The Hooligans

by P. T. Deutermann

  “I’m surprised the Japs didn’t tumble to all that,” Boss said. His croaking was wearing off, down now to a throaty squeak.

  “Oh, but they did,” the old man said. He hoisted the little bottle to see if anyone wanted another shot. Three simultaneous headshakes, which ignited a gathering headache. The bottle went back into the rucksack. Gently. McAllen resumed.

  “Came in like the bloody samurai warlords they all think they are and told the Tanabuli natives to scarper. Get lost. The water was theirs for the duration. Everyone in the village was forced into the jungle. About a week later a platoon of naval infantry showed up on my rubber plantation and a couple others, some twenty miles north of the harbor. By then I’d gone bush and was making my way off the island by boat. Found out later my workers were rounded up and told to start harvesting latex. Field boss told ’em that it was the wrong time of the year to slash the trees. Got his face slapped good and proper. My boys got the message and slashed the trees. Of course, there was no goo and then the trees began to die. Head Jappo blamed that on my boys. Rounded up all but one, who escaped, and shot the lot of them. That news got back to the Blind Man.”

  “The blind man?” Boss asked. Chief Higgins was taking a nap by now. I was just starting to feel my teeth again. VanPiet looked like he was chewing gum, but I hadn’t actually seen any gum.

  “Aye,” McAllen replied. “And he’s the only potential problem you could face setting up a torpedo-boat base in Tanabuli. You could think of him as a yowie if he lived back in Australia. Half-man, half-spirit. Shape-shifter. Witch doctor. Shaman. Pick your bogeyman. Supposedly lives way back in that cave which produces the spring. Been there over a thousand years. If you dare to lay eyes on him you become blind, like him. Has magical powers for both good and evil. No one has ever seen him, of course, and yet they all believe he exists up there, somewhere in that cave. You get the picture, right?”

  “Well, sort of,” I said. “But you said the Japs killing the plantation workers got this bogeyman’s attention?”

  “Apparently, it did. The one boy who got away from the plantation massacre made his way to where the Tanabuli villagers were hiding out and told the headman what had happened. By then the Japs were bringing in barges for water, so everyone was keeping his bloody head down. The headman took the boy up to the cave the next night and the two of them snuck past the sentries. They went to something called the talking stone. The boy whispered the story to the stone and asked for the Blind Man to do something about it.”

  “And now you’re going to tell us something happened to the Japs who killed the farmworkers,” Higgins said. I hadn’t realized he’d returned to the land of the living.

  “Well, laddie, as the story goes, the Jap major in charge at Tanabuli got word that the platoon had bollocksed the rubber effort and sent a message for them to report to him in the harbor. Now: there’s one road that runs the length of Santa Isabel, north to south, halfway between the seashore and the central ridge of the island. Not really a road, actually; more of a glorified path through the jungle. The platoon never showed up. The major then sent a squad up the road to find them, and find them they did. Or at least their heads, all neatly impaled on bamboo poles out in the middle of a small river. Just the heads; no bodies. As far as the locals were concerned, the Blind Man had done his bloody job.”

  “Or somebody had,” Cushing said. “Like maybe the farm workers’ families followed the platoon down the road and took care of business.”

  “Aye,” McAllen said. “Most likely that’s precisely what happened. The Jappo major was madder than hell about this so he sent two squads back to where the heads had been seen, some ten miles up the trail, and told them to find the bodies; bring ’em back for a proper Shinto burial. When that lot didn’t return, either, the major got spooked and the whole lot decamped across the Slot to one of their bases on the Russell Islands. Listen, the point of my story is this: when you-lot move into Tanabuli, be aware that the locals believe in this Blind Man fella absolutely. Don’t anyone make sport of the legend. Pretend to accept it, and do so with respect. No reason to shoot yourselves in the bloody foot right from the start, now, is there.”

  “Got it, Mister McAllen,” Boss said, nodding. “Any chance you’d like to come with us? Our intel people tell us there are no Japs on Santa Isabel except for a seaplane base up at the north end of the island.”

  “Wouldn’t bloody miss it,” the old man crowed. “And by the way, please call me Wooly.” Then he turned to me. “By the way, Doctor,” he said. “Did anyone tell you that when I first came out from England that I’d been a physician?”

  I shook my head.

  “Please note the past tense,” he said with a grin. “Haven’t practiced for years, have I.”

  It turned out he’d gone to the university medical school in Glasgow, joined a practice, practiced for five years, and then got struck off for “improper behavior” with one, or possibly more, of his female patients. He was then encouraged to emigrate to Australia. The Aussies wouldn’t license him unless he agreed to provide medical services in the northwest territories to the aborigines, because the government couldn’t get any licensed physicians to go out there. He went to Queensland instead for five years, where the Aborigines in turn taught him their version of natural medicine. He then wrote a book about that, causing an uproar in the Australian medical community. The government suggested he emigrate again, but this time to the Solomon Islands, which were under the colonial administration of Australia and where the sole white doctor in that island chain had died a suicide.

  Captain VanPiet called Boss aside as the meeting broke up. He asked Boss when the squadron would make the big move.

  “Thinking day after tomorrow,” Boss replied. “Need to get some stuff together for the trip up. I’ll probably send a two-boat patrol ahead to scope out the lay of the land.”

  “Well,” VanPiet said, looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, “there’s a civilian cargo ship coming into the harbor late tonight. Gonna be here for three days, working on a boiler problem. Civilian crew.”

  “Is that so?” Boss said innocently.

  “Yeah, and I’ll probably let ’em go ashore tomorrow night for a little beer muster, over on the Cactus side of the island.”

  “Where they’ll be out of sight of the ship for a little while?”

  “That’s possible,” VanPiet said with a perfectly straight face. “There’ll be some of my boiler techs left onboard, but they’ll be down in the engineering spaces.”

  Boss stared down at the sand for a minute. “And in return for this priceless intelligence,” he said, finally, “we will leave your stockpiles alone. The ones up on that little hill over there. Where the Marines sometimes gather for a midnight wiener-roast.”

  “Those very stockpiles, yes,” VanPiet said solemnly.

  “Deal,” Boss said. “And thank you very much. For everything.”

  “I’m gonna miss evening prayers,” VanPiet declared.

  “Not if I leave a small cache in my Quonset hut,” Boss said. “Under one of those overturned ammo crates. Just to tide you over until you can make your own arrangements, that is.”

  “Wonderful,” VanPiet said, beaming as only a Dutchman could, knowing that certain necessities of life were not going to suddenly dry up.

  NINE

  Three days later, the squadron rumbled into Tanabuli harbor at dawn, where we were met by a platoon of Marines and our two advance boats. We’d traveled all night, staying close in to the shore where possible and keeping the speed down to minimize wakes. The boats were piled high with all the squadron’s stuff, so we were in no position to get into a fight. The harbor was beautiful: a long, narrowing estuary of crystal-clear water, white sand beaches for a change, and a small collection of huts and longhouses scattered along the curving beach. There were no facilities, just fishing boats drawn up on the sand, dense palm tree groves, and curious locals staring in awe at the dark gray torpedo boats rumbl
ing up to the beach and then dropping anchor twenty feet offshore. To the east was the low rise of the tree-covered central spine of Santa Isabel Island, twenty-five miles long. Behind us and not more than a couple hundred yards across the harbor was that wedge-like cliff of black rock, 150 feet high and perhaps a mile long. A bright, wide waterfall fell ten feet into the sea from a pool at the base of a long slit of a cave in its face. Unlike Guadalcanal, there were no looming mountains on Santa Isabel, only that long ridge of green trees and jungle that disappeared north into the humid mists. It was hot and muggy, as usual, but somehow the air seemed cleaner now that we were away from blood-soaked Guadalcanal.

  Our MTB pushed its nose right into the sand along the beach and Boss, Wooly McAllen, and I hopped off to meet the Marine first lieutenant and the village headman. Having Wooly along proved to be a Godsend. The locals recognized and, better yet, welcomed him. He spoke to them in a mixture of pidgin, English, and some native dialect. The Marine lieutenant told us the area appeared to be secure, with no Japs around as far as they could tell, and that the locals were glad the Japs were gone. They said the Japs had left suddenly and gone across the Slot, not to the Russells, but to the big Jap airfield at Munda, northwest on New Georgia Island. They had stripped the village of all food supplies before leaving and had seemed to be in a big hurry, as if they’d been expecting an attack. The Marine first lieutenant was taking no chances, however. He kept patrols out day and night in the surrounding woods.

  He and Cushing then began talking about where we could build a camp and also where we could disperse the boats in anticipation of a Jap air attack. I took Wooly aside and asked him how I could get up into that cave.

  “Want to go see the Blind Man, then, do you, mate?”

  “No, I’m looking for a safe place for a medical aid station. Especially one that has running water.”

  Wooly asked permission from the headman, who assigned a boy to show us how to get up there. We took a fishing skiff across the harbor to the bottom of the cliff next to the waterfall. From across the harbor the cliff had appeared to be flat faced, but up close we found that the waterfall had carved a notch into the face some fifteen feet back. There was a beach of sorts on either side and a ledge leading up to the lip of the waterfall. Two young women were in a boat right under the falls, collecting water in jars. They paddled away when they saw Wooly and me, but with much giggling. Our boatman scolded them, but they didn’t seem to take him very seriously. We walked up to the ledge above to find a semicircular pool that was fifteen feet wide and almost twice that long. At the other end of that pool was a wet, slanting face of rock down which the real waterfall, which surged out of a crack in the rock above, sheeted down into the pool. The cave appeared to be more like a grotto, but it did offer shelter because the face of the cliff above the waterfall substantially overhung the pool. The air was fresh and cooler up there than on the beach where we’d landed. I could easily envision up to a dozen beds.

  “We won’t have any religious problems turning this area into a small hospital, will we?” I asked Wooly.

  “Don’t think so,” he said. “Especially if you offer some medical help to the village, yes?”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  The next morning two destroyers arrived, bringing yet more “stuff.” They couldn’t come into the harbor because it was too shallow, so the Marines organized the villagers to use their boats to ferry in materials. Suddenly the tiny village of Tanabuli was awash in stacks of fuel and lubricant drums, ammo crates, C-ration boxes, and all the rest of the things needed to support a clutch of motor torpedo boats. It became apparent that there was no way in hell that this tiny, primitive village could absorb the onslaught of logistics that was upon them. I kept waiting for a Jap reconnaissance plane to come over and do a double take at such rich pickings. That night, however, brought salvation in the form of a Navy cargo ship, escorted by two more destroyers. That ship began dropping amphibious boats into the water from offshore filled with the solution to all our problems: Seabees and their noisy toys. Even better, they were led by Tiny Tim, who immediately proposed to move everything across the long, narrow, and of coursed damned bay and away from the cramped confines of the Tanabuli village.

  Cushing agreed. The estuary on which the village sat was barely a mile across, but on the other side there was nothing but miles of white sandy beach and trees of all descriptions. We could widely disperse the boats, supplies, tents, and fuel dumps while still enjoying the advantages of a protected harbor. Even better, I could construct an aid station above the waterfall. The Seabees had been ordered to construct a seaplane ramp across from the village. The Navy’s Catalina flying boats could then stage out of our base and provide the MTBs with scouting assets over a wide swath of the Slot, as well as ferry casualties back to Cactus if needed. My only concern was what the Japs would do once they discovered what was going on at Tanabuli. We all had a pretty good idea.

  By now it was early November and the rainy season was setting in, which didn’t help the Seabees. It did, however, make flying conditions miserable, with an almost continuous low overcast. That meant Jap recon flights were less likely to see what was happening at Tanabuli, or at least that’s what we fervently hoped. The high command had ordered that the boats stand down so as not to alert the Japanese until the base was up and running, so there was a period of intense maintenance, personnel changeover, and training. Word got around that the Jap army had gone totally on the defensive on Guadalcanal, although that was definitely not the case in the seas around that bloodied island. I heard that the medical command over on Guadalcanal had taken over my beloved bunker on Tulagi harbor and, apparently, just in time for some of the fiercest naval battles of the campaign.

  Tim assigned a team of eight Seabees to my aid station project and they had us up and running in five days. They suspended a roof structure from cables like a big awning over the upper pool, with the cables anchored in the cliff face. Under that we were able to drape rolls of insect netting over an area large enough to contain fifteen cots and a bare-bones surgical tent. During the construction effort I’d taken the opportunity to go up into the actual cave. The entrance above that wide, wet slab was quite narrow, but then it opened up into a cool vault fifty feet high. The spring water rushed down a crack in the cave’s floor with some force before pushing down to meet the slab. I found what I assumed was the talking stone, a plinth of black obsidian two feet square, three feet high, and leaning just a bit. There was clear evidence of a footpath leading up to the stone, but no other signs of either mystic or religious paraphernalia.

  The floor of the cave rose gently behind the stone into an ever-narrowing defile leading into darkness. The light from the front of the cave seemed to dim perceptibly at this point so I decided not to push it. I don’t know if it was fear of running into the Blind Man or just reluctance to walk into darkness without a flashlight, but something told me to turn around, and so I did. Nothing like the power of suggestion, I told myself, but still … I stopped on the way back down. There was the faintest breeze blowing from behind me, which for some strange reason raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I considered that breeze for a moment. It had to mean that the passageway behind me led either to an opening in the top of the cliff or at least somewhere in the seaward side of that strange volcanic formation. A call from one of the Seabees broke the spell and I hurried back down past the stone, to the activity below.

  TEN

  Operations resumed the day after Christmas. Four boats went out to see what they could see in what were new waters, although the monsoon winds promised a mostly dismal, choppy night out in the Slot. Cushing stayed in to decode a lengthy message from Nouméa about what was going on in the campaign to take back the Solomon Islands. The boats of the squadron had been dispersed along the length of the estuary in groups of two on the shore opposite from the village. The Seabees had anchored buoys for the boats to tie up to, which meant that they didn’t have to wait to hoist an anchor
in the event of an air attack, a measure we all thought was long overdue. The boat crews stood four-hour anti-aircraft watches during daylight. One boat would be ready to open fire against low-flying aircraft immediately, while its partner on watch would be ready to man guns and start shooting in sixty seconds. The squadron’s supplies of fuel, ammo, food, and parts had also been dispersed all along that five-mile-long shore.

  Our Marine security force maintained constant patrols out in the forests on the chance that Jap raiding parties might land up the coast and come pay us a visit. They also set up an observation post on the seaward side of the rock formation where I had established the medical station. It was nothing elaborate, just a bamboo shelter where three Marines with a radio and their rifles could keep watch on the seaward approaches to Tanabuli harbor. Cushing and his radio people were operating out of a kludge of four tents set out in a palm grove. The Seabees had promised him a proper bunker headquarters but they had been suddenly withdrawn for some more urgent project. Still, we had a better situation than we’d had at Tulagi, if for no other reason than that we enjoyed unlimited fresh water.

  Cushing had asked Tiny Tim if there was any way they could pipe fresh water from the cave along the shore to the area where the boats were congregated. The operative word was pipe. The Seabees’ inventory didn’t include pipe. Tim had an idea of how to solve this problem. Bamboo. There were large stands of mature bamboo trees, many up to ten inches in diameter, along that road that led north to upper Santa Isabel Island.

  “Cut a bunch of that damn big bamboo down,” he said. “Make uniform sections out of the damn trunks, marry them together, and you got yourself a damn pipeline.”

  “But the bamboo trunks have these woody membranes inside,” Boss pointed out. “Water can’t flow through that.”

  “You got damn 20 mm cannons on them spitkits, right?” Tim asked, splashing a chaw of red tobacco into the weeds. “Fire a damn 20 mm round through the damn trunk, and water will by God flow, I damn promise it.”