I don’t know how long we just sat there. A part of my brain was telling me we couldn’t just stay there, exposed as we were on the sand. Not with that Jap gunboat out there. But that meant moving, and moving was out of the question for a while. Until we heard the sound of airplane engines. I opened my eyes to find full daylight was upon us. I sat up, rolled over, got up on my hands and knees, yelled in pain and fell right back over. Rooster managed to get to his feet, as did the young seaman, who looked as if he was about to sprint into the jungle until Rooster snapped at him. They dragged me and then Teller into the undergrowth at the top of the beach. I scanned the seaward horizon, looking for that gunboat, but she’d gone. We could still hear the drone of a multi-engine plane farther out in the strait, but there was some haze now and I couldn’t see it. It sounded like it was running a search pattern of some kind. We needed to get farther into all that undergrowth.
The youngster looked like he was still ready to flee until I told him to help me with the lieutenant. All three of us ended up pulling him, still on his back, ten feet into the cover of the jungle, while he gritted his teeth and tried not to scream. The engine noise grew louder. I hoped they wouldn’t be able to see where we had disturbed all that pristine sand but I thought they were going too fast to see that level of detail. Plus that black sand wouldn’t show that it had been disturbed like white sand would. I hoped.
A minute later one of those damned Kawanishi flying boats roared by, not 50 feet over the water, positively bristling with cannons and guns, but, happily, he was a couple hundred yards offshore. We waited to see if the thing would turn around but it kept on going down the strait. Teller groaned.
I crawled over to him and gently slid his khaki trouser legs up his shins. His lower legs were red and swollen, but I couldn’t see any obvious fractures. I gently touched his shinbone and he nearly jumped out of his skin. There were angry purple stripes running from his knees all the way down to his insteps on both legs.
“I don’t think they’re broken,” I said. “Bruised all to hell, but not broken.”
“So you decline to operate, then, Doctor?” he asked.
I looked up at his face. He’d attempted a joke. Good sign.
I looked over at Rooster, who was nodding. I sat back on my haunches and tried to think of what we had to do next. Water. Food, if possible. Get deeper into the jungle before the Japs sent a squad out to see if any survivors had made it to the beach. One of us would have to go back down to the beach and erase all signs of our landing. My head hurt. Hell, everything hurt. I looked at the three other faces and realized that I was now in charge.
Good deal, I thought. My first command.
SIXTEEN
All aviators go through survival training, either at Pensacola or in the snake-infested countryside down in the Florida Everglades. I sat there, trying to organize my thoughts until the light changed. I heard a wall of rain approaching us through the jungle, making quite a ruckus. The sound reminded me I was dying for a drink of water. God was sending us some.
I got up and began snatching great big green leaves off various plants, twisting them into crude funnels, and handing a funnel to each man. Point the wide end up into the falling rain and drink from the other end. The shower swept past in five minutes, by which time we were no longer thirsty. Now if I could only find some young bamboo and a really sharp machete, we’d be able to store water. Great idea, of course, but it only made our situation more poignant because we had nothing—no machetes, matches, survival food, first-aid kits, weapons, or even a compass. If you managed to survive a crash on land and your plane didn’t burn you’d have all of those things. On the other hand, having experienced what happens to a sub when it hits a sea mine, I could understand why they didn’t bother. Lieutenant Teller had told us those life jackets we found were only used when deckhands had to go out on the main deck to work in heavy seas. No wonder they reeked of mold.
“Everybody okay with my being the man in charge?” I asked.
“By all means,” Teller said immediately, wincing as he tried to move his right leg. He’d been trying to do that for some time now and hadn’t gotten very far, so maybe my medical diagnosis had been off the mark. If so, and if the Japs found him, they’d just bayonet him where he lay. I sent Rooster and the youngster, who turned out to be an engineman-striker named Cory Macklin in one of the sub’s main engine rooms, down to the beach with instructions to sweep it clean. That Kawanishi flying boat hadn’t spotted us, but we knew that they’d found the inevitable oil slick and debris field where Hagfish had met her ghastly end. It would only be a matter of time before they’d send an army patrol out to see if anyone had made it ashore; the Japs wouldn’t miss an opportunity to murder some helpless survivors.
I laid out my plan when the beach sweepers got back to our little hidey-hole. “We need to move away from the beach,” I began. “Hopefully find some place that’ll give us both shelter and fresh water.”
“And then?” Teller asked.
“Hunt for food.”
“How?”
For some reason his reply pissed me off. “Beats me, Mister Teller,” I said. “So first things first—we need to figure out a way to move you.”
We spent the next twenty minutes trying to solve that problem because Teller’s swelling legs still wouldn’t support him. I pushed into the jungle for a good three feet before giving up, having encountered a green tangle of liana vines, large, hostile-looking plants, and the sounds of something substantial slithering away. There was no way we could get through all that without machetes. I still had my Hagfish penknife in my pocket, but that wouldn’t impress this jungle very much. Then Rooster had an idea: send one man down the beach, and a second man in the opposite direction. Look for a creek or a river coming down to the sea. Then we could pull Teller into the surf, such as it was, and drag him in the water to the creek and then upstream. Let the water support him and then all we had to do was pull. Rooster and Macklin headed off in opposite directions with instructions to keep just inside the jungle line if possible.
That left Teller and me to wait for some results.
“Look,” he said. “Way I feel, I’d be just as happy to crawl out into the sea and take a deep breath. Then you guys would have a better chance.”
I sighed. “Our chances of getting out of this are pretty small,” I said. “Having to deal with you just makes it interesting. You think we hit a mine?”
He nodded. “We were in just under three hundred feet of water, so we should have been safe. I guess nobody told the Japs.” He coughed then and spat out some bloody saliva. “My innards feel like they’re all detached from their moorings,” he said. “The captain and I both were hammered at least five feet into the air. Neither one of us had a chance to even bend our legs. I think he broke his neck when he came back down. I didn’t swim off—I was washed off. Don’t know why the hell I didn’t just drown.”
“And all the folks down below?”
He shrugged and then winced. “That blast broke the boat literally in half. She would have flooded end to end in about thirty seconds. All the interior hatches were open, although that wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Even if someone survived the explosion, he would have been pinned to the overhead by the flooding.”
“Does anyone know we were headed through that strait to the other side of the island?”
“Nope,” he said. “Skipper never sent out a message on his intentions. Still scared of their listening nets. They’ll wait two weeks back in Pearl and then declare Hagfish missing and presumed lost. Welcome to the submarine service.”
“I guess we aviators are spoiled,” I said. “We go out in a flock. Someone gets shot down, someone else will see it. Then they send PBYs out to look for the pilot. Sometimes, when you see the guy going down in flames and no chute, you know he didn’t make it. They’d still send out a PBY.”
“That must be comforting,” he said. “When one of ours disappears in the Pacific, there’s no p
oint in searching. Most of this ocean is miles deep.” He eyed the skies around us. “Pray for rain, there, Boss. My throat is really dry.” Then he went to sleep.
Rooster was the first one back. He’d found nothing. Macklin came in an hour later and reported that he’d found a smallish creek coming down from higher ground beyond the jungle. I turned to tell Lieutenant Teller, but then discovered he’d gone to find his shipmates, entombed in the straits about two miles away.
Shit, I thought. On the other hand, his dying meant we could move a lot faster, and going up that creek seemed a better bet than taking on this jungle.
Fireman Macklin asked what we were going to do about Lieutenant Teller.
“There’s nothing we can do, Macklin,” I said. “We have no way to bury him.”
“Jesus, we can’t just…”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s not Lieutenant Teller anymore, Macklin. That’s a corpse. Lieutenant Teller is back down on what’s left of Hagfish, commiserating with the rest of them. God will take care of them, and Nature will take care of—that. Now we gotta go.”
Four hours later we found exactly what we’d been looking for. The big surprise was that the jungle wasn’t very much of a jungle once we crept over the bar and sloshed our way up the creek bed. We’d walked in the surf line the whole way to the creek, which slowed us up a lot but left no tracks. The stream widened out once we moved away from the shoreline. We finally realized we were going up in elevation as the jungle thinned out. After the first hour, we came out onto semi open ground. There were trees and some scrubby vegetation but they grew sparse as we continued to climb into low hills above the coast. I felt it was safe enough now to continue on dry land but, even though we’d left the jungle behind, there were still vines snaking through the grass everywhere. We all tripped over the damned things on our way up. I fell once hard enough to make my eyes water.
The skies were clear and it was hot. We were all sweating pretty hard which wasn’t a good thing without fresh water. We’d tried the creek water, but it had been brackish. Hats would have been nice, too; that sun was medium ferocious. We finally heard and then came to a thin waterfall which was pouring out of a narrow gorge, maybe 50 feet above us. There was a shallow pool at the bottom of it. We all just climbed in and luxuriated in the cool water after first slaking our thirst. The rocks encasing the falls were black and porous, probably ancient lava. Looking back down the slope we could see the broad band of the coastal jungle and even a glittering ribbon of blue water where the straits were. Along with what looked like a gunboat.
“I guess they know,” Rooster said. “Shit!”
“Yeah, I suspect they do,” I replied. “Hopefully they’ll find Teller’s body and decide no one else made it out.”
I was basing my wishful thinking on the fact that we’d gone up the beach but stayed in the shallow surf the whole way. Our situation was better, but only minimally so. We had water but no food. Even if we caught fish or small game, we had no way to cook it. None of us knew enough about the flora of Talawan to be able to say that such and such plant was safe to eat. We were certainly hungry, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to eat raw fish or game. Then Macklin surprised us.
He’d taken off his watch, which had stopped working after being in the water. He pried off the lens cover and then began to gather tiny bits of dry grass and leaves into a small pile. Using the lens cover and that intense southwest Pacific sun, he soon got a fire started, which Rooster and I fed with dry sticks collected from around the waterfall pool. For some reason, that little fire was the most comforting thing I’d seen since the disaster in the strait. I speculated that there must be fish in that waterfall pool, but Rooster just shook his head.
“No way to git those suckers,” he pointed out. “Gotta do it another way.”
He took Macklin with him and went back downstream about a hundred yards. They collected an armful of the thinnest of those maddening vines and tied up a crude gill net, which they placed across the stream. Then Macklin went back up to the point where the pool funneled down into the stream and began throwing rocks into the water. Rooster waited at the homespun net and collected a half-dozen fish as they fled from the disturbance upstream. None of them was a trophy, but all of them were pretty good eating that evening, cooked on hot rocks next to the pool.
Two out of three ain’t bad, I thought as darkness descended. The next thing we needed was some kind of shelter. I’d been hoping for a cave near the falls like I’d seen in all the Hollywood castaway movies, but there wasn’t one. Just worn volcanic rock which looked like it had been through smallpox. There was warm black sand around the pool, so each of us burrowed down into that for the night. Strangely there weren’t too many insects, or at least nothing like down in the coastal jungle. I wondered how high we’d climbed.
My body still ached and I was saddened by the loss of Lieutenant Teller and all the rest of the Hagfish crew. Teller had tried to keep a brave face, but when he said all his organs felt like they’d been torn off their moorings, he must have known he was dying. Rooster seemed to be in better spirits and was probably relieved to be out of that claustrophobic steel tube masquerading as a warship. Macklin was still pretty jumpy, but he was young and strong, so the three of us had a pretty good chance of surviving. It would depend on how many Japs there were on this island and how hard they looked for us.
But survive to what end? I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on this island, and yet, having seen the charts, I couldn’t imagine how in the world anyone would find us and bring us back into the fold. We were a very long way from carrier task groups, PBYs, and with Hagfish’s loss, no American submarines would be sporting about in these waters anytime soon. I drifted off to sleep with the comforting smell of woodsmoke, determined to rethink our problem in the morning. Maybe build a big raft and sail it off to the east. Or south to Australia. Get those saws, hammers, and nails going, and big canvas sails to catch the southwest Pacific trade winds. Right.
I think it was the woodsmoke that betrayed us, because when I woke up the next morning we were surrounded by about a dozen figures with decorated Asiatic faces. They wore what looked like a combination of tribal clothing over tan or black shorts. Every one of them had a rifle of some kind. They were squatting on their haunches and looking at us as if we were some kind of interesting new food prey. Rooster heard me exclaim, sat up, and stared at them.
“Aw, shit,” he growled. “Don’t tell me—cannibals?”
SEVENTEEN
The sound of a man laughing softly came from behind me. I turned to find a Filipino man leaning against the black rock wall which flanked the falls. He was taller than the others and had a look of authority about him. He was wearing khaki trousers and a white shirt, leather boots, and a sweat-stained pith helmet. A large pistol supported by one of those Sam Browne duty belts decorated his right hip. He looked to be in his late thirties, but it was hard to really tell.
He casually launched himself off the lava rock wall and came down to where the three of us, still in our shallow sand graves, were staring in amazement. I halfway expected him to say: Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
“Welcome to Talawan,” he said. “And, no, these are not cannibals. They are native peoples of this island and their ancestors include people from all over this part of the world, including China. More importantly we are members of the Philippine resistance. I assume you are Americans? From whatever ship that was that exploded out in the straits?”
I was almost too surprised to answer. The contrast between his clearly Asiatic heritage and the quality of his English was remarkable. Looking at his face I wondered if he was only part Filipino. “You got it,” I replied. “And who might you be?”
“I am Domingo Abriol, formerly of Manila. But enough talk: right now we need to get you three out of here before a Jap beach patrol gets a whiff of that smoke and comes up to have a look.”
The three of us climbed stiffly out of our sandy bunks. Two of the n
ative militiamen doused our smoldering fire while others tore off branches and began sweeping away all evidence of our overnight stay. I took off my shoes and socks and walked into the pool to rid myself of all that sand. Rooster and Macklin followed me in. In five minutes we were off, walking single file with Domingo Abriol in the lead. We climbed up and around the outcropping that had created the falls, while three of his men spread out behind us to make sure we’d left no obvious sign. Above the falls was a fairly level plateau about a half mile wide. From that we filed down a narrow trail leading into a shallow, grassy canyon. The trees were getting sparser up here and there were house-sized boulders scattered up and down the ravine. Above us was another black rock cliff which looked to be at least a thousand feet high. In the distance off to our right the unmistakable cone shape of a volcano pushed a thin grayish plume straight up into the hazy tropical air.
“I didn’t know there was a Philippine resistance,” I said to Abriol’s back. I was puffing now, out of shape from those days of sitting around in the sub, plus some of my leg muscles still hurt from the mine explosion. Rooster was beginning to really drag, while Macklin kept looking furtively at the Filipinos and their rifles. The ground was tricky, with lots of rocks scattered everywhere.
“Much bigger operation up north on Luzon, the main island,” he said over his shoulder. “Talawan is not exactly an important island, so we are very small potatoes compared to the Luzon resistance. The big islands have regular army organization—colonels, battalions, companies. Down here on Talawan it’s just me and my friends here.”
One of the villagers walking ahead of us gave a sudden shout, startling Macklin, who’d been walking behind him. Macklin stepped sideways and then tripped over a rock and went facedown onto the ground, where a thick, light brown snake with a hood behind its head struck him right in the face—twice, before the villager who’d yelled stepped forward and removed its head with a wicked-looking machete. Everyone in our group froze for a moment before leaping to Macklin’s aid. We rolled him over. I gasped when I saw his face. It was as if someone had thrown acid into his eyes, turning them a grayish, egg-white color. There were two clear bite marks, two holes on his right cheek, the other two on the right side of his neck just under his jaw, clearly red puncture wounds. The ones on his neck were bleeding. Macklin took a deep, straining breath, then a second one, harder than the first, tried for a third, and then his eyes lost focus and he went mortally still. I was speechless.
The Nugget Page 15
