Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1)

by William Peter Grasso

  But she still hadn’t told them a thing.

  She had been detained by six men of the Japanese military police—the Kempeitai—just as she was about to cast off on Mapoon Maiden. They brought her to the icehouse, the same place she and her crewmen had stashed Sato’s body 10 minutes before, invisible in a large steel bin beneath a load of ice and fish. The kempei had been instructed by Colonel Najima to question her about the mysterious disappearance of Mister Sato. According to the Kempeitai doctrine of kikosaku, nothing produced information better and faster than the prolonged infliction of physical pain.

  A young, mustachioed sergeant was the leader of the kempei, pacing the icehouse with a decidedly, stiff-legged limp as he conducted the interrogation. He spoke English almost as flawlessly as Bob Sato. When first apprehended, she asked how he had become so fluent. The four letters he gave in terse response—UCLA—meant nothing to her. She stopped asking questions when two kempei grabbed her arms and the coarse rope began to bite into her wrists. Her crewmen could only stand on board and watch helplessly as a kempei brandished his pistol, holding them at bay. They had little doubt the policeman would use it if necessary.

  They had been at it for almost two hours, and the limping sergeant was growing bored with the whole business. He had already questioned the two soldiers who served as Sato’s escort. They said they had seen no sign of Jillian Forbes when they dropped Sato off at her house last night. They had been instructed to wait at the Mission House—with the comfort women—where Sato would rejoin them at sunrise. When he had not shown up, they went back to the Forbes woman’s house to look for him. They found neither her nor Mister Sato. The sergeant had never encountered a civilian who could take as much pain as this woman and not tell him whatever he wanted to hear, whether the words the pain inspired were true or not. Maybe she really didn’t know anything, after all.

  The colonel always said Sato was a fool…and a disgracefully bad drinker. Maybe he did just wander off drunk and become some wild creature’s dinner. It’s better we’re rid of him. Now the colonel will have to depend on my skills in dealing with the primitives.

  Two of the kempei relaxed against the bin concealing Sato’s body, enjoying the perverse thrill of watching the woman being tortured. They were oblivious that the answer to their questions was just a few feet away, packed in ice and fish. Through the searing pain, Jillian was thankful for their cluelessness.

  “Let me ask you again, Miss Forbes,” the sergeant said. “Where were you last night?”

  “I told you…I spent the night in the bush. Alone.” Her voice quavered and cracked under the strain of the ropes.

  The sergeant struggled to sound skeptical through his indifference. “Help me to understand, Miss Forbes, why anyone would do that.”

  “We all need to go walkabout sometimes. You’d never understand…you’re not from here.”

  “And I’m very grateful for that, Miss Forbes. Living here obviously makes one crazy.” He made a chopping motion with his hand to the kempei manning the rope: cut her down. The rope slackened abruptly, and Jillian toppled to the floor. She lay still as her wrists were cut free and didn’t try to move as sweet relief began its battle to overcome the throbbing pain still coursing through her body.

  “We’re done with you...for now,” the sergeant said as he led his men out the door to their vehicle. A small but resentful crowd of blacks had formed outside the icehouse, and they parted sullenly to let the Japanese through. As soon as the kempei drove away, Jillian’s crewmen raced inside.

  “They are not our friends, Miss Jilly,” Theo, the first mate, said as the crewmen helped her to her feet, relieved and grateful to find her still alive. “Say the word and they’re dead men.”

  “No, Theo,” Jillian said, trying to rub the feeling back into her hands. “Those bastards have never been our friends….but I won’t have you trying to fight them.” Jillian cast a long glance at the tub that concealed Sato’s body. “This isn’t over yet,” she said, “not by a bloody long shot.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  One look at Jock Miles’s face told Melvin Patchett something had gone terribly wrong. Then the rest of the patrol—complete with stretcher—came into view through the trees. Patchett did a quick mental roll call and one man didn’t answer: Russo.

  “We didn’t hear no gunfire, sir,” Patchett said to Jock. “You didn’t have to go hand-to-hand, did you?”

  Jock shook his head. Try as he may, he had no words to say yet. This was not going to be an easy story to tell.

  “So you didn’t get spotted?” Patchett asked, making his way to the stretcher.

  “No,” Jock replied, his mouth finally in sync with his brain once again. “Thank God for that, anyway…and we did find the headquarters. It’s right on the airfield. We’ve got an excellent position fix for the bombers.”

  Guess and Hadley laid the stretcher down. The first sergeant began to kneel next to it, then recoiled when he saw the dead snake tucked next to Russo’s body. He recovered quickly and lifted the towel covering Russo’s face. It took a few moments to make sense of what he saw.

  Doc Green hurried over with his medical kit but stopped cold in his tracks still 10 feet away. He could see all he needed from there: the fang marks on Russo’s face, like black quotations marks in the skin, set in a field of mottled purple and yellow; the gaping, mortal wound across the throat. “Bloody hell,” Doc murmured.

  “Somebody want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?” Patchett said.

  Jock took a deep breath. He began to plod through the tale of what happened at Airfield One as Guess displayed the snake proudly. As it dangled from his outstretched arm, a few inches of the snake’s tail still managed to coil on the ground. With its head attached, it would have been nearly six feet long. As the story neared its end, Patchett was fixated on Guess’s grinning face, trying to decide if this young man didn’t understand the enormity of what he had done or if the stress of coming face to face with the enemy had driven him out of his mind. Melvin Patchett had seen more than a few cases of mental breakdown from combat, though, and they had never looked quite like this.

  When Jock had finished speaking, it was deathly quiet for a few moments. Guess broke the silence: “This is a killer snake, right, Doc?”

  “Yes, son, it can be,” Doc Green said. “Being bitten in the face like that…that would be difficult to treat, for sure. But it’s never certain if someone is going to die from snakebite. You never know how much venom was injected or how great a man’s resistance to it is. If death did come, though, it would take some time…hours, maybe days.” He measured his words as if preparing testimony for Guess’s court martial. “One thing I’d have to say, though,” Doc added. “Even without hearing Captain Miles’s retelling, it’s fairly obvious the throat wound would have killed that man long before any snake bite.”

  Guess’s smile faded. “But he was making so much noise,” he said. “We would’ve all been dead.”

  Patchett put a hand meant to be comforting on Guess’s shoulder. “You could be in some real deep shit here, boy,” the first sergeant said, his tone of voice showing a surprising hint of compassion. That compassion promptly vanished as he added, “Now let’s get this man buried. Get rid of that fucking snake, too.”

  This eventful day was still only half over. Jock Miles tried to bolster his flagging strength with a D bar as he and Melvin Patchett went over plans for the afternoon’s patrol to Weipa Mission.

  “You sure you’re up for this, sir?” Patchett asked. “I mean, this little trip could be a big waste of time. There’s no guarantee that Jap colonel’s going to be dipping his wick.”

  Jock was adamant. “I want to cover all the bases, Top.”

  “And how are you even gonna know if you’ve got the right guy or not?”

  “I’m still working on that one, Top.”

  “As I live and breathe, Captain…why on earth are you trying to freelance this mission now? We’re supposed to be ju
st recon. Nobody said nothing about setting up no ambush. Ain’t that the kind of thinking that got you in trouble back at Pearl?”

  “At ease, First Sergeant,” Jock replied, his command voice bristling with annoyance.

  “Sorry, sir…but permission to speak freely?”

  Jock had a sudden change of heart. Maybe this wasn’t the time to be getting on his high horse with a top-notch NCO like Melvin Patchett. He softened his tone. “All right, Top. Go ahead.”

  “With all due respect, sir, do you think that’s gonna get you back in the Army’s good graces? After the way they screwed you? Shit, you shoulda been a light colonel by now, at least. Look, you found the fucking headquarters, just like you were ordered to. Now let’s call in the bombers and get the hell out of here. Mission accomplished.”

  Patchett stopped himself from adding, Or are you wanting to stick around just to get into that crazy Aussie woman’s drawers?

  But the first sergeant could tell right away he had wasted those words. His captain obviously had no intention of backing down. “Negative, First Sergeant,” Jock said. “That’s not the way we’re going to do it.”

  There was no point arguing anymore. Melvin Patchett decided to try and make the best of what he considered a very bad situation. “Okay, sir, as you wish. But if we’re gonna pull off an ambush, we’re going to need a sniper…and Guess is the only one we’ve got.”

  “I fully intend to use Private Guess, Top.”

  “I think that’s a pretty piss-poor idea, sir,” Patchett said, scratching his head in bewilderment. “Don’t you think that boy’s gone a little off his rocker? Technically, he’s under arrest for murder, ain’t he?”

  “Sure he is, Top…but how exactly do you hold someone under arrest out here? It’s not like there’s a stockade…or spare men to guard him. Best thing to do right now is just keep him doing his job—”

  Patchett interrupted, throwing up his hands in a cautioning gesture. “How well do you think the others are going to work with him now, Captain? They’re already calling him Killer…although I doubt any of them are gonna miss Russo much.”

  “They’ll all do their jobs, Top. They’ve got to…or the Japs will kill them…and they know that for a fact.”

  Melvin Patchett sat silently for a few moments, deep in thought. Finally, he asked, “Do you mind if I have a little talk with him first, sir?”

  “Talk? About what, Top?”

  “I just want to make sure that li’l ol’ country boy just got hisself scared out there and he ain’t gone crazier than a shithouse rat. Because if he even begins to look like he’s thinking about doing another one of us in, I’ll cancel his ticket myself. And that wouldn’t be no bullshit mercy killing, neither, sir…that’d be self-defense.”

  It didn’t take much talking to convince Melvin Patchett that J.T. Guess wasn’t crazy. A bit fatalistic, perhaps, but he still came across to the first sergeant as the best soldier in the unit.

  Hell, Top, Guess had said, if we ever get out of here alive, maybe then I’ll worry about some firing squad.

  When the first sergeant cautioned him to put any thoughts he might have about going AWOL out of his mind, Guess replied, I saw what happened to Sergeant Roper, Top. I ain’t running nowhere.

  Now, as his exhausted comrades from this morning’s patrol to the airfield rested at the abandoned settlement, PFC J.T. Guess, once again clutching the Springfield sniper rifle, was enthusiastically beating his way through the bush with Captain Miles, Corporal Mike McMillen, and PFC Teddy Mukasic.

  They moved north, staying in the forest well east of Yellow Vermin Road and getting closer to Weipa Mission. What they didn’t realize was there were other, smaller roads—just narrow trails, really, barely wide enough for a vehicle, hidden by the forest until you stepped onto them—branching east from the main road to where some Japanese units were bivouacked. It was a heart-stopping moment when an army truck suddenly rumbled by, just 10 yards in front of them, through woods so dense it seemed a bicycle couldn’t find a path. The truck’s occupants were as oblivious to the Americans’ presence as the Americans had been to the trail.

  Jock and his men crept to within 50 yards of a bivouac, hidden in the shadows among the thick stand of trees. It was just a small clearing with a smattering of weather-beaten tents, accommodating no more than a platoon. About a dozen men idled without weapons within the bivouac area, talking loudly, engaging in horseplay, or bathing in metal drums filled with water warmed over open fires. None of the soldiers appeared the least bit concerned about security. They might as well have been on a camping vacation.

  “We could take ’em all out in a second,” Corporal McMillen whispered to Jock as they crouched in high grass.

  Jock whispered in reply, “Don’t get too carried away. Let’s not blow the mission now, when we’re so damned close to pulling it off.”

  “Oh, I know, sir. But the urge to empty a couple of magazines into them....especially when they’ve got their heads so far up their asses…”

  Jock patted his eager corporal on the helmet. “Just keep it in your pants a little bit longer, Mike. Now let’s get moving.”

  By mid-afternoon, they had gotten as close to their objective as they could in broad daylight. The forest ended abruptly some 150 yards from the Mission buildings; there was little natural coverage from that point to the water’s edge at Albatross Bay, another 400 yards distant. Industrious land clearing, first by the missionaries, now by the Japanese, had seen to that, and gave the Americans an unsettling view of a Japanese warship loitering offshore. Moving laterally a few yards, they found a clear field of fire through the trees to the Mission House.

  As J.T. Guess sighted his Springfield rifle from a prone firing position, the telescopic sight centered on the Mission House’s front door, he announced, with all the confidence in the world, “This is plenty close, sir.” He adjusted his aim slightly to take in the lanterns hung by the door. “Just so there’s a little bit of light, it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  Mike McMillen wasn’t convinced. “In daylight, maybe. I hope you can tell officers from enlisted men in the fucking moonlight,” he said.

  “As long as they still got them swords on, it won’t be no problem,” Guess replied.

  “Even pissant sergeants can be wearing a sword, Guess,” McMillen replied. “That don’t mean shit.”

  They all took a good look at the Japanese soldiers milling around the settlement. McMillen had a point. None of the Americans could tell the rank of any of the Japanese from this distance.

  “How are we supposed to identify this colonel, sir?” McMillen asked. “In the dark, yet?”

  As Jock pondered the question to which he didn’t yet have an answer, J.T. Guess said, “It don’t matter…I’ll just shoot ’em all.”

  Heading back to their staging area at the abandoned settlement, Jock took his patrol well to the east. He was hoping to avoid any more surprises, like the hidden roads and Japanese bivouac earlier. That proved to be wishful thinking.

  They had only walked about 10 minutes when, in the distance ahead, a house appeared through the trees. It was small, but a stately Victorian nonetheless. Jock checked the sketch Jillian had drawn; he remembered her pointing to the corner of the sketch, where she had purposely not made a mark: This is my house, she had said, but promise me you won’t mark the location. They advanced a bit closer; the paddock and small horse barn behind the house came into view.

  But there was more to see, as well: two Japanese staff cars were parked, one in front of the house, one in back. A few moments later, two men—they appeared to be Japanese soldiers—left the house and began walking between the house and barn. Their eyes were cast down, their bamboo swords flicking at the ground. They were searching for something. Whatever it was, they didn’t seem to be finding it.

  Jillian appeared on the veranda; Jock and his men recognized her instantly. She was followed by a man who appeared to be a Japanese sergeant. His uniform was d
ifferent—more formal, less practical for the tropics—than those they had seen on the soldiers at the airfield and at the Weipa Mission. Looking through his binoculars, Jock could tell the man had a mustache and was sweating like a pig. When he walked, he limped, favoring his stiff left leg. He and Jillian were in what appeared to be a business-like conversation, although they could not hear a word that was being said.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Mike McMillen said. “She looks awful chummy with them to me.”

  “We don’t know what they’re saying, Corporal,” Jock replied. “Don’t rush to judgment, okay?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jock noticed J.T. Guess crouching into a shooter’s stance, his rifle pointed toward the veranda where Jillian and the Japanese man stood. “Stand down, Guess,” Jock whispered. “We’re not shooting any Japs yet.”

  “Who said I’m aiming at the Jap, sir?” Guess replied, his eye pressed to the telescopic sight.

  “Goddamn it, Guess, put the weapon down,” Jock said.

  Through the telescopic sight, Guess had a bird’s-eye view of the slap the Japanese sergeant had just delivered to Jillian’s face. Lowering the weapon, he pointed toward the house and said, “You better take a look-see at what’s going on up there, sir.”

  Like watching a silent movie, Jock stared through his binoculars as two more soldiers appeared from the house and restrained the struggling Jillian by the arms. The sergeant repeatedly slapped her face while saying something—Jock couldn’t read lips, but it appeared he was saying the same thing over and over again—as if the blows would eventually coax the demanded response. But she was saying nothing, just struggling and kicking to no effect. One of the men restraining her produced a bamboo sword and smacked Jillian across the head. She collapsed to the deck of the veranda, lying motionless on her side. The sergeant signaled to his men, and they headed for their cars. Before leaving, though, he tried to clumsily kick Jillian with his game leg, aiming for her stomach but striking the shins she had curled defensively before her. Frustrated, he kicked her shins several times, almost toppling himself in the unsteady attempt before giving up and striding away.