Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove Page B

now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we’re doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.
    By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he’d just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.
    They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto’s seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand a loaf of bread wasn’t easy, but he managed.
    He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.
    Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water atdawn the next morning. It didn’t occur to the soldiers to try to stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he’d listened.
    He didn’t know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.

III
    J IM P ETERSON HADN ’ T thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the Enterprise tell him what a damn fool he’d been, but he didn’t think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.
    And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the Enterprise . They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he’d interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don’t care what I’m in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”
    They wouldn’t listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn’t have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.
    â€œYou see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren’t the only one who wants another shot at the Japs—but you’re gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”
    â€œJesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The Enterprise had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”
    â€œBeats me,” the captain answered.
    â€œThey kicked us in the nuts, and we weren’t even looking!”
    â€œSure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it’s not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there—literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn’t just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”
    â€œUp in smoke is right,” Peterson