Aboard the carrier, rage boiled. “Those little slanty-eyed cocksuckers want a war, they’ve got one!” Lieutenant Jim Peterson shouted to whoever would listen.

“You were the one who said they wouldn’t fight.” Three people reminded Peterson of that at the same time.

He was too furious to get embarrassed at being wrong. “I don’t give a shit what I said,” he snarled. “Let’s knock the yellow bastards into the middle of next week.”

But that was easier said than done. Everyone knew the Japanese were somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands-but where? Had they come down out of the north or up from the south? The Enterprise couldn’t even ask the harried men at Pearl Harbor what they knew. As soon as that horrifying message came in, Admiral Halsey slapped radio silence on the whole task force. No Japs were going to spot the carrier and her satellites by their signals.

In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese-and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who’d shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.

The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They’d been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news-about seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose-far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.

As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the Enterprise. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary-people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too-but what trickled in didn’t sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row’s taken a hell of a licking.”