s true, too,” Oscar said.

“Some of it, yeah, but not all of it. Most of the time, they haven’t been too bad,” Susie said. As far as Oscar was concerned, that was damning with faint praise, but Susie would do whatever she felt like doing. If the world didn’t like it, that was the world’s tough luck. As if to prove as much, she picked up her handbag, kissed him good-bye-a long, slow, delicious kiss, as if to give him something to look forward to when she got back that evening-and went out the door.

“Jesus,” Oscar said hoarsely, listening to her footsteps receding down the hall. He shook his head, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. It didn’t want to. Susie was a hell of a piece of work-a hell of a piece, period-no two ways about it.

Still shaking his head, he gathered up his sailboard and carried the contraption down to Waikiki Beach. To his relief, the Japs hadn’t cordoned it off with barbed wire. But they did have machine-gun nests and mortar positions camouflaged with golden sand every fifty yards or so along the beach, and more of those half-soldier, half-sailor types trotting here and there.

Fortunately, one of their noncoms or ratings or whatever the hell he was had seen Oscar before. Oscar bowed to him-not easy when he had the big, clunky surf board under one arm and the mast and rigging and sail in his other hand, but he managed. The Jap even deigned to bow back, though not so deeply. More to the point, the tough-looking little man waved him on toward the Pacific.

“Thanks,” Oscar said, and then, “Arigato.” He knew only a handful of Japanese words, but he’d learned that one long before the war started. It came in handy all kinds of places. And it sure came in handy now. The Jap’s face lit up; his grin exposed several gold teeth. He bowed again, this time as equal to equal, and shouted to his men. Oscar couldn’t understand any of it, but by the way they smiled and nodded it must have been good. How to win friends and influence people, he thought.

The Japanese had chased the fishermen off the beach, but they let Oscar paddle out to sea. They were used to him, and didn’t think he was heading out to a submarine or anything like that. Only he knew about the submarine he’d met. He hadn’t even told Susie, though he had asked the sub’s skipper to get word to her family on the mainland that she was all right.

He ran up his mast, rigged the sail, and scooted out to sea on the breeze from off the hills in back of Honolulu. Even as the land receded, he could still hear the rumble of artillery off in the distance. It made him think about things in a way he hadn’t for quite a while. If his countrymen took over again, could he patent the sailboard? If he could, there was probably money in it. He’d done without much money for a long time. Having some might be nice.

He’d got out far enough to think about dropping his hooks into the Pacific when he spotted something floating on the water. It was too small to be a boat, and it wasn’t going anywhere, just bobbing on the swells. Curious, he swung the sailboard towards it.

He’d just realized it was a rubber raft when a head popped up out of it. “Hey, mac, what the hell you call that thing you’re on?” the head’s possessor asked in purest Brooklynese.

“A sailboard,” Oscar answered automatically. He had questions of his own: “Who are you? Are you okay? How’d you get here? Want me to help you get to land?”

“A sailboard? Ain’t that somethin’? What’ll they think of next?” The guy in the raft jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Name’s Nick Tversky. Yeah, I’m jake-not a fuckin’ scratch on me. Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good, ya know? Goddamn Nip flak tore hell outta my engine, but the shit all missed me. Can you get me ashore without letting everybody from Tojo on down in on where I’m at?”