Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove Page B

couldn’t shake the enemy or turn the tables on him. Tracers flashed past. Peterson tensed, not that that would do him any good if a shell slammed through his armored seat and into his back.
    Machine-gun bullets stitched across his wing. Two cannon shells hit his engine, one right after the other. It quit. None of his cursing and clawing brought it back to life. All of a sudden, he was flying the world’s most expensive glider.
    He’d told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice—if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free . . . right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.
    He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so. . . . Better the jungle than the sharks.
    Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who’d shot him down? One burst from the bastard’s machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.
    Peterson waved back with a one-finger salute. Fortunately, the enemy flier either didn’t see it or didn’t know what it meant. He flew back into the fight instead of returning to wipe out the insult in blood.
    Like bad-tempered dandelion fluff, Peterson floated down. He spilled air from the chute and swung his weight this way and that, fighting not to go into the drink. And he didn’t. He came down on the fairway of a golf course about a quarter of a mile from the sea.
    Two gray-haired men advanced on him with upraised five-irons. “Surrender!” they shouted.
    In spite of everything, he almost burst out laughing. Here he was, taller than either one of them, fairer than either one of them—and they thought he was a goddamn Jap because he came out of the sky. “Get me to a car and get me to an airfield,” he growled. “If they can find a plane for me, I’ve got some more fighting to do.”
    The golfers gaped at him as if he’d started spouting Japanese. If they’d lived here a while, they might even have understood some Japanese. Did they understand English? “I think he’s an American, Sid,” one of them said, as if announcing miracles.
    â€œYou’re right, Bernie,” the other declared after cogitations of his own.
    Peterson felt like murdering them both. Instead, they drove him back towards Ewa. To the east, the flames and smoke of the U.S. Navy’s funeral pyre climbed higher into the air every moment. Soot floated down like black rain.
    I N HIS Z ERO , Lieutenant Saburo Shindo watched Pearl Harbor go up in smoke below him. This was the blow Commander Fuchida had wanted to strike: the blow against the harbor’s great tank farms and repair facilities. Even if the invasion of Oahu failed by some accident, the Americans wouldhave a devil of a time getting much use out of their forward base in the Pacific. The channel was plugged, too, with ships sunk trying to steam out and fight. The Japanese task force wouldn’t have to worry about sorties, not for a while.
    Shindo flew at four thousand meters. The thick, black, greasy smoke had already climbed past him. How high would it go? How far would the pall spread? He couldn’t begin to guess. He also couldn’t see the ground as well as he would have liked, for the smoke obscured it. The very success of the attack was ruining reconnaissance.
    â€œWe were attacked by carrier-based aircraft flying in from the west,” Shindo said into the radio. He knew the carriers wouldn’t answer, but Admiral Nagumo, Commander Genda, and Commander