Bascom, with a dozen boys from No. 11 in tow, caught up with Tal.
“We made it!” the Irishman shouted. Judging by his khaki shorts, he’d fallen into the paddies again last night. The two hugged. The others crowded around. Bascom poked Tal’s Colt .45.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Bolick gave it to me.”
“Damn it. I didn’t get one. You shoot anybody with it?”
“No. Almost.”
“Too bad.” Bascom indicated the smoke grenade. “Where you going with that?”
“Barracks One. I’ve got to make the people in there get out.”
One of the boys asked, “You gonna use it?”
“If I have to. You guys all packed?”
“The hell with this place,” Santana answered. “I’m not takin’ anything outta here but me.”
Bascom said to Tal, “We’ll come with you.”
The boys walked in a gang through the camp, Tal and his Colt in the lead. Sporadic gunfire from the ravine and Boot Creek punctured the morning; the last hiding Japanese were being rooted out. The boys strutted undaunted. They saluted passing soldiers and got salutes in return.
Barracks 1 stood near the north gate. Married couples lived here, most of them older. In the past month, many of the funerals called over the loudspeaker had come from this building.
“Wait out here,” Tal told the boys. He took the bamboo steps in one bound. Sounds of chaos and elation crisscrossed in the long hall. Tal poked his head in a dozen cubicles. In each, animated folks examined their few possessions to pick which would go with them to freedom. Some husbands argued with wives, others sat resigned on cots while the women decided. Many ate out of tins they’d squirreled away.
In each room, Tal said the same: “Hey, folks, the soldiers say the Japs have a full division just ten miles south. We gotta go.” In different words, he heard the same response from every couple: Welcome back, son. Hold your horses, we’ll be along.
Tal lifted a bench from the common room and set it in the barracks hallway. He placed the smoke grenade on a high rafter where none of the folks could get to it. Before he could take the pin in his fingers, a woman tugged at his shorts.
“Shoot him!” she said, pulling Tal down off the bench. “Shoot him, he’s getting away!”
Confused, Tal reached for the Colt. “Where? Where is he?”
A guard, hiding in the barracks? Did he have a gun? Tal yanked the big pistol out of the holster while the woman dragged him by the shirtsleeve to the back door. Could he kill a guard? Maybe he’d just tackle him, let one of Gusto’s guerrillas do the rest. With his thumb, Tal dropped the hammer on the Colt. He wanted to shake loose from the woman. He hurried alongside her down the hall, not sure what he was about to do.
“There!” She pointed between barracks. Only two people were on the path, Mr. Lazlo and his wife. The old hoarder carried a hefty suitcase in each hand, his wife lugged away a trunk and their fat Siamese cat.
“Shoot him, boy,” the woman insisted.
“Ma’am.” Tal peeled her grip from his shirt. “Get ready to leave.”
He eased the hammer and holstered the Colt. Tal left the unhinged woman staring after Lazlo. In the hall, he stood on the bench and set off the smoke canister. Tossing the bench aside, he hustled out to Bascom and the boys. They cheered Tal’s exit, gray billows spilling behind him. The boys wanted to watch the old folks flee. Curses searched for Tuck through the smoke but were quickly exchanged for coughs. Tal cupped his hands and shouted into the building, “I told y’all to get out!” The boys found this a grand, final prank.
Tal stepped away from the gushing smoke. The first folks stumbled through the back door, clutching what they could gather. Tal went to ask Bolick for another job. The boys from No. 11 fell in step.
P-38s zoomed over the camp, so low the boys raised their hats and hands to the pilots. When the planes blared away south, another clatter replaced them, this time a grinding, metallic whine from the tarmac outside the camp.
A volley of gunfire shrieked from the roadway. Tal and the others dived to their bellies. At the north gate, a guard tower disintegrated, chewed up by a five-second burst from a machine gun as powerful as any strafing plane. A body jackknifed out of the watchtower. Tal’s chin dropped to the ground when the gate burst apart. A vehicle he’d never seen the likes of broke through. The colossal thing had tracks, squealed and rolled like a tank, but was open in the middle. A dozen soldiers rode it behind a pair of mounted machine guns, one of the barrels smoking.
Following this clanking transport, with shreds of the busted gate hanging off it, more just like it rumbled into the camp. The column stretched past the weedy ball fields and Baker Hall outside the wire.
On the second machine, alone except for the driver, stood Remy.
Tal flew off the ground. The armored tractors outpaced him running full tilt. He left the others behind, dodging internees drawn to the tarmac and the new flush of soldiers flooding into the camp. Remy dismounted, folks flocked around him. He’d taken off his fedora. Remy dropped it when Tal flew into his arms.
Both laughed loudly, pounding each other’s back. Remy held Tal at arm’s length to look him up and down. Someone handed Remy his hat off the ground.
“You’re all right, then.”
“Yeah,” Tal said. “You, too.”
“I’ll be better when we’re outta this place.” Remy latched an arm across Tal’s shoulders. Together they turned to the crowd. No one had any idea where he and Remy had gone four days ago or why they’d returned with the raiders. Tal wanted to announce what the two of them had done, that they hadn’t just escaped, they’d brought back the army. They were heroes. He forgave Remy everything.
Lucas stepped up. The committeeman embraced Tuck and Remy equally.
“Well.” Lucas laughed. “I’m now a big believer in the Tuck boys. Welcome back.”
Lucas turned to address the internees, shouting above the idling transports for the people to head to the ball fields and load up. Tal and Remy ducked away.
Tal whispered, “I reckon it’s time to go fetch the girls.”
They walked the road along the fence. Soldiers swarmed in every direction trying to herd internees to the amtracs. Tal and Remy traded quick versions of their different adventures, Tal with the guerrillas, Remy at Airborne headquarters. Tal described big Bolick, the soldier who’d given him the Colt. Remy claimed his most terrifying moments had come this morning before dawn, expecting a Japanese patrol to nab them on the bay, not knowing what sort of battle was going to be waged for the camp, and fretting about Tal.
“I made my peace,” he said, “just so long as you were okay.”
“I’m good, Remy.”
His father indicated the .45. “You any good with that?”
“Don’t know. I pulled it out twice. Haven’t fired it yet.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to. For now, take it in hand.”
Tal slid the Colt from its holster. He and Remy passed through the main gate, where the concrete pillars had been sundered by explosions. Both dirt pillboxes had been breached and ruined. Japanese bodies sprawled on the pavement and into the cratered grass, uniforms shredded. They crossed the field along the rim of the long, freshly dug trench.
“Let’s keep it quiet,” Remy said. “We don’t know what’s waitin’ for us.”
Again, Tal pulled back the hammer on the pistol.
~ * ~
Chapter Forty-four
I
N THE hall, Carmen waited for the footsteps to arrive. One pair of soles pounded the stairs fast, climbing with frantic hurry. On the landing, Papa waited, too, and Yumi outside her room in the opposite wing.
Furious breaths rose with the echoes of the rushing feet. Then Carmen knew the feet were bare, they slapped the treads, and she was not surprised when Kenji skidded on the landing, past Papa, running for her.
Naked save for the loincloth, Kenji bolted down the hall. Long yello
w arms and legs and heaving yellow chest halted in front of her. A pistol filled one hand.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“The Americans.” He panted and pointed through the walls to the camp as if Carmen did not know. “I ran . . .” he labored to rein in his breathing “... ran here. There’s bodies everywhere.” Kenji showed the gun to himself as though surprised to be holding it, then looked to Carmen. “I picked it up.”
Behind him, Yumi returned to her room. Papa watched from the landing.
“Hide me.”
“Come in.”
Carmen held the curtain for Kenji, the first time she had done that for anyone entering her room. She followed him inside.
“Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t know.” His galloping breath slowed. “I went through the main gate with others. They ran for the jungle. I came here.”
“I mean did the Americans see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Stay back.”
Carmen crept to the window, dropping to her knees to reveal only her eyes and forehead. She did not see the boy. Yes, Kenji, she thought, you ran and the boy ran faster. He will run here next.
Fighting raged around the camp. Filipinos barefoot and shod spread across the grounds, firing guns and swinging bolos at the stripped Japanese. American soldiers moved with efficient malice against the guards’ defenses, as merciless in their firepower and tactics as the guerrillas were in their wrath. Many guards who’d been on duty when the attack started held their ground and died on it, others mocked their Bushido and scampered away.
Timid Papa put his head inside the curtain. Carmen pulled in her head from the window.
Papa indicated Kenji. “What is he doing here?”
“Hiding. Trying to save his life. What do you want?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Run away. I told you. Go to another island. Change your name. Never admit you were here. Leave her. She is going to die.”
“Will you speak to the Americans?”
Carmen reached to her pocket. She held up the Songu tag for Papa to see.
“No.”
Papa, sickened and lost, dropped his eyes from the wooden tag. His swollen head withdrew from the room. Down the long, empty corridor, which for almost a year had told Carmen of soldiers coming and going, Papa ran. To Mama, or away from the old woman, Carmen could not care.
Kenji stood unmoving. He, too, waited for instructions from her. Strange, this turnaround.
Behind her, the sounds of fighting rattled the morning sun and easy breeze. Gunsmoke and dust drifted in. She turned from Kenji to get on her knees again and watch the battle.
A great gout of flame and dirt jetted high above the main gate; the noise and concussion battered her walls, shaking the plaster. Behind her, Kenji squeaked. Another explosion rocked the main gate. Carmen took the chance to stand and lean out far, to see the Japanese killed in and around their pillboxes from American shells. She searched quickly for the boy. She wanted to call for him, see him fashioned like a genie out of the smoke of the battle.
Carmen returned herself to the room.
“Kenji.”
He did not have his finger over the trigger. He held the gun like a brick.
“Yes.”
“I have nowhere to hide you in this room. Go across the hall. Don’t let anyone see you. Not even Yumi.”
“What will you do?”
I will leave, she thought, when the boy comes.
“Go,” she said. This sounded selfless and brave, as if it were not for him to know what she might do.
Kenji slipped a hand behind the drape. He halted to look back on her.
Carmen clamped her lips. For so long she had not told Kenji that he could never save her, only Songu. And Songu died today. A few more minutes of silence were all that was needed. She pushed Kenji through the black curtain.
Carmen propped her tatami against the wall beneath the window, some small protection against a stray bullet. Dropping low as before, she put her eyes above the sill to watch over the camp a last time, and to keep an eye out for the boy.
The fighting moved outside the camp, flaring up when the Americans found guards hiding in the ravine, in drainage pipes, breaking out of cover into a run. The commandant’s big sedan, the one he would have whisked Yumi away in, had left without her.
In minutes, Carmen saw Tal walking with a crowd of boys. The Irish lad, Bascom, was with him. Where were they going? She followed Tal and his pack to a barracks at the north end of the camp. He disappeared alone into the bamboo building. The fighting inside the wire had eased, the gunshots became erratic, mostly outside the fence in the ravine and creek. The Americans had turned from raiders into hunters. Another long minute passed, until a gray cloud boiled from the barracks where the Tuck boy had gone. Old men and women poured from the doors and windows ahead of the smoke. Tal stood outside with the boys, waving their arms at the people evacuating.
A flight of American fighter planes swept in low over the camp. In the wake of their engines, gunfire rattled from the north gate, close to the smoking barracks. The guard tower there fell apart like a matchstick house. Carmen peered through the rising smoke, beyond the gate, to the game fields where she had never played or walked. An enormous column of odd vehicles, steely like tanks, rushed the gate, smashed into it. The vehicles charged into the camp, deafening and powerful, loaded with hundreds more American soldiers.
The first tank through the broken gate trailed wire and wood off its nose like whiskers. Remy rode erect on the second. Remy did not see Tal darting to catch him.
Remy climbed down. Father and son reunited. Carmen stayed low in her window, patient now that she would be with them. She imagined the stories they would tell her, disputing each other, competing for her approval. She would favor Remy in order to annoy Tal, then laugh with him when she admitted doing so.
The two came her way alone. She watched them exit the camp through the main gate, past the many Japanese corpses and the new trench. Like Kenji, Tal carried a gun. They walked out of sight behind her building.
She dressed quickly in the black slacks and pink top Remy had bought her six weeks ago. She carried her sandals to sneak away. Carmen said goodbye to her room, wished it to hell, and left quietly under the curtain.
~ * ~
Chapter Forty-five
R
EMY HAD not seen the new trench before, it had been dug while he was away from the camp. The gouge in the earth was deep enough to hold hundreds of bodies. The mass grave would have been shallow and temporary, an ugly contrast to the permanence of slaughter. Remy and Tal both sped away from it.
At the rear door to the animal husbandry building, Tal moved in front. The boy was nineteen and no soldier, but the gun in his hand made this the order of entrance into the building. Remy tiptoed behind the boy up the stairwell.
They reached the first landing with no sound above them. Before heading up the second flight, Tal raised the pistol in both hands. The gun was harder and more menacing than any part of the frail boy, looking wrong at the end of his reedy arms. Remy followed, peering up into the empty stairwell, listening for a boot, alert for a hand on the railing, any hint that they were not alone.
Tal kept the pistol ready while rising to the third-floor landing. The old makipilis’ mattress lay there, abandoned in the corner. The desk stood empty of papers. Only Yumi’s wooden tag hung on its peg.
The boy moved without sufficient caution for Remy, striding across the landing to the hallway that held Carmen’s room. He lapped a hand over Tal’s shoulder.
“Hold on, boy.”
Tal shrugged from under Remy’s fingers, too much trust in a gun.
Remy did not know how to stop him, or if he should. He had no sense of how this was playing out, no feel for the hand dealt him. This was Tal’s game, and it would be his luck. Remy accepted this.
He hung back, not to crowd the boy. Tal jutted the
pistol ahead of him. Where was Carmen, why wasn’t she greeting them? Was she gone? Had the girl lost faith that they’d come back for her, had she lit out on her own? Worse, was she hurt? Had the Japanese caught her, sniffed out that she was an informant working for the guerrillas? Was she dead? In the five days Remy had been away from Los Baños, the Japanese had time to dig another massacre pit. They could have done much else.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 36