The Preserve

by Steve Anderson

  “We have something like a treaty. I only hope it’s not like the kine you Americans usually come offering. Those are full of tricks.”

  “We Americans, you mean.”

  “Me too? Huh. I sure don’t feel like it.”

  They kept eating, staring out at the ancient Place of Refuge, and drinking, giving each other sidelong glances.

  “I won’t take your mana, haole,” she said. “I promise.”

  “And in return, I won’t make you swim across the shark’s den.”

  “Deal,” they said at the same time, toasted the wine, and they laughed.

  18.

  Lett was now the talk of the operation. Lansdale slapped him on the back and stood so close Lett thought he was going to hug him and squeeze him.

  “Man oh man, you’re making such progress,” Lansdale sang.

  He walked Lett into his lavish command tent with an arm around his shoulder. Lett was still in fighting mode, and it was all he could do not to repel that arm and snap it. The tent had ground cover and a living area with canvas armchairs. Lansdale stood Lett in the center of the room like he was the unassuming boy who’d fought off the street bully, sizing him up and down, looking for wounds, and Lett didn’t know if he was to be punished or praised and he didn’t care. It all took him back to the orphanage in Ohio a moment, and that oddly calmed him. Lansdale shouted and his Filipino orderly rushed in with warm water and towels and clean fatigues for Lett. The orderly pulled off Lett’s clothes and a medic came in to check him out fully, prodding and tapping him—“breathe in, breathe out, good”—before the orderly wiped Lett down like a prize horse.

  Meanwhile, Lansdale talked to Lett, giving him the rundown. The commando had returned from up high in the mountains with two tribal warriors, likely former scouts from the war. But Lett was there to stop them, hunt them down. Lett had foiled what Lansdale called a “venal and deranged incursion to hijack a valuable operation.”

  “The man obviously wasn’t responding to his cure,” Lansdale said. “But you? Look at you. You’re back to your old self. And how.”

  Lett could imagine what Frankie and Kodama would do to the commando. He’d seen it for himself. “Where are they taking him?”

  “Don’t you worry about that.” Lansdale sneered but then wiped at his mustache and a full grin appeared, just for Lett. “Look at you, just look at you. You obviously are responding to the cure—with flying colors, I’d say.”

  Lett was expecting one of Lansdale’s trite slogans any moment, but none came. The orderly wrapped Lett in a dark, satiny Chinese robe that Lett shook off, prompting Lansdale to snap his fingers, and then the robe was out of the room completely.

  Lansdale planted hands on his hips. “Why, you didn’t even need your weaponry.”

  Lett remembered he’d been carrying his M1 carbine. His knife was still clean in its sheath—the orderly now wrapped a new web belt around his waist and hung the knife off it. “Where’s my rifle?” he muttered.

  “We have it for you. You left it.” Lansdale wagged a finger. “That old Selfer, he had you pegged right indeed,” he said. He seemed to have forgotten altogether that Lett had stood up to Kodama and wouldn’t do his bidding.

  Lansdale gave him his own breakfast of pork chop, soft scrambled eggs, hash with plenty of onion, toast, coffee, and guava juice. Lett ate in Lansdale’s tent at a table with plates and silverware and could feel the curious eyes of those passing the tent flap outside. He shoveled in the food and, since he didn’t have to do a sentry shift that morning, or any duty, went back to his pup tent afterward. His M1 carbine had been returned. It lay on his bedroll.

  He made straight for his musette bag and prepared his syringe and shot up a double dose.

  Not taking his medicine was why that had happened, he told himself. It was why he had that old nightmare again, and why he’d acted so instinctively, so ruthlessly to subdue three attackers. He wondered what Lansdale truly thought about it. Did those actions somehow prove to Lansdale that the treatment was working? Lett sighed at the sick notion and brooded at the thought of Lansdale in general until his chest was so tight his breath came out wheezy, not unlike the commando’s. Lansdale had it wrong—that was not his old self. That was a sick person. All he needed was to take his dose.

  ***

  The next morning, Lett and others climbed into two trucks that were still empty. The mango tree dig had yielded little apparently, but the ensuing interrogation surely offered something better. They traveled maybe an hour, tops. It was nearing noon, the sun rising directly above the valley like a glaring light bulb hanging from the very middle of a ceiling.

  They drove between two seemingly impassable ridges and arrived at a place not even that sun at its highest point could find. More trucks were waiting here, big six-by-sixes—their power trains running to every wheel. Two more experts were there, Corps of Engineers men. Lansdale and the previous engineers had led the way over in a Plymouth and held another meeting of their minds. It was an All-American confab now. Kodama and Frankie weren’t invited. Neither was needed, apparently—they had done their part for the effort.

  Poor dead Reuben must have finally told them what he knew.

  Lett and the other guards watched the perimeter, which consisted of only the trucks and the narrow, shaded road. As they did so, Lansdale and his cohorts slung their briefcases and disappeared into dense flowering shrubs, passing first between two palms many yards apart, but that could act as a telltale landmark if a person knew what to look for. They knew. They appeared to map out their way, counting footsteps and gauging angles and directions.

  And later Lett heard a boom from somewhere inside the hillside, not an explosion, more like a wall falling over.

  ***

  “You, there,” a man said to Lett. One of the engineers had found him standing guard and now glared at him impatiently, all metal-framed glasses and civilian job boss haughtiness.

  “What do you need?”

  “We need a watchman. Lansdale says you’re our man.”

  Just then Lett’s insides squeezed up, and his stomach turned from an unholy smell that he recognized all too well. It was worse than rotting meat, or decaying jungle vegetation, or decomposing flesh. It was the gas from corpses left far too long in an enclosed space.

  The engineer smelled it too and his already pale face colored green. “You recognize that,” he said. Lett nodded. “We’re just lucky it’s been leaking out for a long time now; else we’d have to wait weeks before we could stand it.” The engineer pulled nose plugs from a pocket and shoved them in. “Sorry, I don’t have any more.”

  “You got cigs?”

  The engineer handed Lett a pack of Camels. Lett shook out one, tore it in two and placed a half in each nostril. The engineer nodded in appreciation. “Well, if that isn’t some GI ingenuity.”

  He led Lett straight into the side of the hill, through a tall opening that became a cave, then a cavern, then a wide tunnel. He put on a hard hat, although the tunnel was more than high and wide enough here. A couple mining lamps showed the way. Voices echoed from about thirty yards down the tunnel, which curved until the beams of flashlights appeared, then spotlights.

  Lansdale and his latest team had gathered around a spot in the floor of the tunnel.

  “Here is fine, just keep watch,” the engineer told Lett and strode back to his place among the current meeting of the minds. Lett stood at the curve of the tunnel. He crossed his arms and cradled his carbine in them. He kept one eye on the entrance but one on the work at hand, and no one seemed to mind.

  They crouched over the spot in the floor, dismayed and enrapt and inspired at once like schoolyard boys poking a downed bird to see if it would wake again. They had shiny prodding tools instead of sticks. Lansdale eventually placed an ear to the ground. After about twenty minutes of this, they marked their spot with a little flag, then they ate Spam sandwiches and drank coffee, the remainders of which they offered Lett. Then they moved on, waving at Le
tt to follow as if he were a slow-witted dog.

  He slung his carbine and followed. He figured the place had been rigged and trip-wired to the hilt—Reuben must have revealed how to enter and avoid any booby traps. The tunnel led to a larger cavern. The rays of their flashlights bounced off walls, revealing angles and crags and hollows that the darkness washed away again like sand under surf, but when their lights combined, they made matters clear enough. The space was reinforced with concrete. Lett saw the remains of a steel wall or door. Beyond he saw rifles, pistols, a radio set, and empty ration boxes all strewn about, the requisite samurai sword, and three skeletons in Japanese uniforms. They wore telltale Japanese rubber-soled shoes with a separated big toe.

  The sight had steeled the team, and made them slap one another’s backs, and Lett could taste the metallic tang of men on a mission.

  Lansdale eyed Lett, smiling. Lett looked away.

  Lansdale led them on, the engineers whispering, sharing their findings. A few wooden boxes stood along the way, about the size of milk crates. One of the engineers was marking these with a wax pencil. Farther along, the cavern had partially collapsed, leaving mounds of rubble—Lett guessed this was how the stench had slowly released. Among the rocky debris was the wreckage of tracks and a handcar like miners used, and wiring and cage lights hung along the walls. Other tunnels branched off the cavern, Lett saw. Slabs were built into the floor here and there, some concrete, some steel, and he figured this was what they had been studying out in the entrance tunnel—another slab to break through, but one disguised to look like the earthen and rocky floor.

  One of the shafts branching off looked man-made, or at least neatly carved out. This was more like a chamber. The team shined their lights on what had to be hundreds of rectangular wooden boxes, all stacked like ammo in a depot—or gold ingots in a vault, Lett thought. He immediately drove the thought from his mind.

  More chambers appeared. The Japanese must have run out of boxes because now Lett saw platinum and gold bars in perfect rows. The flashlight beams on them ignited flashes and sparkles that made Lett shield his eyes. Then he saw large urns holding gems and jewels and glistening nuggets. These loomed phosphorescent in the darkness when the light beams moved onward. Lansdale approached each find and touched it and spoke to it like a general visiting a field hospital; the engineers stood back like doctors and nurses ready for any urgency.

  They trod farther, on the balls of their feet. Lett followed. At this point a red cord hung horizontally along the tunnel wall to guide anyone who might be getting lost in this maze. They saw other shafts blocked off but made to look natural; the engineers chipped away at these to reveal walls of concrete. Lansdale had a map out, Lett saw, and they consulted it more often, stopping to gather around it, leaving Lett in the dark. They hadn’t bothered to offer him a flashlight. It made him feel more comfortable somehow.

  Eventually they reached another access tunnel like the one they’d entered. Rounding the final bend, the group stopped in their tracks. Lett followed up behind, his eyes widening at what their flashlights revealed.

  Piles of skeletons appeared, some wearing nothing but loincloths, but then Lett noticed it was their ragged underwear. Others wore the shreds of dungarees and uniforms. These were POWs—they had to be. Lett could imagine the way it went down. Like slaves had built the pyramids of old, these poor fellows labored to fill this cave for their Japanese masters before being walled inside. Their rags were so worn and meager that he couldn’t be certain these were Allied POWs. He thought he saw a Marine cap but didn’t want to get close enough to look. They could be Korean, Filipino, Australian, American. He suspected all of the above. Labor was labor.

  One of the Corps of Engineers officers was vomiting, which brought more smell.

  Lett couldn’t stop staring. They must have numbered in the hundreds. Had they been clawing at the wall and gassed somehow? Or had they been left here to run out of air and starve, and here they lay to die? Or had they turned on one another, for the scraps of raw meat that would keep the last of them going?

  Lansdale was standing close to Lett, so close Lett felt his breath on his ear. “May they rest in peace,” Lansdale said. “This is why we fought.”

  He looked to Lett for some equally solemn confirmation. Lett could only snort. As victors, the Americans had and might still have all the best reasons for appropriating these spoils, he thought, on account of plenty of crimes. There was what the Japanese did in China, to Nanking alone. How they took no prisoners. The kamikaze terror. Not to mention Pearl Harbor. And there were these poor POWs left to die. Seizing spoils had surely been going on over here since the war, just as in the ETO. But the spoils part of this? No, this was not “why we fought.” These so-called spoils belonged to their original owners.

  Oddly, the gleam in Lansdale’s eye returned. He patted Lett on the shoulder again. It was all Lett could do not to recoil. Then Lansdale stroked Lett’s M1 carbine. “You know, you will have to use that thing eventually,” he said.

  And he strode off, back where they had come, back toward his treasure finds, leaving Lett in the dark. Suddenly, Lett felt so cold, more chilled than in any midnight hole in December in the Ardennes.

  ***

  Lett and the rest of the sentries took turns guarding the perimeter over the next two days while laborers and carabao arrived to do their work inside the tunnels and caverns. Lett never saw Kodama or Frankie after they did their work on Reuben, and Lansdale only showed once or twice to reenter the caves and reemerge smirking. He had the laborers burn away foliage around the entrance, to make room. A few large items came out. A giant gold Buddha required two carabao and ten men moving it along cut logs. Apart from that, Lett heard the occasional booms and cracks, saw the engineers coming and going with their clipboards and briefcases. But most of the find did not come out.

  On the third day, a captain Lett had never seen before—a spiffy command-staff type—came and left them new uniforms and gear, still without insignia or even markings but neat and tidy. Lett didn’t have to be told to clean his weapon and make things shiny all around, and neither did the others. None of them wanted to catch a holy wrath from a staffer or worse yet, his master. Lansdale made the rounds, telling them to “look sharp, boys,” and spewing another of his cheery homilies: “Act the part you play and become the part and the man, too!”

  Lett knew why all along, but he hadn’t figured on brass as high and as shiny as they got. He heard the roar of the new command car coming up the road. The burnt foliage opening was trimmed back to resemble an arched gateway. They stood at attention along the way. The command car pulled in close enough to brush leaves and fronds.

  Army General Douglas MacArthur rose from the backseat followed by two staffers, including that spiffy captain. The general had his pipe in his mouth now, and his mouth scowled slightly like in that famous photo of him wading ashore at Leyte, returning to retake the Philippines just south of here. Or, Lett wondered, was that just a smile the grand leader was stifling? Lett, for one, would have bet that gold Buddha alone on the latter.

  Before he strode inside that cave the general slowed half a step, just enough to give Lett a most honorable and respectful nod.

  19.

  Lett returned on a fast-running cargo ship, reuniting with Jock and others they’d flown over with. Jock sized up the fittings, paint scheme, signs, and sound of the smooth engine and told Lett their vessel had probably been refitted during the war and commissioned to fight as a Q-ship or any manner of disguised, undercover merchant vessel with concealed weaponry. The cargo hold was off limits to them, but Lett figured that some of what was found in those caverns was making its way back to the US Territory of Hawaii, and that they were on board as extra watchmen if needed. Their cramped quarters, with its protruding bolts and bars, stacked bunks, and stale smells of his fellow humans, took Lett back to a wartime hospital ship where he’d despaired so much that he’d wanted to leap into the cold Atlantic and end it all. But this t
ime, inside the head of this cargo boat crossing the postwar Pacific, he shot up his trusty dose—and he swore it was helping.

  The men were able to lounge on the top deck of the clandestine trawler, and Lett sprawled in the sun on a pile of netting for the first few hours. The breeze and blue sky and open horizon should’ve brightened his thoughts. It helped him focus and simplify, like breaking down his M1 carbine did. Again he tried to justify his actions, and even the acts of Lansdale and Frankie, by recalling how understanding General MacArthur had seemed. Winning the war hadn’t been pretty and keeping the peace wasn’t going to be, either. Thus, men like Lansdale. Someone had to complete that dirty work. He just couldn’t be a part of it, not that way. It spooked him too much. He had to get clear of Lansdale somehow. But how?

  Jock wasn’t helping his mood. Jock sulked. Jock joined him on the pile of netting, tugging on the coarse greasy cords. “I don’t know what you done on your special patrol or secret mission or whatever,” he said. “But I ended up getting duty. Mine was no joyride.”

  Lett hadn’t told Jock about what he’d done. A grunt always kept things in right after. Maybe a part of him didn’t want Jock to know, to be sullied by it. Maybe he didn’t want what made him choke the commando or, worse yet, what Lansdale and Frankie had done to start catching like some fast-spreading onboard disease. Scurvy with a death wish, reopening previously healed wounds.

  Jock kept opening and squeezing a fist. “They took us to this one hill,” he said. “It was green like jungle but only a thin veneer, all rock underneath. There was a cave or a cavern or whatever. We holed up. Tents. Anyways, they must have known I don’t do so well with caves and caverns, what have you, so they kept me posted outside. The others went inside that hill. They took a prisoner in there with them. A local. Just a boy.”

  “Hold on,” Lett said. “When was this? How long were you there?”