He’d seen a handful of missionaries in China. But for them, these people on Oahu were the first whites he’d ever set eyes on. They were big. He’d seen that from the moment he landed, when they started shooting at him. But big didn’t mean tough-or not tough enough, anyhow. They’d fought hard, but in the end they’d surrendered.

Shimizu’s lip curled. They deserved whatever happened to them after that. He couldn’t imagine anything but fighting to the finish. At least then it was over. You didn’t give yourself up to the foe so he could do whatever he wanted with you-and to you.

Lieutenant Horino strode along with one hand on the hilt of his sword. “Let them see who their masters are,” he declared.

No one in Wahiawa showed the Japanese even the slightest disrespect. The locals would have been crazy to do so. Whoever tried it would have paid, and so would his or her family and friends and neighbors. Civilians didn’t have shooting squads the way prisoners did, but the occupying authorities would have come up with something to make people remember.

Then the regiment trudged out of the town. More rice paddies replaced cane and pineapple. Men muttered about sore feet. No one would have had the energy to sing now. Shimizu didn’t have the energy or the desire to order them to sing an Army song. He picked his feet up and put them down again, over and over and over.

The regiment didn’t quite make it into Pearl City, let alone Honolulu, before the sun went down. Colonel Fujikawa looked unhappy. He’d also been unhappy when they failed to march from Honolulu to Haleiwa in one day. “You’ve got weak,” he grumbled.

He was probably right, too. Oahu didn’t offer marching opportunities the way, say, China did. You could march forever in China. After a lot of campaigns there, Shimizu thought he had. This place wasn’t like that. You settled down and you patrolled in town, and that was that. If you did a whole lot of marching here, you marched into the Pacific.

As the men were settling down by the side of the road, an enormous flying boat landed in Pearl Harbor and taxied up to the shore at Pearl City. “I wonder what that’s all about,” said Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa, who was curious about everything.

“No idea,” Shimizu said. “If the brass wants us to know, they’ll tell us about it. As long as it’s one of our planes, I won’t lose any sleep about it.”

It must have been a Japanese plane-no gunfire erupted, no bombs burst. He ate rice, assigned sentries, and rolled himself in a blanket as soon as it got dark. And, weary as he was, he lost not even a moment’s sleep.

BY NOW, JANE ARMITAGE WAS USED TO JAPANESE soldiers tramping through Wahiawa. She was used to bowing whenever she saw them. She was used to keeping her thoughts to herself. If she didn’t, someone might blab to the Japs, and what happened after that wouldn’t be pretty.

And she was used to being hungry. She hated looking into the mirror in her apartment. The face that stared back was a stranger’s, all cheekbones and chin and staring eyes. Only her yellow hair reminded her that she was really herself. When she got into the shower, her ribs stood out like ladder rungs. She could watch muscles move on her arms and legs.

The only thing that kept her from complete despair was that everybody in Wahiawa was in the same boat-all the locals, anyhow, for the occupiers ate well enough to keep their weight on. One scrawny wretch in a group of normal people would have drawn notice. One scrawny wretch in a group of scrawny wretches? They said misery loved company. By God, they had a point.

“Damn you, Fletch,” she would whisper once in a while, when she was sure nobody could hear. Her ex-husband had been an artillery officer at nearby Schofield Barracks. He’d sworn up and down that the U.S. Army would give the Japs a black eye if they ever came anywhere near Hawaii. These days, Jane despised him more for being wrong than she did for drinking too much and generally for forgetting she existed except when he felt like a roll in the hay.

She couldn’t brood for very long. She had her vegetable patch to look after. She was growing turnips and potatoes. She hated what the work did to her hands. They were hard and callused and scarred, with short nails with permanently black rims. There too, though, she wasn’t the only one-far from it. Without the produce the locals grew, they might well have starved to death. The occupying forces wouldn’t have shed a tear. The Japs might have laughed instead.

She hardly ever thought, I should be teaching third grade, any more. The elementary school was closed, by all appearances permanently. The principal… Jane flinched away from that thought. She still remembered the thunk of Major Hirabayashi’s sword biting into Mr. Murphy’s neck when the Japs caught Murphy with a radio after they ordered all sets turned in.

But the dreadful sound and the memory came back to her even when she was weeding in the little plot of ground. She’d chop through some nasty plant’s stem… and Murphy’s head would leap from his shoulders, blood fountaining impossibly red and his whole body convulsing-but not for long, not for long.

“Your plot looks good.”

Four words returned her to reality. Bad as reality was, it beat the stuffing out of what had been going on in her head. She turned. “Thank you, Mr. Nakayama,” she said. She didn’t have to bow to Tsuyoshi Nakayama. He was just a local Jap, a nursery man, not one of the invaders. But she did have to treat him with respect. He was Major Hirabayashi’s interpreter and factotum. Get on his wrong side and you’d be sorry. Jane didn’t want to find out how sorry she could be.

“Thank you for working so hard,” Yosh Nakayama told her. He was about fifty, but looked older, his face tanned to wrinkled leather from a lifetime in the sun. “If everyone worked as hard as you, we would have more to eat.”

He’d lost weight, too. He hadn’t used his position to take special privileges-of which food came first these days, well ahead of money or women’s favors. By all appearances, he didn’t much want the job he had. That didn’t keep him from doing it conscientiously.

Jane saw a bug. Automatically, she lashed out with a foot and squashed it. Nakayama nodded approval.

“Some people don’t care enough to do things right,” he said. His English was slow and deliberate-fluent, but not quite the speech of someone who’d grown up with the language. “You are not like that.”

“Well, I hope not,” Jane said. “If you’re going to do something, do it right.”

He nodded again, and actually smiled. His teeth were very white, except for a couple of glinting gold ones. “Yes,” he said, and went on to the next vegetable patch without another word.

Yes? Jane wondered. Then why didn’t my marriage work? Of course, that had taken two, and Fletch hadn’t exactly held up his end of the bargain. Jane wondered if he was still alive. If he was, he was probably a prisoner. She shivered under the warm Hawaiian sun. The Japs treated POWs worse than they treated civilians, and that was saying something. Gangs of prisoners occasionally shambled through Wahiawa, on their way to God knows what. She didn’t like thinking that Fletch could be one of those skeletons in rags.

She didn’t wish her ex-husband anything particularly bad. If she ever saw him coming up the street in one of those labor gangs, she would… She didn’t have the faintest idea what she would do. Break down and cry, most likely. But if she broke down and cried about everything in Hawaii that upset her these days, she’d have no time to do anything else. She assassinated a weed instead.

PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON WAS NOT A HAPPY MAN. The Marines who served under him would have said he was never a happy man, but a platoon sergeant was supposed to make his men feel as if hell wasn’t half a mile off. He wanted them more afraid of him, and of letting him down, than of the enemy.