Kenzo lifted the trap door high enough to get through it, then closed it over his own head. It was dark and gloomy under the house, and smelled of damp dirt. There’d been more digging since he last saw the shelter. Elsie squeezed his hand. “We just went down here yesterday,” she said. “We’ve got water. We’ve got some food. We can last till it’s over-I hope.”

“And we’ve got a honey bucket over there in the corner, at the end of that trench.” Mr. Sundberg chuckled hoarsely. “All the comforts of home.”

Kenzo’s nose had already noted the honey bucket. It was better than nothing. The whole setup was a lot better than staying out in the open. “Thanks,” he said. That didn’t go far enough. He tried again: “Thanks for looking at me and not seeing a Jap.”

Elsie squeezed his hand again. Her mother said, “We’ll sort that all out later. Let’s see if we can live through this first.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such good advice.

REPLACEMENTS CAME UP TO FILL THE RANKS of Captain Braxton Bradford’s company. Les Dillon looked at the new men joining his platoon with something less than delight. They were plainly just off the boat. They must have landed in the north, hopped on a truck to get down here-and now they’d go into the meat grinder. They were clean. They were clean-shaven. Their uniforms weren’t filthy, and weren’t out at the knees and elbows. The way the veterans looked and smelled and acted seemed to dismay them. They might have been in the company of so many wolves.

“Any of you guys ever seen combat before?” Les knew the answer would be no even before the new fish shook their heads. He sighed. Sheer ignorance was going to get a lot of them shot in the next few days. He couldn’t tell them that straight out. What he said instead was, “Try and stick close to somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Shoot first and ask questions later. The Japs have had time to get ready for us, and they don’t give up. We’ve got to make the damn bastards pay for what they’ve done to Hotel Street.”

“Hotel Street, Sergeant?” a replacement asked.

Les rolled his eyes. The kid didn’t even know. Wearily, Dillon said, “Best damn place in the world to get drunk and get laid. That give you the picture?” The young Marine nodded. He looked eager-gung-ho, people were calling it these days. Gung-ho was great if it kept you going forward. If you didn’t pay enough attention to where you were going, though…

“Y’all listen up, hear me?” That was Captain Bradford. A Southern drawl often seemed to be the Marine Corps’ second language. The company commander went on, “We are gonna go on through those houses and apartments in front of us, and we aren’t gonna stop till we get to the rubble past ’em where the Japs bombed Honolulu a year and a half ago. We’ll set up a perimeter on the edge of that zone and wait for the artillery and armor to soften up the way ahead. Questions, men?”

Nobody said anything. Les figured the new guys would keep going if they got half a chance. Marines were like that, grabbing as much as they could as fast as they could. The Army was more methodical. Dogfaces said the Marine way caused more casualties. Les thought there might be more at first, but not in the long run.

“You new men, keep your eyes open, hear?” Bradford added. “Damn Japs are better at camouflage than y’all ever reckoned anybody could be. Fuckers’ll hide in a mailbox or under a doormat. Everybody watches out, everybody helps everybody else. Right?”

“Right, sir!” the Marines chorused. Les caught Dutch Wenzel’s eye. The other platoon sergeant gave back a fractional nod. The replacements wouldn’t know what to look for. Some of them would get educated in a hurry. Others-probably more-wouldn’t stay in one piece long enough to have the chance.

Some of those houses and apartments and little shops up ahead were as innocent as they looked. Some held Jap riflemen or machine-gun positions. Japanese mortar crews would be waiting in the alleys and on the roofs. Les knew the Marines could clear them out. What the cost would be… That was the question.

A couple of bullets snapped past. Les was on the deck before he knew he’d thrown himself flat. It was just harassing fire, but it was from an Arisaka. He didn’t believe in taking chances. Some of the new guys gave funny looks to him and the other Marines who’d flattened out. He didn’t care. His mama hadn’t raised him to take chances he didn’t have to.

Machine guns, mortars, and some 105s opened up on the buildings ahead. Hellcats strafed them. By the time the barrage let up, they were smoking wreckage. Les wondered how anybody could tell them from the rubble farther east. He shrugged. He’d worry about that later, if at all.

“Boy, those Jap bastards must be dead meat now,” a recruit said happily.

Les laughed, not that it was funny. “Yeah, and then you wake up,” he said. “They’re waiting for us. You see one you think is dead, put a bullet in him. He’s liable to be playing possum, waiting to shoot you in the back.”

The replacement looked disbelieving. Les had neither time nor inclination to knock sense into his empty head. Captain Bradford yelled, “Forward!” and forward he went.

As usual, he ran hunched over, making himself the smallest possible target. He dodged like a halfback faking past tacklers. And the first piece of cover he saw-goddamn if it wasn’t a bathtub, blown from Lord knows where-he dove behind.

Sure as hell, the shelling and strafing hadn’t killed all the Japs. It hadn’t even made enough of them keep their heads down. Arisakas and Springfields and Nambu machine guns opened up. Knee mortars started dropping their nasty little bombs among the Americans. So did bigger mortars farther back. Les hated mortars not only because the bombs could fall right into foxholes but also, and especially, because you couldn’t hear them coming. One second, nothing. The next, your buddy was hamburger-or maybe you were.

Wounded men started screaming for medics. The Navy corpsmen who went in with Marines didn’t wear Red Cross smocks and armbands or Red Crosses on their helmets. The Japs used them for target practice when they did. The medics carried carbines-sometimes rifles-too. In France in 1918, the Germans mostly played by the rules. As far as Les could see, there were no rules here. This was a very nasty war.

He snapped off a shot or two, then ran forward again. Several Marines were shooting at a ground-floor window from which machine-gun fire was coming. Les Dillon put a couple of rounds in there, too, to give the Japs inside something to think about. Two Marines crawled close enough to chuck grenades through the window. The machine gun promptly squeezed off a defiant burst. More grenades flew in. This time, the enemy gun stayed quiet.

Les ran for a doorway. Dutch Wenzel ran for one a couple of houses farther on. He stopped halfway there, yelped, and said, “Aw, shit!” His rifle fell to the pavement.

“What happened, Dutch?” Les called.

“Got one right through the hand,” the other noncom answered. “Hurts like a son of a bitch. I never got shot before.”

“Welcome to the club.” Les wouldn’t have joined if he had any choice. But an injury like Wenzel’s…

“Sounds like you got a million-dollar wound. You did your bit, it won’t kill you, it’ll probably heal good, and you’re out of the fight for a while.”

“Yeah, I already thought of that,” Wenzel said. “But you know what? I’d sooner stay here with the rest of you guys. I feel like I’m getting thrown out of the game just after we went and scored six runs in the eighth.”

“Stay there till we push forward some more,” Les said. “Then you can get to the rear without worrying a sniper’s gonna get you.” Without worrying so much, he thought.

“Yes, Granny dear,” Wenzel said. Les laughed. Like him, the other platoon sergeant was more used to giving orders than taking them.