“I understand,” the skipper said. He nodded to Genda. “We have about twenty minutes, Commander. Any last notions that will give us a better chance?”

“All I can think of, sir, is to tell the fighters above our carriers to hit the enemy strike planes with everything they have and to ignore the U.S. fighters as much as they can,” Genda answered. “They should already know that, though.”

“Very well.” Kaku nodded again. “We will wait, then, and be ready to maneuver and to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Genda said gravely. Akagi carried a dozen 120mm guns and fourteen twin 25mm mounts.

She could put a lot of shells in the air. Her escorts could put up even more. How much good would all that firepower do? In the last fight, facing what was plainly a smaller strike force, two of the three Japanese carriers had been hit. Japanese fliers had given better than they got, though, so that battle proved a success. Could they do it again? Would this one?

“All ahead full,” Admiral Kaku called down to the engine room. In time of need, Akagi could be handled almost like a destroyer. And time of need was coming. The ships ahead of the carrier started shooting. A moment later, so did the carrier herself. Puffs of black smoke appeared in the sky.

Trailing smoke, an enemy plane-one of the ferocious new fighters everyone was talking about? — cartwheeled into the sea. A great splash, and the aircraft was gone. “Banzai!” someone called. But how many more planes would have to fall before this battle became a success?

ONE THING JOE CROSETTI HADN’T TRAINED for was antiaircraft fire. There were obvious reasons why not. If such training got too realistic, he might have had to practice bailing out… if he could.

As the attack force neared the Japanese fleet, shell bursts appeared in the sky ahead of him and then all around him. When one shell burst not nearly far enough below him, it was like driving a car over a nasty pothole you hadn’t seen-he bounced sharply down and then sharply up again, so that his teeth clicked together. Only after he tasted blood in his mouth did he realize he’d bitten his tongue.

A few seconds later, he got another pothole bump, and something clanged into his fuselage. “Jesus!” he yipped, anxiously scanning all the dials on the instrument panel at once. Nothing seemed wrong or out of place. He still had fuel, oil, hydraulics… That clang scared him out of ten years’ growth just the same.

Only one thing to do-take out his moment of panic on the Japs. The little yellow slant-eyed sons of bitches thought they owned the world. They thought they had the right to own the world, and to take whatever pieces of it they fancied. Joe was here, literally, to show them they were wrong.

Here they came. The U.S. Hellcats had ripped into the Japanese strike force. Now it was the Japs’ turn to try to knock down as many Dauntlesses and Avengers as they could before the dive bombers and torpedo planes struck at their ships.

Nobody could say the guys who flew those Zeros weren’t game. Nobody could say the bastards didn’t know their business, either. They understood just what they had to do, and they aimed to do it. If Wildcats and Hellcats got in their way, they fought them. Otherwise, they went for the planes that mattered more.

“Hit ’em, boys!” The squadron leader’s voice rasped in Joe’s earphones. “The best defense is a good offense. This is what we came for.”

Joe’s element leader needed no more encouragement than that. “Come on, Crosetti,” he called. “Let’s go hunting.”

“Roger,” Joe answered, and stuck with the other Hellcat when it zoomed out ahead of the American dive bombers and torpedo planes, as if to tell the Japs they’d have to go through the fighters to get where they wanted to go.

The Japanese fighters flew in what Joe thought of as a gaggle-not nearly such a rigid formation as the Americans used. It put him in mind of boxing against a southpaw: you weren’t sure what was coming next. They looked as if they ought to be easy to pick off one at a time. If they were so damn easy, though, how come they’d given American pilots two successive sets of lumps around Hawaii, to say nothing of the black eye in the Philippines?

“Oh, shit!” That was the voice of Joe’s element leader, and panic filled it. Joe saw why, too. A Zero had put a cannon shell into one of his wing tanks. Self-sealing was all very well, but nothing would have stopped that leak or that fire. “I’m going down!” he wailed, and he did, spinning wildly. Joe hoped to see a chute open, but there was nothing, nothing at all-just a Hellcat falling toward the sea.

An instant later, an Avenger blew up. That wasn’t gasoline catching on fire; that was the torpedo slung under the aircraft blowing up. A Jap fighter must have made a lucky shot.

Joe looked around frantically for someone to latch on to. He felt naked and alone up there, the way anybody suddenly bereft of his comrade would have. For the time being, he had nobody to keep an eye out for him.

And then, suddenly, somebody was flying alongside of him. The other American pilot waved, as if to say he’d lost his leader and was looking for somebody to link up with. By the way the fellow flew, he was content to stay a wingman. That wasn’t how Joe wanted to become an element leader, but one of the fastest lessons he got in combat was that nobody gave a damn about what he wanted.

Some of the Avengers had already started heading down toward the Pacific for their torpedo runs. They weren’t the hopelessly slow, hopelessly clumsy Devastators that had preceded them, but they weren’t any real match for Zeros, either. Several Japanese fighters dove after them.

When Joe saw that, he laughed a very nasty laugh. The Zero that could outdive a Hellcat hadn’t been born yet. He pointed, then shoved his stick forward. His fighter’s nose dropped. As he dove after the Japs, his new wingman stuck like glue.

He got on a Jap’s tail and thumbed the firing button. The Zero caught fire. It went straight down into the ocean. Yelling like a red Indian, he went after another one. This Jap must have spotted him at the last second, because the fellow did a flick roll and squirted away like a wet watermelon seed shot out between your fingers. One second he was there; the next, gone.

“Son of a bitch!” Joe said: frustration mixed with reluctant respect. The Zero really was as maneuverable as people said. Joe sure wouldn’t have tried that getaway in a Hellcat, but it worked like a charm. Still, in evading him, the Jap had to break off his attack on the Avengers, so Joe figured he’d done his job.

And his altimeter was unwinding like a son of a bitch. He leveled off at under two thousand feet, then pulled the stick back and climbed. If he’d had any Japs on his tail, he would have left them behind as if they’d nailed their shoes to the floor.

As he gained altitude, he got a look at the Japanese ships not far ahead. He’d spent more than a year studying silhouettes and photos and models from every angle under the sun-and he still had a devil of a time telling destroyers from cruisers, cruisers from battleships. Even the carrier was hard to spot, and he was damned if he knew for sure which one she was.

But that wasn’t his headache, not really. He needed to run out of planes before he worried about ships. He looked around for more Zeros to shoot up.

FUCHIDA HAD KNOWN IT WOULD BE BAD. The American air armada and the ferocious attack it got off against the Japanese strike force had warned him of that. But nothing in his blackest nightmares had warned him it would be as bad as this.

American ships stretched as far as the eye could see, as far and farther. Fuchida knew-few men knew better-the resources the Japanese Empire had available. Raw fear almost made his hand shake on the torpedo plane’s stick. How were those slender resources going to stand against… this?