Days of Infamy Read Free Page A

mats. They had no room to move around. Some were too sick to do anything but lie there and moan. Others gambled or sang songs or simply slept like hibernating animals, all in the effort to make time go faster.
    The Kuril Islands seemed like an afterthought to Japan: rocky lumps spattered across the Pacific, heading up toward Kamchatka. Etorofu was as windswept and foggy and desolate as any of the others. When the Nagata Maru anchored in Hitokappu Bay, Shimizu was unimpressed. He just hoped to get away as fast as he could. He wouldn’t even have known where he was if the platoon commander hadn’t told him.
    He had hoped to be able to get off the freighter and stretch his legs. But no one was allowed off the ship for any reason. No one was allowed to send mail. No one, in fact, was allowed to do much of anything except go up on deck and exercise. Every time Corporal Shimizu did, more ships crowded the bay. They weren’t just transports, either. Ships bristling with big guns joined the fleet. So did flat-topped aircraft carriers, one after another.
    Something big was building. When the men went back down into the hold, they tried to guess what it would be. Not a one of them turned out to be right.
    Y OU CAN BE unhappy in Hawaii as easily as anywhere else. People who cruise over from the mainland often have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. The sea voyage from San Francisco or Los Angeles takes five days. They set the clocks back half an hour a day aboard ship, so that each outbound day lasts twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. By the time you get there, you’re two and a half hours behind the West Coast, five and a half behind the East.
    And then, after Diamond Head and the Aloha Tower come up over the horizon, you commonly stay in a fine hotel. You eat splendid food. You drink . . . oh, a little too much. You don’t get drunk, mind. You get . . . happy. You admire the turquoise sky and the sapphire sea and the emerald land. Strange tropical birds call in the trees. You savor the perfect weather. Never too hot, never too cold. If it rains, so what? The sun will come out again in a little while. You want to be a beachcomber and spend the rest of your days there. If you find a slightly brown-skinned but beautiful and willing wahine to spend them there with you, so much the better.
    Hawaii is what God made after he’d done Paradise for practice. How could anyone be unhappy in a place like that?
    First Lieutenant Fletcher Armitage had no trouble at all.
    For one thing, Armitage—called Fletch by his friends—was a green-eyed redhead with a face full of freckles. In between the freckles, his skin was white as milk. He hated the tropical sun. He didn’t tan. He burned.
    For another, his wife had left him three weeks before. He didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure Jane understood why. He didn’t think there was somebody else. Jane hadn’t said anything about anybody else. She’d said she felt stifled in their little Wahiawa apartment. She’d said he didn’t give her enough of his time.
    That had frosted his pumpkin—not that frost had anything to do with anything on Oahu. “For Christ’s sake, I give you every minute I’ve got when I’m not with my guns!” he’d howled. He served with the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion—the Lucky Thirteenth, they called themselves—in the Twenty-fourth Division. “You knew you were marrying an officer when you said ‘I do.’ ”
    She’d only shrugged. She was small and blond and stubborn. “It’s not enough,” she’d said. Now she had the apartment, and presumably felt muchless stifled without him in it. She was talking with a lawyer. How she’d pay him on a schoolteacher’s salary was beyond Fletch, but odds were she’d figure out a way. She usually did.
    What Armitage had, on the other hand, was a hard cot at