Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

That got laughs all through the bus. A couple of years earlier, nobody’d wanted to hear about national defense, much less talk about it. Now nobody wanted to pay attention to anything else. But making up for lost time was no easier, no more possible, than it ever was.

Brakes groaning, the bus stopped. The cadets shouldered their duffels again. As they descended, a lieutenant commander came out of the closest old brick building and greeted them with, “Welcome to Pensacola Naval Air Station, gentlemen. You will have no mothers here. We assume you’re old enough to take care of yourselves till you show us otherwise-at which point we’re liable to throw you out on your ear. Now if you’ll line up for processing…”

Processing here was for the cadets about what it was for a cow going through the Swift meat-packing plant in Chicago. Joe didn’t end up with USDA CHOICE stamped on his backside, but that was almost all he escaped. The paperwork he filled out made what he’d done at Chapel Hill seem like the kindergarten course. “We ought to drop this stuff on the Japs,” he grumbled to Orson Sharp. “It’d smash ’em flatter than a ten-ton bomb.”

“It can’t be helped.” Sharp took everything, even bureaucratic nonsense, in stride. Joe didn’t know whether to admire him or to want to clobber him.

They shared a two-man tent a good deal more spacious than their four-man dorm room. Joe looked at a mimeographed handout a bored petty officer had given him. He rolled his eyes up to the heavens and let out a theatrical groan.

“For heaven’s sake, what is it?” Sharp asked. Any other cadet in the group would have said something more pungent than for heaven’s sake.

“Listen to this.” Joe read from the handout: “ ‘Flight training and academic preparation will continue in the ratio of three parts to two. Academic subjects to be covered will include the following: navigation, ordnance and gunnery, indoctrination, recognition, communications, and airplane engines.’ We’re stuck with more classes, for cryin’ out loud.” He would have been more pungent himself with anybody but his roommate. He refused to admit that Orson Sharp was a good influence on him.

“Well? We need to know all those things.” Sharp was so reasonable, he could drive anybody nuts.

“I thought we were done with notebooks and desks and tests. Lord knows I hoped we were.” Joe refused to cheer up, even though he already knew a lot about engines.

“I’m not thrilled, either, but we can’t quit now. We just have to go through with it.” Sharp wasn’t wrong. Joe didn’t clobber him. He couldn’t have said why, not to save his life.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA was working in a Honolulu office that had once housed a U.S. Navy officer. The space was larger and better appointed than anyone below flag rank would have had in Japan, but nothing out of the ordinary here. His work was nothing out of the ordinary, either. That left him slightly discontented. He wouldn’t have minded leaving Oahu and going on to fight in the Philippines or the Dutch East Indies. Things were too quiet here. He wanted new problems to sink his teeth into.

He hadn’t had that thought more than ten minutes before an excited radioman ran into his office and exclaimed, “Sir, one of our picket boats has sighted two American carriers heading toward these islands!”

“Well, well,” Genda said. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the Yankees to try to raid Hawaii. “Give me more details.”

“Sir, there are no more details,” the radioman answered. “The picket boat’s signal cut off in the middle of the message.”

“ Ah, so desu. I understand.” Genda nodded. No, he wouldn’t be able to get more details from the picket boat’s crew. No one this side of the Yasukuni Shrine for the spirits of the war dead would. Now he had to think about what to do to make sure the Americans paid for their folly. “ Akagi and Soryu have been notified?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Captain Hasegawa says he wants to let the American ships come closer before he launches his attack against them. The Americans will have to come closer if they’re going to strike at Oahu.”

“ Hai. Honto,” Genda said. That was why the picket boats were out there, some more than a thousand kilometers north and east of the island. No carrier-based bombers could fly that far and return to the ships that had launched them. Genda looked at his watch. It was almost three. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans intended to run in towards Oahu all through the night, as the Japanese strike force had done back in December. Thinking out loud, he went on, “We caught them by surprise, though. They won’t play the same trick on us. We’ll be ready and waiting tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Do you need me to pass anything on to either of our carriers?”

“Just one thing-good hunting.”

THE AIRSTRIP BY Haleiwa had to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Out beyond the grass and the palm trees and the beach was the vast turquoise expanse of the Pacific. Neither the beauty nor the perfect climate did anything to salve Lieutenant Saburo Shindo’s temper. When he looked north to the Pacific, he saw only an opportunity he would not have. The Americans stuck their head in the tiger’s mouth when he happened to be ashore. Others aboard the Akagi and the Soryu would hunt them at sea. As for him…

Feeling like a caged tiger himself, he paced back and forth at the edge of the runway. The pilots drawn up at attention there followed him with their eyes. He glared at them, then deliberately stopped so they had to look west, into the sinking sun, to see him.

“I hope we will be unlucky,” he said. “I hope the men on our carriers will find the Americans and sink them before they can make their night run towards Oahu. But if the carrier pilots fail, we will see American planes overhead early tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”

“ Hai! ” the fliers chorused.

“You had better,” Shindo snarled. “Because you will be up and waiting for them when they arrive. You will be waiting for them, and you will make them sorry they dared come anywhere near this island. Do you understand that?”

“ Hai! ” they chorused again.

Shindo scowled. “All right, then. I will be up there with you, and I will be watching. Anyone who lets an American escape-even one American, do you hear? — will answer to me. I am more dangerous to you than any stinking Yankee pilot ever born. Do you understand that?”

“ Hai! ” the pilots said once more.

“Good. You’d better.” Shindo turned his back. “Dismissed.” He heard the men muttering, but he didn’t look at them again. Let them mutter. As long as they were worrying about him, they wouldn’t worry about the enemy. That was what he had in mind.

JANE ARMITAGE BROKE a nail weeding her potato patch. She hardly bothered to swear. That wasn’t because she didn’t want to seem unladylike. She couldn’t have cared less. These days, though, a broken nail was nothing to get excited about. She looked down at her hands. Before the war started, the only mark they’d had was a small callus on the side of her right middle finger: a writer’s callus. Now hard yellow calluses banded her palms. Her fingers were battered and scarred. Her nails… didn’t bear thinking about. They’d been a disaster even before she broke the latest one. She bit it off short and reasonably straight-why wait to go back to the apartment and dig out a manicure scissors? Then she got back to work.

Pretty soon she’d be able to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down toward the Waianae Range. A shower would be-not quite heavenly, not without hot water, but welcome even so. Then she could go have supper. She was amazed how important food had become in her life now that she didn’t have enough of it. Just thinking of supper was enough to make her stomach rumble. It would go on rumbling after she ate, too.