As he flew out over the north coast, bound for the Bunker Hill, he spotted another well-plastered airstrip down below. Haleiwa, he thought. That’s what the name of that one is. He grinned, there in the cockpit. Yeah, he knew the map, all right.

CARELESS OF-INDEED, OBLIVIOUS TO-his own safety, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo manned a machine gun near the edge of the Haleiwa airstrip. He blazed away at the American dive bombers attacking the strip-and at the fighters attacking anything around it that might make a target.

The machine gun, a Japanese weapon modeled after the French Hotchkiss, used metal strips of ammunition, not the more common belts. The loader was a Japanese groundcrew man who’d protested his unfamiliarity with the process. Shindo’s pistol, aimed at his forehead, proved amazingly persuasive. Whenever the machine gun ran dry, in went another strip of cartridges. Only the groundcrew man’s chattering teeth suggested he might want to be somewhere else.

One of the new American fighters-the same planes that had worked such fearful slaughter on Japan’s beloved Zeros-must have spotted Shindo’s tracers. On it came, straight at him, the machine guns in its wings winking balefully. He fired back, shoving down hard on the triggers till his gun unexpectedly fell silent.

“Give me another strip, you stinking son of a back-passage whore!” Lieutenant Shindo shouted.

The groundcrew man neither obeyed nor answered. Shindo glanced over to him. Bullets from the American plane’s machine guns chewed up the grass and dirt all around the machine gun. One of them had caught the unwilling loader in the face. The unfortunate man no longer had a face. Not much was left of the back of his head, either. His brains and scalp spattered Shindo’s coveralls.

Shoving the dead man aside, Shindo began feeding ammunition into the gun himself. That cut down his rate of fire. He did what he could, though, till the last American planes abandoned Haleiwa and headed out to sea.

Then he ran for the revetment that sheltered his Zero. Two planes nearby were burning, but his survived. He glanced back toward the runway. His mouth twisted. It was as cratered as the surface of the moon. The bulldozer that could have set things right in a hurry burned beside the runway. No one had thought to move it. Not even me, Shindo thought bitterly. And yet a bulldozer was, or should have been, as much a weapon of war as an airplane.

With or without the big, brutal machine, though, they had to get the airstrip ready as fast as they could.

“Prisoners!” he shouted. “Have we got a gang of prisoners anywhere close by?”

TAKEO SHIMIZU HAD RAPIDLY grown to hate the American rifle he carried. It wasn’t just that the Springfield was too long and too heavy for comfort. But he’d got used to all the places where his old Arisaka bumped his back when he carried it along. The Springfield hit none of them. It had its own places, and they drove him crazy-especially the one just above his kidney.

All the soldiers in his squad groused about their Springfields. He let them. If anything, he encouraged them. It gave them something to do as the northbound kilometers went by. People working in the rice paddies that had replaced sugarcane and pineapple fields paused to stare as the Japanese soldiers tramped by. The laborers-Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, whites-had to know what the big bombing attack meant, but no one had the nerve to do anything but stare. An open jeer, here, might have touched off a massacre.

Shimizu’s squad-and the rest of the regiment of which it was a part-were north of Wahiawa when he heard aircraft engines. His head came up like that of a hunting dog taking a scent. So did Senior Private Furusawa’s. “Now,” Shimizu said, “are those our planes or the enemy’s?”

Furusawa nodded. A moment later, he said, “The enemy’s! The roar is deeper than ours!”

They came out of the north. From the sea, of course, Shimizu thought. One second, they were tiny in the distance. The next… Shimizu just had time to shout, “Take cover!” before the big, blunt-nosed fighters opened up on the column of marching men.

There wasn’t much cover to take. Shimizu threw himself flat by the side of the road and hoped for the best. Bullets rattled off asphalt, thudded into the ground… and made wet, splashy noises when they struck flesh. When a couple of them struck flesh too close to the noncom, he decided any cover was better than none. He jumped into the closest rice paddy.

Even as he crouched in the water, he unslung the Springfield and held it up to keep the muddy water from fouling the rifle. Considering how much he disliked it, that proved how thoroughly orders about maintaining a clean weapon at all times had been beaten into him.

He was far from the only soldier who went into the paddies. Not all the men were as fastidious about their rifles as he was. Some even ducked their heads under the water as planes flew by at treetop height, guns blazing. Shimizu understood that, but he wouldn’t have wanted to do it himself. He assumed they fertilized the paddies here with night soil, the way they did in Japan and China.

Combat always seemed to last forever, even if in truth it was usually over in a hurry. This was hardly combat at all. Shimizu admired the handful of men who stood there and fired at the American planes. He admired them, yes, but without wanting to imitate them. The enemy here had things all his own way-and then he was gone, off to make misery somewhere else on Oahu.

Dripping and filthy, Shimizu dragged himself out of the rice paddy. Soldiers who’d flattened out and lived were getting to their feet, many of them with dazed expressions on their faces. Not all the men on the highway and by it were getting up again, though. Too many never would. The iron smell of fresh blood and the latrine stench of punctured bowels fouled the tropical air. Wounded men moaned. Bodies and pieces of bodies sprawled in ungainly postures. What had the Americans been firing? When one of those bullets hit a man, it tore him to pieces. The regimental physicians, those of them left alive, ran from one writhing soldier to another, doing what they could. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be enough.

“Forward!” called Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander. “We have to move forward! Are we going to defend this island against the American invaders or not?”

“Hai!” It was a ragged, shaken chorus, but a chorus nonetheless. Takeo Shimizu tried to ignore the wobble in his own voice when he joined it.

The American fighters strafed them again half an hour later, this time from behind. The Americans had to be flying home, back to the carriers that had brought them so close to Oahu. Where are our carriers? Shimizu wondered again. What’s happened to them? The enemy planes roared off to the north, leaving many more dead and maimed behind them. Wasn’t that answer enough?

Shimizu had come ashore on a north-facing beach, not two years earlier. Now he would have to keep the Yankees from doing the same. He didn’t think he would have to wait for them very long, either.

AFTER THE YUKIKAZE GOT INTO PEARL HARBOR, Commander Minoru Genda demanded a car to take him to Iolani Palace. The officers there laughed in his face. American bombers had left the harbor a shambles. If there were any running motorcars, they were reserved for people more important than a mere commander off a sunken ship.

He’d had to pull strings to get his hands on a bicycle. Pedaling hurt, but the ankle wasn’t broken. The Yukikaze’s doctor had assured him of that much, anyhow. With it tightly wrapped, he could manage. As he rolled east, he saw what the American bombers had done to Hickam Field. Many of the airplanes flying off it still survived, but the runways themselves were cratered wastelands that reminded him of the worst photos he’d seen of First World War battlefields. How soon before Japan could get those planes flying again? Soon enough to attack the enemy invasion fleet that was bound to come? He dared hope so, anyhow.