“I don’t think so.” Genda was sure she was right, but he didn’t care. Right now, they had nothing left but each other, and they might not have each other long, either. He gathered himself, picked her up, and carried her to the bed. He was a small man, two or three centimeters shorter than she was, but he was strong.

Their lovemaking had always had the sweetness of stolen fruit. Now, every time they touched, they knew it might be the last. The way things were these days, each joining might be the last thing they ever did. For him, and evidently for her, too, that only made the flame burn hotter.

Afterwards, a pink flush mottling the pale skin between her breasts, she said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”

With the air of a successful stage magician, Genda pulled a pack of Chesterfields from a trouser pocket.

“Here,” he said.

Cynthia squealed and kissed him. “My God, my God, my God!” she said. “Where on earth did you get these? Where?” To hear her talk, the tobacco drought might have been worldwide, not confined to Hawaii.

Genda made a small ceremony of lighting one for her and one for himself. “A friend gave them to me,” he said, and let it go at that. The friend had got them from another friend, who’d got them from a dead U.S. Marine. That might be more than Cynthia wanted to hear.

She coughed when she first inhaled. Genda had done the same thing. They’d gone without tobacco so long, it was as if they’d never smoked at all. But the second puff made her smile. “Jesus, that’s good!”

she said, and then, after a momentary pause, “Can I have a few to take back to Stanley? I’m sorry. I know it’s greedy. But if I give him cigarettes, he won’t wonder why I went out.”

“Okay,” Genda said. The slang made Cynthia smile. Genda didn’t begrudge her five Chesterfields… very much. He knew she was right. If she gave the king those, he’d think she’d left Iolani Palace to get her hands on them. That she’d got them from her lover wouldn’t cross his mind-or Genda hoped it wouldn’t.

She smoked her cigarette down to the tiniest of butts, then stared sorrowfully at the scrap of tobacco that remained. “I feel like chewing this like a hillbilly,” she said.

Although Genda knew about snuff, chewing tobacco had never caught on in Japan. The idea made him queasy-or maybe it was just the Chesterfield.

The Queen of Hawaii got out of bed and started dressing. “I’d better go back now,” she said. As she had on the way from the palace to Hotel Street, she tucked her hair up under her hat and put on the sunglasses.

“We will do everything we can,” Genda said. Cynthia Laanui nodded. And after they’d done that… Neither one wanted to dwell on what might happen then. She nodded one more time, then walked the bicycle out the door without a backward glance.

Genda waited five minutes before he dressed so they wouldn’t be seen leaving together. He wrestled his own bicycle down the stairs and started back to Pearl Harbor. He hadn’t gone far before he realized the great naval center was under attack. Planes roared above it: fighters strafing and dive bombers stooping on targets to drop their bombs. Japanese antiaircraft guns-and some captured from the Americans at the surrender-filled the sky with puffs of black smoke.

Naval guns were also firing on Pearl Harbor, from ranges beyond the reach of shore-based artillery. Genda wished Japan hadn’t had to wreck the great coast-defense guns the USA had installed along the southern coast of Oahu. They would have taught those ships respect. But they could have harmed the Japanese Navy, and so Aichi dive bombers with armor-piercing bombs had blown up the casements in which they lurked.

Were those landing craft in the water? Whatever they were, they looked a lot more sophisticated than the Daihatsu barges on which Japan relied. Genda pedaled harder. He’d had permission to leave his station, but he wanted to be there to defend the harbor as long as he could. As if one man will make any difference now, he thought bitterly. But his legs pumped up and down all the same.

THE BUNKER HILL WAS A GOING CONCERN AGAIN, flight deck repaired, incinerated planes shoved into the drink, new Hellcats and Dauntlesses taken aboard. Joe Crosetti missed the fighter that had gone up in flames, but the new one would do the job just fine. He missed the men lost when that Jap crashed his Zero into the carrier far more. You couldn’t replace men the way you could airplanes.

Not far away, the Copahee was still under repair. The escort carrier had taken a bomb from that same Jap. The guy was a son of a bitch, yeah, but he’d done a hell of a piece of work there.

Sailors on the baby flattop took off their caps and waved to Joe as he and his buddies from the Bunker Hill flew over them, bound for Oahu. He waggled his wings to return the compliment. By rights, the sailors could have been pissed off. How had that Jap got through in spite of radar and the combat air patrol overhead?

Joe feared he knew the answer. The Americans had got overconfident and fallen asleep at the switch.

The blip on the radar coming in alone? So what? It was bound to be another American plane, wasn’t it? Well, no. And the guys flying CAP had been slow getting a handle on it, too.

The carriers fell away behind him. So did the destroyers and cruisers screening them. He came up on the warships bombarding Oahu. Their guns thundered below him. Flame and smoke belched from the muzzles. The ships heeled in the water at the recoil. Some dug-in Japs would be catching hell.

Fewer bombardment ships remained north of Oahu. A good many had steamed around the island to pummel Pearl Harbor. Joe and his fellow fliers were on their way there, too. He’d shot up the harbor before, plenty of times. Things were different today. Marines and dogfaces were landing. They were going to take the base away from the Japs. Just about all the Japanese soldiers were at the front. What kind of fight could sailors and other odds and sods put up?

“We’ll fix ’em, goddammit,” Joe said. A second front here would do almost as much good as the second front in Europe Stalin kept shouting for. Catch the enemy between hammer and anvil and smash him flat.

“Yeah,” Joe muttered. “Yeah.”

One thing the Japs had already made very plain-they had no quit in them. All the antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out were banging away like nobody’s business. Flying past a near miss was like driving a car over a hole in the road. You went down and then you went up again, sometimes hard enough for your teeth to click together. But you didn’t pick up shrapnel from a hole in the road unless somebody’d stuck a land mine down there.

Something clanged against the new Hellcat’s fuselage. Joe automatically checked the gauges. Everything looked good. These babies could take it. Hit a Zero or an Oscar with a good burst of.50-caliber bullets, and it’d break up in midair. The Army fighter the Americans called the Tony was a tougher bird, but nowhere near as tough as a Hellcat.

Orders were to shoot up anything Japanese at Pearl that might shoot back. Joe went in at not much above treetop height, machine guns blazing. He wondered if the place was worth taking away from the Nips. Two campaigns inside of two years had turned it into a pretty fair approximation of hell on earth. The water had a greasy sheen. He was so low, the odor of spilled fuel oil got into the canopy. Wrecked American and Japanese ships lay side by side, brothers in death. Before the war started, nobody except a few aviation-minded cranks had really believed airplanes could sink capital ships all by themselves.

“I believe! Oh, Lord, I believe!” Joe sounded like a Holy Roller preacher. How many hundred thousand tons of twisted steel lay below him? The last two times the U.S. and Japanese fleets clashed, neither side’s ships had set eyes on the other’s. Planes did all the dirty work.