“Now what?” Halsey asked. He still strained to go after the Japanese, although he would have loved to have vented his frustrations on General Short.
When Nimitz responded, it was in a voice filled with gloom. “You will take the Lexington and Enterprise to Australia.”
“Australia?” Halsey was incredulous. “The Japs are coming here!”
“You’re probably right.”
Nimitz knew that Halsey was more than right. As a recipient of Magic information that was denied Halsey, Nimitz had been told of troop movements in and around Japan, as well as another gathering of the Japanese fleet. Logic said that Hawaii was a possible destination. Under the circumstances, Nimitz had reluctantly concluded that the situation in the islands was temporarily hopeless.
“Oh my God,” Halsey said. “You’re abandoning Pearl, aren’t you?”
“Not entirely. But I cannot justify attempting to defend the place at this time. If the Japs don’t come and the repairs are made, we can return just as quickly as we left. The remainder of the fleet will protect our West Coast, while your carriers protect Australia. You might not like that directive, but it comes directly from Roosevelt.”
“But if the Japs do come here, the army’ll be overwhelmed.”
Nimitz nodded sadly. “The way things are, that’ll happen even if we stay. I’m returning to San Francisco by air and taking Kimmel’s staff with me. From there we’ll plot our next steps.”
“Chester,” Halsey said softly, “what about the dependents? There are thousands of wives and children of army and navy personnel here, not to mention ordinary civilians. Should we try to take some of them with us?”
Nimitz took a deep breath. It was the most agonizing decision he would ever have to make. “No. I have authorized the removal of the sick, the very old, and the very young, and that’s it. We cannot take them all, and I am not in a mood to play Solomon over who stays and who goes. Further, any attempt to evacuate other civilians will cause a panic. No, we’ll simply say that our actions in moving our ships from here are being taken to fight the Japanese, which is true. We’ll leave enough smaller ships to placate the civilians, and just maybe deter the Japanese, but the heart of the fleet must leave.”
“I hope it works,” said Halsey.
“So do I,” Nimitz answered in a voice that was almost a groan. “So do I.”
Jake Novacek drove his ‘38 Buick carefully down the darkened streets of Honolulu. There were very few cars on the road as a strict curfew was in effect. He’d been stopped several times, and only the fact that he was an armed army officer in uniform had kept the local police or Military Police from taking him in.
His apartment was across the street from a couple of stores. One was a grocery owned by an old Japanese man who also owned Jake’s apartment building. Jake wondered just how he’d fare with the nation at war with Japan. To his chagrin, Jake realized that, even though he’d shopped there often enough, he didn’t know whether the old man was a citizen or not. Jake just bought food and beer, and paid his rent. The old man was named Matsuo, and Jake didn’t know if that was his first or last name.
Jake was dirty, bloody, and exhausted. A bed, he thought, my kingdom for a bed. Oh, yeah, and a shower. He’d seen so much death and so much grief. He just wanted to get the hell away from anything military, if only for a few hours. His apartment was his oasis.
He was haunted by the faces of the families who’d lost loved ones, in particular the pain shown on the face of Alexa Sanderson. Such a beautiful lady in so much agony, he thought, and no possible way for him to help her, or all the others whose loved ones were still being pulled from the dirty waters of Pearl Harbor. He wondered if the funeral had provided any solace for her.
He pulled into his parking spot and wondered just how much longer he’d be able to drive his car, since gas rationing was inevitable. He made a mental note to get a lock for his gas cap. He wondered if somebody might someday steal his tires and what the hell he could do about it. Then he’d be reduced to riding a bicycle. He’d been reliably informed that he looked stupid on a bike. Of course, he’d been drunk the last time he’d attempted to ride.
Food rationing was inevitable too. Thank God nobody’d thought to ration beer. He had a dozen bottles of Budweiser in the fridge that he would cherish after drinking two of them tonight. Then another thought hit him. What would he do if the power went out? He disliked warm beer, but, he thought with a chuckle, he would drink it in the service of his country.
“Get out, you bums!”
“Fucking Jap!”
Jake turned quickly at the sounds. They came from Mr. Matsuo’s store across the street. Three young white men spilled out of the store, followed by an outraged Matsuo. The men were carrying food and beer.
“You pay, you pay,” yelled Matsuo. “Thieves, you thieves!”
The leader of the three, a tall, rangy man in his thirties, stopped and kicked the old man in the gut, dropping him to the ground, where he groaned and writhed.
Shit, Jake thought as he trotted across the street. His sidearm, a venerable but reliable. 45 automatic, was already in his hand. “Enough, children,” he snarled. “Drop everything and get your hands up.”
“What the fuck?” said the leader. “Hey, you’re a soldier. You should be on our side. This is a fucking Jap, just like the bastards who killed our men.”
Jake held the pistol steady. The three were drunk. No surprise. “Yeah, and what branch of the service are you in?”
“Registered civilian,” said the leader, smirking. “Now, what are you going to do? You can’t arrest us. You ain’t no cop.”
“Don’t have to be,” Jake said. “There’s a curfew on, you’re robbing this guy, you’re drunk, you assaulted him, and, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve got a gun pointed right at your empty heads.”
Sirens could be heard in the distance, and they were approaching. Somebody had called the real cops. The would-be thieves heard them too.
“You ain’t gonna shoot us and you know it. We’re all white men and this is a yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed Jap,” the tall one said. “And we’re leaving right now.”
“No,” Jake said and pointed the weapon at the leader’s chest. “What you’re going to do is lie down on the ground and wait.”
“Bullshit,” the leader said. “Take him, boys.”
The three men lunged forward. Jake quickly reversed the pistol and smashed the leader in the face with the butt, turning his nose into a bloody mess and knocking out several teeth. He then wheeled on the second man and hit him alongside the head with the pistol. The man screamed and dropped to his knees. Jake kicked him in the ribs, and he fell over. The third man stopped and lay down on the ground, his eyes wide with terror.
“I’m dying,” said the leader, his voice distorted by his smashed face and the blood running from his mouth.
A squad car with one cop arrived seconds later, and the store owner, now shakily on his feet, quickly explained the situation. Equally quickly, Jake had wiped any blood off his pistol and put it back in its holster.
He recognized the officer as one of the good guys, a cop named Malone, who wasn’t stick-happy when it came to arresting drunken military types. Mr. Matsuo told Malone that the three louts had tried to rob him and that Jake had saved him.
Officer Malone looked at the three men and then at Jake. “They’re pretty messed up, Captain. Any idea what happened to them?”
Jake shrugged. “They may have run into each other while trying to run out of the store.”
“Yeah,” the cop said solemnly. “They look like clumsy types.”
Air-raid sirens went off again. Japs or another false alarm? Odds were a false alarm. There’d been scores of them since the attack. Malone swore, pushed the three drunks into his squad car, and sped off down the road, his own siren wailing. Jake looked around. It all had happened so quickly. He shook his head. Now more than ever he needed to clean up and rest.
Mr. Matsuo ran up to Jake and shoved a bag in his arms. “Thank you, Captain. And here.”
Jake grinned. He now had another six bottles of Budweiser.
The northern Pacific was bleak and windswept, but this was no deterrent to the men who loaded their precious cargo onto the decks of the Imperial Navy’s carriers. Victory was a fever, and the crews were flush with
