W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines

by Behind The Lines(Lit)

  Since he was steering somewhat to the right of the rising sun-east and south (in other words, steering southeast), and this corresponded to the com-pass indications, they were probably headed on a generally southeastern course. But they weren't navigating. For the moment, of course, that was a moot point, since navigation presumes a destination, and they didn't know where they were going-except in the most imprecise terms, "to Mindanao."

  Everly searched the boat as soon as there was light enough for that, but found nothing of value except two cans of pineapple slices and a bottle of Coca-Cola. No charts, no other food, and no water.

  He found a bucket, too, and used it to flush the blood from the deck. But cleaning up the compartment where they were hiding, where the Filipinos tried to kill them, was impossible. He could have poured water into the compart-ment, but there was no way to pump it out.

  When a sickly sweet smell began to come from below, Everly closed the hatch and they tried to ignore the odor.

  They shared the Coca-Cola and the two cans of pineapple slices.

  Weston thought that perhaps it wasn't wise to eat all the pineapple at once. Maybe they should have saved half for later.

  Then he decided it didn't make any difference. They had to find more food and water, or they were finished.

  By ten in the morning, the heat from the sun grew uncomfortable. Using a foul-smelling piece of worn canvas, they rigged an effective sunshade. But that was too late. They were already, badly sunburned.

  A few minutes after three in the afternoon, they saw on their left horizon what could be land.

  The question was, if it was land, and not their eyes just playing tricks on them, what was it?

  It very easily could have been part of the island of Luzon, the far side of the entrance to Manila Bay. The Japanese were supposed to be all over that part of Luzon. Was that true?

  Was it worth it to go through everything they'd gone through just to find themselves prisoners of the Japanese... even before that would have happened if they'd stayed on The Rock instead of deserting in the face of the enemy?

  But the alternative to making for what was probably land on the horizon, Weston decided, was to continue on a course he had very little confidence in, and without food and water. For all he knew, if he kept on his present course, he could very easily be heading out into the South China Sea, with no landfall possible until long after they were dead of dehydration.

  Twenty minutes later, they could see enough to know that it was indeed land on the horizon. A half hour after that, they were close enough to make out surf crashing against a solid wall of vegetation. There was no sign of civiliza-tion.

  It was now getting close to five p.m.

  "We don't have an anchor, and we can't get through that surf," Weston said.

  "Go to the left. Maybe we'll find something," Everly replied. As they approached the beach, the western end seemed to recede and then disappear.

  "What is this?" Weston asked.

  "I think we got a little fucking island," Everly said, pleased.

  "Holding two reserve divisions of the Imperial Japanese Army," Weston replied.

  Everly looked at him with genuine concern in his eyes. "Why would you say that, Mr. Weston?" he asked.

  "I was making a joke."

  "Oh."

  The sun was low on the horizon when they finally saw a break in the surf. As they approached it, Weston saw that it was a passage between a very small island and the first island they'd found.

  There was still no sign of human life, and the only sounds were the distant rustle of the surf and the waves splashing against the bow of the boat. The war that they had so recently left on Corregidor and Bataan-the smells of burned fuel and supplies, the never-ending muted roar of cannon, the dull crump of explosions-could have been happening at another time on a distant planet.

  As they entered the passage between the islands, Weston saw a small beach on the larger island. There was no surf.

  "We could try to put in there," he said, as much to himself as to Everly. "I don't know how shallow it is. We're likely to go aground."

  "Do we have any choice, Mr. Weston?"

  Weston steered for the small beach.

  They made it all the way to the shore without scraping bottom. As Everly leapt ashore, carrying a rope with him, Weston decided the current flowing through the passage had scoured it clean of sand.

  Tying the boat up was no problem. Trees and thick vegetation came right down to the water. Everly looped the line around a thick, twisted tree trunk. The current pulled the boat against what Weston presumed was the solid rock of the shoreline.

  What's going to happen now, he thought, is that the current is going to batter the hull against the rocks, whereupon we will sink.

  That didn't happen. The current simply held the hull against the rocks with little movement.

  Everly heaved himself back aboard.

  "There's a goddamned hill, starting right at the trees," he said. "I don't think I could climb it even if it wasn't dark. We'll have to see what happens in the morning."

  "There's supposed to be feral hogs on these islands," Weston said.

  "What?"

  "Wild pigs. Maybe we could shoot one."

  Everly's silence made it clear he didn't think that was likely.

  "You want to do two-hour watches?" he asked.

  "Fine."

  "You want to go first, or me?"

  "I'll go first," Weston said.

  Everly made himself a pillow from some of the clothing he had removed from the bodies, covered himself with the rest, and went to sleep.

  In ten minutes, it was so dark Weston had difficulty seeing him.

  He sat immobile for perhaps ten minutes, listening to unidentifiable sounds coming from the shore; and then, without thinking about it, he scratched his chest. His skivvy shirt was covered with drying blood.

  On all fours, he crawled on the deck, carefully avoiding Everly, until he found the bucket. Then he crawled aft again and stripped. First he carefully rinsed his skivvy shirt and drawers in the water and arranged them on the rail to dry. Then he dipped the bucket into the water, held it over his head, and poured it over his body.

  He did this a dozen times-the dried blood had matted his hair together, and didn't want to dissolve-until he was sure he was as clean as he was going to get.

  Still naked, he sat down with his legs folded under him. He looked at his watch. The luminous hands told him it was five minutes to eight. He wondered how long it had taken him to find the bucket, do his laundry, and bathe.

  Fuck it, I'll count two hours from now. From eight. I'll wake Everly at ten.

  He sat there in the dark, his knee touching the web belt with the.45 in its holster, remembering with sudden clarity how the watch had looked when he'd brought it home from the Officers' Sales Store at Pensacola. It was a Hamilton Chronograph, stainless steel. By pressing the appropriate button, he could mark elapsed time of his choice-length of flight; one minute 360-degree turn. Whatever.

  It came in a metal box with a spring-loaded cover. It had an alligator strap, and there was a little book of instructions. He wanted one from the moment he first saw it. But it was considered pushy for students to wear one until they had completed Primary Flight and soloed, and stood a reasonable chance to win their wings of gold.

  He remembered very clearly the first time he strapped it to his wrist.

  On another planet, at another time, when he was a Naval Aviator.

  When Weston opened his eyes, Everly, naked, was squatting beside him. It was light. Weston was confused. It shouldn't be light. He woke Everly at ten. Ev-erly therefore should have waked him at midnight. At midnight, it was still dark.

  "What's up?"

  "I didn't hear a fucking thing for two hours," Everly said. "So I figured, fuck it, why wake you up? And I went to sleep."

  "Oh."

  "And look what I see when I do wake up," Everly said, and pointed.

  West
on sat up.

  Two hundred yards offshore was a cabin cruiser.

  Adrift, Weston thought. Not under power.

  "Can you get us over there?"

  "I don't know. I can try."

  "It's a long way to swim, and there's sharks, I hear, in these waters."

  "Let's get the sail up, and we'll see what happens."

  Neither put into words what both thought: There was a chance the cabin cruiser would have food aboard. And a compass. And God only knows what else.

  What's it doing here? Adrift?

  It took them nearly an hour to reach the boat. There was almost no wind, and the current moved both vessels through the passage and into open water as they pursued it.

  As they drew closer, they became aware of the sweet stench of corrupting bodies, and then of a horde of flies.

  The boat looked like a ChrisCraft 42, but there was no ChrisCraft insignia.

  Probably, Weston decided, a local-manufactured boat, using a ChrisCraft as a pattern. Her tailboard read yet again, Manila, and a faded Manila Yacht Club pennant flew from her rigging.

  The stench grew worse as they approached her. When they were at her stern it was nearly overwhelming.

  Everly finally managed to get a hand on her, pulled himself aboard, and then threw Weston a line. The moment he saw Weston had grabbed it, he went to the side rail and threw up.

  The line was new, still white.

  Weston made the boat fast to the cruiser, and then jumped aboard.

  There was evidence that the cruiser had been machine-gunned, probably strafed. He saw bullet holes in the deck, in the bulkheads, and in the glasswork.

  The ignition key was in the on position. The fuel gauges showed empty, but Weston pressed the engine start button anyway. The engines turned over, but there was no fuel, and they didn't start.

  The flies started to bite. There was nothing he could do about them.

  Everly came out of the galley carrying cases of canned food.

  "There's even beer," he said. "Fucking flies are eating me alive."

  "I wonder what happened."

  "Who the fuck knows? What I think we should do is stack everything there by the stern, and then I'll go on the boat and you hand it to me."

  They made half a dozen trips into the galley before Weston found the cour-age to ask the question that was in his mind even before they had come aboard:

  "What happened to the people who were on here?"

  "If they were alive, they would have come out by now," Everly said.

  Weston went into the galley again; and then, forcing himself, he went through it, into the passageway leading to the cabins.

  He could not restrain the urge to vomit. When he had stopped heaving, he had difficulty resisting the urge to flee.

  But he went into the master cabin. He found two bodies. A gray-haired woman was on the double bunk, her hands folded on her stomach. She was wearing shorts and a knit shirt. The shirt was thick with blood, the blood cov-ered with swarms of flies.

  She had been shot in the chest.

  The second body was lying on the deck next to the bunk-a man in his fifties; he had shot himself in the temple. A snub-barreled revolver was on the deck beside him.

  Weston took a quick look around and fled the cabin.

  "Well?" Everly asked when Weston was back on deck.

  "There's a... a couple... back there. It looks as if the woman was killed and then the man shot himself."

  "Anything we can use?"

  "I didn't look."

  Everly gave him a look of contempt and headed for the cabin.

  Weston sat down on a cushioned seat against the stern rail and supported his head in his left hand, using the right to wave away the swarming flies.

  Everly reappeared carrying blankets. Weston saw that he had the snub-nosed pistol jammed in his waistband, and that he, too, now had a first-class wristwatch. Weston had seen it on the man's body.

  "I also found a bunch of good fucking charts," Everly said.

  "What do you think we should do about the boat?"

  "What do you mean, do about it?"

  "Burn it, maybe?"

  "And call attention to ourselves? The Japs already strafed this boat once. Those were machine-gun bullets in the woman." He indicated the bullet holes in the desk and glass.

  "We can't just leave them in there like that," Weston said.

  "Yes, we can," Everly said. "We load this stuff on the boat and get the fuck away from here before some other Jap airplane comes this way."

  Weston felt anger well up within him, so quickly and so fiercely that he was frightened. He forced himself, literally, to count to ten before he spoke.

  "Sergeant, find something to weight the bodies down. Maybe an engine battery. We'll wrap them in blankets and put them over the side."

  "Didn't you hear what I said, Mr. Weston, about getting out of here before the Japs come back?"

  "Didn't you hear what I said, Sergeant, about finding something to weight the bodies down?"

  Everly met Weston's eyes for a long moment.

  "The proper response, Sergeant, is 'Aye, aye, Sir.' "

  There was another hesitation, shorter, but perceptible.

  "Aye, aye, Sir," Sergeant Everly said.

  "Where's the charts you said you found?" Weston asked. "I want a quick look at them."

  "Over there, Mr. Weston," Everly said, pointing to what looked like a brand-new briefcase. "We also have another three thousand dollars."

  "You found a wallet or something?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Names of these people in it?"

  "I guess they're their names."

  "Don't lose it," Weston ordered. "Someone will want to know what hap-pened to these people."

  "Like when we get to Australia?"

  "Or when we win the war," Weston said curtly.

  Everly smiled.

  "Something funny, Sergeant?" Weston said as he felt his temper rise again. Then his mouth ran away with him.

  "When I was in the Officers' Basic Course, Everly, I had an instructor, a man like you. As a matter of fact, I recall him mentioning that he was an old China Marine. You know what he told me a Marine was? He said that a Marine was somebody hired by the Government to take bullets for civilians. And that's what we're going to do. We're Marines, and we're going to bury these civil-ians. If we take a bullet while we're doing it, that's how it will have to be."

  Everly continued to smile.

  "You think that's funny?" Weston snapped.

  "No, Sir, what I was thinking..."

  "Out with it, Sergeant!"

  "That maybe you're not the candy-ass I thought you were at first."

  "Well, fuck you, Sergeant!" Weston heard himself say.

  "Yes, Sir," Everly said. "I'll go see if I can find some batteries or some-thing."

  As Everly said, the charts were good. Within a minute or so, Weston was sure he had found where they were-in the passage between Lubang Island and Ambil Island, to its east. According to the chart, Ambil was uninhabited. To the south, across the Verde Island Passage, was Mindoro.

  Now that he had the charts (presuming the boat didn't come apart on them, or Japanese aircraft didn't strafe them, or Japanese vessels didn't intercept them, or, for that matter, they didn't founder in one of the sudden, violent storms for which these seas were famous), he saw a good chance of making it through the inland Sibuyan Sea, and then the Visayan Sea, past the Visayan Islands (Panay, Negros, Cebu, and Bohol) into the Mindanao Sea and to Min-danao.

  There was a Waterman pen-and-pencil set in the briefcase. He used the pencil to mark a tentative course, aware, but pretending not to notice, that Ev-erly had brought the bodies onto the deck and trussed them neatly in blankets. Each of them was weighted down with two batteries.

  Everly found that a portion of the aft rail of the cruiser could be opened inward. He opened it.

  "Anytime you're ready, Mr. Weston," he said.

  "I think a word o
f prayer would be in order, Sergeant," Weston said as he replaced the charts in the briefcase.

  Having said that, the only thing he could think of was the Lord's Prayer. He recited it, as Everly stood with his head bowed.