Fujimoto had many times gone over the repair list with Ogata. Besides restoring the ship’s hull integrity, her boilers needed re-tubing, her pumps overhauling, her armament needed to be re-furbished and re-calibrated. In addition to a thorough cleaning, inside and out, she needed a complete bottom job to bring her back to her designed thirty-five knot capability.
Kunisawa called to Fujimoto from atop the destroyer’s pilot house. “Some fun, ehh, Katsi? Ran over three logs and a waterlogged sampan getting here. And I think half a life boat is jammed under the screwguard.”
“Everything else intact?” asked Fujimoto.
“Of course.”
“We were worried you would break into the liquor cabinet.”
“Damned Americans don’t drink.”
“Good.”
“Except you should see what we found in the Captain’s sea cabin.”
Fujimoto’s heart sank.
“Scotch. Good stuff. Greek.”
“They don’t make scotch in Greece,” shouted Fujimoto.
Deeper in the cove they heard a toot. It was a whistle on the drydock, signifying they were ready. Just then a launch lay alongside the Stockwell, and ten men scrambled aboard to help with the drydock’s mooring lines.
Kunisawa watched for a moment satisfied everything was in place. Then he leaned over the pilot house rail and shouted an order down to his bo’s’n waiting patiently in the tugs’ pilot house. The bo’s’n gave two blasts on his horn, and water boiled under the tug’s stern.
The ships moved ahead. Kunisawa shouted back to Fujimoto. “Greece. Scotland. Germany. Who cares? That stuff burned like hell when it went down.”
“Did you save any?”
Kunisawa gave a deep bow. “Sorry. It went to good use.”
“I’ll bet it was paint thinner.”
Instead of looking back, Kunisawa waved over his head, concentrating on the drydocking’s precision.
A zephyr twirled in from Butuan Bay, clearing the death-haze from the Stockwell. They couldn’t yet the sun, but the destroyer’s port quarter was visible as she eased toward the drydock’s yawning mouth.
Jimbo spoke for the first time. “What a disgusting wreck.”
Smiling broadly, Fujimoto was sure his luck had changed. “She’s perfect, Koki.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
15 September, 1942
Three Kilometers South of Amparo
Mindanao, Philippines
A brilliant half-moon set over the Agusan jungle, turning the night sky from a royal blue to a deep cobalt, a sharp contrast to the fog that had been hugging the coast for the past two weeks. With the moonset, the star-carpet overhead became thick, yet, despite the sky’s stark beauty, Helen’s teeth chattered. Someone was watching her, she was sure.
Take hold.
Crouched under a tall bush, she watched the moon plunge through a grove of Narra trees, where three monkeys were silhouetted as they jumped gracefully from one limb to another. Their screeching told her she was safe. At least that’s what Amador had said before he marched to the runway’s south end to take up his position. “Listen to the damned monkeys. And the cicadas. They’ll tell you if you’re alone. If you didn’t hear them, scram. Because the Hapons won’t be far behind.”
She was near the north end of a three thousand foot dirt runway, one of many caches set-up by General MacArthur in a crash program eighteen months ago. The idea was that the emergency airstrips could take over the Philippine’s defense, should the primary bases be wiped out. MacArthur’s idea was good one. In one quick raid, the Japanese wiped out over half the bombers and fighters of the U.S. Army Air corps at Clark Field on December 8, 1941. But MacArthur hadn’t planned on the sell-out by Filipino fifth columnists and saboteurs who tipped the Japanese. Thus the bombers at dirt airstrips everywhere were blasted in their camouflaged revetments within days of the war’s outbreak, nullifying any serious airborne threat from MacArthur.
So now, Helen stood beside a cratered runway with the wrecks of a half dozen early model B-17s scattered about. The jungle-riot in the trees failed to calm her, her eyes snapping to every new sound. The Kempetai could play the same game and she wasn’t going to be careless, especially on this, their first airdrop. If the enemy was hidden out there and she moved too quickly, she could be easily spotted by a Japanese who had been more patient than she.
“I can’t stand it.” Wong Lee stood next to her.
“Don’t!” Her voice between a whisper and a guttural rasp.
Too late, Wong Lee flicked his Zippo.
“Damn you,” she hissed.
He mashed his hands into the grass and cupped them so tightly, that hardly a glow escaped.
“You’ll kill us all.”
“No Japs, tonight.” Wong Lee took an enormous drag then exhaled luxuriously.
“They have noses, you idiot.” Automatically, she looked to her right, upwind. They were about two hundred feet from the runway’s northern end. Beyond that was a little more clear ground then the tree line. Nothing stirred.
Wong Lee lay back, putting his hands behind his head, studying the night sky. “Their noses are ruined. They smoke more than I do.”
“Nonsense.”
Wong Lee closed his eyes and feigned sleep.
Helen’s watch was barely visible in the fading light: almost ten minutes to two. Any time now.
DeWitt’s terse message explained the plane, a long-range amphibian, loaded with food, ammo and medicine, would make one pass at two o’clock sharp, north to south, right over the Amparo runway at 500 feet. They would heave out their bundles, letting them settle by parachute to the runway. Amador had placed his guerrilleros strategically around the field: he and Renaldo were hidden at the runway’s south end, Legaspi and Carillo about midway; Helen and Wong Lee at the north. With Legaspi were two carabao hooked up to logging skids. It would take at least an hour to drag the stuff to the main highway, where they would transfer the goods to a wagon. With any luck, the stuff would be hidden in Amparo within the hour, Buenavista the next day.
She wondered what Otis was sending. Food? Penicillin? Soap? Would Otis have thought of soap? What a luxury.
At exactly one-fifty-five, Amador was to point his flashlight to the sky and flash three shorts and a long--something from Beethoven, she remembered. Then he was to do it once again a minute later.
She squinted once again at her watch: about eight minutes to two. “Damn.”
“Huh?” Wong Lee took a final drag, ground the butt out with thumb and forefinger, field stripped it, and stuffed the remaining little wad of paper in his pocket. “What’s wrong?”
She waved at the jungle around them. “You don’t know who is out there. Our most vulnerable moment is when we go for the supplies.”
“Why does Don Pablo say you’re lucky?”
That’s out of the blue. She reached inside her blouse for Ingram’s ring and palmed it for a moment
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I mean that Navy guy.”
“You don’t know him.”
“He’s one damn lucky son-of-a-bitch.”
“Shut up.” What the hell is he doing?
“Someday I’m going to throttle that bastard for cutting in on me.”
Helen could barely see his face in the gloom.You’re married. “And, he was there first.”
“All’s fair in love and war. Besides, my wife is Stateside and I’m here. Then your boy is Stateside and you’re here. Don’t you believe in providence? That you’re here and I’m here?”
“Wong, you’re hopeless.” Helen realized her teeth had stopped chattering. Thank you.
He sat up slowly. “You wanna know why I smoke so damned much?”
“That’s easy. You’re trying to kill yourself.”
“You bet. Because I don’t want anything of me left over for the Japs to have.”
They were back on familiar ground having had this argument many times, yet she still played the gam
e. “It’s not working. You don’t have lung cancer.”
“No, not yet. But I’m working on it.” His tone changed. “When they get me, I’m going to have a ton of dynamite strapped to my body, and I’ll light the fuse with my last cigarette.”
“Poetic.” I wonder if he really does have a death wish?
“Kaboom! Right out of Verdi.”
“Shh.” Her watch read one-fifty-five. Just then Amador’s flashlight blinked with three short flashes and one long flash from the runway’s south end. The night was still so clear and beautiful, Helen refused to believe the Japanese were ready to burst in on them. “Someday soon you’ll be once again serving roast duck with plum sauce.”
“Thought you didn’t like plum sauce.”
“At this point I’ll try anything. How about tonight after we get to Amparo?”
“Maybe. But it’ll be breakfast time by then.”
“I’m game to try anything by the great Wong Lee.”
“My mother cooks it best.”
Wong Lee’s mother, Ginger, managed his restaurant in Los Angeles. His daughter Suzy Lee and his wife, Mary, managed Wong Lee’s in San Francisco. “Is it as good in San Francisco?”
“Mary adds a bit of ginger. Makes mom mad as hell.”
“Which one’s the best?”
“Mary’s stuff seems to go better with beer. The business crowd likes it.” Wong Lee rubbed his chin for a moment. “Helen. I want you to stay here after the plane drops the supplies.”
“We’ll go together.” She stood slowly, making sure she remained in deepest shadow.
“No, you stay here. That way, you can take some of them out.”
“Not tonight, Wong.” Now the roles were switched. She was trying to convince him there were no Japanese hidden in the night.
He rose and stood beside her, his hands on his hips. “You know what? I haven’t tasted roast duck with plum sauce for eight months. I’ve not seen Mary or my mother for eight months. Okay. I can stand the snakes. I can stand the heat. I can stand the starvation. The lack of food, medicine. I can stand it all.”
“I know.”
“What I can’t stand are the damned dreams.”
She hadn’t heard Wong Lee talk like this.
“I hear them. I see them. The Japs kicked the door in. Didn’t give them a chance. I’d barely jumped out the window when they shot my Uncle and my nephews in bed. Little kids, Tom and Jerry we called them. They were five and seven. I heard the bullets hit; they screamed.” He was talking about Malaybalay and the night he’d escaped from the Kempetai. “All we were doing was washing dishes for a little ten table place down the street. Tom and Jerry--they helped, too. Someone snitched I was American.”
“I dream too, Wong.”
“Do you have pills for it?”
Something whistled in the distance.
Louder.
Radial engines softly backfired.
A shadow flicked directly overhead. For four or five seconds she heard the rush of airframe noise as the airplane glided over the runway. Then the airplane’s engines roared as the pilot firewalled the throttles, clawing for altitude, heading for home. It had the same growl of the PBYs she’d seen so many times at Corregidor.
“Damn good pilot. No noise. Must have glided all the way in from high altitude.” Wong watched the red glow of the plane’s exhausts fade to the south.
Helen heard a ‘thunk’ off to her left, near the runway. Then something smacked the grove, further to her left.
“The Lucky Strikes are in that one over there.” Wong, pointed to the grove.
They started walking. “How can you tell?”
“By the sound it made when it hit the trees.”
“Come on.”
“That’s what bothers me.”
“What?” In the darkness she saw his hand point toward the sky.
“That guy. The pilot. He sleeps in clean sheets tonight, or whenever he gets home.”
“Good for him.”
“But don’t you see? Like just a little bit of ginger in the plum sauce the airplane is a new taste for us. Americans. Freedom. Those crates out there. Makes you almost not want to have them for fear there’s a Jap behind the next bush, ready to take it all away and kill you.”
They parted heading for their respective bundles. “Wong?”
“Yes?” He stopped.
“Amador isn’t going to die. He promised me.”
“Oh?”
“I want your promise, too.”
After a moment, his voice drifted over. “I promise.”
They started walking again and Helen said, “Good. You’ll stop smoking then?”
“Never.”
They reached Amparo within an hour and while Wong Lee, Amador, Renaldo, Legaspi, and Carillo unloaded the skid, Valentino Lubang called Helen into his little two room hut.
Valentino’s five year old son, Emilio, had old had fallen into a ravine earlier that day and broken his arm. A simple fracture, Helen set it and the boy did his best not to cry as she set about her work. When it was done, Helen took him in her arms and rocked him to sleep.
A grateful Valentino Lubang shook Helen’s hand over and over after she put the sleeping child to bed. The wafer-thin, five foot two Valentino praised her presence as a Godsend especially since, his wife, Corazon, wasn’t there to be with her son. Months ago, she’d been dragged off by the Kempetai for duties as a comfort girl.
Amador and his guerrilleros had made camp outside the village. Too exhausted to join them, Helen fell asleep on a banig, a woven mat, in Lubang’s Sala, a little front room.
Outside, her mind barely registered a truck crunching to a stop in the gravel.
A scream. Gunfire. “What?” She rose from her banig and blinked as two men stormed into the little room waving flashlights. A male voice screamed in Tagalog. Then another shouted, “get up!”
“What?” she mumbled. Amazing. That was in English. Mentally, her system was telling her something was very wrong. But her body wouldn’t respond.
Two pair of hands pulled Helen to her feet. This time the shouts were in Japanese and the soldiers reeked of tobacco and basi, a local wine of sugar cane and herbs.
A candle was lighted and Helen was dragged across the room and shoved against the wall. One soldier pushed again, this time against her breast, for good measure; then they walked out.
Other women screamed and cried out in the village. A pig squealed. But a rifle cracked and the squealing stopped.
The soldiers shouted back and forth, some in Tagalog; some again in English.
Valentino rushed in. “Put this on, quick.”
“What?” Desperately, Helen tried to blink sleep away. But her eyes seemed as if covered by sandpaper.
Valentino pressed a garment into her hands and turned his back. “A dress of Corazon’s. It’s the best I can do.”
“What do they want?” She began taking off her overalls.
Valentino looked out the door. “They’re conscripting ten of our women to clean their ship. That Hapon out there, their officer, promises to return you home in a week. With money in your pocket as well,” he snorted.
“At daybreak they’ll still see my face, my eyes.”
With a snap of his fingers, Valentino ran into the back room and returned with a long black veil. “Corazon’s” he puffed, out of breath.
She squeezed his hand and took the veil. It had a lingering perfume scent.
“She wore it to church.” Valentino stammered. “It...it was her parent’s wedding gift.
“Thank you.” She draped the black veil over her face and looked down to see the dark floral patterned dress extended to her ankles. “I’m no longer an occidental.”
“They’re loading the truck. I’m sorry there’s--”
“Quick. Do you have a piece of paper?”
“Yes, but--”
“Get it.”
Lubang did so and brought it to her.
Fortunately Lubang was li
terate in Tagalog so she asked him to print in bold letters:
LEPER (in remission)
Then she scribbled a name with the legend ‘MD’ beside it. He’d just pinned it on her when the two soldiers stomped in, screeching in Japanese.
Valentino hung an old cracked leather musette bag over her shoulder. “A few things.”
She tried to mouth ‘Thank you’ but they dragged her out the door to the truck. She must have been the last one because right after they heaved her in the back, the truck started, doors slammed and they drove off.
The truck bounced down the Agusan Valley toward Butuan. Helen lay on the floor near the back watching the Eastern horizon grow red. Two guards sat in back, both asleep, their rifles jiggling between their legs. A few whimpers ranged through the truck but most of the women remained quiet, stoic, almost accepting their fate; that they would not return alive. One caught Helen’s eye, an overweight mestizo, and returned a malevolent stare, as if this whole thing were Helen’s fault. That this would not have happened had she and her damned guerrilleros not showed up at two in the morning.
She rolled on her back, watching a marvelous cloudless day develop, so unlike the recent fog-shrouded mornings. Terror coursed through her veins as the truck drove on. Despite what Valentino said, she thought she was headed back to some sort of interrogation. Occasionally, she raised her head and looked out, wondering if she could somehow scramble over the guard’s legs as they crossed a bridge, leap far into space and end it all.
Never again, would she let them interrogate her. Never.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
15 September, 1942
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company
San Francisco, California
The bachelor’s officers’ quarters was a batten-board, faded yellow, two-story utilitarian building that looked as if it was built in a hurry. Ingram and Toliver shared a room. It had a bed on either side, two dressers, two closets, two easy chairs and a long desk under wooden Venetian blinds. A portable radio in the corner softly played Artie Shaw.
A CODE FOR TOMORROW: A Ingram Novel (The Todd Ingram Series Book 2) Page 14