Jake had just put on his trousers and was deciding whether to eat breakfast in town or at the officers’ club when he thought he heard thunder. At first, he ignored it, but it was sunny out; why the thunder?

As he pondered this, the sounds got closer. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. Somebody was going to get in a whole lot of trouble for scheduling gunnery practice on a Sunday morning in December.

Then he was on the floor and gasping for breath while his ears rang from the shock of an explosion. His small room was full of dust, and something cut his arm.

Jake got up and ran down the stairs and outside, where other officers were gathering, shock and disbelief on their faces.

“What the hell’s going on?” Jake yelled, and no one answered. Had some asshole dropped a bomb or plunked a shell down on the wrong spot? He felt a twinge of sorrow for the poor bastard. Then a plane flew overhead, and he saw the rising sun on its wing.

“Japs!” someone yelled. “We’re being attacked by the Japs!”

Another bomb landed nearby, and he felt the concussion. Jake ran in the general direction of the airfield, dreading what he would see when he got there. He knew that the planes on the ground were vulnerable. Nobody was prepared for an attack.

He arrived just in time to see a Jap plane peeling off from a strafing run. It passed over his head by no more than a hundred feet, and he saw the pilot’s face. It looked like the monkey-faced bastard was grinning.

Jake wrenched his eyes back to the runways, where so many planes had been parked nearly wingtip to wingtip in anticipation of a saboteur’s attempt to sabotage them, which General Short feared in these tense times. Jake had said it was a bad idea, and now, as he watched them burn and explode by the dozens, he knew he had been vindicated and hated the fact.