The Commodore Read online

  There was a sudden blaze of yellow candlelight as the woman who’d ministered to him down on the beach came into the room, a glass-chimney candle in her hand. She was in her fifties, long dark hair tinged with gray coiled in a tight bun, a handsome, tanned, and lined face that bespoke many years out in the tropical sun. She was wearing a white, sleeveless blouse and khaki trousers. There was a large pistol strapped to her right hip in a holster. She smiled at him.

  “Back from the dead, then,” she said. “How’s the head?”

  “Fractured and willing to let me know that anytime I move,” he said. He looked over at the pitcher. “Is that water?”

  “Yes it is,” she said, and poured him a glass. She held it to his lips while he drank the entire thing. When he’d finished she sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling the netting aside so that she could talk to him. “Remember anything?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I’m an American naval officer; my name is Harmon Wolf. I need to get back to…” He hesitated.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is the question, isn’t it? Get back to what? There was a great deal of shooting the previous evening. Gunfire and other explosions. We never know who’s shooting whom, but ever since you lot went into Guadalcanal, there have been many unpleasant—things—washed ashore here.”

  “I can just imagine,” he said.

  “My name is Jennifer Matheson,” she continued. “This is a Lever Brothers rubber plantation on Kalai Island. The Japs haven’t been here yet, but the word around the district is that they soon will be. My husband, Jack, is the plantation manager, but he’s gone long-bush into the hills with one of the coast watchers. I’m staying here, trying to hold things together until the Japs actually show up. Me and my boys. They’re the ones who found you on the beach.”

  “Those natives?”

  She smiled. “Melanesian is the proper term. Many of the workers here were from Malaita Island, across from Guadalcanal, but they’ve gone home. Those two are local Kalai men, loyal to me and the plantation, for now, anyway. If the Japs come here, that could all change. We grow rubber, here. The Japs will want all of it. Hungry?”

  “No,” he said, but then changed his mind. “Yes, I mean, as long as I can eat without moving my head, that is.”

  She got up from the bed. “I’ll get you some soup,” she said. “And we need to change that dressing on your head. Then I’ll want your name and rank, so we can get a message off to Sydney.” She paused, examining his face. “I must say, you don’t look like an American,” she said.

  “I’m an Indian,” he said. “From the Chippewa tribe.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “You Yanks never fail to surprise.”

  She left the room, calling for someone in the house in that strange pidgin dialect he’d heard her use. He dozed until she came back with a mug of broth and one of the natives—excuse me, he mentally corrected himself, Melanesians—who was dressed in a tropical uniform of some kind.

  “Try sipping this,” she said. “Then the district NMP here will look at that wound. His name is David.”

  David, it turned out, was one of the Kalai locals who’d been trained in first aid and basic medicine by the British colonial authorities who governed the Solomon Islands. Whenever the district officer made his rounds to hold court, collect taxes, and settle administrative disputes, David went along to bring medical care and supplies, especially to the more remote tribes and villages living back in the hinterlands, known in pidgin as the long bush. He gently removed the bloody dressing, taking enough hair with it to make Sluff wince. He went into the adjoining bathroom and filled a bowl with water, to which he added a tincture of Mercurochrome. He gently washed the wound site. Sluff thought he could feel his skull buckling, like the plates on the side of a ship. David produced a new bandage from his kit bag, dusted it with sulfa powder, and pressed it gently against Sluff’s head, holding it in place for a minute. He removed it, smelled the bandage carefully, and then put it back, this time with some tape. He looked over at Mrs. Matheson.

  “Altogether sua ’e look’m aurait,” he pronounced in the singsong voice. “Mobeta ’e stayim quait insait house bilong youme, slip tumas altogether.”

  David nodded politely and then withdrew, carrying the bloody bandage out with him. “Okay, what’d he say?” Sluff asked. David had never once moved his head, God bless him.

  “He said the wound didn’t look infected, and that it was best if you stayed right here and slept too much.”

  “Wow.”

  She smiled. She had a pretty smile, which made her look younger. “If you live here you get used to it,” she said. “There’s a pretty big vocabulary, actually. Now: Give me your particulars and we’ll get a report off via the coast watchers’ net, quiktaim.”

  Sluff recited his full name, rank, and serial number, and then added his title of ComDesRon 21. He asked if the radio station was here on the plantation. She said no, that it was inland, but did not provide any further details. He wondered if she didn’t quite believe that he was who he said he was. She told him to finish the broth and then pointed out the bedpan resting beneath the bedside table. He frowned. There was no way he could reach down to get it. He started to say something, but she was gone.

  After he finished the broth, which tasted mostly of salt and possibly a fowl of some kind, he lay back on the pillows. His head hurt. He realized that his whole body hurt from being thrown through the air and into the sea, but the head wound dominated his pain while keeping good pulsing time with his heartbeat. He wondered how the naval headquarters at Nouméa would react to the news that he was alive. He could almost visualize Halsey’s choleric chief of staff, Captain Browning, rubbing his hands together and saying, Oh, good, now we can hold a proper court of inquiry about the disaster he led his squadron into. His right ear began to buzz. Why not, he thought. Masks the sound of my heartbeat. The broth was warm in his stomach. Pretty soon he’d have to deal with getting to the bedpan. Then he fell asleep again.

  He dreamed. The north woods. His family. The summers logging. His father’s disappearance. The academy. Coming up the line in the Navy, always aware that he was, with his Indian features, different. The prewar naval officers corps was pretty much a white proposition. The only dark skin one saw on a warship inevitably belonged to stewards, and Sluff’s mahogany features always provoked a double take in the wardroom when another officer saw him for the first time. The gold academy ring added to the confusion: Is that guy one of us? Or did he steal it? When it became clear that he was at least as good as most of them, professionally, the knowing looks became more discreet. The Navy, God bless it. Advancing some of the fringes of American society for the better good of the country. You know. Roosevelt, for God’s sake.

  The December 7 slaughter of the spit-and-polish, bugle-blowing, brass-polishing, teak-deck-holystoning battleship navy had changed a lot of things. For one thing, far too many potential execs and skippers drowned in the burning oil fires of Pearl Harbor. The interwar years’ stately parade of superannuated captains and commanders was suddenly decapitated, and then the Bureau of Navigation, which administered naval officers’ careers, had to scramble. Instead of lineal numbers and dates of rank, professional ability had necessarily risen to the forefront in the calculus of promotion.

  He tried to roll his memory through those years leading to command of a destroyer, but they were a blur when compared to the night with the battleships, the contemptuous looks from Halsey’s staffers after that battle. And after that, another blurred passage as his mind roamed among the flashes in the night, the sound of the torpedoes launching, the terror in the sonar gangs’ voices when they reported hearing the sleek monsters whining past the ship as if hunting. And then the final battle, the seeming ease of the ambush followed by that terrifying report of three big ships rounding Kalai’s southern point and heading straight for them. That sinister black cruiser looming out of the night, its forward eight-inch guns training over in his direction, aimed
right at him even as his own flagship’s guns were banging away, tracing hot red arcs of fire into the cruiser’s superstructure. He could see the light from his own flagship’s gun flashes reflected in the windows of that towering steel pagoda temple just before she opened fire and ruined everything. The noise was beyond frightful. It was overwhelming, punctuated by the cries of the wounded and the convulsive lurch of the ship as she was cut in half …

  “Wake up, Captain,” a woman’s voice shouted. “Wake up. They’re here. We must leave. Now!”

  He tried to focus, gather his senses, and then he heard the all-too-familiar sound of naval gunfire, nine-gun salvos ripping the night apart, followed by painful explosions outside among the plantation warehouses and processing buildings. Bright fires were burning out there, and the grounds around the house shook with every salvo.

  Before he could gather his wits there were natives in the room, carrying what looked like an old-fashioned World War I canvas litter. They swept the mosquito netting aside, pushed back his sheet, and then lifted him bodily onto the litter down on the floor. His skull felt like it was cracking again. He tried to protest but could only whimper, and then his bearers were hustling through the house and out to the back veranda as another salvo, closer this time, tore up trees and small outbuildings, showering them with dirt, burning palm fronds, and wooden fragments. The fires were brighter now that they were outside, and the four men carrying him broke into a jog. Sluff couldn’t think, only feel the thump-thump-thump of their bare feet as they ran across the yard and headed out into the actual rubber-tree plantation along a sandy road. He grimly fought the urge to throw up as the pain in his head found something new to keep time to.

  Finally the shells began to fall behind, becoming red flashes seen through the forest of rubber trees instead of the pounding blasts they’d just run through. He saw Jennifer Matheson running behind the stretcher-bearers, trotting along without even breaking a sweat, that big Webley pistol firmly in her right hand. She didn’t look frightened, only determined. He became aware of other people running out alongside them as they headed back into the orderly rows of rubber trees and away from the cacophony of the attack behind them. Some of the “boys” had rifles; others were carrying canvas bags in each hand.

  They’ve rehearsed this, he thought. This isn’t panic; this was planned. He thought he heard the chatter of machine gun fire behind them and wondered if a landing party had just arrived. Then the pain in his head grew worse, much worse, and he began to cry out. The bearers never broke stride, but, suddenly, David was running alongside. Something sharp pricked the side of his neck, and then everything became much, much better.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kalai Highlands

  “This the chap?” a gravelly voice asked. “Looks like an oversized wog, he does.”

  Sluff heard Jennifer cluck her tongue. “That’s rude, Jack,” she scolded. “He’s an American Indian. And he’s a naval officer, to boot.”

  “Humph,” Jack snorted. “I’ve seen pictures of wooden Indians, but from the looks of that wound, this one’s going to be a steel-plate Indian.”

  Sluff could hear other people moving around them, as well as the sounds of distant gunfire. He thought it sounded like a ship’s guns. He tried to open his eyes but the morphine still had him and he wasn’t able to make anything work except his hearing.

  “Have you reported that he’s here?” Jennifer asked.

  “Aye, I have,” Jack replied. “Nothing back yet. From the sounds of that sea fight the other night, the Yanks are probably up to their eyeballs in Japs about now.”

  There was a sudden gabble of pidgin nearby. Jack muttered an uh-oh and withdrew. Sluff wondered where he was. It felt like he was on a hard bed or cot and inside a building. He could hear many footsteps of people walking on a wooden floor, and the room smelled of wet palm fronds. He tried again to open his eyes. No go. He tried to speak. To his surprise, the word “water” croaked out of his parched mouth.

  “Ah, right,” Jennifer, said. “Water.” She snapped out something in rapid-fire pidgin and a moment later he felt a wet towel being wiped gently over his face and then there was a cup at his lips. He tried to open his mouth but he couldn’t, and for some strange reason that panicked him.

  “Easy, easy,” she said, feeling his body tense up. Then he felt the tip of that wet towel being pressed between his lips. Slowly a wave of wetness permeated his mouth but without choking him. Better, he thought. Then he whimpered and went back under.

  He awoke later to the sound of a tropical rain beating down on a metal roof. The noise was deafening but also comforting. This time his eyes did open. It was dark. The rain fell like a solid waterfall. He swallowed, or tried to. A small wave of nausea rose in his throat but then subsided. He wondered what time it was and where everyone had gone. Incredibly, the roar of the rain grew louder, and he closed his eyes again. He was still thirsty. Then he heard voices nearby, excited voices. He opened his eyes and looked around the small room. He moved his right hand and gently probed the bandage covering the side of his head. It felt like there was a broken dinner plate taped together under there that had been glued back together but only recently.

  The voices grew louder and then there was a flashlight coming toward the partially opened door. Jack came in, followed by Jennifer and two Melanesians, carrying a stretcher.

  “Good, you’re awake,” Jack said. “Look—there’s a problem. We’ve had a message that the Japs have landed an army search party on the beach and that they’ll be looking for us by sunrise.”

  “Oh” was all Sluff could manage through his dry mouth. Jennifer heard him croak and brought him a glass of water, which, this time, he could manage.

  “We’re two hours into the hills above the plantation if they know where to look. Based on what my boy told me I have a bad feeling that someone’s blabbed and they do know where to look. As soon as this rain stops, we have to do a runner.”

  “Okay,” Sluff said, and made as if to get out of bed. He felt Jennifer’s hands restraining him, and then his cracked skull weighed in, convincing him to stay very still. Another native showed up in the doorway, firing away in pidgin.

  “Shit!” Jack muttered when the man finished. “They’ve got dogs. We’ve got to go now. Jenny, darling, you sort out moving the Yank. I’ve got to dismantle the teleradio and bury the extra codebooks. Oh, and Captain: The control station says the American navy will be sending a submarine to get you. When and where to be determined. Okay. I’m off.”

  Jennifer instructed the two bearers to put the stretcher on the bed. While she immobilized his broken head as best she could, they transferred him from the sheets to the stretcher and strapped him to it. He tried not to cry out. He thought he could feel the bandage getting soggy, but then they were on the move again, this time out to the veranda, where they parked the stretcher between the arms of two chairs. Jennifer had formed a pillow from one of the bedsheets and got it under his neck. Then two blankets were rolled tight and put on either side of his head. Finally they parked a pith helmet over his head and face, tied it down to the stretcher poles, and then they were away into the night, walking, thank God, and not trotting. The rain drummed on the helmet as if trying to find a way to get in and drown him while the rest of his body felt actually cold.

  He couldn’t speak or see anything, but it felt like they were going up, with occasional downward stints to cross streams and flooded gullies before resuming the climb. He wondered if this torrent would destroy their scent. Dogs. He shivered, both from the chill of the rain and the thought of a pack of dogs catching up with them, followed by sword-wielding samurai wannabes. Then he thought about the two bearers, grunting with the effort of carrying his nearly two hundred pounds through the jungle and across mountain slopes in darkness and pouring rain. What if they dropped him? Would he roll down the hillside like a rotten log and fetch up in a swollen stream? If the sound of baying dogs rose behind them, would they drop him and run? He realized h
e was thinking selfishly. These men were doing there uttermost to get him away from the Japs. He tried to think of a way to repay them, or at least thank them. Then there was a bright light followed by a blast of sound as a shell exploded somewhere up the hill from them.

  The bearers stopped immediately and put him down as the acrid smell of high explosive drifted down the hillside. Another shell went off, but farther away and down the hill from where they were halted. Then there were others, some close, some distant, seemingly random, as that Jap cruiser anchored off the plantation wharves fired lone shells into the hills above the plantation, just to let the coast watchers know that they were missed and being sought after. Every thirty seconds a round would sail over or under their position in the man-high grass, whistling through the torrential rain and then blowing up in a shower of wet mud and cracking trees. They’re not aiming at anything, he thought. Just shooting up the hills to let us know that they’re coming. The randomness of it made it even more terrifying. He heard Jennifer shout an order and then they were on the move again. The rain never let up.

  Two exhausting hours later they went to ground in a cave. He knew it was a cave because one moment the rain was hammering on his body and the next it was an echo. The bearers moved much more slowly now as they picked their way over rocks and litter on the floor of the cave, which stank of bat guano and tropical mold. Finally they set him down and removed the pith helmet. To his surprise he could see. It was very early morning outside, but light enough that he could make out the dimensions of the cave and see the shadowy forms of the men who’d carried him so far. He made eye contact with one of them and mouthed the words, Thank you. The man gave him a big grin and then Jennifer came up.