When the big American push started, shells crashed into the refugee camp where he and his brother and their father had stayed since their apartment-and Kenzo and Hiroshi’s mother-burned in the Japanese attack on Honolulu. Japanese positions were nearby, so Kenzo could see why the Americans struck. Seeing why did nothing to ease the horror.

He and Hiroshi got out unhurt. That would do for a miracle till God decide to dole out a bigger one somewhere else. He’d seen bad things when the Japanese took Honolulu. He hadn’t seen the worst, because the Americans chose to surrender rather than let the worst happen to the civilians in the city. The Japanese didn’t care about civilians. They would fight as long as they had cartridges, and with bayonets after that.

And whether the Americans wanted to bring hell down on the civilians of Honolulu or not, what else were they going to do to get rid of the Japanese soldiers among them? Kenzo and Hiroshi stayed flat on their bellies all through the artillery barrage. They’d learned that much in the earlier round of fighting. It didn’t always help, but it was their best hope.

Shrapnel tore through their tent and the ropes that held it up. It fell down on them, which frightened Kenzo worse than he was already-something he wouldn’t have thought possible. Through the roars and crashes of exploding shells, he heard screams, some abruptly cut off.

When the shelling eased, he struggled free of the heavy canvas. The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”-something his missing father might have said. He could smell blood in the air. There lay a man gutted like an ahi-and there, a few feet away, lay most of his head.

Wounded men and women were worse than dead ones. They writhed and shrieked and moaned and bled and bled and bled. Kenzo bent to use a length of rope torn apart by shell fragments as a tourniquet for a woman who’d lost a big chunk of meat out of her leg below the knee. He hoped it would do her some good.

He was in the middle of that when someone shouted in Japanese: “Come on, give me a hand! Yes, you!” When he looked up, a soldier was leading Hiroshi away. The soldier had a stretcher, and needed Kenzo’s brother to help him carry wounded. No doubt they would deal with soldiers first, civilians later if at all.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said again. He couldn’t stop them from grabbing his brother, not unless he wanted to get killed himself and probably get Hiroshi killed with him. The other trouble was, they were both too likely to get killed anyway. More American shells screamed in, some on the Japanese positions, some on the luckless refugee camp. More screams rose, many of them screams of despair. Kenzo hugged the ground next to the injured woman and hoped none of the fragments would bite him. He had no idea what else to do.

When the barrage eased, he asked the woman, “How are you?” She didn’t answer. He took a look at her. A chunk of shrapnel had clipped off the top of her head. Her brains spilled out onto the dirt. Kenzo threw up. Then he spat again and again, trying to get the horrible taste out of his mouth. And then he staggered to his feet and stumbled away. Any place in the world had to be safer than where he was.

At first, his flight was blind. Before long, though, it had purpose: he headed for Elsie Sundberg’s house. If anything happened to her… If anything happened to her, he didn’t think he wanted to go on living. He’d been through a lot just then, and he was only twenty years old.

Getting to her house in eastern Honolulu was a nightmare in itself. He had to pass several checkpoints manned by special naval landing forces, and they would just as soon have shot civilians as looked at them. That was no exaggeration. Bodies lay in the street, blood pooled around them. Some of the women’s skirts and dresses were hiked up. Kenzo bit his lip; the occupiers hadn’t killed them right away.

Had he tried sneaking by, he was sure they would have put a bullet in him. Instead, he came up to each barricade and roadblock openly, calling, “I’m the Fisherman’s son! I’m looking for my father!”

He hated using his father’s collaboration in any way, but it got him by. And one of the men at a sandbagged machine-gun nest said, “Didn’t he get out on the submarine the other night?”

“What submarine?” Kenzo asked-this was the first he’d heard of it.

“There was one,” the landing-forces man said. Kenzo couldn’t very well argue with him, because he didn’t know there hadn’t been one. The fellow went on, “I don’t know whether your old man was on it or not, though. They don’t tell guys like me stuff like that.” He gestured. “Go ahead, buddy. I hope you find him. I always did like listening to him.”

“Thank you,” Kenzo said, wishing he hadn’t heard that quite so often from Japanese military men. He could have done without the compliment. Would his father have got on a submarine-one probably bound for Japan? Muttering unhappily, Kenzo nodded to himself. His father would be able to see the jig was up here. And he must have been afraid of what the Americans would do to him when they came back. He likely had reason, too, even if he was a Japanese citizen. Collaborators would catch it.

Kenzo talked his way past another couple of Japanese strongpoints. The special naval landing forces and the soldiers they had with them seemed determined to hold on to Honolulu as long as they were still breathing and still had ammo. God help the city, Kenzo thought, not that God seemed to have paid much attention to Honolulu since December 7, 1941.

The fresh shell crater in the Sundbergs’ front lawn made Kenzo gulp. One of the windows had only a few shards of glass in it. There was a fist-sized hole in the front door. Nobody answered when he knocked. He started to panic, but then quelled the alarm thudding through him. They’d built a hidey-hole under the house.

He tried the door. It swung open. He carefully closed it behind him, wanting things to look as normal as they could. Then he went to the closet that held the entrance to the foxhole. Sure enough, the rug over the trap door was askew.

If Elsie and her family were down there, they had to be panicking, hearing footsteps over their heads. Kenzo squatted down and rapped out shave and a haircut-five cents on the trap door. He didn’t think any Japanese soldier would do that. When he tried to lift the trap, though, he found it was latched from below. That was smart.

He rapped again, calling, “You okay, Elsie?” Could she hear him through the floor? He called again, a little louder.

Something slid underneath him-the latch. He got off the trap door so it could go up. It did, about an inch. Elsie’s voice floated out of the opening: “That you, Ken?”

“Yeah,” he said, almost giddy with relief. “You okay?”

“We are now,” she answered. “You gave us quite a turn there.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I figured I would, but it was too late by then.”

“How about you?” Elsie asked.

“The Americans shelled the camp,” he said bleakly. “There are machine-gun nests not far away, so they’ll probably do it some more. Hank and I are okay so far. The Japanese dragooned him into being a stretcher-bearer, but he was all right last I saw him.”

“What about your father?” Elsie knew where his worries lived, all right.

“I think he’s on his way to Japan right now,” Kenzo replied. “And if he is, that may be the best thing for all of us.”

Elsie’s mother spoke up: “If they’re shelling the camp, you won’t have anywhere to stay. Come down here with us.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Damn straight we’re sure.” That gruff male voice belonged to Mr. Sundberg, whom he hadn’t met so often. “We owe you plenty, Ken. Maybe we can pay back a little. Come on-make it snappy.”