It also made Shindo jealous as could be. Fuchida was very able. Nobody would have quarreled with that; Shindo certainly didn’t. Because he was so able, he sometimes got to do things he wasn’t strictly entitled to do. Sitting in the copilot’s seat of an H8K was one of those, sure enough.

None of what Shindo thought showed on his face. That was true most of the time, but he made a special point of it now. The two of them served together, but they weren’t close friends the way Fuchida and Minoru Genda were. And Fuchida had two grades on Shindo. Letting a superior see what you thought of him was never a good idea.

All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”

“Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”

“If they want another go at us, they can have it,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them the same kind of lesson we did six weeks ago.” He paused, eyeing Fuchida. Now the other naval aviator’s face was the sort of polite blank mask behind which anything could have hidden. Shindo decided to press a little to see what was there: “We’re just about back up to strength here with aircraft and pilots.”

“In numbers, yes,” Fuchida said. “Do you think the replacements fly as well as the men we lost? Are the bombardiers as accurate?”

So that was it. Shindo said, “They’ll get better as they get more flying time. I was thinking the same thing not long ago about Shokaku ’s crew.”

“I hope so.” Fuchida still sounded worried. “We don’t have the fuel to give them all the practice I wish they could get.”

Saburo Shindo grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. Blowing up the tank farms had hurt Japan as well as the USA-though the Americans surely would have fired them to deny them to the invaders.