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was being run off the road by the thousands now trying to flee into the center of the island.
    They slowed for a moment, edging around the shoulder to get past where a head-on collision had occurred, most likely just moments before, one of the cars burning.
    Strange how in little more than eighteen hours he had already become inured to the anguish created by war. Someone was inside the burning car, thankfully not moving. A woman clutching a child was beside the funeral pyre, screaming, being restrained by two teenage boys.
    They reached the top of the pass, slowing for a moment due to the bumper-to-bumper traffic… and ironically the sea behind them was now dark. The bombardment had stopped.
    A number of cars were pulled over by the side of the highway, people out, staring back at the place from where they had just fled.
    At the top of the pass, working under the glare of several sets of truck headlights, some national guardsmen were setting up a couple of antiquated seventy-five-millimeter guns, relics of the last war. He shook his head. At dawn, if an invasion was on, this would be one of the first places they’d shell, or they’d send in a few bombers. They should be deploying on the back slope of the mountain, underconcealment, not out in the open as they were now doing. My God, he wondered, are we really such amateurs? He wanted to stop, to shout some advice, but knew his suggestion would be ignored.
    Margaret slowed in the traffic and finally came to a stop in the confusion.
    “Is it over?” she asked. “Should we go back?”
    He shook his head.
    “No. Janice’s place will be safer.”
    She shifted back into gear, went up over the shoulder on the east-bound side to get around yet another accident, this one fortunately not fatal and burning, and started down out of the pass.
    She said nothing. He looked over at her, her so-attractive black hair, dark eyes and complexion, more oriental than occidental. And he felt fear. If this indeed is the first move of an invasion, what will happen to her?
    He had been at Shanghai, had talked with his friend Cecil about Nanking. A beautiful woman like Margaret? He knew what would happen if this island paradise became a battlefield.
    Or on the other side, might the rage be so intense tomorrow, invasion or not, that someone might decide to start stringing up Japanese civilians? It still happened with Negroes in the South; why not Japanese on Oahu after this day, or when the invasion started, if it started?
    After coasting for several miles down the Pali Highway, traffic having thinned out somewhat, they turned off into a small development on the northern edge of Honolulu. Janice lived alone; her husband, God save him, was an Army major with MacArthur in the Philippines.
    As they turned into her driveway he could see a flutter of curtains. A moment later the door cracked open and she came running out, falling into the arms of Margaret’s mother, her aunt. Both spoke hurriedly in Japanese.
    Janice had on her Red Cross uniform.
    Margaret got out of the car and the two embraced and for a moment she didn’t notice that James had slid over and was now in the driver’s seat, the car’s engine still running.
    She looked back.
    “James, what are you doing?”
    “I have to go back to the base. If it’s an invasion that’s where I have to be.”
    “Damn it, James,” she sighed, anger in her eyes, as if arguing with a recalcitrant child, “this is ridiculous. You’re wounded, you’ve done enough.”
    “I have to do my duty,” was all he could say in reply, wondering if the words sounded pompous, but knowing no other way of expressing it.
    She leaned over, drawing closer to him, so close that he could smell her perfume, and it lowered his guard.
    “What about us?” she whispered. “I might be OK, but what about Mom and Janice? You heard what Ed Simpson was shouting. We need you here.”
    He felt his throat tighten. She was right, of course. Invasion or not, he should be