“No.” Genda spoke without hesitation.

Senior Private Furusawa shrugged. He didn’t seem very surprised. “Well, in that case we’ll just have to give it our best shot, won’t we?” He shrugged again. “Karma, neh?”

He could speak indirectly at least as well as Genda. What he meant was, We’re all going to die here, and we can’t do a damn thing about it. Genda thought about that, but not for long. He didn’t need long. He sighed, nodded, and said, “Hai.”

YASUO FURUSAWA KNEW HE OUGHT TO GET AWAY from Commander Genda. The naval officer knew he’d fallen back from the north instead of senselessly charging and throwing his life away. That made Genda dangerous to him as the Japanese were driven back into Honolulu. If the officer wanted to make an example of someone, he had a nice, juicy target. And sticking around Genda endangered Furusawa in another way, too. The Navy man was a greenhorn at infantry combat. His white uniform only made things worse. He drew bullets as well as he could have without painting a target on his chest. And bullets meant for him could all too easily find someone nearby instead.

But Furusawa stayed by him. Before long, he found himself Genda’s unofficial aide and orderly. Genda, he thought, was the smartest man he’d ever met. And the officer didn’t seem to think he was a baka yaro himself. That made Furusawa proud. Right now, pride was about all any Japanese had left.

He shook his head. Japanese soldiers, or most of them, had a contempt for death the Americans couldn’t begin to match. Oh, the Yankees were brave enough. He’d seen that in the first invasion, and he saw it again now. But he could not imagine an American rushing out against a tank with a flaming bottle of gasoline and smashing it down on the cooling louvers above the engine. The Japanese who did that must have known he couldn’t get back to cover alive. And he didn’t; the Americans shot him before he made even three steps. But their snorting mechanical monster went up in flames, and the Japanese picked off the crewmen bailing out. Without the tank, the enemy attack bogged down.

Could I do that? Furusawa wondered. His long retreat from the north left him with doubts about himself and about his courage. He didn’t think he was afraid to die if his death meant something. The death of that soldier with the Molotov cocktail certainly had. He’d cost the Americans a tank and five men.

That was one side of the coin. The other side was, losing that tank and those five men wouldn’t cost the USA the battle. Honolulu would fall. Hawaii would go back under the Stars and Stripes. Nobody but a blind man could believe anything else.

Well, in that case, why don’t we throw down our rifles and throw up our hands and surrender? But Furusawa shook his head. No less than any other Japanese, he believed surrender the ultimate disgrace. And he didn’t want to spread his own disgrace and shame to his family back in the home islands.

Besides, some of the men in charge of Honolulu might have been blind. If they didn’t think they could throw the Americans back, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. The garrison commander was a Navy captain-in Army ranks, he counted as a colonel-named Iwabuchi.

“We can do it!” he shouted to anyone who would listen. “We will do it! The white men have no stomach for blood! Well, before long we will drown them in an ocean of it!”

Furusawa remembered him drilling his special naval landing forces before the Americans landed. He’d been just as fanatical then. He’d sounded like a screaming madman, as a matter of fact, and he still did. But he did more than just scream. Furusawa wouldn’t have wanted to attack Honolulu. Artillery hid inside buildings here. Machine guns had elaborately interlocking fields of fire. If you took out one nest, you exposed yourself to fire from two or three others.

The only thing Captain Iwabuchi hadn’t worried about in Honolulu was its civilians. If they starved, if they got shot, if they got blown to pieces-well, so what? And if a fighting man wanted a woman for a little fun before he went back to his foxhole-again, so what?

You knew what kind of screams those were when you heard them. They sounded different from the ones that came from wounded people: they held horror as well as pain. Commander Genda clucked in distress. “This is not a good way to fight a war,” he said.

“Sir, this is what the Army did in Nanking, too,” Furusawa said. “I hadn’t been conscripted yet, but the veterans in my regiment would talk about it sometimes.” Most of them had sounded pleased with themselves, too. He didn’t tell Genda that.

“But American propaganda will have a field day,” the Navy man said. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is supposed to protect Asia from Western imperialism. Now who will protect Asia from Japanese imperialism?”

He put his life in Furusawa’s hands when he said something like that. If the senior private blabbed to someone like Iwabuchi… Well, one more time, so what? Genda would die a little sooner than he might otherwise, and perhaps a little more painfully. Given the perversity of war, though, neither of those was certain. None of the Japanese defenders was likely to get out of this any which way.

The Americans probed with infantry. They got a bloody nose and pulled back. Captain Iwabuchi was jubilant. “They can’t stand up to us!” he shouted. “If they come again, we’ll smash them again!”

Commander Genda sounded less gleeful. “They aren’t done,” he said to Furusawa. “They’re putting a rock in their fist, that’s all.”

“A rock, sir?” The senior private didn’t follow him for a moment.

“You’ll see,” Genda answered.

About fifteen minutes later, Furusawa did. American artillery started pounding the Japanese front-line positions. Furusawa had never imagined so many guns all going off at once. His own forces were not so lavishly provided with cannon. Huddling in a ball to make as small a target as he could, he felt as if the end of the world had come.

When the barrage lifted, the Americans surged forward again. Furusawa was too dazed to shoot for a little while, but Japanese machine guns opened up on the Yankees again. He was amazed he’d lived through the shelling, and even more amazed anyone else had. The automatic-weapons fire drove the Americans back again in front of his foxhole, but they broke through farther north.

“What do we do, sir?” he asked Commander Genda. “If we stay here, they’ll outflank us and cut us off.”

“Hai,” Genda answered. Any Army officer would have ordered a fight to the death where they were. Furusawa was as sure of that as he was of his own name. After a moment’s thought, Genda said, “We fall back. It doesn’t look like we can do much more where we are, does it?”

“Not to me, sir,” Furusawa said in surprise.

To his even greater surprise, Genda smiled at him. “Well, you know more about it than I do.” They fell back, passing the wreckage of a machine-gun nest that hadn’t survived the barrage. Furusawa wondered if the Army would have done better with people like Genda in charge. He feared he’d never know. XIV

WHY THIS IS HELL, NOR AM I OUT OF IT. KENZO TAKAHASHI REMEMBERED THE line from an English Lit class. It sounded like Shakespeare, but he didn’t think it was. Who, then? He couldn’t remember. Miss Simpson wouldn’t have approved of that at all. If Miss Simpson was still alive, though, she was just as busy trying not to get blown up as Kenzo was.

He and Hiroshi didn’t know where their father was. He’d headed for the Japanese consulate, and he’d never come back. Hiroshi and Kenzo both went looking for him, and neither one had any luck. Kenzo even went to the consulate himself. The guards let him in when he told them whose son he was, but nobody inside would tell him anything. Nobody of very high rank seemed to be there. He wondered where the consul and the chancellor and the other big shots were. Wherever it was, would they have taken Dad with them? Kenzo had trouble believing it.