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

by William Peter Grasso

  “We’re going to double back and get on the other side of that road,” Jock replied. “Then we’re going to take a look at the airfield.”

  McMillen was a few yards behind and had overheard the conversation. “You think that’s such a hot idea, Captain?” he asked. “Everything’s burned away. We’ll be out in the open.”

  With a steady and confident gaze, Jock looked McMillen dead in the eyes and said, “We’ll never know what really happened over there unless we look, Mike.”

  Staying deep in the trees, Jillian skirted the Weipa Mission as she walked back to her house. The route took her well out of her way, but she wanted to see what was going on in the Mission. Maybe, she hoped, she would get a chance to see in daylight if there was anything worth salvaging on her boats or in the icehouse. It only took one look from afar to dash that hope.

  The Mission was crawling with Japanese. They streamed in and out of every building like ants, many with arms full of plunder. Some appeared to be drunk. Despite their uniforms, these men weren’t soldiers anymore; they were an undisciplined mob.

  In front of the Mission House, the colonel’s car was gone. The body of the kempei sergeant she had shot was still lying there. A group of soldiers walked by, regarded the corpse for a moment, then each kicked it in turn as they moved on.

  I guess they don’t think too highly of their policemen, either, Jillian thought. They probably think one of their own killed him.

  Looting and drinking weren’t the only things on their minds. Comfort women who thought it best to return to the Mission House had been proved wrong. They were dragged outside and gang-raped. Those who struggled were beaten and worse; one women was lying alone, naked, and motionless in a pool of blood, curled into the fetal position that hadn’t saved her from the thrusts of bayonets.

  Poor Alice Tookura, the young, black shop girl so dedicated to her job at the Mission general store, was the only non-Japanese person Jillian could see. Alice was kneeling against a post of the store’s veranda, her arms bound behind her back around the post, her head slumped to her chest, her dress torn open. Jillian could just make out the traces of blood against the dark skin of her exposed thighs. Alice lifted her head and began a wailing protest to the sky until a soldier walked over, silenced her with a blow to the face, and casually walked away. The Japanese were finished with her; they were more interested in pillaging her store.

  Far across the Mission, Jillian could see throngs of soldiers ringing the harbor, milling about, picking with curious wonder through debris around the bomb craters, looking seaward for the vessels that had disappeared overnight. The presence of the Imperial Japanese Navy had dissolved, with one notable exception. At the outer edge of the harbor, she could see the tip of the main mast of a Japanese destroyer rising above the surface. The rest of the warship was submerged beneath it. She could see nothing of her boats. Probably no more than charred splinters, the lot of them, she thought. Where the icehouse had once stood, a bomb crater had taken its place.

  Some of the soldiers had given up on waiting at the harbor and were walking north, out of the Mission settlement, where they’d soon come to the mouth of the Mission River, too wide and deep to cross at that point. They’d continue east nearly 10 miles along its southern bank until it could be forded—an unlucky few becoming croc food along the way, no doubt, Jillian was sure—then continue north into the 100 miles of wild territory between Weipa and the tip of Cape York, where Australia ended in the Torres Strait. Across the strait was Papua New Guinea, where the Japanese adventure to Cape York had begun. She reckoned several hundred soldiers had passed through the Mission as she watched, with more meandering that way.

  And the sky…it’s empty! No planes!

  Jillian moved closer to the edge of the tree line, desperate to find a way to rescue Alice. Trying to free her now would be suicide: she was just one woman with a bolt-action rifle and a handful of bullets. There were hundreds of armed Japanese still wandering around the Mission and more seemed to be spilling in from Yellow Vermin Road. I’d be just one more fanny to rape…if I didn’t get shot dead first. She’d bide her time—and wait for just the right moment.

  Alice was standing now, bloodied and half-naked, struggling to free herself from the post. Good, Jillian thought. As least she’s still got some strength. I’m not so sure how well I’d do if I had to carry her.

  The number of Japanese soldiers around the general store began to dwindle. There wasn’t much left to pilfer. In a few minutes, the last soldiers at the store moved on, joining the crowd heading north. Jillian weighed the chances of rescuing Alice:

  It’s still a long way across open ground…Someone will catch me for sure. But I’ve got to try…

  She stayed concealed in the trees, waiting, praying for a miracle.

  Colonel Najima only played with the food the old black man had slid under the cell door an hour ago before vanishing once again. Najima was hungry, but he found the offering repulsive. It’s some sort of charred snake…or a lizard, he complained to himself. And these berries…only a fool would eat them. Perhaps they’re trying to poison me.

  But the colonel knew that was unlikely: If those faint-hearted white men…those Aussies or Yanks, whoever they are…had wanted me dead, I would have been dead hours ago. That impertinent Forbes woman has more nerve than all of them put together. I should have had her done away with a long time ago.

  Whatever his captors’ plans were, it made no difference: he wouldn’t eat the food offered by the primitives. Najima kicked the wooden plate back under the cell door. I don’t need their food. Every minute that ticks by brings my rescue closer.

  His last thoughts suddenly seemed prophetic: there were footsteps on the veranda outside. The sound of a man barking orders in Japanese. The door of the shack swung open, and a long bayonet on the muzzle of a rifle poked at the empty air beyond the threshold. A second passed before the man wielding the rifle stepped through the door: a young, trembling Japanese Army private, his face and uniform filthy, as if he had been rolled in ashes. Another man, still unseen beyond the doorway, pushed the private inside before making his own, careful entrance. Once inside, that man stood with hands on hips, a cocky grin on his leathery face as he surveyed the dingy room and its inhabitant.

  He was no cleaner than the private who had preceded him through the door. Despite his filthy uniform, Colonel Najima could see the man was a sergeant, old enough to be a veteran of every campaign waged by the Empire since the Siberian adventures of 1918. His tunic strained against the considerable paunch beneath it. There was no glimmer of recognition of either man by the other.

  “Find the old Aborigine with the key to this cell,” Najima commanded. “Free me at once.”

  The sergeant said nothing in reply. He merely wandered around the room, opening drawers and cupboards, looking for things to steal. Or eat. When he came to the plate on the floor, he stooped, and with grimy fingers lifted a handful of the meat to his lips. He began to chew the food with great relish.

  Enraged, Najima said, “SERGEANT, I ORDER YOU TO FREE ME AT ONCE!”

  The sergeant picked up another handful off the plate and stuffed it into his mouth. Chewing slowly and noisily, he stepped closer to the cell, taking the full measure of the man inside. He turned for a moment to the trembling private, motioning him to the nearly empty plate on the floor. “Go ahead,” he said, the food still in his mouth muddling the words. “Finish what’s left, Private.”

  The private fell upon the plate like a man who hadn’t eaten in days, scraping the last morsels into his mouth.

  Najima’s next words had a decidedly threatening tone. “Do you not realize who I am, Sergeant?”

  The sergeant shrugged. He didn’t know and couldn’t care less.

  “I am Najima, your regimental commander.”

  The young private snapped to attention at the sound of the name, but the sergeant had no reaction. He wiped his mouth with a grimy sleeve of his tunic. When he was finished, he ra
n his fingers along the cell’s bars, savoring their impenetrability, and said, “I doubt that very much. You wear no rank. You carry no sword. All the regimental officers are dead, burned to a crisp. You are someone’s prisoner. You are nothing.”

  “You will die for your arrogance, Sergeant.”

  The sergeant thrummed his fingers along the bars once again and said, “Arrogance? You speak of arrogance? It was the arrogance of the regimental command that placed all that aviation fuel in one storage area…in the middle of that tinderbox forest. They paid for that arrogance with their lives…and the lives of countless men under their command. Those of us who survived the inferno will be lucky not to starve to death before we escape this godforsaken hell.”

  The sergeant turned and headed for the door, motioning for the private to follow. The confused young man held his ground, looking like some street urchin caught red-handed in some petty crime, food dribbling down his dirty chin. “Come on,” the sergeant said, “he cannot hurt you.”

  Najima called to the two men, imploring them to wait. His voice had lost its imperiousness. Now he sounded like a man in dire trouble, begging for help from strangers. “Please,” he said, “find the old black man with the key.”

  “There is no one to find. This village is deserted,” the sergeant replied.

  “Then do not leave me to this humiliation, Sergeant. Lend me your bayonet…and I’ll seek my freedom in eternity.”

  “You do not deserve such a favor,” the sergeant said as he vanished into the bright sunlight outside, dragging the private with him.

  Jillian’s miracle was delivered by a most unexpected source. The mobs of Japanese soldiers moving through the Mission had thinned to a trickle, and there were none near Alice Tookura, still bound to the post at the general store.

  I just might be able to make it to Alice, Jillian supposed, if I can use the Mission House for cover. The Japs are spread so thin now…and they’re all farther from me than Alice at the moment. This is my chance.

  Jillian moved forward to the edge of the tree line, readying herself for the sprint across the 150 yards of open ground to the Mission House. Just as she was about to leap from her concealment in the trees, a single Japanese soldier emerged from the Mission House and walked casually into the path she had planned to take. He didn’t appear to notice Jillian and began to walk straight toward Alice Tookura. Jillian crouched down and, her heart racing, clung to a tree for cover.

  It appeared at first the soldier would walk right past Alice and join the others drifting out of Weipa. He did pass her by a few steps. Then he stopped. As if by reflex, Jillian leaned against the tree for support and sighted her rifle in the center of the soldier’s back.

  If he so much as touches her…

  The soldier turned, and Jillian could see he held his bayonet, now detached from his rifle, in his hand. Just as she started her gentle squeeze on the rifle’s trigger, he moved quickly, stepping behind Alice and spoiling her shot. Jillian released her finger from the trigger before the hammer could strike home.

  Suddenly, Alice’s hands were in front of her, free of the ropes.

  Bloody hell! He cut her loose!

  The soldier—that surprising Good Samaritan—was walking away to join his comrades.

  Alice seemed unsure what to do with her freedom. She wandered in circles on the store’s veranda, trying with difficulty to hold her torn dress closed and rub her sore wrists at the same time.

  Jillian stepped from the tree line and waved an arm over her head to get Alice’s attention. Once Alice saw her, Jillian gestured, Come this way! Hurry!

  This was the second time that day Jillian had watched someone cover that distance on the dead run. If Jock and his men thought they set a new record for the 100-yard dash, Alice was in the process of shattering their record. Her bare feet flew across the ground in a blur; after 20 yards, she gave up trying to hold her dress closed and used her arm swing to full advantage. When she reached the tree line, she had every intention to keep right on running. Jillian’s attempt to grab her turned into a tackle. They both tumbled to the ground.

  “Steady on, Alice. You’re safe now,” Jillian said as she pulled the terrified woman to her feet. “Come on…let’s get you some clothes up at my house.”

  Alice still seemed in a daze as Jillian pulled her along by the hand through the woods. The walk to Jillian’s house should have only taken 10 minutes; the need to coax Alice along lengthened it to almost 20. The girl kept stopping and turning to look longingly back toward the Mission, as if she was searching for something lost.

  The house finally came into view through the trees, still a fair distance away. Relief began to flow through Jillian’s body. She was home again.

  But that relief lasted only a moment. There were Japanese soldiers—a dozen, maybe more, she couldn’t be sure—swarming all around it, and more inside. They were just like the ones she had seen in the Mission: leaderless, undisciplined, more like feral animals than humans.

  They had looted everything they could get their hands on. Food, drink, blankets, and, of course, liquor were being removed from the house and loaded onto the horse cart they were about to steal as well.

  “You have your rifle,” Alice said. “Why don’t you just shoot them all?”

  “I don’t have that many bullets, Alice.”

  “But your beautiful house, Miss Jilly…”

  A raucous sound exploded from within the house, clearly audible even at their distance from it. Jillian knew exactly what it was: 88 musical notes played all at once. The piano had been overturned, its wooden frame smashed to pieces, no doubt. Then the sound of breaking glass: windows were being smashed by the blows of rifle butts. From a shattered window, there was a wisp of smoke and then the flicker of flames.

  Casting her eyes away from the chaos, Jillian said, “Shit. They’re torching it.” The circle of destruction was being closed around Jillian Forbes’s existence. What the Yanks hadn’t managed to destroy by accident, the Japs were finishing off on purpose.

  The only thing still outside that circle was Jillian’s horse, Franz. He was led to the cart. A few soldiers inexpertly tried to secure him to the cart’s harness.

  “Oh, no,” Jillian moaned. “He’ll never submit to that.” She closed her eyes, bracing for the inevitable gunshots that would signal Franz’s death. The circle would be complete.

  Franz reared and bucked like the wild horse he had once been. Two soldiers who had been trying to secure Franz to the harness were thrown to the ground, each with an arm snapped like a twig.

  The interior of the house was ablaze. Flames licked from every window and doorway.

  With one great swirl of his massive body, Franz overturned the cart, reducing it to splintered boards. The men who stood on the cart were launched on a quick and violent trajectory to the ground. Free of the harness, Franz bolted away, heading deep into the bush. Some gunfire chased him: two soldiers awkwardly fired and cocked their weapons repeatedly, each encumbered with a bottle of rum they preferred not to lose tucked beneath a forearm. They emptied their clips in poorly aimed shots at the fleeing animal. None of their bullets hit Franz, who had vanished into the woods long before the last errant shot rang out.

  “There’s a good boy,” Jillian whispered through bittersweet tears. “Farewell, my friend…and keep running.”

  Flames were consuming more and more of the house. Soon, the entire structure would be ablaze—and so would the woods downwind as the embers took flight. The Japanese soldiers scooped up what they could of their plunder and hurried off to the northwest—exactly downwind—toward Weipa Mission.

  Jillian and Alice didn’t need to say a word. They had both gauged the wind and knew that the ground they occupied would soon be on fire. In a few minutes of running upwind, they were clear of the spreading inferno.

  “That wildfire will burn all the way to the Mission firebreak, I’m sure,” Jillian said. “With any luck, it’ll kill those jackasses who started it, to
o.”

  Alice’s composure was returning. She stopped to fashion a lace from vines and used it to stitch together her ripped-open dress. She made a bittersweet joke as she worked: “What would the missionaries say of me walking around like this? They’d think I was a loose woman.”

  Deadpan, Jillian replied, “Yeah, they’d probably think you were even worse than me.”

  Her mending done, Alice asked, “So where do we go now?”

  Jillian picked up a stick to draw a crude map in the dirt. “Look, Alice,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map, “we’re here.” Then she pointed to a different spot. “Your people have gone here, just across Peppan Creek. Go to them and stay there. Old Robert is worried about you.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us, Miss Jilly?”

  “Later. I’ve got to find the Yanks first and tell them what’s happening.”

  After doubling back several miles to the south along Yellow Vermin Road, past the boundary of the fire’s destruction, Jock and his three men had no trouble finding an opportunity to cross it unseen. The Japanese presence on the road had thinned out until there were long stretches of time—sometimes as much as 10 minutes—when it seemed completely deserted. The Americans’ crossing was almost leisurely. Reversing direction again, they walked north through the virgin forest. Their path was diverted only once, to skirt a linear clearing hundreds of yards long gouged from the woods by a stick of bombs. The devastation looked just like what the bombs had done to Patchett’s position.

  After a few more minutes, they reached a creek that marked the abrupt line between verdant nature and a barren hell. They stood at the southern edge of a slack-sided rectangle emblazoned into the earth some 20 miles square, bounded by the road on the east, the Gulf of Carpentaria on the west, and the Embley River at Weipa to the north. The occasional tree trunk which still stood, even in death, had been scorched and whittled down to nothing more than a jagged pike, pointing skyward. Gray ash several inches thick blanketed the ground. Jock called a halt to get the lay of the devastated land before them. His men hunkered down in the shade of the last stand of unburned trees, dreading the walk they feared was coming across the flat, open terrain ahead. In broad daylight, yet.