By now, almost three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, the initial invasion scare had tapered off and things had settled down at Makapoo considerably. Obviously if the Japanese were going to follow up their air attack with an immediate invasion, they would have done so within three weeks. Also, at Makapoo almost all of the heavy, basic barbed wire work had been completed and all that remained to be done were the small jobs of touching up and adding refinements here and there; and it was this fact that had to do with the, one might say, flanking attack against Mast’s pistol when it came. Mast had been working, whenever he was not on post at the guns, with a large twelve-man detail under one of the buck sergeant squad leaders, putting up combinations of single- and double-apron wire around the three sides of the position that did not face the sea. This was one of the major wiring jobs, and on this detail also happened to be Mast’s old enemy O’Brien as well as another man, a thin-faced little corporal and assistant squad leader named Winstock, who, when he himself was not on post commanding one of the holes, was in charge of one half of the wire detail.
