The Commodore Page 20

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, kneeling beside the stretcher. She looked exhausted, but her eyes shone with the strength of someone who’s seen and dealt with worse than a night escape across the tropical escarpments of Kalai Island.

  “The braces helped,” he said. “Is there any more water?”

  She held up a canteen and carefully fed him about a cup’s worth. “We should be pretty safe, for now, anyway. Jack took the radio and his team in the opposite direction to another hide. We’re hoping the rain will drown out their scent. And ours.”

  “How do you two communicate?” he asked.

  “Runners,” she said. “These boys can move through these hills like ghosts. Jack’s also sent down a rifle party.”

  “They’d take on a Jap army patrol?”

  “Oh, no,” she said with a knowing smile. “They’re hunters. They have instructions to shoot the dogs. Kill the dogs, and the Japs will blunder about until they run out of food and water. Then the boys will take them on.”

  “Jack says someone blabbed.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Most of the people on Kalai hate the Japs because of something that happened three years ago. But you never know—for the price of some tobacco or a rifle and some ammunition? There’re bad apples on this island just like anywhere else. Besides, the Japs seem to be winning over there on Guadalcanal, so from their perspective, maybe the right move is to get on the side of the winners, you know?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, glad to have had the water. Then he remembered something about a submarine. He opened his eyes to ask her about that but she was gone. He looked over at the clutch of natives, who were obviously exhausted. They were passing a bowl of something between them, each taking three fingers of what looked like rice and then passing it on to the next man. One of them saw him looking. He got up, came over to the stretcher, and offered two fingers’ worth of rice. Sluff opened his mouth and took it. It tasted fishy, as if someone had ground fish paste into it. Salty, too. Wonderful. He realized he was very hungry and hoped that that was a good sign.

  The man rejoined his crew and Sluff closed his eyes again. Outside he could still hear the occasional crump of naval gunfire as that cruiser spat shells randomly into the hills, seemingly just for the fun of it. He wanted to raise a hand, feel the side of his head. He’d been seeing strange colors and was having trouble forming words in his mind.

  Stop trying, he thought. Rest. He wondered if there was any more of that fishy rice. A shell went off outside, fairly close this time.

  Missed, you sonsabitches, he thought, and then went down again.

  He awoke to find David, the native medical practitioner, at his side, ministering to his head wound. This time he put something on the site that stung enough to make Sluff gasp. David stopped what he was doing, washed his hands in a small bowl, and then gave Sluff some water and two white pills. David took Sluff’s wrist, opened his palm, and put the pills into it. Then he helped Sluff to raise his hand to his mouth. It took a surprising effort but he managed to put the pills in his mouth and then drink some water.

  “Altogether goodfella,” Doctor David pronounced. “Bye-m-bye feelin’ bettah.”

  “Thank you,” Sluff managed. The pills had had an acrid taste. He assumed they were pain pills of some kind. “Is there any food?”

  David shook his head. Then his expression changed. He got up and went down toward the cave entrance. Sluff realized it was daylight outside. Five minutes later David came back with a dark brown coconut. He pulled out a large knife, whacked the top off the coconut, and then held it up to Sluff’s lips. Sluff swallowed the sweet milk greedily, almost choking before he finished it. Then David produced a banana, peeled the top half, and let Sluff gum it for a few minutes. When David left to go back outside Sluff let his head go back down onto the rolled towels and closed his eyes. A minute later he heard distant rifle fire, not the single shots of bush hunters sniping Jap dogs, but a full-on fusillade of shooting that sounded like a dozen rifles were firing. The Jap patrol?

  He heard a lot of local dialect erupting out in front of the cave, and then two natives came scrambling into the cave, hastily picked up Sluff’s stretcher, and began climbing over the uneven, rock-strewn cave floor, taking him farther back into the cave. The ceiling began to lower as they went and the smell became much stronger, ammonia, sulfur, and general rot. They stopped when the cave ceiling had come down to only five feet. Sluff saw small brown shapes plastered to the ceiling above him. The bats made tiny squeaks of protest at all the sudden noise. The two natives laid the stretcher down at a dogleg bend in the cave and then each of them put a finger to his lips in the universal sign to be quiet. Then they backed out, stopped about fifteen feet from where he lay and began urinating on the floor as they backed down the cave toward the entrance. Why not, Sluff thought, until he realized they were laying a trail of human scent that stopped fifteen feet from where he lay helpless in a stretcher behind that little bend.

  He could no longer hear any sounds of gunfire or anything else for that matter, and wondered if this was where it would all end. Commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21 one moment, a prospective skeleton in a cave somewhere in Melanesia the next. He fingered his two dog tags, held around his neck by a small chain. He felt the little notch at the end of each tag and remembered what it was for. On the battlefield, the medics would find a dead soldier and remove his dog tags. They’d position one of them vertically between his teeth, using that little notch. Then they’d slam his jaw shut. The other they’d hand over to the graves registration people behind the front lines. Not all bodies got back. He wondered where the hell he’d learned that grisly fact—certainly not at the Naval Academy.

  The pills began to take effect and he settled into a state of semiconsciousness. He felt his breathing slow down and his limbs relax. He tried to stay awake and alert but then asked himself—why? He wasn’t armed and he doubted he could even sit up if the Japs came. If they found him they’d unlimber one of those glinting swords and take his head off, and that would be that.

  Then he heard a low growl out in the front part of the cave, and all thoughts of sleep vanished.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kalai Highlands

  He tried to think of what to do. Move back in the cave? Stay very still? Shit or go blind? The light in the cave was failing, but darkness wouldn’t fool a dog. He checked the stretcher and discovered he was still strapped in. The drug was arguing with him: Relax. There’s nothing you can do.

  No, he thought frantically; there has to be something. But there wasn’t. He was helpless. No wonder the natives had fled. They didn’t want to watch.

  Something was definitely approaching out in the cave. He could hear pebbles being displaced, some scratching noises, and then even some panting. That damned thing was coming on.

  He lay very still now, suppressing his breathing, trying not to make any sound at all. Then the dog hit the urine trail and the panting increased, along with a snuffling noise, as it tasted the bright human scent. More scrabbling across the rock-littered floor of the cave. It was darker now, must be night outside, he thought, but he could sense that damned thing getting nearer and nearer. He strained to see, watching the edge of that dogleg turn in the cave wall, clamping his breath in his throat, breathing only through his mouth, tensing against the straps.

  There: a dark shape materialized at the edge of the dogleg. He could just barely make out ears, but the dog was big, really big, its nose busy vacuuming up scent. Then it froze. Oh, God, he thought: he’s sensed that I’m here. Then the dog barked.

  It was a big bark, a really big bark that caused Sluff to jump despite his best efforts to keep still. And then came the roar of a thousand brown bats launching from the walls and ceiling and inner recesses of the cave as that big bark echoed off the ancient volcanic stone. The only thing going faster than the bats was the dog, who yipped once and then fled like a bullet, pursued by a tidal wave of fluttering, squeaking bat
s as they thundered down the cave and exploded out the entrance.

  There was thirty seconds of silence, and then someone started laughing. He heard Japanese echoing back up into the chamber, and then more men started laughing, probably at the abject state of that supposedly vicious tracking dog trying to climb a tree out on the hillside. The general hilarity lasted for another thirty seconds, and then a voice of authority sounded off, followed by several “Hai”s.

  After that, silence. Sluff found himself up on his hands and elbows, still trying to not make a sound. He strained his eyes to see down the tunnel of greasy rock, but everything was gray. And then, his nose started working. The smell was horrific. Every one of those startled bats had done what any self-respecting startled bat would do, and he was literally covered in fresh bat guano. That’s why the damned dog ran, he thought. I would have, too, if I’d known, and if I could run, which I can’t. He was covered and the cave was covered. The ammonia stink made his eyes water.

  Great God, he thought. Where’s the bosun’s mate—I need some goddamned coffee.

  The natives came back after about an hour. Four of them made their way into the cave, slowly, apprehensively, probably expecting to find a headless white man at that dogleg bend. One of them had a flashlight, which he switched on to behold a white man who was no longer white and who stank like a phosphate plant. There was a quick conversation, and then they came into his crooked little chamber, picked him up, and literally trotted down the entire length of the cave and right out into the humid darkness on the hillside. They scrambled down the hill until they came to a noisy mountain stream and then unceremoniously set Sluff and his stretcher down into the water. One of them stepped down into the creek to hold Sluff’s head up out of the water and then they waited.

  The water felt wonderful—cool, not cold, but a welcome relief from the Solomon Islands’ heavy air. He consulted with his right hand, which agreed to function, and then cupped handfuls of cool water to his face and guano-plastered hair. After five minutes the stench of ammonia had abated, and they lifted him out of the stream and laid him down on the bank. Then Jennifer Matheson materialized, a flashlight cupped in her hand to produce a beam sufficient for her to walk but not attract attention. David was at her side. He wrinkled his considerable nose but then fell to work cleaning the area around Sluff’s head wound. The sudden smell of antiseptic filled the air. It stung but it was better than bat guano.

  “Have a close call?” she asked.

  “Two of them,” he said. “The dog found me, but then the bats launched when he barked. Scared him and he ran out of the cave howling. That scared the bats so they lightened their loads as they gained altitude. Every one of them, as best I can tell.”

  She chuckled. “The Japs’ve gone on across the face of this mountain. I have two boys laying spoor to keep the dogs interested.”

  “How many in the patrol?”

  “A dozen, we think,” she said. “Regulars. Traveling light. They had four dogs, but we’ve thinned the pack down to two. Now the boys are leading them into an area of pig traps. Grave-sized holes in the ground covered in palm frond. The bottom covered in sharpened stakes. It works on pigs, and they’re smarter than dogs. In the meantime, we have to go the other way.”

  “Ow!” he protested when David finally stripped off the dirty bandage.

  “Sorry, sah,” David said. “’e gotta go altogether.”

  “Where’s Jack?” Sluff asked, as David used surgical scissors to cut away matted hair. He was pretty sure he could feel his skull crackling.

  “In a new hide with his teleradio and some sentries. He set up a half-dozen hides in these mountains against the day when the Japs actually landed. They know about the coast watchers, of course, so he has to keep moving.”

  “They using radio direction finders?”

  “Control warned us of that, but Jack doesn’t believe it. As far as he’s concerned, they’re a bunch of vicious monkeys dressed up in soldier suits.”

  “He’d be wrong about that,” Sluff said. “We use signal flags and flashing lights right up to the moment when we know they’ve seen us. Then we use radio.”

  “Tell Jack that, then,” she said. “The point is, this island’s not as big as Guadalcanal, so if they persist, we may have to take to the sea and go over there.”

  She’d been in the islands long enough that the word there came out “dare.” David finished applying a new bandage. Sluff thought his head didn’t hurt quite as much as it had before. He was weary and hungry, but he thought he might be able to move his arms and legs in a coordinated fashion pretty soon. David got up, showed Jennifer that he had only one large bandage left, and then disappeared into the darkness. Two bearers took his place. She gave him a good drink of water and told him there’d be food where they were going. Somewhere in the far distance, a dog howled, the plaintive sound of a dog in serious misery. The sound gave everyone pause.

  Know the feeling, dog, Sluff thought.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Kalai Highlands

  The new hide was just below the tops of a three-thousand-foot-high ridge some five crow-fly miles from the bat cave. The view was spectacular, extending across the lower slopes of the ridge all the way down to the black-sand beaches and then out over the northern expanse of Ironbottom Sound. A bulge of black volcanic rock overhung the coast-watcher campsite, which was nestled in a thick copse of trees, vines, and high grass. The radio’s antenna had been strung through the treetops with a jungle vine wrapped around it for camouflage. Jack’s teleradio equipment was in a bamboo and palm-frond hut just inside the jungle line.

  Sluff’s stretcher was parked up under that bulge of overhanging rock. Just before dawn, they’d arrived at the campsite, where he got his first meal in three days, a mixture of tinned meat, rice, and boiled squash. It was wonderful. There seemed to be a lot of people coming and going, although he couldn’t tell much about their faces through the mosquito netting erected over his stretcher. They’d notched out a rectangle of logs and put his stretcher down on that to keep the ants at bay. A bamboo A-frame held the netting. The slope faced southeast, so the sun was beginning to heat things up, even under the overhang.

  Jennifer’s rubber plantation was two ridges behind them, perhaps six miles farther up the coast. They couldn’t see the Japanese ships anymore, assuming they were still there. Jennifer had told him that the patrol had lost their dogs and immediately started making their way down the slopes toward the beaches. She told him that David would keep an eye on him, as she had to go down to the coast, herself, to line up the boats they would need if the Japs came back in strength.

  “Jack’s been told to stay off the air for a few days,” she said. “He can keep a listening watch, but they don’t want him transmitting. He still thinks that’s nonsense, the radio direction business. I think they might wind the station up, actually.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “We’re so close to Guadalcanal that our warnings of approaching ships or aircraft don’t actually offer much warning time. The stations up in the Shortlands and New Georgia are the ones who give the Yanks time to get fighters into the air.”

  “Any word on when I might see a submarine pickup?”

  “Not a word,” she said, with a wan smile on her face. “You may yet get to experience a ride in a sea canoe.”

  “Canoe?” he asked.

  She laughed. “It’s how we get about these days. We had a schooner but a Kawanishi flying boat shot it to pieces about a month ago. We go at night, eight rowers, two passengers, and a limited amount of ‘stuff.’ So far, Jap warships pay us no mind, if indeed they even see us. The canoes, as we call them, are thirty to as much as fifty feet long, hollowed-out trees. The journey to Guadalcanal won’t be the problem. The landing will, because the Japs have an entire army over there. How’s your head?”

  “Better, I think,” he said, touching the bandage carefully. “I’ve tried sitting up but I’ve got a ways to go. Is there a spare canteen ar
ound?”

  She said she’d see to it. “One meal a day now that we’re out in the long bush. I’ve told David to bring you fruit when he can, but we’re on the run, here. I’ll be gone for three, mebbe four days. You have problems, stop any boy and ask for David.”

  “Not Jack?”

  She paused for a moment. “No, not Jack,” she said softly. “To him, you’re a complication he doesn’t need. He’ll do his duty and his best to get you back to American lines, but our boys, their families—their survival come first.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Do you?” she asked. “Because if he has to choose…”

  He nodded. “Like in the cave.”

  “Just like that, Captain. Your chaps don’t seem to be in any great hurry to recover you, do they? Look: I’m an Aussie. Jack’s a Pom. We see things differently sometimes. We Aussies think the Americans have come to save our bacon. Jack thinks the Americans are going to throw the British Colonial Service out when this is all over. So: If we have to do a runner, I’ll try to get you over to Guadalcanal. If we manage that, your lot will be able to retrieve you a lot faster than a submarine. Or so it seems.”

  He smiled. “So it seems. I was in charge of what I think turned into a disaster. That might explain the delay.”

  Her face turned sad. “You may be right about that,” she said. “Our boys collected and buried over two hundred bodies from the beaches after that night. Some Japs, but mostly Americans. Look: I must scarper. Chin up. It can only get worse.”

  They smiled at each other and then she was gone. A few minutes later the largest spider Sluff had ever seen climbed up the mosquito netting and looked him over. Sluff raised a hand and cocked his finger over his thumb and tried to flick it off the netting. The problem was that he couldn’t quite make his fingers obey. The spider, he was very sure, was grinning at him. Jap spider, probably. Time for another nap.