After one more pass along the beach, he saw he was low on gas. Time to go back and refuel. He’d got out of Haleiwa by bouncing along the grass near the damaged airstrip: if he could take off from a rolling, pitching carrier deck, he could also manage that. But he pulled up instead of trying to land where he’d got airborne. The U.S. naval bombardment had cratered the fields near the runway. He would surely flip his Zero if he tried to put it down.

If he couldn’t land there, though, where could he? The next closest runway was at Wheeler Field, near the center of the island. He knew the Americans had worked Wheeler over, too, but they would have done that from the air alone. Some of the bigger naval guns might have reached it, but surely they would be concentrating on targets closer to shore. Shindo would have, were he mounting an invasion. He had to assume the Americans would do the same.

Wheeler was only a couple of minutes away. He realized at once that the runways would not serve. They’d been pounded hard, and the bulldozers that might have fixed them in a hurry had been pounded even harder. He saw several burnt-out hulks. One of them had been flipped onto its back, no mean feat with a machine so massive.

Bombs had fallen on the grass around Wheeler Field, but it wasn’t-Shindo was betting his life it wasn’t-an impossible landing surface. He came in as slow as he could, just above stalling speed. Down went his landing gear. He brought the fighter’s nose up and the tail down, as if he were out to snag an arrester cable on a carrier deck.

He bounced to a stop. It wasn’t a landing to be proud of, but he got down. For the moment, nothing else mattered. He undogged the canopy, pushed it back, and stood up in the cockpit. Groundcrew men ran toward him. “What do you need?” they shouted.

“Everything,” Shindo answered. “Gas. Oil. Ammunition. A place to piss.”

One of the men pointed back into the bushes. “Do it there. The Yankees won’t spot you that way. And do it fast, before their planes come over again, see you, and shoot you up.”

They weren’t just talking about him, of course. The Americans were much more likely to spy his Zero. As Shindo went into the bushes and undid his flying suit so he could ease himself, he heard the buzz of engines overhead. But that was the familiar buzz of his own country’s airplanes; the Zero and the Hayabusa used the same powerplant. Keeping a few planes in the air to protect what was left of Wheeler Field struck him as a good idea, though he pitied the Army pilots in their Peregrine Falcons. The fearsome new American fighters would chew them up and spit them out. Higher speed and the wing cannon gave Zeros at least some kind of chance against the enemy.

When he came out of the undergrowth, he didn’t see any armorers working on those wing cannon.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

A man reloading one of his machine guns said, “So sorry, Pilot-san, but this has been an Army field for a while. Because Hayabusas don’t carry cannon, I don’t think we’ve got any 20mm ammunition.”

“Zakennayo!” Shindo exclaimed. He thought hard. “Wait a minute. You fly Donryus out of here, neh?” The Ki-49-its name meant Dragon Swallower-was the Army’s counterpart to the Navy’s G4M bomber. It was faster, but had a much shorter range. Like the G4M, it mounted a 20mm cannon for defensive armament.

“I’m an idiot!” the armorer exclaimed. He clapped a hand to his forehead, then bowed. “Please excuse me, sir. We store ammunition for bombers separately from what fighters use.”

“I don’t care if you stow it up your back passage,” Shindo said. “Just get me some, and hurry about it.”

The armorer screamed at his colleagues. One of them dashed away. He came back fast enough to satisfy even the unhappy Shindo. No enemy airplanes had shown up, which was all to the good. Shindo wondered if he’d be able to take off again without nosing down into a hole in the ground. The run was bumpy, but he got airborne.

He would take off and land on highways if he had to. All he wanted to do was hit the Americans as hard as he could for as long as he could. But how would he get refueled if he had to land on a highway? How would the armorers reload his guns? He shrugged. For now, he had fuel and ammunition-and plenty of Americans to hit. He roared back toward the landing beaches.

JIRO TAKAHASHI STARED AT THE SCRIPT in front of him in dismay. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked up to Osami Murata in even greater dismay. “So sorry, Murata-san, but I can’t say this!”

“Why not?” the radio correspondent from Tokyo asked calmly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jiro echoed. He hoped Murata was joking, but feared he wasn’t. “It isn’t true, that’s what! How can you say-how can you have me say-all the Japanese in Hawaii support the Emperor against the USA?” Not all the Japanese in his own family supported the Emperor against the USA, as he knew too painfully well. He kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “Captain Iwabuchi has put up signs all over Honolulu that anyone who causes trouble will be shot. He’s put them up in English and Korean and Tagalog and Chinese and Japanese. He wouldn’t do that if he thought all the Japanese here were loyal.”

“Captain Iwabuchi has to fight.” Murata was patience personified. “That’s not your job. Your job is to persuade people to support the Emperor and Japan. You’ve been good at it, Takahashi-san. Now you have to keep on doing it. We need you more than ever, in fact.”

“Do you?” Jiro tried to keep the worry out of his voice. He probably ended up sounding like a machine. He knew why they needed him more than ever. The Americans were ashore on the north coast of Oahu. They hadn’t come very far yet, but they plainly ruled the air here. Japan had used that edge to win after her invasion. Couldn’t the United States do the same? He feared it could.

“Yes, we do.” Beneath his calm, beneath his good nature, Murata showed steel. “Are you sure you’re a loyal Japanese citizen yourself, Takahashi-san?”

“I should hope I am!” Jiro said.

“Well, I should hope you are, too,” the radio man said. “But if you are, you’re going to have to prove it.” He tapped the script with an elegantly manicured fingernail. “With this!”

“Jesus Christ! Give me something I can read without wanting to go out and cut my throat afterwards!” Jiro said. “Hawaii isn’t better off under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere than it was before. Not all Japanese here love the Emperor. I wish they did, but they don’t. I don’t know what the Koreans are doing, but I don’t think they’re ‘flocking to volunteer along with their Japanese co-imperials.’ ” Koreans didn’t like being part of the Japanese Empire. The Koreans in Hawaii had made no secret of being glad they weren’t part of the Empire any more-except now they were again.

Murata waved Jiro’s complaints aside as if they came from a little boy. “We all have to do what we can, Takahashi-san,” he said. “We’re fighting a war. It’s come here again. We didn’t want that to happen, but it did. We have to use every weapon we can get our hands on. Building morale, here and in the home islands, is one of the weapons we need. You’re scheduled to go on the air in a few minutes. Are you going to read what you’re supposed to read, or not? Reading it will help the Empire. If that doesn’t matter to you…”

He didn’t say what would happen then. By not saying, he let pictures form in Jiro’s mind. Jiro didn’t like any of those pictures. They started with bad things happening to him and went on to bad things happening to his sons and friends. None of those bad things would be hard to arrange, not at all. He played the last trump in his hand: “I’m going to complain to Chancellor Morimura.” If he reminded Murata who his friends were, maybe the man would back off.