End of the Beginning

Thump! In fell the dead Jones. They tried not to put him on top of anybody else, but the trenches were filling up. Despite the lime, the stench was bad. “Could be one of us next,” a bearer said.

Stubbornly, Jim Peterson shook his head. “As long as we’re strong enough to carry, we won’t die right away. I aim to last till the US of A comes back.”

“How long do you figure that’ll be?” the other man asked him. He didn’t say, Ever? — which was something.

Peterson shrugged. “Damfino. I’m go

Even saying that was taking a chance. If one of the other three corpse-haulers ratted on him to the Japs, they might kill him out of hand. But they probably wouldn’t. He couldn’t do anything to them, no matter what he said. Odds were they’d just beat him up and put him back to work till he couldn’t work any more.

“We better get back,” he said. “If we aren’t at the lineup, they won’t feed us.”

That got his companions in misery moving. Losing out on food was the worst thing that could happen to you here, worse even than a beating. Food kept your motor turning over. Assuming you wanted to go on living, that was good. As Peterson and the other three walked back, men from another hut came past them with a dead body even ski

He didn’t look back.

The count for his hut was fouled up, as it often was when somebody died. The Japs always got all hot and bothered when they saw fewer men than they expected. They knew Jonesy was dead, but that somehow didn’t seem to matter. They had to fuss and fume and gabble and wave their hands till they remembered that so many live guys minus one dead guy equaled the number of guys swaying in front of the hut.

Rain started coming down when the POWs finally trudged off to get their morning rice. This wasn’t “liquid sunshine.” Up here in the mountains, when it rained it rained like a son of a bitch. Peterson’s shoes squelched in the mud. It leaked in through growing gaps between uppers and soles. Pretty soon, those shoes were just going to fall apart. He didn’t know what he’d do then. No, actually he did know: he’d damn well go barefoot.

For the first few minutes after food hit his stomach, he felt almost like a human being. He headed for the tu

Gangs who’d got there before him had built the road up to the mountains. It wasn’t paved, but it was heavily graveled-usable in all weather, without a doubt. If the tu

Did they care? Were the POWs working on the tu

Guards didn’t carry picks and shovels. They carried rifles and, sometimes, axe handles. If they didn’t like the way a POW was moving, they’d whack him with one or the other, or sometimes haul off and kick him. A prisoner couldn’t strike back. If he did, the guards would bayonet him and let him die slowly. They knew which wounds would kill in a hurry, and avoided those.

There weren’t that many guards. Peterson sometimes thought a concerted rising here might succeed. If it did, though, so what? The prisoners would still be stuck at the ass end of the Kalihi Valley, and the Japs could easily seal off the outlet… whereupon everybody here would starve, since living off the land was impossible. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, he thought.

They did-and they were damned. Peterson grabbed a pick and shouldered it like a Springfield. Torches and candles threw the only light once Peterson and his gang got into the tu

The sound of picks biting into volcanic rock drew him onward. Shovelers loaded the chunks the pickmen loosened into wicker baskets. Haulers lugged the spoil out of the tu

There was the face of the excavation. Peterson swung up his pick and brought it forward. When he pulled it loose, basalt or granite or whatever the hell this stuff was came with it. A shoveler used his spade to get the stuff away from Peterson’s feet. Peterson swung up the pick again.

As it did on a road gang, work had a pace here. Prisoners growled at anybody who worked too fast. They had reason to growl: if one guy did it, the Japs would expect everybody else to. Why give the slant-eyed monkeys the satisfaction of busting your balls for their lousy tu

Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward. Thunk!… After a while, the work, like a lot of work, developed its own rhythm. Peterson fell into the almost mindless state any endlessly repetitive labor can bring on. Not thinking was better. If time just went by, he didn’t dwell on how tired or how hungry or how filthy he was.

And then he brought himself up short, so suddenly that he almost slammed the pick down on his own foot. Aside from the self-inflicted wound, that would have earned him a thumping from the guards. To them, anybody who hurt himself was trying to shirk, and they made would-be shirkers sorry.

But if they were serious about wanting this tu

Which meant the tu

It also made no damn difference, not in what he had to do. The air stank of sour sweat and rock dust and burning fat. The rubble on the tu

Up. Forward. Thunk! Pull. Clatter. Pause. Up. Forward…

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO LOOKED OUT across the airstrip at Haleiwa. It was beautiful, no doubt about that: green grass, a creamy beach, and then the blue, blue Pacific. What worried him were the things the blue, blue Pacific hid.

He forgot about the view and glowered at the mechanics he’d summoned. “Don’t tell me it isn’t an authorized modification,” he snapped. “I want a bomb rack on my Zero, and I want a bomb rack on every Zero at this airstrip. Wakarimasu-ka?”

“Yes, of course we understand, Lieutenant-san,” one of the mechanics answered. “But think of the drawbacks. What happens if you get into a dogfight with an American plane? Think how much the weight and drag of a bomb would hurt you.”

“If I run into an American, I can dump the bomb,” Shindo said. “But I need something to let me go after submarines-or surface ships, if the Yankees stick their noses into these waters again. You’re not going to tell me the bomb rack will slow me down much by itself, are you?” His glare warned that they’d better not tell him any such thing.