In Danger's Path

by W. E. B Griffin

  There was also, Doto-Si told Brewer privately, a genuine threat from Chinese and Mongolian bandits, who robbed caravans whenever they thought they had the caravan outnumbered. That meant they would have to be armed, and prepared to fight.

  That was going to be a hell of a problem, Brewer realized. Very few of the Yangtze sailors had any experience in that kind of fighting. And though soldiers from the 15th Infantry could be presumed to know how to handle weapons, he didn’t know how many of them would be willing to trust their survival to the Mongolian madam of a Peking whorehouse.

  But about that time he began to hear scuttlebutt in the Fouled Anchor that Sergeant James R. Sweatley and some of the other active-duty Marines in the Peking legation detachment had announced they weren’t just going to raise the white flag when the war came and turn themselves in as Japanese prisoners.

  The very next time—in early November 1941—Sergeant Sweatley came into the Fouled Anchor, Chief Brewer and Technical Sergeant Abraham were waiting for him. They bought him a couple of drinks, then took him into Brewer’s office to sound him out.

  Brewer didn’t think much of Sweatley. He was still only a buck sergeant after twenty years in the Marines, and on several occasions, he had been a troublesome drunk both in the bar and upstairs.

  But Abraham argued that he was a Marine sergeant on active duty, and that meant he would be in a position to get weapons, which the others didn’t have and damned sure were going to need. On top of that, he and the other Marines he’d bring with him were young. A good thing, under the circumstances—especially considering some of the others who would be going into the Gobi.

  “What we say here goes no further,” Brewer began.

  “What we say about what?”

  Technical Sergeant Abraham decided to cut through the bullshit. “The scuttlebutt is that you and some of the other Marines are not going to surrender to the Japanese when this war starts. Is that true, or are you just running your mouth?”

  “Who said I said something like that?”

  “Two of the Marines who say you’re taking them with you,” Abraham told him, and furnished their names.

  Who else, Sergeant Sweatley wondered, have those bastards been running their mouth to?

  Then he said the thought aloud.

  “As far as I know, nobody else,” Abraham replied. “I had a little talk with them. Told them if any of their officers, or even some of their noncoms, heard them, they’d be confined until it was time to surrender.”

  “What do you want, you and Brewer?”

  “The same thing you do, to stay out of a Jap POW enclosure. To get the hell out of China, into India, or maybe even Russia.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And to take our families with us,” Brewer added.

  Sweatley knew about Brewer’s family. And he knew about Abraham. He had three kids with his Chinese woman, and then she’d up and died on him, and he had stayed in China because of the kids, to take care of them.

  “If I was planning something like that, and I’m not saying I am, what I would do is head for India,” Sweatley said. “On horseback. Traveling fast and light across the Altai Mountains into the Gobi Desert and then across it.”

  Jesus, Chief Brewer thought, that makes him the second person—Doto-Si being the first—who understands that the only way to get out of China is through the Gobi Desert.

  “Ride horses across sand dunes?” Brewer countered sarcastically.

  “Let me tell you something, Chief. The Gobi is mostly rocks, not sand. If you had a car and enough gas, you could drive across the sonofabitch.”

  “Then why don’t you just drive across it?”

  “I thought about it. And did the numbers. For one thing, there’s no way I could carry that much gas. For another, trucks would be conspicuous. That’s the last thing I can afford.”

  “You really think a dozen or more Marines on horseback wouldn’t be conspicuous?” Abraham asked.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you’d be white men in Mongolia.”

  “I’ll worry about that later. If, I mean, I was thinking about something like this.”

  “I’ve been thinking along the same lines,” Brewer said. “My wife and me, and some other people. My wife is a Mongolian. She knows all about the Gobi Desert.”

  “No shit?”

  “We’re thinking of crossing it in horse-drawn, rubber-tired wagons,” Abraham said.

  They were doing more than thinking about it: Three days before, Brewer had sent Doto-Si to Peking in the Oldsmobile, with the kids and one of the bouncers, to go to Baotou to buy wagons.

  “And you don’t think you’re going to stand out as a white man in Mongolia?”

  “I’ve got a Nansen passport,” Brewer said. “It’s phony, but I can’t tell the difference between it and a real one. I can pass myself off as a White Russian.”

  “Oh.”

  Brewer’s smarter than I thought, Sweatley thought. I didn’t even think about getting a phony Nansen passport.

  “And I got a Mongolian wife and kids,” Brewer went on. “If I stay in the wagon and let her do the talking, I might not even have to show anybody my Nansen passport.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Sweatley asked.

  Brewer looked at Abraham, who nodded. Then Brewer took the chance and told Sweatley. “There’s ten Yangtze sailors, including me, who stayed here when we went into the Fleet Reserve. All of us are married. Mostly to Chinese, but there’s a German wife, and a White Russian. There’s two Marines, Abraham and a guy named Brugemann, who used to be the finance sergeant in the Fourth. And, all told, twenty kids. I have also been talking to some soldiers who took their retirement here. There’s maybe six, seven of them in Tientsin.”

  “Like I said, what do you want from me?”

  “We could be useful to each other,” Brewer said.

  “You tell me, Sergeant Abraham, how are—what did you say, twelve?—twelve wives and twenty kids going to help me get to India.”

  “You know how to navigate?” Chief Brewer asked.

  “I know what a compass is,” Sweatley said.

  “A compass won’t be much help in the middle of the Gobi Desert,” Abraham said. “There’s only a few roads, and the Japs will be watching them. You’re going to have to cross the Gobi Desert the same way you cross an ocean, by celestial navigation, by the stars.”

  Sweatley understood that he was being told the truth. And navigating across the Gobi Desert was something else he hadn’t given much thought to. Brewer and Abraham obviously had.

  “For the third time, what do you want from me?”

  “You’ve seen the wagon train movies,” Chief Brewer said. “Women and children and farmers, protected by cavalry. That’s what you’re going to be. The Marines, and maybe some of the 15th Infantry soldiers, would be the cavalry. In exchange for that, we’ll feed you, and hide you from the Japs and Chinese bandits.”

  Sweatley, thinking it over, did not immediately respond.

  “The only way to get across the desert is by wagon train,” Abraham argued reasonably. “Or camels. You got any money to buy wagons? You think you could ride a camel?”

  “I got some horses,” Sweatley replied. “Including spares. Pack animals.”

  “Listen to me. I know what I’m talking about,” Abraham said. “There’s no way you can cross the Gobi like you’re on some cavalry patrol fighting Indians in the movies. It has to be crossed very slowly, maybe five miles a day. When the weather gets really bad, you don’t move at all.”

  Brewer joined in the attack. “We’re going to have to take our meat with us, on the hoof. When we find water, we’ll fill up our water barrels, because we may not find any more for another hundred miles. You getting the picture?”

  Sweatley shrugged. “Your wife’s Mongolian?”

  “Yeah, and she speaks it, too. Which—correct me if I’m wrong—is something else you don’t have, somebody who speaks Khalkha, which is what the
y call their language. In case you need to ask directions, for example.”

  “How do you plan to get from here to the Gobi?”

  “By car from here to Baotou…” Abraham said.

  “That’s where we have the horses,” Sweatley blurted.

  “…and then by wagon from there. Across the mountains into Mongolia and into the desert.”

  Sweatley grunted, then asked: “How many of the others have Nansen passports? Can you get them for us?”

  “Three of us have Nansens,” Brewer replied. “And I’ve got one more. Blank. All it needs is a picture.”

  He means, Sweatley thought, that I can have the blank passport. If I join up with him. Him meaning him and the Chink women and half-breed children.

  “How do you know your horses are going to be there when you need them?” Chief Brewer asked.

  “Because I got two Marines with Thompson submachine guns up there, living with them in the stable.”

  “How are you going to get from here to Baotou when the time comes?” Abraham asked.

  “We have two trucks, International ton-and-a-halfs.”

  “Two trucks for how many Marines?”

  “Nine, not including me. With the two at Baotou, that makes a dozen of us.”

  “Supplies?”

  “Yeah, we got supplies. That’s why we need two trucks.”

  “And if one truck breaks down between here and Baotou?”

  “Then we move our stuff from the one that broke down to the one that didn’t.”

  In turn, Chief Brewer was more favorably impressed with Sergeant Sweatley than he expected to be.

  For a Marine, Brewer thought, Sweatley isn’t too slow.

  “What about weapons?” Abraham asked.

  “That’s a problem,” Sweatley confessed. “All we have, in addition to our individual weapons, is the Thompsons and an air-cooled Browning .30. In Baotou.”

  “You can’t get any more from the legation?”

  “There aren’t any more at the legation. We got the Thompsons and the Browning from the Fourth Marines in Shanghai.”

  “You heard they’ve been ordered to the Philippines?” Abraham asked.

  Sweatley was surprised. He shook his head, “no.”

  “And the Yangtze River gunboats,” Brewer chimed in.

  “You know that?”

  “One of our guys was a radioman first on the Panay,” Brewer said. “He was aboard her—’visiting’—when the word came. He’s working on getting us a shortwave radio.”

  A shortwave radio, Sweatley thought, is something else I didn’t think about.

  “Do you know when they’re going?”

  “It has to be soon,” Brewer said.

  “Then we don’t have much time to get our wagon train on the road, do we?” Sweatley observed, extending his hand to first to Abraham and then to Brewer.

  They left Peking, independently, on 7 December 1941, within hours of hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Taking off was much harder for Sergeant Sweatley than he thought it would be.

  It wasn’t even going over the hill. Over the hill meant fuck it, I’m going to party until my money runs out or the Shore Patrol finds me, whichever comes first.

  What I’m doing is fucking deserting. In time of war, which means they can shoot me if they catch me.

  And shoot everybody I’m taking with me.

  But the only alternative is not going, which means surrendering, just as soon as the Japs find time to go to the legation. If the Japs don’t just line the Marines up and shoot us. Or use us for bayonet practice.

  Fuck it, Marines are supposed to fight, not surrender. This way, maybe we can do the fucking Japs some damage, somewhere, somehow, and we sure as hell can’t do that if we just put our hands in the air and walk out of the legation and hope they don’t shoot us, or bayonet us.

  But it was still tough to actually go to the go-down where they had the stolen (and repainted in Marine Green) International trucks, and open the doors and drive away, when everybody knew they were supposed to be in the legation, putting into execution the Plan in the Event of Hostilities.

  They had the duty of burning the classified records and smashing the code machine and everything else they didn’t want the Japs to get their hands on—including the stock of whisky and wine—and they weren’t doing it.

  They managed to get out of Peking without trouble, taking back roads to avoid the roadblocks they knew the Japs would set up on the Peking-Changchiak highway. There were roadblocks, of course, but they were manned by Chinese, who were not yet ready to challenge two U.S. Marine Corps trucks guarded by Marines in field gear and steel pots, Springfields at the ready.

  It took them a long time, at low speed on dirt or mud back roads, to make it around the Japanese roadblocks and onto the Peking-Changchiak highway beyond them. And it was dark when they reached the Great Wall of China, no more than a hundred miles from Peking. That put them behind schedule, but Sweatley decided it made more sense to stop for the night rather than risk what they might find at the gate in the wall without looking at it first.

  At first light, he took a long, good look with a pair of binoculars at the passage through the wall. When he saw only Chinese, no Japs, he decided they could probably bluff their way through this one the same way they’d bluffed their way through the others near Peking.

  That worked, too. And by one in the afternoon—five hours after passing through the Great Wall—they were outside Changchiak. There three men stepped into the road to flag them down—scaring Sweatley more than a little. But they turned out to be Chief Brewer, Technical Sergeant Abraham, and Staff Sergeant Willis T. Cawber, Jr., U.S. Army, Retired.

  Cawber had brought with him the other retirees from the 15th Infantry, along with their wives and children. One of the wives was a White Russian, and one of them a French woman. They had seven children among them.

  Cawber, whom he had not met before, immediately got off on the wrong foot with Sweatley. “You were supposed to be here last night,” he complained in a sour voice.

  Deciding to let that pass, Sweatley explained why he had spent the night on the other side of the Great Wall.

  “You were supposed to be here last night, Sergeant,” Cawber repeated.

  “You better get this straight,” Sweatley snapped. “I don’t have to explain a fucking thing to you. So far as I’m concerned, you’re just going along for the ride.”

  And then Cawber made things worse by trying to tell Sweatley how he thought they should organize the convoy of vehicles.

  “You don’t listen, do you?” Sweatley said. “I’ve been running convoys around China for six years, and I don’t need a retired doggie to tell me how to do it.”

  Chief Brewer and Technical Sergeant Abraham took Staff Sergeant Cawber aside, and Sweatley proceeded to set up the convoy the way he thought it should be run.

  Chief Brewer would head it up in his Oldsmobile, with another car behind him, and a Marine would be in each car. Then would come the first of the Marine trucks, with four Marines in it—including Technical Sergeant Abraham. There were seven other cars. These would follow the first truck, with either a Marine or one of the 15th Infantry retirees carrying a weapon in each. Cawber could ride in any of the cars he wanted to. The second Marine truck, carrying Sweatley and the rest of the armed Marines, would be at the tail of the convoy.

  That day they met a pretty fair amount of traffic on the road; and because the Great Wall of China made a U-shaped loop to the west, they had to pass through it again. That meant they didn’t reach Chining, 150 miles down the highway, until half past seven that evening. As night began to fall, Sweatley made another decision.

  When Brewer stopped to talk things over, Sweatley explained that he thought it would be better to keep going and pass through Chining right now, even if it proved difficult to find someplace to stop on the other side in the dark. By morning, he explained, the Chinese might have gotten word to arrest westerners. Serg
eant Abraham agreed with Sweatley, and so did Brewer. Even though Staff Sergeant Cawber didn’t say anything, Sweatley sensed he didn’t like it when Brewer agreed to the plan without asking him.

  They spent the night parked by the side of the road. Sweatley put out a perimeter guard and spent most of the night awake, but there was no trouble.

  They started moving again at first light, and made the 175 miles to Huhehot by three in the afternoon. On the other side of Huhehot, Brewer stopped the convoy again. There were problems. Three of the eight automobiles were running low on gas. Though Sweatley’s trucks had more than enough gasoline, in five-gallon Texaco tin cans, to refuel them, Sweatley was opposed to doing that.

  “We’re going to abandon the cars in Baotou anyhow,” he said. “Hiding them will be a problem. What we should do is load the people in the trucks and other cars and get rid of the cars here.”

  “You’re making all the decisions, are you, Sweatley?” Staff Sergeant Cawber asked, sarcastically.

  “I’ll get rid of my Olds,” Chief Brewer said, nipping the argument in the bud, “and the Packard and the Buick. The more gas we can take with us, the better. And I don’t think we can be sure of finding gas in Baotou.”

  The supplies the Oldsmobile, Packard, and Buick were carrying were transferred to Sweatley’s trucks, while the passengers were distributed among the other cars and trucks. Several miles farther down the road, they came to a narrow trail leading to the left. The cars were abandoned there, out of sight from the road. At Sweatley’s suggestion, their ignition keys were left in place, but the Peking license plates were removed.

  It began to snow thirty minutes after they resumed their march to Baotou. They reached the city after dark. By then it was covered with snow.

  The women and children were put into a go-down Brewer had arranged for, guarded by several of the Marines and soldiers. Meanwhile, the Sick, Lame, and Lazy; the Marines; and the other able-bodied men spent the night at a stable transferring the supplies to the rubber-tired wagons and carts. The cars and trucks were then abandoned—scattered in inconspicuous areas all over Baotou.