Once upon a time, Ford Island, there in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been a tropical paradise, all palm trees and bougainvillea and frangipani. Nothing green was left now, just dirt and char marks and the wreckage of buildings-and antiaircraft guns among the wreckage. Joe squeezed the firing button on top of the stick. His six.50s hammered away. The recoil made the Hellcat jerk in the air. Japs scrambled for cover. He might have been playing pinball, except those were real people down there. Real people I hope I kill, he thought.

Out at the edge of the harbor, landing craft were coming ashore. Some of the AA guns were firing at them instead of at the airplanes overhead. That wasn’t so good. A three-inch gun could do horrible things to a boat that was meant to be equally awkward by land and sea. Joe strafed a gun from behind. He didn’t think its crew heard him coming. What.50-caliber slugs did to human flesh was even worse than what antiaircraft guns did to landing craft.

Some of the ugly, boxy boats came right up the channel. Wrecks blocked bigger ships from getting in, but the landing craft scraped past them. Joe wagged his wings in salute as he shot at a Japanese machine-gun nest.

A Hellcat trailing smoke plunged into the water of the West Loch. Joe looked around. He didn’t see a parachute. Maybe the poor bastard inside the plane was lucky not to get out. He would have come down in the middle of a big swarm of Japs, with a piss-poor chance of getting away. What they would have done to him before they let him die… Compared to that, going straight into the drink looked pretty good.

Joe made pass after pass, firing short bursts so he wouldn’t overheat his guns and burn out the barrels. Finally, his ammo ran dry. He still had plenty of fuel, but so what? Unless he wanted to imitate that Jap and see how big a fire he could start, it didn’t do him much good here.

It would take him home, though. He flew back over Oahu toward the Bunker Hill. The Japs shot at him several more times, and missed every one. Hitting a fast-moving airplane wasn’t easy. Frustrated gunners on both sides could testify to that.

A few more puffs of black smoke around him, and then he was out over the Pacific. He hoped none of the American ships would fire on him. If one did, they all would, and they threw up a lot of shells and bullets. They might not get him anyway, but why take chances?

He ran the gauntlet. A CAP fighter came over to have a look at him, but it pulled away when the pilot recognized he was in a Hellcat. It waggled its wings as it went. He returned the courtesy.

As always, landing on the Bunker Hill meant turning off his own will and doing exactly what the landing officer told him to. Fighter pilots were a willful breed. He hated surrendering control to somebody else. But the easiest of the many ways to kill yourself on carrier duty was to think you knew better than the landing officer. However little Joe liked it, he believed it.

At the officer’s signal, he shoved the stick forward and dove for the deck. “Jesus!” he said as he slammed home. His tailhook caught the second arrester wire. The Hellcat jerked to a stop.

Flightcrew men came running up as Joe opened the canopy and got out. “How’d it go, Mr. Crosetti?”

one of them called.

“Piece of cake,” Joe answered. “I need ammo. Then I can go back and give ’em some more. We’re going to take Pearl Harbor back from those bastards-you better believe we are.”

The sailors cheered. “We’ll have you back in the air in nothin’ flat, sir,” an armorer said. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“Not me,” Joe said. “That’s for the guys with lots of gold braid.” As an ensign, he outranked all the ratings around him. He was an officer, of course. But he felt he was barely an officer. Just about all the others on the ship were entitled to give him orders.

That was a worry for another day. Now all he wanted to do was hit the Japs another lick. What would end up happening to Pearl Harbor once the Americans took it back-was also a worry for another day, and not for the likes of him.

FIGHTING WAS GETTING CLOSE to Honolulu now. The roar of battle from Pearl Harbor never went away, no matter how much Jiro Takahashi wished it would. He’d made a bet not long after the Japanese conquered Hawaii. He’d bet they were the winning side. For a while, that bet looked pretty good. It didn’t any more.

He wished his sons would give him a harder time about it. He deserved a hard time for his foolishness. But they treated him sympathetically, as if he were an old rake coming back to earth after a spree with a young floozy who took him for everything but the gold in his teeth.

“Shigata ga nai, Father,” Hiroshi said. “When the Americans come back, we just have to try to keep you out of trouble if we can.”

“They can’t get him for treason.” Kenzo spoke as if Jiro weren’t in the tent in the botanical garden. “He’s not a U.S. citizen. He was just helping his own country.” No matter how dumb he was. He didn’t say that. He didn’t need to say it. Everything that had happened since the Americans came back shouted it for him.

“Do you think they’ll care?” Hiroshi asked. “To them, he’ll be a Jap who helped the other Japs.” The hateful key word was in English. His older son went on, “They’ll probably deal with all the people like that, so we’d better have some good reasons why they shouldn’t.”

“Don’t worry about me, boys,” Jiro said. “Consul Kita told me he would take care of me if he could, and I’m sure he meant it.”

They both stared at him. “Big deal,” Kenzo said. “Kita can’t even help himself now, let alone anybody else.”

“That’s the truth,” Hiroshi agreed. “All just talk and nonsense.”

“Well, I hope not,” Jiro said. “The consulate is still up and running.”

“Up and standing still, you mean,” Kenzo said. “It hasn’t got anywhere to run to. The Americans are in Pearl Harbor, Father. They’ll be here in Honolulu any day now. What can Kita do?”

Jiro shrugged. He got to his feet. “I don’t know. Maybe I ought to go and see, neh?”

“You ought to leave that place alone, Father,” Kenzo said. “Haven’t you got in enough trouble because you went there?”

“If America wins, you will be happy,” Jiro said. “All right-be happy. I wouldn’t be happy even if I never went on the radio. America is not my country. It has never been my country. I came here to make some money, not to live.”

“And you made more than you ever would have in Japan,” Hiroshi said.

“So what?” Jiro shrugged again. “So what, I say? I have lived for all these years in a land that does not like me, does not want me, and does not speak my language. If you want to go on being Japs”-he brought out the English word, too, and laced it with contempt-“in America, fine. Not for me, not if I can help it.”

He pushed past Hiroshi and Kenzo and out of the tent. His sons didn’t try to stop him. If they had, they would have got a surprise. They were taller and younger than he was, but he was meaner. I raised them soft, he thought. Most of the time, that pleased him. They didn’t need to be as hard as he had. But they didn’t have that toughness to fall back on, either.

The air stank of smoke, of burning. It wasn’t so bad as it had been when all the fuel at Pearl Harbor burned. Then Honolulu wore a shroud for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Still, it left his lungs as raw as if he were smoking three cigarettes at the same time. He smiled wryly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked one cigarette, let alone three.

Up Nuuanu Avenue he went. The guards at the Japanese consulate waved to him. “Konichiwa, Fisherman!” they called. “You haven’t got any goodies for us today?”

“Please excuse me, no,” Jiro answered. With so many American ships operating south of Oahu now, they probably would have sunk the Oshima Maru if he dared put to sea in her. “Is Kita-san in?”