He dumped bait-minnows and offal-into the Pacific. He and Kenzo lowered the lines into the blue, blue water. “Now we wait,” Hiroshi said, a sentence that could have passed from one fisherman to another anywhere in the world since the beginning of time.

A mackerel leaping out of the water not far from the sampan told Kenzo catchable fish swam nearby. It told Hiroshi the same thing; he looked as smug as their father did when Japan figured out some new way to make things tough on the USA. Kenzo damn near told him so, but that would have started an argument, too.

When they hauled up the lines, they brought in ahi and aku and mahi-mahi-and some sharks with them. The next little while was the frantic part of the operation. They gutted fish and got them in the storage hold as fast as they could. One of the sharks, about a three-footer, almost bit Kenzo and kept flopping and thrashing even after he’d torn out its insides.

“Damn things really don’t die till after sundown,” he said.

“You’d better believe it. They-” Hiroshi broke off. He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”

“I don’t hear anything.” Kenzo paused-he’d just made a liar of himself. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I do. Sounds like thunder.”

Hiroshi snorted, and with reason: the day was fine and clear, with hardly a cloud in the sky. “Pick something that makes sense, why don’t you?”

“Okay. Maybe it’s bombs.” Kenzo said the first thing that popped into his mind. Once he’d said it, though, he realized how much sense it made. The low rumbles were coming from the direction of Oahu, sure as hell. Hope tingled through him. “Maybe the Americans are really paying a call.”

“It’d be a big one if they are,” Hiroshi said, which was true, for the noise went on and on. Since neither one of them could do anything about it, they both went back to gutting fish.

A few minutes later, Kenzo looked east again. When he didn’t return to work right away, Hiroshi looked that way, too. They whistled softly at the same time. Thick columns of black, greasy-looking smoke were climbing up over the Waianae Range. “That is an air raid, a damn big one,” Kenzo said. After gauging the position of the smoke plumes, he added, “Looks like they’re pounding the crap out of Schofield and Wheeler.”

“Looks like you’re right,” Hiroshi said once he’d made the same calculations. “They’ve got to be hitting other places, too, only we can’t see those from where we’re at.”

“Yeah.” Kenzo hadn’t thought of that, but his brother was bound to be right. Wheeler Field was one of the most important airstrips on Oahu. If the Americans hit that one, they’d hit Hickam and Ewa and Kaneohe and the others, too. And if they were hitting airstrips like that… “Maybe the invasion’s really on!”

“Maybe. Jesus Christ, I hope so,” Hiroshi said. “About time, if it is.”

The intermittent thunder of explosions ceased. But the rumble from the east didn’t. If anything, it got louder. Kenzo suddenly pointed. “Will you look at that?”

“Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, this time in tones approaching real reverence. The sky was full of planes, streams of them, and they were flying west, from Oahu toward Kauai. That took a lot of them right over the Oshima Maru.

Kenzo and Hiroshi stared up in open-mouthed awe. Kenzo had seen pictures of B-17s before the war started. Some of the big four-engined bombers matched what he remembered of those pictures. Others were a new breed, with longer, narrower wings and tails with twin rudders. The roar of the engines overhead seemed to make the sampan vibrate.

“Where are they going to land?” Hiroshi whispered.

“Beats me,” Kenzo answered. He hadn’t known Kauai had an airstrip long enough to land planes that big. Maybe the Japanese had built one, although he thought they’d done as little as they could on all the islands except Oahu. Still, he didn’t figure that swarm of bombers would have headed for Kauai if they didn’t have somewhere to put down.

“We’ll tell our grandchildren about this day,” Hiroshi said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “Let’s just hope we live to have ’em.”

WHEN CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU HEARD THE AIR-RAID sirens go off, he didn’t worry much. Another American nuisance raid, he thought. The Americans sent seaplanes over Hawaii the way Japan sent them over the U.S. West Coast. They’d drop a few bombs, and then they’d either get shot down or go away.

But orders were orders. “Come on,” he called to his men. “Out of the barracks and into the trenches. Put the cards and the go boards away. You can pick up the games when you come back.”

Grumbling, the soldiers followed him outside. Grumbling even more, they scrambled down into the trenches they’d dug in the lawn in front of the stucco building. People who stained their uniforms swore. Sure as sure, they’d get gigged for dirty clothes at roll call tomorrow morning.

When Shimizu heard aircraft engines overhead, he was relieved at first. “Hear how many there are?” he said. “Those must be our bombers coming back from the practice run they were on.”

“I don’t think so, sir, please excuse me,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “This is a deeper noise. Our engines have a higher pitch.”

Shimizu listened a little longer. The noise did seem different. Still… “Sounds like a lot of planes to me, not the ones and twos the Yankees send. They don’t usually come by daylight, either. Are you saying-?”

Before he could finish, antiaircraft guns started banging. The gunners didn’t think the planes overhead were Japanese. And Shimizu heard the flat, harsh crump! crump! crump! of bursting bombs. He heard more of those explosions than he ever had when the Japanese were conquering Hawaii.

He looked up into the sky. His jaw dropped. Those weren’t American seaplanes. He’d grown familiar with their big-bellied lines. Those were bombers, monster bombers, swarms of them. Most flew to the west, in the direction of Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor. But some came right over Honolulu. And the likeliest reason they came right over Honolulu was…

Bombs fell from their bellies. He could see them, tumbling down through the air. And they all seemed to be falling straight toward him. “Duck!” he shouted, and threw himself facedown in the dirt. All of a sudden, he had more important things to worry about than getting dirt on his uniform.

The bombs’ rising whistling scream made him want to scream, too. Then they hit, and he did scream. It didn’t matter. Nobody could hear him through that thunder. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake. He’d been through some bad quakes in Japan. This was worse than any of them. When things rained down on him, he wasn’t sure if he’d be buried alive.

While you were on the receiving end of a bombardment, it seemed to go on forever. At last, after what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of real time, the bombs stopped falling. At least they did close by-he could still hear explosions off to the west. They were just paying us a social call, Shimizu thought dazedly. They really wanted to visit the airstrip and the harbor.

Like a ground squirrel looking to see if the fox had really gone, he stuck his head out of his hole. The barracks had been shelled before. They’d been leveled this time. Craters were strewn over the ground around the building. So were bodies, and pieces of bodies. Other buildings nearby were smoking ruins.

Yasuo Furusawa came up beside him. The druggist’s son looked around with the same horror on his face as Shimizu felt. “Oh,” Furusawa said softly, and then again, “Oh.” It didn’t seem enough, but what else was there to say?

“Help the wounded!” officers screamed. “Get ready to move! Get ready to fight!” Shimizu didn’t know how he was supposed to do all those things at once. He didn’t know how he was supposed to get ready to fight at all. His rifle was in the barracks, which had started to burn. Looking down the trench, he didn’t see anyone else who had a rifle with him, either.