Both at the start of the Japanese invasion of Hawaii and now at the end of their tenure here, his own countrymen came closer to killing him than the Japs ever had. He waited for those fighters to come back and shoot up some more Japanese positions-positions, he hoped, a little farther away from him.

“SHIT!” Joe Crosetti exclaimed when another Hellcat crashed and exploded in flames in Waikiki. He knew that could happen to him, too. He hated being reminded. Somebody wasn’t going home to his mom and dad and brothers and sisters-maybe to his wife and kid. Some clerk in the War Department-some bastard thousands of miles away from the fighting and snug as a bug in a rug-would have to send out a Deeply Regrets telegram. And some family’s life would turn upside down.

As Joe’s thumb found the firing button and he raked the Japs below with.50-caliber slugs, he never once thought that they had moms and dads and brothers and sisters and maybe wives and kids, too. They were just… the enemy to him. They weren’t people, the way the guys on his own side were. And they were still doing their goddamnedest to kill him. Their pale, cold-looking tracers spat from machine guns down on the ground and probed for his fighter, trying to knock him out of the sky like that poor luckless son of a bitch who’d just bought the farm. Something clanged into the Hellcat. As always, Joe quickly scanned the instruments. Everything looked okay. The engine kept running. He reached out and patted the side of the cockpit. “Attababy!” he told the plane. They weren’t just whistling Dixie when they said a Hellcat could take it.

Down on the ground, the Japs were sure taking it. More fires than the one from that other plane’s funeral pyre were rising from Waikiki. See how you like it, you bastards, Joe thought. He hoped there weren’t too many civilians down there. If there were, it was their tough luck. They were almost as abstract to him as the enemy. He wished the Japs would just throw in the sponge, the way some lousy pug’s handlers would after Joe Louis beat the snot out of their pride and joy.

Sometimes, though, a pug stayed in there and went toe-to-toe with the champ till he got KO’ed. If the Japs wanted to do that against the USA, by God, they’d get carried out of the ring, too. Yeah, they’d landed a sucker punch at the start of the fight, but you only got one of those. And when you were up against the heavyweight champion of the world, one wasn’t enough.

Joe sprayed Waikiki with bullets as big as his thumb till his guns ran dry. Then he got on the radio to his squadron leader: “Going home for more ammo.”

“Roger that,” the other pilot answered. “We’ll keep ’em busy while you’re otherwise occupied, Admiral.”

“Out,” Joe said with a snort. Admiral! He still aspired to a lieutenant, j.g.’s, stripe and a half on his sleeve.

A few more tracers came up at him as he flew north: Japanese holdouts still doing their damnedest to make trouble. They still held a few pockets in central Oahu where they’d been encircled and bypassed. Sooner or later, soldiers and Navy fliers would clean out those pockets. It wasn’t as if the Japs could retreat to the jungle here and fight a long guerrilla war. Oahu had plenty of jungles. The only trouble, from what Joe’s briefings said, was that you’d starve if you tried playing Tarzan in them.

Five minutes after he left Waikiki behind, he was out over the ocean again. Unless you flew over Oahu, you didn’t realize what a small island it was. He waggled his wings as he flew past the destroyers and cruisers and battleships still firing from the north. Some of them had come around the island to hit targets near Pearl Harbor and Honolulu.

None of the ships shot at him. None of them had shot at that crazy Jap who crashed his Zero into the Bunker Hill, either. Bastard had extracted a high price for his worthless neck, too. He’d hurt that baby flattop along with the big fleet carrier.

Combat air patrol came by to give Joe a look-see. They hadn’t done it soon enough with that Jap. Joe, of course, was harmless, at least to U.S. ships. He and the CAP planes exchanged more wing waggles and some raunchy banter over the radio. Then he flew on toward his carrier.

He still didn’t like carrier landings. He didn’t know a single pilot who did. He suspected there was no such animal. Like them or not, he did exactly what the nice gentleman with the wigwag flags told him to do. It worked: the landing officer didn’t wave him off. When the flags dropped, so did Joe’s Hellcat. His teeth clicked together as the wheels hit the flight deck. The tailhook caught. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Joe shoved back the canopy and scrambled out of the cockpit. He ran for the island as soon as his feet hit the deck planking. The faster you got away from the plane, the better off you were. The briefings had that one right. As if Joe needed the reminder, the Jap suicide pilot drove home that lesson.

“Over Waikiki, Crosetti?” the briefing officer said when Joe reported.

“Yes, sir.”

The other officer-a regular and an older man-smiled. “Not the way you expected to get there, I bet.”

“Sir, till the war started, I never figured I’d get there at all,” Joe answered.

“Well, since you did, suppose you tell me what you saw,” the briefing officer said.

“Aye aye, sir,” Joe said, and he did.

AT BREAKFAST ONE MORNING on the hospital ship, Fletch Armitage realized he was making progress. Breakfast, like most breakfasts on the Benevolence, was scrambled powdered eggs, fried Spam, and hash browns. Nothing was wrong with the hash browns. They had crunch over greasy softness, and you could pour on the salt till they tasted just the way they were supposed to.

The powdered eggs and Spam, on the other hand… Up till that morning, Fletch had shoveled them into his face with reckless abandon, like a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation. He damn well was a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation, and he wanted to claw back from that edge just as fast as he could. He made a pig of himself at lunch and dinner and snacks in between times, too.

Some of the rescued POWs had eaten themselves right into stomach trouble. The only trouble Fletch had was gaining weight back fast enough to suit him.

This particular morning, he took a big gulp of coffee with plenty of cream (well, condensed milk) and sugar and tore into breakfast. He ate a mouthful of Spam and eggs, then paused with the oddest expression on his face. “You know what?” he said to the guy next to him in the galley.

“No,” the other ex-prisoner said. “What?”

“These eggs and this meat-they’re really lousy.” Fletch knew he sounded astonished. He had all the food he wanted. Now he’d got to the point where he didn’t just want food. He wanted good food. Wanting it on a hospital ship was probably optimistic, but even so…

“You’re right.” The other man sounded as astonished as Fletch had. “I didn’t even notice up till now.”

“Neither did I,” Fletch said. The guy to his left was just as skinny as he was. Some of the poor bastards from Kapiolani Park had actually starved to death before the U.S. Navy could throw enough food into them to keep them going. Fletch hadn’t been in that boat, but he’d been in the one tied up right next to it.

“Take your plate, sir?” a Filipino mess steward asked. Fletch nodded. Good, bad, or indifferent, every scrap of food in front of him had vanished. He wondered if he would ever leave anything uneaten again. The way he felt now, he wouldn’t bet on it.

As the steward also took the other former prisoner’s plate, Fletch asked, “Any chance of getting fresh eggs and real ham around here?”

“Yeah,” the other former POW said. Several other scrawny men nodded.

The Filipino beamed at them like a proud mother just after Junior’s first steps. “Oh, my friends!” he said.