Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“ Ichi,” the officer said. The interpreter held up one finger. “ Ni.” Two fingers. “ San.” Three… The guards raised their rifles to their shoulders and stared down the barrels.

Peterson didn’t find out how to say four or five in Japanese. With almost identical frightened moans, half a dozen prisoners in the front ranks plunged down into the crater. They floundered over to the other side and started scrambling up toward the asphalt once more. Other men followed them. As soon as a couple made it up onto the highway again, they reached into the hole in the ground to help their buddies climb out.

Along with everybody else, Peterson went through the hole. He was filthy and weary by the time he made it to the other side. Going around would have saved time. It would have been ever so much easier. But it wasn’t what the Japs wanted.

“You know what they’re doing?” he said as the march north resumed.

“Lording it over us, you mean?” Prez McKinley said, trying without much luck to get the dirt off his tunic.

“Yeah, that, too,” Peterson answered. “But they’re breaking us, taming us, like you’d break a mustang or something.”

McKinley muttered to himself. It sounded like, “Try and break me, will they?” And maybe he had a point. But maybe not, too. If the Japs could get the Americans to do what they wanted without making a fuss for fear something worse would happen if they didn’t, wouldn’t that be enough to keep them happy? What more could they want, egg in their beer?

Plenty of people were out in the fields, cutting down sugarcane and pulling up pineapple plants. The Big Five, the companies that had run Hawaii ever since the annexation, were probably having heart attacks. What the Big Five thought was the least of Jim Peterson’s worries. What he saw here actually made some sense. If Hawaii couldn’t import what it needed from the mainland, it would have to grow its own food. People were taking the first steps in that direction, anyhow.

Yes, but can they grow enough soon enough? he wondered. All he could do was give a mental shrug. He didn’t know. At least they were trying.

On went the POWs. A few people in the fields waved to them. That took guts, with Japanese soldiers watching the prisoners and others watching the laborers. Peterson wanted to wave back. He didn’t, though; it might have drawn the Japs’ notice to people who weren’t afraid to show they didn’t like the occupiers.

They were nearing the turnoff for Wheeler Field when a soldier who’d been visibly dragging for a while went over to the side of the road and sat down on his haunches. “Can’t-go on-for a while,” he panted. “Get my breath-catch up later.” His face was gray with fatigue. Peterson wondered if he’d been hiding a wound.

Two guards rushed over to him. “ Kinjiru! ” they shouted. One of them made a motion with his rifle: get up.

“So sorry, soldier- san,” the American soldier said, shaking his head. “Can’t do it. Too damn tired. Let me rest-a little. Then I’ll come.”

“ Kinjiru! ” the guards yelled once more. The one who’d gestured did it again. When the American didn’t get up, they both kicked him. He howled and rolled over onto his side. They waited a moment, then kicked him again. He groaned. With an effort, he made it to his hands and knees. They waited a minute or so. When he didn’t get to his feet, they kicked him some more. Plainly, they were ready to kick him to death if he didn’t straighten up and fly right.

He must have figured that out at about the same time Peterson did. With another groan, he heaved himself up onto his pins. He stood swaying like a cypress in a hurricane, but he didn’t fall down. One of the guards shoved him back into the pack. Two POWs caught him and held him upright; otherwise, he would have fallen on his face. The other guard used his rifle to urge the whole gang of prisoners forward again.

The exhausted soldier had a devil of a time going forward. The guards watched him like wolves eyeing a sickly elk that couldn’t keep up with the herd. If he fell again, he was theirs.

He saw it, too. “You better get away from me, boys,” he croaked. “If they decide to shoot me, they might hit one of you by mistake.”

Rage kindled in Peterson. “Fuck ’em all,” he said. “We’ll get you there, goddammit.” He draped the flagging man’s arm around his shoulder. “We’ll take turns.”

“I’ve got him next,” Prez McKinley said. Other men clamored to volunteer. The Japs didn’t make a fuss. As long as everybody kept up, they didn’t care how. Peterson strode ahead, taking his weight and a good part of the other man’s till Prez cut in on him, almost as if at a dance.

This’ll work as long as most of us are sound enough to help the ones who aren’t, he thought. Good thing Oahu’s a small island. They can’t take us too far. This might turn into a death march if they could.

As the sun sank down toward the Waianae Range, a couple of trucks forced their way through the column of prisoners. They were U.S. Army vehicles, the white star on the driver’s-side door hastily painted over with a Japanese meatball. “Goddamn guards didn’t want to shoot them for going around the holes in the road,” Peterson whispered to Prez McKinley.

“Oh, hell, no,” McKinley whispered back. “They got Japs driving ’em. You suppose they’ve brought rations for us?”

“That’d be nice,” Peterson said. In spite of the Japanese officer’s promise, the prisoners had got no food as they tramped up Kamehameha Highway. Peterson’s stomach was growling like an angry bear.

But instead of rations, the trucks disgorged machine-gun teams, who deployed onto high ground from which they could rake the throng of prisoners. A Buick came up a few minutes later. In it were the Japanese officer and his local stooge. The officer spoke in his own tongue. The translator turned it into English: “If anyone tries to escape, we will open fire on all of you. You are responsible for one another. See to it.”

“Where’s our food?” The question came from half a dozen places in the crowd.

The local obviously didn’t want to translate it into Japanese. But the officer nudged him, just as obviously asking what was going on. The local Jap spoke. So did the officer. The fellow in the sharkskin suit said, “You disgraced yourselves with disobedience at the first hole in the road. Going hungry is the price you pay. You should be thankful it is no worse.”

Jim Peterson was anything but thankful. With all those machine guns staring down at him, though, he couldn’t do a thing about the way he really felt.

JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his sons looked over the Oshima Maru. As she bobbed in the light chop in Kewalo Basin, she hardly seemed like the same sampan. A tall mast and a gaff rig changed her into something much more graceful than she had been with a diesel stuck on her stern. That she was also much slower than she had been and dependent on the breezes seemed almost an afterthought.

“She’s ready,” Eizo Doi said. The handyman cracked his knuckles, producing a noise alarmingly like a machine-gun burst. “You sure you know what you’re doing with her, Takahashi- san? If you don’t, you should only take her out a little ways the first few times, till you get the hang of it.”

“I’ll manage,” Jiro said. “I helped my father man a boat on the Inland Sea. How to place the sail and which line to pull, they’ll come back to me soon enough. What I really need to do is show the boys how everything works.”

Kenzo said something to Hiroshi in English. Jiro caught the words Moby Dick. Was that some sort of strange obscenity he’d never heard before? He knew what a dick was, but the moby part went right over his head.