“Ask him if his men can operate the POW camp machine guns,” I interjected. Magron frowned when he heard the question and then shook his head.
“I can show them,” I said. “Even two or three machine guns would be very useful if they make one of their banzai charges. A man with a bow cannot shoot fast enough to kill a twelve-man squad that does not fear death.”
Magron grunted. I realized he was tired, if not exhausted. I’d been able to snatch a couple hours of sleep after the POW camp raid. He had not. He nodded his head once, emphatically.
“As you say,” Tomaldo announced. I told him that Magron should get some food and then a few hours of sleep. He would need to be wide awake tonight.
Magron didn’t take well to that suggestion, declaring he was not tired and just because he was old, he was not weak. He then stomped off towards the cook fire for some food. I told Tomaldo to ask the women to attend to him and to get him to sleep for a little while.
I then went to check on Rooster. The women had him on a cot in one of the newly rebuilt huts. Tomaldo followed me over there. The women told him that the American had lost a lot of blood but that the bullet appeared to have gone right through him. They had given him some water and a few sips of their pain-killing witches’ brew. Tini sat on the ground at his head, wiping his brow and trying to be brave.
I noticed that Tomaldo was starting to look a little gray around the edges. When I pointed this out to one of the women he, too, was immediately taken under care. I came out from the shelter to see Magron sitting against one of the broken tree stumps, sound asleep. There was a bowl next to him, and one of the really old women was sitting next to him, keeping the bugs away with a palm-frond fan.
Good, I thought. Then finally I went to check on Father Abriol. He was still laid up in the tree cavity and asleep or, more likely, doped. His color had returned and when I put my nose down to the bandaged stump there was no smell of decomposition. Maybe, I thought. Just maybe.
All the principal fighters were now hors de combat. I went to find some water and then I started asking via hand gestures where those captured Jap machine guns were.
THIRTY-THREE
By the day’s end nothing was ready. Nothing. Magron had slept for four full hours, waking up and transitioning to an embarrassed, towering rage in the blink of an eye. He began yelling at everybody, which accomplished little more than scaring his people. Thirty minutes later one of his patrols came back to the village. Their report was chilling. Tachibana had indeed sent out patrols and this group of ten archers, alerted by their Negrito that soldiers were coming, had set up an ambush with their bows. When the Jap squad entered a small clearing the Filipinos unleashed a storm of poison-tipped arrows, taking down seven soldiers, the entire squad, without making a sound. The only problem was that the Japs had stationed a tail-end-Charlie guard to walk 50 yards behind the main squad. This guy appeared out of nowhere and opened fire on the Filipinos with a submachine gun. Three Filipinos went down dead before the Negrito put a dart in his throat. As he began to collapse, he stitched the Negrito from top to bottom, killing him instantly. Then he seized up and fell over.
The remaining Filipinos helped the wounded back to the village while one man was left behind to collect all the Jap weapons and ammo belts and hide them in the nearby forest. Magron deflated when he heard this bad news. I thought maybe his success at the POW compound had made him forget that the Japanese army had conquered China and then the whole of Southeast Asia. Jap soldiers who’d been through all that were not to be taken lightly. The other two Filipino patrols had encountered a second Jap squad. They had elected to lie down in the jungle and just let the Japs go by. They had heard the chatter of the first squad’s submachine gun in the distance. As soon as the Japs were out of sight and sound, they’d headed back to the village. Magron wasn’t thrilled with them, but they at least were all alive and present for duty, unlike some of their brothers-in-arms. The three remaining Negritos had vanished.
Magron and I needed to talk so I went to see if Tomaldo could translate for us. I discovered that he was running a fever and that his wounded hand was almost hot to the touch. The women were feeding him small sips of some other medicinal brew. God, I thought, if Tachibana had any idea how bad off we were he’d turn out his entire garrison and end all his problems right here in Lingoro. My last hope was Abriol. I went back to the tree trunk and found him awake.
“Can you translate for me?” I asked. “I need to talk to Magron.”
“I’ll try,” he said, weakly. One of the women began clucking her displeasure but Abriol shushed her. I sent one of the other women to bring Magron. He stepped through the hidden door a few minutes later.
“This has been a bad day,” I began, while Abriol translated.
Magron looked at me like I’d just said something particularly stupid. I went on.
“We cannot attack the garrison tonight until we are better prepared. We lost archers today. This will frighten the rest. There are more weapons to be recovered. I tried to teach some of the archers how to use the machine guns but they could not understand me. Tomaldo is down with a fever. The Negritos have disappeared. The Japs are out in the woods.”
“What shall we do?” he asked.
“I want to go into Orotai, with you, to see what the Japs are doing.”
That last bit surprised the priest. “Tonight?” Abriol asked. “Just the two of you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Our fighters need time to recover. I want to sneak into the town and see if we can cause some trouble for the Japs. Make them pull their patrols back into the town. Take a couple of fire archers. Frighten the garrison.”
Abriol translated and Magron’s eyes lit up. I think he then said the Tagalog equivalent of: Now we’re talking!
Abriol warned me that this was a very dangerous thing to do. The town was by now almost empty. Anyone creeping around the streets would be immediately suspect. I watched Magron, who I think understood that Abriol was trying to talk me out of this.
“Tell him we should do this tonight,” I said. “It will encourage the people we need tomorrow to know that their leaders are not afraid to fight the Japs.”
“But—”
“Please, Father. I need to do something he wants to do; otherwise everything’s going to turn to worms.”
Abriol translated and Magron got up immediately to organize things. I went to check on Rooster. They’d cleaned him up considerably and they had smeared the wound site with honey. He appeared to be sleeping rather than unconscious, but I sure wished I could get him to a real sick bay.
Magron, six archers, and I slipped out of the village just after dark and headed for the town in banca boats. Without the Negritos to sniff out Jap patrols Magron thought we’d be safer on the river. Our little flotilla smelled of pine pitch or whatever the Philippine equivalent of that was. The fire arrows were interesting. They were thicker than the ones I had seen before. One of the archers showed me that they were hollow. The entire shaft had been stuffed with that tarry substance, plus a bigger blob on the point.
The sky was fully overcast so we enjoyed almost perfect darkness out on the river. The boats made no noise whatsoever going downstream because Magron had timed our sortie to join the ebbing tide. I sat alone with a single paddler in the middle of our banca fleet. I’d pawed through the pile of captured weapons and discovered an American submachine gun, a US Army .45-caliber M3, commonly called a “grease gun” by the Marines on Guadalcanal. There were only two clips for it. It had obviously seen some rough service and may even have been captured on Guadalcanal. I’d fired one at the academy rifle range and mostly torn up dirt, but as a scare weapon, it was pretty convincing.
We landed upstream of the town on the town-side bank, just outside of the shabbier precincts of Orotai. There were no streets, per se, just crooked paths and crude, stinking drainage ditches. Magron led the way, followed by his archers, with me being tail-end Charlie this time. We stayed away from that single pave
d street along the harbor, keeping instead just behind it and using the more substantial buildings on the street as cover. I was worried about stray dogs, but we didn’t see or hear a single one.
We moved more carefully the closer we got to that blunt point of land where the river joined the harbor, because that’s where the Jap compound was. We passed behind their makeshift O-club, which was now dark. A glow of lights rose as we closed in on the compound. The Japs had put up spotlights, all pointing outwards along the top of their compound fence. Originally the fence had been barbed wire, but now it was a solid wall of bamboo stakes, maybe ten feet high. The dark silhouettes of a couple of gun towers kept watch over the perimeter fence, their gunhouses almost invisible in the dark shadows caused by the bright spotlights. To the left was the town’s fishing boat pier, now bereft of boats. We could hear a generator running inside the compound, but no other sounds.
Magron pulled his team together and began issuing instructions, none of which, of course, could I understand. In one sense, it didn’t really matter. They were going to do whatever they were going to do; I was along mostly to show respect and moral support for Magron. His somewhat hostile demeanor had softened a bit ever since I’d proposed we go into the town and raise some hell, especially after I’d shut down Father Abriol’s objections. It was disheartening to see Abriol soften from his formerly steely resolve. Pain does that, I reminded myself. He’d hurt himself badly in that fall and then had tried to tough it out. Now, minus his leg, he seemed truly defeated. The bombing of the village hadn’t helped his morale, either. It was one thing to entice a Jap patrol into an ancient man-trap, quite another to be the most likely cause of a Kawanishi social call.
Magron took my elbow and led me to a large but half-dead tree right next to where the town’s main drag ended at the fishing boat piers. He pointed to the first crotch of limbs, almost eight feet off the ground. Then he pantomimed the perimeter fence of the compound, the gates in the now solid wall, those gates opening, and many men coming out. He touched my M3, pointed me up into that crotch, and made a sweeping motion with an imaginary gun. I nodded my understanding. It was clear as a bell: get up in this tree with that thing. If the Japs come out, give them a nasty surprise.
He grinned. We were going to kill some damned Japs tonight, you American occupier, you. I grinned right back at him, suppressing the sudden desire to tell him that any Japs coming out of that compound would have their own version of the M3. But, I thought, what the hell. Rooster was down, maybe even dying. Abriol had been sufficiently shocked by what those seaplanes had done and the subsequent amputation as to be out of the game, perhaps permanently. Tomaldo, Mister Energy himself, was wounded and down with a fever that might or might not require the same treatment that Abriol had gone through, and he had to know that. The villagers were being very brave, God bless them all, but underneath all that bravado they were sick with grief at what had been done to them and terrified at the prospect of what horrors might follow. Even the fierce little Negritos probably had had enough. And, there were hostages.
Magron was right: it was time.
I managed to get up into that tree without dropping my weapon but it hadn’t been exactly a quiet effort. Fortunately the Japs didn’t appear to have any patrols out in the town, itself. I settled down to wait.
And wait. Then wait some more.
I almost began to believe I’d been directed up into my tree to ensure I wouldn’t interfere in whatever the hell Magron was plotting, but then I understood. There were noises rising in the compound, which was some hundred yards distant from my position. There were sounds of men moving in response to verbal orders, and I could just barely make out small figures climbing up those towers and then others coming down.
Changing of the guards. Was this what Magron had been waiting for?
I felt rather than heard something go flying over my tree, arcing high into the night air and trailing a yellow glow. A fire arrow! The missile curved up and then down, trailing a few sparks, and disappeared behind the fence.
Suddenly the night was filled with fiery trajectories, each one rising higher than I would have thought possible, before curving downward in a gentle arc and disappearing. This went on for almost an entire minute. I’d been so busy watching the arrows go over that I forgot to look back at the compound, which was now no longer dark at all.
Or quiet.
There was a sudden upsurge in shouted Japanese behind the wall and then the now familiar sound of police whistles. The thatched roof of one of the towers suddenly burst into flame, revealing the spectacle of three Jap soldiers crowding the top of the ladder in an effort to get away from the burning embers that were falling down on them. Even better, as they went down the ladders some stopped suddenly, shrieked, and then fell with arrows sticking out of their bodies. Behind the towers there was a larger conflagration rising. A machine-gunner in one of the other towers began firing into the town, but it was clear from the tracers that this was more a panicked response than a search for specific targets. Three fire arrows from three different archers converged on that tower, and a moment later the machine gun went silent. Then I heard deep popping noises from inside the compound, followed seconds later by thumping explosions out in the town and along the main street.
Mortars.
Tachibana had anticipated an attack and had registered mortars on the most probable positions that any attackers would take up. Soon there were fires in and along the front street to match the blazes lighting up the sky within the compound. The volley of mortars was answered by a shower of fire arrows from places nowhere near the mortar blasts, and this time, the wooden walls of the compound were the target. The arrows stuck into the walls but then sagged down, which let the entire length of the fuel-stuffed shaft lie vertically on the bamboo wall, almost guaranteeing that it would catch fire. By now the three guard towers were fully aflame, lighting up the entire area in front of the compound like giant tiki torches.
I was acutely aware that all the fires had lit up my tree pretty well, too. I shifted my position so that I could point the grease gun at the compound’s main gate. Part of me couldn’t believe the compound defenders would open that gate and come out fighting, but, then again, these were Japs. When in doubt, start screaming banzai and then charge your enemy. Which is exactly what happened. The front gates swung backwards and a small horde of Japanese soldiers came streaming out, bayonets fixed, and yelling at the top of their voices at as yet invisible enemies.
You’re on, Nugget, I thought.
I brought the grease gun to bear and began to sweep the stream of Japs charging out of the compound. This is for Rooster, Tomaldo, and the battered priest, I shouted, as I cut them down. I purposefully aimed at their knees just like the Marines had taught me. When the slide finally locked open, there were fifteen motionless bodies piled up in front of the gates. I jammed a second clip into the M3, raised it, pointed it, and then relaxed my trigger finger until two of the soldiers lying on the ground tried to sit up and point a rifle at me. Two bursts and that effort was quashed. Two more poked rifles around the main gates and started shooting blind. I let off a burst at the part of the gate they were hiding behind which suppressed that problem.
By now no one else was moving. I could smell the oily heat coming off the barrel of my grease gun. The gates to the compound remained open, framing what was now a major conflagration behind them. How hard could it be to douse a flaming arrow stuck into some wood, I wondered. Really tough if you didn’t have fire-fighting water to begin with, I realized. The Japs had probably been subsisting on rainwater ever since the townspeople had disabled the only freshwater well in town.
I waited for Magron to make the next move while continuing to scan the front walls of the compound for snipers, but Tachibana moved first. He fired another volley of mortar rounds which began landing in the plaza area in front of the compound and among the nearest buildings facing the main gates. Some of them fell close enough to my scraggly tree to chip pieces
of bark away. I crouched down in the crotch of the tree and hoped for the best. Behind me I could feel the heat of new fires as the adjacent structures went up. Tachibana was clearly trying to drive the archers out of their bow range as he concentrated the mortar fire into the area from which most of the fire arrows had come. After shooting two dozen or so rounds, he checked fire, at which point a volley of arrows came from the other side of the compound walls. These weren’t fire arrows, so I presumed they were poison-tipped war arrows. I only caught a brief glimpse of them as they arced over the walls and were briefly illuminated by the fires within. The archers seemed to be concentrating on a specific area in the compound, so one of the archers at least knew the compound layout and where the mortar battery was. The barrage seemed to work because there were no more rounds popping out of there.
Once again silence reigned except for the crackling of the fires in the compound and behind me. With several sections of the wooden walls aflame it might as well have been daytime. I could see a couple of wooden buildings in the compound starting to collapse but I didn’t see a single human figure moving in there. I wondered where Magron had taken his position. It had to be within sight of the gates. Then he suddenly appeared. Incredibly he’d stationed himself at the far right corner of the compound wall, where it cut back toward the riverbank. He’d probably been able to see inside the compound through a crack in the bamboo wall during the whole fight. I saw two Filipinos behind him, peeking round the corner of the wall.
Then we heard a familiar voice: Tachibana himself, beginning some kind of exhortation to his remaining men. Each time he finished speaking they roared their approval, but there were definitely fewer voices in his rabidly loyal garrison.
Now what, I wondered. Another charge? I had only the one partial clip left, but I could thin them out as they bunched themselves getting through that gate. Then a whole section of the wall came crashing down in a flurry of red embers, revealing the whole interior of the compound. I could see Tachibana atop a mortar ammo box in front of a couple dozen or so soldiers. The soldiers were standing in ranks with their rifles, ignoring the hot smoke and flying embers swirling around them. Three officers stood right behind Tachibana. The colonel himself wore that enormous samurai sword which bobbed at his side as he worked himself up.
The Nugget Page 28
