by Jon Stafford
Harry rolled over on his back, half-expecting Japanese soldiers to jump him, or at least fire back. There was nothing! The nonsilence was not replaced by any new sounds. No soldiers attacked. It was just the deafening roar of the putrefied land he despised, the strange unquiet.
Finally, he did hear something, a low whisper. “Boss, you all right?”
A wave of relief flooded him. Only Tony Polavita ever called him that! Then two other recognizable voices came in out of the dark.
“What the hell was that?” said one.
The other, obviously the snorer, groused, “What happened?”
What a relief ! They were all there, Harry thought. He was halfway around the world from his family, and his mission’s success was in doubt, but he couldn’t help smiling broadly.
“I’m okay,” he said slowly.
“Want me up there with you, Boss?” Polavita whispered.
“Yeah,” Czarik added, “me too?”
“Shut up,” Harry answered quietly but firmly.
Silence fell again. Harry checked his watch again. He figured it was safe. Anyone watching them from the jungle would have heard them already and made themselves known. It was 0500 now.
His mind wandered, first to his wife, Dell, and then to their three children. For the first time he thought it would be nice to go back to the farm, to raise crops again, just give up his career in the Navy. He’d only seen their eldest, Wilhelmina, once, and never seen the boys, Toby and Danny. With Dell’s father, Ray, dead, there was no one to help Dell run the farm. Both of us are struggling, he thought, and both of us are losing.
What could have happened to Bennish’s men? Why didn’t they come back? They had had three hours of daylight when they left. They’d headed off jogging, and it wouldn’t have taken much time to go down to that plantation, maybe twenty minutes. That would have given them plenty of time to snatch the guy. Unless there were Japanese here! They had heard no shooting, but the surf could have hidden the sounds. On and on the questions and ideas recirculated in Harry’s mind.
There was about an hour left before dawn. Harry relaxed a little, thinking back to his years in the choir at St. Bartholomew’s Lutheran Church in Dorance. Hymns whirled through his mind, one after another. One in particular rolled through his mind over and over again:
Singing songs of expectation,
Marching to the Promised Land.
Clear before us, through the darkness,
Gleams and burns the guiding light.
Brother clasps the hand of brother,
Stepping fearless through the night.
He had to laugh, thinking of old Mrs. Franklin singing it. She must have weighed three hundred pounds. When she hit those high notes, they were hit! He used to shudder when she sang, because it was more like screeching.
Something flickered in Harry’s peripheral vision. He turned toward the coastal road.
There, amazingly, was a gleaming light just as the hymn said! He stared, his mouth open. It was definitely a light, and it was moving! In another second he recognized that it was the patrol, and that they were coming back on the coast road holding torches! In a few minutes, with both groups yelling encouragement to each other, they were close enough to distinguish the men holding the torches.
“It’s my guy Duke,” Polavita said, squinting a bit, “three of our guys and . . . a cart with what looks like two men on it.”
As the returning party came up to them, Harry could identify the figures on the cart: Ensign Bennish, his uniform bloodied, and another figure in a dirty white Panama suit, bound with ropes—probably the mysterious Vandelmann. At least they all came back, Harry thought, relieved.
Osborne greeted them with an indignant snarl. “He shot Howie, sir! This goddamn German asshole shot little Howie!”
Harry hurried over to Bennish. The little ensign tried to get up, but Harry motioned for him to lay back.
“I don’t feel so bad, sir,” Bennish said. “I’m just sorry about the mission. I’m sorry I bungled it, Harry.”
“Well, you got him.”
“But I really don’t know what I could have done differently. We had a rough time of it, sir. This German is a little crazy.”
Harry looked at the German for the first time. He was an average looking man of fifty to sixty years with a huge waxed moustache that came straight out on either side of his nose. His suit must have been nice once, but now it was dirty and soaked in sweat. He also reeked of booze.
“So, this is the guy we risked our lives for?” Harry asked. “You’re joking, right?”
“We go up there to the house, sir,” Bennish explained, “and we knock on the door. We can see him in there playing cards with two natives, drinking these shots of some kind of liquor, just roaring laughing. So, we knock again, walk in, he looks surprised, and damn if he didn’t shoot me.”
Botel leaned over Bennish and started examining the wound.
“Jim, how does it look?” Harry asked.
“It doesn’t hurt much, Harry,” Bennish said woozily. “Let me stand up.”
“Stay down, Howie. Jim?”
“Harry, the bullet went right through his side here.” Botel pointed at the open wound that he had slowly unwrapped. By this time it had gotten reasonably light and there was no need for the torches anymore. “He’s bled a lot. But it’s a clean wound, not bad if we can get him out of here soon.”
Harry turned to his men. “Let’s not waste any time in getting out of this dump.”
They headed to the rafts. Osborne, who had settled down a lot, but still regularly waved his pistol at the German, added something.
“Harry, I almost forgot. While this damn German was shooting Howie, Phoebe went up the line to scout and found two Japs.”
Harry had noticed a smile on the face of the diminutive little sailor, but hadn’t thought anything about it.
Phoebe immediately began to talk, almost boasting.
“Yes, sir, I found these two Japs in a hut and I plugged ’em, sir, with my .45. They were dead for sure. I watched ’em fall over and they didn’t get up. Just after that, I heard the shot and ran back toward the plantation.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be any enemy presence on this island!” Harry had a very bad feeling about this.
“Funny thing about that, sir,” Phoebe continued. “When I turned to run back to the plantation house, a phone rang in the hut they were in. I didn’t think they had phones on this rock.”
All of the men stared. Osborne, Polavita, and Harry yelled at the same instant, “A phone!”
Phoebe looked hurt. “So they got phones?”
“They don’t have phones on this heap, Junior,” Osborne said caustically. “That was an enemy field phone. You never said anything about a phone. Sir, I didn’t know or I woulda gotten out of there and not spent those hours looking for that damn cart.”
Polavita chimed in. “Yeah, kid, who do you think was on the other end of that thing, my little sweet grandmother?”
“Phoebe, you sure you heard a phone ring?” Harry asked softly.
“Yeah.” Phoebe’s voice sounded dispirited. “I thought it would be a good surprise and you would be happy with me.”
“Was it a short ring?” Osborne asked.
“Yeah, a funny sorta ring.”
“Yeah, a field phone,” Duke said. The rest nodded.
“Ketchel, give me that Morse lamp,” Harry said. He pointed it at the submarine, whose hull-down silhouette could not be seen between the waves, and sent:
HAVE GERMAN. HOWIE SHOT. JAPS ON ISLAND.
In a moment, he could see the answer as it came back.
ROGER.
Harry sat down to take stock. He looked at Botel, who had been leaning over Howie the last few minutes. The little officer was no longer talking.
“His wound’s beginning to fester in this heat,” Botel said.
Meanwhile, the German had sobered up just enough to begin nonstop talking. He was in a jovial mood, still sitting on the cart.
As each man passed he would ask, “Wie heissen Sie?”
Ketchel finally looked up and said, “He wants to know your name.”
None of the men answered, but the German kept on asking.
Harry stepped back and thought. The whole thing was becoming clear to him. The German had lied, perhaps about everything. Maybe he knew important things and maybe he didn’t. He had a plantation, so he was in the copra business. The information Rudy Ferrell had come up with was that the Green Islands had been German up until the end of World War I, when they had gone over to Australia as a mandate. So this guy had come here as a young man. But for the last thirty years he had done business with the Australians.
It was also a good bet that the German had continued sneaking copra out to his Aussie clients after the Japanese bypassed the place. Now he feared from the increasing Japanese activity that they might occupy the island. When they examined his copra tanks and found them empty, all they would have to do was get some of his native workers together to figure out that he had been double-dealing them, and they would put him in a nice hole in the ground. No doubt he had a pile of money in Australia in some bank. He’d contacted his business cronies to get him out, but since the Aussies had no subs, the pressure came through Washington to Admiral Lockwood at ComSubPac.
“Meine Haus liegt hinten dem Walde,” Vandelmann blurted drunkenly, pointing toward his plantation.
“Shithead says his house is over there,” Ketchel said, not looking up. He was leaning against a tree.
“Yeah, I’d like to send him back to his house,” Osborne added, looking at him with a hateful glance. “How about on the end of a torpedo, jackass?”
“Der Alte aber verlor sein ganzes Geld!” Vandelmann insisted.
Ketchel translated, “Ah, the asshole says he’s a poor old man who’s lost all of his money.”
Several of the men chimed in at the same time, “Ah, drop dead! We’re just crying our eyes out for ya!”
The German looked at Ketchel and said, “Űbersetzung?”
“Ja.” Ketchel sounded irritated. “Translation, ja, ja, I’ll translate for you. Though I bet you understand everything in English just fine.”
Harry, Osborne, and Polavita all looked at each other. He wondered if they were thinking what he was thinking. The Japanese were on the island. By now, they had probably guessed what was going on with Vandelmann, and maybe guessed that some Allied force was on the island as well.
The wind had started coming up since dawn. Could both rafts get off the island and through the Cauldron? It remained to be seen. If they pulled out now, but were swept back in, the enemy might be waiting for both. The patrol would be captured and the mission would become a disaster. The orders were still there, hanging over Harry’s head, and it was obvious what had to be done.
“All right, Duke, you know what to do! Get that machine gun of yours and set it up over there on that rock or some other place with a good field of fire. Did we get the three hundred rounds?”
Osborne nodded, then walked over to the trunk of a palm tree about fifteen feet away and picked up the Browning automatic rifle that stood against it.
“Polavita, sprinkle Ketchel and Minton around with those Springfield rifles and a lot of ammo. Duke will tell you where. Then come back here.”
“Yes, sir!”
Men didn’t use “yes sirs” and “no sirs” on board Bluefin. But this was an emergency, and they all knew that discipline might save their lives.
In a moment, with the men placed, Polavita came back.
Harry bent down with Osborne and Polavita. “Tony, you need to make good on this . . . ”
Several voices swept their way: “Sir, look!”
Everyone stood. Harry picked up a pair of binoculars and could see a truck rounding the end of the island. The three bent down again.
“This mission is going to succeed or fail depending on if you can get through the surf with that German right now. Take Botel, Czarik, and the big raft. That will give you three men paddling and the German and Howie lying down in the bottom for ballast. It ought to keep you from overturning.”
“Sir,” Polavita said, “I hate to leave you with Phoebe. He’s just a kid and he’s afraid already.”
“That can’t be helped. I’m sorry to give you only three paddlers, but it’s the best I can do for you and still hold this place. If you can’t get through, don’t get drowned, get swept back in.”
Polavita nodded. He could see it was the only way.
“Go now, and we’ll try to hold them off with the gun. Send up a flare when you make it. I need Duke here with me.”
The three men stood. “Okay, Harry, we’ll get you off this damn place,” Polavita promised.
Harry watched them take off at a run, pulling the cart and its bound prisoner. Then he glanced toward the enemy, now with three trucks but still a long way away. He noted that the men were getting the big raft ready.
Then he picked up the blinker light again. The surf was up from when they had come ashore the day before, but he aimed the Morse light out to sea anyway and signaled:
JAPS COMING UP COAST ROAD. SURF HIGH. SENDING ONE BOAT WITH HOWIE AND GERMAN.
Harry felt confident that with the periscope up as high as it would go, and the lens turned to four-power, the message would get through. He wondered if the reply, sent from the bridge, would come through. But in only a minute he saw the response clearly, one word:
ROGER.
As the raft shoved off, Harry looked up the road. The Japanese were clearly in view now, about three-quarters of a mile off.
He could hear Vandelmann’s loud, drunken voice trailing away as the boat moved off: “Nach und nach.”
Harry looked at Ketchel, who was at his post with his Springfield rifle close by. He rolled his eyes and translated for the last time, “The asshole says ‘little by little,’ sir, whatever the hell that means.”
Harry picked up the field glasses and turned toward the advancing enemy. The three open trucks were packed with men, the lead one with a machine gun over the cab on some kind of a swivel track. Several squads of men followed the trucks. Harry est
imated the total to be perhaps one hundred, to his four!
Osborne had the gun set up on a rock that stood up about four feet high. The other two men, Ketchel and Phoebe, had bolt-action Springfield 1903 rifles. Harry first picked up a Springfield himself, but then set it back against a tree. It would be better, he thought, to hand the gun’s magazines to Osborne.
“Maybe we can hold ’em up for awhile,” the fifty-eight-year-old chief said.
“Yeah, let’s hope long enough.” Ketchel nodded. They looked toward the raft. It had cleared the surf and was almost out of sight. They knew that if the raft got out and a flare went up, they could scramble to get out, but that would take an hour and the Japanese would be in front of them in twenty minutes.
The thought was too much for Phoebe. The young radioman began to sob. “We ain’t never gonna get outta here, are we? I know it’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m real, real sorry!”
“Shut up now, boy,” Ketchel responded blandly.
Sullen looks spread across the four Americans’ faces as they watched the overpowering enemy force approach. Then, they were startled by a new, approaching sound, increasing in volume. It came from behind them and instantly passed over and toward the Japanese.
The Americans ducked instinctively. Then a tremendous explosion hit in the water about fifty yards from the first truck, now about five hundred yards off. It was so unexpected that it took a second for them to realize that it was Bluefin’s deck gun!
Before they could react, another shell soon cascaded by. The Japanese, now puzzled, never moved after the first shot. Then the second hit in the palm grove on the other side of the Japanese and they began to scatter. The third shell hit almost directly under the first truck and blew the vehicle violently end-over-end, fifty feet into the air. Harry and the others yelled and screamed and jumped.
Other shells followed into the enemy formation, blowing up the other two trucks and forcing the enemy into the jungle. Standing and now rather quiet, one word of gratitude played on the men’s lips: “Phelps!”