“You must have a death wish, buddy,” Fárez said.
“Maybe I do,” Sammy said.
“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Fárez asked.
Sammy cast a dark look over his shoulder.
“I mean it,” Fárez pressed. “Why would you do such a dumb thing? I don’t mean telling people what you saw—that was brave—but confessing to the secret police. What kind of idiot does that?”
“If you’d seen the things I have, felt the things I have, you’d understand,” Mori said.
This only set off Fárez more. “You think you’re the only one with problems? You think you’re so special, so fragile, so damn sensitive that you deserve special consideration? Let me tell you something, you crazy Jap. You’re not. You’re like every damn soldier who has ever lived. We’re all terrified, we all see things we were never meant to see. What do you think war is?”
Louise stared at Fárez, surprised to see such fire coming out of him. This was the same man who’d blushed at the thought of removing one of his dog’s testicles.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Fárez said. “There’s none of us fighting this war for glory. Maybe a few, but they’re the scary ones, the ones who order you to charge a machine-gun nest when you’re out of ammo. The more of the glory kind you get, the more likely you are to have stuff like what you people did in China. The rest of us are trying to stay alive, and we’re trying to keep our buddies alive. You wanted something to fight for, that’s it. You fight to keep your friends from getting killed. That’s good enough.”
Mori didn’t answer but scooted along, pace quickening, though how he managed after so many hours on the road, Louise didn’t know. He all but disappeared ahead of them. The other two let him go for a stretch, and soon enough he slowed. Sammy resisted for a while, but Louise and the corporal finally reeled him in like an exhausted fish played out on a line.
Sammy stopped, panting and leaning against his crutches. Fárez handed over his canteen, which the other man took without comment. He drank half and handed it back. The American took his turn drinking. Neither soldier said anything for a moment, and Louise stayed silent, too, feeling something pass between the two men.
Stumpy was off his leash at the moment and came to nose at the three companions to get them moving again. He started with Louise, then moved to Fárez, and finally pushed insistently on the back of Sammy’s leg. The Japanese man smiled and reached to scratch the dog’s head.
“You can’t fool a dog, you know,” Fárez said.
“Sorry?” Sammy said.
“If Stumpy will vouch for you, I guess you ain’t so bad.” Fárez grinned. “For a Jap.”
Sammy shook his head, a smile at the corner of his lips. He plucked something from Stumpy’s coat. “You got yourself in some burrs, friend.” He picked again and showed it to the other two. “Look, they’re all over him.”
“So he did, the little stinker,” Fárez said, starting in on the burrs. Stumpy didn’t want to be groomed and tried to get away, but Louise had learned this trick by now, and got hold of him long enough for Fárez to put the leash back on.
When the three had cleaned the dog of the worst of his burrs, Louise took the leash. The dog whined and pulled to keep going. She allowed her patients one last pull on the canteen, then pressed them all into motion. Nobody spoke after that for a long time.
They stopped that evening in a nipa hut crowded with evacuees, with more arriving throughout the night. Other patients and villagers, she supposed, were strung out all along the trail both ahead and behind. Louise was the only nurse in this particular shack and had few medical supplies, so it was fortunate that she didn’t have any critical injuries to care for.
But it was hardly a comfortable night. The pounding rain leaked through the roof and dripped on their heads. She huddled with a village woman and her two children, while around her men struggled to sleep. Morning came as a relief, though she was exhausted. Someone cooked up some rice, and she ate a cup of it with a pinch of salt before she was back on the trail with Fárez, Sammy, and their stub-tail mascot.
The evacuation was fluid, with soldiers and cargadores passing them and being passed in turn. By late afternoon, Louise had caught up with Maria Elena and Frankie, and they re-formed their original group with a few additions. They were trudging painfully along when they came upon three Filipinos with ancient rifles standing by the side of the road. The men watched with sharp expressions.
Louise didn’t recognize them from Sanduga, and her heart pounded, thinking she and her companions were going to be robbed or worse, when the men suddenly broke into smiles, showing teeth stained red from betel-nut juice.
“Ang mga Amerikano ay mabubuting tao,” one of the men said.
Maria Elena translated: “Americans are good people.”
Their faces darkened when they spotted Sammy Mori, but Fárez glared them down, and Louise interposed herself between the Japanese soldier and the Filipinos until they’d left the men behind.
“I suppose those are our partisans,” Fárez said with a final glance backward, as if worried they were being followed. “Not much to ’em, is there?”
“We’re lucky we weren’t murdered,” Frankie said. “Or worse.”
Shortly after that, another man with a rifle directed them onto a small side trail that climbed a steep zigzag up the mountainside. Roots and jutting tongues of stone made steps of sort, and they inched higher with the injured patients.
They found themselves in a high, bowl-like valley, surrounded by peaks. A tidy grid of rice paddies and vegetable gardens spread out from about a dozen shacks. The village had a small Catholic church built of wooden planks and a grass roof like all the rest, and the early arrivals were already busy trying to make it suitable for a hospital. A few supplies had been cached on site, but they were even more meager than in Sanduga.
The place was named Cascadas, a Spanish word referring to the swiftly flowing mountain stream that passed through the center of the village. The villagers seemed related to the refugees from Sanduga and, like the people of the lowlands and hill country, knew all about the arrival of the Haponeses. They’d promised to help the Americans and their Filipino allies. Still, Louise couldn’t help but notice the worry on the faces of village elders and the anxious glances of mothers with young children at their breasts.
Louise spotted two women who looked out of place: short, black-skinned people who looked more like Papuans than Filipinos. Negritos, she learned, an ancient tribal people of the mountains who sometimes came down to help with the rice harvest in return for cigarettes or a bottle of lambanog. They were safe enough if you encountered them in the village, she was told, but don’t wander too far into the jungle, or they’re liable to cook and eat you.
Maria Elena told Louise this, translated from an earnest old man with stubby teeth stained red by betel nuts. He was animated in his gestures when he talked about cannibals, but the whole thing seemed fanciful. He warned her about cobras and wild boars as well.
The last of the hospital refugees didn’t arrive until the next morning. Dr. Claypool was with them. Louise had snatched a few hours of sleep, but spent most of the night attending to a sickly group of patients. Now she met the doctor outside the hospital. The view of the little valley and the surrounding mountains was spectacular in the early-morning light, everything glittering and green. It was cooler up here, too, thank God.
“That’s everyone,” Claypool said. “The only one we’re missing is Kozlowski, but he has business on the road. He and the alcalde are disguising a couple of the side trails we took to get here, making them harder to spot. And, well, there’s someone else we left behind.”
Louise guessed with a sinking feeling who that was. “Private Johnson didn’t make it, did he?”
“You heard?”
“I inventoried the patients this morning, and there was one man missing.”
“Kozlowski and the locals are digging him a grave.” Claypool’s he
avy eyebrows furrowed in a look of pain. “Blast it, he was doing fine. He was well enough to be on work duty just a few days ago.”
“Digging a latrine, if I remember. That’s probably when he got the dysentery. Bet he touched something and didn’t wash his hands.”
“Spread the word,” he said grimly. “I want the men to know why Johnson is dead. Get it through their thick skulls. Disease is as big a threat as enemy bullets. That means sanitation, that means mosquito nets. We’ve got plenty of malaria and dysentery to go around—we don’t need any more.”
“The journey didn’t help matters,” Louise said. She held out her arm to show dozens of little red marks. “There’s not one of us who didn’t get chewed up by mosquitoes every step of the way. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more malaria and dengue over the next couple of days.”
Claypool sighed long and hard. “We’ve lost four already, Miss Louise. Three we left in Sanduga, plus Johnson.” The doctor looked exhausted, defeated, vulnerable in a way she couldn’t remember seeing before. “Somehow we’ve got to carry on. I just, I don’t see how we can manage it. We left our food, we left most of our supplies, we have no electricity.” He drew in a single great breath and let it out into another sigh. This one held what sounded like a shudder. “Miss Louise, I can’t do this, I can’t hold it together.”
“I don’t see as you have a choice.”
“I never said I did, but I wouldn’t be the first man to break down under pressure, you know. That’s all I’m saying, that I . . . that I feel . . .”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” she urged. “Somehow we’ll manage. You will manage.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I do.” Louise put a hand on his wrist. “Don’t lose faith.”
“You’re right.” He let out his breath and drew it in slowly, and this time sounded calmer, like a man settling himself. He looked stronger, more confident when he was done. “I’m sorry, Miss Louise. I had a bad moment, that’s all. Don’t tell the other nurses, please.”
“No worries, Dr. Claypool.” She gave what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “There’s nothing to tell.”
Chapter Seventeen
Yoshiko Mori and his men left Santa Maria by truck and made excellent time at first. Eight Japanese secret police, plus seventeen Filipino Sakdals, all armed and ready to snuff out any resistance they encountered on their way to Sanduga.
But they slowed under an onslaught of heavy rain and slowed even more when Lieutenant Fujiwara’s sharp eyes detected disturbed ground on the road where the Americans had mined it. Or so it seemed at first. They couldn’t find a way around the mines, so Mori appropriated two carabao from a nearby village and drove the buffalo down the road to detonate them.
Nothing happened to the carabao. There were no mines; it was only a decoy. Fujiwara’s vigilance had cost them at least three hours. Worse, a few minutes later they hit a legitimate trap. The enemy had sabotaged a short bridge over a muddy stream, and the truck fell off and broke an axle.
They abandoned the truck and continued on foot. The rain turned from heavy to torrential. Floodwater washed out the road in multiple places. Elsewhere it seemed intentionally damaged. More sabotage.
Japanese and Filipinos alike were in a foul mood by the time they came upon Sanduga. Three days had passed since leaving Santa Maria in the lowlands. They were hungry, footsore, and covered with bug bites and fungal infections from damp socks and boots.
Sanduga was mostly empty, and those villagers who remained were slow to cooperate. There was some shooting that may or may not have been in response to hostile action by the locals. The only casualties were an old woman and a couple of pigs. The dead pigs would be put to good use, of course, but the dead woman only served to drive the rest of the villagers into the brush.
Mori took stock of his conquest. Americans had been here; there was no doubt of it. The largest building had been a hospital made of cement block and was now a mess of overturned cots and smashed bottles of medication. The enemy had destroyed their generator and dumped their fuel into the ground on their way out.
It smelled ugly inside the hospital, a stench of dirty bedpans and used bandages infested with maggots, and so he covered his mouth and led Fujiwara back outside without inspecting the entire building. Let his men see to that.
Mori shielded his eyes from the sun. “They can’t be far ahead of us.”
“It’s my fault, sir. If we hadn’t wasted so much time getting past those fake mines, we might have arrived in time.”
“Your skills of observation could have easily saved us had those mines been real,” Mori said.
“They didn’t spot the sabotaged bridge.”
“True,” Mori conceded. “You deserve blame for that.”
Fujiwara hung his head in shame.
Mori looked around, instinctively disliking the close, jungle feel of the surrounding mountains. Sanduga itself was shabby, ramshackle, nothing like a tidy Japanese village. It was dirty; it smelled bad. These unruly mountain peasants would no doubt resist the Japanese until they were driven out and forced to settle in towns and cities to be civilized.
The Sakdals were busy looting the village but seemed unhappy with what they found and soon started to set the buildings on fire to amuse themselves. Let them. Mori didn’t intend to stay, and the destruction of Sanduga would send a message to other villages that were tempted to side with the conquered instead of the conquerors.
Meanwhile, one of his secret police had set up the radio to communicate with headquarters, and now he came running up, breathless, to say that Colonel Umeko wanted to speak to him.
“What the devil are you doing up there?” the colonel demanded when Mori picked up the receiver. “I thought you were in Santa Maria.”
“I was, sir. But remember what I said about partisans?”
“No, I do not remember, Mori. What are you up to?”
“We found an American hospital, sir, recently abandoned. They’re trying to set up to support the partisans, but we’ll sniff them out, sir. We can’t be more than a day or two behind.”
“Where?”
“Up here in the mountains. We’ll have to keep moving. I’ve got enough armed men to take them, and if they’re carrying their wounded, I’ll overtake them without trouble.”
“Don’t you have better things to do than muck around in these little villages?”
“No, sir. This could be important.”
A gunshot rang from the hospital, and Mori jumped. He dropped the radio receiver and sprang to his feet. He and Fujiwara rushed inside with pistols drawn. They moved slowly from room to room, then more quickly when they heard a groan and a cry for help in Japanese.
Mori ducked his head into one of the rooms and withdrew it quickly as someone fired at him. He’d seen enough in that brief glance to understand. There was an American on a cot with a pistol. Another man lay on the floor nearby, a Japanese soldier.
“Damn my haste,” Mori said to Fujiwara. “We didn’t check the whole hospital.”
“One of the Americans, sir?”
Mori gave a sharp nod. “Too injured to move, apparently. He can’t even hold himself up. But he managed to shoot one of our men.”
“Who did he get?”
“I didn’t see. We’ll figure that out later. For now, we’ve got to take care of that American.” Mori thought it over. “The man’s cot is against the back wall. We’ll both go in, you to the right, me to the left. Watch out for the body on the floor. Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
The two law soldiers came into the room, firing as they spread out. The injured man on the cot got off one more shot, but it was wild, and the Japanese emptied their pistols into him. He cried out, then was still.
Breathing hard, Mori studied their enemy. It was an American, all right, missing his right leg and his right arm, but that hadn’t kept him from using what he had left to good effect. Mori had to respect him for going down shooting instead
of surrendering.
He was so focused on the dead American that he didn’t notice the other two enemies until Fujiwara hissed a warning. Mori would have shot them, too, if he hadn’t already emptied his pistol. He drew his sword and rushed the nearest cot before seeing that neither man was a threat.
These two were Filipinos, also severely injured. One had something white and frothy about his mouth, and his breathing was low and shallow. He seemed to have swallowed something. The other man, badly burned on the face and neck, stared through eyes wide with terror and pain. He had something clenched in his hand, which Fujiwara pried loose. Looked like morphine tablets.
Mori held the man’s gaze. You should have swallowed these when you had the chance.
“Help me,” the injured Japanese said from the floor.
Mori spared him a glance. It was Yamaguchi. The bullet had caught him in the thigh, but the wound didn’t look serious.
“Put your hand on it. That will slow the bleeding. I’ll see to you when I can.”
“Yes, sir,” Yamaguchi said through clenched teeth.
“So they couldn’t move everybody,” Mori told Fujiwara. “They gave these three a lethal dose of morphine and left them behind.”
“A hard decision, sir,” Fujiwara said, “but a necessary one.”
“Hai. I’d have done the same thing.” He glanced at the remaining soldier, who continued to stare. Mori couldn’t help the twinge of sympathy for the injured man. “Too bad this one was too cowardly to follow through.”
“But good for us, sir.”
“Good for us,” Mori agreed.
Yamaguchi groaned. Mori supposed he’d better see to the man’s injury. He stayed with the Filipino while Fujiwara went to fetch the medic.
Fujiwara came running back a few minutes later with two Japanese soldiers. The second man was the radioman, who was frantic for Mori to attend to the colonel.
Mori had completely forgotten about the conversation with his superior, and when he got back on the radio, he cringed as Colonel Umeko roared at him. He tried to explain, but the man cut him off.
The Year of Counting Souls Page 17