The next morning, aspirins and most of a gallon of black coffee put only the faintest of dents in Fletch’s hangover. He managed to choke down some dry toast with the coffee. In his stomach, it felt as if it were all corners. Douglas looked as decrepit as he felt, a very faint consolation indeed.

And they did go through live-fire exercises. Having a 105mm gun go off by his head did nothing to speed Fletch’s recovery. He gulped more aspirins and wished he were dead.

JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his two sons carried tubs full of nehus onto the Oshima Maru as the sampan lay tied up in Kewalo Basin, a little west of Honolulu. Takahashi, a short, muscular, sun-browned man of fifty-five, had named the fishing boat for the Japanese county he’d left around the turn of the century. He watched the minnows dash back and forth in the galvanized iron tubs. They knew they weren’t coming along for a holiday cruise.

He wondered if his sons knew the same. “Pick up your feet! Get moving!” he called to them in Japanese, the only language he spoke.

Hiroshi and Kenzo both smiled at him. He didn’t see that they moved any faster. They should have. They were less than half his age, and both of them were three or four inches taller than he was. They should have been stronger than he was, too. If they were, he hadn’t seen it. They didn’t have the fire in their bellies, the passion for work, that he did. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to give it to them.

Hiroshi said something in English as he set his tub down on the deck. His younger brother answered in the same language. They’d both been educated in American schools on Oahu. They used English as readily as Japanese, even though Jiro had sent them to Japanese schools after the regular schools ended. They went by Hank and Ken as often as by the names he’d given them.