4a had been in place for more than eleven hours and Joe Camp’s fevered mind was working the problems of the ambush over in his head again and again, not really to solve them (they had already been solved) but as a way to kill time. Camp scratched his face and suddenly removed a small, red-brown snake from his bootstraps, throwing it away into the underbrush with a disgusted look. Usually, only the bigger snakes tended to be poisonous, but he really had very little knowledge about the local wildlife. Looking up at the dim light which filtered through the canopy, he was distinctly aware that he was a long way from Harvard. If his fraternity brothers could only see him now. Kappa Nu, tried and true...
At that moment Keta, a lead sentry to the northeast, emitted a shrill cry, imitating a local bird. Camp heard the stealthy clicks of safeties being switched off from shotguns, and two tiny sounds across from him told him that Pagou had armed the mines which were placed along the path well clear of their position. Then, suddenly, as Camp cocked his submachine gun, a low whistle sounded from Keta, a signal Camp had not expected. It meant that whoever was coming up the path, they were not Japanese. The Kachins, ever mindful of his commands, stayed still. Joe Camp wiped the sweat out of his eyes and waited for what seemed like a long time.
The first man to come over the rise was even smaller than the Kachins, not more than four feet tall. His skin was painted with a black, crumbly paint in odd patterns, including two lines beneath his glinty eyes which put Joe in mind of football season. The little man’s skin was a deep, rich red-brown and his black hair was shaved at his temples and elaborately tied in strands at the top, with knotted ponytails hanging at his back. Other than a loincloth made of gaur skin he wore nothing except his smile. The smile, though, was quite disturbing. Glinty, bright white sharpened teeth shone from the darkness of his face as he moved briskly up the path, humming some repetitive tune to himself. If he saw any of the men of 4a, he made no indication. Then he was gone. Camp sprang up on numb legs and shot across the path to Pagou, who he found clutching a detonator in one hand and his shotgun in the other. They conversed briefly in Kachin whispers.
“What tribe?” Camp asked.
“Tachoan, very bad. Bad people.”
“Do they cooperate with the Japanese?”
Pagou shook his head gravely.
“Do they kill the Japanese?”
Pagou nodded.
“So why are they bad?”
“They kill everybody.”
“What?”
“They are airung.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Eaters. Dead eaters.”
“Cannibals?” Camp asked in English.
“I don’t know that word,” Pagou said with a smile.
Another bird whistle from Keta, followed by the noise of many people approaching.
“I’m going to talk to them. If anything happens, let ‘em have it.”
Pagou shook his head as if Joe Camp didn’t understand a thing about it and nodded sadly.
“Sure thing, Father.”
Camp sidled out into the path, a Thompson slung on his shoulder and a .45 shoved in his belt strap, which had been tied like a rope around the waist of a scarecrow. Camp wiped his hand across his face and pushed his thinning blond hair back in the same motion, slicking it down with sweat. From the darkness of the bushes he could see the brown orbs of Pagou’s eyes watching him.
A group of about twenty of the little Tachoans came over the hill, all smiling. Camp watched as two of the tribesmen, seeing him, separated themselves from their group and moved towards him with their empty hands raised.
“Hiya,” one said cheerfully, showing shark-like, perfectly white teeth. The other, older one remained silent.
“Hello,” Joe Camp said in English, suddenly on guard for no reason he could place.
“That a nice gun there, misser,” the young one, painted with black and red stripes, said cheerfully.
“Yes.”
“You British man?” The Tachoan’s thick, black eyebrows rose over comically large eyes as he considered Camp.
“No. American,” Camp answered, looking at the group of Tachoans gathered at the crest of the hill on the path behind the two leaders. Apparently they had been hunting. A litter carried between two men bore a heavy load covered in some type of billowy, white material.
The young Tachoan man conversed with the older man in a pidgin Camp could not understand except for the word “American.” The old Tachoan mumbled something to Camp, which the younger one readily translated.
“He say you bring guns and we kill invaders for you.”
“That can be arranged.”
“I do not know this word.”
“I can do that,” Camp reiterated.
“This is good,” the young man said, and smiled wider, like the Cheshire cat. Camp waited for him to disappear into his grin. It wouldn’t have surprised him.
Camp spoke carefully. “I need to know you are enemies of the Japanese before I can give you guns.”
“Oh. We are big enemies. We olompai tarpu-sentei. We nashu cthulhu-sentei.”
Camp’s mind raced over his lexicon of Burmese words and came up with a few matches to the Tachoans’ strange sentence. “Cthulhu” was a word completely unknown to him. From what he could understand from the other words, the little Tachoan man had probably said something like, “We eat the (foreign) man. We are the sons of the (some name, probably of a local deity)”.
“I must know this before I give you guns—“ Camp began to explain, and was cut off by the young and older Tachoans conversing rapidly in pidgin.
“He say we show you,” the little Tachoan laughed.
With a whistle from the older Tachoan, the litter bearers trotted forward in well-practiced lockstep. As they approached, something dropped in Camp’s gut as he realized the white cloth covering the load on the litter, which was stained with blood, was the shredded remains of a parachute. Nothing was parachuted into Burma except Allied equipment...and troops. Camp unslung his submachine gun and held it ready, but pointed at the ground as the little smiling men pulled back the silk.
Four gutted, naked Japanese bodies were stacked one on top of the other like butchered hogs, tied to a single bearing pole of mahagony, their arms and legs twisted and near white to accommodate their dead weight, and their hands were tied so tightly to the pole that the skin there had split. Their innards had been removed with a hunter’s efficiency and their legs were covered in black stains as if they had been standing when the butcher had gone to work. The faces of the dead stared in goggle-eyed amazement at the canopied sky, their heads thrown back as if in a religious ecstasy. Camp tried to keep his expression clear. Although he had killed many Japanese and had studied many seemingly backwards cultures, he had never seen anything like this before. He tried to swallow, forgot how, and struggled to clear his throat as his eyes attempted to maintain a steady, emotionless stare.
Despite the corpses abuzz with flies, and the smell, the little Tachoans continued to smile and laugh in their strange guttural language. As Camp watched a Tachoan child wandered up to the litter and picked a chunk of dried blood from one of the dead man’s ears. The tiny child grinned and placed the morsel in his mouth like he was savoring a fine candy.
“We will find you later. We will send you guns,” Camp said, his mouth numb, watching the child chew its treat.
The two leaders smiled and nodded to themselves.
“If you find men like me in the jungle, what will you do?” Camp asked, trying to figure out if the parachute that covered their kill was for equipment or for a man. Something told him the little Tachoans were dangerously clever.
“We will bring them to the pass at Chaukan,” the young Tachoan said somberly.
“You will not eat them? No olompi sentei?”
The young Tachoan laughed loud and long in response to Camp’s clumsy use of his language. The older Tachoan leaned in and conferred with him for a moment in their pidgin and then he to
o started laughing.
“You think we eat the white man?” the younger Tachoan finally said, smiling.
“You don’t?”
“You too skinny. Always sick... No good meat.” The younger Tachoan sucked in his cheeks in a mockery of Camp’s malarial look and turned to his people, who seeing his odd expression, laughed, revealing shaved, razor teeth. The little people laughed around him for a long time.
“We will find you,” Joe Camp mumbled and stepped back as the procession moved forward again. At the back of the group four Tachoan boys struggled under the weight of three recently bloodied Japanese Arisaka bolt-action rifles each, slung over their thin shoulders. As they passed, Camp could smell the wafting odor of gunpowder from the recently fired weapons.
Two of the boys (smiling, always smiling) were wearing officers’ caps from the 55th Division of the Japanese army, and the belts slung at their shoulders held insignia markings of the 5th Regimental Mountain Group. This was the division and regiment that Joe Camp and his commandos had been lying in wait for all night.
As the last of the Tachoan’s crested the hill, the Kachin’s of 4a stood up from the underbrush. Pagou looked over at Camp and said, “What now, Father?”
But Joe Camp wasn’t paying attention. He was looking away in the direction the Tachoans had taken up the road, eyes focused on some distant point. The Tachoan’s laughter continued to float back to him through the forest. They seemed endlessly amused at Joe Camp’s sense of humanity.
They had been traveling now for more than an hour and had three more to go. After the meeting with the Tachoans, 4a had packed up its gear and headed northwest along the ragged path in the opposite direction of the little savages. Since the 5th Regimental Mountain Group seemed to have been eliminated or at least routed, Camp radioed command at Nazira for new orders. A return message indicated that Camp was to meet with an officer being flown in from India with orders from OSS command. The rendezvous point was a four hour trek through the highland jungle.
Camp was not looking forward to meeting with anyone from OSS command. Those that came into the jungle for a jaunt and thought that they knew the ropes were the worst. The jungle didn’t seem that bad to those who had a way out to India or China, hell, a way out to anywhere but Burma. You would think that a well-fed man stepping off a plane from some civilized place would pay some grudging respect to the scarecrow-thin, battle-hardened jungle man, but, still, somehow, the officers from command all expected you to feel a camaraderie with them, and it was very hard to manufacture something like that on the spot.
However, Joe Camp would salute and “yes sir” and “no sir” whoever stepped off that rickety plane from civilization like he was President Roosevelt himself. If Roosevelt was still the president...
Flying into the jungle was relatively common, although Joe had not heard from OSS command for more than two months in that manner. Small airplanes brought Allied officers in and the wounded out. Equipment and troops were usually dropped from the air, but occasionally—not often—small commando groups would bleed over the border into Burma undetected.
4a straddled either side of the path, nearly silent as they crept forward, alert and ready for anything. Camp saw the two Kachins in the lead hunker down suddenly at the crest of a hill and, like dominoes, one by one the rest of 4a sank into the underbrush and disappeared. Camp unslung his Thompson and waited, kneeling behind a cluster of bamboo shafts, watching the road through an opening in the foliage. Only the hat of the Kachin who was covering the man on point was visible. The road was silent except for jungle sounds until Keta, the scout, gave the all-clear.
Camp sidled over the hill with the rest of his men. Below him in a small dip in the road were the remains of the Japanese 5th Regimental Mountain Group. Equipment of Imperial Japanese manufacture lay scattered in rough piles, thrown down by the bearers as the fighting began, no doubt. There was too much of it on the road for any significant number of the 5th to have survived the encounter. Twelve men lay dead in the road in bizarre positions, dressed in light khakis and t-shirts, skin alive with flies, guns gone (taken by the Tachoan boys, Camp thought). Most of the Japanese bodies had contorted to configurations not possible in life. Camp had never seen anything like it before. Some portions of their skin seemed to be severely burned, and certain limbs were twisted so thoroughly that bones appeared to have broken due to muscle contraction alone. The twelve in the road had yet another thing in common: their eyes had been put out.
Those that had died off the road were found laying spread eagle, staring at the sky, still clutching their rifles, as if they had been picked off suddenly by a sniper. No bullet wounds could be found on their maggot-infested bodies. In the end, over forty bodies were found within a half-mile of the road. The rest, no doubt, had stumbled out into the rainforest hoping to return to their camp alone. Most would not make it.
The men of 4a dutifully policed up ammunition and anything else of value from the remains of the massacre, while Joe Camp sat on a stump lost in thought. Something was nagging at the back of his brain, something important about the Tachoans and the Japanese. Pagou and another Kachin rigged a box containing a fully operational Japanese machine gun for bearing using two thick shafts of bamboo. They would carry it to the airstrip and give it to those who could use it. Watching this, it slowly dawned on Joe Camp. He stood up suddenly.
The Tachoan adults, as far as Camp could recall, had not carried any weapons.
Pagou, as if reading Joe Camp’s thoughts shook his head sadly and repeated, almost to himself:
“Very bad, bad people.”
The L-1 Vigilant hooked the air like a gull, bouncing forward on the grass of the landing strip as the wind lifted its fragile frame twice before finally letting it go. The tiny, olive drab two-seater’s engine sputtered to a halt as it taxied to one side. The smell of gasoline and cooking meat hung in the air of the airfield, which had been hacked from the side of a low rise in the jungle by men toiling for hours with machetes and shovels just the week before. In another two weeks, Camp knew, no evidence of this airfield would remain. The jungle was just that fast.
Camp watched from his meal of assorted B-ration cans, which he had set up in front of him on the grass in some dim approximation of a civilized dinner. As he ate a slice of canned apple, two white men exited the L-1, both in non-descript khakis with little or no insignia (not surprising; it was a guerrilla war after all), talking to one another as they walked towards Camp’s men. There were about forty men in the clearing, only fifteen of whom were under Camp’s command. The rest were freedom fighters who had gathered here for supplies or news.
One huddled group of native Karens, guns never far from reach, continued to eat their meal of Gaur meat, unmindful of the racket the landing plane had made. Not one man of that group even looked up. Camp’s group of Kachins happily chattered away, splitting a meal of cooked gibbon and canned pineapple. Two Chinese soldiers from Chang Kai Shek’s non-existent Chinese Expeditionary Force morosely picked at their tin plates full of brown rice, looking lost and out of their league.
Camp stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked forward. The larger of the two men waved at Camp and walked over as if he knew him, and Camp puzzled for a moment before retrieving his glasses from his front pocket. It was not until he was within fifteen feet that Camp realized that the man was not only someone from OSS command, he was OSS command. As far as Burma went, Major Carl Eifler was as high up on the OSS totem pole as you were likely to get before having to leave the country. With a pug face and the build of a linebacker, the two hundred and fifty pound man dwarfed Joe Camp; together they looked like a before and after advertisement for a Charles Atlas Body Building kit. Camp snapped a startled salute, almost knocking his glasses off his head. Eifler cackled.
“You trying to get me shot, lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Joe replied, wide eyed.
“Donovan’s got some plans for you. You’re outta here.”
“But s
ir—“ Camp began.
“Don’t give me any lip, Joe. They need you. You’ll get your orders when we get to Nazira.”
“But 4a—“ Joe glanced over at his men, who were watching the exchange quietly.
“You’ll be back shortly. Until then, Captain Wilkinson will be taking over your spot.” Eifler pointed back at the other man who had ridden in the plane, a clean shaven, intelligent-looking man with a fine thin build. Ivy League. With his luck, the guy was probably a Yaley, Joe thought.
“Give me a minute with 4a,” Camp asked, and seeing the assent in Eifler’s eyes gathered his group around him. They all huddled down in front of him like kids at a Boy Scout meeting.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 18
