“It could have been me,” she said one more time. Then she clung to him and cried her heart out. He hadn’t seen many tears from her before. “What am I gonna do?” she asked after the storm passed.
“I think you better stay in here, not let those bastards spot you,” Oscar answered.
“I’ll go nuts,” she said. “I’ll lose my tan.” Snockered as she was, that seemed to matter a lot to her. But then she shuddered, remembering what she’d seen. “I’ll do it.”
“Okay,” Oscar said. “For now, just settle down. Get some sleep if you can. You’ll feel it when you wake up, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not drunk!” she said irately.
“Sure, babe. Sure.” Oscar lied without hesitation. The things you do for love, he thought with a wry smile. Then he stopped cold; as usual, the word brought him up short. But he nodded to himself. Whether the word made him nervous or not, it talked about something real. He gave Susie a kiss.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Just because,” he said. “Just because.”
GUARDS HUSTLED AMERICAN POWS SOUTH, away from the American soldiers who’d landed to bring Oahu back under the Stars and Stripes. Like most-probably all-of his buddies, Fletch Armitage would sooner have run toward the Americans than away from them, shooting squads or no shooting squads. The guards might have been bastards, but they weren’t stupid bastards. They could figure that out for themselves. The minute anybody got the slightest bit out of line, they opened fire. Dead prisoners marked the road back toward Honolulu.
Men slipped away anyhow, especially at night. Fletch got no sleep. Every few minutes, a rifle or a light machine gun would bark. Screams from the wounded punctuated the time between bursts of gunfire. Sometimes the Japs would let wounded men howl. Other times, they would go out and finish them off with rifle butts or bayonets. Fletch couldn’t decide which noises were more horrible.
But the noises weren’t what made him sit tight. A cold calculation of the odds was. Could he get away from the guards? Possible, but not likely. Once he did, could he sneak through the Japanese lines without getting murdered by ordinary enemy soldiers? Also possible, but even less likely. Put the two together, and he figured his chances were much less than drawing the king of spades to fill out a royal flush.
When the sun came up, he saw how many Americans had died trying to get away, and how many hadn’t died-yet. Had he had anything in his stomach, he might have thrown it up. The Japs hadn’t bothered feeding the POWs, though. It didn’t look as if they were going to start now, either.
Curses and kicks got the prisoners on their feet. The guards bayoneted one man who had trouble. After that, the stronger Americans helped their weaker buddies up. “Isogi!” the guards shouted. How they expected the POWs to hurry was beyond Fletch, but they did.
“Bastards,” somebody said. Fletch nodded. The Japs were also bastards who’d eaten; they’d brought rice along for themselves.
Before long, clouds drifted over the marching-actually, shambling-men. It started to rain. In the blink of an eye, everybody threw his head back and opened his mouth as wide as it would go. Men fell down because they couldn’t see where they were going. Nobody gave a damn. Fletch got a couple of swallows before the sun came out again.
By the afternoon of the second day, they reached the outskirts of Honolulu. Fewer men had tried to run off than had the day before. They were farther from the front, and they had the horrible examples of the day before still fresh in their memories. Honolulu looked fortified to a fare-thee-well. The Americans hadn’t fought in the city. They’d surrendered before drawing a couple of hundred thousand defenseless civilians into the battle. By all the signs, the Japs cared no more about civilians than they did about POWs. Fletch didn’t know what would make them surrender. He couldn’t think of anything that seemed likely to.
The POWs did get fed, after a fashion. They were marched past a pot of rice. Each man got a spoonful, shoved straight into his mouth by a cook who looked as if he hated them all. Everybody got the same spoon. Fletch didn’t care. By then, he would have eaten rice off a cowflop. He would have thought about eating the cowflop, too.
Hardly any locals were on the street. The ones who were seemed to cling to the sides of buildings and to do their best not to make themselves conspicuous in any way. They watched the prisoners with frightened eyes.
Through Honolulu. Through Waikiki. Fletch had a pretty good notion of where they were going by then.
When he turned out to be right, he started to laugh. The POW next to him must have thought he was nuts, and might not have been so far wrong. “What’s so goddamn funny?” the man demanded.
“This is where I came in,” Fletch answered.
Back to Kapiolani Park and the POW camp there. Back through the barbed-wire gates that had let him out when the Japs decided they’d sooner get work from their prisoners than leave them sit around idle and starving. As long as they were going to starve us, they could use us while we wasted away. Oh, yeah. That’s what you call efficiency.
Fletch wondered why the Japanese were bringing prisoners back here now. To keep them from running off to the Americans? That was bound to be one reason. To keep the Americans from shooting them up by mistake? In spite of his misery, he laughed again. The next sign the Japs showed of worrying about what happened to POWs would be the first. To gather a lot of prisoners together in one place so they could be massacred more easily? He looked at the machine guns in the towers out beyond the barbed wire. That seemed alarmingly likely.
And what could he do about it? Not one single, solitary thing, not that he could see. The gate shut behind his gang of POWs.
He looked around. The camp wasn’t so insanely crowded as it had been the last time he was here. That would have encouraged him if he hadn’t feared most of the missing men were dead.
His old tent had been right about… here. It was gone. Somebody else had the spot now, and had run up a lean-to that looked as if it would stop leaning and start collapsing any minute now. The barracks still stood, but he didn’t want anything to do with them. Any place where POWs congregated in large numbers was liable to be a place where the Japs could get rid of them in large numbers.
He didn’t mind sleeping on the ground. Why should he? He’d done enough of it lately. There was bound to be canvas to scrounge, and sticks as well. Before long, he could rig some kind of shelter to keep off the rain. Till then, he wouldn’t worry about it, not in this weather. Getting wet mattered much less than it would have on the mainland. He did head for the one water fountain in the park. The march down had left him dry as a bone.
Because the POW camp wasn’t so crowded, the line at the fountain was shorter than it had been in days gone by. Even so, while he waited another gang of POWs came in. He finally got to the water, and drank and drank and drank.
“Been through the Sahara, buddy?” asked the guy behind him.
“Feels like it.” Fletch splashed some water on his face, too. It felt wonderful. At last, reluctantly, he gave up his place.
Still more prisoners came into the camp. Fletch remembered what some crazy Roman Emperor had said, a couple of thousand years earlier. It went something like, I wish all humanity had a single neck, so I could cut off the head at one blow. He wished that hadn’t come back to him from whatever history class he’d heard it in. It described what the Japs looked to be doing here much too well.
THE TROUBLE WITH MORTARS was, you could hardly hear the bombs coming in before they burst. Les Dillon caught a faint hiss in the air and threw himself flat just in time. The fragments from the mortar round snarled past above him. He allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. The Japs had a particularly nasty little weapon the Americans called a knee mortar. It wasn’t fired off anyone’s knee, but one man could serve it, and every other Jap infantryman seemed to carry one. One of those bombs had almost punched his ticket.