“Some of their pilots are awful good,” Sharp said. “I ran into this guy in an Oscar the other day. He could make that little plane sit up and beg and darn near”-he might have been the only man on the carrier who would have said darn near-“wag its tail. I had two more Hellcats with me, and we couldn’t touch him. He got out of stuff you couldn’t get out of. We never laid a glove on him-and I landed with a hole in my prop.”

“They can leave you talking to yourself, all right,” Joe agreed. “With those two little machine guns, though, they have a devil of a time hurting you, and you can get away from ’em easy as pie. As long as you don’t dogfight ’em, you’re okay.” He paused. “Did they patch you up or put a new propeller blade on?”

“New blade,” Sharp told him. “I could’ve flown without the repair if I had to-it’s only a.30-caliber hole-but why take chances? We’ve got the spares, and that’s what they’re here for.”

“Better believe it,” Joe said. “And pretty soon the Japs won’t have any planes left, or anywhere to fly them out of if they do. I don’t care how sweet a pilot you are. If you can’t get off the ground, you might as well pick up a rifle and go fight with the infantry.”

Before answering, Orson Sharp finished the Coke and set the bottle down by the other dead soldiers.

“That’s probably what happened to some of our guys after December 7.” His voice was grim.

“Yeah, it probably is.” Joe didn’t like to think about what had happened to American servicemen of any sort since Hawaii fell, but that would have been an extra humiliation on top of all the others. Not to be able to fight the way you’d trained so hard to do… “Time to pay ’em back.”

An hour later, he was in the cockpit again, buzzing towards Oahu. Orson Sharp was up there with him. Their orders were looser than they had been at the very start of the land campaign. They were supposed to shoot up anything that moved on the ground, knock down any planes that came up against them, and especially make sure the enemy didn’t have the chance to repair his airfields.

One of those fields, the one at Haleiwa, had already fallen into U.S. hands. As Joe flew above it, he saw bulldozers and steamrollers swarming over the strip to put it back in commission. He also saw artillery coming down nearby. The field wasn’t ready to use, not by a long shot. He preferred flying off a carrier deck to shellfire. Hellcats were well-protected planes, but nothing on God’s green earth would save you if you stopped a 75mm round.

As if to remind him of that, puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft shells burst all around him. The Japs put up as much flak as they could. This wasn’t nearly so heavy as it had been when he flew over the Japanese carriers and their escorts, though. That had been almost thick enough to walk on. It had scared him, too. Now he had its measure. You jinked a little. You sped up and slowed down. You tried not to give them a straight shot at you. Once you’d done that, you went on with your mission. Every so often, somebody got shot down. You just hoped your number wasn’t up that particular day.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind when a Hellcat, trailing smoke, fell out of the sky and crashed into a rice paddy down below. No way the pilot could have got out-it happened too fast. “Oh, you poor, unlucky son of a bitch,” Joe said. The flak must have murdered his engine-or murdered him, so he had no chance to pull up or bail out.

A machine gun turned its winking eye Joe’s way. Those coldly frightful ice-blue Japanese tracers zipped past the Hellcat. Joe’s thumb stabbed the firing button. Red American tracers jumped out ahead of the fighter. He had six machine guns, all of them firing heavier slugs than the Jap’s weapon. Joe wouldn’t have wanted to catch a.50-caliber round. If the wound didn’t kill you, the sheer shock of getting hit was liable to.

Only a handful of Oscars and Zeros rose against the Hellcats. So did one sharp-nosed fighter of a type he hadn’t seen before. That had to be a Tony, an Army machine with an engine based on the Messerschmitt-109’s liquid-cooled in-line powerplant and not the radial engine that powered both other Japanese fighters. Tonys were supposed to be fast and well-armed. This one, beset by half a dozen Hellcats, didn’t last long enough for Joe to tell much, though it survived more battle damage before going down than other enemy planes Joe had met.

If there were more of those, they could be a royal pain, he thought. The Tony looked a hell of a lot like an Me-109. Part of that, no doubt, was the engine, which dictated the shape of the plane’s front end. But he still wondered whether some German engineers had stepped in and given the Japs a hand.

That wasn’t his worry. He and the other Hellcat pilots took turns shooting up Hickam Field, down by Pearl Harbor. Watching Japs sprint for cover was fun. Watching some of them not make it was even more fun. It didn’t feel as if he’d just shot men, any more than it had when he downed enemy airplanes. They were just… targets, and he was glad he’d hit them.

Someone else had set a bulldozer on fire. Joe admired the column of smoke that rose from it. As long as the Hellcats kept coming back, the Japs could only repair the runways at night. And early-morning visits by Dauntlesses made sure they’d have new damage to fix the next night.

You didn’t see Japanese soldiers marching along highways by regiments any more. To Joe, that was a damn shame. They’d been awful easy to shoot up then. But they weren’t fools. They’d learned better in a hurry. These days, they traveled by squads and platoons, and they stayed off the roads whenever they could. That did make it harder to strafe them. Of course, it also made it harder for them to move and to fight, which helped the gyrenes and dogfaces on the ground.

Joe looked for gun emplacements. Strafing artillery pieces was always worth doing. People said shellfire killed and wounded a lot more men than all the rounds from rifles and machine guns put together. Joe didn’t know if that was true, but he’d heard it more than once.

A lot of the Japs’ gun pits were in the jungle-covered mountains, and camouflaged with fastidious attention to detail. He spotted one gun only because he saw the muzzle flash. If not for that, he never would have known where it was. How they’d manhandled it up there was beyond him.

When he ran low on ammo, he flew back toward the Bunker Hill. One by one, his fellow pilots were breaking off, too. He laughed a little. He’d had all this training in formation flying, and here he was on his own. The Japs didn’t have enough planes in the air to make neat formations necessary any more.

A destroyer was on fire, a few miles off the coast of Oahu. Some enemy pilot had managed to get through the CAP overhead. The Japs were still giving it everything they had. They didn’t seem to realize they were fighting out of their weight-or else they just didn’t give a damn.

Destroyers and their bigger buddies needed to stay close to shore so they could pound enemy positions with their guns. The carriers cruised farther north-with luck, farther out of harm’s way. Joe didn’t see any of them in trouble, and was glad not to.

He found his own ship and lined up on her stern. After that, he did exactly what the landing officer told him to do. Not making his own decisions never failed to rattle him. That was what he was supposed to do when he was in the air. But he had to obey here. He’d seen that ever since he first tried putting down on the placid old Wolverine on Lake Erie. He believed it. He just didn’t like it.

The landing officer straightened him up, got his approach angle a little gentler, and then dropped the wigwag flags. Joe shove the stick forward. The Hellcat dove for the carrier’s deck. The tailhook missed the first arrester wire, but caught the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.