As the corpsman tried to nudge past on the narrow catwalk, Patchett grabbed him lightly by the arm and whispered some advice in his ear: “I’d work on that attitude, swabbie, or you and me’s gonna lock asses. Didn’t the Navy tell you we’re all on the same side here?”
The corpsman—clearly disinterested at the prospect of locking asses with this hard-boiled top sergeant—stuttered something like an apology before fleeing aft down the passageway.
Jock helped Private Youngblood to his feet. “Let’s go see if we can find a quiet place to talk about this,” he said.
Youngblood replied, “I don’t think there is such a place on this submarine, sir.”
“Maybe I can work something out. Give me a minute.”
As Jock stepped through the bulkhead door, Patchett asked, “Did you know that Deuce feller had medical training, sir?”
“Not until after I picked him, Top. Bit of luck, eh? Considering we don’t have room for a medic on this trip.”
“Luck? You’re just dipped in it, ain’t you, sir?”
The sub captain had no objection to Jock bringing one of his men out to the cigarette deck for a little chat, as he put it. “Just make sure you both remember how to get your asses below deck on the double if we’ve got to dive. The last Navy man through is dogging that hatch. If you’re still on the other side…well, that’s too damn bad.”
As soon as he emerged topside, Joe Youngblood took a moment to enjoy the starry night and fresh sea air. “Too bad the other guys can’t come up here,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jock replied, “but we’re in the crew’s way enough as it is. It won’t be too long before we’ll be getting all the fresh air we can stand. You’re from Oklahoma, right?”
“Yes, sir. Near Ada.”
“What were you doing before the war?”
“I was working as a farmhand. Taking night courses at the college there, too.”
“What were you studying?”
“Education. I wanted to be a teacher.”
“I think you’d be a good one, Joe. You’ll get your chance when all this is over. But for now, teach me about this dream of yours that got you all riled up.”
“It was more than a dream, sir. It was an apparition. From my people’s stories.”
“So let me hear it.”
“It’s not easy to tell, sir…not something white people want to understand.”
“Give me a try.”
Youngblood unfurled the story of The Woman in White. The tale boiled down to this: in the course of the life of each and every person in his tribe, a woman in white—a spirit—would appear three times. Each appearance would herald a fortuitous event. The first two could happen at any time. The third happened when you were about to die.
“Dying? That’s a fortuitous event to your people?”
“That’s what I’ve been told ever since I was a child, sir. It’s the natural order of all things, they say.”
“You don’t sound convinced of that, Joe.”
Private Youngblood didn’t need to reply. He stood at the ship’s rail, staring silently into the night’s emptiness. The picture left no doubt in Jock’s mind the man wasn’t sold on the concept of death ever being a welcome thing in someone’s life.
“And I’m guessing you’ve seen her three times, Joe?”
“Sort of. Twice for real—the first time was in the big drought. Some of us saw her walking calm as could be through the fields, through the parched, dying crops, barefoot in that simple white dress, long black hair flying in wind like the blast of a furnace. We all hoped it meant the drought would end…and the next day, the rains came. The second time, I’d been arrested on some trumped-up charge. A grocery store got robbed…the storekeeper said some tall redskin kid did it. The police chief hated all Indians, so I was as good a suspect as any to him, even though I was nowhere near the place at the time. And I could prove it.”
“I’m sure you could, Joe. So what happened?”
“Late that night, I looked outside through the barred window of my jail cell and saw that same spirit woman walking down the street, singing one of the old songs of hope and courage, her dress glowing white hot in the moonlight. The next morning, just as they were about to take me to the courthouse for arraignment, there’s this big commotion at the police station. A bunch of federal marshals were arresting the police chief. Seems he’d been running cover for the local moonshiners…might have even killed a couple of people who got in his way. My charges got dropped the next day. They just went away, like the whole thing never happened.”
“And the third time,” Jock said, “that was in the dream you just had?”
“That’s right, sir. In my dream.”
“So you didn’t actually see her three times.”
“No, sir…but I think it was telling me the third time’s coming. In the dream, she was on an island.” He pointed in the direction they were sailing. “Maybe that island.”
“You mean Manus, Joe?”
He nodded. “If she’s there, I guess there’s not much I can do about it.”
“Yeah, there is, Joe. You can try to calm down and—”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I’m quite calm.”
There was no arguing that point. Joe Youngblood was calm…and seemed resigned to a fate Jock refused to accept.
“I’ve seen this so many times before, Joe. Fear can make us all believe strange things.”
Again there was no reply. Jock struggled in the darkness to read the look on Youngblood’s face. As near as he could tell, it was a scowl—a look of dismissal. The words the young Indian had said just a few minutes ago echoed in Jock’s head: not something white people want to understand.
A thin strip of pale gray began to paint the eastern horizon. Soon, the golden light of dawn would shine on their lone submarine as she sailed through the hostile waters of the Bismarck Sea.
“I need you to get below now,” the sub’s captain called to Jock. “If any planes pop up, we’ll need to dive in a hurry. I’d hate like hell to leave you behind.”
Chapter Eleven
Jock wiped the river of sweat from his eyes and checked his wristwatch. It was still two hours to sundown—and that meant two more hours just like the last twelve, submerged and loitering off Manus Island, waiting for the darkness which would allow them to surface undetected by the very OP they intended to seize. They’d have to stay drenched in sweat and breathing the sweltering air of the buttoned-up submarine a little longer.
Pressed face-first against the periscope, with his arms draped over its handles like an ardent dance partner, the captain asked Jock, “You want to take a look? You can’t see a whole lot…but you’ll get a pretty good idea where we are.”
Jock took his turn to dance with the periscope. The captain was right: you couldn’t make out any coastal details, but it was obvious they were getting close to where they needed to be. The looming conical mass of Mount Dremsel jutting out of the sea to the northwest made that quite clear.
“How far offshore are we?” Jock asked.
“About four miles,” the captain replied.
Jock pivoted the periscope a few degrees right. “So I’m guessing the mouth of the Warra River must be right about there. I want to take the rubber boats up that river if I can. You can still get us to within a mile of it when we launch?”
“Yeah, but no closer. It starts to get shallow real fast. You should be able to row to shore in about twenty minutes, though. The current will be pushing you in the right direction, too.”
Jock backed away from the periscope. “Okay, then,” he said, “I’ll be with my men until we’re ready to surface.”
“MAN OVERBOARD,” a seaman on the sub’s deck cried as he threw a life ring into the water. The GI it was aimed for, PFC Cotton Allred, never got to grab it. Sergeant Major Patchett already had a firm grip on his shoulder straps and was pulling him out of the water and into the rubber assault boat.
“If you let go of that
damn weapon, zipperhead,” the sergeant major said, “I’m letting go of you, too.” Once Allred sloshed onboard, Patchett added, “Just how clumsy are you, boy? Even the…even the Yankees managed to get themselves into these blow-up toys without going for a swim.” He’d almost said, Even the damn Nips managed…
From the other rubber boat, Jock called out, “Everything okay, Sergeant Major?”
“Everything’s just peachy keen, sir,” Patchett replied. “A little wetter than necessary, courtesy of our cracker sharpshooter here with his soaking wet weapon”—he put his face inches from Allred’s—“which he will not even think about disassembling to clean until we’re on dry land. Is that clear, boy?” Turning back to Jock, Patchett concluded, “But otherwise, sir…peachy keen.”
That didn’t comfort Jock very much. “Please tell me the radio didn’t get wet,” he said.
Sergeant McMillen, in Patchett’s boat, had already made sure of that. “The walkie-talkie is dry and serviceable, sir,” he reported.
“Excellent,” Jock replied. “Let’s get moving.”
Oars began to dig into the water.
“Good luck,” the sub captain called after the boats. “Be back for you guys in six days.”
“We’re counting on it,” Jock replied.
They’d been rowing through the darkness for ten minutes. In the bow of the lead boat, Jock studied the compass in his hand. The two GIs on the oars—Deuce Hashimoto and Bogater Boudreau—seemed to be keeping right on course. Sergeants Hadley and Botkin huddled at the stern with the walkie-talkie rigged as a radio direction finder. Botkin fiddled with the loop antenna and shook his head. “Something’s not right,” he told Hadley, who moved to the bow to relay the news to Jock.
“Sir,” Hadley said, “the transmission we expected from Dremsel at 2200…we didn’t get it. Just dead air.”
“Maybe they changed frequency,” Jock replied. “Did you check?”
“We’d just be guessing, sir. And the set would be down for a few minutes every time Botkin has to change crystals. We’d probably miss everything.”
“How about the Lorengau station? Did they transmit as usual?”
“Yes, sir. Botkin’s getting the bearing to it now. But with only one signal…”
Hadley stopped himself. He didn’t need to tell Major Miles that with only one radio signal from the Japs, they couldn’t get a good fix on their boat’s position. It took two.
“What are we going to do, sir?” Hadley asked.
“We’re going to stay on this compass heading…and keep our fingers crossed good and tight.”
A minute later, the lead boat’s bow bumped against something quite solid, and it came to an abrupt stop. Low waves lapped against its stern, spinning the craft so it bobbed broadside against whatever was holding it fast. “This can’t be right, sir,” Hadley whispered, shining a blackout flashlight into the wall of stilt roots scraping the rubber hull. “This is a mangrove…and it looks so thick you probably can’t even walk through it.”
Bogater Boudreau said, “Maybe we can just ride the crocs through it.”
“Knock if off, Bogater,” Hadley replied. “That ain’t funny.”
“Wasn’t meant to be, First Sergeant. I tell you what, though…right this minute, I fear the croc more than the Jap. No man’s crazy enough to be out here…’cept us, of course.”
“I thought you Cajuns weren’t afraid of crocodiles,” Hadley said.
“Not when we can see ’em…or when we’re not in some glorified inner tube they can rip apart with one bite.”
“Knock it off, both of you,” Jock snapped. “Stay alert, dammit.”
Patchett’s boat materialized out of the darkness, bumping into the lead boat with the low moan of rubber sliding against rubber. “A little premature for a landfall, ain’t it, sir?” the sergeant major said. “Either that, or you guys just set a new world’s record for the one-mile row.”
“No shit,” Jock replied as he studied the map in the red glow of Hadley’s flashlight. “Come here, Top. Take a look at this.”
Patchett hopped into the lead boat. “Botkin couldn’t get a fix from Dremsel like we hoped,” Jock said. “But we know where we set out from and we sailed a pretty constant heading—”
“Pretty can be an awful inexact word, sir.”
“Tell me about it,” Jock said as he circled a spot on the map. “The question is, are we east or west of the Warra River? Assuming the current was exactly what the Navy said it was…I’d say we hit land here, somewhere near this old mission. If that’s true, we’re east. What do you think, Top?”
Patchett took a minute to study the map. When he finally looked up, he said, “I’m not so sure, sir. Lots of variables, like the Navy’s info, for openers…”
“Yeah, sure, Top…but look at it this way. When the sun comes up, we’ll get our bearings real quick one way or the other. We won’t be able to miss Mount Dremsel standing up there like a giant statue. But if we take our best shot now and actually find the river, we can ride it almost all the way to the bluffs below Dremsel and save ourselves a whole lot of jungle walking…and a whole lot of time.”
“So what are we gonna do, sir?”
“We’re going to start rowing west along this mangrove. If I’m right, the coastline will turn north and we’ll hit something that feels like a river pretty soon.”
Patchett had doubts he didn’t dare voice in front of the men: If we actually find the river, and if there are any Japs around, we’ll be sitting ducks in these boats. Then again, floating along under cover of darkness sure beats the hell out of humping it through a pitch-black jungle. And we can’t turn back. Hell, there’s no “back” to turn to…so it’s time for some “unity of command,” I reckon.
“You heard the major,” he hissed at the oarsmen, his arm a signpost pointing west. “Get these damn boats moving thataway right fucking now.”
They could hear little as their boats slid along the mangrove, just the soft slapping of the oars against water and the gentle burble of wakes, sounds so light not even the birds nesting in the mangrove’s trees stirred. They could see even less. To their right, the shadowy outlines of the gnarled, tangled stilt roots could—to ten pairs of apprehensive eyes—look like the talons of giant birds of prey or perhaps prison bars as depicted by artists on the edge of insanity. To their left, there was nothing but the invisible sea.
Like Patchett, Sergeant McMillen was having his doubts, too. Taking a turn on the oars with Joe Youngblood, he mumbled, “Are we even sure this is Manus we’re rowing around?”
“Hard for it not to be, Sarge,” Youngblood said, “considering we were only a mile away from it when we left the submarine, and it’s sixty miles long.”
PFC Allred—the sharpshooter who had fallen into the water trying to get off the submarine—kept a wary eye on the land slipping past. He had doubts, too: Will this weapon even fire after I dunked it? Sergeant Major won’t let me take it apart in the boat…too easy to lose a part into the water, he says. Just shake it out and dry-fire it a couple of times, he says, until we get on dry land. It won’t rust up that fast, he says. As I live and breathe, he’d better be right. If some Jap pops up along here, I want to be holding something in my hands that shoots better’n my pecker.
In the lead boat, Bogater Boudreau had no doubts, just questions. “How come we took two of these boats, sir, when we could’ve all fit in one with a little room to spare?”
Jock replied, “So we’ve got a hundred percent better chance of getting out of here if we lose one. I’d have taken three if they could’ve fit in that damn submarine.”
It seemed like much longer, but only five minutes had passed before the mangrove to their right suddenly dissolved into the darkness. “Turn right,” Jock said, pointing to a new course. “Yeah, that’s it…come around a little more. There—now we’re heading north.”
In a few moments, the unmistakable outlines of stilt roots jutting from the water reappeared. “Okay,” Jock sai
d, “this is looking better. If I’m right about where we are, in about ten minutes the land is going to bend back to the west…and we’ll be at the mouth of the Warra.”
Hadley asked, “How are we going to know for sure we’re at the river, sir?” The question wasn’t a challenge, just an honest expression of concern.
“The Warra’s not that wide, a little less than a hundred yards at the mouth. We’ll row diagonally across it until we hit the far bank. That’s the bank we need to be on, anyway—the west bank. It should only take a few minutes.”
“And if we don’t hit it, sir?”
“Well, Tom, we’re going to have to get out and walk on this island at some point. It’s just a question of where we do it.”
It had all come together. They were definitely rowing up a river now—the men on the oars could feel the current fighting them, slowing them down. All the assumptions of time, distance, and geography had become hard facts. This had to be the Warra.
One more calculated assumption remained: how long it would take to reach the river’s unnavigable headwaters. Just where these headwaters lie was in itself a guess. Jock figured they’d be able to row for about four miles until they reached a point where the elevation began to rise and the river turned to shallow rapids. Even at this slower pace, they’d make it to those headwaters just before dawn. Then they’d become infantrymen again and have to cover the six uphill miles to Mount Dremsel on foot.
They heard the hiss of the rapids sooner than they expected—Jock estimated about two miles sooner. “Fucking Aussie maps,” Patchett said as they pulled the boats ashore. “Can’t even get contour lines in the right place.”
“I’m not complaining, Top,” Jock replied. “The maps were good enough to find this damn place in the dark just by feeling our way along.” He checked his watch. “We’ve got an hour to sun-up. Give the men a rest stop until then, half on perimeter, half off. Once we’ve got some light and we can see what the hell we’re doing, we’ll stash these boats.”
Operation Blind Spot (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 4) Page 6
