That was what shooting squads were all about. The Jap who’d come up with the idea must have got a bonus from the Devil. If one man escaped, all the others got it in the neck. That violated all the rules of war, of course, but the Japs didn’t care. Anybody who’d seen them in action had no doubts that they would get rid of nine because the tenth vamoosed.

The sun sank behind the Waianae Range, Oahu’s western mountains. The labor gang was widening the road that led to Kolekole Pass from Schofield Barracks. Why the road needed widening, Peterson couldn’t see. He’d been stationed in the Kolekole Pass for a while during the fighting. Not many people wanted to get there, and he couldn’t imagine that many people ever would.

But it gave the POWs something to do. It gave the Japs an excuse to work them-to work them to death, very often. Peterson laughed, not that it was funny. Working the prisoners to death was probably no small part of what the Japanese had in mind.

He finished the last grain of rice in the mess kit. He always did. Everybody always did. He remembered when he’d left food on his plate in the Enterprise’s wardroom. No more. No more. He got to his feet. He topped six feet by a couple of inches, and had been a fine, rangy figure of a man. Now he was starting to look more like a collection of pipe cleaners in rags. He’d lost somewhere close to fifty pounds, and more weight came off him every day. He didn’t see how, but it did.

Peterson made a point of walking right past Walter London and scowling at him. Most POWs were scrawny wretches. London was skinny, but he wasn’t scrawny. He was a wheeler-dealer, a man who could come up with cigarettes or soap or aspirin-for a price, always for a price. The price was commonly food.