Corrigan's Run

by Colin Falconer

  That was two weeks ago. For all the jokes about Tojo Time, the men here looked half-starved and angry. They all of them wondered if it was going to be Corregidor all over again.

  Mitchell’s arrival, along with his squadron of nineteen fighters and twelve dive bombers was the first ray of hope the men had had in weeks. The Marines called them the Cactus Air Force.

  Mitchell leaned against the wall of the dug-out and closed his eyes. Outside of uniform he was told he looked like a college professor. Now in his early forties he considered himself to be old to be flying combat fighters. But it was a war, and the Navy was short of men. Besides, he had wanted in.

  I don’t look like a college professor now, he thought, with some satisfaction. He wore a battered blue baseball cap, and his shoulder holster bulged under a dirty leather flying jacket. The ragged ensemble had become the uniform of the Cactus Air Force.

  Ten minutes later there was a faint crackling from the loudspeaker. Mitchell jumped up, dropping his cigarette in the mud. He heard a voice, precise, high-pitched. It reminded Mitchell of the BBC newsreaders he had heard in London.

  ‘Good morning, this is The Weatherman. I am speaking to you from the Upper Solomons. First the weather. There are clear skies here and over Bougainville, Choiseul and New Georgia. Nice weather for flying! It is now eighty-five degrees.’

  Mitchell and the corporal - his name was Shoup - exchanged glances. He scribbled furiously on the pad in front of him. The voice continued, clipped and precise.

  ‘There has been a lot of surface activity in our region. I think you should anticipate reinforcements in your area late this afternoon or this evening. I have seen three carriers, five destroyers and a large troop transport heading down The Slot. They were making approximately ten knots. By my estimation they will arrive at Savo at between eighteen and twenty hundred hours tonight.’

  There was a pause. Mitchell leaned on the desk next to the corporal, the muscles in his jaw clenched.

  ‘Now for you airmen ... a squadron of torpedo bombers has just flown overhead from Kavieng headed your . . . wait a moment . . .’ The drone of aircraft engines was chillingly clear. ‘Another four formations of three have just flown overhead. You probably heard them. Be prepared for twenty-four torpedo bombers, in two waves, coming your way. Be with you in about two hours. That's all for now. Good luck! Over and out!’

  Shoup scribbled down the message and as soon as the transmission ended he picked up the telephone and called Air Control in the Pagoda. When he had finished he looked around for Mitchell, but he was already gone.

  He let out a whoop and beat the table with his fists. At last. Now they could give the Japs a taste of what they'd been dishing out.

  Chapter 25

  Corrigan had built a lean-to under a banyan tree from palm leaves and coconut fronds. It was only a temporary arrangement for he was eager to be on his way. If the Japanese found them, he'd be shot along with the rest of them.

  He found himself thinking about Rachel. Christ, what a woman. The way she had stood beside him in the wheelhouse on the way back from Marmari Point! If she had been afraid, she certainly hadn't shown it. And the way she cut the bullet out of the priest's leg . . . she had a lot of spunk, you had to give her that.

  What a waste. No wonder Father Goode had been hiding her away all this time. Corrigan smiled grimly to himself in the darkness. It was a pity he would not get to know her better.

  A shadow fell across his face. It was Sanei. She slipped inside the lean-to and he heard the rustle of fabric as she removed her shirt and the strip of tapa cloth at her waist and slipped naked under the thin blanket beside him.

  She wrapped her thigh around him and her fingers began to unbutton his shirt. He felt her warm breath on his cheek.

  ‘Iris.’ It was her pet name for him. Irish. Only she couldn't pronounce it properly. He had always liked the sound of it before; tonight it irritated him. He pushed her hand away.

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  She ignored him. Her tongue flicked into his ear.

  ‘Christ, it's like sleeping with a gekko. Get away, for God's sake, I'm tired.’

  ‘Make pus-pus,’ Sanei whispered.

  ‘I don't want to.’

  Sanei's fingers went to his groin and she immediately found what she was looking for. Try explaining that away, Corrigan thought sourly.

  ‘Make pus-pus longa me!’

  Corrigan sighed. What the hell, why not? It wasn't the time or the place to start getting sentimental. He rolled towards the sweet brown body next to him.

  Besides, if they made enough noise, it would upset Father Goode.

  *****

  Wolfgang Heydrich took the battered straw hat off his head and mopped his face with a voluminous white hankerchief. His thin white hair was soaked with sweat and clung in long wet strands to his scalp. It had been a long climb.

  He had been born in the marshy flatlands of Flensburg, and even though he had lived in the Solomons for the past fifteen years, he still felt like a foreigner. He probably always would. After two days in the jungle prickly heat had struck at his groin and across his back and under his armpits.

  Heydrich's plantation, Marakon, was built next to the sea on the west coast of the island and he rarely ventured away from it. He would only trek here into the jungle for a very good reason. The hunting down of Ian Manning was, in Heydrich's mind, the best reason there was.

  He had heard rumors that Manning had not left the island with the other Britishers on the Melinda. The Japanese were searching the island for him but they were hampered by two things; first, the natives were still loyal to the British, and second, the Japanese had committed their experienced troops to Guadalcanal and the soldiers on Santa Maria were mostly raw recruits, unskilled in jungle warfare.

  Heydrich had one advantage over the Japanese; he was white. If Manning was still on the island, and the natives knew where he was, they might tell him what they would not tell the Japanese. And so he had decided to make this long hike deep into the hills east of Marakon, where the Japanese had so far not ventured.

  He had set off three days ago. The hills rose steeply from the shores of Rolavo Bay and the orderly rows of palms on his plantation, and he and his party were soon lost among the giant trees and ferns, the creepers and twisting liana. By the end of the first day they had barely travelled two miles.

  It was the third morning of their expedition. Gumu, his native guide, pushed doggedly on ahead. He was almost naked, except for the lava-lava at his waist, and his taut brown body glistened in the steaming heat. The boy had been born in these mountains, and he seemed to melt into them like a shadow.

  Giant ferns and clumps of bamboo crowded together at the foot of the towering trees. Thick lianas fell across the path and Heydrich had to clamber over fallen trees, their trunks rotted and covered with white creamy fungus. Every hundred yards he stopped to wipe sticky cobwebs out of his face and hair.

  They climbed for almost an hour. Heydrich felt his heart thumping in his chest, and his lungs felt as if they were on fire. He gulped from his water bottle and forced himself on.

  He thought about the day the Japanese had first arrived in Vancoro. Heydrich had toasted their arrival with a bottle of schnapps he had been saving for such a special occasion. Someone had finally put the Englishers in their place, routing them out of their clubs and their pukka houses, shooting them down in their monstrous palaces all over Asia.

  How he hated them; their tea parties, their polo, their bridge games to which he was never invited. He hated the way they condescended to him at their tennis club, and he hated how they and the French had humiliated his country at Versailles. He hated them for taking his father's legs at Verdun in 1916 and making him live the rest of his life a cripple, and he hated them because his mother died from tuberculosis in 1923, starved and impoverished, because of them and their fucking Treaty.

  It had taken him years of work and not a little luck - and yes, he had cheated, but why n
ot? - to become their equal on this stinking island; yet even here they treated him as if he was a beggar.

  Now, at last, the tide had turned.

  The morning after the Japanese raised their flag over the Residency, Heydrich had presented himself to the Japanese Colonel but had been frankly affronted by his new ally’s indifference. He had offered his services, but Nakamura had perfunctorily examined his papers and told him to go back to his plantation and stay out of trouble.

  We’ll see about that.

  *****

  Gumu stopped and pointed. ‘There!’

  Heydrich made out the thatch and palm huts of a village between the trees. A tendril of smoke drifted up through the jungle’s twilight. Already the natives' curs were howling as they caught the scent of the strangers.

  It was a typical native village; it was surrounded by a tall bamboo fence, bound with lianas. Inside the kraal the reddish earth was packed hard, and dogs and pigs and small children scampered and crouched beneath the wooden stilts of the huts.

  The headman of the village came out to meet them. Gumu told Heydrich his name was Tasimboko. He wore a thick belt of palm fronds over his carefully woven lap-lap so that he looked a little like a rooster. There was a thin string of trochus shells around his neck, and his teeth were blackened with betel.

  ‘Tell him I'm looking for the government kiap,’ Heydrich told Gumu. ‘Tell him I have an important message for him and I have to talk with him.’

  Gumu translated what Heydrich had said. The headman exchanged worried glances with some of the other village elders who had come out to join them.

  They had no idea what to do; it was written all over their faces. You know where he is, Heydrich thought. And I’m going to get it out of you somehow.

  *****

  Tasimboko was bewildered by the recent turn of events. For as long as he or any of the other villagers could remember, they had been ruled by the whites, and they had a sort of mild affection for them. But now they had deserted the island and been replaced by the yellow soldiers. This confused them because the kiap was still somewhere in the hills. He had come to the village and told them that white soldiers would soon return and throw the japoni off the island. They believed him. Already other white men - one of them wounded, and lying on a stretcher - had come to join the kiap.

  He had warned them that his hiding place was to be kept a secret. He supposed though that he only meant it was a secret from the yellow men; here was another white man who had come to join Manning in his refuge. He consulted with the other elders and they decided that the kiap could not mean to hide his eyrie form other whites like himself.

  So he finally turned back to Gumu and told him that the kiap’s camp was half a day's march away, in the hills to the north. He could take him there if he wished.

  Gumu passed this knowledge on to Heydrich.

  Heydrich nodded and laughed. For three days now he had trekked through this infernal jungle, visiting almost every village within five miles of Marakon. It had been worth it, after all. He was sure the Japanese Colonel would be most grateful.

  ‘Tell them I will back in a couple of days,’ he told Gumu. ‘I will go with them to find the English kiap then.’

  As Heydrich set off back down the mountain he forgot the aching in his limbs and the jungle rot in his shorts. Now he would revenge himself on the English.

  And he would start with that little scheiss Manning.

  Chapter 26

  ‘He is somewhere on this island,’ Nakamura said.

  ‘We cannot be sure, Nakamura-san,’ Kurosawa said. ‘We could be chasing a phantom.’

  ‘Our air force is taking heavy casualties over Guadalcanal. Whenever they fly a mission, they find the Americans are already in the air, waiting for them. The High Command believes they must be receiving advance intelligence of our attacks. Our forces have already captured two Englishmen with a transportable radio on Bougainville. There may be others on Choiseul or Santa Ysabel or even here on Santa Maria.’

  He turned to the map of the island on the wall of his office and stabbed a stumpy index finger on the thick, green-shaded area to the north.

  ‘We will begin our search here. In the hills to the north-west.’

  Tashiro nodded. ‘That would be the logical place for a spy. He would have excellent views across The Slot. Our planes would be flying straight over his head from Rabaul and Kavieng.’

  ‘If he is there, the natives will know where he is. They will lead you to him.’

  Kurosawa took the spectacles from his nose and polished them with his handkerchief.

  ‘You disagree, Lieutenant Kurosawa?’

  Kurosawa replaced the spectacles on his nose and took a deep breath. ‘I do not think we should rely on the support of the natives, Nakamura-san. They have not co-operated with us so far.’

  ‘Why do you think that is, lieutenant?’

  ‘Perhaps they are still frightened of the English.’

  The colonel looked at Tashiro. ‘Then we shall have to make them more frightened of us.’

  ‘Yes, Nakamura-san.’

  ‘If he is there, we must find him. Tashiro, I charge it to you as your personal responsibility.’

  Tashiro bowed. ‘I will find him, Nakamura-san.’

  Kurosawa looked dismayed. Nakamura was a good soldier; but this wasn't war, this was police work. What they needed was a system of informants. But while they continued to treat the natives as kichibu - beasts - then they would be fighting two enemies. They could hunt for weeks in the jungle. If they chose, the local villagers could inform the Englishman whenever they got close, and they would end up chasing ghosts. Terrorizing them might only make turn them more firmly against them.

  ‘Nakamura-san, may I suggest,’ Kurosawa stammered, ‘perhaps more troops might be necessary. A company of soldiers, conducting a systematic sweep of the area ...’

  ‘A company of soldiers? For one Englishman?’

  At that moment the door opened and a guard stepped inside, saluting smartly.

  Nakamura looked up impatiently. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The German Heydrich is outside, Nakamura-san. He wishes to speak with you. He claims it is urgent.’

  Nakamura hesitated. ‘Very well,’ he barked at the guard. ‘Show him in here.’

  As Heydrich entered the room, a miasma of rank sweat accompanied him. He had not bothered to change his shirt since his return from the jungle. His cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  ‘Colonel Nakamura, I have excellent news. It is about the English kiap!’

  Nakamura regarded him sternly, then turned to Kurosawa. ‘He smells like a pig. What does he want?’

  ‘He says it is about the Englishman, Nakamura-san.’

  ‘I know where he is!’ Heydrich said. I will take you to him!

  Kurosawa felt vindicated but remained respectful in front of Nakamura-san. ‘He says we don’t need to beat the villagers, Nakamura-san. He knows where we will find the English spy.’

  *****

  Rachel watched Corrigan shove the tins of corned beef and beans that Manning had given him into the pocket of his rucksack. ‘You're leaving us, Mister Corrigan?’

  ‘Too right I am. I've no mind to stay here and wait for those yellow barbarians to come and shoot me.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to thank you before you left. You saved my uncle's life.’

  ‘If that's what you think you're as crazy as he is. All I've done is win him a few extra days. The Nips are going to get him in the end. And the rest of you too.’

  ‘I dare say you're right.’

  Corrigan felt enormously sorry for her. She was, after all, just a girl, barely twenty. Look at her. She had tried to wash her tattered calico dress, and because she didn’t have anything else to wear Manning had lent her one of his stiff-collared shirts to wear. It was many sizes too large for her and fitted her like a dress. Modesty was served with the addition of a native sarong. She looked so vulnerable in it.

  ‘You
don't have to stay here,’ he said. ‘If Blood and Thunder wants to die a martyr, you don't have to go down with him. Come with me. You'll stand more of a chance than you will up here.’

  Rachel gave him a soft smile. ‘Thank you Mister Corrigan. But I'm not staying just because of my uncle. I love these people too, in my own way. I won't see them subjugated by the Japanese.’

  ‘You'd rather see them subjugated by the English?’

  ‘We all know evil when we see it, Mister Corrigan. Some of us run from it, some of us stay and fight. It depends on what you believe in.’

  Corrigan shook his head in wonderment. ‘I don't know where a young girl like you gets all these damn stupid notions.’ He hoisted his pack on to his shoulder.

  ‘Are you going to say goodbye to my uncle?’

  ‘You must be joking.’ Corrigan straightened and for a moment he hesitated. Then he held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Miss Goode. You've got a lot of spunk, I'll give you that.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mister Corrigan. Good luck.’

  ‘Keep it for yourself. You'll need it more than I will.’

  He turned and made his way back down the path they had come a few days before, Sanei running to keep up alongside him.

  Then the jungle closed behind him like an impenetrable green veil, and he was gone.

  *****

  They reached Marakon at dusk. From the spur overlooking the plantation Corrigan could make out the splash of Heydrich’s red-roofed bungalow between the geometric rows of coconut palms. The boathouse was almost a quarter of a mile away from the house, built over the planks of a short wooden jetty jutting out into the bay.