“For crying out loud,” Jock said, “who can say who knocked that plane down? Could have been any of you…or it could have been all of you. Why don’t we look at it that way? We all worked together…and we didn’t have to bury anyone.”
“Maybe the poor bastard just picked a bad time to have engine trouble,” Patchett said. “I didn’t notice any bullet holes on that wreck. Did you? With the amount of lead y’all flung at that thing, it shoulda looked like Swiss cheese.”
They all had to admit the first sergeant was right. They hadn’t noticed any bullet holes.
“Okay,” Jock said, “let’s forget about handing out medals for the time being and focus on doing our jobs before we all get our asses killed. Top, assemble the team leaders right here. Let’s have us a little chat before we start our walkabout.”
“Walkabout? As I live and breathe, sir, I do believe you’ve gone troppo on us,” Patchett said.
Jock would have felt better if the first sergeant had laughed when he said it. He would have felt better, too, if that murderous look on J.T. Guess’s face had softened to something more benevolent.
They walked for hours, heading west, making good time across the flat terrain. Sometimes they were beneath a canopy of eucalyptus trees, other times they crossed open ranges of sparse grass or low scrub. Flying insects were everywhere, prompting some of the men to joke about the Australian salute—the constant need to swat flies away from your face. It was hot beneath the mid-afternoon sun. At Doc Green’s suggestion, most wore their army green towel draped across their neck and used it often to wipe the sweat from their eyes.
The men were getting more confident about picking spots to cross streams and small rivers; twice they had spotted fresh water crocs submerged just below the surface and given them a wide berth. Like Doc Green had said, the fresh water variety, smaller than their vicious salt water cousins, usually didn’t attack humans unless provoked. The soldiers kept their distance, anyway.
Sergeant Roper’s team led the column, with J.T. Guess as point man. It made good sense to have the boy from the backwoods of north Georgia as the first man in the entire column. He was used to moving swiftly and stealthily through the woods, stalking game while avoiding Mother Nature’s deadly pitfalls. He seemed more aware of his natural surroundings than any of the others. In the Army, that was called terrain appreciation.
As the sun began to lower in the western sky, they found themselves navigating a field of termite mounds. There must have been over a hundred of these spires of earth crowning the insects’ underground nests. Some of the mounds were taller than a man. Corporal Jorge Pacheco had tried to count them all but gave up at 50. It was too hard to keep track of which ones he had already counted. The mounds seemed other-worldly, like something that belonged on some imaginary planet in a Buck Rogers movie, and the thought of millions of insects so close unnerved him. Please, God…don’t let the captain lay us up for the night near these things.
To Pacheco’s relief, they pushed on. Later, when they came to a briskly running stream, First Sergeant Patchett put the corporal in charge of water purification. “Pa-cheek-o,” Patchett said, “make sure every swinging dick puts a Halazone tablet in each and every one of his canteens. Don’t need nobody getting the shits.”
“Yes, First Sergeant, will do…But it’s Pa-chek-o, not Pa-cheek-o.”
“Hmm…that sounds kind of Russian to me, Corporal. I thought you were a Mexican.”
“I’m a New Mexican, First Sergeant…and it’s still Pa-chek-o.”
The shadows grew long across the bush as the sun approached the horizon, looking like a shimmering tangerine hanging low in the sky. In a stand of trees stretching across a broad rise, Jock figured he had found his place to spend the night.
“What do you think, Top? Shall we set up camp here?”
“Looks good to me, sir. I’ll give Hadley’s team first watch. I’d better get them started on weapons cleaning, too, after that little firepower demonstration before.”
“Get the machine gun cleaned and back in action first, Top, before we break any other weapon down.”
Immediately, Jock felt silly for saying that. Even though Patchett’s reply—“Affirmative, sir!”—was full of gusto, the look on his face said, Do you really think you needed to tell me that? How dumb do you think I am?
Patchett had it all organized in no time flat. Hadley’s five-man team manned the star-shaped perimeter, each man digging in with his entrenching tool at a point of the star. Roper’s team was assigned to dig what would double as sleeping and fighting holes for everyone else. They took to the task with much grumbling.
Jed Roper asked, “You ain’t really gonna make us dig in just to catch some sleep, are you, Top?”
“You bet your sweet ass I am, Sergeant,” Patchett replied, fixing Roper in a stare that would bore holes in steel.
“I suppose you want a latrine, too,” Roper said.
“No need…Every man’ll bury his own shit for now. Once those K rations start working their magic, you’ll only be crapping a little pebble about once a week, anyway.”
The radio team assembled their set in the middle of the perimeter. “Get us a position fix, Sergeant Botkin,” Jock said. “I’m sure we’re all dying to see just where the hell we are. I know I am.”
PFC Billings, digging his hole on the perimeter, found he had some company watching him from a distance. “Hey, look!” he said. “Those are the first kangaroos we’ve seen since Brisbane.”
Doc Green strolled over for a look. “No, those aren’t kangaroos,” he said. “But you’re close. They’re wallabies. See how they’re shorter than the ’roos you’re used to seeing down south...and with a thicker body, too?”
“Yeah, I guess so. They are smaller,” Billings replied.
“Up here in the Cape, you won’t see very many kangaroos, if at all,” Doc said. “But I’ll wager those won’t be the last wallabies we see.”
Bogater Boudreau shook his head in aggravation. “I thought Australia was fucked up enough as it is, but then we come to the Cape where we’ve got crocodiles that ain’t really crocodiles, kangaroos that ain’t really kangaroos…Maybe we’ll run into Japs that ain’t really Japs, too.”
Everyone in earshot found that funny except Doc Green. “Bogater,” he said, “if the blacks side with the Japanese and take up arms, you just may be right about that.”
Boudreau asked, “You think they will, sir?”
Doc held up his arms in a who knows? gesture. He took a step closer to Boudreau, his gaze fixed on the young Cajun’s shoulder. There appeared to be a telltale stain on the shirt’s fabric; his wound might be oozing. “Let’s have a look at that burn, soldier.”
“It’s fine, sir. No problem.”
“Let’s look anyway.”
Reluctantly, Boudreau removed his shirt. The bandage beneath showed tinges of red and yellow stain. “Damn,” Doc said. “You sure you haven’t been carrying anything on that shoulder?”
“Might have laid my weapon on it a couple of times while we was walking.”
Doc grimaced as he peeled off the bandage. “I don’t want you doing that. If this burn gets aggravated any worse, we’re going to have big problems out here. I’ll get my kit…we’ve got to get you patched up again.”
First Sergeant Patchett, doing a check of the perimeter, stopped to join them. “We got trouble here?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Doc replied.
The first sergeant didn’t look convinced, but he had some wisdom to dispense. “Y’all listen up,” he said. “It’ll be dark real soon. Don’t anybody go wandering around in the dark…not even to take a shit. Before you know it, you could be outside the perimeter, and one of your trigger-happy buddies is gonna shoot your ass.” Patchett didn’t wait for a response. He hurried away; there was much he needed to check on in the camp before nightfall.
Jock was startled to find how loud the whir of the radio’s hand-cranked generator sounded out here in the bush. It
hadn’t seemed nearly as loud when he first heard it demonstrated back in the dayroom. Now he was sure the racket PFC Savastano was making as he spun the handles could be heard half a mile away. Botkin was busy at the telegraph key, alternately transmitting, then pressing the earphones to his head to better hear the reply. He and PFC McGuire had very serious looks on their faces as they worked with the code book to decipher the message. He kept the transmissions as short as possible; the Japs might be listening, and while they probably couldn’t break the code, they had direction-finding capability, too.
“I’ve got three lines of position, Captain,” Botkin said. “Not much radial spread between two of the stations but the third one is from waaaay out west at Mount Isa. They all say we’re pretty weak...they had a rough time locking us in. These are their best guesses.” He handed Jock a message slip with the three azimuths: Mossman station: azimuth 325 magnetic. Iron Range station: azimuth 280 magnetic. Mount Isa station: azimuth 020 magnetic. Jock went to work plotting them on his map.
The results were less than encouraging. Instead of the three lines of position converging at a single point, they formed a triangle with an area of about 15 square miles. The center of the triangle was some 25 miles east of Weipa. Task Force Miles was somewhere in that triangle. Probably.
“Shit,” Jock said. “We need to be a hell of a lot more accurate than this to call in the bombers. I wonder how much of the error is being caused by this damned map.”
Botkin offered a note of optimism. “Conditions might improve after dark, sir. Maybe on a higher frequency.”
“Let’s hope so, Sergeant. Let’s fucking hope so.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jillian was exhausted; she had captained one of her boats today, taking the place of the usual captain who needed to care for his sick wife. It looked like she’d need to do that for a few more days, at least. She had just sat down to supper when she heard footsteps on her veranda. The dog sleeping on the kitchen floor raised his head, offering a grumble that was more curious than threatening before laying his head back down.
She met Nathan Gooreng at the back door before he even had a chance to knock. She hadn’t seen much of Nathan, the foreman of Sato’s Aborigine workers, since the last labor dispute at the airfield. His showing up like this couldn’t be just a social call.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss Jilly,” Nathan said, “but there is a problem. Again.”
She invited him in. Though he hungrily eyed the food she had set out, he refused Jillian’s offer to join her at the table, preferring to squat next to the dog and pet its head. He didn’t refuse the offer of a cold beer, though. After quenching his thirst with a long drink that downed half the bottle, he began to tell his story.
“Our work for Mister Sato takes us farther and farther from our country,” he said. “Soon, we will finish a road from Weipa airfield to the place of the next airfield. It will be farther south and more inland, on Coen River.”
“That’s over fifty miles from here, and it’s nothing but bush,” Jillian said. “How long does it take you to get there on this new road?”
“Nearly two hours. They have been driving us from here to there in Army trucks. But they say now that it is too far to do that every day, so they want us to live at the work site.”
“For how long?”
Nathan shrugged. “Forever, I suppose.”
Jillian stared vacantly into the mug of tea clasped between her hands. She needed to be thrust back into the role of peace keeper at this moment like she needed a hole in the head.
“Nathan, you know they’ll kill you if you refuse.”
“If they kill us, Miss Jilly, they’ll have no one to do the work.”
Jillian shook her head. “No, Nathan…they’ll kill you first as an example to the others.”
“If they kill me, the others will not work.”
“But Nathan, you’ll still be dead. I can’t let that happen.”
Deep in troubled thought, she began to pace the kitchen. She was running out of ways to placate Bob Sato, yet it fell to her once again to keep the threat of Japanese violence from becoming a reality. “Let me try to think of something,” she said. “Now go home to your family, Nathan.”
Jillian had been unable to eat another bite since Nathan’s visit. Her mind was full of terrible images: Japanese soldiers burning black settlements to the ground; the wailing of terrified children; men being led off for slave labor, those refusing being killed on the spot; women being gang-raped.
What if those stories from China aren’t such old wives’ tales after all? Did it start the same way there? No, it couldn’t have...the Chinese actually tried to resist them from the very first, army pitted against army, with the people in the middle. Would it matter that Australia did not…no, could not...resist? Probably not.
She kicked the sideboard with a violence that set the alarmed dog to barking. Slowly, as if the weight of the world was pushing her down, she slid with her back against the wall to a seated position on the floor and buried her face in her hands.
A vehicle came to a stop outside; its driver shut off its motor. There were footsteps on the veranda once more, this time stopping at the front door. Bob Sato had come to call again. Standing in the fading light of day, he seemed nervous yet hopeful, scrubbed and groomed in freshly laundered clothes a tourist might wear, holding a spray of wildflowers in one hand like a young boy on his first date.
Jillian almost didn’t open the door. She now felt a revulsion toward this man—this Japanese man—she usually reserved for the degenerates who roamed the Cape earning their living as croc hunters and livestock thieves. Yet he seemed so harmless; how could this innocuous looking man—this academic—hold so totally the fabric of her life and the lives of everyone she knew in those soft hands?
Tucked under his arm was a stack of phonograph records. “I brought Chopin,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. Chopin! How bloody romantic! I really am the only game in town, aren’t I?
With a cheekiness born more of exhaustion than wit, she asked, “What? No saké?”
His face broke into a broad smile. “Actually, I have some in the vehicle…”
“Well, leave it there, Bob. We’re going to need stronger stuff than that tonight.”
Once settled in the drawing room, Jillian broke out the dark Australian rum. Sato was a quick and easy drunk. She felt sure he wouldn’t stand a chance against the rum’s potency. All I’ve got to do is get him drunk and he’ll agree to anything. Of course, I’ve got to come up with a plan for him to agree to first.
He placed a record on the Victrola and turned the crank. A Chopin etude began, its notes galloping merrily across the piano keyboard, conjuring images of children happily at play. Sato took delight in the precise, allegro rhythm of the piece, waving his forefingers like a conductor setting tempo as he returned to the couch. He took a sip of the rum, struggling to keep his smile as the dark liquid burned its way down his throat.
“This has quite a kick,” he said, contemplating the glass he held in his hand.
“Oh, you bet it does, my friend.”
She bided her time, letting him finish the first glass before saying, “There’s some business we need to discuss, Bob.”
Sato looked surprised. “Why, yes,” he said, “there’s something I need to discuss with you, too.”
Refilling his glass, she said, “You go first, Bob. The floor is yours.”
“I’m afraid I’ll need your help again with the blacks, Jillian.”
She played dumb and asked, “Really? What’s the problem now?”
“We have a few too many of them. Our situation has changed in a most unexpected way. Since neither the Australian nor American armies have mounted any sort of challenge whatsoever…and seem unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future…our soldiers have become bored. We need to give them something to do before morale collapses completely. Colonel Najima has decreed soldiers will replace some of the black laborers. W
ork will bolster their spirits.”
“How many blacks do you have to sack?” she asked.
He took a big swallow of rum before answering, “About a third.”
She considered what he had just said as she swirled the rum in her glass, from which she had yet to take a sip. Her body might be tired, but her mind was still razor sharp. Bob Sato, on the other hand, was already glassy-eyed. It was time for Jillian to crank up the theatrics and move in for the kill.
“You miserable son of a bitch,” she said, her enraged tone a very convincing job of acting. “All this big talk about your Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Total bullshit! First you jack these blokes up with your big talk and a fat paycheck, and now you want to kick them out on their arses. Just how do you plan to pick the one third who are out of luck?”
Sato’s hand reached clumsily for her arm. She slapped it away. “Don’t fucking touch me, Sato,” she said. Even the sleeping dog awoke and began to growl.
Cringing, he offered an answer to her question: “I was hoping you’d help me determine who to sack.”
Just a short while ago, he felt sure this was the night he would break through her silly excuses—Oh, it will hurt, Bob! Boo hoo!—and make passionate love to her. At the moment, though, he was more concerned with blocking any blow her hands or feet might deliver. But she just sat there, curled into her corner of the couch, glaring hatefully at him.
Jillian’s expression slowly transformed itself into a satisfied smile, for Sato had just provided the answer she had been searching for ever since Nathan’s visit. She grabbed a pad and pencil and began to construct a chart resembling a calendar. “I’m going to make your life very easy, Bob Sato,” she said. “Have another drink while I do a little figuring here.”
Looking ready to agree to anything she might suggest, he did as he was told. In a few minutes, Jillian had constructed a formidable-looking work schedule. Holding it up for him to see, she asked, “You’ve got about one hundred black laborers…most from Weipa, the rest from Aurukun, right?”
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 17
