Prisoners with dry beriberi, by contrast, had a lean and hungry look. Like mine, Peterson thought through his usual haze of exhaustion. The pins and needles in his hands and feet were red-hot fishhooks and spikes.

The really alarming thing was, he could have been worse off. When cholera went through the camp a few weeks earlier, he hadn’t caught it. He’d buried some of the dark, shrunken corpses of men who had-after he put in his usual shift at the tunnel, of course. Cholera killed with horrifying speed. You could be normal in the morning-well, as normal as POWs got, which wasn’t very-and shriveled and dead by the afternoon.

One nice thing: cholera scared the Japs, too. Several guards had died just as fast as any prisoners. Beriberi, by contrast, didn’t bother them at all. Why should it? They had plenty to eat, and the right kind of food, not just a starvation diet of boiled white rice and not much else.

Peterson looked around, hoping to spot a gecko. POWs ate the little lizards whenever they could catch them. Sometimes they roasted them over little fires. More often, they didn’t bother. When you were in the kind of shape they were in, raw meat was as precious as any other kind.

“You know what?” Gordy Braddon asked from beside Peterson. The Tennessean was as skinny as he was, with knees wider than his thighs. A nasty abscess ulcerated one calf. Pretty soon, the medical officer would have to cut it out to keep it from going gangrenous. A puckered red scar on Peterson’s leg showed where he’d gone through that. Ether? Chloroform? The Japs had them. They laughed when the medical officers asked for some. The medical officers were lucky to get iodine, let alone anything more.

“Tell me,” Peterson said after a while. Beriberi sapped the will as well as debilitating the body. Sometimes even conversation seemed more trouble than it was worth.

“We’re gonna leave one man dead for every foot of tunnel we drive,” Braddon said.

Peterson contemplated that. Again, he took his time. He couldn’t help taking his time-his wits wouldn’t work fast no matter how much he wanted them to. “One man?” he said after the slow calculations were complete. “We’re liable to leave five or ten men dead for every foot of tunnel.”

His companion in misery took his own sweet time thinking about that. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he said at last. “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”

“Yeah.” Even in his present decrepit state, Peterson didn’t need to think that over before he agreed with it. He managed a graveyard chuckle. “Well, you know what the Japs say. ‘Always prenty plisoner.’ ”

At the rate POWs were dying in the Kalihi Valley, he wondered how long there would be plenty of prisoners. Of course, this place was specifically designed to use them up. A lot of men who went into the ever-deepening tunnel shaft lasted only a few days. The ones who managed to get past that dreadful initiation to life here did better-if survival was better, which didn’t always strike Peterson as obvious.

“All I want is to be alive when we take this goddamn place back,” Braddon said. “Reckon I get to pay these sons of bitches back then for what they owe me.”

“Yeah, that’s what keeps me going, too,” Peterson agreed. “Sometimes the idea of getting my own back is about the only thing that does keep me going.”

He wondered whether the USA would be able to take Hawaii back. When he’d been in the POW camp up near Opana and the ordinary labor gangs, he’d had some connection with the outside world. Part of what he got was Jap propaganda, of course, but not everything was. Here and there, people had clandestine radio sets and heard the other side of the news.

Not in the Kalihi Valley. The Japs hardly bothered with propaganda here, because they didn’t think the poor damned souls working on the tunnel were ever coming out. If any of the prisoners had a radio, no news from it had ever got to Jim Peterson’s ear.

He started to settle down for sleep. A thrashing in the bushes made him pause. A furious grunting made him scramble to his feet. Braddon jumped up, too. So did men in worse shape than either of them. So did men in worse shape than either of them who’d been sunk deep in exhausted sleep.

That grunting meant a wild pig was out there. If they could catch it, if they could kill it, they could eat it. The mere thought of a chunk of pork drove Jim Peterson harder than any Japanese taskmaster’s bamboo club.

Pigs did wander into the camp every once in a while, looking for garbage-or maybe looking to dig up bodies buried in shallow graves and do unto humans what humans were in the habit of doing unto them. The POWs had pigstickers-bamboo spears with points made from iron smuggled out of the tunnel. They hid them in the jungle; if the guards found them, they confiscated them and beat everybody in the nearest barracks. To the guards, anything that could stick a pig could also stick one of them. The guards weren’t wrong, either. Peterson dreamt of spearing a couple of them. Only the certain knowledge of what would happen to him and everybody else if he tried stayed his hand.

He grabbed a spear now, and plunged into the dripping emerald jungle in the direction of the grunting. Before he got there, it rose to a furious squealing. “For Christ’s sake, don’t let it get away!” he shouted, and ran harder than ever.

He found where the pig was by almost falling over it. It was a boar, as nasty a razorback as ever roamed the hills in Arkansas. Two men had already driven spears into it, and hung on to them for dear life. A boar’s tushes could rip the guts out of a man almost as well as a bayonet could. And a wild pig was faster and stronger than a Jap with an Arisaka.

Peterson thrust his spear into the boar’s side. Much more by luck than by design, the point-which had started its career at the end of a pick-pierced the pig’s heart. The beast let out a last grunt, one that seemed more startled than pained, and fell over dead.

“My God!” Peterson panted. “Meat!”

The boar was almost as scrawny as the prisoners who’d slain it. Hunger must have made it chance the camp, just as the POWs’ hunger had made them attack it. More men ran up behind Peterson.

By camp custom, the prisoners who’d done the actual killing got first crack at the carcass. Also by camp custom, they took less than they might have-enough to fill their bellies once, no more-and left the rest for their comrades who hadn’t been quite so fast or quite so lucky.

Peterson toasted his chunk of meat over a small fire. He wolfed it down, charred on the outside and blood-rare-close enough to raw to make no difference-inside. In happier times, people warned against pork that wasn’t cooked all the way through. They talked about trichinosis. He couldn’t have cared less. He would have eaten that pig knowing it had died of the black plague.

His stomach made astonished, and astonishing, noises. It wasn’t used to such wealth. He had to gulp against nausea once or twice. Meat was rich fare after rice and nowhere near enough of it.

For a little while, the pins and needles in his extremities would ebb. Some of the men with wet beriberi would lose a little fluid from their limbs, and from their lungs. Their hearts wouldn’t race quite so hard whenever they had to move. And then, until the next time a pig got desperate or unlucky enough to fall foul of the POWs, things would go back to the way they’d been before. You couldn’t win. The most you could do was stretch the game out a little.

“By God, I’ve done that,” he muttered. He slept better than he had in weeks. Too soon, though, his next shift came. It would have been killing work even with all the food he wanted all the time. As things were… As things were, by the time he finished, he wondered whether he’d stretched the game at all-and, if he had, whether he’d done himself any favors.