“May I ask you something, First Sergeant?”
“You sure can, sir.”
“I heard what you said about hand-to-hand combat. I suppose you were talking about the Great War?”
“Yessir, I was.”
“Then we share a proud legacy, my good man,” Shaw said. “We gave the Kaiser a right whipping, we did. You on land, me at sea.”
“Don’t know what it looked like on the sea, sir, but on land it just looked like a whole lotta dying to me. Nobody whipped nobody.”
Across the perimeter, Lieutenant Bob Wharton sat alone, consumed by two emotions: the paralyzing fear of first combat and the hate he felt for Theo Papadakis: That immigrant midget New York City greaseball needs to stop grandstanding and just do his fucking job. “I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “I’ll do it!” Yeah…you’ll do it, you little National Guard jerk-off. You’ll get yourself and your whole damned platoon killed before this is over…and probably the rest of us, too. I don’t understand Captain Miles at all. He’s a West Point man just like me, but yet he keeps handing me the short stick…like when he made that Jewboy Grossman XO instead of me. Fuck them…fuck them all.
Chapter Six
Day 1/Day 2
It was just another boring night on the OP. Nothing new to report to Headquarters at Port Moresby: no flashes on the horizon of big naval guns locked in battle on the Coral Sea, no sound of enemy airplanes overhead, just the hourly assurance the men on the OP were still there, watching for signs of the enemy’s approach. The duty officer, a captain of the Japanese Imperial Army, was writing a letter to his wife by the light of a dim flashlight when he heard something on the slope behind him: a faint crunch.
Is that a footstep? Or am I just imagining it?
He thought about shining his light down the slope behind him but quickly changed his mind. None of my men would bother coming up here in the middle of the night unless they had to…not even Oshida, that idiot from the Navy. Slipping from the stool, he crouched, rousing the corporal napping on the ground beside him with a thump of his fist against the man’s head. “Order the security detail to the observation post immediately,” the captain said.
The corporal crawled groggily toward the field telephone but never got to turn its crank.
A hand clamped over his mouth, muffling his startled cry as the bayonet sliced into his throat.
As he slid from his assailant’s grasp to the ground, the corporal saw the shadowy outlines of another death dance coming to an end a few feet away. His captain had met the same fate at the hands of a different assailant.
Neither of the Japanese soldiers died right away. They would writhe in the moonlight for minutes, bloody bubbles foaming at their slashed throats. Those bubbles burst in a sickening gurgle of life slipping away.
PFC Frank Simms took a few wobbly steps back from where the corporal lay, dropped his bayonet, and slumped to a seat on the ground. His voice trembled as he mumbled something over and over again:
“Holy fucking crap…holy fucking crap…”
Melvin Patchett wiped the blade of his bayonet clean on the captain’s trousers before walking over to Simms. His voice as even as if asking the time, Patchett said, “Easier shooting them with a gun from far away, ain’t it? If you’re gonna upchuck, son, do it real quiet-like.”
The first sergeant turned away and called into the darkness, his words spoken softly but their tone unmistakably urgent: “Mukasic, where the hell are you?”
“Here, Top.” PFC Teddy Mukasic’s silhouette appeared out of the shadows.
“You didn’t see nobody else getting away, did you?” Patchett asked.
“No, Top, nobody else,” Mukasic replied. His voice sounded as shaky as Simms’s.
“Then give ’em the signal, son. This ain’t over yet.”
Teddy Mukasic’s flashlight blinked its message down the slope—three quick blips and then a short pause, repeated once, twice—and then the forest below erupted in the strobe-like flashes and drumroll beat of automatic weapons firing.
The Japs in their bunkhouse weren’t all asleep—but they might as well have been. Like shooting fish in a barrel, dammit, Jock thought, grimacing as he watched the slaughter from a short distance up the slope. Rule Number One: if you’re caught in a well-laid ambush, you’ve got no chance. You’re dead.
And this ambush was nothing if not well laid.
Of course, it helps a whole lot if the enemy has their heads up their asses.
Jock’s two platoons encircled the bunkhouse, Wharton’s on the north and west side, Papadakis’s on the south and east. That perimeter, though, was only there as a safety valve. The killing blow was struck by only three men—Sergeant Tom Hadley, Corporal Bogater Boudreau, and a third man picked from the Mad Greek’s platoon. The three, armed with Thompson submachine guns, approached the bunkhouse silently from the downslope side, stepped into the triangular space between the ground and the floor, and, with their weapons pointed straight up, fired continuously on full auto through the flimsy wood planking as they walked methodically to the upslope end. Then they turned and retraced their steps until reaching the downslope side once again. The whole process took little more than 20 seconds.
They all knew it was overkill: each of the three shooters had expended eight magazines of .45-caliber ammunition—some 450 rounds total—before they were done. It made one hell of a racket, but there were no other Japanese within miles to hear it.
When they finally stepped from below the bunkhouse, each of the three was stained with the blood dripping through the bullet holes in the floor.
A squad of Wharton’s men entered the bunkhouse. “We’ve got eight dead…and one gonna join ’em real soon,” a sergeant called out.
That made nine.
Patchett, Simms, and Mukasic hustled down from the peak and found Jock at the perimeter. “How many at the OP, Top?” Jock asked.
“Two, sir,” Patchett replied. “Both dead.”
“Shit. That only makes eleven. One’s missing.”
Lieutenant Wharton’s voice rang out in the darkness: “Negative, sir…we’ve got the twelfth man.”
Two of Wharton’s men approached with a prisoner between them, his hands bound behind his back. The GIs hurled the prisoner at Jock’s feet in the glow of a flashlight’s red beam. The man wore only an undergarment that resembled a diaper.
“The guy must’ve been taking a piss in the woods,” Wharton said, and then his tone became exasperated. “Looks like he walked right through the Greek’s position and tried escaping to the west. My guys were right on top of it, though.”
Patchett asked Lieutenant Wharton, “You wouldn’t be jumping to no conclusions, would you, sir?”
“Damned straight I’m not, First Sergeant,” Wharton replied, his tone defensive and belligerent. “I know he didn’t get through my lines.”
Lieutenant Papadakis’s squad leaders weren’t sure where their platoon leader was. One of them told Jock, “Last I saw of him, Captain, he went off with Hadley and Boudreau.”
Bob Wharton smirked and said, “I’ll bet I know where he is, sir.”
Wharton was right. They found the Mad Greek with Hadley and Boudreau in the woods on the downslope side of the bunkhouse, still cleaning off the blood that had dripped on their weapons and helmets.
Pulling Papadakis away from his men, Jock said, “I take a pretty dim view of this, Lieutenant.”
Wharton couldn’t wait to get a word in. “Yeah, while you were playing Cowboys and Indians—”
“That’s enough, Lieutenant Wharton,” Jock interrupted, none too pleased. “I believe I can handle this. Go get your platoon squared away.”
As Bob Wharton skulked off, Jock turned his anger back to Theo Papadakis. “Theo…you fucked up. While you were doing some private’s job down there, nobody was doing yours. Your platoon left a hole some Jap walked right through. He could have given us away…if he got that far.”
His voice pleading, Papadakis replied, “I just
wanted to make sure it was done right, sir.”
“Hadley and Boudreau don’t need much supervision, Theo. You shouldn’t have been with them. You nearly blew the whole mission for us right there.”
“But sir, I—”
“No buts, Lieutenant. Lead your platoon…or I’ll find someone who can.”
Jock checked his wristwatch. Shit…it’s damned near midnight-thirty.
He scrambled through the dark, trying to find the place on the trail where they had cut the Japanese landline. If it hadn’t been for a bright white shirt glowing faintly in the darkness, he might have never found it. But there Gabriel was, shirt on his back once again, standing over two men busily splicing the lines back together.
“We had a hell of a time finding these wires, sir,” one of the soldiers said as he put a final twist on the splice. “There…that should do it.”
Jock and Gabriel hurried to the bunkhouse. As Jock stepped inside, the young Papuan froze in his tracks when he saw the dead Japanese sprawled across the floor. He wouldn’t cross the threshold.
“Come on, son,” Jock urged. “It’s time to make that call.”
Gabriel seemed shell-shocked. His feet wouldn’t take another step. Jock picked up the field telephone and carried it outside the bunkhouse, away from the horrors it held.
“Do it from out here, Gabriel,” Jock said, pulling the young man along. “You don’t need to be looking at that.”
Gabriel gave what seemed to Jock a look of relief. He took the phone and gave the hand crank a few vigorous turns. Then he waited, the receiver pressed to his ear.
In a few moments, Gabriel spoke some words, unintelligible to the Americans around him. He listened for a moment and then spoke a few more words before putting down the receiver.
Gabriel’s mouth twisted into a shy smile. “It is done,” he said.
“That’s great,” Jock replied. “Now, do you think you can do that every hour for about the next thirty hours?”
“Yes, sir. I can do it.”
“Outstanding. Just try to get a little sleep tonight in between calls,” Jock said. “Don’t worry…we won’t let you miss one. But before you doze off, I need to ask one more favor…”
He brought Gabriel up the slope to where the Japanese captive was being held. Lieutenant Wharton stood with a few of his men, their silhouettes barely outlined by the dim glow of red-filtered flashlights.
“We’ve got him tied to a tree over there, sir,” Wharton said, pointing into the darkness. “We found some clothes to put on him that weren’t all shot to hell.”
Jock asked, “Is he blindfolded?”
“No, sir.”
“Go do that right now,” Jock said.
As one of Wharton’s men set off on the task, Jock said to Gabriel, “I need you to identify our captive, if you can. I don’t want him seeing your face, though.”
Gabriel looked confused, even alarmed. “Why, sir?” he asked. “Why can’t he see me?”
Judging by Bob Wharton’s facial expression, he was just as confused.
“Because if this guy falls back into Japanese hands somehow,” Jock said, “I don’t want them knowing which locals helped us. They’d make an example of you, for sure.”
Wharton seemed to take offense. “He’s not getting away from me and my men, Captain.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Lieutenant…but it may not come down to a question of him getting away. I’m more worried about him being taken away. This little operation of ours can’t be chalked up as a victory yet. Not by a long shot…”
And then it began to rain as if someone had turned on a fire hose.
Nobody even had the time to get his cheap and little-used GI raincoat from his pack. Within seconds, every man was drenched. Surprisingly, none took shelter inside the bunkhouse. “The men are already calling it The Morgue, sir,” Patchett explained to Jock.
But Jock was glad to see his men knew how to cut their losses. They had pulled their steel helmets—the steel pots—from their wooden liners and were catching all the rainwater they could. “Purest way to get those canteens topped off out here,” Patchett said. “I trained these boys real good, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, that you did,” Jock replied, “but we’ve got a bigger problem. We’ve got to get rid of these bodies, real quick.”
They heard Trevor Shaw’s voice before they saw him coming. “That’s being taken care of, Captain Miles,” Shaw said. “My natives have already dug a trench big enough to bury all of them. It’s just a short way down the backslope. They’ll happily perform the burial duties.”
As Jock and Patchett exchanged looks of surprise and relief, Shaw added, “And I deeply appreciate your wisdom in keeping the prisoner blindfolded.”
Chapter Seven
Day 2
The drenching rain shower of last night had been mercifully brief. At dawn, First Sergeant Patchett took his first good look at the defensive perimeter they had set up around the OP in darkness. What he saw pleased him.
“Didn’t find one position where we’d be shooting at each other, sir,” he told Jock. “Not too bad, considering the Chinese fire drill it could’ve been. I told the lieutenants they oughta get their men dug in deeper, though. I’ve got the two mortars laid in uphill from The Morgue. They can stash their ammo under the roof and out of the rain.”
“Okay, good,” Jock replied. “Do we have an ambush site picked out yet?”
“As a matter of fact, we do, sir. Found a nice, flat place about two hundred yards down the trail that’s a natural kill zone for the machine guns. I’d put both thirty cal on it, set up for interlocking fire, if that’s okay with you.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, Top. We can use the BARs for automatic fire on the OP perimeter.”
Travis Shaw added, “Let’s make sure we don’t accidentally ambush Virginia and her men when they arrive with the radio.”
“Commander Shaw,” Patchett said with a surprisingly polite tone, “our men ain’t no geniuses, but they can sure tell the difference between a split-tail, a native, and a Nip in broad daylight. Besides, you said they’re gonna be on the south trail.”
“Point taken, First Sergeant,” Shaw replied.
Gabriel Lakai sat a few feet away beneath a ground sheet rigged between trees as a pup tent. The field telephone was in his hand. His face wore a decidedly distressed look, like he was going to be sick any moment.
“Something wrong, Gabriel?” Jock asked.
“I’m…I’m not sure, Captain. Headquarters said something…I think it was a question…I didn’t understand.”
Jock crouched next to the young man and asked, “So what did you tell them?”
“I didn’t know how to answer…I simply told them hai. That means yes.”
Patchett shook his head and blew out a whistle like the sound of a bomb falling. Casting a frigid glance Gabriel’s way, he said, “Like this little shindig ain’t asshole-puckering enough, eh, Captain?”
It didn’t look like any Japanese bomber they had seen before. They couldn’t see guns protruding from the mottled green fuselage or wings. Every one of Jock’s men on the south slope of the perimeter—those facing the Coral Sea—had his eyes glued to the plane as it lumbered by from west to east, level with their altitude on the mountain. That big red disk painted on its side made such an inviting target.
Then it started a slow turn back toward them.
“Oh, shit. What the fuck is he doing?” Patchett mumbled.
Jock turned to Trevor Shaw. “What kind of plane is that, Commander?”
“It’s a Ki-48, I believe. We call it a Lily.”
“A Lily…So it’s a bomber?” Jock asked.
“Bomber, scout, transport…it’s fairly versatile, Captain. But a bit vulnerable. We see them quite often over Papua.”
Jock hoisted a bulky walkie-talkie from the ground and spoke into its mouthpiece: “This is Blind Eye Six. Remember the SOP. Stay down and do not, repeat, do not engage the approaching aircraft.
Acknowledge, over.”
The responses from Lieutenants Papadakis and Wharton crackled in the radio’s earpiece.
This plane was no speed merchant. It took well over a minute to complete the turn reversing its direction. Now it was heading straight toward them, skimming the trees along the mountaintop ridge. It passed over the OP, its broad shadow sliding over them like a momentary eclipse. No one fired a shot.
Jock wiped his brow. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Don’t know, sir,” Patchett replied, “but the sound of those engines alone, right there on top of you, is enough to make you crap your britches, ain’t it?”
Gabriel Lakai huddled against a tree, convinced he was responsible for bringing this calamity down on their heads. I’ve given us away. I know so little Japanese. How could I answer those questions correctly?
The plane pulled up slightly, beginning a turn back to its original course. But it didn’t stay on that course for long. It began another slow semi-circle back toward the mountaintop. This time, as it began its run down the ridgeline, the wings began to rock violently. It seemed it would crash into the trees for sure, but the engines throttled up and it struggled to climb away from the mountain. Again, no one fired a shot.
“Looks like he got caught in some turbulence,” Jock said. “I’ve heard the air can get pretty rough flying around mountains. Maybe now he’ll knock off whatever the hell he’s up to.”
But the plane came around again.
“Gabriel,” Jock said, “have you ever seen them do anything like this before?”
“No, Captain Jock.”
So what is this clown trying to do?
Operation Long Jump (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 2) Page 4
