The Commodore Page 21

  He awoke sometime in the late afternoon to voices. One of them was Jack’s. He was cussing up a storm about the radio and the idiot “Ozzies” in charge of the coast-watcher operation. He stopped when he saw that Sluff was awake. He took off his bush hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and came over to Sluff’s improvised hospital bed. He seemed a bit unsteady on his feet.

  “Bloody mandarins,” he grumbled. “The whole lot of them. Safe and sound back there in Sydney, mumbling arcane theories to each other about radio eavesdropping. They tell me to stay off the air? So then what the hell am I doing here?”

  “The Japs have listening stations in the home islands and probably right over there on Guadalcanal,” Sluff said. “They can take a bearing on a transmitter, from as close as Guadalcanal or as far as Tokyo. Or from Singapore, Truk, Rabaul. Cross all those bearing lines, they get a position on the transmitter. Ship-based, shore-based, doesn’t matter. With enough listening stations, they can pin down your radio’s location within a few miles.”

  “Bugger that,” Jack said. “I simply don’t believe it. Those monkeys?” He belched, and Sluff caught the scent of whiskey.

  “Those ‘monkeys’ took an entire British army at Singapore,” Sluff said. “Sank all our battleships at Pearl Harbor. And they’ve been kicking some serious ass right here in the Solomons. You may not respect them, but we sure as hell do.”

  “That’s the problem with you Yanks,” Jack said. “No offense intended, but, Jesus! You lot are doing everything piecemeal. A few ships here, a few ships there. Where’s the goddamned American fleet?”

  “What fleet?” Sluff asked softly. “And where’s yours?”

  Jack stared at him for a moment, then made a gesture as if to wave it all away. He stood up. “You should try to get up and move around,” he said. “I’ll send David to help. If you can’t, you can’t, but it would be better if you could stand and even walk.”

  “I’ll give it my best,” Sluff said. “But, please, stay off the air.”

  “A-a-a-a-h,” he said. “Bugger that. I’m here to coast-watch, and I’ll bloody well coast-watch, monkeys, or no monkeys.”

  David came to check on him at sundown and to bring him some fruit and fresh water. He smelled the bandage, which apparently met with his approval. Sluff told him he needed to get up and walk.

  David shook his head. “Tumora traim altogether. Tonait malolo.” He made a sleeping gesture with both hands clasped along the side of his aboriginal face. “Nau: rum bilong was-was.”

  That apparently was an invitation to take care of any urgent bodily functions. The chamber pot he handed over was a serious clue.

  In the morning David was as good as his word. He helped Sluff to get up out of the stretcher and then sit on the bunk of logs. His head spun for a moment, but then he began taking stock of his extremities, testing his arms and legs, and then finally his balance as he stood up, leaning heavily on David’s ample shoulders.

  It was all right, he realized. The side of his head was still this painful lump of bandage and skull fragments, but his balance came back as soon as he was standing, and there was nothing wrong with his legs. For two minutes, anyway, after which he sagged down onto his knees, much to David’s amusement. Another one of the boys came over and between them they got him upright again and gently frog-marched him in a circle around his improvised hospital bed until he suddenly grew so weary that he couldn’t stand up at all. They supported him long enough to get back onto the stretcher, where he fell fast asleep.

  They did it all over again that afternoon. The next day, the same routine, and this time he made progress. He was worried about his skull. Pressing his fingers on the wound site made small pieces of bone crackle. But that was his skull—not his brain. Jack came to watch and nodded approvingly. He told Sluff there’d been no word about any submarine pickups but that there was still chatter about getting the white people off of Kalai. He said he’d reported that cruiser and the army patrol, but no action had been taken. There were still some bodies washing ashore, but by now they weren’t recognizable as individual human beings. A mass grave had been dug on the north side of the plantation, which the Japs had abandoned after shelling it.

  “Yanks and monkeys together for eternity,” he said. “No help for it.”

  “Jennifer said you went to join another coast watcher,” Sluff said. “He still here?”

  “Nah,” Jack said. “He scarpered when that cruiser showed up. Took a sea canoe to Guadalcanal. Good luck to him. He was never much of a watcher. Always on the run, scared of the boys, I think.”

  “Have you been staying quiet on the radio?”

  “Pretty much,” Jack said, with some disgust. “Got some specific orders, actually. But this morning I saw a damned Jap submarine on the surface, five miles off the coast. Sent that in, by God.”

  Sluff nodded, but decided to say nothing. These men out here were cut from a different cloth, apparently. Had to be, to stick with this isolated life.

  That night he slept well, aided by a second meal of rice and fresh fish. The next morning dawned clear and five degrees cooler than the previous few days. He got up again, this time without help, did his was-was, and then stepped out from under the huge black overhang into the sunlight. Below him he could see the coast watcher’s shack and a hint of silver from the antenna strung out through the trees. There were perhaps a dozen natives hanging around the shack performing various morning chores, or just squatting in clumps of two or three, smoking their horrible tobacco. That’s when the Kawanishi flying boat came, popping up over the nearest downhill ridge and flying straight at him, the sun at its back and its entire front half bathed in red flashes as the pilot turned loose with twenty-millimeter cannon.

  Sluff backpedaled awkwardly to the relative safety of the overhang’s shadow, flattening himself against the back wall behind his makeshift log bunk. He’d never seen one of these seaplanes but he’d read all about them; the Kawanishi was called an Emily in the allied reporting system. Five twenty-millimeter cannons, plus five machine guns, four engines, and a two-thousand-pound bomb capacity made this aircraft a formidable foe. The plane roared overhead, firing now from its rear-pointing cannon, which tore up the teleradio shack, the grounds around it, and every living thing caught in their cone of fire.

  It was over in ten seconds. The only sound coming from out front was the crackling of flames as the coast watcher’s shack burned to the ground. Sluff crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the overhang and looked down the slope. He could see several motionless bodies down there. A small wave of flame was advancing up the hill through the dry grass. Then he felt rather than heard the thrumming of engines. He backed up again to his tiny bit of shelter under the overhang, getting flat up against the back wall as the Kawanishi came back, not shooting this time but flying low and fast back out toward the coast. He couldn’t see it but he did see its shadow flit across the smoldering grass in front of the overhang. The drone of its engines diminished, but then steadied.

  Oh, Lord, Sluff thought. He’s turning around.

  There was nothing he could do. Even if he’d had a rifle, shooting at an aircraft that could point twenty-millimeter cannons right at you would have been suicide. But why was it coming back—pictures? They’d done what they’d come to do. The engine noise increased rapidly now, as if the pilot was pulling the aircraft up into a climb.

  Pulling up? Then he understood: The plane had dropped a bomb.

  It turned out there were three bombs: one that went off in the jungle short of the burning shack, blasting several palm trees into the air, a second among the litter of bodies out on the ground, and a third that apparently smacked right into the face of the overhang. That blast hurt Sluff’s ears, but what happened next scared him almost to death. The overhang broke off the cliff face with a biblical crack of doom as tons of volcanic rock dropped straight down onto the ground right in front of his face, accompanied by a cloud of dust and dirt that nearly smothered him.

>   For one terrible moment, he thought he’d been buried alive. With his eyes closed, he put his hands out in front of him. His fingers could just touch the gritty surface of the rock. He gasped when he felt it move, but then, with an earthshaking groan, the huge black boulder, a hundred feet long and half that thick, began to roll down the hill. As the dust cleared he saw it gather speed like a giant steamroller and flatten the shattered remains of the coast-watcher station. Then it hit the jungle, where it compressed everything in its path into a green mat before dropping out of sight over the first ridge on its way to the sea. The silence that followed was momentarily absolute.

  He crawled forward before realizing he didn’t have to. The morning sun was beating down on his head. He looked up. A shiny black cliff rose behind him. There was a dent in the ground in front of him nearly eight feet deep, sufficiently pronounced that he could actually sit down on its edge. Below him most of the grass fire had been snuffed out by the passage of the rock. The bodies he’d seen before were no longer visible. There was a hundred-foot-wide notch cut into jungle beyond that gave a clear view down to the next ridgeline.

  He sat back and tried to absorb the situation. The grass around the edges of the trough carved out by that boulder was still smoldering, and it was thick enough to sting his eyes. Wolf Who Walks in Smoke, he remembered. Sits in Smoke was more like it. Had the Mide foreseen what he’d be doing some twelve years later? At the time of his naming, Sluff had been the original skeptic about all things mystical. The Mide routinely mocked his mother’s Catholic Church’s panoply of ritual, robes, smoke, incense, arcane language, and elaborate ceremonies. Sluff had wondered then if the Chippewa elders’ fascination with ritual dances, smoke, robes, arcane languages, and elaborate ceremonies was any different. It was a question he’d never asked, either of his frantically devout mother or his uncle.

  He stared back down the hill, where the air above the crushed meadow seemed to almost vibrate with the sound of that baby mountain’s passage through the coast-watcher camp. He wondered what time it was, and where he’d be able to find some water.

  TWENTY-SIX

  At first he decided not to go down the hill to see if there was anyone still alive. There were plenty of good reasons, first among them that the Kawanishi might come back. If he did find someone still alive, there was nothing that he, barely able to get around, could do for them, and after that black mass of rock had gone directly over them, he didn’t want to see the results. Besides, he was too weak. His balance was unreliable.

  You have to go, his conscience told him. You have to make sure. They did that for you.

  He took a deep breath and slid down into the depression formed when the rock first broke off. Then he went sideways down the hill, crabbing along in the four-foot depression in the ground created by the sheer mass of that rock. He encountered the first body, that of one of the native Melanesians, thirty yards above where the shack had been. The man had been flattened into a gingerbread-man shape. Everything that had been inside was now outside. Sluff held his breath as he went past, trying hard not to retch. They were all like that, he discovered, simply flattened into the volcanic soil, two-dimensional now instead of three. At the burned area where the shack had been he found what had to be the remains of Jack, the determined coast watcher. Finally he could take no more.

  He staggered off to the right, toward the edge of that distinct notch smashed into the jungle, fetching up against a palm tree and then indulging in some deep breathing. They weren’t human, those remains. Just, well, there was no word for it. Then he remembered that Jennifer would be coming back—when? Today? Tomorrow? He knew he was too weak to be able to bury them all, or even some of them, but she should not have to see this.

  The jungle was slowly, tentatively, coming back to life after the obscene violence on that hillside. There were small black birds investigating the results of the Japs’ attack on the station. Suddenly furious, he yelled at them. They ignored him. Life and death in the jungle. There were natural rules about that.

  Then he heard what sounded like crying, somewhere inside that seemingly solid wall of jungle growth, trees, and a string ball of arm-thick vines right in front of him.

  Girls, he thought. Little girls, crying. Good God, he thought.

  He called out, leaning against the tree now, and the crying noises stopped in mid-whimper. He called again, hoping that they’d recognize that it was a white man calling, not a japan, as the natives called them. His forehead pressed against the scalloped bark of the tree, and a column of ants trickled straight up the tree, an inch from his nose. After a few minutes the bushes twenty feet away parted and two young Melanesian girls emerged, one older than the other, moving so fearfully that he almost stopped breathing so as not to frighten them. They froze when they saw him. He beckoned for them to come closer and they did, one step at a time, obviously ready for an instantaneous bolt back into the jungle.

  His legs began to tremble and so he sank down with his back against the tree. Apparently that made him less of a threat, because they became bolder, advancing now, gaping at all the destruction, the crushed landscape, and the motionless forms on the hillside that brought shocked fists to their mouths. He realized he was very tired and desperately thirsty in the late-morning heat. When they looked at him again he made signs that he needed water. They looked back at him and then the older one shook her head. The younger one grabbed the older one’s hand and pointed back into the jungle, gabbling away in their own language, not pidgin.

  The older one finally understood and they came over and helped Sluff to his feet. Walking erratically between them, he tried not to trip and fall as they took him into the jungle on what was obviously a well-used path. They went downhill until they came to a stream like the one where David and company had rid him of his bat guano. He went down prostrate on the bank of the rushing stream and drank as much as he could hold, lost most of it, then drank again. He then washed his face and hands. He could still see the images of all those good people out on the hill, and he washed and washed as if he could make them go away. He vaguely heard a thrashing noise behind him as some people came out of the jungle on the other side. It was Jennifer Matheson and her crew. He stared up at her as she approached the bank of the stream.

  “We have to talk,” he said from his prone position on the ground. “Everything’s changed.”

  Three hours later he was back in his makeshift hospital bed, but no longer under the black cliff at the top of the hill. Jennifer had set up a camp down under that lower ridge where the huge rock had disappeared from sight into a shattered jungle. They were hidden in a narrow canyon created by an ancient lava flow that went back into the ridge face for about five hundred feet. The gash in the rock wasn’t straight, so they’d been able to set up a campfire that could not be seen from down below the ridge or out on the sea. A tiny brook bubbled through the canyon, no more than a foot across but enough to provide water for washing and drinking. One boy was tending the campfire, hovering over it and blowing on it to ensure that there was not the faintest whiff of smoke.

  Jennifer had insisted on going back to the remains of the coast-watcher station, despite Sluff’s protests. She’d taken two of her “boys” with her. When they returned, she was ashen-faced and tight-lipped. Her two helpers were positively goggle-eyed. She’d then given a set of clipped orders to her crew and they’d gone off in all directions. Jennifer had left the canyon and walked into the jungle for a while. Sluff thought about trying to comfort her but decided that maybe he should just sit down and be quiet. An hour later the boys started returning, bearing bags of rice, some tinned meat, a rifle, the stretcher he’d been sleeping in, and, miraculously, what looked like David’s medical bag. The Kawanishi hadn’t come for Sluff, and she undoubtedly knew that. “Bugger-that” Jack had brought that attack down on himself.

  The question of the hour was pretty obvious: What do we do now? He thought he knew the answer. With the coast-watcher station destroyed, the only alt
ernative was extraction.

  That meant crossing to Guadalcanal.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  That night they all sat around the campfire, some eating, some not. The two boys who’d been to the site of the attack had disappeared. Nobody was talking. Everyone seemed to be totally engrossed in watching the tiny fire, whose light barely made it up the canyon walls. Sluff was sitting on his stretcher with his back up against the wall. When he could stand the silence no longer, he decided to ask the question.

  “Jennifer,” he said.

  “What,” she replied. Her tone of voice was not exactly friendly.

  “We have to get out of here, right?”

  “You have to get out of here,” she said, softly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This island is my home,” she snapped. “The plantation is lost, my husband is dead, but this island is my home. I’m staying. I’ll stay long bush until these goddamned japans either leave or we kill them all.”

  “You said they were going to shut the station down and pull you out,” he said.

  “What I said is that they were going to shut the station down. It was up to us to get over to Guadalcanal. As long as Jack came out with me, I was all right with that. Now I’m not.”

  He nodded his head. “Can you help me get out then?” he asked.

  “I need to think that through,” she said, after a long pause. “Because there’s a problem, yes?”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The way these people see it, you have been nogut kas here. Bad luck. You showed up, everything went to hell, and now this disaster. Half these boys here will slip away into the bush by morning after seeing what happened at the station. Some will stay loyal and exact revenge on the japans when they can, but many of the others have had enough of this white man’s war. I know that’s unfair. We knew that the japans would eventually come for the rubber, but that’s how they see it.” She stopped for a moment and then sighed. “My world has gone upside down. I’ll think about it.”