“What the fuck?” Les muttered. He’d figured they would keep driving straight south. He said, “Sir, what about Pearl City and Pearl Harbor?”

“They’ll be taken care of, Sergeant, I promise,” Bradford said. “Only difference is, we won’t be the guys who do it.”

“Right,” Les said. Somebody somewhere way the hell up the chain of command had had himself a brainstorm. Whether it would end up being the good kind or the other kind-well, everybody would have to wait and see how that turned out. “Honolulu.” Dillon tasted the word. He’d been thinking about Hotel Street not long before. He wondered what was left of it. If the damn Nips didn’t shoot him first, he’d find out.

MINORU GENDA WAITED IN A HOTEL ROOM on Hotel Street. He’d brought his bicycle upstairs with him to the bare little cubicle. If he left it on the street, even chained to a lamppost, it would be gone by the time he came down. He’d paid too much for the room. He’d paid too much for the bottle of island gin he’d brought here, too. He shrugged. What did he have to do with his money now but spend it?

A knock on the door. He jumped up from the bed-the only furniture in the room but for a battered chest of drawers. Hotels on Hotel Street had only one thing in mind.

He opened the door. Queen Cynthia Laanui stood in the hallway. Probably the most recognizable woman in Hawaii, she’d taken pains not to be recognized. Her red hair was tucked up under a straw hat. Enormous sunglasses helped hide her face. She’d brought her bicycle upstairs, too. A cramped room with two bicycles in it amused Genda. Small things still could. Few big ones were amusing any more.

Queen Cynthia walked the bicycle in when Genda stood aside. He closed the door behind her and locked it. Then he took her in his arms. They kissed greedily. When they broke apart, she said, “It’s not going to work, is it?” She didn’t sound bitter-only very tired.

“No.” Genda wished he could lie to her. Back at Pearl Harbor, Japanese officers were still busy lying to one another. They kept on believing that if this went right, and if that went right, and if they caught the Americans napping here, they might still save Oahu. American officers must have danced that dance of delusion at the end of 1941 and the start of 1942. Before long, defeat stared them in the face even so. And it would stare the Japanese in the face, too. Genda went on, “We fight hard. We are brave. But, so sorry, we cannot win. The enemy is too strong.”

Saying something like that brought vast relief. His colleagues might have arrested him for telling the truth. If you didn’t look at something, they were convinced, it would go away. But being convinced didn’t make it true.

“What are we going to do, then?” Cynthia asked. “What can we do?”

What did we mean here? The Empire of Japan and the soon to be extinguished Kingdom of Hawaii? King Stanley and herself? Genda and herself? All of those at once? That last was Genda’s guess. He said, “We all do the best we can.” His answer was as ambiguous as her question.

She spotted the bottle on the chest of drawers. Two lithe strides took her to it. She yanked out the cork, swigged, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s nasty,” she said, coughing, and then drank again.

Genda took a pull, too. It was every bit as bad as Cynthia said it was. But the only thing worse than rotgut liquor was no liquor at all. “You have courage, not to try to get away,” he said.

Her laugh was all razors and barbed wire. “Where would I go? How would I get there? Wherever it is, somebody would know my face. Your propaganda people made sure of that. I’m on postage stamps, for crying out loud. And pretty soon I’ll be on post-office walls, too.” Seeing that that meant nothing to Genda, she explained, “That’s where we put posters of wanted criminals.”

He kissed her again. “You are not a criminal to me, but you are wanted.” Paying compliments in English wasn’t easy for him. He hoped that one came out right.

It must have, because she turned red. But she sounded no happier as she answered, “Yeah, and that only makes me a bigger villain to the USA. Like being Queen of Hawaii wasn’t bad enough, I fell for a Japanese officer. They won’t know whether to shoot me or hang me.”

She was probably right. No, she was bound to be right. If the Americans came back, they would have debts to pay.

He wished he could offer to take her to Japan. She deserved to escape such a fate. He didn’t think the two of them would last long as a couple once she got back to the home islands. King Stanley would have to come, too. Genda’s liaison with a round-eyed woman would draw much more notice, and much more censorious notice, in Japan than it did in this easygoing place. The King and Queen of Hawaii would undoubtedly go on being used for propaganda purposes: brave heads of a government in exile. Genda could see it all now.

What he couldn’t see was how to get Queen Cynthia-yes, and King Stanley-away from Oahu. If he’d known how to do that, he might have had some notion of how to get away himself. But no Japanese planes had been seen in these parts since the American fleet’s fighters and bombers smashed the fleet and then the land-based aircraft. An H8K flying boat might be able to sneak into Pearl Harbor. But the odds were long. As the Americans had shown by their landing at the Kapiolani Park POW camp, they controlled the sea and air all around Oahu, and their grip tightened by the day.

Genda didn’t think Japan could scrape together enough carriers and other ships to challenge this armada, even if she abandoned the rest of the war-which she couldn’t very well do. Everything Admiral Yamamoto had said about what the United States could do if roused was coming true. From Honolulu, though, Tokyo was more than 6,000 kilometers away. Even now, Hawaii shielded Japan.

Maybe a submarine could sneak in and out. None had come in, though. Genda didn’t know if any had tried. Which would be worse, knowing some had failed or knowing his superiors far to the west hadn’t dared risk any? One more question he hadn’t asked himself.

“When… things go wrong, Japanese people often kill themselves, don’t they?” By the way Queen Cynthia asked the question, she knew the answer.

“Yes, we do that.” Minoru Genda nodded. He didn’t go into details about seppuku. Women weren’t expected to disembowel themselves anyway, only to slit their throats. After the nod, he shook his head, trying to shove such unpleasant, unwelcome thoughts aside. It wasn’t the first time he’d had them. He said, “Too soon to worry about such things. Much too soon.” He sipped from the bottle on the dresser. If he drank enough of that, he wouldn’t worry about anything for a while.

Cynthia also drank. But her voice was completely sober. “Too soon to worry about it, yes. Much too soon? I don’t think so.”

Since Genda didn’t really think it was much too soon, either, he didn’t try to argue with her. He asked, “How is his Majesty?”

“He didn’t think… this would happen when he let you put the crown on his head,” she answered. Genda already knew that. She went on, “It’s funny. He’s at least hapa-haole himself, but he really is angry with haoles for what they’ve done to Hawaiians. That’s genuine. A lot of him is bluff and bluster and bullshit”-maybe she felt the almost-gin after all-“but that’s for real.” She looked down at her ring and flushed again. “Well, he isn’t angry at all the haoles.”

“No one could be-can be? — could be angry at you,” Genda said.

“That’s sweet. You’re sweet.” Now Cynthia Laanui kissed him. A long time ago, someone had told him that the person who started a kiss was the one who needed it more. By the desperate way Cynthia clung to him, that held a lot of truth. When they separated, she said, “You don’t know me very well. You can’t know me very well, if you tell me something like that. Don’t get me wrong-I like it. But I know it’s silly, too.”