By the way the Army officer’s eyes widened, it was certainly news to him. “Two?” he said. “I knew of one, but…” He in turn surprised Fuchida, but not so much. The Yankees hadn’t kept quiet about Essex. Maybe they wanted their own people to know they were building ships so they could retaliate. They’d been much more secretive about the other big carrier, and the smaller ones.
“I think our intelligence is reliable here,” Fuchida said.
“Zakennayo!” Murakami muttered. “Two! And light carriers! How soon will they have more?” That wasn’t quite fearful anticipation in his voice, but it came close.
“There I cannot tell you, not for certain.” Fuchida did his best not to remember Admiral Yamamoto’s worries over how fast the Americans could build things once they got fully geared up. Most experts in Japan thought Yamamoto an alarmist, but he knew the USA well-and he was Yamamoto. One disagreed with him at one’s peril.
“What is your best estimate? What is the Navy’s best estimate?” Murakami was nothing if not persistent.
“Summer.” Fuchida spread his hands. “Don’t ask me for anything closer than that, Murakami-san, because I can’t give it.”
The Army officer looked discontented. “General Yamashita is already assuming summer. I was hoping you could tell me more.” He didn’t say, I was hoping to win points for myself if you did tell me more, but it hovered behind his words.
“Please excuse me, but I am not a bonz, to lay out the future for you,” Fuchida said, hoping he hid his irritation.
“Will the Navy be ready?” Murakami asked.
That did it. Fuchida was a patient man, but even patience had its limits. “No, of course not,” he snapped.
“We’re going to go out against the Americans in a couple of rusty old tubs, and they’ll sink us just like that. ” He snapped his fingers.
Lieutenant Colonel Murakami turned red. He had brains enough to know when he’d been given the glove. His colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Minami, was all too likely to have taken Fuchida literally. “All right. All right. I know you’ll do your best,” Murakami said. “But will your best be good enough?”
“It always has been so far.” Pride rang in Fuchida’s voice; he was still affronted. “Anyone who doesn’t think it will should transfer out of this kingdom-which wouldn’t be a kingdom if the Navy didn’t know what it was doing.”
Murakami blushed again. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, though Fuchida had been careful not to challenge his personal courage. When the Navy officer didn’t push it any further, Murakami went on, “Speaking of being stationed in a kingdom, here’s something that may amuse you: King Stanley has asked for some airplanes, so Hawaii can have an air force as well as an army.”
“You’re joking,” Fuchida said. Lieutenant Colonel Murakami shook his head. And, thinking about it, Fuchida wasn’t all that surprised. King Stanley was vain. He would be the sort to want a toy air force to go with his toy Army. Fuchida asked, “What did General Yamashita say to that?” Yamashita, from everything he’d seen, had a short fuse.
But Murakami surprised him, answering, “Yamashita-san consulted with the Foreign Ministry, and they said to keep the Hawaiian happy if he could do it without causing us trouble. So King Stanley is getting half a dozen of our most decrepit Hayabusas.”
“The Hawaiian Air Force.” Fuchida had to smile at that. He would have screamed bloody murder, though, if King Stanley had demanded Zeros. As far as he was concerned, the Hawaiians were welcome to Hayabusas. The Peregrine Falcon was the Army’s chief fighter plane. It was even lighter and more maneuverable than the Zero, but armed with nothing more than a pair of rifle-caliber machine guns. A Sopwith Camel rising to fight the Red Baron in 1917 had had just as much firepower. Handled well, a Hayabusa gave good service. Even so… He didn’t want to criticize the plane to Murakami, who was not an aviator, but he would almost rather have gone up in a Sopwith Camel.
Murakami was smiling, too, for reasons of his own. “Do you know what the King’s biggest challenge is?”
“Tell me,” Fuchida urged. “I’m all ears.”
“Finding pilots small enough to be comfortable in the cockpit.”
Fuchida did laugh then. Hawaiians were bigger than Japanese, as the two sets of guards at Iolani Palace proved. The naval officer said, “A good thing he’s sticking to Hawaiians and not using whites-although local Japanese would solve his problem for him.”
“General Yamashita suggested that,” Murakami said. “The King was polite about turning it down, but he did. He wants Hawaiian pilots flying for him. He has his pride, too, no matter how foolish it is.”
“I suppose he does,” Fuchida agreed. Much good pride would do the puppet king of Hawaii. With or without a few fighter planes to call his own, he would go on doing what Japan told him to. If he didn’t… If he didn’t, the Kingdom of Hawaii would suddenly need a new sovereign.
VI
ANYONE WHO WANTED TO HOLD AN OUTDOOR CEREMONY IN BUFFALO IN March-even at the end of March-was rolling the dice. There was a backup plan, then. Had the weather gone south (or rather, in Buffalo, gone arctic), Joe Crosetti and his fellow cadets would have received their commissions in the Castle, an impressive-looking crenellated building in the eastern part of the Front, the park that nestled up against Lake Erie.
The Castle, as far as Joe was concerned, had only one thing wrong with it: it was the headquarters of the Buffalo Girl Scouts. He could hardly imagine a less martial place to become an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
But the weatherman cooperated. The day dawned bright and sunny. The mercury was in the upper forties. In San Francisco, that would have been frigid at noon. Everybody from less temperate parts of the country kept assuring him it wasn’t bad at all. Since he wore a warm wool uniform, he couldn’t argue with them too much.
Memorials to Buffalo units that had fought in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War were scattered over the park. They were probably easier to spot at this season of the year than in high summer, when leaves would have hidden many of them from view. Seeing them reminded Joe of what he was at last becoming fully a part of.
So did the tall bronze statue of Oliver Hazard Perry. The folding chairs for the ceremony were set up in front of it. “This is a good place for doing what we’re doing,” Joe said to Orson Sharp.
Sharp nodded. “I’ll say. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours!’ ” he quoted.
Joe had forgotten that. He suddenly laughed. “And the enemy he was fighting was England, and she’s the best friend we’ve got.”
“Yeah.” The young man from Utah laughed, too. “And do you remember who his younger brother was?”
“Afraid not,” Joe admitted. He’d done okay in history, but he hadn’t set the world on fire.
“Matthew Perry-the guy who opened up Japan,” Sharp said.
“Holy Jesus!” Joe said. “Boy, he never knew how much he has to answer for, did he? He should have left it closed. That would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”
“Places, gentlemen, places,” someone called in an official-sounding voice.
Places were in alphabetical order. Joe sat up near the front, his roomie toward the back. The mayor of Buffalo made a speech praising all the bright young patriots who passed through his city on their way to knocking the stuffing out of the Axis. It sounded like every other political speech Joe had ever heard until his Honor pointed to the bridge spanning the Niagara River at the north end of the Front. “That’s the Peace Bridge,” he said. “This end is in the United States; the other end is in Canada. We want peace all through the world, but we will have to win this war before we can get it.”