She’d worry about that later. All she wanted to do now was get away from the brothel, get away from the Japs, and let the world scorn her if it would.

More artillery shells screamed in. Jane threw herself flat before they burst. Fletch had talked about that, too, and she’d seen it worked when the Japs came down from the north. Now her own country was doing its best to kill her. She forgave it. As she lay there in the gutter with fragments of sharp steel screeching by above her head, she cried tears of pure, unadulterated joy.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HELPED MECHANICS gut wrecked Zeros and Hayabusas, salvaging machine guns and 20mm cannon for use against the Americans on the ground. He’d already gutted his own fighter. To his mortification, the Yankees had caught it on the ground and shot it up bad enough to keep it there for good. He’d wanted to die in the air, with luck taking a few more enemy planes with him. The kami in charge of such things paid no attention to what he wanted.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Japanese fighter in the air. The Americans ruled the skies now. Their fearsome planes roared over Oahu like flying tigers, shooting up anything that moved. When the Japanese landed here, Zeros dominated the air. Now Shindo was finding out how taking what he’d dished out felt. He would rather have stayed on the other end of it.

“Pass me those tinsnips,” he said. The mechanic working with him did. He sliced away at the aluminum skin of a Zero’s wing. The fuselage had burned. The other wing had gone up with it. This one, by a freak of war, was pretty much intact. Put that cannon in some kind of improvised ground mount and it would make a few Americans sorry they’d ever been born.

The thought had hardly crossed his mind before he heard a sound he’d come to hate: the roar of enemy engines in the air. American radials had a deeper note than their Japanese counterparts; anyone who’d heard both would never confuse the two. Shindo threw down the snips and ran for the nearest trench. The Japanese had dug lots of them when they thought they would still be able to fly out of Wheeler Field. That proved optimistic, but the trenches still gave people a place to hide when Yankee planes came over.

A few soldiers fired at the fighters and dive bombers with rifles. So Americans had fired at Zeros when the war was new: furiously, but without much hope. The Americans had knocked down a couple of Japanese planes-put enough lead in the air and you would. Much good it had done them. No doubt the Japanese here would knock down a few American planes, too, and much good that would do them.

In fact, the muzzle flashes told the Yankees where the trenches were. Shindo huddled in the damp-smelling dirt as heavy machine-gun slugs chewed up the ground all around him. Some of them struck home. Few men who were hit cried out, as they would have if a rifle-caliber round struck them. If a high-velocity bullet the size of a man’s thumb hit you, you were usually too dead to scream.

Bursting bombs made the earth shake under him. The noise was tremendous, something beyond the normal meaning of the word. Shindo felt it through his skin as much as he heard it. Dirt rained down on him. Fragments of bomb casing howled past not nearly far enough over his head.

And then, like a cloudburst, it was over-till the next time. Shindo looked at his wristwatch. He shook his head in slow wonder. All that horror, compressed into less than ten minutes? It was as abbreviated as air-to-air combat, and seemed even slower. In the air, he could have fought back. Here, he just had to take it.

The Americans hadn’t gone back to the north. They’d flown south instead, to harry Pearl Harbor and Ewa. That meant they might hit Wheeler Field again on the way home to their carriers. Shindo shrugged stoically as he climbed out of the trench. If they did, they did, that was all. He couldn’t do anything about it. He could help the Army meet the U.S. invaders.

Or he thought he could. When he got a look at the fighter he’d been cannibalizing, he wasn’t so sure any more. One bomb had landed right on it, another close by. One blast or the other had driven his tinsnips deep into the trunk of a palm tree, so deep he knew he’d need other tools to get them out. And the barrel of the cannon he’d been freeing had a distinct bend in it now. Nobody would use that weapon against the Yankees.

Shindo’s shoulders slumped. How were you supposed to fight the enemy when he blocked things even before you did them? Again, the Americans must have been asking themselves something like that at the end of 1941. Now that it was Japan’s turn, Shindo found no better answers than they had then.

JIM PETERSON STOOD AT ATTENTION WITH HIS FELLOW sufferers in the Kalihi Valley. Most of them were as skeletal as he was. Beriberi and dropsy swelled others past what was natural. A man like Charlie Kaapu, who was only gaunt, stood out as an extraordinary physical specimen.

POWs had tried to get away from this hellhole before the Americans came back to Oahu. Now, with the hope of rescue in the air, escape attempts came more often. But sick, starving men couldn’t go very far very fast. They usually got caught. And when they did, they paid.

This poor fellow looked like a rack of bones. The butcher’s cat would have turned up its nose at him even before the Japs beat the crap out of him. Now he was all over bruises and blood, too. They’d broken his nose. A couple of guards held him upright. He didn’t seem able to stand on his own.

“What’ll they do to him?” Charlie Kaapu whispered to Peterson. He’d quickly mastered the art of speaking without moving his lips.

“Don’t know,” Peterson whispered back. “That’s why we’re here, though-so they can make a show.” It wasn’t much of a show. The guards let the POW fall to his knees. A lieutenant swung his sword. Peterson had heard that samurai swords would cut through anything on the first try. One more lie-or maybe the Jap hadn’t taken good care of the blade. Any which way, he needed three hacks before the POW’s head fell from his neck. The body convulsed, but not for long. The head just lay there. If anything, it seemed relieved the ordeal was over.

“Fuck,” Charlie Kaapu whispered. Under his swarthy skin, he turned green.

He was a civilian. He hadn’t seen so much. Peterson only shrugged. The Japs had done plenty worse. The lieutenant let out a torrent of Japanese. A noncom who spoke fragments of English pointed to the emaciated corpse and the pool of blood soaking into the ground under it. “You run, you-” He pointed again. That got the meaning across, but Peterson suspected some of the lieutenant’s eloquence was lost in translation. Yeah, like I give a shit, he thought.

Off in the distance, bombs burst and.50-caliber machine guns chattered: the unmistakable sounds of American planes giving the Japs hell. The guards resolutely pretended nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The POWs had to pretend the same thing. Men who grinned or laughed caught hell. Several of them had died from it-not as spectacularly as the beheaded man, but every bit as dead. The guards were jumpy, and getting jumpier all the time, no matter what they pretended.

The sergeant with a little English pointed toward the mouth of the tunnel through the Koolau Range. “You go!” he yelled, and the POWs went.

It was madness. Peterson knew it. Everybody knew it, prisoners and guards alike. The only reason the men were digging through the mountains’ bowels was so they could die from hard labor and bad food. Too many of them hadn’t needed any further abuse from the Japs. The routine was deadly enough.

Besides that, even if there had been some point to all the man-killing labor, there wasn’t any more. The Japanese would never get a nickel’s worth of good out of the tunnel. By every sign Peterson could use to judge, they wouldn’t hold Oahu. The Stars and Stripes would fly here again. Everything the POWs in the Kalihi Valley did was an exercise in futility.