A telephone call came in from Honolulu just after Shindo finished that early breakfast. Since he was expecting it, he sounded properly subordinate to Commander Fuchida. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We will make a sweep to the north… Oh, yes, sir. If we spot anything, we’ll do our best to shoot it down or sink it.”

“Good,” Fuchida said. “It would be excellent if we could show that we are making the Americans pay.”

“I understand, sir.” What Shindo understood was that Fuchida’s superiors were breathing down his neck. But Shindo, like any fighter pilot, did want to be up in the air going after the enemy.

He told the armorers to load a 250kg bomb on the rack he’d had installed under his Zero’s belly. If he met a submarine, he wanted to be able to punish it. The bomb wouldn’t handicap him against the lumbering American flying boats he was likely to meet in these waters. It would have against Wildcats, but he didn’t expect to run into Wildcats. Wildcats meant carriers close by, and there were no American carriers close by.

Away he went, up into the sky. Certain officers-not Fuchida, to his credit-complained about how much gas searches used up. They didn’t think enough about the cost of not searching.

As Shindo flew in a widening spiral over the Pacific, he breathed in oxygenated air with the taste of rubber. That taste and flying would always be linked in his mind. For some men, it was the smell of gasoline; for others, the throbbing roar of the engine. Not to Shindo. For him, that taste said it all.

He wanted to spot the enemy. He wanted to kill the enemy. If he saw a flying boat, he wanted to shoot it down. If he saw a submarine, he wanted to sink it. He’d flown too many searches where nothing turned up.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind when he spied motion in the air out of the corner of his eye. He started to swing his Zero in that direction, then stopped, laughing and swearing at the same time. That wasn’t an enemy flying boat-that was another Japanese fighter plane, on a search spiral of its own. No one except the Americans would have been happy with him had he gone after it and shot it down.

That the other pilot might have shot him down instead never crossed his mind. He respected the ability of every man he faced. Not taking your opponent lightly was the best way to live to a ripe old age. But, without false modesty, Shindo expected to win every aerial combat he entered. So did any good fighter pilot. Without that touch of arrogance, you couldn’t do your job well.

He felt like a peregrine falcon on the prowl for pigeons. But there were no pigeons. He kept one eye on the fuel gauge. If he had to go home hungry-again-he wouldn’t be a happy man.

There! What was that, four kilometers below, down on the surface of the Pacific? It wasn’t a pigeon, but it might be a duck. It was somebody’s submarine, sliding along on the surface as if it didn’t have a care in the world.

Somebody’s, yes-but whose? Japan had subs in these waters, too, to go after American warships if the Yankees tried to invade Hawaii again. But if the submarine was American… Saburo Shindo didn’t want clodhoppers from the Army looking down their noses at his service. Sinking an American sub would be a good way to shut them up for a while.

He put himself between the sun and the boat and went down lower for a closer look. Anyone in the conning tower would have to look up into that glare, and would have a hard time spotting him. Attacking out of the sun worked against other airplanes. It ought to be just as good against a submarine.

If he attacked… Shooting down his own side’s plane would be bad. Bombing his own side’s sub would be disastrously worse. But he knew the lines of Japanese submarines very well. He had to. This one looked different. In these waters, anything not Japanese had to be American.

Shindo didn’t dither. Dithering was in his nature even less than in most fighter pilots’. As soon as he was sure that boat belonged to the enemy, he dove on it. He’d never trained as a bomber pilot. His Zero didn’t have dive brakes on the wings, the way Aichi dive bombers did; the design team that made the fighter hadn’t figured it would need those big slotted flaps. He couldn’t dive as steeply as an Aichi pilot could, either; his plane wasn’t built to handle the stress of pulling out of a dive like that. He did the best he could with what he had.

The submarine swelled enormously. Shindo saw someone on the conning tower-and then, all at once, he didn’t. The boat started to slide beneath the waves. They’d spotted him! But acceleration wasn’t the only thing pulling his lips back from his teeth in a predatory grin. Too late! They were much too late!

He worked the bomb-release button. That was as much a makeshift as the rack under the Zero’s belly; it wasn’t an original part of the instrument panel. It did what it was supposed to do, though. The bomb dropped free. Shindo pulled back on the stick, wrestling the Zero’s nose up before it went into the Pacific, too. The fighter’s airframe groaned. No, it wasn’t made for this kind of work.

But the nose did lift. Shindo swung the Zero into a tight turn so he could see what he’d done. When he did, he pounded a leather-gloved hand down on his thigh. The bomb had hit maybe ten meters aft of the conning tower. Men were swarming out of the sub, which was trailing smoke and sinking fast.

Shindo went around for another pass. By then, the American sailors had got into several inflatable life rafts. His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. The Zero’s machine guns chattered. Back when the fight for Hawaii was new, Shindo had let an American pilot he’d shot down parachute safely to earth. Thinking back on it, he had no idea why he’d been so soft. He shrugged, there inside the cockpit. He tried not to make the same mistake twice.

A couple of sailors in the rafts fired pistols at his plane. Had he been down there, he would have done the same thing. But he was up here instead, and so he shot up the rafts till they sank, till blood turned the Pacific red. This was why he’d come out here. If an American flying boat rescued those sailors, they would make more trouble for Japan. And if they managed to reach Oahu or another island, anti-Japanese locals, of whom there were too many, were likely to take them in. Nobody would have to worry about either of those unfortunate developments now.

Quietly pleased with himself, Shindo flew back towards Oahu.

A LONG COLUMN OF BOOTS marched through the mud in a driving rainstorm of the sort southern California Chambers of Commerce pretended this part of the country didn’t get. Lester Dillon had spent enough time at Camp Elliott to know better. The youngsters who wanted to be Marines looked thoroughly miserable.

Dillon was miserable, too, but he didn’t show it. As far as they were concerned, he was immune to vagaries like weather. If rain hit him and ran down the back of his neck, if his boots squelched in the mud-well, so what? He was a platoon sergeant. At the moment, he was a platoon sergeant who craved coffee with brandy in it, but these puppies didn’t need to know that.

“I can’t hear you!” he shouted, pitching his voice to carry even through the downpour.

The boots had been singing a marching song. Understandably, the downpour dampened their zeal. Dillon understood that, all right, but he wasn’t about to put up with it. They weren’t supposed to let anything dampen their zeal. That was part of what being a Marine was all about. If rain could do it, coming under fire would be infinitely worse. Coming under fire was infinitely worse, but they had to act as if it weren’t. They roared out the song through the rain: