STRIKE: A Novel of the Battle of Midway Read online

“Cheating,” he said. “Son. Of a bitch.”

  Wild Bill’s smile evaporated. “Well, chum. Now you’ve gone and done it.”

  Chairs scuffled along the wood floor as the four Air Corps pilots stood glowering. Whether Harry was right or wrong didn’t matter to Taylor and Welch. They were the same tribe, all for one and one for all, and Harry wasn’t in it.

  He took a step back as the men fanned out around him.

  Taylor sighed. “What’s done is done. Can’t you just go home?”

  Harry crouched into a fighter’s stance and gamely put up his fists. “Nope.”

  There was no way for him to win, but as far as he was concerned, he already had, in one sense. Right then, his honor—which at this point he confused with the honor of the entire Navy—seemed more important than a busted nose or a split lip.

  Connecting a single punch with Wild Bill’s smug smirk would feel like victory, and anything that came his way afterwards would be worth the pain.

  They closed in. Tensing like a spring, Harry took his swing at Wild Bill, but the pilot cheated him again by ducking back laughing, and as he recovered, the others rushed in to grab his arms.

  He struggled, but it was useless. He was done.

  Well, darn, thought Harry, who’d refused to shed his upbringing’s prohibition against cussing. It had all worked out so much better in my head.

  “Cut it out,” somebody yelled. It was one of the privates who worked the place. “No fighting in here, sirs. I’ll have to call the MPs.”

  “Our friend has had one too many,” Wild Bill replied. “He’s having a little trouble finding the door. We’re going to see him out.”

  Wiping glasses behind the bar, the private took in this lie with pursed lips. “Whatever you’re doing, best make it quick.”

  “Certainly.” He winked at Big Red. “You heard the man.”

  The pilot grinned. “Let’s see how good this cowboy does a carrier landing.”

  The men hauled Harry kicking and squirming off his feet until he became a human battering ram aimed directly at the front door.

  “Wait,” he said. “Fellas? Hang on a minute—”

  With a martial shout, they started running. “HOOAH!”

  This is gonna hurt, Harry thought.

  The door rushed toward his gaping face. Wild Bill opened it with a mocking sweep of his arm, revealing a distant hangar awash in bright orange light.

  “Au revoir, chum. Farewell, adieu—”

  The group came to a stumbling halt as the hangar exploded in a blinding flash.

  2

  ATTACK!

  Harry had expected to soar through the air before a tragic crash landing on the rough ground outside the O-Club. Instead, the men just dumped him where they stood, all fun and games forgotten in their surprise.

  An airplane roared overhead, its shadow flickering across the bright grass.

  “Stupid idiot,” Big Red said in wonder. “That guy is in big trouble.”

  “He’ll be lucky if he gets Leavenworth,” Wild Bill agreed, referring to the military prison where this errant pilot would likely be busting rocks for the foreseeable future. “Because I may just shoot him.”

  Harry rose to his knees and pointed. “Then who are they?”

  Dozens of planes approached with the high-pitched buzz of angry hornets. One peeled off into a glide bombing run, and the servicemen who’d run toward the burning hangar now scattered.

  “Get down,” he yelled. “It’s an attack!”

  “Shut up, cowboy,” Big Red growled. “You don’t know…”

  His voice trailed off as a little black dot tumbled from the plane’s centerline at a thousand feet and erupted among the base’s fighter planes parked in tight formation, tearing them to shreds.

  The men staggered as the ground trembled and the air pressure suddenly changed. A wave of heat and thunder washed over them.

  The plane howled overhead, revealing two red meatballs on its wings.

  “Now do you believe me?” Harry said. “They’re Japs!”

  Taylor and Welch bolted, leaving him with Wild Bill and his hulking sidekick, who stood blinking as another dive tore apart a dozen tightly packed planes. Harry hit the deck as burning pieces of fuselage crashed across the field.

  Bombs now fell at regular intervals, detonations loud enough to flatten eardrums, each followed by the gloating, triumphant snarl of the planes pulling out.

  Harry trembled and whimpered at each blast. He’d heard exploding ordnance before many times during training, but it was one thing to hear practice shots and quite another to hear bombs exploded in anger.

  Bombs that were trying to kill him.

  Fighters plunged toward the field with a deep growl that steadily rose in volume and pitch as they zeroed onto targets. With strobing flashes, the pilots opened up with machine guns and cannons. The slugs raked the barracks, more parked planes, a group of servicemen running across the airstrip.

  Harry gaped at the resulting slaughter, still shaking but otherwise unable to move, utterly helpless. He had no idea what he was supposed to do or even could do. He had a strange thought that this couldn’t be happening, it was such a nice day, warm and mild and sunny, with a gentle breeze rustling the palm trees.

  “What’s the ruckus?” the private working the O-Club called out from the doorway. “Who ordered bombing practice on a damn Sunday?”

  “Get down, GET DOWN!” Harry screamed and covered his head.

  The Army pilots thudded to the ground next to him as a rain of cannon rounds struck the building with sickening crashes. The private disappeared as if sucked back inside. Harry clenched his eyes, though he could still see the bright flashes of the tracers.

  The attacking plane veered off to recover, and he was able to breathe again and try to get his bearings.

  Wheeler was being wiped out.

  Two more explosions hammered the field in quick succession, hurling dust and twisted metal and a single ragdoll of a body into the sky. The concussions trembled through the ground.

  The hangars were burning down to their frames, pumping vast, coiling columns of smoke into the eastward breeze. One of the barracks was ablaze.

  Dozens of planes had been reduced to shattered wrecks. Broken glass, debris, shrapnel, and more than a few bodies littered the field.

  God, it was a duck shoot.

  Harry spared a glance at the O-Club, now riddled with massive, ragged holes. Men screamed in pain and rage into the growl of the planes and the deafening blasts, and the base’s air raid siren finally revved up to wail its warning, attack, attack, we’re under attack!

  Thanks a lot for the warning, he thought dryly.

  “Where are our planes?” He’d said it as much to himself as the pilots next to him. “Why aren’t we fighting back?”

  Harry spotted an aircrew frantically trying to get a fighter off the ground and raised his fist with a whoop to salute the brave pilot in its cockpit. Some of the antiaircraft guns were now manned and firing. Streams of tracers reached into a sky that seemed filled with planes and smoke.

  “What do you think, Red?” Wild Bill said, still lying on Harry’s left curled into a ball. “I’m just wondering.”

  “What do I think about what?” Red growled from his right.

  “What should we do?” Harry chimed in, thinking they should probably do something.

  The big pilot raised his head to glare at the ongoing destruction of the base. “To hell with it.” He stood and gave his uniform a quick dusting. He even straightened his tie. “I’m gonna have a drink. See you around, Bill. Good luck, cowboy.”

  With that, he disappeared back inside the O-Club.

  “What about you, Bill?”

  “How the hell should I know?” the man raged. “I’m going to call the major. I need orders.”

  He started to crawl back toward the O-Club, reaching ahead to claw at the ground before hauling himself another yard.

  Harry didn’t want to be out here alon
e. “What about me?”

  “I need orders!” the pilot yelled back. “I’m calling the major!”

  “But—”

  “I NEED ORDERS.”

  Harry ignored him now, distracted by two planes zipping overhead, engaged in a dogfight. We got a plane in the air! On the other side of the airfield, another was taking off. Against lopsided odds, the Pineapple Air Force was fighting back.

  He tried to let out another whoop, but it came out a dry croak. He suddenly ached to do something, anything. He needed to reach Pearl somehow and get orders himself.

  All he had to do was get back onto his feet. Pick himself up and make a mad dash out of here. Getting to Pearl wouldn’t make any difference in the outcome of this massacre, he knew, but he’d finally be acting instead of lying here useless while bombs fell and men died all around him.

  Harry tried to push myself up onto his hands and knees, but nothing happened. Though his spirit was willing, his flesh was weak, and right now his flesh refused to obey at all. He seemed to be paralyzed, every muscle clenched but unable to release. He wondered if he was wounded. The truth was he was utterly terrified.

  Understanding this, Harry’s spirit chimed in, only too happy to play along. The sensible thing to do, he told himself, is stay put and stay alive.

  The war had begun in sudden fury. He’d fight another day, when he finally reached Enterprise and could get in a cockpit, and until the attack abated, what could be do?

  If there was an Enterprise. If she survived. And if the Japanese didn’t land a division or two and take the whole of Hawaii in the meantime.

  That’s when Harry got mad.

  Enraged, actually. Blind, seeing-red, homicidally enraged.

  The Japanese, who had no business attacking the United States and certainly not its mighty military, had delivered a historic sucker punch.

  The cheats weren’t giving the American servicemen a fair fight. Good men at church or chow or still in their bunks were dying. And Harry for one refused to take another minute of it, because that’s how honor worked.

  It demanded courage. It made you risk everything so that if you lived, you could go on living with yourself without the curse of forever hoping you could try again.

  He rose to his knees only for the world to explode in the loudest boom he’d ever heard. The world turned white. The earth shook and tilted. The shock wave struck him like a wall of bricks and knocked him sprawling, where he lay for a few moments just struggling to breathe.

  Harry came to clawing at the ground, trying to dig a shallow trench in the rich, warm soil. Fresh waves of black smoke boiled into the air in the distance.

  Ammo dump, he thought. The bombers had hit an ammunition depot. Armageddon.

  Wagging his head to clear his addled wits, Harry struggled to his feet and shook his fist like a lunatic at the planes overhead. He howled defiance into the bomb blasts.

  “I’m right here,” he raged. “You cheating Japs!”

  A brand-new Buick automobile came to a screeching halt in front of him. Taylor leaned out the open driver’s side window. “What the hell are you doing, you idiot? Where’s Bill and Red?”

  “I don’t know,” Harry said, answering both questions.

  The pilot stared at him. “You coming or staying?”

  He leaped into the car as a plane dove toward them, its machine guns already blazing.

  Dust and grass sprayed from the chewed ground, growing closer by the—

  “Going,” Harry screamed. “GO!”

  3

  THE PINEAPPLE AIR FORCE

  The car lunged out of the line of fire and sped off toward the base exit road. In the back, Harry gaped at the sky in mute terror.

  “They’re alive, though, right?” asked Welch, who sat in the front passenger seat.

  “What?” Harry said. So many had died. “Who?”

  “Wild Bill and Big Red.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, you’re coming with us. We need every man. One for all.”

  Their feud had been forgotten, rendered meaningless by the Japanese surprise attack. The only tribe that mattered now was America. His duty, however, lay on a different path. “I have to get to Pearl.”

  “You’re coming with us,” Welch repeated.

  “Where?” With rising alarm, Harry realized they drove north, taking him even farther from the naval base.

  The pilot didn’t answer. Focused on his driving, Taylor didn’t either. The car screeched around a curve, shoving Harry against the door.

  He looked out the back window again to watch the Japanese planes dart over the airfield in strafing runs. A thick haze of smoke darkened the sky over the burning airbase. The automobile hurtled down the empty road now at close to a hundred miles an hour.

  I survived all that, he thought. And now I’m going to die in a lousy car crash.

  “They used carrier planes,” Welch muttered, as if finally answering a question he’d been wrestling with. “They must have.”

  Harry hadn’t had a moment to think about it, but the man was right. There was no other way.

  Somehow, the Imperial Japanese Navy, or IJN, had sailed an entire battle group across the Pacific undetected, parked off Oahu, and now pounded it with planes launched from aircraft carriers.

  One had to respect the audacity of it, the cunning and bold strategy, even if one resented the underhandedness of a surprise attack.

  Even in his confusion and terror, he understood the Japanese had just redefined naval warfare. They’d taken what the British had done at Taranto and executed it on an unheard-of scale.

  “So, what’s the plan?” he asked. “Head to the mountains?”

  Welch turned in his seat to scowl at him. “Why the hell would we do that?”

  Harry took a moment to get his reasoning straight, which was no easy thing as his brain was scrambled and still processing it all. “They didn’t come to bomb our airplanes. They wanted to hit the Fleet, right? They only hit Wheeler so you guys couldn’t defend the ships. Probably the other airfields too.”

  “I’m with you so far. What of it?”

  “It means right now they’re bombing Pearl,” he said. “And if they put that many planes into hitting Wheeler, they’ve got even more down at the harbor.”

  “Which makes this crap sandwich a buffet.” Welch gave him a disappointed look. “You think we should find someplace to hide and wait it out?”

  “I’m saying this might be an all-out effort to take Hawaii. If the Fleet doesn’t win the battle, the Japanese might land troops. If that happens, we’ll either have to surrender or find a unit.”

  Harry had trained as a pilot, but he might end up an infantryman or maybe even a guerilla. Deep in thought, Welch said nothing.

  Behind the wheel, Taylor’s shoulders clenched even further. “It doesn’t change a thing.”

  “Right,” Welch said and then filled Harry in. “We called ahead to Haleiwa. They weren’t hit. Too out of the way. The Japs probably don’t even know it’s there. The ground gang has four planes loaded and ready to get into the fight.”

  The pilot’s squadron was stationed at Wheeler but had been assigned to temporary duty at the Haleiwa Fighter Strip. For the last four days, they’d practiced short emergency landings and aerial gunnery while boredom drove them in the evenings to seek out different kinds of adventure down in Pearl City.

  Harry wondered what these pilots hoped to accomplish once they reached their planes. Even if the whole squadron got into their cockpits, it added up to only eight P-40 Warhawk and two P-36 Mohawk pursuit fighters.

  He doubted it was enough to make a difference, but at least they’d be in the fight. He envied them.

  As for him, he should have been aboard Enterprise, but he had no idea whether she’d returned to Pearl overnight. For all Harry knew, she was under assault by swarms of bombers.

  Going to Pearl was a hopeless cause in any case, at least for now. Haleiwa was ten miles or so north of Whee
ler, fifteen from Pearl Harbor. They were on the only main road, so going to Pearl meant facing Wheeler again.

  All he could do was chip in any way he could. “What can I do to help?”

  Welch turned around to face him again. “You’re flying with us, naturally.”

  “What? Me? In a P-40? Are you nuts?”

  “Consider yourself recruited into the Pineapple Air Force.”

  “You ever fly a Warhawk?” Taylor asked behind the wheel.

  “Once! In training!” In advanced flight school, Harry had mostly trained on older models of the SBD Dauntless. Before that, he’d flown biplane trainers.

  “You’ll be fine,” Welch said, though he hardly sounded convincing. “It’s fast—no plane goes faster in a dive. It’s not as maneuverable in slower-speed dogfights as the new carrier planes the Japs will throw at us.” These were A6M Type 0 carrier planes, which the Americans called Zekes or Zeros, fast and agile pursuit fighters. “At higher speeds, though, it flies like a dream.”

  “It’s a little skittish,” Taylor chimed in. “Remember you’ll have to go gentle on the reins.”

  “Oh,” Welch added, “and it tends to pull to the left on takeoff, so remember to compensate with the right rudder to keep it steady.”

  Exactly how Harry remembered it from training. “You guys are going to get me killed, you know that? And if I survive, they’ll court martial me for flying one of your planes without authorization. We need to get orders.”

  Welch gave him the stink-eye. “I thought you wanted to fight Japs.”

  That settled it. Harry crossed his arms with a loud sigh, sorry he’d ever laid eyes on these Army pilots.

  “We’ll reach altitude,” Taylor said, “and then we’ll boom and zoom.”

  This tactic entailed darting against an enemy with a quick, plunging, slashing attack and then zooming away back to altitude. The trick was to stay out of a prolonged, close-quarters fight, where the Zero’s superior maneuverability at lower speeds had a big advantage.

  Harry gulped. “Sure thing, Lieutenant.”

  Honor was turning into a real bitch.

  4