Corrigan's Run

by Colin Falconer

  ‘STOP IT!’

  Her knees were giving way. She clung on desperately.

  ‘Corrigan b'long me!’

  Finally it stopped.

  When Rachel opened her eyes again, the rope bridge was rocking gently with the wind, the only sounds the creaking of the cordage, and the murmur of the waters far below. She gulped in long, deep breaths, her whole body shaking violently. She could not get off the bridge until it stopped.

  Sanei was still standing there, grinning at her. ‘You fright you for die?’

  ‘Get away from me,’ Rachel said.

  ‘You no for die,’ she said, as if she was speaking to a little child, ‘bridge good too mus. You no for die.’

  ‘Get away.’

  Sanei reached out and began to stroke Rachel's hair, taunting her. ‘Corrigan b'long me. You savvy, missy?’

  Rachel wanted to snatch the girl's hand away, but she dared not release her hold on the rope. ‘Get away from me,’ she repeated.

  Sanei laughed, then turned her back and walked away. For a long time Rachel dared not move; she couldn’t stop shaking. Finally she dragged herself the rest of the way across the bridge, and fell on her knees on the other side and retched violently into the grass. In the back of her mind she heard Sanei repeating over and over: ‘Corrigan b'long me.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t,’ she said, spitting bile into the grass.

  *****

  The strain of the past few months had taken a terrible toll on Ian Manning's health. He was on the point of collapse. His eyes were shrunken into his head, and the flesh had wasted off him.

  ‘You can't stay here, Manning,’ Corrigan said. ‘If you do, you're going to die.’

  ‘I had already considered that possibility.’

  ‘Well then, let me put it another way. When are you going to get the rest of us out of here? You may want to be a hero, but I don't.’

  ‘I'm doing what I can, Patrick. I've asked them for an evacuation on a number of occasions. You must realize their problem.’

  ‘I don't give a damn about their problems. You and that bloody priest got me into this. Now you can bloody well get me out.’

  Chapter 46.

  It was almost three weeks after Father Goode's death that Corrigan got the news he had been waiting for.

  Manning was in the radio hut, he and Rachel, Sanei and Sergeant Lavella were outside, sitting on the packing crates, next to the smoldering ruins of the fire. They had eaten a sparse meal of rice and salted fish, and now they shivered in the cool night wind.

  Suddenly Manning emerged from the radio hut, a scrap of paper held triumphantly in his hand. ‘Well, it looks like I'm going to get rid of you at last.’

  Rachel looked up eagerly. ‘The Americans?’

  Manning handed her the message. ‘Two nights' time, they'll pick you up in Jervoise Bay, to the north. This time next week you'll be in Australia.’

  ‘That's what you said before,’ Corrigan muttered.

  ‘It's definite this time.’

  ‘I'll believe it when I see it.’

  ‘Boat she come?’ Sanei said to Corrigan.

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘We go?’

  ‘Well, I'm not volunteering to stay.’

  Manning shuffled back inside his hut and they fell silent once more, staring at the glowing embers, each lost in their own thoughts.

  *****

  Rachel woke once during the night, cold, and drew the rough blanket up around her shoulders. She couldn't get back to sleep. Framed in the doorway of the lean-to, she watched lightning flash silently across the night sky. Curious, she got up and went outside. The broad white flashes came from the horizon far to the south-west and she realized it wasn't lightning at all; it was cannon fire.

  Guadalcanal, the terrible battle raging so close to the anonymous drama they were playing out on this remote island. We’re just a small part of all this, she thought. Our lives don’t matter a damn compared to what’s happening over there. How can we run away from this?

  *****

  The climb to the top of the observation platform took Manning ten long and painful minutes. He looked down. Sergeant Lavella was watching him, his forehead knitted in a frown of concern. It was taking him longer every day to get up here, and his cough was worse. When he looked in the broken shaving mirror in the mornings he saw a haggard ghost with hollowed cheeks staring back at him.

  He dragged air into his lungs. The horizon swam in and out of focus and he felt the world spin. He closed his eyes and tried to ride out the wave of nausea that swept over him. A part of him wanted to simply let go. It would be so easy to die, much easier than going on; he forced the notion aside. No, he would not give up. He couldn't, not now.

  Slowly his vision began to clear and the breath came easier to his lungs. He kept climbing.

  The situation was desperate. Sergeant Lavella's tiny force was now down to three men; they had lost Constable Anea. He had been wounded in the arm during the raid on Marakon and then caught a fever. Manning had wanted to evacuate him with Corrigan and Rachel but a few days ago he too had died.

  Another bamboo cross had been erected by the side of Father Goode's grave below the ridgeback.

  Manning had considered evacuating with the others on the submarine. His days on the island were numbered. God knew, if he left now no one would blame him. He had served almost nine months behind enemy lines and it was clear he wouldn't be able to operate effectively much longer.

  Carefully, he ascended the last few feet to the platform and stopped to get his breath. Then he bent over the field glasses on their tripod, concentrating on the distant strip of ocean to the west.

  There were five Japanese destroyers in the Slot, grey and wolf-sleek, their bow waves throwing up a moustache of white foam. They were headed south, seven transports lumbering along with them. They looked like toys against the backdrop of mountains and clouds over the distant islands.

  Manning made a note in his leather-bound book and slipped it back in the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he started to climb slowly back down the tree.

  He was still ten feet from the ground when he realized he was not going to make it.

  The world started to spin again, faster this time, and there was a roaring in his ears. He groaned, tried to hold on but he felt just too weak. He was falling.

  He thought: this is it. It's all over.

  Then the earth rushed up to meet him and there was silence.

  Chapter 47

  ‘He’s broken his broken wrist. He has a concussion. What damage he’s done inside it’s impossible to tell. If it was too bad we would have seen it by now.’ Rachel finished bandaging the splint around Manning's left arm and straightened, brushing a lock of hair away from her face. ‘But aside from his injuries, he’s a sick man. Listen to him breathing. He needs a hospital.’

  Corrigan and Sergeant Lavella had joined Rachel in the radio hut where Manning lay moaning and semi-conscious on his bamboo cot.

  Corrigan sat on one of the metal boxes in the corner. ‘Well, that's his war over. We'd better all get out of here while there's still enough of us left to carry the wounded.’

  ‘I don't know if he'll take the rigors of a long journey,’ Rachel said.

  ‘He certainly isn't going to blossom back to health up here, now, is he? The submarine will be here tomorrow night. We'd better all be there when it comes.’

  Rachel avoided his eyes. She wondered how she could tell him. He would probably try to stop her, but there really was no other choice.

  ‘Pity we gave the vicar the last of the booze,’ Corrigan said. ‘Poor old Manning could probably do with some right now.’

  ‘Americans . . .’ Manning murmured. ‘. . . must tell them.’

  ‘What's he saying?’

  ‘Japoni ship he come,’ Sergeant Lavella said pointing towards the ocean. ‘Kiap want talk-talk longa bockis.’

  ‘There’s more Japanese ships coming down The Slot,’ Rachel said.
<
br />   ‘Well, that's not our worry anymore.’

  ‘Americans ...’ Manning groaned. ‘Must ... must tell them...’

  ‘Forget it, your war’s over. You've done your fair share and I've done a lot more than that considering I'm just a poor bloody Irishman who's supposed to be neutral. We'd better get ready to leave. It's a full day's hike to Jervoise Bay.’

  Rachel sat for a long time by Manning's cot. He didn’t look like a hero; he looked like a schoolteacher or a clerk. Yet he had stayed, when others had run; he had held on until the last of his strength had gone. Now she found herself pitted against her conscience. Someone had to take over Manning's job at the radio. It might as well be me, she thought.

  After all, she had watched Manning operate the radio many times; she was sure she could operate it herself by now, and anyone with two arms and legs could climb to the top of the observation tree. There were tear sheets from Jane's Book of Ships to help identify the warships on the Slot and penciled silhouettes of Japanese warplanes that Manning had drawn on a foolscap sheet.

  It would be so easy to walk away; in a few days she could be eating real food again instead of the endless rice and taro, she could sleep in a real bed with clean sheets. Most of all, she could go to bed at night and not start at every monkey's scream, every crash of a falling branch.

  It was not so easy to forget that just a few hundred miles away men were dying in the jungle and on the sea and in the air, giving up their own lives to keep the islands from the Japanese. She did not know how important Manning’s radio was to those men but she was sure in her heart of one thing.

  She could not run away now.

  *****

  An hour later Corrigan stomped back into the hut and found Rachel playing with the radio transmitter.

  ‘Well? Are you ready?’

  ‘I'm not coming.’

  Corrigan stared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘You may go, of course, Mister Corrigan. But I'm staying here.’

  ‘You're not serious, now?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘You're out of your mind!’

  ‘Probably.’

  Corrigan recognized that look of steely determination he had first seen the night she had asked him to take her to Marmari Point.

  ‘My God. You're not planning on taking over the radio?’

  ‘I have been watching Mister Manning operate the radio every day for weeks. I think I can master it. I have spoken to Sergeant Lavella and he assures me his men will stay here to help me.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what you're proposing?’

  ‘We are all born to die.’

  This was senseless. Everyone around him seemed to be hell-bent on throwing their lives away. ‘Don't be so bloody stupid! This isn't a game! If they find you here with this damned radio they'll take turns to rape you and then they'll tie you up to that tree and cut bits off you till their arms get tired! Then they'll leave you there for the ants and the birds to finish you off! The best you can hope for is they shoot you by mistake first. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Please let go,’ she said mildly.

  Corrigan realized he had her by the arm. He let go, embarrassed. ‘You're coming with us.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  They stared at each other. It was Corrigan who turned away first. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘For the same reason I could not let the native chief die, Mister Corrigan. I cannot turn my back on the world.’

  ‘But it's not going to change anything!’

  ‘I disagree.’

  ‘I could make you come with us,’ he said.

  ‘You could, if you tied me hand and foot and carried me. Or you could destroy the radio. But then you'd be taking sides, wouldn't you?’

  ‘If you want to tie yourself to a cross, it's up to you.’

  ‘I'm sorry.’

  ‘Don't be, I don't give a damn,’ he said and stormed out.

  *****

  They had loaded just enough supplies for the march to Jervoise Bay. Sergeant Lavella was to act as guide, and another of the constables, Beni, was coming along to help carry Manning. The other two constables were staying behind with Rachel.

  Manning had recovered consciousness. He now lay in the shade of the banyan tree, on a stretcher Sergeant Lavella had put together from bamboo poles and some tent canvas. Corrigan knelt down beside him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Don't waste your time with me, Patrick,’ he whispered. ‘I'm not going to make it.’

  ‘Don't talk daft. You'll be all right. Just a few scratches, that's all.’

  Manning blinked slowly. ‘What about the radio?’

  ‘No offence, but fuck the radio. I want you to talk to the girl. She's got it in her head to stay behind here.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She'll get herself killed! She's a bloody woman, for Christ's sake!’

  Manning turned his head away. ‘Someone's got to do it, old boy.’

  Corrigan stamped away. Rachel had not moved from the radio hut; she was in there studying Manning's leather-bound note book. She looked up as Corrigan entered. ‘Ready to go?’

  Corrigan nodded. ‘Sergeant Lavella said you ought to have this.’ He put the bolt action Lee-Enfield on the crate next to her.

  ‘I’m honored. I don’t think I’d know how to use it though.’

  Corrigan shuffled, embarrassed. ‘Lavella and Beni will head back here after the rendezvous. They shouldn't be gone more than a couple of days.’

  Rachel nodded.

  ‘It's not too late to change your mind.’

  ‘It's not too late for you to change yours.’

  Corrigan stiffened. ‘About what?’

  ‘You could come back and help me.’

  ‘I could also put a gun to my own head and blow my brains out. It would be quicker.’

  Rachel shrugged. ‘I've been up on the platform, watching the Slot. Manning is right. There's a lot of ships massing out there. Destroyers, I think.’

  ‘They can launch a massed assault on the South Pole for all I care,’ Corrigan said. ‘Christ, what a waste.’

  Rachel looked up at him, puzzled. ‘What is?’

  ‘You. A waste of a beautiful woman. In other circumstances I probably wouldn't be saying this, but you're not a bad-looking piece.’

  Rachel turned away. ‘You'd better be going, Mister Corrigan. Good luck.’

  ‘Miss Goode . . . Rachel ...’

  ‘Please. Just go.’

  Corrigan stood in the doorway, hands clenched into fists at his side. This reminded him of that other time, long ago, when he had to turn his back on futility. It took an effort of will to tear his eyes away from the slim and stubborn girl at the radio and leave her there to die.

  Chapter 48

  Lieutenant Mashita Tashiro leaped out of the rubber dinghy and into the sandy shallows of Jervoise Bay. He waited for his men to beach the raft and form a ragged line along the strand. Another raft, with Lieutenant Kurosawa and the rest of the platoon on board, ran up on to the sand.

  ‘Which way do we go, Tashiro-san?’ Kurosawa said.

  ‘I will head south towards the mangroves,’ Tashiro told him. ‘Take your men and head north. If you see any natives bring them back here so I can question them.’

  They had searched up and down the coast for almost two weeks now without a sign of the Englishman. Kurosawa felt tired and dispirited.

  ‘We will never find them this way, Tashiro-san,’ he said softly so that their soldiers would not hear. ‘The Englishman would not come near the coast. He will be somewhere up there in the mountains.’

  Tashiro ignored him. ‘We will rendezvous back here. Leave two of your men to guard the boats.’

  ‘Yes, Tashiro-san,’ Kurosawa said formally and went back to the beach to organize the patrols.

  *****

  Corrigan left Lavella and the others in the forest while he went ahead to scout for a way th
rough the mangrove swamp that covered the peninsula. He focused his field glasses on the dazzling white strip of beach. A solitary callophyllum tree stretched its long trunk over the water, as if shrinking from some horror in the jungle beyond.

  It was deceptively peaceful, the only sound the boom of breakers on the reef and the faint sighing of the offshore breeze. The two sampans appeared almost innocuous against the shimmering backdrop of the lagoon and its emerald fringe of coconut palms.

  ‘Holy hell,’ Corrigan murmured in frustration at the incredible chance that had brought the Japanese patrol boat to the very same bay where they were supposed to rendezvous with the American submarine.

  Of all the damned luck. Well, there was nothing they could do about it. They would just have to wait and sweat it out. Corrigan wondered what the submarine commander would do when he saw the Japanese patrol boat there in the bay. Would he wait, or would he decide they had been captured and head back to Noumea?

  ‘Christ, I'll never get off this damn island,’ Corrigan muttered. He climbed to his feet and headed back through the swamp to break the news to the others.

  The mangrove swamp was a dark and evil place. The gnarled roots of the trees writhed and twisted on the muddy banks and the thick tangle of branches overhead blocked out the light from the sun. Corrigan made his way back along the creek, trailing the Enfield over his right shoulder, the mud sucking at his legs. Mud skippers darted away from him in surprise; crabs with bright orange carapaces clicked their pincers at him; a bright-colored beetle crawled laboriously up one of the spindly mangrove roots. Once he heard the splash of a much larger creature dropping out of sight into the creek.