Free Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove

cruiser amidships. The cruiser shuddered to a stop. A destroyer was hit, too, and her back broken. She sank faster than the carrier had.
    And there was another cruiser (or battleship? Shindo could still hope) hit, her bow torn off by the force of the blow. Shindo wished for more bombers to finish off the whole flotilla. He shrugged, then let out another cheer as a second destroyer was struck. Despite the cheer, he knew the carrier-based planes were lucky to have accomplished this much. The American carrier was dead. That mattered most. The Japanese Navy also had a swarm of submarines in Hawaiian waters. Maybe they could finish off some of the U.S. ships that had escaped the torpedo bombers.
    That wasn’t Shindo’s worry, or not directly. He’d done everything he could here. The surviving Nakajimas were flying back toward the northeast. He followed them, as he’d trained to do. They had better navigation gear than he did. He smiled as he buzzed along over the Pacific. It wasn’t as if he had to worry about American pursuit. No, everything had gone just like a drill.
    T HE FIRST ATTACKS on Oahu passed Schofield Barracks by. Listening to the radio, looking at the smoke rising from nearby Wheeler Field, Fletcher Armitage was almost insulted. “What’s the matter?” he exclaimed. “Don’t they think we’re worth hitting, the lousy yellow bastards?”
    Little by little, the brass started waking up from the haymaker they’d taken. Orders came for units to move to their defensive positions. The Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment headed for Waikiki. The Ninety-Eighth Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) rolled out for Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu. And, along with the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion hurried up to the north shore, to defend the beach between Haleiwa and Waimea.
    They hurried, that is, once they got everything ready to roll. That took a while. Along with everybody else, Armitage discovered war was different from drills. The sense of urgency was much higher. Unfortunately, it made a lot of people run around like chickens that had just had a meeting with the hatchet and chopping block.
    â€œCome on, goddammit!” Fletch screamed at a sergeant fifteen years olderthan he was. “You know how to hitch the gun to the truck. How many times have you done it?”
    â€œAbout a million, sir,” the sergeant answered quietly. “But never when it counted, not till now.” He looked down at his trembling hands as if they’d betrayed him.
    That wasn’t the only foul-up, small and not so small, in the battalion—far from it. Armitage thanked God things weren’t worse. At last, all the 105mm guns and their limbers were attached. All the men who would fire them had piled into the trucks. All the infantrymen in the accompanying regiment had their rifles and ammunition and helmets. They started north from Schofield Barracks a little before two in the afternoon.
    They had barely begun to move when the antiaircraft guns still at the barracks began pounding away, throwing shells up into the sky. Through the roar and rumble of the trucks’ diesel engines, Armitage hadn’t been able to hear any airplanes overhead. “Are they shooting for the fun of it?” he asked whoever would listen to him.
    He got his answer less than a minute later, when bombs started bursting not far away. The truck stopped, so suddenly that the soldiers in back were pitched into one another. “Holy shit!” somebody shouted.
    Fletch was shouting too, in a fury at the driver: “What the hell are you doing? Keep going!”
    â€œI can’t, sir,” the man answered. “Truck two ahead of this one just got blown to hell and gone. Road’s blocked.”
    â€œWell, get off the road and go around him,” Armitage raged.
    â€œI’ll try, sir,” the driver said dubiously.
    Armitage wished he