General Briley said nothing for a few moments; he sat with a serene smile on his face, enjoying the familiar sight of an anxious subordinate squirming before him. Finally, he said, “Colonel, one thing you’ll learn working for MacArthur. Sometimes it’s more important to be seen as doing something. Doesn’t matter what it is. Just do something.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Onboard the Catalinas, the men of Task Force Miles watched as the coastal mountains of northeast Queensland began to cast long shadows toward the blue, shimmering sea below. It was the same body of water they had flown over all day, but it was no longer called the Pacific. It was now the Coral Sea.
The two planes began a gentle descent for landing. The flight had been relatively easy on their bodies. Only two of Jock’s troopers on L for Love had gotten airsick. Whether it was due to motion sickness or the American revulsion to the Vegemite sandwiches the Aussies provided, no one was sure.
Suddenly, the radio operator sat bolt upright and clasped his headphones tighter to his ears. Jock could tell from the tension in the man’s face the message he was receiving was no routine weather report; it was a matter of grave importance.
“Cairns is reporting a Jap air raid, sir,” the radio operator yelled to Tim Wells and everyone else in the cockpit.
“Shit,” Wells muttered as he scanned the sky above his aircraft. A deck of cumulus clouds had formed a few thousand feet above, looking like so many fluffy sheep grazing on a broad, invisible plain. They would provide a splendid place to try and hide from Japanese fighters. “Pilot to Flight Engineer,” Wells said into the interphone. “We’re going to climb back to six thousand. What does that do to our fuel reserve?”
Without waiting for the answer, Wells eased the throttles forward and pulled the plane’s nose up sharply, instructing his co-pilot, “Tell the lads in the back we may be in for it.” Then he turned to the radio operator and said, “Tell Mother to spread out and play hide and seek.”
Headphones crackled with the flight engineer’s report on fuel reserves, and the news was not good. Expressing the frustration of the entire RAAF, Tim Wells said, “Only thirty fucking minutes left! Bloody MacArthur! I’ll wager his airplane gets all the fuel it needs!”
Trading speed for altitude, L for Love struggled to reach the cloud bank. The radio operator clamped the phones to his ears once again. “Yank fighters are trying to intercept the Japs,” he said.
“That’s just bloody wonderful,” Wells replied, but his sarcastic tone left Jock Miles puzzled. Seeing Jock’s confused look, Wilcox, the navigator, set him straight: “We’re delighted you Yanks are finally trying to do something, sir, but at the moment we’re just as worried about getting shot down by one of your trigger-happy flyboys as by the Japs. It’s happened a couple of times already.”
In the Cat’s cabin, Jock’s men were startled when both gunners suddenly flung open the blisters and swung their .50 calibers to battle stations. As Jock passed through the bulkhead hatch that separated cockpit from cabin, his men’s voices peppered him with a flood of words that all boiled down to the same question:
What do we do, Captain?
Even Doc Green had awakened.
“Take it easy, fellows…we’re still okay,” Jock said, trying his best to sound calm and collected. “The place we’re heading to…Cairns…they’re having a Jap air raid. We’re going to hide out in the clouds until it’s all clear…”
Fortunately, they could not hear the words completing the sentence in Jock’s head: if we don’t run out of gas first.
“But they’ve got the guns out, sir!” Sergeant Hadley said. “Shouldn’t we be loading our weapons?”
“Negative, Sergeant,” Jock replied. “Do you see any gun ports for us to shoot from?”
Already in the gunners’ compartment, Russo called through the open hatch to the bunk room, “Captain, we could shoot from the blisters.”
The Aussie gunners took a dim view of that suggestion. Shaking his head adamantly, one of them said, “How about you stay out of our bloody way and let us do our bloody job?”
“That’s good advice, men,” Jock said. “Just sit tight. This crew knows what they’re doing.”
By now they had leveled off in the cloud deck, coasting along, using just enough engine power—and petrol—to maintain altitude. They vanished into a huge, white puff of cloud, then reappeared, only to quickly vanish into another. If it wasn’t for the gunners scanning their sectors, fingers on triggers, it would have been idyllic. They seemed alone in a marshmallow sky.
The shadows on the cabin sidewall gently slid upward, a sign the plane was in a shallow bank. With no visual horizon to reference, they were the only indication of the maneuver to those in the cabin. After a few moments, the shadows slid back down the sidewall. They were in level flight again. The cabin darkened a bit; the clouds around them had grown thicker now. Only rarely—and for a brief moment—could they catch a glimpse of the Earth’s surface through the cabin’s small windows.
Trying to spread some optimism, Jock said, “Those clouds make for great concealment, don’t they, men?”
The optimism lasted only a second. The left waist gunner screamed, “BLOODY HELL!” His words dissolved into the roar of his .50 caliber as he squeezed off a long burst.
Hunched low, their faces pressed against the small cabin windows, Jock and his men strained desperately to see the gunner’s target. But all they saw was the same field of cottony white for one second, two seconds, three…until the fluffy whiteness suddenly turned into the mottled green and brown of a twin-engined airplane with a big red meatball on its side flying directly abeam and parallel off their left wingtip. It was a Japanese bomber the Allies called a Betty. She was so close they thought they could touch her.
The .50 caliber roared again, a longer burst this time. On the Betty, a turret at the aft end of the long greenhouse canopy winked flashes from its guns. A half-dozen thin horizontal shafts of pinpoint light instantly appeared in the Cat’s cabin, traversing the dusty air above their heads, each shaft made of sunlight that a new bullet hole allowed inside. PFC Boudreau, one of the men in Hadley’s team, began to gyrate in a frenetic dance as a glowing fragment from a tracer round ricocheted from a fuselage frame and landed squarely on his shoulder. Its velocity spent, it lacked the energy to puncture skin, but it was still hot enough to ignite the fabric of his fatigue shirt on contact. Doc Green smothered the flare-up quickly with a towel from his kit.
The Betty popped in and out of view through the milky clouds as if being viewed through a shutter. Much faster than the Cat, it moved farther ahead with each appearance. In a few more clicks of the shutter, it vanished.
“ANYONE HIT?” Jock asked, scanning the cabin for casualties. Everyone, even PFC Boudreau with the burn on his shoulder, seemed to be all right. As Jock stood, his body intersected the shafts of light left by the Japanese bullets. They made neat, bright circles on his chest. As he touched his fingertip to the little spots of light, Jock thought, That was a real good time not to be standing up. He hoped nobody noticed how badly his knees were shaking.
It was then he glanced aft, into the waist gunners’ compartment, and saw the man who dueled with the Betty. He was without a scratch and still seemed ready for action, scanning the sky with his machine gun. But now he was trembling from head to toe and trying to wipe away tears of fear and frustration from his eyes.
L for Love skimmed the clouds for another 10 minutes. They had not seen another airplane since the close encounter with the Betty and had only caught fleeting glimpses of ground and sea. Jock Miles was summoned to the cockpit.
“Cairns has given us the all clear,” Tim Wells said. “Trinity Inlet, where we’ll be landing, isn’t beaten up too badly. We can’t waste any time getting down…petrol’s too low…so have your men holding on tight.”
The descent felt like the downhill run of a roller coaster. “Bogater” Boudreau, wearing his singed fatigue shirt like a badge of honor, said in his s
low, bayou drawl, “Pretty hard to talk with your innards all up in your neck.”
And then they were down, bouncing and lurching along the water’s surface as the Cat slowed to taxi speed. Nicky Russo was seated on the catwalk as he packed his gear, his feet dangling into the bilge. Those feet promptly became soaking wet. “WATER!” he screamed. “WE’RE TAKING ON WATER!” His panicky words could be heard even in the cockpit.
With the whoosh of a fired carbon dioxide cartridge, Russo inflated his life vest. He jumped onto the highest crew bunk like a housewife standing on her kitchen table, frightened by a mouse. Then he tried to claw his way up to the flight engineer’s perch in the cabane strut but was stopped by the sole of the man’s shoe pressing firmly on his head.
“Relax, mates. Relax,” the engineer called down to the Americans. “The bilge pump will take care of it.”
Jock and his men really wanted to believe the engineer, but the water level never receded. If anything, it rose higher. Even the waist gunners seemed to be getting a bit apprehensive, their fingers toying with the inflation lanyards on their life vests. “Keep your knickers on, Yanks,” one of the gunners said, trying to sound reassuring. “We’re almost to the ramp.”
The Cat coasted to a stop adjacent to the shore. Her engines fell silent; the beat of her windmilling props against the air diminished quickly until it, too, was gone. There were sounds of many men’s voices, accompanied by loud clunks from outside the fuselage as ground crewmen attached the beaching gear—three sets of tandem wheels, one on each side of the forward fuselage, one below the tail. The bilge water sloshed forebodingly as the Cat was rotated until her tail was toward land. A tractor’s engine revved—and she was slowly towed backwards up the launching ramp to her parking spot.
Spilling to the ground from L for Love, the men of Task Force Miles expected far worse than the sight that greeted them. A few of the hangars and buildings at the seaplane base had suffered damage, some of it severe. What had been a US Navy Catalina was now a smoldering heap of skeletal metal. A ground crewman reported there had been a few injuries, but no deaths reported. At least not yet.
As they unloaded their gear from L for Love, the other Catalina, M for Mother, was towed alongside. Melvin Patchett was the first man down the ladder. As he strode toward Jock Miles, it was not hard to detect the wobble in his step. As he got closer, he was obviously a little green around the gills.
“Have a good flight, Top?” Jock asked.
Putting on the brave show, Patchett replied, “Never been so bored in my life.”
“So I guess you didn’t run into any Japs, then?”
Patchett looked surprised. “Japs? Never saw another airplane the whole trip. Couldn’t even see you most of the time.” Color was coming back to the first sergeant’s face. His expression became stern as he scanned the damage on the airfield. “Why, sir? Did you?”
“Damned near kissed a Jap bomber up there in the clouds.” Jock pointed to the bullet holes in L for Love’s fuselage. Steady streams flowed from a number of punctures in the lower fuselage. The water they had taken on during landing was now leaving the flying boat the same way it entered.
“Holy shit,” Patchett said, squinting for a better look at the airplane’s punctured skin. “Everyone okay?”
“Boudreau got burned a little…shell fragment or something. Looks like it hurt his shirt worse than him…but he just might be our first Purple Heart.”
“Son of a bitchin’ Japs,” the first sergeant muttered. “Can’t wait to shove this Thompson right up their asses. I just heard some of the Aussies talking…they say Cooktown and Mossman got bombed, too.”
“Yeah, I heard that, Top.” Pointing to the unblemished hangar before them, Jock added, “We’ll billet in there. Let’s get a hot meal in them and then try to get us all some rest.”
“Takeoff still planned for oh two thirty, sir?”
“Affirmative, Top…Oh, and I found out we’ve got a little map problem. We’ll try to get that cleared up before we leave here.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
In the drawing room, the upright piano lay open, its tuning pins exposed. As one finger repeatedly tapped the high C, Jillian gave a gentle tug on the tuning hammer with her other hand. “There…that should do it,” she said. There was no one to hear her except one of the Mission dogs, sprawled by the couch in the hot, darkening room, cooling himself by alternately playing with and then licking a small chunk of ice. She had been so consumed with the piano tuning she had forgotten nightfall was nearly here, and the coming darkness had once again silenced the drone of Japanese airplane engines.
It was an unseasonably hot evening for the dry—the winter—in Cape York. Barefoot and wearing baggy shorts, Jillian had long ago unbuttoned her shirt, exposing the sweat-dampened men’s undershirt she wore beneath it. The room took on a warm glow as she lit an oil lamp, the light playing off hundreds of books that lined shelves on the rich, wood-paneled walls. There were well-worn volumes on history, economics, marine biology, music, and anthropology. Literary classics adorned their own, special shelves.
Returning to the piano, she wiped away the sweat that had dripped on the keys during her labors. Then, she played a brisk arpeggio starting at the lowest note and traveling all the way up the keyboard, her hands expertly crossing over repeatedly until the last key was struck.
Not bad, Jillian thought. I might actually get good at tuning this thing with a little practice. But if I break any more hammer springs I’m in big trouble. I don’t imagine I can get piano parts from the Japs, too.
She reinstalled the articulating cover that also served as the piano’s music stand and closed her toolbox. Settling onto the bench, she arranged the sheet music before her. When done, she took a deep breath, head hung down, eyes closed in concentration. Softly, she began to play the first notes of Liszt’s Vallée ďObermann.
She drew power from the music she was making. The somber feel of the piece’s introduction, occasionally spiced with notes that gave hints of optimism and promise, began to liberate Jillian from the reality of her life. The music transported her to a plane of existence far more exquisite than the one she was actually living. She did not even notice when the dog, bored now that the ice had melted and every drop licked up, sauntered out the back door to seek amusement elsewhere.
Minutes ticked by as she played on, flipping the pages of sheet music with mounting anxiety as the piece approached its complex crescendo; this was where she always faltered. The swirling, staccato melody demanded the hands exchange roles at a lightening pace as it traversed octaves. Only a true virtuoso had a fair chance of the hands landing on nothing but the correct keys throughout the entire passage.
She winced as she made the first mistake but played on. The second mistake followed quickly, then another. Too frustrated to continue, she slammed her open palms against the keys in defeat, letting the discord ring in the sultry night.
Her heart lurched when a man’s voice pierced the stillness. “Why did you stop?” Bob Sato asked. “You were doing so well.”
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” she asked, startled and annoyed but not afraid. “And how long have you been standing there…inside my house?”
Still seated on the piano bench, she turned to face him. In the frail, flickering light of the lantern—her hair hanging damply across her face, little beads of perspiration clinging to the valley between her breasts, just visible above the scooped neck of the undershirt—Jillian had never looked more beautiful to Bob Sato.
“I said I would call on you tonight.”
“You were pissed,” she replied. “I’m surprised you remembered.” She pointed to the bottle he carried in his hand. “But I told you… none of that grog of yours. You didn’t bloody remember that.”
Sato held out the bottle of saké to her. “Consider it a house gift.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she snatched the bottle from his hands. “Thanks,” she said, then pointed to what his ot
her hand carried. “What’ve you got there?”
“Just a few recordings I thought we might enjoy. Liszt, Chopin…even Wagner.”
Jillian rose from the bench and walked to the front window. “Where are your bodyguards?” she asked, scanning what little she could see in the twilight.
“I released them for the evening. No doubt, they’re at the Mission House—”
“With the whores.”
“Comfort women, Jillian. We call them comfort women.”
“A rose by any other name, Bob…The Victrola’s over there in the corner. Why don’t you crank it up. Let’s hear someone who can really play.”
He selected a recording and set it on the turntable. Jillian recognized the tender but resolute melody immediately: Chopin. Sato took a seat at one end of the couch.
Jillian decided it would be impolite not to serve the saké Sato had brought. He’ll have to settle for sherry glasses…I don’t have anything like those silly little cups they use. She sat at the opposite end of the couch, more than an arm’s length away from him. Even though she poured herself a glass, she made it a point not to drink more than a sip or two. The rest went into the vase on the table next to her when he was not looking. Frequently, he had to pop up to select a new record; that was the best time for disposal.
By his fourth glass, the saké was taking hold of Sato. He lost interest in the music and became more interested in making conversation. Like a conspirator, he asked, “You received your petrol supply today, I trust?”
“Yes, I did. My tanks are full once again. Thank you very much.”
“This is a lovely house, Jillian. Classically Victorian. How long have you lived here?”
“Most of my life. It was my father’s house.”
“I see,” Sato said, adopting a cautious tone for his next question. “And your father is…?”
“Missing, presumed dead. Went out hunting one evening and only his horse came back. We never found his body. Crocs, probably.”
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 12