Patchett broke open the Webley, spilled its bullets onto the ground and held it up for all to see. In a deadpan voice, he said, “Would’ve looked a lot better if this was a Jap Nambu, though.”
A queasy look came over Cockburn. He asked Jock, “What are we going to do with him, sir?”
“We leave him, Corporal. You can come back and bury him later, if you like…once you take us where we’ve got to go. I want these trucks on the road in five minutes…and get your men in proper uniform right fucking now. This isn’t some Tarzan movie.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
According to Corporal Harry Cockburn, he and his men knew this route like the backs of their hands. You couldn’t really call it a road. It was just a dirt trail, carved by many horses and a few wheeled vehicles from Temple Bay westward, into the bush. The trucks were climbing the high ground just inland from the coast, not really mountains anymore but still obstacles you’d prefer not to cross on foot, especially with the loads the men of Task Force Miles were carrying.
As Jock had surmised when he first saw the two old trucks, their progress up the hills would be very slow. They chugged along in low gear, the ruts in the trail pitching their occupants roughly about. Jock had already returned his folded map to the safe place between his steel helmet and its wooden helmet liner, where no rain or perspiration could ruin it. For the meantime, the map was useless; there were no landmarks to confirm position. As long as they were heading due west, they were at least headed in the right direction. Once the truck ride was over, Jock would get a fix from the radio section to pinpoint exactly where in the middle of nowhere they were.
Little conversation had transpired in the cab of the lead truck between Jock Miles and Harry Cockburn, who was at the wheel. The shock of the Dutchman being gunned down had left them disinclined to talk, and Cockburn was consumed by the effort necessary to keep the truck on the winding trail.
It didn’t take long to crest the hills, even at the snail’s pace they were forced to maintain. Now Cockburn had to ride the brakes, still in low gear, to keep from plummeting out of control on the downslope to the plateau that would carry them toward Weipa. Once at the bottom, the Aussie corporal breathed a sigh of relief. He had a burning question for Jock: “Tell me, sir…why was it so bloody necessary for my men to put their shirts and hats on? We usually muck about in the bush wearing as little as possible, since it’s so bloody hot.”
Jock answered with dead certainty. “Because when bullets start flying, your bearded, bare-chested troopers don’t look much different from Aborigines. My men are green and under enough stress as it is. If we get into trouble, I want it to be as simple as possible for them to figure out who the bad guys are. Otherwise, you and your men could end up accidentally dead. Just like the Dutchman.”
Cockburn winced at the mention of Van Der Hoorst. “You know, Captain,” he said, “we’re not going to get attacked by blacks.”
“That’s funny. Your high command told me the Aborigines were not to be trusted. They’ll probably side with the Japs.”
“The abos aren’t on anyone’s side, sir. They never are. They just look out for themselves.”
Jock thought about that for a moment before asking, “By the way, what happened to those blacks in the rowboat?”
“They left as soon as those Cats were unloaded,” Cockburn replied. “That’s all I paid them to do. They live a few miles south of where you came in. They took their boat and rowed straight home. These utes are borrowed, too, from some miners near Iron Range,” Cockburn added, patting the steering wheel. “I’ve got to return them as soon as we’re done with this little exercise. They’re holding our horses as collateral. I’ll have to borrow these sorry bastards all over again when it’s time to pick you up.”
“And what will you be doing while you’re waiting to pick us up again?”
“Our job, sir…watching for Japs on the northeast Cape with the rest of our outfit.”
They were making better speed now, almost 20 miles per hour across the flatter ground. Jock looked out the cab’s rear window to see how his men were faring. Sergeant Hadley’s team was nestled in the truck’s bed along with PFC Savastano from the radio team, Doc Green, and Nackeroo Billy, the man who shot Van Der Hoorst. They were all alert, scanning the surrounding terrain, weapons at the ready. Russo was standing with his machine gun resting on the cab’s roof, scanning the sky for aircraft, bobbing and ducking occasionally to avoid being swatted in the face by low-hanging branches. Every inch of space in the bed was crammed with men and their gear, including one Radio Flyer. Jock was glad to see two hand grenades hanging from each man’s web gear. Not wanting them rolling around in the Catalinas, he had delayed the grenades’ planned distribution until they were on the beach at Temple Bay. In the chaos with the Dutchman, though, he had forgotten to do it until Melvin Patchett gently reminded him.
The first sergeant saved my ass again. He even had them bury the packing the grenades came in, in no time flat.
Jock could see the second truck, lightly veiled by the dust the lead vehicle kicked up. It followed at proper tactical interval some 50 yards behind. Nackeroo Ben was at the wheel, with First Sergeant Patchett riding shotgun. Sergeant Roper’s team and the rest of the radiomen filled the bed, with Nackeroo Roddy, now wielding a Bren Gun, posted as air guard.
“I don’t like all this dust we’re kicking up,” Jock said. “Makes us too easy to spot from the air.”
Cockburn just shrugged. “It’s the dry, sir. We’d kick up dust just walking on this trail. Do you want me to drive slower?”
Jock shook his head vigorously. “Hell, no! Let’s get there as quickly as possible. We’ll take our chances.”
A far different conversation was going on in the bed of the lead truck. The shock had worn off, and the enormity of what he had just done was fraying Nackeroo Billy’s nerves. Desperately, he searched for affirmation that the Dutchman’s death at his hands was perfectly justified.
“But he had that money,” Billy said, for perhaps the tenth time. “And he’s a bloody German…”
In the most conciliatory tone he could muster, Doc Green replied, “There’s a good chance he was Dutch, son, not German…and what happened was an accident. An unfortunate accident. Things like that happen in war. Nobody’s blaming you.”
Billy desperately wanted to believe Doc’s words. They did nothing, though, to ease the tightness in his chest, the bitter taste washing into his mouth, or the rhythmic convulsions of his stomach. The look on his face gave him away; Doc knew the young man was on the verge of nausea. He managed to get Billy’s head over the tailgate just before the heaves began. The others looked on with a mixture of sympathy, distaste, and relief. They were all thinking exactly the same thing: At least he didn’t puke on me or my gear, the poor bastard.
At this pace, the ride to the drop-off point would take almost three hours. They had been on the road a little over an hour and were making their way through lush stands of eucalyptus trees, which provided excellent cover from aerial observation, even with the dust they left in their wake. This would be a great place for a piss stop.
“Don’t get your willies bitten off by a croc, mates,” Cockburn yelled as the soldiers climbed from the trucks.
That reminder—there was more to fear in the bush than the Japanese—gave Jock’s men a moment’s pause. All except Bogater Boudreau.
“Ain’t gonna be no crocs around here,” Boudreau said. “Not enough water to suit them.”
All the same, the men looked around very carefully before selecting a spot of ground to anoint. Wordlessly, they went about their business, until a shriek cut through the air—and the bup-bup-bup of a Thompson’s short burst.
The shriek had come from PFC Simms, one of Roper’s team. He had backpedaled in terror so quickly he fell flat on his butt. Feet churning, he continued to scoot backwards while still seated on the ground. At least one bullet from his Thompson had torn into the long body of the python he had disturbed
, lurking beneath a fallen tree. The wounded snake was now thrashing about in plain sight.
First Sergeant Patchett was red-faced with annoyance. “DO NOT WASTE ONE MORE ROUND ON THIS CREATURE, ANY OF YOU,” he said. “Simms, you get up now, before you piss yourself. That’s just an itty-bitty ol’ snake. He didn’t bite you, did he?”
Doc Green stepped forward for a look. “No, he’s not bitten,” he said. “Wouldn’t be poisonous, anyway. Pythons constrict you to death.” He turned to the other stunned troopers. “Remember what I told you lads about snakes?” he asked, pointing to the fallen timber. “That was a perfect spot to find one.”
Jock Miles shook his head in frustration. It’s never going to end, is it? Just one fucked up thing after another. But it was time for him to take back command.
“All right, men,” he said, “let’s put the cocks away and get back on the road.”
As they shuffled to the trucks, Bogater Boudreau broke away and returned to the writhing snake. In the blink of an eye, he cut its head off with his bayonet. “Hey, Doc,” he called out, “can we eat this son of a bitch?”
The Doc’s reply was a tentative, “Yes, you can, but—”
“Well, somebody come give me a hand, then,” Bogater said as he tried to coil the still squirming body of the decapitated snake. End to end, it must have been 12 feet long. “I’m tired of them K rations already.”
“Kiss my ass, redneck,” Russo said from the truck’s bed. “I ain’t riding with no fucking snake. Dead or otherwise.”
“I ain’t no redneck, you stupid Yankee. I’m Cajun.”
“KNOCK IT OFF,” Jock said. “Boudreau, leave the fucking snake and get in the truck.”
Reluctantly, Bogater Boudreau complied. “Yes, sir,” he said, “but I’m betting a couple of days from now some snake’s gonna look mighty tasty.”
They had only been back on the trail for about 15 minutes. At first, they all thought the airplane hadn’t seen them. She wasn’t very high—perhaps a thousand feet, Jock estimated—and kept heading north after her shadow rippled across the terrain ahead of the trucks. She vanished as quickly as she had appeared, obscured by the trees flanking the trail.
But the dust! He’s got to see the dust we’re kicking up.
Her pilot did see the dust. The Jap fighter descended and, turning in a tight circle to the left, set up for a head-on attack at treetop level. She came back into view leveling out of the turn dead ahead of them. She was rapidly growing in the windshield of the lead truck, as if planning to chop them all to pieces with her propeller.
Jock began to scream a command, but at that exact instant Russo opened up with his machine gun. The pounding noise of the gun, amplified by the thin metal roof of the cab on which it rested, was all Cockburn heard as he watched the rapid movements of Jock’s mouth, issuing what must have been very emphatic orders. He had no idea what the American captain had just commanded, but Jock’s hand reaching over and jerking the steering wheel to the right provided the answer. The truck departed the trail and bumped to a stop just as Japanese bullets plowed the dirt where they had just been. The second truck, its Bren Gun spitting bullets at the plane, left the trail in the opposite direction. It, too, escaped being hit.
As the Jap plane flashed overhead, close enough, it seemed, to touch the big red circles on the bottom of her wings, a chorus of Thompson submachine guns firing wildly upward added their noise to that of the two machine guns. As the firing died out, the sound of the plane’s snarling engine could still be heard, but the trees blocked all sight of her once again.
“KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE THOMPSONS,” Jock yelled to the men in his truck. “THAT’S NOT WHAT THEY’RE FOR. SAVE YOUR AMMO…LET THE THIRTY CAL AND THE BREN DO IT.” He glanced across the trail and saw Melvin Patchett berating the men in his truck, no doubt delivering the same message.
“GET MOVING,” Jock yelled to Cockburn.
“WHERE, SIR?”
“BACK ON THE TRAIL. WE’RE SITTING DUCKS HERE.”
“I DON’T KNOW IF THAT’S SUCH A GOOD IDEA, SIR.”
“WELL, I DO, CORPORAL. NO FUCKING TIME TO EXPLAIN. GET MOVING.”
Sixty seconds later, the duel began again. This time, they saw the Jap fighter from a long way off, coming at them from the rear. Both air guards on the trucks started firing their machine guns. Contrary to their leaders’ instructions, though, just about every other man on board the trucks began to discharge his weapon, too. Terror overrode fire discipline once again; they simply couldn’t help themselves.
She streaked over them without firing a shot in return. The sound of her engine changed. Its smooth rumble turned to the screech of rending metal for a few moments and then, with one final groan and a wisp of black smoke, fell silent.
She veered left and vanished from their sight, once again hidden by treetops. Over the noise of the truck motors, they couldn’t hear the crack as she met the trees or the crump as she bellied into the ground far ahead. They drove for several minutes more before they found her. She sat in a clearing of her own making, crumpled but intact, some 50 yards off the trail. There was no post-crash fire. Her pilot was nowhere to be found.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Cockburn said. “Let’s track him down.”
“Negative,” Jock replied. “We’re getting back on the road.”
From their faces, Jock could tell some of his men wanted to chase the pilot, too. It was time to nip that sentiment in the bud.
“Let me remind you we’re on a recon patrol, men,” Jock said. “The point is to avoid contact with the enemy so we can collect information in secret.” He noticed Melvin Patchett was already checking the cockpit for any information they might use.
Cockburn still wasn’t convinced. “But sir, he probably radioed where we are.”
“All the more reason we don’t want to be hanging around here, Corporal. Now everyone…mount up. I’m thinking we’ve got another hour on the road until our drop-off point. This is a big country. Let’s get lost in it.”
As the men climbed back into the trucks, Jock asked Patchett if he had found anything in the cockpit.
“Nah,” the first sergeant replied. “They’re pretty disciplined little bastards. They take all their garbage with them.”
“Speaking of discipline, Top…how many rounds of Thompson ammo do you figure we wasted shooting at that plane?”
“Probably not as bad as it sounded, sir. Look at the bright side…at least they fired back, instead of crawling inside their helmets, crying for their mamas. Maybe we’re learning them something after all.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They bounced along the trail for another hour. They hadn’t seen another airplane or another living soul the entire time. Now, looming ahead just as Jock had predicted was the sight they were looking for. It seemed completely out of place in this wilderness: a line of telegraph poles, running across the trail north to south, as far as the eye could see in either direction. A dirt trail wide enough for heavy trucks ran beside it.
“We reached these buggers just in time, Captain,” Harry Cockburn said. “This is as far as we can go. Our petrol supply will be down to fumes by the time we get back.” He pulled the truck under the cover of some eucalyptus trees and stopped.
Jock touched his finger to a spot on the map, where a thin black line— a road, maybe just a trail—met a thin blue line—a river, the same spot he had circled during that first mission briefing. The thin black line was the Telegraph Track, carved into the bush when they laid the telegraph wire to the northern end of Cape York in the late nineteenth century. As they looked to their right, they could see the track dipping sharply where it crossed a narrow span of the Wenlock River.
“Over by the river is the Moreton relay station, Captain. Of course, it’s been evacuated, like everything up this way.”
“Yeah, this looks like the place,” Jock said. It was barely midday; Task Force Miles could cover a lot more ground on foot before the sun set. “What’s at the nor
thern end of this telegraph line, Corporal?”
“Japs, probably, sir.”
First Sergeant Patchett dispersed the two scout teams into a defensive perimeter. When he was satisfied with their placement, he joined Jock Miles, who was bidding farewell to Harry Cockburn. “Thanks for the ride, Corporal,” Jock said. “I must admit I had my doubts about the mode of transport…”
“We’ve all got to make do with what we can find, sir,” Cockburn replied as he offered a salute and a smile.
Melvin Patchett had his own words of farewell for the Aussie. “You watch your ass going back, son. Make good use of that Bren if you need to.”
“Will do, First Sergeant. Good hunting to you!”
With a final wave from the Nackeroos, the trucks set out down the same trail from which they came, headed back to Temple Bay. As the sound of their engines faded and died, Jock’s men were able to hear only the raucous noise of a thousand birds crying out all at once—until raised voices from the perimeter, where Russo’s machine gun covered the Telegraph Track, added their own discord. Russo and Guess were at each other’s throats once again.
“You’re full of shit, Yankee,” Guess said. “We was all firing at that plane. No telling who brought it down.”
“None of you assholes stood a chance to hit it with them pop-guns,” Russo replied. “Like the captain said, ‘Let the thirty cal do it’…and I fucking did.”
Now they were standing nose to nose. It only took a second for the shoving match to start and a second more for punches to be thrown. By the time Sergeant Hadley got to them, they were wrestling in the dirt. Hadley pulled them apart as Jock and Patchett arrived.
“Are you trying to get us all fucking killed?” Patchett said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Do either of you two idiots understand the term noise discipline?”
Russo directed his appeal straight to the captain. “But sir, ain’t it more likely that I shot that Jap down?”
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 16
