He nodded. “Using that radio kind of gave it away,” he said. “As I said, we use it sparingly, and only at designated times. Then we move it quickly. My limited skills with Morse code keep me on the air longer than I’d like.”
“I could get Rooster here to send the message—he’s an aviation radioman as well as a gunner. He’s like lightning on the Morse key. When’s the next window?”
“Tonight. By the way, he also knew that you two were survivors from what happened out in the strait.”
“But not about what happened to that Jap patrol today?”
“Not yet,” he said. “He will, in time, of course. He has eyes and ears in Orotai, as I have up-country. That incident will get out quickly. What happens after that depends on whether or not the Japs think it was an unfortunate accident or that we were involved.”
My head was spinning: What the hell had we got ourselves into on this tiny remote island? Mohammedans fighting with Christians and also with each other. Both of them, Shia and Sunni, were fighting the Japs. And of course there was always “Dugout Doug” MacArthur safe in Australia vowing “I will return,” which undoubtedly angered the Mohammedans and all the rest of the Filipinos no end.
TWENTY
Two hours later we were met somewhere out in the forest by two women, who apparently had been told to bring us into the village where the radio was hidden. There was still some moonlight and also a well-defined path, but our route to the rendezvous with the women had been anything but straightforward. The village was dark when we got there, and except for some very thin dogs there didn’t seem to be anyone up and about. The women took us to a longhouse, a rectangular-shaped shed with no walls and some bamboo tables and benches inside. One of them lit a single, small candle and gestured for us to sit at one of the tables. She then bowed and retreated into the darkness. I wanted to ask what was next but I realized that all of this was pretty much prearranged.
After a while four men carrying what looked like a stretcher came towards the longhouse from the opposite direction we’d come from. The radio came in two parts: the radio itself and the generator, which was powered by a set of hand cranks like bicycle pedals on either side. Father Abriol met the men and instructed them where and how to set up the device. He unreeled a long wire from the back of the radio and gave the end of it to one of them, who walked out of the longhouse and into the forest with it. I was surprised at how long it was, but when it finally began to tension up, Father Abriol gave two sharp tugs on it.
“He’ll take that end and climb a tree to get it off the ground,” he explained. “I’ve taught them how to run the generator and maintain the required voltage. Now we have to write the message and then code it.”
Code it, I thought. Well, of course. Father Abriol asked me what I wanted to tell Manila. I thought for a minute. Who were we talking to and who were they talking to? We needed to tell the Navy high command in Nouméa that we were there on Talawan and that Hagfish had hit a mine.
“Try this,” I said. “‘Inform American high command two Navy aviators rescued by USS Hagfish are on Talawan. Hagfish sunk by a mine. Aviators are only survivors.’ That short enough?”
Father Abriol nodded. “The code is pretty basic,” he said, producing a pocket notebook and a stubby pencil. “It’s based on the numerical day of the month. I write the message on double-spaced lines. If today is an odd-numbered day of the month, say, the thirteenth, I offset the message letters by seven to the right. So ‘a’ becomes ‘h.’ If it’s an even day, say the eighth, I offset the message letters to the left by six. So ‘a’ becomes ‘t.’ I start the message with the number of the day I’m using in the clear so they can break it. Then I send the rest of the message as a stream of letters.”
Rooster was fascinated by this so Father Abriol had him help with the encoding process while I held the candle. They made the calculations and wrote the substituted letter above each letter in the message. I then “broke” the message to see if it came out right, which it did. At the appointed time one of Abriol’s men sat down next to the generator and began rolling the pedals while watching a needle on the face of the transmitter to keep it slightly above the required eighteen volts. Rooster said the radio was pretty basic—it could transmit on one frequency only. He sat down with the key pad and began tapping out the letters of the code. It took only a couple of minutes, and then Father Abriol held an earpiece to his right ear and waited for Manila to acknowledge. Then he nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Now we pack it all up.” He rattled off some Tagalog and his troops retrieved the antenna from its treetop, packed the whole kit up on the stretcher, and walked off into the woods with it. Father Abriol tore the page out of his notebook and held it over the candle. Then we went back into the woods in a different direction from which we’d come, with a guide in front.
“Where we going now?” I asked.
“Orotai,” he said. “It’s only five, six miles away from this village, which is called Lingoro. I’ve had word there are Jap ships in the anchorage.”
It was not quite breaking dawn when we finally stepped into what looked and smelled like a restaurant. We’d come down a maze of back alleys containing some interesting wildlife, including a huge snake that had a rat halfway ingested. We walked by lots of trash, stacks of bamboo logs, bundles of firewood, bags of charcoal, the occasional water buffalo, and chickens penned up in wire crates. From the last alley we ducked through a gate into a fenced dirt yard and, dodging more chickens and ducks, into the kitchen area. There were four women in the kitchen, all busy preparing things I couldn’t identify. We walked through the waiters’ passageway, past the dark dining area, and then up some stairs to the second floor, which turned out to be one big room. The windows were shuttered with bamboo curtains and there were beds along one wall, each enveloped by mosquito netting, as well as a large table in the middle.
We were met upstairs by two Filipino men wearing dark cotton trousers and short-sleeved white shirts. They greeted Father Abriol warmly, shook hands with us, and then gestured towards the table, where we all sat down. One of the women from the kitchen brought up some coffee and bread. I needed the coffee—we hadn’t really slept since the night before the snake cave. I marveled at Father Abriol: he didn’t seem to have been fazed in the least by being up all night and walking several miles to boot. He introduced me to the two men.
“This is Vergilio Santos; and this is Benny Himalan. They are both policemen in the town. Vergilio is the de facto chief of police.”
I shook hands with both men. Vergilio could speak limited English, courtesy, apparently, of Father Abriol. “Welcome to Orotai,” he said. “Bad place now.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for your protection.”
He beamed. “Japanese bad people,” he said. “Hurt Orotai people.”
“They hurt everybody,” I said. “All over the Pacific.”
Father Abriol had to translate that one. Vergilio nodded solemnly. Then Abriol took over in Tagalog and I sipped some coffee. Rooster just watched while discreetly checking out how we’d escape from this room if we had to. And if we had to, what would be the point of that, I wondered.
Father Abriol and Vergilio talked at length. Benny Himalan just listened, nodding every time Vergilio made a point. Father Abriol made one last statement in Tagalog and then turned to us as the cops took their leave.
“The incident at the cave is out on the streets,” he said. “The Japs rounded up a group of Filipinos and made them go out to carry back the bodies. So far there’s no talk of reprisals—the dogs made a mistake and the soldiers suffered. Second, there are two Jap ships in the anchorage. Warships, from what my people are telling me. That means there’ll be Jap officers in the town tonight. They come ashore bringing cases of sake, get drunk, and then at midnight the ships’ boats come in and haul them all back to their ships.”
“Where do they do all this carousing?” I asked, and then, almost immediately, I knew the answer.
“Right here, Lieutenant,” Father Abriol said. “Vergilio and I both thought that the best place to hide you, for tonight at least, was here, the last place the Kempeitai would be searching if they somehow got word you’d been smuggled into town.”
“What’s a Kempeitai?” Rooster asked.
“The Japanese version of the German Gestapo. Bad news, all around. Even the Jap army officers are afraid of them. If a Kempeitai agent questions the loyalty of an officer, that officer might as well kill himself. There’s four of ’em here in Orotai.”
“Lovely,” I muttered.
“The owner of this place will be up shortly. It was originally the only bar in the town. The Japs took it over and told him they would be his only clientele. The Jap officers come here every night. When warships come in, their officers come here as well.”
“Their version of an O-club,” I said.
“Something like that. Then they made him build a Jap bathhouse of sorts out back. There are showers and one of the cooks is a good barber. We’ll get you some plain black trousers and white shirts—those uniforms have to go.”
“Officers in civvies behind enemy lines are automatically considered spies and shot,” I pointed out.
“If the Kempeitai catch either or both of you you’ll be praying to be shot. So, right now I need to get out and down to the church tower to see what’s here. Then I’ll have to send another radio report. And, finally, I need to say Mass.”
“Doesn’t that bring a crowd?” I asked. “Don’t the Japs notice?”
He smiled. “There’s a small river that empties out into the bay here,” he said. “I go upriver a few miles and set up an altar on the shore after dark. My ‘parishioners’ come in banca boats; they hear the Mass from out on the water. Then I distribute the Holy Eucharist to them. I give them extra consecrated communion wafers to take back to their families in the town and the villages.”
“I gotta ask,” Rooster said. “Where do you get communion wafers in the Philippines?”
“Oh, right here,” Father Abriol said blithely. “They bake them downstairs.”
I thought Father Abriol was taking the old adage about hiding things in plain sight a mite far. On the other hand, if this was the official watering hole for the occupying army officers, those Kempeitai bastards probably wouldn’t be tossing the place. Unless, of course, somebody informed. Like a certain emir.
Father Abriol put on a loose flowing white shirt to hide the Sam Brown gun belt and then donned a small Moro-like headdress. “After you get cleaned up they’ll show you where you’re going to hide for the night,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll go take a close look at this POW camp. I’ve been hearing some terrible things about it. Oh, by the way, we need to do something about those pasty white faces of yours.”
I had no answer for that. Aviators normally have sunburned faces from all the sunlight burning through our canopies at altitude, but we’d been cooped up on that submarine for long enough to begin looking like the submariners, who had had complexions like the underside of an oyster.
Four hours later we’d been transformed. First we’d been taken to the bathhouse with our heads covered in a towel by three giggling Filipino women. The walls of the bathhouse were sheets of corrugated steel sunk vertically into the ground and supported by bamboo frames. The roof was made of the same stuff. We were shown the primitive showers and given bars of sandpaper soap, or at least that’s what it felt like. After we’d showered and de-grimed, the girls led us in all our naked and red-skinned glory to the warm bath pool. The “baths” were basically square holes in the ground lined with lava rocks and then filled with water.
The girls removed melon-sized lava rocks from a charcoal burner with a stable fork and dropped them into the water, with lots more giggling, especially in Rooster’s direction. Apparently they’d never seen a man with red hair before. Then the hot bath, where we were given safety razors with which to shave. Then the cool bath. As I luxuriated in the waters I had to wonder: in a few hours there would be Japanese officers in here. What would they think if they knew their restorative baths had been contaminated by US Navy fliers? I felt like pissing in the water, but I knew that would upset our Filipino hosts, upon whom our lives depended utterly.
That raised an interesting question: What if the report of our being here had not been relayed to American military authorities, whether in Nouméa or Australia? Or, if it had, what if they’d decided that retrieving the two of us wasn’t worth hazarding another submarine? It was a reasonable question, given what had happened to Hagfish. That hadn’t been our fault, of course, but still: Talawan had proved itself to be a dangerous place for US submarines. Rooster and I kicked this around while soaking in the wonderful warm water. It was not an optimistic discussion.
Before we got out we had to retrieve the lava rocks, which went back onto the charcoal grate. The girls gave us some short-skirted bathrobes and took us back to the second floor of the restaurant. By then some amazing smells were drifting out of the kitchens. If this place had been closed off to everyone except the garrison, then the Japs themselves must be supplying the food. It was early evening and the Japanese officers would soon be arriving if the scurrying and chattering staff were any indication. In a normal restaurant, the staff would have been excited at the prospect of a full house, but from what I could see, these people were actually afraid. Then the face-maker showed up.
An elderly lady came up to the second floor, bearing a tray. We thought it might be some of the food being prepared downstairs but then we saw the small vials on the tray, along with a collection of brushes. She bade the both of us to lie down on the mats, put almond-shaped pieces of damp cloth over our eyes, and then proceeded to paint our shaven faces with an amazingly soothing solution of I know not what. When she was finished she sat back and nodded approvingly. There were no mirrors in the room, so I had no idea of what I looked like now, but apparently my pasty white skin was no longer a problem. I wondered how much it would help, though: our beards would be evident in just a few days, especially Rooster’s. His face didn’t look all that much different, but when he saw mine he mimed the word: wow.
An older man came upstairs after our makeup artist had left. He had some pidgin English and showed us where we’d be hidden during the night. The walls of the second floor appeared to be made of split bamboo logs. He showed us how to open a section of one wall, which revealed a long hidden room, more like a long closet than a room. There was a two-tiered line of bunks mounted along the corrugated-iron external walls. The whole thing was 30 feet long and maybe 4 wide. If there was any ventilation I couldn’t see it, and a rush of hot, humid air reeking of stale cigarette smoke hit our faces when he opened it up. He left the door open and then told us they’d bring us food as soon as Father Abriol returned.
“Hapon sundalo here chop-chop,” he told us. “Gonna be much noise. Here is water. Now: you go inside. Be quiet.”
He slid the wall section back into place and then it sounded like he was hanging some sort of fabric on the wall outside. We were startled by a sudden roar of rain on the metal roof, but it had the effect of cooling all that tin and making the air inside the hidey-hole more bearable. It stopped almost as soon as it had begun. Rooster found a crack between two floorboards through which we could see down into the big, open dining room downstairs. We spread some mats on the floor and took turns watching the festivities getting underway below us. This was as close as either of us had been to actual Japs.
Neither of us was up to speed on Jap uniforms, but we assumed that the guys wearing khaki shorts and carrying swords were army and the ones in gray uniforms and without swords were from the warships. They filed in over a noisy half hour while three tiny Filipino women rushed about bringing small containers of some kind of booze to the short-legged tables. Sake? The officers were sitting cross-legged on thin pillows down on the floor, lighting up smokes, guzzling down their drinks, while calling lustfully to friends at the other tables and offering a
toast a minute in every direction. Then there was a sudden pause in the ruckus as a very large Japanese officer sauntered into the room and took a seat at the center table, where the older officers were sitting.
“Man, that’s a big sucker,” Rooster muttered. He wasn’t kidding. I almost wondered if he was one of those sumo wrestlers we’d seen in movies about Japan, except he didn’t seem to be sporting those enormous fat rolls. His khaki uniform fit him like a tent, and his hair was longer than any of the other army officers’ and tied at the back in a greasy bun. He carried an extra-long samurai sword, and it looked like he had another, shorter version stashed along his waist. The rest of the officers were obviously deferring to this guy, whose hoarse voice was louder than all the rest and sounded like someone who could double as a foghorn if he wanted to. This had to be the garrison commandant, Tachibana. The serving girls brought him three vases of liquor, which he downed directly, not bothering to pour them into the miniature cups the others were using.
The atmosphere down below was getting pretty thick with cigarette smoke but then we smelled food. Some of the Filipinos we’d seen earlier down in the kitchen appeared and began putting bowls on the tables along with more of those little vases. There was lots of bowing and scraping on the part of the Filipinos as they backed out of the room.
We got tired of watching the Japs stuff their faces and suck down whatever they were drinking until it was apparently time for speechmaking. The two older naval officers each stood up, made a short speech, bowed and sat down. That was followed by an approving chorus of bowing Japanese from the assembled multitude. Finally Tachibana heaved himself to his feet, his sword upsetting some of the tableware. He launched into what sounded like an angry tirade but the crowd was loving it or at least pretending to and responding with banzai’s and hai’s. Just like Hitler’s crowds, I thought, and they’re both in the same bloody business.
The Nugget Page 18
