Mukasic managed to whimper a few words between the dry heaves. “But why’d they do that, Top?” he begged. “They were surrendering.”
“Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, son. Either way, the captain already got us one too many prisoners.”
Half a mile away, Jock and his men heard the shooting from the direction of Patchett’s camp, the same direction in which they were walking. J.T. Guess, taking his turn at point, muttered just one word when the bullets started flying: “Shit.” None of the four thought they could be much more alert than they already were, but the sound of an automatic weapon—the unmistakable noise of the .30 caliber machine gun—fine-tuned their senses up another notch. They pressed on, their bodies instinctively hunched low to the ground, what some people back home called a duck walk. The smaller the target they could make of themselves, the better. They weren’t sure if the silence they now heard—after that 15-second orgy of gunfire—was a harbinger of victory or catastrophe.
Guess thought he heard voices ahead. American voices. He pivoted toward Jock, a few yards behind. “I do believe we’re there, sir,” he whispered. “Should I give ’em the password?”
Jock nodded. Guess shouted, “Laverne!”
He was answered by the chatter of a Thompson’s burst. Bullets splattered wildly around them for a few seconds, scarring only the trees. When the fusillade ceased, Jock’s angry voice rang out:
“LAVERNE, GODDAMNIT! LAVERNE! NEXT MAN WHO PULLS A FUCKING TRIGGER ON ME IS ON MY PERMANENT SHIT LIST.”
The next voice they heard was Sergeant Hadley’s, berating someone: “That’s the captain, you fucking idiot!”
Jock and his men drifted into the perimeter, looking mightily pissed off. There was little doubt who had shot at them: PFC Savastano, one of Botkin’s radiomen, sat in his fighting hole looking white as a sheet, telltale wisps of smoke still floating lazily from his weapon’s muzzle. Hadley crouched over him, face flushed with anger, looking ready to throttle the private if he as much as twitched.
“Sorry, sir,” Hadley said to Jock. “Damn good thing Thompsons ain’t worth a shit at that distance. We’re all a little jumpy. We just had a go with some Japs on the south side.”
“Yeah, we know,” Jock said. “I’ll bet everyone within ten miles heard it. Where’s Top?”
Hadley pointed him in the right direction, and in a few moments, Jock slid into the hole next to his first sergeant. “Glad you’re back, Captain,” Patchett said. “We’ve got to find a new place to lay low, on the double. I’m betting the whole Jap Army heard that little shoot out.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Jillian had heard the sound of the machine gun, too, but she was much farther from it than Jock and his men. The silence that followed left her with the same anxious confusion: did it signal good news or disaster? If nothing else, it sharpened the direction to search for them.
Her heart sank when she came to the place where she had shared dinner with them last night. As she stood at the edge of a gaping bomb crater, she couldn’t conceive of anyone surviving such an attack. The old perimeter was a complete void. If Patchett and his men had met death there, surely there would be some grisly indication.
But no…they’re just gone. The sound of that gunfire, though…Somebody’s around here, somewhere.
She kept walking, more slowly and cautiously now, in the direction of the shots.
Sergeant Botkin was nothing if not observant. He saw her first, a long way off through the trees. From his spot on the perimeter, he could make out her distinctively female shape, her long hair flowing from under her decidedly unmilitary bush hat. Even though she had a rifle slung from her shoulder, he would never mistake her for a soldier. He even recognized the clothes and boots she was wearing. They were the same ones she had on last night.
After PFC Savastano—one of his men—had nearly assassinated Captain Miles not long ago, he wanted—no, desperately needed—to make sure a mistake like that didn’t happen again.
“Miss Forbes is coming…pass it down,” Botkin called to the man manning the fighting hole to his left. He listened intently for the message to make the full circle of the perimeter back to him. By the time he counted to 15, it had. He breathed a sigh of relief.
Jillian found Jock and Patchett at the center of the perimeter. There was much information the three of them needed to share. Jock described the obliteration of Airfield One by the wildfire, the apparent exodus north of the Japanese forces, and the encounter with the suicidal Japanese lieutenant colonel. The first sergeant told of the errant bombing raid, the toll it had taken on the men, and the encounter with the Japanese soldiers.
Jillian asked, “You’re sure you killed them all? None got away?”
“Don’t think so,” Patchett replied. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but I’m kinda surprised we haven’t had more visitors…all that noise gotta attract some attention.”
Jillian shook her head. “No,” she said, “if anything, it’s going to keep them away. They don’t seem to be much interested in looking for trouble right now. They just want to get out of here.”
She went on to describe what she had seen in the Mission—the disorganized troops fleeing north, probably the same ones Jock had seen farther down the road; the rape and murder of the comfort women; the lucky break that had saved Alice Tookura. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And that kempei I shot this morning? He’s still lying there. I saw some soldiers kick his corpse as they passed. How’s that for a total breakdown of discipline?”
Melvin Patchett laid back and chuckled. “Just goes to show you,” he said. “Don’t matter what army it is, they all hate their military police.” He looked to Jock and asked, “Remember the old saying, sir?”
“Sure do,” Jock replied with a big grin. “I’d rather have a sister in the whorehouse than a brother in the MPs.”
Jillian found herself laughing, too, although she pretended to scold them as she said, “You Yanks are bloody awful!”
There wasn’t much time for laughter, though. She told them what happened at her house. “Everything…all my music, my piano…it’s gone,” she said. “At least my horse escaped with his life.”
There was little time to mourn what had passed. That battered group of men that was Task Force Miles needed to be moved to a safer place, and quickly. Someplace out of the way. Jillian knew just where to go.
“I’m going to take you blokes to the place across Peppan Creek, where the blacks have all gone,” she said. “It’s well east of the Mission, well away from this parade of Japs. You can rest, gather your strength…you’ll even get fed well, if you don’t mind eating snake and croc and the like.”
Doc Green hobbled slowly over and joined them. “The bit about getting fed well…I’m glad to hear that,” he said, the exhaustion evident in his voice, too. “The lads are already grumbling that you showed up without your food wagon.”
Jillian rolled her eyes and threw her hands up. “Fucking men,” she said, protesting to the heavens. “You can never do enough for them, can you?”
Jock couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. “Jillian,” he said quite seriously, “we’re not complaining. Believe me we’re not…”
She wasn’t paying attention to Jock. She had become fixated on what Doc Green was trying to do. He had removed the sodden bandage from his lower leg and, wielding surgical scissors, proceeded to cut off the bloody trouser leg below the knee. The wound now exposed was jagged and deep. Doc was on his third try to thread suture into a surgical needle. For the third time, his tired and shaking hand missed.
“Here, let me do it,” Jillian said, taking the needle and thread from his hands. “You’ll never be able to stitch that yourself.”
Grateful for the help, Doc offered no resistance. He rolled onto his stomach, giving her clear access to the wound.
Jock didn’t mean for his next words to sound harried and sarcastic, but that’s how they came out: “You sure you know how to sew someone up
, Jillian? How long is this little surgery gonna take, anyway? We need to get moving.” He wanted to put his foot in his mouth the minute he said it.
Jillian shot him an angry glance. “Yes, I’m sure…and it’ll take as long as it needs to, Jock.”
It was Patchett who defused the tension. He held up his open hands in a gesture to Jillian that meant, Whoa…nobody’s trying to rush you.
The first sergeant’s tone was mellow and soothing as he said, “Jillian, we just need to know when it’s safe to collapse the perimeter and start walking, that’s all. We’re gonna be racing the sun.”
Looking at Jock’s contrite face, she wished she had stifled her words, too. Their eyes met, and they apologized to each other without saying a word.
“Ten minutes, I think,” she said, gently cleaning the wound. “Does that sound about right to you, Doc?”
Chapter Forty-Nine
It had been a difficult walk for the men of Task Force Miles and their female guide, but they made the almost 13 miles to Peppan Creek in four hours’ time, arriving as night began to fall. From time to time, a man would stop and sit down, mumbling words like, I just need a minute. A minute was all he would get, as a comrade, himself struggling to keep the steady pace, pulled him to his feet. Corporal Pacheco, drowsy from the morphine, rode on the Radio Flyer being pulled by McGuire from the radio section. Experiencing occasional moments of glee from the drug, Pacheco would pretend to flog McGuire as the words “Giddyap, horsy!” croaked from his dry throat.
Doc Green had a tougher time of it. Jillian had done a fine job stitching and bandaging the gash on his calf, but the leg stiffened painfully and he was soon exhausted. He had managed to eat half of a rock-hard D bar before they set out, but the reserve of energy from the bitter chocolate was spent within an hour. PFC Savastano became his human crutch for the rest of the walk, supporting Doc like a man doing fervent penance. After nearly shooting Captain Miles and his patrol, Savastano needed to atone for his panicky mistake and convince himself—as well as the others—he was someone you could depend on. When Sergeant Botkin asked if he needed to hand off Doc to someone else, Savastano replied, “I’m okay, Sarge. I want to do this.”
Even the most fit of the group—Jillian, Jock, McMillen, and Guess—were exhausted by the time they reached Peppan Creek. They hadn’t suffered the effects of the bombing like the others, but they had been walking since sunrise.
The sun was still low in the sky when they heard a series of strange, shrill sounds—like the steady shriek of some animal—very loud and close at first, then fading as it was relayed to the north. “Ahh, they know we’re coming,” Jillian said, smiling serenely.
Jock’s head swiveled, trying to locate the source of the sound. He saw nothing. No one. Confused, he asked Jillian, “Who knows we’re coming? Those are humans making that racket?”
“Indeed,” she said. “That’s the Aborigine telegraph…the cooee. Surely you’ve heard that sound before in the bush?”
“Yeah, I guess I did…but I never knew what it was.”
The new camp at Peppan Creek was a collection of old, abandoned mining shacks and new, temporary shelters the blacks had constructed from whatever material they could find. In the twilight, the camp was a shadowy presence spread across several acres of thick woodland. Old Robert was waiting for them at the edge of the settlement. He had known of their approach a long way off. Deep within the camp, women tended small cookfires; children played happily.
“There is food and shelter for everyone,” Old Robert said, nodding respectfully to Jock.
Melvin Patchett tried to come to grips with the physical dimensions of the settlement. “We’ve got a problem, sir,” he said to Jock. “We can’t defend all these people. The area’s just too big.”
Old Robert smiled and said, “There is no need to defend us. We are safe here. You are safe here.”
“All the same,” Jock said, “we need to set up some kind of security. Perhaps a few listening posts…”
Old Robert simply shrugged. “This village is one big listening post,” he said. “I doubt any Japanese that might blunder this way in the dark will be any less noisy than you were.” Before Jock or Patchett could protest, he added, “I have much greater fear of your soldiers shooting my people in error than any Japanese doing so in earnest. Your men are exhausted, Captain. Put just one of them with my people while the others sleep. He will alert you if, by chance, the Japanese come near.”
Thinking back over the day’s events, Jock found it hard to disagree with Old Robert’s logic. He was too tired to argue; so was his first sergeant. They both nodded in acquiescence.
Jillian guided Patchett as he went about the business of getting Task Force Miles fed and bedded down for the night. They had everyone squared away by the time the camp was enveloped in darkness. Jock and Doc Green were billeted in one of the old mining shacks, a small, corrugated metal structure Jillian dubbed the officers’ quarters. As soon as Doc had finished his dinner—he hadn’t even bothered to ask what was the strange, reptilian meat he wolfed down—he fell dead asleep. Jock wished he could just fall asleep, too, but there were plans to be made. He gathered Jillian and his NCOs—Patchett, Hadley, McMillen, and Botkin—around the fire pit outside his shack. A kettle hung from a metal rod above the pit’s low flames. The men were about to enjoy their first taste of hot coffee in almost six days—since their early morning breakfast at Cairns, before the final flight leg of the journey on the Catalinas. They pooled the dried coffee powder from the K rations each of them had been saving for just such an opportunity. They would need the caffeine boost just to stay awake for the meeting.
“Looks like this settlement is as good a place as any to hole up,” Jock began, “until we get new orders…”
“Or they get us the hell out of here,” Patchett said, not sure if he was completing the sentence the way his captain had intended.
“Yeah, that’s right, Top,” Jock said. “How’s our supply situation?”
“We’re doing okay,” Patchett replied. “We’ve got at least ten days’ worth of K rations left, thanks to Miss Forbes here—”
“And the good people of Weipa,” Jillian added.
“Right,” Patchett agreed. “Plenty of water around, and we’ve still got plenty of Halazone tablets. Ammo for the Thompsons is okay, and Guess’s Springfield hasn’t fired a shot yet, but we’re real light on machine gun rounds…a little over a hundred left…about one fifty if we belted Guess’s ammo and shit-canned the sniper rifle. One more run-in with the Japs and that’ll be gone. Still got all our grenades, though.”
Jock asked, “Can you speak for Doc on the medical supplies, Top? How low are we?”
“Real low, sir. We’ve only got a handful of field dressings left, and most of the antibiotics are already used up. Getting bombed by our own guys really did us in there.”
“How much penicillin?”
Patchett shook his head. “Hardly any, sir.”
“Okay, could be worse,” Jock said. He looked to Jillian and asked, “How far are we from Najima’s jail?”
“It’s about two miles west of here…back across Peppan Creek.”
“And Old Robert says the colonel’s refusing to eat?”
“So far,” she replied. “It looks like he’s been drinking the water, though.”
“Hopefully,” Jock said, “we’ll have him in Brisbane in a few days. He won’t starve to death by then.”
“It’s better that he’s in that cell,” Patchett said. “We need him around here like a hole in the head right now.”
“Amen to that, Top,” Jock said as the others mumbled their agreement. “Now, we’ve got to tell Brisbane what’s going on. Losing the radio was a tough break, but I think we’ve got other options. Jillian, are you sure there are no other transmitters around here that Sergeant Botkin might be able to get working?”
“Afraid not,” she replied. “The only one was at the Mission, and the Japs smashed it to pieces first thing
.”
“And there’s no telegraph link to the Mission…or anyplace around here?”
“No, Jock, we only had the radio. If it was on the blink, the constable…Mick Murray…would send one of the blacks as a runner to the relay station at Moreton on the tele track.”
Patchett looked skeptical. “The telegraph line…that’s forty miles from here.”
“More or less,” she replied.
The first sergeant’s brow furrowed. “How long did that take?”
“The runner would leave at daybreak and be at the telegraph station around midday. He’d rest overnight while waiting for the reply and be back at the Mission the next day.”
Patchett threw up his hands in disbelief. “Over forty miles in six hours? On foot?”
“I did say he was a runner, First Sergeant.”
Patchett snickered and said, “And he probably did it barefoot, too.”
“Of course,” Jillian replied.
“Don’t any of these blacks ride horses?” Patchett asked. “If they had some horses, they could cover that distance a lot quicker.” He paused, then added, “So could we.”
Jillian shook her head. “The Weipa people aren’t keen on breaking and keeping horses. They’re not stockmen…fishing comes much easier to them than herding livestock. The missionaries had some horses, but they turned them loose before they evacuated. I had the only horse left, and now he’s gone, too.”
“Okay, okay,” Jock said, taking back control of the discussion. “I’m glad you brought up the telegraph line, because it’s been on my mind ever since our bombers were kind enough to destroy our radio. Now, we passed the Moreton relay station on our way here. That’s where we got off the trucks and started walking. We know it’s abandoned, but the relay stations south of there…are they abandoned, too, Jillian?”
“I don’t think so. The next station is about fifty miles south at Mein, and there are a few more before the line hits the coast at Cairns. Last I heard, that part of the Cape wasn’t being evacuated…at least not yet. But my knowledge of evacuations isn’t exactly current…it’s over a month old.”
Long Walk To The Sun (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 1) Page 31