Corrigan's Run

by Colin Falconer

  Five pairs of eyes watched and waited by the first line of trees. The only sounds were the rhythmic rush of the waves, the crackle of the logs burning in the signal fire and the lonely cry of a night heron fishing on the reef.

  Corrigan saw a light wink on and off quickly from somewhere beyond the promontory. The Americans! They had waited for them after all!

  Lavella grinned, his teeth appearing very large and white in the moonlight. ‘Boat b'long fish he come,’ he whispered.

  ‘Damned right,’ Corrigan said and pointed his torch across the bay, flashed it on and off twice in the pre-arranged signal.

  The answering flicker confirmed the submarine had seen their signal. A boat would be sent ashore for them. In another few minutes they would be gone.

  Corrigan turned round to the others. The native policeman Beni sat, impassive, his back resting against the trunk of a coconut palm; Sanei came and stood next to Corrigan, gripped his arm. ‘Me belong you,’ she murmured.

  ‘Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere without you,’ Corrigan said. ‘For all the good that does you.’

  ‘Patrick,’ Manning whispered in the darkness.

  ‘The war's over for you too, old son,’ Corrigan said, squatting down next to the stretcher. ‘Another few minutes and you'll be on that submarine.’

  ‘What about Rachel?’

  ‘For God's sake. Not that again.’

  ‘Go back for her, Patrick.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Corrigan snapped and walked back down to the beach to wait there on his own.

  Chapter 51

  Corrigan thought he would feel grateful. Instead there was only a profound sense of loss. For the first time he thought about what he would do when he finally reached Australia and he realized that out there beyond the reef there might be nothing for him.

  The wind was cool and Corrigan had on only a thin, ragged shirt. He shivered. Sensing something was wrong, Sanei came down to join him at the water’s edge.

  ‘Which way, Iris?’

  He didn't answer her.

  He was jolted from his introspection by the throb of an outboard motor. He saw the white moustache of a bow wave as the rubber boat shot through the breakers, and up on to the beach.

  A white-jacketed officer leaped out of the boat. He had a revolver in his right hand. ‘Manning?’ he said.

  ‘Manning's hurt,’ Corrigan said. ‘We've got him on the stretcher over there.’

  ‘All right, quickly. We must hurry. If a Jap patrol boat comes by, we're sitting ducks out there.’

  Sergeant Lavella and Constable Beni carried Manning down the beach and laid the stretcher in the Zodiac.

  Corrigan turned to the officer. ‘Right, that's it.’

  ‘Aren't you coming with us?’

  Corrigan shook his head. ‘I've changed my mind.’

  nei looked round at Corrigan and suddenly realized what was going on. She tried to pull him towards the boat. ‘No,’ she hissed. ‘We go, we go now!’

  Corrigan shook his arm free. ‘Better get going, lieutenant. It's dangerous out here.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ the American said. He ran back through the surf and jumped into theZodiac. Within moments it was skimming across the bay towards the dark shadow of the submarine. The drumming of the outboard motor was swallowed up by the roar of the breakers.

  ‘Which way, Iris?’ Sanei's voice betrayed her bewilderment. ‘You say we go.’

  ‘I changed my mind,’ Corrigan said.

  He walked up the beach to where Sergeant Lavella and Constable Beni stood watching. ‘Which way you not go longa boat?’ Lavella said.

  ‘Can't stand submarines. I get claustrophobia.’

  He led the way back into the jungle.

  Rachel was turning the dials of the radio. She looked up and saw him standing in the doorway. There was a soft smile on her face.

  On the trek back up the mountain he had asked himself a thousand times why he had done it. He didn't give a damn about the war. Sure, he didn't like the Japanese but he was damned if he was going to fight them just to save the bloody Empire.

  That wasn't what made him come back. It was this damned woman.

  He slouched against the packing crates in the corner.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello Mister Corrigan,’ she said. ‘I knew you'd come back.’

  PART THREE

  Chapter 52

  Tashiro was a desperate man. Kurosawa had been right all along; they did not have enough soldiers to find the Englishman. They had to go out in force because of the ever present threat of ambush, but this inevitably made their progress through the jungle far too slow.

  The extra men Nakamura had requisitioned had not arrived. The High Command did not seem to appreciate the difficulties they faced and had diverted the reinforcements to Guadalcanal. They had all been cut down in one night on the Matanikau River.

  But now, finally, they had the special tracker dogs they had been promised.

  Tashiro inspected the rows of cages on the wharf. He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the fetid smell of the animals. They were Doberman Pinschers, he was told they could hunt down the English guerrillas just by their scent. They were angry at being kept penned in their cages and were barking and jumping at the bars.

  The islanders stood around in small groups, watching them. Every village had dogs but none of them had ever seen animals like these, red-eyed beasts with large yellow fangs and lean, muscled bodies.

  Tashiro turned to them. ‘Now we will catch your English kiap,’ he shouted at them, without waiting for Kurosawa to translate. ‘We will hunt him down like an animal!’

  I will disgrace him. I will drag his body through every village on the island and restore my honor. Even better, let’s take him alive.

  Tashiro heard the whine of aircraft engines overhead and looked up. The villagers started to run for the trees.

  Tashiro laughed. ‘No, no!’ he yelled at them. ‘Sikorki Japan! Japanese plane!’

  Some of them hesitated. Tashiro slapped the palm of his hand on his chest to impress them. ‘Sikorki Japan!’

  He looked up again, shielding his eyes against the early morning sun. The plane circled over the island, then banked and flew towards them, flying low. A feeling of unease swept over him. There was something unfamiliar about the fighter's lines. For the first time it occurred to him that the aircraft might be American.

  But it couldn't be. Not this far north.

  Then he saw the shark's teeth painted on the nose. It was olive green and there was a blue star painted on the fuselage. He started to run.

  *****

  To engage, to destroy, to engage again - it was a battle routine that left little time for introspection. The imminence of death was pushed to the back of the mind - it was the only way to stay sane.

  He had lost count of how long he had been on this malarial swamp, this dot on the map in the middle of nowhere. He was either hungry or terrified or bored. He shot down Japanese fighters in his sleep. Sometimes he died in his sleep as well.

  But he didn’t sleep often or very well. When he wasn’t in the air he was rehearsing tactics in his mind. His obsession had made him one of the air force’s most effective pilots; there were now twenty-one red circles painted on the fuselage of Mitchell’s Grumman, each a confirmed kill.

  They wanted to rest him, but he wouldn’t rest; even though he didn’t know how much more of it he could take.

  Every morning they were up an hour before dawn, warming up the Pratt and Whitney engines. They would take off in their Wildcats at first light, to pursue the destroyers and transports of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka's Tokyo Express as they made their way back up the Slot; or to intercept the bombers and their escorts on their way down from Kavieng.

  Taking off and landing at Henderson Field had become a nightmare. After each storm it was a porridge of glutinous mud; in hours the water would drain away through the porous black coral to leave behind a dust bowl that choked a plane's en
gines.

  There was no mess hall, just a musty, sodden tent where they served Spam, sausage or the dehydrated mashed potato they all despised. They all took vitamin pills but malaria and dysentery took a terrible toll among the young pilots anyway and Mitchell's squadron was always well below full strength.

  Fatigue was their natural state; sucking oxygen day after day, hour after hour, at high altitudes, sapped their strength and made them groggy. They never got enough rest. More than good food or the company of a woman, what Mitchell longed for most was sleep.

  But as the battle for Guadalcanal reached its climax, he spent more and more of each daylight hour in the air; by night, they were shelled from the ocean or bombed from the air. He slept in slit trenches and dozed in the mess hall; once he even fell asleep in his cockpit, while the ground crew refuelled his plane.

  It was this fatigue he feared most; it slowed reactions, made a pilot prone to elementary mistakes that could cost him his life. He watched the sun rise every morning from the dank cockpit of his Grumman and wondered if he would live to see it set..

  Is this my day to die?

  Just a week ago two Japanese battleships in Iron Bottom Sound had rained fourteen-inch shells on Henderson Field for hours. It was like hundreds of railroad cars screeching down from the sky, ploughing the airfield apart. He had scrambled out of his dug-out at dawn and found the airfield littered with twisted steel matting and mangled cans of Spam - the result of a direct hit on the supply dump. The Cactus Air Force had been decimated. Only eleven of the ninety planes could still fly.

  One of them was his and he climbed in and led the other ten into the air to harass the Tokyo Express in the Slot.

  That night the Japanese attacked across the sand spits of the Matanikau. The Marines beat them back with first their Howitzers, then their machine guns, and finally their bare hands. Even the signalmen and bandsmen and cooks rushed out through the mud and rain to meet them.

  The following night they came from the other side of the field; the Marines' Brownings scythed them down as they came through the Kunai grass, piling their bodies in windrows. The hollow-eyed survivors later told Mitchell how they had to clear away the bodies with grenades to leave their fields of fire open. One young gunner fired twenty-six thousand rounds that night.

  The next day was Dugout Sunday. Mitchell huddled in a slit trench in the pouring rain while his fighter was being repaired, and Japanese mortars thudded onto the base every ten minutes. Then that night, up on Bloody Ridge, the Japanese attacked again. Another thousand died.

  No matter how many Japanese soldiers fell, how many planes they shot down, they still kept coming. It seemed endless; rain, mud, shelling, fear.

  The fear only left him when he climbed behind the controls of his Wildcat; he felt in control again. He could fight back. And today there was a cold hatred in his heart such as he had never felt before.

  He thought about the dead bodies he had seen laid out on the beach at Lunga Point, most of them just boys. He thought about two of his pilots strafed and killed as they hung helpless in their parachutes over Savo Island.

  He thought about the Weatherman.

  There were two of them now, an Englishwoman and an Irishman. The scuttlebutt was that the Navy had evacuated the original Weatherman and these others had taken his place. One of their native scouts had found out about the tracker dogs and they had called in for help.

  Mitchell had volunteered for the mission.

  Below him he could make out a sampan nestled against the wharf, and some of the locals running towards the trees. He threw his aircraft into a steep banking turn and dived towards the harbor, his wingtips skimming the branches of the casuarinas and the coconut palms.

  He saw three large cages on the wharf. He lined them up in the cross-hairs of his target finder and fired his wing cannons. One by one they exploded and splintered into fragments.

  Baking again, he strafed the length of the beach, as the Japanese soldiers ran for cover into the coconut palms, others throwing themselves off the sampans into the bay.

  He headed back to Guadalcanal with one last glance over his shoulder. Three sampans were sinking, plumes of black smoke belched from the superstructure of another, shot through with orange flame.

  ‘One for The Weatherman,’ he said into his closed face mask and headed for home.

  *****

  Lieutenant Tashiro watched the Wildcat make a low pass over the wharf, the tracer bullets kicking up sprays of water under the jetty. The death howls of the Pinschers were lost under the roar of the engines and the chatter of the cannons.

  He bore it all, stone-faced. After the fighter had turned for home he dusted off his uniform and inspected each of the dogs in turn to make sure they were all dead. Most of them weren’t even in one piece.

  He told his men not to bother burying them. He had them tossed off the end of the jetty to show his disgust. The shame was almost too much to bear.

  Chapter 53

  From their platform high in the trees below Mount Teatupa, Rachel and Corrigan watched the armada of planes pass overhead. The drone of their engines was deafening.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Corrigan said.

  Rachel made the sign of the cross. ‘This is it.’ Out on the horizon they had already counted an armada of sixty-one Japanese ships, all heading south.

  Corrigan squinted upwards. ‘Never seen so many planes in my whole bloody life. How many do you reckon there are?’

  Rachel took out Manning's leather-bound notebook and started to count the formations. Nine planes in a formation. Ten formations. Eleven. Twelve. More coming. More to the west now, over The Treasuries.

  By the time she was done she had estimated a hundred and twenty heavy bombers and eighty fighters.

  ‘What altitude would you say they're flying at?’ Rachel said.

  Corrigan rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand. ‘Five thousand feet. Maybe thirty. Christ, don't ask me.’

  ‘I'll say fifteen thousand feet then,’ Rachel said. ‘It's halfway in between.’

  ‘Better get back and crank up the radio then. The Yanks aren't going to believe this.’

  *****

  Corrigan watched the burning Zero dive towards Jervoise Bay. The pilot tried to land her belly down on the water but at the last moment the nose spilled forward and the fighter exploded. The burning wreckage was quickly swallowed by the lagoon.

  He could make out other stragglers returning to Kavieng and Rabaul. Two heavy bombers, glycol vapour trailing from their wings, had already dropped into the sea to the west.

  They had counted over two hundred planes flying north, fewer than fifty making their way back.

  Corrigan clambered effortlessly down the trunk. He gave her the numbers and she wrote them down in Manning’s notebook. Then she put her arms around him. Neither of them spoke.

  Corrigan felt curiously elated; it seemed almost a personal victory. A part of him even wished that Manning had been there to share it.

  *****

  Sanei watched them from the ridge, hugging her knees to her chest. Bright tears spilled down her cheeks.

  She hated Corrigan at that moment, as she had never hated anything before.

  She hated him even more than she hated the white missus.

  She knew now why Corrigan had come back, why he had not taken them away on the American boat when he had the chance. He would give the white missus everything he had promised her. He would let her have his babies and he would buy her a proper whitefella house. And then what would happen to her?

  Nothing she could do, she couldn’t compete with a white missus.

  She watched Corrigan take Rachel's face in his hands and kiss her. He had never kissed her that way, he never would.

  Unable to bear it, she ran off into the jungle.

  *****

  Wolfgang Heydrich was in a foul temper. His last two houseboys had already run away in terror. Now he didn’t have them to take out his frustrations on, he t
urned his attentions to Alice Melama'a and the old cook, Mary.

  Alice's crime was that she had neglected to strain the rice for his midday meal. Snatching a handful of hair, he dragged her along the veranda and threw her headlong down the steps.

  ‘Useless nigger!’

  ‘I look out longa you, mastah!’ Alice pleaded. ‘I make good kai-kai for you now!’

  Heydrich ran down the steps and aimed a kick at her rump. Alice twisted away, sobbing, then scrambled to her feet and ran off down the path. Heydrich watched her go, his anger spent for now. Damned natives. Not worth two Pfennigs, the lot of them.

  He looked round at the garden. Since the houseboys had run away it had been left untended. It was overgrown with weeds and the fast-encroaching jungle. Two wild pigs were brazenly rooting at the base of the frangipani trees.

  Well, what did he care. Everything was all to hell anyway. The Deutschland was gone and the Japanese gave him a pittance for his copra. The Colonel had hinted he was lucky they paid him at all.

  ‘South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ he snorted. ‘Scheiss!’

  They had eaten his food, slaughtered his chickens and his pigs, looted his gramophone and his radio. They were animals, all of them. Now he was trapped on this island with them, having to suffer their humiliations and their petty thieving. Gott in Himmell. Without his boat, he was virtually a prisoner.

  But Wolfgang Heydrich wasn't finished yet.

  He would think of something.

  *****

  Sanei climbed up the sandy path that led to the tabu hut on the outskirts of the village. A few women returning from the gardens with yams watched her with open curiosity.

  The vele man was sitting outside his hut, under the overhang of the thatch roof. He was very old, his skin scaly with disease, and he a cataract over his left eye. There were betel stains at the corners of his mouth.