Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Blast picked him up and slammed him down again like a professional wrestler. It tried to tear his lungs out through his mouth and nose. Dazed, he tasted blood. Concussion could kill without leaving visible injury. As he staggered upright again, he realized that had almost happened to him.

Closer to the crater the bomb had dug, men hadn’t been so lucky. Some of what he saw might have come straight from a butcher’s shop. Butcher’s meat, though, didn’t scrabble frantically, trying to put itself back together. Butcher’s meat didn’t scream for its mother, either.

Fletch bent over and was noisily sick. Then he yelled, “Corpsmen! We need some corpsmen over here!” That shout was rising everywhere.

He bent again, this time by an injured man. With clumsy fingers, he put on a wound bandage to slow the soldier’s bleeding. Then, almost stabbing himself in the process, he gave the man a morphine injection. The wounded soldier sighed as the drug began to take hold.

Next to him, a sergeant was using a bayonet to cut another wounded man’s throat. Considering what the bomb had left of the young man, Armitage only nodded. The sergeant was doing him a favor.

After plunging the bayonet into the ground three or four times to clean it, the sergeant looked over to him. “How the hell are we supposed to get to our deployment area now, sir?” he asked.

The column was an abbatoir. Trucks burned. Others lay on their side or upside down. Guns had been flipped about like jackstraws. “Sergeant, I’ll be damned if I can tell you,” Fletch answered. “Truth is, I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive the last few minutes to care about anything else.”

“Yeah,” the noncom said. “But we better start caring PDQ, don’t you think?”

Fletch looked around again. He saw ruin and wreckage and slaughter. He looked up to the sky. He didn’t see any more Japanese planes, for which he heartily thanked God. But that didn’t mean the bastards with the meatballs wouldn’t come back again. He also didn’t see any American planes. That didn’t surprise him. The Japs must have swept them away like kids in second grade erasing a blackboard. How the hell was his force supposed to do anything if the Japs could hit it from above whenever they pleased?

He had no idea, none in the whole wide world. But he managed a nod he hoped wasn’t too downhearted. “Yeah, Sergeant. You’re right. We’ve got to try.”

JIRO TAKAHASHI TOOK the Oshima Maru out on Sunday just like any other day. The idea of the Sabbath meant nothing to him. The Sabbath was for haoles, who’d invented the silly notion. As far as he was concerned, work was work, and one day as good for it as another.

Maybe Hiroshi and Kenzo had different ideas. If his sons did, they’d never had the nerve to say anything about them. If he’d sent them out in the sampan while he stayed home and slept, they might have. As things were, his example pulled them along. If he was willing-even eager-to get out of bed before sunrise and head for Kewalo Basin, how could they tell him they didn’t want to? They couldn’t. They hadn’t yet, anyhow.

Some sampans were coming in even as the Oshima Maru put to sea. A few men went fishing by night, trailing lights in the water to lure nehus and the tuna that fed on them. They were first to market with their catch, and so got good prices. But their expenses were higher, too-Jiro didn’t have to worry about a generator or the fuel to run it or light bulbs. The work was harder at night, too, though that fazed him much less than the extra cost did.

He set a tub of minnows down in the bottom of the sampan. A fairy tern swooped down to try to steal some of the little fish. He waved his hat. The white bird with the big black eyes flew off toward Waikiki.

“Waste time, bird!” Hiroshi said. Kenzo laughed. Jiro only shrugged. He got the Oshima Maru ’s engine going. The sampan shook and thudded with the diesel’s vibration. Out to sea they went. The sky had just started turning pale yellow, out there beyond Diamond Head. Pink would follow, and then the sun.

Today, he got out early enough to suit him. He’d cleared the defensive sea area well before sunrise. Today, other old-school fishermen would be complaining about their lazy, good-for-nothing sons. Not even Jiro could find anything wrong with his boys this morning. They’d done everything he wanted, and done it in good time, too.

He didn’t tell them so. He didn’t want them getting swelled heads. Besides, why should he praise them for merely doing what they were supposed to do? If he did, then they’d want praise for every little thing. They’d expect it, but they’d be disappointed. He wasn’t the sort to throw praise around. He never had been, and he never would be.

They chattered back and forth in incomprehensible English as the Oshima Maru skimmed over the water. When they needed to talk with him, they switched to Japanese. That was almost always pure business. They didn’t waste a lot of time on chitchat with him. This past week, with no progress in the talks in Washington, the impulse to talk had dried up even more than usual. For all his efforts to make them into good Japanese, they saw things from the USA’s point of view.

Jiro looked ahead, trying to spot a good fishing ground. Hiroshi did the same, even if he wasn’t so good at it. Kenzo stared over the sampan’s stern, back in the direction from which they’d come. Jiro almost told his younger son, “Waste time!” but figured he’d be wasting his breath.

Then Kenzo pointed north towards Oahu and spoke one word: “Look!”

The urgency in his son’s voice made Jiro turn around. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, an oath he used even though he was a Buddhist and Shintoist, not a Christian. Those black clouds on the horizon couldn’t be good news.

“That’s not Honolulu. It’s too far west,” Hiroshi said. “That’s Pearl Harbor. I wonder if some of the ammunition there blew up or something.”

Maybe he would make a proper fisherman one of these days after all. He was dead right about the direction from which the smoke was rising. Kenzo said, “I wish we had a radio on board. Then we’d know what was going on.”

As far as Jiro was concerned, a radio for the boat was more expensive than it was worth. He said, “Whatever’s going on up there, it’s got nothing to do with us. We have a day’s work ahead of us, and we’re going to do it.”

Neither Hiroshi nor Kenzo argued with that. If they’d tried, he would have knocked their heads together, and so what if he would have had to stand on tiptoe to do it? Some things simply needed doing, and he would have done what needed doing here without the least hesitation.

As things were, the Oshima Maru ’s diesel kept pounding away. Most of the smoke to the north vanished below the horizon. Jiro forgot about it. He’d find out what it was when he got home. In the meantime, there were fish to catch. If his sons wanted to go on about Pearl Harbor while they worked, he didn’t mind-as long as they did work.

He steered the sampan to what he thought would be a good spot. Boobies plunged into the sea nearby. That said there were small fish around. Where there were small fish, there could be tuna to feed on them. He killed the motor. The sampan glided to a stop, alone on the Pacific-alone but for that nasty smoke smudge in the north, anyhow. Whatever had happened to Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t anything small.

Again, Jiro made himself shove that aside. He picked up a tub of bait minnows and poured them into the ocean. Away they streaked: little silver darts racing in all directions. “Come on,” he told Hiroshi and Kenzo. “Let’s get the lines in the water and see how we do today.”