When they got out of essentials of naval service, they had to hustle to make it to introductory navigation. Joe liked that least of the three academic courses in the program; it showed him he hadn’t paid enough attention in geometry and trig. But plenty of other cadets were struggling harder than he was.

“I hope you didn’t get Moore mad at you,” he said to Sharp as they hurried from one building to another.

“So do I, but I won’t lose any sleep over it,” the cadet from Utah replied. “I had a legitimate question.”

“I guess so,” Joe said.

Sharp’s eyes said Joe had just flunked a test. “Don’t you care what happens to the civilians in Hawaii? They’ve got a tough row to hoe.”

“Well, yeah,” Joe admitted. “But isn’t kicking the Japs out the best thing we can do for them? Odds are, whatever that freighter was carrying was going to the Jap Army or Navy, not to civilians.”

“Maybe. I suppose we have to hope so.” Sharp sounded no more convinced than Joe had a minute earlier. “They can’t let everybody starve, though.”

“Who says they can’t?” Joe retorted. “Look what the Nazis are doing in Russia.” Sharp winced but didn’t carry the argument any further, from which Joe concluded he’d won the point.

Any pride in his prowess disappeared in introduction to navigation. He butchered a problem-and he did it on the blackboard so everyone could see. “I’m afraid that answer is just exactly 180 degrees off, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said. “In other words, you couldn’t be wronger if you tried. Take your seat.” Ears blazing, Joe did. The instructor looked around. “Who sees where Mr. Crosetti went astray here?” Several people raised a hand. The instructor pointed. “Mr. Sharp.”

Orson Sharp solved the problem with what looked like offhand ease. He wasn’t having any trouble in the class. When he sat down, he didn’t act as if he’d just shown Joe up. Maybe he didn’t even feel that way. Joe knew he would have were their positions reversed. That made him resent his roomie even if Sharp didn’t resent him.

After the lecture, the instructor gave out more problems, these for pencil and paper. Joe thought he did pretty well on them. You probably did, but so what? he jeered at himself. Everybody already watched you show what a jerk you could be.

He breathed the heady-and chilly-air of freedom again when he got out of class. As far as he could tell, he’d never make it back to his carrier if he took off from one. But when he said that out loud, Orson Sharp shook his head. “I saw what you did. You took the tangent instead of the sine-just a little goof. You won’t do it with your neck on the line.”

“I hope not,” Joe said. Sharp perplexed him almost as much as his mangled navigation. Maybe the other cadet really wasn’t mad at him after all. Did that mark almost inhuman restraint or a genuinely good person?

The cadets’ other academic class was identification and recognition: how to tell bombers from fighters, cruisers from battleships, and Allied planes and ships from the ones that belonged to the Axis. They’d already had to learn the silhouettes of some new German and Japanese planes that hadn’t been known when they started the course.

Joe eyed blown-up photos and drawings with something less than his usual attention. He kept thinking about the question he’d asked himself between classes. How do you identify and recognize a genuinely good person? It wasn’t as if that were something he had to worry about every day. He knew too well that he didn’t fill the bill. Orson Sharp might.

Despite absentmindedness, he got out of the class without embarrassing himself again. Along with the other cadets, he trooped over to the cafeteria-now styled the galley in deference to the influx of Navy fliers-for lunch. The choice was between chicken a la king (which the cadets universally called chicken a la thing) and creamed chipped beef on toast (which had an older and earthier nickname). Joe chose the chicken. Sharp filled his plate with the beef.

At every table, some wit tapped out dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, the Morse for SOS. People snorted. Orson Sharp looked puzzled. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Pointing to Sharp’s plate, Joe said, “You know what they call that stuff.”

“No. What?” The kid from Utah seemed more confused than ever.

As the pseudo-distress calls went on and on, Joe fought not to roll his eyes. Sharp really had led a sheltered life. Patiently, Joe spelled it out for him: “Shit on a shingle. S-O-S.”

“Oh.” A light went on in Sharp’s eyes. “No, I didn’t know that. Well, at least it makes sense now.” He dug in. “I don’t care what they call it. I think it’s good.” As usual, he didn’t let being different from the other cadets faze him. He had his own standards, they suited him, and he stuck to them.

After lunch came athletics. Orson Sharp knocked people into next week on the football field. Joe played offensive end and defensive back. Bigger guys tried to run over him. He tried not to let them. Along with everybody else, they both got knocked around by the dirty-fighting instructors. Swimming felt strange to Joe. He already had a pretty good crawl, but they wanted him to use a modified breaststroke because it kept his head out of the water better. He did his best to learn it. He’d gained five pounds since coming to Chapel Hill, all of it muscle.

And when the lights went out at half past nine, he fell asleep as if he’d been clubbed.

ACCELERATION PRESSED LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO back into his seat as he roared off the Akagi ’s flight deck. He’d had the mechanics install steel plates in the back and bottom of the seat. A lot of Japanese pilots disdained the extra weight: it made their Zeros slower and less maneuverable. The Americans had carried much more armor than he did. It had saved a lot of pilots, or at least let them bail out. It hadn’t saved Hawaii, but he still thought it was a good idea.

Surrounded by a screen of destroyers, Akagi patrolled northeast of Oahu. The Japanese had also commandeered some big fishing sampans, mounted radios on them, and posted them in a picket arc close to a thousand kilometers out from the Hawaiian Islands. No carrier-based bomber could fly that far and return to the ship that had launched it. The United States wasn’t going to catch Japan napping, the way Japan had caught the USA.

Just in case the boats in that picket arc had missed something, Shindo watched the sky like a hawk. Some people slacked off when they didn’t expect to run into trouble. Shindo wasn’t one of those. Routine meant routinely capable, routinely excellent, to him.

He also glanced down at the ocean every now and again. Losing the Bordeaux Maru was a wake-up call for the Japanese Navy. That had happened more than three weeks ago now. The submarine that got the freighter was bound to be long gone. That didn’t mean others hadn’t come to take its place, though. Shindo couldn’t sink one if he spotted it on the surface: the Zero didn’t carry bombs. But he could shoot it up. If his machine guns and cannons filled it full of holes, it couldn’t submerge. Then it would be easy meat for bombers or destroyers.

Here, though, nothing marred the Pacific but the ships of the Japanese flotilla and their wakes. The rest of the ocean seemed glassy smooth. There was hardly any chop; the wind was the next thing to a dead calm. No big swells were rolling down out of the north, either, as they had been when the task force moved on Hawaii. Had those been much worse, the barges would have had trouble landing, and the invasion might have turned into a fiasco. Admiral Yamamoto had bet against the kami of wind and wave, and he’d won.

Shindo called the other fighter pilots flying combat air patrol: “Anything?”