Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

thing.” He crossed the road and headed down the beach toward the water. Charlie Kaapu followed.
    Oscar had a couple of good rides in. The second time, Charlie went off his board. He had a scowl on his face when he recaptured it. He stood there at the edge of the sea, dripping and fuming. Then he frowned, looking north. “What’s that noise?”
    After a moment, Oscar heard it too: a distant drone that put him in mind of mosquitoes. He also looked north. He pointed. “There they are. That’s a hell of a lot of airplanes. The Army or the Navy must be up to something.”
    The airplanes flew in several groups. Some went south through the central valley. Others took a more southwesterly course. They were plenty high enough to make it over the Waianae Range. Oscar briefly wondered why they were all coming off the ocean. Then he shrugged again. What the military did wasn’t his worry. He and Charlie went back to their surf-riding.
    L IEUTENANT S ABURO S HINDO piloted his Zero back toward the Akagi . Exultation filled the commander of the second wave’s fighters. The first two attacks had heavily damaged the ships at Pearl Harbor and punished the airfields on Oahu. Now , Shindo thought, now we finish the job .
    There was the carrier, with some of the fleet’s screen of destroyers andcruisers and battleships. And there were the transports, steaming south towards Oahu as fast as they could go. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. He was usually on the phlegmatic side. Not today. Today he felt like a tiger. And by tomorrow morning, the Japanese would be landing on the island.
    Meanwhile, he had to land on the Akagi . Another Zero came in just ahead of his. The deck crew manhandled the plane to one side. The landing officer signaled for Shindo to continue his approach. He did, concentrating on the man’s signals to the exclusion of everything else. The carrier’s deck was pitching and rolling in front of him. The man on it could gauge his path better than he could himself. Learning that lesson was the hardest thing any Navy flier did.
    Down went the flags. Shindo dove for the Akagi ’s deck. The arrester hook caught a wire. His Zero jerked to a stop. He shoved back the canopy, scrambled out of the plane, and ran for the carrier’s small portside island. “Admiral Nagumo!” he called. “Admiral Nagumo!”
    Admiral Chuichi Nagumo came out onto the deck to meet him. He was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, with a round face, two deep vertical lines between his eyes, and thinning hair cropped close to his skull. He was a big-gun admiral, not a flying man, which sometimes worried Shindo. He’d got command of the Pearl Harbor expedition by seniority: the usual Japanese way. So far, though, he’d handled things as smoothly as anyone could have.
    â€œAll is well?” he asked now. Tension stretched his voice taut.
    â€œAll is very well!” Shindo flashed a grin at Minoru Genda and Mitsuo Fuchida, who’d come out onto the flight deck behind Nagumo. Fuchida, the air commander, was a couple of years older than Genda, taller, with long, horsey features. Shindo pulled himself back to the admiral’s question: “Yes, sir, all is very well. We need to launch the third wave right away, to smash the dock facilities and the fuel tanks and to hit Schofield Barracks for the Army’s benefit.”
    â€œWhere are the American carriers?” Nagumo demanded.
    That was the one fly in the ointment. They hadn’t caught any of the carriers in port. Shindo gave the only answer he could: “Sir, I don’t know.”
    Those lines between Admiral Nagumo’s eyes got deeper yet. “You are thinking about what happens to Hawaii,” he said heavily. “I am thinking about what happens to my fleet. What if the Americans strike us while we linger here?”
    From behind him, Commander Genda said, “Sir, we have six