The survivor

by Robb White

  Someone was in it; he could see the darker, blotchy outhne of one of them.

  It was Jason, who hit so hard that it broke his grip, flattened him out and shoved him, roUing over and over, appearing and disappearing in the soup.

  Adam got him by the belt and hauled him clear and flung him up on the sand.

  Then Guns came, neatiy rolled, and made it.

  And the Rebel made it.

  Bleeding, cut, scraped, bruised, and battered, the four men dragged themselves across the sandy beach and into the shelter of the palms.

  The enemy could have taken them then with ease, for suddenly, as though it had been waiting, a total exhaustion swept over them all and they collapsed, lying sprawled and bleeding among the palm trees.

  THE THREE ENEMY SOLDIERS StOOd lookuig down at the sleeping men sprawled in the dusty sand, with ^es walking around on their wounds. To the enemy the four men looked harmless: they had no weapons of any sort; they had been injmred, for each was stained with blood; they looked helpless in their torn clothing, their bare feet lying on the sand.

  But the enemy soldiers had seen the USMC stenciled on the torn clothing, so they stood back

  from the sleeping men, each of them holding his rifle on them, cocked and ready. In low tones they discussed the sleepers and decided not to kill them now but to take them to the island's headquarters. These harmless, helpless, hurt men could be of value to the Emperor; they would have information about the war plans of the United States. And there were methods for making these men reveal all the information they had. Methods.

  In the early morning there was stiU some mist of the night left drifting around the trunks of the palms, and the heat of the day had not yet begun.

  The only Enghsh word these soldiers knew was ''Okay.'' One of them said it loudly now. "Okay! Okay!"

  Gims, the Rebel, Jason, and Adam woke up. They turned over in the sand and looked up the barrels of the smaU-caHber rifles, the wood of the stock almost yellow.

  The leader of the enemy patrol made a get-up motion with his rifle and said, "Okay/'

  The night before, sitting under the pakns and drinking coconut juice from the fruit, there had been, not an argument, but at any rate a heated discussion about what they should do.

  Guns had said, "The first thing we've got to get is weapons. Something to shoot. If we can't get that, then a knife. But somethingr

  They had not moved far from where they had come ashore. Just back into the concealment of the jungle beneath the palms.

  "We'd better get sort of organized," Adam had said.

  "That's what I mean," Guns told him. 'Tirst, get something to shoot. Then scout this place and find somewhere to hide."

  "As long as they don't know we're here, we don't need weapons, Guns," the Rebel said, forgetting his southern drawl. "We need food and water and a place to stay."

  "And some shoes," Jason put in.

  "Shoes."

  "We're not going to be here forever" Guns said. "Shoes can wait. What we want is something to protect ourselves with."

  The whole thing seemed to Adam a Httle pointless. Maybe they were just arguing because they felt as he did. Cheated. Tricked. After what they had already accompHshed—the ascent from the boat, the survival through that surf—they felt that they had done enough. Instead, they were hope-^ lessly trapped on this enemy-held island.

  "What chance of them coming to get us out of here?" the Rebel had asked.

  "The submarine was supposed to do that," Guns said. "But they must have another one standing by. They must have."

  "I don't think so," Adam said. "If they knew four of us were still alive they might send a sub for us, but they don't know that. In a couple of days they'll put one of those 'Overdue—Presumed Lost' tags beside our names and that'U be that"

  "Do you think that?" Jason asked.

  "He knows that, Jason," the Rebel said. "We're going to be on this stinking island until the war's over. And that's going to be a long time."

  "So maybe we better get organized," Adam said. He looked over at Guns in the moonHght. "We don't need weapons right now. We need a place to hide and water and something to eat. Those first."

  "Okay, so we're wandering around here barefoot as a yard dog and they jump us. What do we do without a weapon?"

  "The main thing is, don't let them jump us," Adam said. "We're a lot better off if they never find out we're here."

  "You know it," the Rebel said. "We haven't got a Chinaman's chance if they even think we're here. This island isn't big enough to hide us if they ever start looking for us."

  "Yeah," Jason agreed, "they mustn't know."

  And now they did know. Adam sat up in the sand, his whole body stiff from the slugging the sea had given him, and looked at the little round ring of the rifle muzzle, and looked up into the face of the enemy.

  For a moment it was easier just to accept this thing. Adam knew what the end of it would be, but he felt in this moment that he had fought all he could fight—from the sunken boat to here. He had gone as far as he could. He had nothing left. It was not fair, he told himself. It wasn't fair at all.

  Beside him Jason, the Rebel, and Guns sat up and stared at the enemy, each one with the gun slanting down.

  Adam studied the faces of the enemy. He had seen faces Hke this many times before. The faces of the workers, the men of the rice paddies and farms, the mills and mines. Not the faces of the miiversity students, the city dwellers.

  Adam straightened his back, sitting up firm and upright. Then he scowled at the enemy and said, in their language, barking it at them, "AttentionI Stand at attention, you low peasants!'*

  They moved slowly, dumbly. But they moved. They lowered the rifles, put their feet together, straightened up, all the while staring at him.

  "We are officers in the Imperial Navy," Adam barked at them in their language. "Nowl About . . . face!"

  They turned their bodies slowly around, but their heads lingered, their eyes still looking at him. Adam saw the doubt beginning to form, and he knew that in a second these men would come out of the spell authority in a loud voice had put on them. In a second they would wheel back around with the rifles.

  But Guns said, in a whisper, the words very urgent, "Get 'eml" and Jason, Gims, the Rebel moved.

  For a moment the low mist was disturbed by the violence and swirled around. Deep furrows appeared in the loose dry sand where feet strained against it. There was almost no sound. Heavy breathing, a dry gargling, the wet breaking of small bones.

  Guns stood with one of the rifles in his hand examining it and said in disgust, "Filthy.**

  Adam had never seen a thing Hke that and for a moment it sickened him, but then he thought of the bright rings of the gun muzzles. This is the way it has to be, he thought This way. You, or him. There was no other way.

  He knew, too, that if he was going to survive in this place he must, soon, learn how to use such violence with such control. Jason, the Rebel, and Guns had done it so fast and with no confusion.

  "Let's get these people out of the way,** Guns said. "When they don't report in there's going to be trouble."

  "They're going to suspect. They're bound to," Jason said. "Look, some of that submariue is going to wash ashore, isn't it, Adam? Enough anyway to make them suspect something. Especially if a three-man patrol just disappears."

  "You shouid've thought of that before we jumped *em," Guns said. "Then we wouldn't have jumped 'em and they'd have killed us. Okay?"

  Adam thought of the sea, of some faked accident. Jason was right, there would be debris from the boat—it was probably on the beach now. Perhaps there had even been some sort of signal from the mine.

  They could not handle an alerted enemy. Three marines and a naval aviator with three rifles not much more powerful than a .22 couldn't handle an enemy suspicious and searching for them.

  He went over to the first man on the ground and

  rolled him over. There was no sign of his death on him.

&
nbsp; In one of the pockets Adam found what he had expected to find and he held it up for them to see. "See if the rest of 'em have one of these," he said.

  Guns, the Rebel, and Jason leaned down to look at the little ivory rod Adam held. It was about the size of a thick cigaret, made of plain ivory. On one end of it was an intricately carved seal.

  "This is the way they sign things, letters and things," Adam said. "W^ith sealing wax. Maybe they've got that, too."

  There was seahng wax on one of them, and a pad of the thin brownish rice paper. And the pen.

  Adam sat down on the sand with the pen and paper and the three seals and the wax and began to write, slowly, in Japanese. He wrote the same thing on three sheets of the paper, vmting: "I am a coward, unworthy of serving the Emperor.** Then, using a different seal on each sheet, heating the wax with a flimsy Htde box of matches, he stamped each one.

  "Now let's take 'em over under the trees," he said,

  "They committed suicide," Guns said.

  "That's right," Adam told him.

  "They're great for that," the Rebel said, pulling a long, slim knife out of a sleazy wicker scabbard. "We found lots of 'em on Guadalcanal."

  "They slit their stomachs," Jason said, his face gray and his eyes averted.

  "Yes," Adam said "Let's give them as much dignity as we can."

  THE MARINES AND ADAM had been on the island for six days now, and each in his own way was losing hope of ever leaving it alive.

  They Hved in the jungle like slowly starving animals; forced to live this way by the enemy, who completely smrounded them, forbidding them food from the sea, forbidding them fire to cook with or warm themselves by after a night of cold rain, forbidding them any avenue of escape. Their wounds from the coraFs cutting them when they came ashore were infected now, painful and bloody; they had been stung and bitten by every bug and insect infesting the dank jungle; fungus diseases were appearing on them—spreading areas of rottenness which seemed intent on eating them ahve.

  On the first day a new patrol had found the dead men with their letters to the Emperor and would have accepted their deaths as suicide except, by then, there were oil stains on the beach from the ruined submarine, there were bits of cork and other debris. Not enough, the men hiding in the jungle were glad to see, to tell the whole story, but enough to start a search through the jungle.

  For two days the marines and Adam had eluded the search parties who came streaming through the jungle, passing through it from one side to the other. They had eaten little in those days and slept little, and when the search was finally abandoned they collapsed in the ruins of a native house

  and slept for a day and a night, taking turns on sentry duty all the time.

  There were things other than coconuts and bitter-tasting roots to eat, but they were not yet starved enough to tackle the big, greasy lizards they sometimes saw. The Rebel had almost managed to eat one that he caught, but the sight of its tail sUthering away all by itself was too much. Or perhaps just the sight of the dead lizard's raw, still quivering body was uninviting.

  They could have eaten the huge land crabs they sometimes saw scuttling around at night. But they too were uninviting, and with a rank, penetrating odor. Without fire to warm the things the men could not, yet, eat them.

  The only birds were birds of the sea which did not fly into the jungle, nor lay their eggs there.

  After six days the marines and Adam were discouraged. This island was a mess.

  They were huddling now in what shelter they could find from the cold night rain. They had eaten the coconuts they hved on and were trying to sleep—to reach another day—and Adam wondered what for?

  Around the burned-out native house they had set up dried palm fronds in a circle, balancing them so that if anyone coming toward the house stumbled into the fronds they would rattle and fall. Inside this circle one of the marines or Adam walked sentry duty, two hours apiece, all night long.

  One of the marines—or Adam. Adam still felt the hot flush of embarrassment when he thought

  about that. It had been either the first day or the second when Guns had said something-they would have to shape up, or something Uke that. And he had added, "You too, Lieutenant/'

  Adam had told him, "Knock off the lieutenant' stuff, Guns. I just appointed myself a buck private in the Marine Corps."

  They had been walking stealthily through the jungle, but now Guns stopped and turned slowly around and looked at him.

  It was then Adam realized that he'd said the wrong thing. The marines had all stopped and looked at him.

  Finally the Rebel had said, ^Tou've got a ways to go, Adam, but you're doin' real good,"

  Guns hadn't said anything.

  Jason had tried to take the curse off it. "As far as I'm concerned," Jason had said, "the Marine Corps is someplace else. Me, Vm on this stinking island and so is Adam. He can be commandant of the Marine Corps if he wants to."

  The nights were a misery, the rain turning everything to mud, but not stopping the crawling of all sorts of unseen and wet, slimy things which bit and stung. Sleep was hard to come by, for they were hungry with, now, a constant, unsatisfied hunger which no amount of coconut meat seemed to stop. They were cold, and wet, and sick—their sores and infections seeming more dreadful in the dark than even in the day, when they could see the spreading diseases.

  The nights were bad and the days little better.

  Each day, working parties of the enemy entered the jungle to collect the fallen coconuts. (The marines and Adam, hiding from them, watched resentfully as these men gathered up their food and carried it away.) There was no freedom of movement, no time when they could relax this around-the-clock vigilance.

  They were trapped in a small area of jungle which the enemy had left standing on the center of the island. The island itself was a long, thin strip of land lying between the open ocean and the atoll's lagoon. It must once have been completely covered with the coconut palms, except for a small area on the lagoon side where the natives had lived. It must, Adam thought, have been a quiet and peaceful place—a httle South Seas paradise. It wasn't any more.

  Straight through the coconut grove, and from one end of the island to the other, the enemy had bulldozed the trees away and then laid down an airstrip made of layers of crushed coral they had dug up from the reefs and the floor of the lagoon. On the seaward side they had left a renmant of the trees (and this is where Adam and the marines now sat in the night rain) which completely concealed the airstrip from the view of submarines or even surface ships.

  The airstrip lay between the sea and the lagoon, a long, white scar, two hundred yards wide and, Adam guessed, at least five thousand yards long-long enough and solid enough to handle multi-engine planes.

  Adam remembered now the almost fearful awe he had felt when they had first seen the long runway. And seen what was on the other side of it.

  The enemy had here, on this island, an installation comparable to Ford Island, in Hawaii, or even some of the air bases in the States. There were hangars, camouflaged and buttressed with logs and sand. There were shops and warehouses, permanent buildings, some of concrete. The barracks and mess halls were well made, of wood—there were no tents, nor lean-tos; everything was solid and permanent.

  Guns had been awed, too. The lagoon side of the island bristled with guns, all of them on concrete pads and well protected. There were dual-purpose AA guns, their long, canvas-hooded muzzles pointing toward the sky. There were many large-caHber coast-defense cannon—Guns guessed that some of them were sixteen-inchers, as big as the armament of batdeships. In pillboxes all over the place were Hght and heavy machine guns, mortars, and Hght field artillery.

  There were well-made, all-weather supply roads to the guns and pillboxes, and, they suspected, underground tunnels as weU.

  The equipment they had on this island was formidable too. Bulldozers, earth movers, cherry pickers, a gantry crane, trucks and vehicles of all sorts.

  Dominating the whole
island was a square, solid, windowless concrete building, two stories high, squatting beside the runway at about the middle

  of it. On top of this was a glass-enclosed control tower with the radar antenna rotating above. The only openings in the massive concrete walls were narrow sHts for the gun barrels.

  "A battalion of marines with everything in the book couldn't knock out that thing," Guns decided as they had hidden in the jungle looking at it.

  "Bretheren and sisteren," the Rebel had said.

  They had spent an hour there, watching the 3nemy across the shimmering runway. There was activity everywhere—men, armed and in complete uniform, parading aroimd in the sun. Men working in the repair shops. Trucks and cars moving about. The whole scene seemed to Adam to have an almost feverish, excited quaHty. It wasn't the way they did it in the Navy. These people were moving too fast, they were too busy.

  And there were hundreds, thousands of them. Everywhere you looked there was the enemy.

  Everywhere. As Adam and the marines had moved through the long days, they had foimd the enemy. He patrolled every inch of the perimeter of that island, from the seaward coral reefs around to the sloping smooth sand of the lagoon side. (Adam had said, "It's a wonder we got ashore at all with sentries all over the place.") His guns were manned, his lookout stations occupied. Patrols on foot and in cars moved all day long (and, the marines were now convinced, all night too).

  At one time there had been a population of natives. On the lagoon side they could see charred stakes of the burned-out grass houses, and in the

  jungle there was the remains of the house they used for sleeping. A very long house of some sort had once been here, but it was now burned down. Around it were the burned remains of dugout canoes. Digging around in the remains had brought the marines and Adam nothing. An elaborately carved wooden chest, charred but not burned, had contained nothing useful.