“It still feels too damn close,” Patchett replied.
Jock looked west, to the cluster of small offshore islands they’d soon be rowing toward. Though they were the same distance from their rubber boat as Manus—some three miles—they seemed tiny and incredibly far away. Nothing about them suggested safe haven. Even rowing with the prevailing wind and current, it seemed unlikely they’d reach them anytime soon.
“Let’s get one more three-sixty scan with the binos,” Jock said. “If we don’t see anything, we start rowing west.”
He left the scanning to Patchett and Hadley. He’d lost his binoculars last night in the battle with the Jap patrol boat, along with everything else but his waterlogged Thompson. The two top sergeants were better suited for the task anyway. Lookout duty was best left to tall men who could actually stand, that extra height pushing the horizon out nearly five miles.
It got deathly quiet as Patchett and Hadley, standing back to back, scanned in a slow, synchronous pivot that would have seemed comically choreographed if the stakes weren’t so high. The silence was shattered when Private Allred shouted, “HEY, SHE’S GOT WATER. A WHOLE FUCKING BOTTLE OF IT.”
He was standing, mouth agape, pointing at Anne Marie. His entire body seemed cast in an accusatory gesture. “AIN’T THIS SOME BULLSHIT,” Allred continued, “WHILE THE REST OF US GOT JACKSHIT, SHE’S GOT—”
“That’s enough, Private,” Jock said.
“Yeah,” Patchett added, pushing the silent but still open-mouthed Allred back down in his seat. “Just shut the fuck up, son.”
Private Allred was right, though. Anne Marie was cradling Mike McMillen’s head in her arm, raising it so he could drink from a glass bottle she had taken from her medical kit.
Jock asked, “What the hell’s going on, Anne Marie?”
“This man needs water more than anyone else here,” she replied.
“Where’d that water come from?”
“From the rain, Major, just like all the rest. I filled the empty bottles I had when we filled the canteens.”
Jock turned to Jillian, giving her an accusing look everyone understood: You were filling the canteens, too. Did you know what she was doing?
“Don’t blame Jillian,” Anne Marie said. “She knew nothing about it.”
Jock asked, “Why didn’t you tell us you had that water, Anne Marie?”
“I’m a nurse. I’m supposed to be prepared for medical emergencies, and with all the blood he’s lost, Sergeant McMillen certainly qualifies as an emergency. A dire emergency, Major.”
“Ahh, bullshit,” Patchett said. “We’re all dying of thirst here…and you’re hoarding, lady.”
“Not hoarding, Sergeant Major. Conserving. And the rest of us are not dying of thirst. Not yet. And before you ask, rest assured that I have not drank a drop of it myself.”
Patchett shook his head, not wanting to believe her. He asked Jock, “What are you gonna do about this, sir? People get killed for less than what she done.”
Jillian slid next to Anne Marie, a solitary show of support amidst a hostile crowd. “She didn’t mean any harm, Jock. She’s done nothing but help the lot of you this whole time.”
“I know that, Jill,” Jock replied. He cast a stern glance at his angry men, and then added the innocuous-sounding words they all knew was meant as a warning: “We all know that, don’t we?”
When there was not even a murmur of obedient response, Jock repeated, louder this time, “Don’t we?”
It was slow in coming, but Patchett nodded first. The others took their cue from him.
“Listen, Anne Marie,” Jock began, “we appreciate your diligence…and we sure do appreciate all the help you’ve been. But here’s the thing—this is a military unit, and when it comes down to deciding what’s best for that unit, only one person gets to decide. And that person is me. So I’ve got to ask you, how much water do you have?”
She pulled two more bottles from her medical kit. “This much, Major…about two liters.”
“Two goddamn liters,” Patchett mumbled. “Shit…we could all live for a whole fucking day off that.”
“Yeah, we could,” Jock continued, “so this is what we’re going to do. Anne Marie, turn those bottles over to the sergeant major, who will distribute an equal share to every person here, with one exception—Sergeant McMillen will get a double share.”
“He’ll need much more than that, Major.”
“I’m afraid we’re all going to need much more than that, Anne Marie.”
There was a commotion at the front of the boat. Hadley, who’d never stopped searching the horizon, was so excited he almost fell into the water.
“Over there,” he said as he pointed to the sky. “Airplanes…two of them…looks like twin-engined jobs…”
“Shit,” Patchett replied as he grabbed binoculars, too. “They better not be some Jap bombers.”
“Can’t tell yet,” Hadley said.
What had been just dots to the naked eye a minute ago grew quickly into full-sized aircraft. The markings were still indistinct—but definitely not the red disks of Japan. Their course would take them almost right overhead.
Patchett asked, “How high up you make them?”
“Two thousand feet, maybe,” was Hadley’s guess.
Botkin struggled to get the radio up and running but it was no use. “That last battery I had…it’s no good, sir. The moisture killed it.”
“Shit.”
“Hot damn! They’re Aussie Beaufighters,” Hadley said. Like a reflex, he began to wave his arm at the planes.
Jillian couldn’t keep the sea captain in her under control. She yelled, “Use those oars like shovels to stir up some foam around us.”
Patchett scoffed at her suggestion, telling Jock, “We need to get their attention with them Very flares, sir.”
“Don’t bother,” Jock replied. “They probably won’t see those flares from way up there. They’ll get lost in the glare of the sun on the water.”
Their conversation quickly turned heated. “Dammit, sir…we gotta do something positive to get their attention. We’re just a little fucking dot in this ocean.”
Jock replied, “Just keep waving and churning up the water like she says with everything we’ve got—oars, gun butts, the works. We’ve only got two flares left and we just might need them in the dark sometime, so we’re going to save them. Do I make myself clear, Sergeant Major?”
Patchett looked ready for a fight. “With all due respect, sir, I just don’t think—”
“Put a damn lid on it, Top. You’ve been on an airplane once in your whole life. I spent the fucking Port Moresby campaign in a goddamn airplane, looking down. I think I know a little better than you how aerial observation works.”
The Aussies in the sky seemed eager to prove Jock right. The lead Beaufighter began to turn while dropping down for a closer look. The wingman was close behind.
Patchett cycled the bolt on his Thompson and said, “If them fuckers think they’re gonna strafe us…”
“At ease, Top,” Jock said, “and just keep waving.”
Jillian cradled her arms across her chest as tears streamed down her cheeks. Jock asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t wave,” she said. “It hurts so bloody bad.”
“That’s okay, honey. I think we’ve got enough arms at work already.”
The two planes flashed past them close enough to see the pilots waving back from their cockpits. The leader climbed away while the wingman came back around for a second pass. This time, he dropped a canister on a bright orange parachute before climbing to join his circling leader.
“Just like a jungle drop,” Patchett said as the canister splashed down a hundred yards away. “You gotta go find the damn thing. It better not sink.”
It didn’t. But it was much too big to be pulled into the crowded boat. With all the care their exhausted bodies could muster, they unpacked the canister while it stayed in the water, carefully opening the li
d and holding it upright while item after item was brought onto the boat.
There were five boxes of rations, enough to feed them for several days.
One well-stocked medical kit.
A five-gallon can of water marked “POTABLE.”
And a handwritten note, which read:
Rescue Cat to arrive within the hour.
We’ll keep you company upstairs until fuel runs low.
Use the parachute as a panel marker.
Cheers,
P/O N Saunders, RAAF
The Beaufighters’ fuel only lasted another twenty minutes. They were barely out of sight, though, flying south back to New Guinea, when the rumble of the Cat’s engines began to blow in on the trade wind. The Cat—a Royal Australian Air Force Catalina flying boat—lumbered in from the southeast, making a beeline for the rubber boat. Jock’s people used the orange parachute as directed, holding it over their heads to aid the Cat’s crew in locating them—a spot of contrast in the bright blue sea. The parachute served another, very practical purpose, too: it made a very effective sun screen.
The big flying boat splashed down and, once slowed to taxi speed, doubled back, coasting to a stop with its wingtip just yards away. Crewmen in the open observation blister beckoned them forward with hand signals; there was no point trying to shout over the clatter of the Cat’s idling engines. Once they rowed close enough to the blister, ropes were thrown to secure the bobbing boat against the aft fuselage.
Mike McMillen was hoisted aboard first. Then, one by one, the rest climbed through the blister, until only Patchett and Jock were still in the boat. “Up you go, sir,” Patchett said, acting as a crutch for his wounded C.O. as the Cat’s crewmen took hold of him.
A flight sergeant asked Patchett, “Have you got everything you need from the bloody boat?”
Patchett took a quick glance—there was nothing left onboard but empty ration boxes and the water can they’d already half drained. He almost tossed the can overboard, but then—perhaps replaying the morning’s events in his head—handed the can over to the flight sergeant. That done, he opened the boat’s scuttle valves and climbed onboard the Cat.
“Good riddance to you,” Patchett mumbled as he cut the boat free. He didn’t bother to watch it swamp and slip away.
The takeoff run seemed to take miles of bouncing and lurching, but finally they were airborne. Jock took a long look around the cabin. Compared to the Aussie flight crew, freshly washed and in clean uniforms, his tattered, filthy people were crammed into the Cat’s tiny cabin like the refugees they were. They gnawed like hungry dogs on the survival rations dropped to them not an hour ago. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d bite anyone foolish enough to try and take their food away.
The flight sergeant who had helped them onboard turned out to be the plane’s navigator. “Sir, the flight will last about an hour and a half,” he said to Jock. “We’re taking you to Cape Sudest, in Papua. Do you know where that is?”
Jock shot him a withering look. “Don’t make me laugh, Sergeant. Yeah, we know where the hell it is. But why there and not Milne Bay?”
“Those are our orders, sir…and we’ve got to get back to a very tight patrol schedule.”
Jock yelled across the cabin to Patchett, “HEY, SERGEANT MAJOR, SPREAD THE WORD…THEY’RE TAKING US BACK TO BUNA. AIN’T THAT HOT SHIT?”
Patchett replied with nothing but a tight, pained smile.
Jillian had overhead what Jock said. Her face reflected all of Patchett’s pain, but without any trace of a smile.
“Buna,” she mumbled. “Bloody hell...not again.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the flight sergeant said, and truly meant it. “Did you fight in the Buna Campaign?”
“We fought, we died…the whole bit, Sergeant. Those two ladies were caught up in it, too. But that’s ancient history now. Maybe you can tell me something else while we’re at it. I don’t want to sound ungrateful to you guys, but what happened to the submarine that was supposed to pick us up?”
“I have no idea, sir. But I can tell you this. It looks like your whole Navy’s gone west for a big blow-up with the Nip fleet.”
“Do you guys know anything about the Hollandia assault?”
“Just rumors, sir.”
“Are they good or bad, Sergeant?”
“Good, sir. Definitely good. We hear it’s going fairly well.”
The navigator returned to his duties on the flight deck. Jock slumped back against the cabin bulkhead and became lost in his thoughts: What that sergeant just said—“We hear it’s going fairly well”—I take that to mean we did our job. The Japs never got a look at the invasion fleet from that mountain on Manus…
And I found Jillian, too.
If only this damn leg…
He squirmed in the rock-hard seat, his wounded and useless leg stretched out as the pain grew steadily worse:
It feels like I’m getting stabbed with a thousand little knives.
He looked down the cabin at Mike McMillen, lying quietly as Anne Marie tended to him. Jock’s viewing perspective was most unfortunate for a man whose own leg wound was steadily worsening: he was looking right at the bottom of McMillen’s stump. It was an oozing morass of blood red and crusty black.
Jock had to look away. The longer he looked at that stump, the worse the pain in his leg became.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Cape Sudest—and the entire Buna area stretching inland from its shore—was so different from the swampy battleground it had been a year ago. It was a logistical base now, one of several in Papua serving as supply depots and transportation hubs for MacArthur’s push down the north coast of New Guinea. Paved roads and wooden walkways displaced what was once nothing but watery muck. The front line had moved west almost five hundred miles, making the entire area decidedly a rear echelon, a bureaucratic jungle manned by paper-shuffling officers and men whose impressions of combat were, save for the few who had actually flown or sailed into harm’s way, gleaned entirely from the barroom bravado and the movies they enjoyed when their work day was over. Their war was strictly a sun-up to sun-down affair.
Somewhere in the vast Allied chain of command which ended here at Buna, the ball had definitely been dropped; as Jock and his people struggled to the dock from the launch that met the Cat, there was nobody to collect them. They realized then and there how lucky they were that someone—somewhere—had at least remembered to pluck them from the sea off Manus. But that seemed to be as far as the accommodations went for the men of Operation Blind Spot.
Troops on stevedore duty gazed uneasily at these bloodied warriors, who might as well have been armed visitors from a strange and savage world. The type of men who’d rip your head off at the first hint of standard military bullshit. The two women didn’t look too friendly, either. Patchett easily intimidated a young PFC truck driver, commandeering his deuce-and-a-half to take them to the field hospital. On arrival, a flustered yet pompous second lieutenant—a living manifestation of the high-level communications failure—told Jock, “You people don’t belong here. We have no paperwork on you. I can’t admit you. For all I know, you’re all AWOL.” His nose was turned up as if their rank odor offended him.
Speaking from the wheelchair Bogater Boudreau had scrounged, Jock replied. “I’m going to do you a big favor, Lieutenant, and not rip that cute little Quartermaster Corps insignia off your collar and stuff it right down your throat. My people don’t need pencil-pushers right now, they need doctors. Now get the fuck out of my way and make yourself useful—get me a landline to Thirty-Second Division HQ, on the double.”
The lieutenant was more flustered than ever now. “Where on Earth do I find them, sir?”
“Try Milne Bay, Lieutenant.”
“But that’s a couple of hundred miles from here.”
“No shit,” Jock replied. “Now get them on the fucking horn.”
This tent-city hospital had no formal triage unit. It hadn’t needed one; being so far from actual com
bat, there was never a flood of casualties. Save for a few malaria and dysentery cases and one unlucky GI who’d fallen off a truck, breaking his arm in the process, the place was deserted at the moment. The wounded in Jock’s party were the biggest influx of people seeking emergency medical care since a careless mess sergeant caused a minor epidemic of diarrhea. A nurse in prim whites nearly fainted when she first laid eyes on Mike McMillen’s stump.
The doctor examining McMillen had a stronger stomach. He was a white-haired lieutenant colonel—Jock figured him for an old-school Army doc: Probably been in since The Great War. He introduced himself as Doctor Lewis.
“Who did this cauterization?” the doctor asked, gently probing the seared area.
“I did,” Anne Marie replied. “There was no other option.”
Heavy on the sarcasm, Lewis said, “Is that so? Are you a doctor, then?”
“No, sir, I’m a nurse.” There wasn’t the faintest hint of inferiority or apology in her voice.
“A nurse, eh?” Noting her accent, he added, “You sound German.”
“No, sir, I’m Dutch.”
“Well, one slip and you could’ve killed this man outright, little lady…but it looks like you saved his life instead. Excellent job.” Turning to his squeamish nurse, the doctor added, “Get this man ready for surgery immediately. Doctor Clancy’s been dying to get his hands on an amputation ever since he got here.”
The doctor summoned another nurse. “Cut that trouser leg off the major here,” he said.
“If it’s all the same to you, Colonel,” Jock replied, “I have three other wounded people I’d like you to have a look at first.”
“If you mean those two bandaged-up sergeants of yours, they walked in all by themselves. I doubt they’re critical. You, Major, on the other hand—”
“Don’t mean to interrupt, sir, but there’s someone else, too. That woman clutching her arms to her chest…”
“Oh, that Aussie rag doll with the bloody this and bloody that always coming out of her mouth?”
Operation Blind Spot (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 4) Page 20
