The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “Hai…! I know this man…” The junior officer responded immediately, bowing formally. “I was present when he was brought in.”

  “This man seems to know of the admiral’s orders, and is trying to spread dissent among the others,” Ikeuchi explained calmly, frowning only slightly over how it might have been possible for the prisoner to have such information. “The last thing we need is some kind of mass riot or breakout attempt before we’ve had a chance to separate them all.” He paused for a moment, then shrugged as if the only possible course of action was clear to him. “Only one thing for it: when you have the signal that all is prepared, take him first…!”

  “Hai, Ikeuchi-san…!”

  It had been a long night’s march for Langdale and Watson, their five hour trek taking them across the south-eastern slopes of Mount Wawani as they made their way slowly and painstakingly back toward Laha from the landward side. A dormant volcano, Wawani was the tallest point on the island at 3,600 feet, with the occasional hot spring or sulphur vent discharging into the clear sky above, higher up toward the summit. The going had been difficult lower down, and Victoria had been grudgingly forced to admit that changing into the soldier’s uniform pants and tunic had been an excellent idea. Loose and baggy as they were, they were nevertheless a far more practical attire for hiking across that rough, humid terrain than her nurse’s dress would’ve been.

  Showing as no more than perhaps ten miles on a two dimensional map, the distance was at least half that again in reality as they trudged their way through the foothills at the bottom of Wawani’s eastern slopes. Both were exhausted as dawn rose above the hills across the bay, and Langdale had to give credit to his young companion that she’d coped remarkably well with a forced march that had tested even his superior, military-trained abilities. It’d been necessary for him to moderate his own pace on one or two occasions to allow her to keep up, but on the whole, Victoria had maintained a solid, steady pace throughout the night and had managed it without any more griping or complaining that he’d have expected from the average infantryman.

  By first light the pair had managed to reach a position in the heights above Soewakoda, quite close to the banks of the narrow, winding Pia Besar river roughly 500 yards inland of the village. Perched on a low rise at the western edge of a small cleared area, Langdale was able to look down on the huts of the township itself and was also able to take note of most of the troop movements in the area. It hadn’t taken long to recognise the significance of guards standing about the village schoolhouse, nor had it been difficult to work out the thinking behind the work party of Japanese soldiers he’d watched marching out of town half an hour earlier, shovels over their shoulders. They’d disappeared into the jungle below, appearing a few tense moments later, tramping in formation along a muddy track that wound its way through coconut plantations, not far from the river.

  Langdale had started to become concerned that they’d need to relocate, had the enemy troops come any closer, but the work detail eventually came to a halt while still perhaps three hundred yards downstream, and it was at that point that his concern for their own safety very quickly transformed into a deep and genuine fear for the lives of every single prisoner being held down at Soewakoda. After just a moment’s rest to catch their collective breath, the work party spread out across the field in which they’d come to a halt and began to dig. Armed with the dubious benefit of Realtime historical knowledge, the SAS sergeant very quickly recognised that what they were digging down there were quite clearly large pits intended for use as mass graves, and a chill rippled through his body as he backed into the treeline a few yards to where Victoria waited nervously.

  It was as he drew near that the F-35 roared past overhead, causing him to duck instinctively and throw a protective arm around Victoria’s shoulders, drawing her down with him into a crouch as she cried out in pain and surprise and clasped her hands over her ears. There was no need for concern that her shriek might alert the enemy; it was completely lost in the thunder of the jet as it streaked away, not a single person catching sight of it as it dipped below cloud cover for just the few seconds necessary for its optical systems to scan and record images of the entire bay area.

  “It’s alright!” He assured, almost grinning as reason caught up with his own surprise and he realised that it had almost certainly been either Max or Alec piloting the aircraft that had just passed. “It’s just a plane: one if ours…!” He thought about it for another moment or two. “They’re getting pictures of the area… trying to find out where everything is.” He gave a proper smile this time. “They’d only wanna know that if they were coming to rescue us!” He added as he began fumbling with his radio headset.

  “What’s happening?” She whispered urgently, desperate to know what was going on as she cast wary eyes upward toward the unbroken cloud cover. “Have you seen them? Have you seen my father?”

  “Not yet…” he answered shortly, not wanting to provide any further details in light of what he believed was about to occur. “Just work parties and troop movements at the moment. Give me a minute…” he added, almost apologetically as he noted the dismay in her expression. “…I need to report in…”

  “Trooper calling Phoenix-Leader… Trooper calling Phoenix-Leader… come in, please…” he whispered softly a moment later, having activated his radio and headset and returned to the treeline with rifle in hand.

  “Phoenix-Leader reading you five-by-five, Trooper…” the reply came through within seconds of his call, the voice quite clearly that of Max Thorne. “Good to hear you’re still kickin’… Patch kit’s working okay then…”

  “Pretty bloody good to hear from you too, sir…” Langdale replied quickly, the closeness of the Hindsight group clear in the informal tone of both. “And yeah, the patch kit’s workin’ so far. They’re a bugger to wire up, but it seems to be okay otherwise. Got lucky with a long-range radio truck… we’ve managed to hide it somewhere up in the hills: as long as no one goes looking for it, we should be right.”

  “You said ‘we’ then, mate: who have you got with you?” Thorne asked immediately, having been given no prior information regarding anyone else being with him.

  “One of the nurses from the Tan Tui hospital, sir… daughter of one of the doctors who was taken prisoner with Eileen and Evan. She managed to get outta there with me and she’s been taggin’ along ever since. She’s doin okay so far.”

  “She managed to keep pace with you on a ten mile night march,” Thorne observed, more than a little impressed despite underestimating the distance by a fair margin. “I’m bloody sure she is…!”

  “I’m guessin’ that was Alec I just overhead then…?”

  “You guess right,” came the answer, and even over the radio, Langdale could tell Thorne was grinning. “Thought it might be handy to get a squiz at what the bastards have got over there against you. You had any issues so far?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle…” Langdale shrugged, not inclined to brag too much. Ran into a patrol last night, but there was only four of ‘em… been clear since then. I’m currently in position in the hills above Laha, maybe a quarter of a mile inland. ‘Got a pretty good view of the airfield and of Soewakoda Village at the moment…”

  “That’s great, Mal,” Thorne advised. “We’re gonna need you to be our eyes and ears on the ground there until we can pull an operation together. We’re workin’ on it as fast as we can, but we’re pretty much buggered for getting anything off the ground before tomorrow night at the earliest: we’re waiting on assets coming in from all over the bloody country at the moment.”

  “Understood, sir,” Langdale acknowledged with a nod and a grimace. “All good by me, but there’s something you might wanna know…” he paused for a moment, taking a breath before continuing. “I’m looking down over the village right now, and I’ve got movement in a plantation outside of town… maybe three hundred yards east of my position.” Another pause. “Whole company of the bastards, sir, and th
ey’re diggin’ graves; no doubt about it…”

  There was a long silence, during which time Langdale had no doubt there’d been some significant swearing at the other end.

  “You know about Laha, yeah…?” Thorne’s query came through eventually, and there was a hardened edge to the tone of his voice now.

  “Yes, sir… I know enough…”

  “They holding anyone down there that you can see?”

  “There’s a long building near the centre of town that looks like a barracks or somethin’,” Langdale answered quickly, placing his rifle on the ground and lifting binoculars to his eyes to scan the area in question. It’s got a bunch of guards around it and a few officers hanging about, far as I can see.”

  “A schoolhouse, maybe?”

  “Yeah… could be a schoolhouse… I can see some faces at the windows now that look like Aussies: a bloody sight whiter than any Jap, anyway…”

  “Understood, Mal…” Another pause, then: “Mal… if this is going down like I – we – think it might be, they’re gonna start bringing prisoners out into that plantation one at a time. You know what happens after that, I reckon…”

  “Yeah, I reckon…”

  “Well, I need you not to do anything other than observe and report for the time being…”

  “But… what…?”

  “I know, mate,” Thorne responded immediately, genuine empathy and remorse in his tone. “I know… but we need to think about what could be a couple of thousand prisoners there on the island at the moment, two of ‘em very important to me and you, and trying to intervene over something like this – before we’ve had time to get a proper relief force together – will probably just get you killed and maybe everyone else too. You hearing me?”

  “Yeah…” Langdale grumped eventually, not at all happy about the answer “…yeah, I hear ya.”

  “Believe me, mate: I don’t like this anymore than you do, but we need to do what’s best for everyone there, and we need your eyes and ears on the ground there to have any chance of success. Just hold tight for the moment: we’ll know more once we’ve had a chance to check the footage Alec has brought back with him. Let me know if anything starts happening down there… otherwise, report back in two hours. Stay frosty, buddy. Phoenix-Leader out…”

  “What did they say…?” Victoria asked quietly, having crept up to crouch beside Langdale at the treeline.

  “That we wait…” he replied glumly. “That aircraft you just heard was taking pictures of the enemy positions here and across the bay. As soon as they know what’s happening, they’re going to put a plan together to get us out of here.”

  “Get ‘us’ out of her?” She questioned carefully, not trusting the wording of that answer. “They mean everyone, right?”

  “I – I think so…” Langdale conceded eventually, hesitant to give a definitive answer on that one. “I don’t know how they’ll get everyone off the island short of getting a ship in here, and I don’t think that will happen while the Japs still have airpower and a task force nearby, but my boss sure as hell ain’t gonna leave Evan or Eileen in this mess – he’ll lay his life on the line to rescue them, believe me – and when he makes his move, I’ll make sure you and your dad are right there with us! Fair enough…?”

  She stared into his eyes for a long moment, as if searching for some hint of falsehood in his words or his expression. She ultimately came up wanting.

  “Fair enough…” she nodded finally, fighting to hold back tears that threatened to rise at the corners of her eyes as she thought of her father again and what he might be going through.

  Banda Sea

  100 miles south of Ambon

  The F-35E cruised at a steady 500 knots, twenty-five thousand feet above an ocean that was completely obscured by a thick, unbroken layer of grey cloud. A little more than an hour’s flight time from Carson’s Airfield at full throttle, Alec Trumbull had gone in ‘dark’ – no active radar or emissions of any kind – and had remained below 200 feet throughout the entire inbound leg of the journey, his afterburner burning voraciously through all 1,800 gallons of fuel in his four underwing tanks at a prodigious rate. Flying supersonic so close to the surface of the earth had been a huge rush, the grey, choppy ocean streaking past below him as he continually scanned his passive optical and infra-red systems for any potential threat.

  He’d dumped his empty external tanks on approach to the island, switching over to internal fuel and revelling in the sudden surge of acceleration at full throttle as the aircraft was suddenly free of the additional weight and drag. He was picking up radar emissions from several sources by that stage, both on Ambon and off the coast (presumably warship search systems), however his passive ECM sensors had been clear in their assessment that the Lightning was not even close to returning a positive signal. As Trumbull had adjusted his automated flight plan slightly and the aircraft climbed into the existing cloud layer currently hanging above 1,000 feet, he’d been confident that to all intents and purposes, the F-35E was completely invisible.

  He was nevertheless able to see every single enemy aircraft in the area. Although his active search systems remained down so as to not give away his presence, the six AN/AAQ-37 DAS high-resolution sensors positioned around the Lightning’s skin provided Trumbull with an unobstructed, 360-degree field of view in the infra-red spectrum. Sensitive enough to detect missile launches at distances in excess of 600 miles, the Distributed Aperture System’s passive detectors were easily able to detect the heat signature of every nearby aircraft.

  Although he could easily have blasted any of them from the sky with the cannon mounted in the F-35’s belly pod, he’d not wanted any engagement that morning and had instead used the information to set a course straight between the existing Japanese combat patrols. Remaining within cloud cover for the entire time, not a single pilot had seen him as the Lightning had hurtled past at supersonic speed, the autopilot sending it into a short, shallow dive above Ambon Bay that was just long enough to expose the Laha and Tan Tui areas to the aircraft’s EOTS optical systems for just a few crucial seconds.

  Scanning in the visual and infra-red spectrums, Trumbull was able to leave the actual flying to the onboard autopilot as he scanned his cameras left and right, taking in huge swathes of the beach on both sides of the bay at extremely high resolution. Another moment and the Lightning was climbing again, streaking upward over Mount Nona and banking away to the south again through the clouds, passing quite close to the cruiser Nachi and her escorts but not once exposing itself to enemy fire either visually or through radar return.

  Half an hour later and with the sun to his back, Alec Trumbull might’ve considered the flight a rather pleasant and uneventful one had it not been for the reasons behind the mission in the first place. Still relying on autopilot for the time being, he now took time to replay some of the images those cameras had recorded. Scanning forward quickly, he briefly checked the images taken of the airfield and of Soewakoda before moving on to a more detailed recording of Tan Tui Barracks, an area Thorne had indicated he should pay particular attention to.

  At an altitude of around a thousand feet, images of guards and of a multitude of prisoners gathered about the barracks buildings were dull beneath the overcast skies, but they were sharp enough all the same. Trumbull was able to look down on frozen moments in time as prisoners gathered for their morning meal with guards looking on, all of them standing about in the mud of yesterday’s rain and none of them looking particularly happy about their lot in life.

  He was about to close of the recording, ready to concentrate on the flight back, when his eyes wavered over the last image that came to the screen. Off to one side of the camp lay a large building that Trumbull was willing to guess was some kind of hospital or medical centre, judging by the huge, red cross painted roughly on the thatched roof. It was the injured man who first caught his attention: a single, motionless figure laid out on a hospital gurney and being either wheeled into or out of the main hospi
tal doors (it was impossible to tell which from the still shot).

  He was about to dismiss the scene as irrelevant but halted as his eye wavered over the three other figures clustered about that gurney. All four – the stretchered patient included – were clearly Caucasian rather than Japanese, and as he looked on he realised that like the fellow lying injured, two of them were actually wearing uniforms that looked nothing like either Australian or Dutch military… rather that they were clearly Wehrmacht tropical pattern, something incredibly interesting in itself. Feeling a sudden desire to get a closer look at this unexpected, unidentified group, Trumbull worked the imaging controls for the large cockpit main screen, zoomed in even further then paused as he recognised one of them.

  The only one of the group not dressed as a Wehrmacht officer – the ‘odd one out’ so to speak – appeared to be wearing Australian standard-issue combat fatigues, and although they had their back to the camera, the familiar shape of the figure showing through made it fairly obvious to Trumbull that the person in question was definitely female and almost certainly Eileen Donelson. The RAF pilot allowed himself the luxury of feeling some relief at that point: as concerned as he still was for his friend’s safety as a prisoner of the Japanese, he was at least now able to present to Thorne and the others some concrete evidence that Eileen was still alive as of sunrise that morning.

  He stared at the enlarged image for a few seconds longer, then froze as a sudden chill rippled through him. The faint smile that had spread across his face disappeared in an instant as he realised that he recognised the face of another member of that small group. The nearest of those Germans, standing quite close to Donelson in the photo, conveniently happened to be staring in the general direction of the camera at the moment of the shot, and the face staring up at him, clear as day, was that of Reichsmarschall Kurt Reuters.

  Alec Trumbull slowly adjusted the grip on his flight controls and swallowed hard, unable to remove his gaze from that shocking image even for a second as he keyed the transmit button on his main radio, his voice hoarse and his mouth suddenly dry as he croaked out the first sentence of his report.