The first three amtracs in the long procession wallowed into the dark water. The dozens of soldiers on board rimmed the open bays, poised like Remy to go swimming. The machines, true amphibians, bobbed on the surface before the water could swallow them. A great, burbling howl coughed out of the wake boiling at their rears. The amtracs surged forward. The amazed soldiers did not take their seats.
Remy’s amtrac plowed into the bay, bracketed between two others. Every paratrooper ogled the rising water until the things proved themselves buoyant. Not until the full column had chugged several hundred yards offshore and the coast vanished in the inky night did Remy and the wary soldiers sit.
Remy accompanied a headquarters squad of the 511th’s C Company. He made no conversation, the din of the amtracs would not have allowed it. The paratroopers settled in for the 7.2-mile voyage across the bay to San Antonio. The amtracs top speed on land was 15 miles per hour, but on water they could cruise at only a third of that. The sluggish, thunderous procession would be in enemy waters for seventy-five minutes. With a .50 caliber machine gun in the bow of each and a .30 caliber beside it, the transports could marshal a lot of firepower, but a shootout with a Japanese patrol boat would be among the worst things that could happen. Surprise would be the first thing lost, thousands of lives would be second.
The soldiers checked their weapons and sat bolt upright on the benches. Remy imagined these boys in the fuselage of a drop plane, chutes packed, battle faces on. They looked fearless. The best Remy could muster was a poker face. He didn’t know what to do with his own fears. He’d listened to and spoken at a dozen briefings about the raid, and still had no idea what was coming. He was not a soldier. These bronzed boys were. Remy was a good enough gambler to know when to bet on someone else’s hand. This calmed him enough to think about Tal.
He worried that the boy was not surrounded by as warlike a force as he was, by so much steel, even afloat. He’d left Tal with the lightly armed guerrillas. Was the boy with Kraft’s small recon team right now, crouched in the ravine? Of course he was. Tal wouldn’t miss the raid any more than Remy would. He wouldn’t desert the girl, break his word, wouldn’t consider it. Remy looked into the predawn sky, the one thing he and his son could both see at the moment. Be safe, he thought, I’m coming. And again, Be safe.
Remy turned his mind to Sarah, the one the boy was most like. Because Remy was afraid, he considered that he might be killed today and he would see her. He’d tell his wife they’d made a good and brave son. A lucky boy. He would ask Sarah to ask God if they could watch him together.
Forty minutes into the journey, the first light seeped out of the eastern horizon. With no landmarks on the bay, guided only by watches and compasses, the whole column cut a hard right turn. Every soldier in Remy’s amtrac scanned for patrol boats. The fleet clamored like a column of tanks on land; maybe that’s what the Japanese in earshot thought they were. Remy hoped his own luck would hold a while longer; he didn’t want to pass it on to Tal just yet.
Miles away, bonfires dotted the coastline. The villagers knew the rumble out on the black bay was the American army. They lit the way to Los Baños. The breach of secrecy was alarming, but the paratroopers were pleased to see land. Over the many engines, the boys shouted that nothing could stop them now.
At dawn, the long column made one more course adjustment, a smaller turn to the right. An early mist obscured the peak of Makiling. The slender outline of San Antonio’s point lay dead ahead.
The amtracs slowed their pace to realign their formation into rows of nine. The fifty-four tractors would hit the beach in six waves. Remy’s took up position on the far right flank of the first echelon.
The fleet churned toward shore. The paratroopers tightened their grips on the stocks of their rifles. A few laid foreheads against the gun barrels as if praying into their weapons. To ready himself, Remy tugged down the bill of his fedora.
Ashore, a few hundred yards off the bow, a green burst of smoke billowed. The front rank of amtracs gunned straight for it.
In the northern sky, a dark sliver headed their way. Remy pounded on the knee of the soldier beside him, pointing into the dim distance. The squad pivoted to catch the V formation of nine C-47s charging across the bay.
The jump planes could not be heard above the amtracs, but every soldier on the water balled a fist at B Company swooping in, on time and on target. In the slow-going, wet amtracs, the soldiers all wished to be in the air.
The C-47s zoomed so low that the jumpmasters in every door waved to the troopers below. Five hundred feet of altitude didn’t look like much.
Remy’s amtrac vibrated. The giant tracks on either side whirled. The first echelon was about to strike the shallows. The troopers with Remy were fired up. They knocked fists on their helmets to screw them down tighter. They got to their feet. Remy yanked down on his brim one more time.
An emerald haze blew over the water to greet them. Remy’s machine thumped the sand shelf and powered out of the bay. On the beach, guerrillas raised high their rifles and long knives to welcome 1st Battalion. The amtracs belched and scattered to offload their soldiers and artillery. The second wave arrived close behind, dripping and roaring.
Two miles south, the first silk canopy opened above Los Baños. Instantly, all nine jump planes sowed parachutes like white confetti.
Remy heard no gunfire. But across the San Juan River, in the tiny drop zone beside the camp, in Boot Creek and the jungle outside the wire, and on San Antonio beach, the attack was on.
~ * ~
Chapter Thirty-nine
C
ARMEN WOKE with a start. Her room remained dark and still, just as it had been when she’d drifted off. She rubbed her face to wipe away sleep.
She stood in her window, anxious, like a guard on duty who’d dozed through his watch. Artillery fire continued to quake in the northern sky. Below, the camp had not changed. Dawn remained hours away. The Japanese carried sallow lanterns in their slow circuits around the fence. Cigarettes burned in the gun towers and a few barracks windows. The camp slept to its final dawn.
Carmen felt rested and regretted it. She’d lost the numbness of fatigue. She was keener now than before, and her helplessness deepened.
Outside the wire, the creek and jungle cawed, louder than they had before she’d fallen asleep. Were the creatures sensing the coming massacre? Could an approaching event be so horrible that animals might read it in the air like scent? Were they calling a warning? Carmen imagined adding her own voice to the beasts and birds in Boot Creek, the ravine, the forest. She’d shout from her high window, waking the internees, alerting them that today they would all be murdered. But this would only rob them of their last hours, they would die on the end of her voice, and her warnings would become a lament until the Japanese came to kill her, too.
She left the window to creep down the dark hall. At the landing, Papa snored on his mattress. The old man looked pitiful, splayed crazily on the tatami as if he’d fallen there. Even his rest appeared a struggle. Carefully, Carmen lifted her tag off the board. She left Yumi’s hanging on its peg—no need to bring trouble to the little girl on the morning of her escape. Carmen returned to her room. She slid the tag into a pocket of her fatigue pants. She would keep it on her like an American dog tag, to identify her.
The sun came very slowly this morning, as if it, too, were reluctant. Carmen gazed at the nipa roof of the Tuck boys barracks. Tal had been gone with his father for four days.
Where was he? He swore he’d return. Had she waited for him too long? Should she have let Kenji steal her away? Was her trust in Tal her death?
“If you’re coming, boy,” she said aloud, to conjure him, “now is a good time.”
The first internees shuffled out of the barracks to their latrines and showers, cooks to the kitchen. Carmen could not stop herself envisioning how easily they would die, the women and children in doomed shock, the men with little meat on them, no strength to fight. She saw it all play o
ut. The guards machine-gunned most, bayoneted the rest. A thousand bodies were dumped in the great hole near the dao, another thousand in the trench beside her building. Dirt pushed over the mass graves. The barracks blank and silent, the guards purposeless. Kenji stood powerless and innocent, Nagata staring up at her from the bloody ground.
Dawn broke before Carmen knew it. The butchery in her head stopped when the real guards in their loincloths marched into the old garden for their exercises. Nagata formed his men into lines beneath a morning haze. She feared that Nagata and not the Tuck boy was her fate.
The roll-call gong rang. On the landing, Papa would rise and see the Songu tag missing from the board. She expected him soon, to ask about it. She would send him away. If Mama came instead, Carmen would ignore her.
The guards chanted in their ugly, naked calisthenics, “Ichi, ni, san, shi!” eclipsing the banter of the jungle. Among the men, Kenji flung himself about, gangly and out of step.
A large civilian car entered the main gate to stop at the commandant’s office. Soldiers loaded boxes into the open trunk. Toshiwara stood aside, supervising.
A knock sounded on her doorframe. Papa stepped under the curtain. Carmen did not leave the window.
“Why did you take down your tag?”
Below, the internees formed up for roll call. Every day they grew more listless. The guards’ exercises were a shambles. They, too, were fading.
She faced Papa. “You asked me to protect you when the time comes.”
“Yes” he said, eager. “Yes.”
“I do it now. Turn your back. Walk away from the camp. Far away.”
“I can’t do that, Songu. She’d never go with me.”
“Leave her.”
“She’s my wife.”
“Then stay with the rest of us.”
Carmen pivoted to the window.
Behind her, Papa said, “The Korean girl is singing.”
“Is she?”
“Yes. Why? If things are so terrible.”
“She’s a bird. It’s a warning.”
“I don’t understand. What’s going on? A warning about what?”
“If you’re going to stay, old man, bring me food.”
“Are the Americans coming? Is that it? Why should I leave the camp? You said you’d speak up for us.”
Carmen measured her own hunger. Papa would report to his wife the cryptic things Carmen had said. The rotten old woman would come back with threats, without food. Carmen preferred to eat.
“Yes, that’s what’s happening. Today the Americans arrive. Keep this to yourself.”
“Today. You know this for certain?”
“Yes. Now will you find me something to eat?”
“Yes, of course. I won’t ask how you know. Keep the wooden tag. There’s no need anymore, right?”
The old makipili bustled out under the curtain. Yumi was in her room, chirping, brushing her hair, waiting for Toshiwara to fetch her and put her in the big car with his luggage and papers. The commandant would drive away and the slaughter he ordered would start. Where could a man go to outdistance such a thing?
The guards’ calisthenics fell apart. Nagata bellowed in frustration. The men would not focus. Their exertion quit. Their heads turned to the sky. Toshiwara beside his sedan bent his gaze skyward. Beyond the wire, from the deep creek and the jungle behind it, birds twittered out of the trees in a startled swarm.
All the Japanese and internees peered up. The rumble of many engines swelled over the camp. Under Carmen’s hands, her windowsill vibrated. Was this another bombing raid on the train tracks, the national highway? The internees pointed into the air behind the animal husbandry building, where Carmen could not see.
In every stretch of the barbed wire, explosions erupted. Concussions rattled Carmen’s walls and her chest. Around the camp, light and fire flashed, swallowing guard towers and bunkers in smoke, plumes of flung dirt. In reflex, Carmen stepped back from the window. Were the Americans actually bombing Los Baños? This made no sense, it was so risky. She pressed herself back to the window. Moments after the first blasts, chaos had not yet taken hold on the ground. Every soldier and internee stood rooted, flabbergasted.
Gunfire cracked. Carmen’s heart seized.
The start of the massacre! The Japanese would commit murder even under American bombs!
Internees scattered. Some fell to their faces. Most stampeded toward their barracks while gunfire snapped on all sides.
At the west gate, a watchtower blew up.
The guards in loincloths came to life. Nagata’s screams cut above the thumping din. More than a hundred mostly nude Japanese dashed out of the field, flapping and barefoot, to reach their quarters.
Cutting across the same open ground, racing them full bore, ran the Tuck boy.
~ * ~
Chapter Forty
T
AL BRACED his feet on the rocks and moss of Boot Creek. He held the grenade the way Bolick showed him, how Bolick and the two guerrillas held theirs, arm extended with elbow locked, like a catapult. His thumb held down the release lever. The pin lay somewhere at his feet in the trickling water.
Nine planes zoomed in low, east of the camp, on time. The first parachute opened, followed by dozens more.
“What do we do?” Tal asked.
Bolick sent one look down the shaded length of the creek bed. The rest of their assault team was still missing. They’d passed only one other squad while creeping to this spot, hidden below the western gate.
The big sergeant puffed his cheeks, resigned. “Throw, boys.”
Tal heaved the heavy lump over the bank of Boot Creek, to the unseen base of the gun tower there. Five guards typically manned this post. Bolick had crawled close and reported only three. The other two were likely on the exercise field.
All four grenades sailed through the leaves. Tal got on tiptoes to see the explosions. Bolick shoved him down into the slope.
The thuds went off in quick succession, shaking the earth under Tal’s chest. With a battle cry, both barefoot guerrillas scrambled up the bank. Bolick beat Tal to his feet and followed the Filipinos.
At the crest of the bank, boiling gray smoke obscured the tower. The guerrillas’ first shots put down two guards staggering in the fog. Bolick turned his gun on the tower, killing the Japanese up there.
Through the shifting smoke, Tal surveyed the camp. Parachutes continued to stream from the jump planes. Around the fence, other guard positions were under attack by small-arms fire and grenades. In front of every barracks, internees fell to their faces in their roll-call lines or scurried for cover. In the garden field, a large crowd of Japanese in loincloths stood gaping into the camp, as stunned as Tal.
From the creek bed behind him, a yell rose, “Go, goddamit, go, go!” and the thump of boots on stones.
Tal called to Bolick. “That’s Cubby!”
In the garden, the hundred bare-skinned guards broke into a mass rush for their quarters.
Bolick shouted, “Run, boy!”
Tal took off. The guerrillas trailed him; Bolick, slowed by the radio on his back, hustled behind them. The big Colt .45 joggled at Tal’s armpit. To speed his strides, he left the gun in its holster.
A cry rose from the running Japanese when they spotted Tal and realized he was racing them to their weapons. The guards tore across the open field at a diagonal to his path. Even barefoot, the nearest soldiers narrowed the gap, surging for the alley between two barracks that led to the guards’ quarters. Tal pumped his legs and arms as fast as he could. He calculated quickly: he might reach the opening between the buildings first, but a hundred frightened and angry Japanese would be right behind. He fumbled for the pistol banging at his chest but found he couldn’t dislodge it and keep up this clip. Tal gritted his teeth and ran for his life.
He couldn’t do this. He was only halfway to the weapons locker, another fifty yards. Even if he made it there first, he’d have no time or stamina left to defend it alone. Before Tal
could get the Colt into his hands, before Bolick and the guerrillas could arrive to stop them, the guards would tear him apart.
Tal closed in on the alley. To his left, the Japanese screamed at him. On the ground in front of the barracks, internees watched him gallop ahead of a crowd of naked guards. Tal hollered, “Out of the way!” Some leaped up, the rest lay flat, bewildered.
Tal pushed himself to his limit, sprinting past the first internees in the dirt. The people added their shouts to the racket. Twenty yards later, he reached the narrow way between buildings.
He drove his heels into the earth, skidding to a stop. He clawed at the holster to yank the big pistol loose.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 34
