Near those fuel tanks had stood the U.S. Navy repair facilities. The Yankees wrecked those themselves when they realized they weren’t going to be able to hold Oahu. Japanese engineers were full of professional admiration for the job their American counterparts did. It made operating Pearl Harbor as a base for the Japanese Navy much harder-much harder, but not impossible.

As if to underscore that, Akagi’s flight deck vibrated under Shindo’s feet. Metallic clatters and bangs came from below. A dive bomber had got one home on the carrier during the fight north of the Hawaiian Islands. The bomb penetrated the flight deck near the bow and exploded in the hangar. Luckily, just about all the ship’s planes were in the air, defending Akagi or attacking the enemy’s carriers. Otherwise, things would have been even worse.

Damage-control parties had got steel plates over the hole in the flight deck so the carrier could launch aircraft. That was the essential, the indispensable, repair. Everything else had waited. The crew was attending to the rest now, as best they could here in Hawaiian waters.

Zuikaku, much more badly damaged than Akagi, had had to limp back to Japan for repairs. That left her sister ship, Shokaku, the only undamaged Japanese carrier in the Eastern Pacific. Shindo muttered to himself. Shokaku ’s fliers and sailors had less experience than Akagi’s. In a crisis…

No less a personage than Admiral Yamamoto thought a crisis unlikely any time soon. The Americans had hurt the Japanese carrier force. Japan had crushed the Americans. Two of the three U.S. carriers that had sailed from the American mainland lay on the bottom of the Pacific now. The third, hurt worse than either Akagi or Zuikaku, had barely staggered back to the West Coast. Whatever invasion fleet followed behind the carriers and their escorts had also run for home.