“Everyone is hopeful, and now there are not so many Japanese warships stopping here at Orotai. Manila tells us that the Japs might just abandon Talawan, that MacArthur has moved to Port Moresby and is pushing them back.”
I suspected that the resistance in Manila was probably swallowing too much propaganda from MacArthur’s new headquarters in New Guinea. And there was still the unspoken question: Did they want MacArthur back? His father, Arthur MacArthur, had been a governor of the Philippines. His son, the current general, had been senior advisor and a field marshal in the Philippine army before being evicted by the Japanese in the early days of the war. I wondered how the emir would react to seeing Douglas MacArthur back in Manila.
“The liberation of the Philippines still might take a long time, Father,” I said. “It’s not like the Japs are quitters; Rooster and I are living proof of that. We hurt them bad at Midway, and yet they sank our carrier and the sub that rescued us. This is gonna be a long slog, Father. Years, not months, I’m afraid. Right now I see the two of us as an additional burden that you don’t need, so maybe the best thing for us to do is build a boat and try for Australia.”
“Darwin is almost two thousand miles from here, Lieutenant. Are you that good a sailor?”
“If we stay here we’re just gonna be two more mouths to feed. And, like you we’re not guerilla fighters, either. We’re dive bomber pilots.”
“Your navy must have a lot of those these days,” he mused. “Dive bomber pilots, I mean.”
“Hunh?”
“Otherwise they’d send someone to pick you two up.”
I stared at him. “That’s a low blow, Father.”
“Guilty, Lieutenant,” he admitted, sheepishly. “But you must admit there’s a smidgen of truth in what I said. Someone senior has decided that retrieving the two of you isn’t worth the effort, especially if they now know the waters around Talawan have been mined.”
“So it’s up to us to find our way back, then, right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, the two of you could make a huge difference here if you’ll join forces with us. Me, I suppose, is what I’m saying. You are professional fighting men. I’m just a priest. I believe the Americans will win this war and that the Philippines will be liberated, but as you point out, it may be a long time in coming. Having actual Americans here with us would help morale immensely.”
“Until the reprisals begin,” I pointed out. “Then having actual Americans here might be viewed as the cause of the reprisals. Tell me: if the Jap garrison knows we’re here, what will they do now?”
“They’ll hunt you,” he said. “It doesn’t take two hundred men to guard those prisoners of war. If nothing else, the rest of them probably need something to do.”
“What about those Mohammedans we met earlier—will they help? They looked like fighters to me.”
“They will fight,” Father Abriol said. “But only on one condition: that the people they’d be fighting for would have to renounce the Christian faith and become servants of Allah and his Prophet.”
Now I began to understand. Father Abriol had two masters: the resistance movement bosses in Manila, but, more importantly, the Roman Catholic Church. If Father Abriol struck that particular bargain with the Mohammedan pagans, he’d have more to worry about than the Japs.
Rooster was quietly shaking his head. I could see that the boat idea was beginning to look better and better to him. Then what sounded like a church bell rang three times from the direction of Orotai, causing Father Abriol to look up sharply.
“We need to go,” he announced. “First drink water, as much as you can. Then fill your water tubes.”
TWENTY-TWO
I thought we’d be headed back to the lava tube, but instead we pressed up the valley. Father Abriol told us that the three bells meant only that part of the Jap garrison was on the move and headed out of Orotai. Where and what for were not included in the bell signal, but of course Rooster and I assumed that the hunt for us was on. Father Abriol kindly refrained from confirming that prospect.
The first thing we did was to cross the stream and walk perpendicular to it until we reached a line of scrub trees and more of those bizarre-looking lava outcroppings. He then peed on that spot. Then we retraced our steps back to the creek, stepped down into it, and walked upstream for a couple hundred yards while trying not to break an ankle doing it. Then we stepped back out and continued on up the valley before stopping. “Your turn,” he said to me. “Just a splash. I think they’ll bring dogs again.”
“Got another cobra cave in your bag of tricks?”
“Something even worse,” he said, cryptically, and then increased the pace. False dawn was showing in the east, where that smoking cone-shaped mountain began to take definition. Ahead was a bulky ridgeline that seemed to cover the entire northern horizon. And every step was up—it seemed that every time we evaded Jap patrols, we had to go up. Rooster and I were again puffing after the first half hour. Father Abriol seemed unaffected. I guessed that two years as a fugitive and limited food supplies probably led to a high degree of physical fitness. We all took turns leaving scent markers on the way up.
The land became increasingly bleak as we climbed towards the head of the valley. There were more of those giant, black boulders and then patches of what had to be volcanic ash. The stink of sulfur became stronger the higher we went. I wondered if it wouldn’t overwhelm any dog’s tracking ability. The ground was so hard we didn’t seem to be leaving any footprints. I finally asked Father Abriol where we were headed.
“That ridge up ahead is actually the edge of a mostly dormant caldera,” he said. “It divides the island. I think I told you that this entire island is one huge volcano, rising all the way from the seabed. We’re headed for the southern rim of the main crater, which bisects the entire island.”
“Another lava tube?”
“No, but if a Jap patrol tracks us up here I have a surprise for them. I’ll explain when we get there.” He eyed the two of us. “In the meantime, let’s take a quick rest and get some more water. This stream is going to disappear soon.”
Any break was appreciated. We slaked our thirst, washed off our sweaty faces, and refilled the canteens. We’d come to the stream’s origin, a dark pool welling up from the sides of the caldera. Beyond that was only a steep slope of black rock. All the vegetation had pretty much disappeared. Looking back down the valley I wondered how far up we were. High enough to see the blue of the Pacific and the straits where Hagfish lay. To the east that single cinder cone was well defined but nowhere near as large as the formation we were climbing. And a couple thousand miles east of that was Hornet’s grave and our former lives as carrier pilots. I looked around for Father Abriol. He was sitting on a rock and quietly reciting prayers from a small black book as the sun came up.
We marched for another hour. He took us to a crack in the rim wall, through which we walked single file. The sides of the crack had been terraced on one side by decades of erosion. At the other end it opened onto the vast, misty panorama of the caldera itself, which was perhaps five miles in diameter. The rim wall fell a few hundred feet to the crater floor, which was a featureless sea of ancient ash. I saw no obvious vents or plumes, nor did there seem to be any wildlife up here. There was a shallow dry wash leading from where we stood down to the floor of the crater. It would be the obvious way down, assuming one would want to go down there. The walls on either side were like black glass, just like the lava tube.
“Rest here,” Father Abriol announced. “I’ll take the first watch at the entrance to the crack. When I get sleepy I’ll come get one of you. See those terraces above us?”
We nodded.
“There are handholds and foot pockets just to the left of the main fissure. We will climb up those to that first terrace if the Japs actually come. Now, before you lie down come with me back to the entrance.”
He told us to find some round, basketball-sized rocks. We spread out on either side and within ten minu
tes we had four. He chose two and we carried them back to the other end of the crack. He positioned one at the top of that dry wash, and the second one he wedged onto that glasslike slope leading down to the crater floor. He then invited us to urinate on both of them. Satisfied, he went back to the entrance.
“Okay,” Rooster muttered. “What the puck?”
“I have no idea, other than he wants the Jap patrol to follow us up here. After that, I’m in the dark.”
“You think we should just tell him goodbye, head for the coast, and go into the boat-building business?”
“With no food, uncertain water supplies, no compass, and no idea of where we’d even find wood for a boat?”
He sighed. “Just a thought, Boss. But I signed up to kill Japs with thousand-pound bombs, not goddamned bolos.”
Me, too, I thought. But: I’d concluded that the padre was right: Our beloved Navy probably did have an ample supply of SBD pilots and gunners, so if we were going to fulfill Halsey’s first law it might as well be here as anywhere. I told Rooster to grab a nap while he could, and then, being the exemplary leader that I was, I showed him how to do that.
Minutes later, or so it seemed, Father Abriol was rousting us out. “They sent a whole squad this time,” he said. “And more dogs.”
The sun was already past high noon, so he’d taken the burden of sitting there, watching, all morning.
“What do we do?” Rooster asked, fingering the handle of that big bolo knife.
“You two climb up to that first terrace,” he ordered. “There is a pile of rocks up there. Pick out the six biggest and bring them to the edge of the terrace. I’ll join you as soon as I set the trap.”
“What trap?” I asked.
“That dry ravine over there goes down to the floor of the crater. The bottom part of it turns to black glass. I’m going to roll those two rocks down the slope. One will go all the way to the floor. The other will roll down the ravine, taking the scent. It should look like more than one man went down there.”
“But what’s the trap?” I asked again.
“The floor of the caldera?” he said with a most un-priestly grin. “It’s volcanic ash. Looks solid, but it’s not. I’m hoping the dog tracking team starts down the ravine following the scent. They’ll hit the slippery part and slide out onto the ash-field, which is God knows how deep. Get going.”
Handholds and foot pockets, the man had said. A mountaineer I was not, but with a lot of awkward effort and a couple of breathless moments, Rooster and I made it up to that first terrace. The terrace was 20 feet wide and littered with rocks and gravel on mostly level ground. Then I saw the rocks the padre had been talking about, stacked like cannonballs. I realized that Nature hadn’t done that.
Then I realized why the padre wanted big rocks. Not all of that Jap squad would go down into that dry wash. We positioned six of the “cannonballs” next to the rim of the terrace. I thought I heard a dog bark down below. We crept to the edge of the terrace, lay down, and peered over the edge just as Father Abriol slipped up over the rim and joined us on the terrace.
I counted eight soldiers total coming cautiously out of the crack. Two were barely managing to hold back two large tracking dogs who seemed to be determined to jump into that ravine and follow the scent trail. The officer in charge of the group, identifiable by his sword, was issuing rapid-fire orders that sounded like he wanted everybody to stop for a moment and regroup, but it was no use. Both dogs and their increasingly overwhelmed handlers plunged into the narrow wash in a clatter of gravel and excited Japanese. Three more soldiers followed them down, their rifles at port arms, obviously trying to be more careful. The officer and his two remaining soldiers stopped short to see what happened next as the dogs, handlers, and the three soldiers clattered a couple of hundred feet down through the narrow ravine.
What happened next was that the dogs, their handlers, and the three soldiers bunched up when the going got really steep, about 50 feet from the bottom. There they encountered the really slippery rock. Then suddenly both dogs started barking frantically as they lunged forward. The entire crew ended up sliding down to the bottom of the slope on their backsides, the soldiers yelling excitedly as they lost their rifles, and then all of them shot out onto that formless gray expanse, into which they promptly disappeared without so much as a puff of ash.
The sudden silence was appalling. The three remaining Japs at the top of the wash were momentarily transfixed. Father Abriol picked up a rock. “Now,” he said in a soft, lethal voice.
While the Japs stood stunned at the top of the wash, we three drop-launched our rocks from our perch 80 feet above them. I threw first. My first rock hit the officer on top of his right shoulder. He screamed in pain and went down, just as my second rock hit him in the head with a satisfying whack. The second soldier was so shocked at seeing the officer with his head stove in that he made an easy target for Rooster, who dropped him with a direct hit at the top of his spine. He lurched sideways onto the motionless officer and then the both of them rolled down into the ravine, gathering speed as they headed for the bottom like two out-of-control rag dolls, limbs flying until they, too, zoomed out onto the crater floor and submerged.
The remaining soldier had by then figured it out. He swung his rifle up and fired one shot at us before the padre flung down a jagged black rock that hit him square in the face as he frantically worked the rifle’s bolt and looked back up in time to see his doom. He collapsed onto his back even as he fired, the bullet ricocheting off the stone wall of the crater. Father Abriol flung a second rock, which hit the man square in the chest, a blow that probably stopped his heart.
Once more, there was total silence. Then Father Abriol surprised us. There were two rocks left. One at a time he picked them up and launched them to hit the lone body directly below. The look on his face was pure murder. Without a word he went to the edge, turned around, and started down the handholds. We waited for him to get all the way down and then Rooster went. He was slower than the padre, which is when I came to the realization that Father Abriol was no stranger to this place.
By the time I got down to the bottom of the terrace, I was surprised to see blood everywhere. Rooster gave me a look and then nodded sideways at the priest. Father Abriol had taken Rooster’s bolo and opened the throat of the motionless Jap. Only then did he sit down and catch his breath, that bloody bolo dripping a pool of blood onto his lap. Rooster and I were too shocked to say anything.
The stink of fresh blood suddenly overcame the sulfur in the air and I thought I was going to be sick. It was one thing to watch an entire aircraft carrier blow up over my shoulder as I pulled out, incinerating hundreds if not a thousand men, but a mile below me. It was quite another to revert to Neanderthal warfare and then have to walk around in the puddles of gore. Unlike in the movies, the smells were pretty bad.
An hour later, we stashed the two rifles we’d recovered in a tiny lava pocket not far from the rim. The rifles seemed to be a pretty small caliber, not much bigger than the .22 rifles of my youth, although the powder cartridge was much longer. The officer’s sword and pistol had come off on their way down, along with a single ammo belt. Rooster had taken a momentary interest in the officer’s sword but it turned out to be some kind of cheap imitation samurai piece. Father Abriol kept the officer’s pistol. We’d left the body where it lay. I’d wanted to drag it down to the crater floor, but Abriol had pointed out what should have been obvious: How would you get back up?
We left the caldera and trudged back down to the spot where the stream bubbled up from the earth. I had a dozen questions for Father Abriol about that place, but he was definitely not in a talkative mood. Having blood on his forearms up to his elbows probably had a bearing on that. When we got to the spring we all stripped down and bathed in that pool for longer than was probably necessary. The water felt wonderful but the act of cleansing ourselves from our murderous, caveman ambush felt even better. At one point I looked over at Rooster, who was complete
ly submerged up to his chin. The look he gave me said it all: we’re in it now. I didn’t think he meant the pool.
Three hours later we were in Lingoro village, sitting around one of those bamboo tables in the longhouse which Abriol called a torogan. I thought it was the same one we’d done the first radio message in, but I’d become completely disoriented by our various treks. The villagers provided food—boiled rice with “things” in it, a large bottle of local beer which Rooster and I split, and some straw pallets to sleep on. The padre didn’t partake of anything; I had the sense that he had shocked himself up there on the volcano. I decided to sound him out on that ambush site, if only to see if he was okay.
“The Arab traders were here first,” he told us. “In the long history of occupation, that is. They go back five, six hundred years. Then there were the Portuguese mariners, the Dutch spice hunters, the Spanish missionaries, and finally the Americans. There were Filipinos here before any of them, of course, but apparently the Europeans thought their role was to be subjugated.”
“Where’d the Filipinos themselves come from?” Rooster asked.
“I was taught that they came from the Indonesian Archipelago, for the most part. For some reason lost to history, the southern part of Talawan became Catholic and the northern part embraced the Mohammedan beliefs. The occupiers of the day always made their religion mandatory. There were times the Spanish tried to eradicate the Mohammedans; other times, the Moros returned the favor. Both sides sent raiding parties to capture slaves, women, rice, and, of course, prospective converts.”
“And that big volcano ridge was no-man’s land?”
He smiled. “After a fashion,” he said. “But on ‘our’ side of the big caldera our ancestors took advantage of some natural terrain features to construct ambush killing grounds, like you saw today. There are others, even some in the forests. For instance, there’s a lava bubble up near our tube hideout, where the ground appears to be solid rock but in fact is eggshell thin. Lead someone out onto it and they’ll fall through. Inside the walls are as slick as glass. No way out. In the old times, they didn’t have much in the way of long-distance weapons, so they used natural features as places to kill invaders.”
The Nugget Page 20