Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

And he didn’t. Neither did Oscar. They glided smoothly up onto the sand. The fishermen gave them a smattering of applause. Somebody reached into his pocket and tossed Oscar a quarter. Oscar caught it out of the air with his net. That won him some more cheers. He would have got more still if he could have balanced the coin on the end of his nose.

He shrugged as he walked back to his apartment. He was a performer when he got on a surfboard. If he got paid for being a performer, what was wrong with that?

A JAPANESE OFFICER shouted in his own language. Along with the rest of the prisoners in the Pearl City camp, Jim Peterson waited for the English translation. He didn’t have to wait long. As usual, a Hawaiian-born Jap about his own age stood next to the officer. The local wore a sharp sharkskin suit. He seemed happy as a clam to serve his new bosses.

“You will be moved,” he said. “You will go to the north and central part of the island. Some of you will work in the fields. You will be well fed and well treated.”

Peterson turned his head ever so slightly toward Prez McKinley, who stood beside him. “Yeah, and the check is in the mail,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

McKinley snickered. He didn’t do it very loud, though. Guards watched the POWs. If you got out of line, they beat you. They stomped you, too, and hit you with sticks. They’d already killed at least one American. Nobody wanted to give them any excuse to go to work.

And there were probably prisoners who couldn’t be trusted. Peterson didn’t like thinking so, but it was the way to bet. Some people were out for themselves, first, last, and always. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If you can’t lick ’em, lick their boots.

The Jap with the sword on his hip shouted some more. The quisling in the sharkskin suit translated: “This move will begin in one hour. All able-bodied prisoners must go. It is an order from the Japanese Imperial Army.” The way he said it, God might have handed it to Moses on a tablet of stone.

“What about the wounded? What about the sick?” somebody called.

Questions-the mere idea that there could be questions-seemed to surprise both the translator and the officer. The officer growled something. If it didn’t mean, What the devil was that? Peterson would have eaten his hat. The local Jap spoke nervously in Japanese. The officer said something else. The translator returned to English: “They will come when they are fit. Until then, they stay here.”

“They could put most of ’em on trucks and bring ’em along,” McKinley said as the gathering broke up.

“They could, yeah, but why would they?” Peterson answered. “They can’t have a whole lot of fuel here. You think they’re going to waste it on Americans? You think they’re going to waste it on American prisoners, for crying out loud?”

“For crying out loud is right,” McKinley said. “Don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I musta been outa my tree.”

“For Japs, they’re being damn nice to give us an hour to get ready,” Peterson said. “It’s not like I’ve got a lot to pack. Outside of the clothes on my back, what I’ve got is a canteen and a deck of cards.”

“Take ’em,” Prez McKinley said. “You can kill a lot of time with cards. And fill up the canteen before you start. God knows whether those monkeys’ll give us anything, no matter what they say.”

That made more sense than Peterson wished it did. Rations had been anything but abundant here. And the Japanese didn’t bother to hide their contempt for the men who’d surrendered. Any American who gave them even the slightest excuse got beaten up. As far as the Japs were concerned, they were on top, the prisoners were on the bottom, and anybody who didn’t remember that was how things were supposed to work was asking for it.

He had to stand in line to fill the canteen. He had to stand in line for everything in the prison camp. Might as well be in the service or something, he thought wryly. The one faucet the POWs were allowed to use was at the back of what had been a park building. Two Japs in a sandbagged machine-gun nest kept an eye on the queue.

McKinley had a canteen, too. He rubbed his chin, which was sporting a pretty fair crop of grizzled whiskers. “Christ, what I wouldn’t do for some shaving soap and a razor,” he said.

Peterson nodded. “Oh, yeah. We’re all going to look like we play for the House of David before too long.”

They set out when the Japanese officer blew a whistle. It felt like about an hour to Peterson. He didn’t know for sure, having been relieved of his watch. The Jap had one on his wrist. Peterson wondered if he’d worn it when he got here, or if he’d stolen it since. He sure didn’t want to know badly enough to ask, though.

The Japanese soldiers nervously eyed the prisoners as they came out of the barbed-wire enclosure the Japs had thrown up around the park. The soldiers gestured with their rifles: this way. Every one of the rifles had a bayonet fixed to it. The long blades gleamed in the sun. They weren’t worth much in combat, but for sticking a prisoner who couldn’t fight back they’d do just fine.

Along with the other men, Peterson started to walk. The journey north was like running a newsreel backwards: the farther he went, the more distant in time the remains of the fighting were. Things seemed to go in waves that hadn’t been apparent while he crouched on the landscape with a rifle in his hand. A stretch of ground would look as if a giant had been stamping on it with hobnailed boots. That would be a place where the Americans had tried to make a stand. Then he would go forward through a few hundred yards of relatively unchewed terrain. After that would come another battered stretch of ground that would in fact have been the previous U.S. line.

Once they got out of Pearl City and onto Kamehameha Highway, there were places where the retreating Americans had blown up the road to keep Jap-run vehicles from moving forward along it. Not all the holes had been repaired. Some of them were ten feet deep and thirty feet across. The prisoners, naturally, tried to go into the fields on either side to get around them.

The guards shook their heads and gestured with their rifles. “ Kinjiru! ” they shouted.

Kinjiru! meant something like, You can’t do that! It was one of the bits of Japanese Peterson had started picking up, however little he wanted any. “What do they want us to do, Prez?” he asked Sergeant McKinley. “Go through the goddamn hole? That’s nuts.”

Nuts or not, it was what the Japs had in mind. “You make,” said one of them who knew a few words of English. “You go in.”

Plainly, none of the prisoners wanted to do that. They piled up at the edge of the crater. The guards did some more yelling. Some of the gestures they used were pretty explicit. If you don’t go in, you’re going to get it. Not a POW went forward, though.

“They can’t shoot all of us,” somebody said. Jim Peterson wished he were sure of that. For the moment, though, it seemed to be true.

One of the guards went pelting off toward the rear. “The most junior man,” McKinley remarked.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Peterson said. By now, he’d got the hang of reading Jap Army rank badges. The more gold and the less red in the background, the higher the grade. Within each grade, the more stars, the higher the rank.

For most of an hour, the standoff continued. Then that poor miserable private, his tunic now all sweaty, returned with the Japanese officer who’d started the parade and his interpreter. He looked things over, then spoke in his own language. The interpreter said, “He says you have to the count of five to obey the order you have been given. After that, the guards will begin to shoot. They will not stop shooting until you obey.”