He was right about that. It looked more businesslike than any plane Fletch had known in 1941, and its business was death.

The line snaked forward. When Fletch got up to the cooks, one of them plopped a ladleful of overcooked, gluey rice and green stuff in his bowl. The ladle was small. For all he knew, the greens were lawn trimmings. He didn’t care. For one thing, he didn’t get enough to matter. For another, he would have eaten all he did get. If the Japs had cooked grubs in with the gruel, he would have eaten those, too.

He savored what little he got. For a couple of hours, he wouldn’t feel like a man starving to death-which he was. He would just be very hungry. To a POW in Hawaii, very hungry seemed wonderful.

Two emaciated prisoners carried an even more emaciated body to the disposal area near the perimeter. Several others lay there, some scrawnier yet. Men who should have been in the prime of life died here every day, and not a few of them. Fletch glanced warily toward the guard towers. If the Japs in them decided to open up, men inside the perimeter would die by the hundreds, by the thousands. And they were thinking about it. He could feel the tension in the air. If anything, those American fighters made it worse. The Japs were losing the fight for Oahu. The distant rumble of artillery fire and bombs going off wasn’t so distant any more. If the guards wanted to take a last revenge on the POWs in their hands and under their machine guns, they could.

If they did, the Americans would avenge themselves in turn. That was obvious. It might have restrained Americans guarding Japanese prisoners. Fletch could tell the Japs didn’t give a shit. They intended to fight to the death any which way. If they could get rid of men who might recover and fight them again-or just men who’d fought them in the past-they would do it, and then die with smiles on their faces.

I’ll give you something to smile about, you slant-eyed mothers. Fletch’s hands balled into fists. He’d had that fantasy so many times. And he couldn’t do one goddamn thing to make it real. Not one. The Japs were on the right side of the wire and he was on the wrong side. He didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting out, either. Hell, a Chinaman would have had a better chance than he did. A Chinaman might have been able to fool the guards into thinking he was another Jap. Tall, thin, freckled, and auburn-haired, Fletch made a most unconvincing Japanese.

He did what most of the POWs did most of the time: he lay down and tried to rest. The laughable rations gave them next to no energy. The less they used, the better off they were. He shook his head when that occurred to him. The less energy he used, the longer he’d last. Whether that made him better off was a long way from obvious.

But sleep had dangers of its own. When he slept, he dreamt of… food. He burned too low for sex to mean anything to him. But food-food was a different story. Those dreams never went away. If anything, they got worse as he got weaker. Steaks smothered in onions danced in his dreams. So did mashed potatoes and string beans. Bacon and eggs. Pancakes-mountains of pancakes smothered in melted butter and maple syrup. Cherry pie a la mode. Not slices-whole pies, with quarts of vanilla ice cream plopped on top. Coffee with cream and sugar. Beer. Brandy. Whiskey.

And when he woke up, the dreams would seem so vivid, so real. He’d be just about to dig in, just about to make up for more than a year and a half of tormenting hunger-and then he’d have his food snatched away by cruel consciousness. When a man cried in Kapiolani Park, he most likely cried after a dream of food.

Still, if you didn’t dream of roast beef, sleeping was better than staying awake. General anesthesia would have been better still. The only kind the Japs offered, though, was too permanent to suit him.

When he didn’t dream of food, he often did dream of combat. Sometimes he and the U.S. Army triumphed over the Japs. Waking up after those hurt almost as bad as waking up after a dream of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Sometimes he got shot in the night or, worse, bayoneted. Returning to himself after those dreams came as close to relief as anything in the POW camp.

He dreamt of combat tonight. It was artillery in his head, which could be as bad as bayonets. He’d commanded a 105; he knew too well what shellfire did to human flesh. If he hadn’t known before, what he’d seen in the fighting would have taught him plenty.

And when he woke, he woke from a noisy dream of combat to… combat. Machine guns and rifles and mortars were going off much too close by. Tracers ripped through the prisoner camp, mostly from south to north. The tracers were red. Fletch needed a moment to remember what that meant. The Japs used ice-blue tracers. Red tracers meant… Americans!

“Holy Jesus!” Fletch whispered. Tears filled his eyes. Maybe those were tears of weakness. He didn’t care. Somebody’d remembered he and his comrades in misery existed. Somebody was trying to save them.

What might have been the voice of God but was more likely a Marine or sailor on a PA system shouted through the racket of gunfire: “Prisoners! U.S. prisoners! Move toward the beach! We’ll get you out!” As if to underscore that, a mortar round hit a guard tower. It went over with a crash. There was one machine gun that wouldn’t shoot back-and wouldn’t shoot any POWs, either.

But the guards and soldiers around Kapiolani Park weren’t about to give up without a fight. As far as Fletch could see, the Japs never gave up without a fight-never gave up, in fact. They stopped fighting only when they died. Their cold-looking tracers spat out at the attacking Americans. And, as the POWs started moving toward their rescuers, automatic-weapons fire lashed the camp.

Men died and fell wounded and screaming just as they were on the point of being rescued. The unfairness of that tore at Fletch. So did raw terror. He didn’t want to be one of those casualties, not now, not at this of all moments. But the prisoners couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. They had no place to hide. Bullets either nailed them or didn’t. It was all luck, one way or the other.

A squad of guards rushed into the camp and turned their Arisakas on the POWs, too. They must have thought they could turn the Americans back. Instead, careless of whether they lived or died, the POWs surged toward them. Disciplined to the end, the Japs all emptied their clips at about the same time. As they were reloading, the Americans swarmed over them. The scene was straight out of Durer or Goya: skeletons rising up to attack the living. The Japs screamed, but not for long. Fletch had always thought only artillery could tear a man to pieces. He found he was wrong. Bare hands did the job just fine.

One by one, machine guns in the guard towers fell silent, knocked out by the attackers. “Move! Move! Move!” roared the big voice on the loudspeaker. “American prisoners, move to the south!”

Tracerlight gave Fletch his first glimpse of the soldiers who’d hit the beach to liberate the POW camp. He needed a moment to recognize them for what they were. They wore dark uniforms-dark green, he thought-not the khaki that had been his color. Even their helmets were different: pot-shaped domes that covered more of the head than the British-style steel derbies Fletch and his comrades had used. For a heartbeat, he wondered if they really were Americans. But they had rifles and submachine guns in their hands, and they were shooting up the Japs. What else mattered? He would have kissed Orson Welles’ Martians if they turned their fearsome heat rays on those guard towers.

These weren’t Martians. They were Americans, even if they wore funny clothes. “Haul ass, youse guys!” one of them yelled in pure New York. “We got boats on the beach waitin’ for youse. Shake a leg, already!”