A lump of gluey rice and anonymous greens about the size of a softball-that was what he was getting all excited about. He knew it. It shamed him. It made him disgusted at himself. But he couldn’t help it. That was how much his body craved even the scanty nourishment the Japs gave him.

For this I went to Annapolis? he thought bitterly as he shoveled glop into his face as fast as he could.

He’d been a Navy lieutenant on the Enterprise, coming back to Pearl Harbor after delivering fighter planes to Wake Island. He’d roared off the carrier’s deck to do what he could against the Japanese-and promptly got shot down. He’d thought his Wildcat was pretty hot stuff till he ran into his first Zero. It was also the last one he’d faced in the air. One was plenty. One had sure been plenty for him.

He managed to bail out, and came down on a golf course near Ewa, the Marines’ airfield west of Pearl Harbor. He’d done his damnedest to get back in the air. His damnedest turned out to be no damn good. Lots of pilots-Marines, Army and Navy men-were in line ahead of him. All they needed were planes. The Japs did a hell of a job blowing those to smithereens on the ground. Japanese mastery of the air in the invasion was absolute.

Since Peterson couldn’t fight the Japs in the air, he’d fought them on the ground as a common soldier. He’d even been promoted to corporal before the collapse; he still had the stripes on the sleeve of his ragged shirt. Nobody would use him as an officer on the ground, which was only fair, because he hadn’t been trained for that. He would have got people killed trying to command a company.

Nobody in his shooting squad knew he’d been an officer. No sooner had he thought of the squad than he thought of Walter London. Up came his head, like a bird dog’s. Where was London? There, sitting on a boulder, eating rice like everybody else. Peterson relaxed-fractionally. London was the weak link in the squad, the guy most likely to disappear if he saw half a chance-and if the other guys didn’t stop him.