1942

Jake saw the woman bite her lower lip and turn her head away. He hadn’t the heart to tell her that he had been by the devastated battleship, and it was a nightmare. Sailors were trapped in the ship, and the sounds of their clanging against the armored hull served as beacons for those who were desperately trying to drill through and rescue them. He couldn’t begin to imagine the nightmarish conditions in the pitch black of an overturned battleship.

Several sounds from within the hull had already ceased as air must have run out of the pockets in which men were trapped. Farther away, other sailors and workers played their radios loudly in order to drown out the agonies of the incessant pounding. If Tim Sanderson was trapped in the Oklahoma, then God help him.

Jake had been truthful when he’d said the navy was trying desperately to save the trapped men. As the hours dragged on, however, it was becoming a losing battle.

Jake asked where she lived, and she told him. She added that a neighbor had dropped her off. When he offered to drive her home, she almost pathetically said not to bother.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Sanderson, your place is on the way to Shafter and pretty near mine.”

With that, she demurred, and they drove in silence to her home. When they arrived, Missy Wilson walked up with her young child sleeping in her arms.

“I’ll take care of her,” Missy said after hearing that nothing had come of Alexa’s vigil by the base. She took Alexa by the arm and led her into the house. Alexa neither resisted nor complained. To Jake it seemed that she was beyond feeling.

Jake shook his head in sadness. He had met Tim’s wife only once before and been struck by her poise and patrician good looks. She was the type of woman he would never have otherwise met if it hadn’t been for the weekly football games.

Football? God, he thought, was the world ever that innocent? As he headed back to his car, another vehicle pulled up and a grim-faced naval lieutenant emerged.

The two men introduced themselves. The naval officer was Jamie Priest, and he was from the Pennsylvania. Like dogs sniffing, the two men checked each other’s rank and academy rings. Priest was a lieutenant in the navy, which was equivalent to a captain in the army. He looked several years younger than Jake, a fact that Jake had found more and more frustrating lately. Jamie Priest was also much smaller, wiry, and, when he removed his hat, showed thinning straw-colored hair.

“I’ve got to talk to her,” Jamie said. “They found her husband’s body in the harbor.”

“Christ,” Jake said.

What a waste of a decent young guy, Jake thought, and what a hell of a way to destroy a young woman. But at least that meant Tim hadn’t been trapped in the Oklahoma, spending a day and a half going mad in the claustrophobic blackness. Should she be thankful for small favors?

Missy emerged from the house, the sleeping child still on her shoulder. She had heard the conversation. “You won’t be talking to her tonight. I gave her some pills my doctor gave me after Killer here was born. Let her sleep. I’ll break the news to her when she wakes up.” Then she looked puzzled. “Shouldn’t there be a chaplain with you?”

Jamie shrugged. “Too many dead and not enough chaplains. Since I knew Tim, I volunteered.”

Jake made a mental note to find out when the funeral was and to check up on Tim’s wife. No, he corrected himself, Tim’s widow. The grief on Mrs. Sanderson’s face as she waited in vain for word of her husband’s fate had touched him deeply.

As he drove away, he realized that Alexa Sanderson’s innocent plight had brought the war home to him in a way that was far different from what the rows of wounded, the anonymous dead, the planes shooting at him by Hickam, and the sight of Lieutenant Simpkins’s shredded body after the Zero had strafed them had done. At least Tim’s widow and her blond friend were far enough away from the carnage that they didn’t have to smell it, or watch as the last of the flames were put out.

Admiral Husband Kimmel touched his chest and felt the bruise where a spent Japanese bullet had struck him during the height of the attack. At the time he had lamented that it would have been better had the bullet killed him instead of dropping harmlessly onto the floor. Since then, nothing had happened to change his mind. The spent piece of lead was now in his pocket.

“I just received a telegram saying I’ve been relieved,” Kimmel said. “I guess no one’s surprised, although I think it’s without justification. The war-warning message from Washington was manifestly ambiguous. They did not tell me to beware of an attack on Pearl.”

To the contrary, Kimmel thought. No one felt that any navy had the capability to do what Japan had done. And, in particular, no one felt that a semibarbaric country full of nearsighted little yellow men with buck teeth would even attempt such an enterprise.

“No one even informed me that the Jap fleet was at sea.”