The Nugget

by P. T. Deutermann

  Almost reluctantly, he told us: first, catch fish, then tie the individual fish to slanting sheets of corrugated iron nailed onto raised platforms. They’d then leave them to decompose under the tropical sun. The decomposing fish would eventually begin to leak streams of “oil” down the valleys of the corrugated iron. They’d collect that, add salt and some secret ingredients, pour it into stone jars, and then let that ferment for a few weeks. They’d strain the result into even smaller jars and sell it.

  The process smelled so bad that the tribe that made it had been permanently exiled to a promontory up the coast and well away from all the other villages. Abriol said that a few drops of that stuff in a rice ball was the protein equivalent of a small fish; when times got tough, as they were now, it was the only “meat” many of the villagers could get. For the prisoners, it would probably be the first protein they’d had in a few years other than the occasional rodent who zigged instead of zagged. I was unable to look at a rice ball thereafter without visualizing the process.

  The plan tonight was for some of Abriol’s fighters to float an unmanned raft of some sort down the river past the POW camp on the ebb tide. Before the river’s final turn leading down to Orotai and the bay, they’d set it afire and let it go with the tidal current, hopefully on the Orotai side of the river. The burning raft would distract the guards long enough for us to cross the small creek, crawl up to the wire, and see if we could make contact. If we couldn’t catch anyone’s attention, we’d shove the bags of fruit under the wire and hope the prisoners found them before the Japs did.

  Suddenly there was a stir in the camp and a searchlight up on one of the guard towers lit up and swung out over the river. That was our signal. We crept up the creek bank until we were upstream of the latrines and then waded into the water, which was only about waist deep and about ten feet across. As the commotion rose on the river side of the camp and more searchlights lit up, we climbed the far bank and scuttled over to the perimeter wire, praying that, unlike Hagfish, we’d been right about mines. The fence was made up of horizontal lines of barbed wire, spaced 12 inches apart and stapled to bamboo posts. We could barely see the glow of the fire from our vantage point all the way at the back of the compound as our sacrificial raft floated down on the outgoing tide. Four of the prisoners’ huts were end-on to us, not more than 20 feet away. We could see white-faced figures lying on what would have been a porch but was just bare earth. Naturally they were all looking down towards the river.

  I pulled a lemon out of my sack and lofted it into the compound, hoping to hit one of the huts. Instead it rolled under a hut. Rooster fished in my sack, stood up, and pitched one right into the clump of figures outside the hut. At first nothing happened, but then several pale faces turned our way in the gloom. I waved both hands at them then signaled them to come to me. Down by the river some of the guards were shooting rifles at the burning boat. Then I saw one man crawling painfully as fast as he could, which wasn’t all that fast, towards the fence. When he got to the fence we pushed both sacks of fruit through the wire.

  Under normal circumstances he would have been a big guy. Now he was skeletal, with a face like pale parchment, sunken, dry eyes, patchy hair, and showing sores on his skin beneath the rags that had been his uniform.

  “Bloody hell,” he whispered in a weak, raspy British accent. “Round eyes!”

  “We’re American Navy pilots, stranded here on Talawan. We’re working on a plan to spring you guys out of this hellhole.”

  He stared at us for a moment, as if the idea was totally preposterous. “I hope there’re more of you out there, then,” he said. “What’s this?”

  “Fresh fruit. We got word that there’s scurvy in there.”

  He grunted, looking back over his shoulder. “Scurvy, dysentery, beriberi, even leprosy, for all we know.”

  There was more shooting from the river side, but it didn’t sound like they meant it. Still, if some sergeant figured out that the boat might be a diversion he might turn out the entire guard company.

  “How many of you are left?”

  “Forty-two lads as of this morning. We were a hundred eighty strong when we got here. Blokes are giving up, I’m afraid. There’s a rumor that more might be coming in. Staff Sergeant William Mason, here, Welsh Grenadiers.”

  I introduced myself and Rooster and then noticed the shooting had stopped. “We gotta get out of here,” I said, conscious now that the burning boat had drifted past the camp. “But we’ll be back with more. Hide that stuff, now.”

  He managed to put a grin on that grimy face. “What stuff?” he asked. “It’ll all be gone in thirty minutes. How shall we know when to meet you at the wire, Leftenant?”

  “We’ll get one of the Filipinos to tie a dead bird on the wire. You see that, we’ll come in after midnight. Keep the faith, Staff Sergeant. We mean to kill all these bastards before this is over.”

  “Save some for us,” he said, a wicked gleam in his parched eyes. “We’ll have some ideas about how to do that.”

  He backed away from the wire, still crawling and now humping the two small sacks. We did the same, went back across the creek and then to our starting point, where we found our Filipino guide waiting. I was pretty sure he was one of the older men we’d seen at the massacre in the village that night. He raised his eyebrows at us.

  “We made contact,” I said, giving him a thumbs-up. He grunted and then turned into the jungle, motioning for us to follow.

  Father Abriol was already there when we got back to Lingoro, which was a far more somber place than during our previous visits. The charred ruins of the burned hut lay accusingly in shambles as we met the padre at the center hut. The usual sleepy faces peering through doorways as strangers came into the village at night were absent.

  “We’ll sleep here tonight,” Father Abriol said, after we’d briefed him on what we’d managed at the POW camp. “Tomorrow we’ll spend the morning rebuilding that hut. It’s the least we can do. I said Mass earlier this evening for the victims. I’ve told the people holding the radio to take it to the fish-oil camp. Nobody goes there.”

  “Did you report the massacre here to Manila?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “They use reports like that to keep the resistance angry. I sent a report, and asked for rifles, ammunition, and whatever medical supplies they can spare.”

  “If they don’t come?”

  He shrugged. “Talawan people hunt with spears, bows, and poisoned arrows. We’ll start picking off Japs that way if we have to. There’s nothing here to really sabotage, so it’s going to have to be more basic than that. Killing the occasional Jap while making it look like an accident, if possible. Turn vipers loose in the garrison’s barracks. Contaminate their drinking water. Poison their rice stores. Of course we’ll have to scatter the women and children into the upland forests once this starts. Leave behind poisoned rice stores in the villages.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Rooster said.

  “Whatever it takes,” Father Abriol said, grimly. “I keep telling myself there aren’t that many of them. A Mindoro fisherman and his family came into the harbor two nights ago with news that the Japs have been driven off Guadalcanal and are retreating up the Solomons chain to Rabaul in the northern Solomons. I’m hoping that means that this garrison is on its own.”

  “Or that they might be recalled to help defend their base in Rabaul.”

  “God willing,” he said.

  I wanted to say that if the garrison was recalled to Rabaul, they’d probably execute all the remaining POWs and burn Orotai, but I held my peace. We had enough to worry about. Rooster was less reticent.

  “You know they just won’t pull out,” he said. “They’re Japs—they’ll do something horrible.”

  “First they’ll need to come out of that compound,” Father Abriol said. “And then into the human jungle behind the town’s one street.”

  “Injun country,” Rooster said, with a wolfish grin.

  Rooster and
I made three more night visits to the POW camp, almost getting caught on the third one. We got what seemed like a very meager amount of food and fruit into those walking skeletons behind the wire, but they treated each delivery like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. On our way back across the creek some large waterbird started shrieking an alarm, and the creek-side tower guard swung a searchlight in our direction. We both had to submerge and watch that shimmering patch of light traversing the surface of the water above us until it finally switched off. We climbed out of the creek and lay gasping like landed fish on the other bank. Our Filipino guide had decamped when the light flashed on, but we knew at least how to start back to the village. He emerged sheepishly out of the jungle to take us back. He was barely a teenager who’d probably witnessed Tachibana’s outrage, so we forgave him.

  It was probably close to two in the morning when we got back to the village, which had become used to our nocturnal forays. Father Abriol, Rooster, and I had done our best to rebuild the murdered woman’s hut. We’d gone out into the woods and cut down bamboo poles and collected palm fronds. I think the villagers appreciated our efforts, but once we left they tore it all down and rebuilt it properly. Then they gave us the hut to sleep in, which Rooster and I agreed was much better than pallets in the village “hall.”

  It wasn’t as if life had returned to normal in Lingoro. There were sentries posted in the woods and along the trails leading into the village. Father Abriol and the elders had laid out a plan for the villagers to scatter if another Jap patrol came across the river. There were people watching the harbor and the garrison’s compound. Each hut in the village had an emergency sack of rice and other necessities parked by the front door. They’d built corrals in the woods away from the village for the water buffalo, and they’d moved all the communal food stores to hides in the woods. The fact that Rooster and I had been risking our lives to get food to the POWs had apparently made a big impression.

  Morning came with a torrential downpour of rain. We couldn’t even see the longhouse from the doorway to our hut. Even so, an old woman, covering her head with an oversized rattan hat, brought us a metal pitcher can of coffee and some kind of rough bread along with two bananas. God love them. Every morning I felt guilty for how the US Army had treated these people back in the early part of the twentieth century. I reminded Rooster that our knowledge of history focused on the twentieth century. These people had been dealing with “occupiers” since the 1300s. His response was interesting. “Then they’ll win, Boss, because they’re still here, and most of the occupiers are dead and gone.”

  The rain stopped midmorning as if God had closed a valve. One moment a downpour. The next moment we could watch the back of the squall thrash its way into the forest. A runner from Father Abriol trotted up to our hut and gave us a small bamboo tube, in which there was a message written on a tiny scrap of paper. Rooster hated bananas so I offered his to the young Filipino, who took it eagerly. Food was still a problem here on Talawan, I gathered.

  The message was printed in tiny characters: MANILA SAYS: MINDORO FISHING BOAT DID NOT RETURN. DO WHAT YOU CAN. THINGS VERY BAD HERE. DESTROY RADIO. GO WITH GOD.

  “Wow,” Rooster said, as he read it. “So what’s the bad news?”

  I had to laugh. He and I looked at each other. A million years ago we had been part of an American carrier task force, delivering death and destruction to entire Jap carrier formations, and then, if we hadn’t been shot down, returning to our carrier for coffee and fat pills in the wardroom. Now we were crouching in a primitive hut, bearded, long-haired, smelling of creek mud, with nut-stained faces except for our eyes, which Abriol said made us look like raccoons who’d lost their masks. Instead of flying lethal, modern dive bombers off of 26,000-ton flight decks, we were trying to figure out how to evade a Jap garrison, free a bunch of half-dead POWs, exterminate all the Japs on the island, and prevent an island-wide massacre in the process. As Rooster would say, piece’a cake. Lately now he’d quit saying that.

  There was more bad news later that day. The two biggest fishing boats operating out of Orotai, and by “big” I mean that they could go 25 miles offshore and back in a single day, had been intercepted by that Jap gunboat, which had confiscated their entire catch. Normally the Jap garrison had been taking half of what every fishing boat brought in, with the gunboat patrolling offshore looking for fishermen trying to evade it and sneak a catch into one of the coastal hamlets. If they caught one doing that, they’d take the entire catch.

  This time they’d taken every boat’s entire catch, leaving the town’s meager food stores in real trouble. Before the Jap occupation, the people had had the luxury of preserving some of the fish while consuming the rest. Now they were living day to day on what got by the Japs and preserving nothing. Rooster and I knew this meant that supporting the two large round-eyes might not be so popular. Maybe it was time for us to get some bows and arrows and go monkey-hunting.

  Father Abriol came into the village right after sunset, bearing some good news for a change. The Mindoro fishing boat had gotten through. They’d delivered a case of hand grenades, two captured Japanese machine guns and some ammo, a small box of signal flares plus a single flare gun, and the news that American frogmen had been seen on Leyte Island. He hadn’t heard about the gunboat incident, which dampened his enthusiasm. As long as that damned gunboat was out there on patrol, the Japs had their boots on everybody’s necks, and we couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

  Or could we?

  “How big are those grenades?” I asked.

  Father Abriol shrugged. “They’re grenades,” he said. “A metal ring at the top, about the size of a baseball with grooves cut all around the middle, and heavier than they look.”

  “I think I know a way to sink that gunboat,” I said. “But I’ll need a fishing boat and some Filipino volunteers.”

  He looked at me in surprise.

  “You’re the one who said it was time to go on the offensive,” I pointed out.

  “But attack a Jap navy gunboat?”

  “Gotta start somewhere,” Rooster said. “Hell, we’ve sunk Jap carriers. A gunboat? Piece’a cake.”

  I liked the sound of that.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Five days later Rooster and I found ourselves back in the strait where Hagfish lay in pieces. We were on one of several 20-foot-long coastal fishing boats departing the Orotai anchorage an hour before dawn. The owner and skipper of our boat was ancient but willing, since it had been his granddaughter and her children Tachibana had slaughtered that bloody night in Lingoro. His crew of four looked to us like teenagers but were actually men in their early twenties. They were actual fishermen, too, but not the ones usually crewing this boat.

  The boat had a curved, half-height bamboo-and-rattan shelter over the back ten feet, but the rest of it was open. Amidships was a galvanized metal fish tank for whatever they managed to catch. The rest of the boat was piled with nets, poles, and several of what Rooster called trotlines. The gasoline engine was mounted right in front of that shelter where the man steering could tend to it. There was a single mast whose function I could not discern. Some small pennants decorated with what looked like religious symbols flew from it. The boat had slots for outriggers on one side to aid in stability in case bad weather ambushed them, which happened often. Fortunately there was a breeze, because the boat reeked of spoiled fish.

  Rooster and I were stowed away out of sight in the shelter behind the owner, who did the steering while smoking a truly noxious cigar. Between the fish-stink and that cigar in the hot, close confines of the “cabin,” we were both starting to get seasick, even though the sea was flat calm. The owner’s name was Emilio and he spoke no English. One of the deckhands, named Tomaldo, did speak some English, courtesy of a course that Father Abriol had been running before the Japs invaded. His mother had been killed six months ago by an injured water buffalo after Tachibana had flubbed the killing stroke out on the main street; the bellowing beast had run
over her trying to escape. Of all our volunteers, Tomaldo had been the most insistent on coming with us.

  Nothing would happen until late afternoon when the local fishing fleet began returning to port. That gunboat wouldn’t even bother to come out until midafternoon, waiting until there was a chance that there’d be fish to confiscate for the garrison. The rest of the day it was moored to Tachibana’s communications ship. Our plan was to sink the gunboat with a surprise grenade attack when the Japs boarded us to help themselves to some of our catch. Emilio had told Father Abriol that the gunboat would usually hail and then stop the fishing boat that seemed to be sitting lowest in the water on the return trip, an indication of a full load. They’d come alongside, throw over a line, and then send down two unarmed sailors with baskets.

  The gunboat was about 90 feet long and armed with a twin 25mm antiaircraft gun mount up on the bow. In a former life it had probably been a deep-sea fishing trawler that the Japs had converted to a coastal patrol boat when war broke out. The ones that patrolled the Jap mainland coasts carried a crew of thirty or so, but this one was manned with only ten men. They were used to dealing with a thoroughly cowed bunch of fishermen, and reportedly these days didn’t even bother to take the canvas cover off that AA mount.

  Our plan was simple if chancy. The gunboat normally tried to intercept the fishing boats about 10 miles offshore before they began to scatter to avoid having their fish confiscated. We were not going to evade. Once it came alongside and bent on a line, we’d wait until they put two of their crewmen down into our boat to root around in the midship fish tank. On my signal, Tomaldo would dispatch the two crewmen with a lethal-looking short spear called a sibat. Rooster and I would come out and begin lobbing grenades into the gunboat’s open pilothouse and any other openings to the boat’s interior. Our crew would then break out the three captured Jap rifles and shoot anyone who appeared on the gunboat’s deck. Rooster and I would then clamber aboard the gunboat under their cover and heave grenades down ventilation scoops, the main stack, and any other openings that might lead below the waterline. Once we knew all 10 crewmen had been killed, we’d scuttle the gunboat, taking any small arms and ammo we could find. Then instead of going back in to Orotai, we’d make for a small cove where a party of villagers would be waiting for us to offload any fish we’d caught and then hide the boat for the night.