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down the steep driveway, nearly hitting the Johnstons’ Studebaker, which was careering down the street.
    “Damn Japs, damn all you Japs!”
    It was Ed Simpson, now down on the street, vaguely waving his shotgun toward them.
    Margaret, in yet another uncharacteristic gesture, gave Ed the finger, hit the gas, and they were off.
    “Where to?” she asked, anger in her voice.
    He didn’t know how to respond. Was the bombardment the prelude to a night landing? War games had theorized that if the Japs did attack and attempt a landing, a diversionary force might come into Kaneohe Bay, which could serve as a sheltered anchorage and secure the windward side of the island. In a protracted fight for the island, the airbases at Kaneohe and Bellows could be used by their bombers and fighters.
    This could very well be the softening-up blow for that invasion. Get away from here, then. But where?
    “Your cousin Janice,” he finally said. Margaret nodded in agreement, taking the next corner fast and hard, weaving around a car backing out of a driveway with headlights off, dodging around people standing in the street. Ahead he saw traffic, cars, the taillights of dozens of cars, their drivers and families all filled with the same thought. Head up Pali Highway and get the hell away from here.
    And now he heard it again, but this wasn’t a single salvo, it was a continual roar—dozens of shells screeching in, searching out Bellows, which was illuminated by star shells. Several of the fourteen-inch shells were short, one of them impacting into a storefront, a hair salon that Margaret frequented, just a block ahead. The explosion flipped a car high into the air, end over end, buildings to either side collapsing, and a geyser of water erupting up from a broken water main.
    Margaret, now cursing loudly against the “damn Japs,” wove around the wreckage like an expert, her mother sobbing at the sight of the broken bodies that had been torn apart by the blast.

    Margaret ran the red light at the intersection, nearly getting hit by an old Model A as she skidded on to State Highway 61, where traffic was growing heavier by the second as more and more, in panic, started to flee, ignoring the orders of martial law. A lone cop, flanked by a portly national guardsman, holding an ′03, stood impotent at an intersection, just watching the traffic race by.
    And then everything slammed to a crawl, the twisting two-lane road ahead bumper to bumper.
    More flashes of light, the air continually rent by the howl of incoming shells, impacting around Fort Bellows and the coastal gun positions up on the mountain slope. Several of the fort’s guns were firing back, and cynically he knew that given the antiquity of the weapons and the ill-trained crews manning them, their reply fire was most likely splashing down miles wide of any target.
    Crawling along at not much more than ten miles an hour, they started to gain up the side of the mountain, and he could see the ocean off to their left. Flashes continually rippled up and down alongthe horizon. Two heavy ships, undoubtedly battleships, were firing. Smaller, more rapid firing from closer in—those were destroyers—but then every couple of minutes, with almost stately precision, two giant eruptions of light, each turret lighting off a few seconds after the next, the gun blasts so brilliant, even from five or more miles out, as to cast shadows on the mountains, followed fifteen seconds or so later by geysering impacts of fourteen-inch shells, the concussion, even at this distance, numbing.
    “The hell with this,” Margaret snapped, and downshifting the car she swung out over the double yellow line, and hit the gas.
    Her mother squealed in terror; he said nothing. When she hit one of these moods, which was exceedingly rare, he knew better than to protest—and besides, dozens of others, in front and behind her, were doing the same. Hardly any traffic was coming over the pass heading east, and if it was, it