McMillen’s team did the digging while the others provided security. Grimly, they slid his remains onto the ground sheet from his bedroll and lowered them into the hole. The bloody soil was used first to cover him. One of Roper’s dog tags was left around his neck. Jock placed the other dog tag in his own pocket. When the burial was done, you couldn’t tell this had been a place of death. Patchett made some marks with his bayonet—a cross with Roper’s initials—in the bark of the nearest tree as Jock marked the location of the grave on his map. The location would be duly reported if and when they returned from this mission. Maybe Graves Registration would be able to reclaim the body at some point in the future, if the data from Jock’s old and suspect map proved accurate enough to locate it.
When they headed west once again, their column shortened by one, a newfound soberness had settled over the men of Task Force Miles. Yesterday, they acted more like cynical, detached spectators to an unfolding drama; today they had become determined protagonists in that drama. Melvin Patchett smiled; he knew the phenomenon well. He said to Jock, “Look at them, sir…nothing tightens up a slack unit like planting one of their own in the ground.” After a few more steps, he added, “Hell of a way to beat a court martial, though.”
Chapter Thirty
They marched through the day, making good progress westward across the level, forested terrain. The only man-made sounds they heard were the ones they created themselves: the scuffle of occasional clumsy footsteps; the soft clink of metal hardware on a man’s gear coming together; the hushed rumble of the Radio Flyers’ tires along the ground.
As the afternoon wore on, a new sound began to rise out of the west: the faint hum of airplane engines, arriving in waves that seemed to flow right through the trees. “Sounds like a bunch of planes landing,” Melvin Patchett said. “We’ve got to be awfully close to an airfield…and it sure as hell ain’t one of ours. Can’t be more than a couple of miles away.”
“Yeah,” Jock replied. “We’ve got about three hours of sunlight left. Let’s see if we can put eyes on it before dark.”
They advanced more slowly now, with Hadley’s team in the lead and Bogater Boudreau as point man. Jock stayed near the front of the column, with Doc and the radio team in the middle between the two scout teams. First Sergeant Patchett brought up the rear, making sure there were no stragglers.
The last airplane engine sputtered and died. It was quiet again—so quiet every man could hear the beating of his anxious heart. Still they saw nothing but the trees. An old cliché crossed Jock’s mind: Can’t see the forest for the trees. Can’t see the damned Japs for the trees, either…and I sure as hell hope they can’t see us. The late afternoon shadows were growing longer. He checked his watch; almost an hour had gone by since the sound of the airplanes stopped. And I’m betting we’ve only gone a mile in that hour.
Suddenly, Boudreau, the point man, dropped to one knee, signaling with a raised hand for the column behind him to stop. The hand signal passed rapidly from man to man until everyone in Task Force Miles had stopped and made himself invisible, either prone on the ground or behind a tree. Even the army green Radio Flyers, camouflaged with vegetation refreshed regularly during the day’s march, seemed to become part of the forest.
Jock low-crawled forward to Boudreau’s vantage point. “The clearing up ahead, sir,” Boudreau whispered. He didn’t have to say anything else. A hundred yards in front of them there was a saddled, chestnut brown horse hitched to a tree. Using his binoculars, Jock saw clothes hanging from a low branch: a white shirt and dark green trousers, just like a Japanese officer would wear. On the ground below the clothes could be seen the tops of a pair of tall, brown riding boots. Just like a Japanese officer would wear.
Melvin Patchett crawled up alongside Jock and took a look through the binoculars. “What do you make of this, sir?” the first sergeant said as he took in the sight before them. “Some Jap making hisself croc bait?”
“I’m going to get a closer look,” Jock said. “I’ll take Hadley and Boudreau with me. Top, you hold position here with the others.”
“Y’all be real careful now,” Patchett said. “Come at him from around the other side so you stay downwind of the horse. Don’t let that four-legged fucker’s nose give you away.”
“No shit, Top,” Jock replied, trying to hide he hadn’t considered the sensory abilities of the horse at all. “I’m just hoping that horse’ll lead us to what we’re looking for.”
There was a slight rise at the far side of the clearing. It took Jock, Hadley, and Boudreau a good 10 minutes to get there, most of it in an adrenaline-fueled low crawl. By the time they neared the edge of the rise, their knees and elbows were bruised and sore, but they were too pumped-up to care. What they saw when they peered over the crest stunned them: it wasn’t a Japanese officer at all but a white woman—damp and naked—drying herself after what must have been a dip in the small pond that filled the clearing. The three men were too startled for words. The last thing they had expected to lay eyes on this day—or any other, for that matter—was a nude goddess. Especially one who seemed so comfortable in a wilderness they found so totally alien. She took her time drying her hair before slipping back into clothes. The three issued a collective, barely audible groan of disappointment as the panties slid into place and another as her breasts hid beneath the undershirt she pulled down from over her head. The blouse and trousers, which from a distance looked so much like parts of a Japanese officer’s uniform, bore no such resemblance at close range; neither did the broad-brimmed hat she placed on her head. Jock recognized the melody she whistled loudly as she dressed. It was Wagner: O Du, Mein Holder Abendstern, the beautiful but bittersweet aria of unrequited love from the opera Tannhäuser.
Once the men found their voices again, they could express their surprise only in hissed whispers. Tom Hadley, his eyes still full of wonder, said, “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be any white people here.”
“Yeah, that’s what they told us,” Jock replied, trying to shake off his lustful bewilderment and figure out what to do next. Further muddling his thought processes was a voice in his head saying, Wagner? Maybe that babe’s a Kraut?
Whatever sexual impulse Boudreau enjoyed was gone; he had the woman zeroed in his gunsight. “Maybe she’s with the Japs,” he said. “A nurse or something.” He snugged his cheek against the Thompson’s stock and wrapped his finger tight around the trigger.
“For God’s sakes, Boudreau, don’t shoot her,” Jock said. “We’ve had enough people die for nothing already…and she might not be alone.”
Indecision and sexual frustration had made Hadley jumpy. “So what the hell are we supposed to do now, sir?”
“We calm the fuck down and see where she goes, Sergeant.”
“She’s got a rifle hanging from that saddle, sir,” Boudreau said, still squinting down his gunsight.
Jock took a quick glance at the rifle through his binoculars and managed to catch a magnified view of the woman’s nether region, its contours etched distinctly against the tightly stretched fabric of her trousers as she bent forward to pull on her boots. “Looks like a hunting rifle, not military,” he said. “Definitely not Jap. As long as she’s not shooting it at us, we’re okay.”
The woman unhitched the horse, swung up into the saddle, and reined her mount to the west. After a few steps, she pulled the horse up and looked back over her shoulder, directly toward the stand of trees where Melvin Patchett and the rest of Jock’s men lay concealed. In just a few seconds, she and her horse were headed straight toward Patchett’s position at a brisk trot.
“Oh shit,” Jock said, the horse and rider now between him and Patchett’s group. “What the fuck is she doing? Come on…we’ve got to get back to the team.”
Jock, Hadley, and Boudreau moved as quickly as they could and still maintain some semblance of concealment, but the woman on horseback was into Patchett’s position before they got very far. From his vantage point some 80 yards distant,
all Jock could see through the trees was the horse rearing up, the woman toppling to the ground, and green-clad shapes of his men pouncing on her. None of this happened silently. The horse whinnied loudly and continuously. The woman swore a blue streak at the top of her lungs—in English, with a decidedly Australian accent—before her angry words became muffled somehow.
We’re fucked, Jock thought as he stood upright and ran the rest of the way, abandoning concealment for speed. You can hear all that noise a mile away. When he reached the melee, two of his men were sitting on the prone but wildly struggling woman, trying—and failing—to pin her flailing hands behind her back. Melvin Patchett crouched next to her, the skin around one eye growing puffy and turning vivid shades of purple. A field dressing had been stuffed in her mouth to silence her, but she managed to spit it out just as Jock joined the chaos.
“GET OFF ME, YOU FUCKING SONS OF BITCHES,” she said as she ripped one of her hands from its restraining grasp and took an ineffectual poke at Patchett. “MAYBE I’LL BLACKEN YOUR OTHER EYE, TOO, GRANDPA.”
Barely able to control his rage, Patchett said, much too loudly, “She had a weapon, sir.”
Despite his desperate gestures to keep it down, Jock’s words also came out much too loud. “All right…everyone, calm down! Simms, Mukasic…get off the lady. Now, miss, you’ve got to be quiet.”
“Oh, bloody hell…you’re Yanks,” Jillian Forbes said, now sitting up and shaking with exasperation. “Now everything’s going to go to shit.” She spun around, anxiously looking for her horse but found Franz under control with J.T. Guess’s steady hand holding the reins.
She leveled an icy glare at Jock. “And you must be the head wanker.”
“Wait a minute,” Jock said. “What do you mean by everything’s going to go to shit?”
“Because you’re going to try to fight the Japanese…and all of us who live here are going to pay the bloody price.”
“We were told all whites had been evacuated,” Jock said. “Do you really live here?”
“Well, whoever told you that was bloody wrong, wasn’t he? Of course I live here…right over in Weipa. Imbeciles!”
“Look, miss…I’m really sorry we got off on the wrong foot—”
“That’s a bloody understatement, Yank.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jock replied. “But I’ve got to ask…how the hell did you see us?”
She pointed to the Radio Flyers. “Those big boxes sitting in the middle of the bush…are those really kiddie wagons? They caught my attention, you bloody idiot. The scrub you used to try and hide them…that doesn’t grow around here.”
“Listen…miss…my name is Miles. Jock Miles. I’m a captain in the US Army.”
The rumbling of airborne engines rose again, this time from the east. A flight of Japanese Betty bombers—just like the plane they had tangled with off Cairns two days ago—passed low and slow overhead, minutes from landing. As Jillian caught a glimpse of them through the trees, a look of loathing spread across her face.
“Bloody savages,” she said, shaking a fist at the planes. “I wonder what poor bastards they bombed today?”
Jock’s manner became more soothing. “Okay, I told you who I am. Can I ask your name, miss?”
“Forbes. My name is Jillian Forbes.”
Doc Green was examining the first sergeant’s black eye when he heard Jillian say her name. He promptly did a double take. “Forbes,” he said. “You wouldn’t be related to Bull Forbes, would you?”
“He was my father. How on earth did you know Dad?”
“I was on a medical team that visited Weipa Mission about a dozen years ago. I was just a student in medical school. My name is Dunbar Green. I’m sorry…did your dad pass on?”
“Yeah, he did,” Jillian said. Then her face broke into a smile. “I guess everyone knew Dad in these parts. You know, I think I remember you. I was just a kid back then, of course, but weren’t you a lady doctor?”
“Like I said, medical student, studying to be a gyno.”
“Oh, yes,” Jillian said. “A lady doctor. All the black women called you Mister Happy Fingers.”
Jock’s men thought Mister Happy Fingers was a pretty good nickname for the doc. A few laughed out loud.
“Shut the fuck up,” Melvin Patchett hissed at the laughing soldiers. “You want to bring the whole fucking Jap Army down on us?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Grandpa,” Jillian said. “Airfield Number One is about four miles east of here, and the Japs never patrol out this far. Not anymore.”
Patchett’s blackened eye was swollen practically shut now, making him look like he had a permanent squint. With gruff skepticism, he asked, “They don’t patrol? Why the hell not, girlie?”
“Too many of them became croc food,” she replied. “Why the hell do you think I carry a rifle? And by the way…do you really think I hit like a girl?”
Jock had another concern. “You said ‘Airfield Number One.’ There’s more?”
“Yep,” Jillian replied, “Airfield Number Two is almost finished. It’s about fifty miles south. And they plan to keep building them farther and farther south until they can bomb Brisbane…even Sydney.” As she spoke, she mentally counted the men in Task Force Miles. “Is this the lot of you?” she asked.
When no one would offer an answer, she added, “Well, you can keep it a secret if you like, but I’m telling you…what you’ve got here is not nearly enough of you to take on a regiment of Japs.”
“A regiment? We’ve been told only a few hundred of them are on Cape York,” Jock said.
Jillian chuckled as she shook her head. “A few hundred? Oh, no, Captain. Try again. It’s more like a few thousand. That’s a regiment, I believe.”
Ever the skeptic, Melvin Patchett was the first to voice what the others were thinking. “How the hell do you know all this, sweetheart?”
Raising two fingers in the V sign, knuckles out, she flicked Patchett off—the Commonwealth equivalent of the raised middle finger in the US—and then reached into her pocket and triumphantly held out Bob Sato’s business card. “I know because this wanker told me.”
Patchett snatched the card from her hand, glanced at it while shaking his head in rejection, and passed it to Doc Green. Doc examined it, remained poker-faced, and passed it to Jock, who quickly decided maybe we should listen to what this young lady has to say.
She proceeded to tell them the whole story of the Japanese occupation. They weren’t surprised to find the Aborigines working for the Japs. She made a compelling case why the people of Cape York cared not a whit about the military misfortunes of Australia, a nation whose government alternately harassed and ignored them.
Despite Patchett’s initial grumblings of collaborator and profiteer, they ultimately accepted that Jillian had little choice but to do what she had done. Her flatly stated rhetorical questions were convincing enough: “What the hell was I supposed to do? Get us all bloody killed?” She sealed her logic with an irrefutable statement: “It’s not like any of you blokes were around to help out.”
They chuckled when she described Sato’s attempts to have it off with her. It took more than a few grains of salt for them to accept the Japs were trying a cheap bluff to take Australia out of the war. But they shook their heads in disbelief when she related there had only been one incident of violence—and a minor one at that—by the Japanese against civilians on Cape York. Doc Green found that detail especially hard to swallow.
“I’ve been north of Alice, Jillian,” Doc said, “and I’ve been to New Guinea. I’ve seen the brutality the Japs are capable of.”
“But they haven’t done it here,” she said.
Doc raised an eyebrow. “Not yet, dear lady,” he replied. “Not yet.”
Shaking her head wistfully, Jillian said, “Maybe so, but you’re the only soldiers who’ve pointed a gun at me so far.”
She had been so involved in telling her story, she lost track of time. Only now did Jillian realize the su
n was about to set. “Shit! It’s too dark to get back home,” she said.
“How far do you have to go?” Jock asked.
“Too far…almost five miles. It’s much too dangerous to be roaming about in the dark. That’s how we lost Dad.”
“Yeah, we know about the dark,” Jock said. “We lost a man last night…to wild boars.”
“That’s awful,” she replied, her words deeply sincere. “So you know what I mean.”
Doc Green had a question. “What were you doing out here, anyway, Jillian?”
“I’d been out on one of my boats all day and stunk of fish. I needed a ride and a bath.” She pointed toward the pond in the clearing. “That’s the only fresh water pool around here the crocs don’t fancy.”
“Yeah, we saw it,” Jock said.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You saw it? Or you saw me?”
Jock replied with just an embarrassed smile.
“You cheeky little bastard,” she said, but with a smile, too. “Now that you’ve seen the big show, how about some tucker? My horse eats grass, but I don’t…and I’m starving.”
Nobody in Task Force Miles could quite believe that Jillian Forbes loved the taste of K rations. She had wolfed down every crumb of a meal package, even consuming the entire bitter D bar with great glee. “These are wonderful,” she said, smearing the last of her canned cheese on a cracker. “I don’t know what you Yanks are complaining about. Can I have more for later?” Happily, she stuffed the ration packages they offered into her rucksack.
Task Force Miles—and their female guest—settled into their defensive perimeter for the night. J.T. Guess turned out to be a godsend in dealing with the horse. “Don’t you worry about old Franz, miss,” Guess told Jillian. “I’ve got him calmed down just fine.”
Watching as Guess and the contented animal relaxed in a patch of low grass, Melvin Patchett said, “Us good ol’ boys sure know how to handle our animals.” As he walked off to check the perimeter, he mumbled to himself, “But that young woman…she needs a good horse-fucking. That’d calm her down right quick.”
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 19
