The Corps 03 - Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

  Oh, my God, I shit my pants!he thought in horror. And then he had another horrifying thought: Lieutenant Howard! Where the fuck is he? Did he go into the trees, too?

  "Sir, there’s somebody else. And two cargo parachutes . . ."

  "We have the mattresses," Reeves said. "Your other man landed in the trees."

  "Is he all right?"

  "I don’t know. We’re still looking for him. The girls are already carrying the packages to the village. Are you all right to walk?"

  "I think so," Steve said.

  "Good," Reeves said. "The sodding Jap chose to send another of his sodding patrols looking for us. We’re going to have to do something about that."

  "You think they’re going to find us?"

  "Wehave to find them," Reeves said. "They must have seen

  the aircraft and the sodding parachutes, so they know there’s something going on up here except some unfriendly natives."

  "I don’t understand, Sir."

  "The Japs are now headed down the hill," Reeves explained, "to report what they saw. We have to make sure they don’t make it. Otherwise, the Jap will send troops up here and keep them here until they do find us."

  Steve got to his feet. He had to steady himself for a moment against a tree trunk, but then he was all right.

  He slapped at another mosquito.

  "What about Lieutenant Howard?" he asked.

  "I told my head boy he has five minutes to find him," Reeves said.

  "And if he doesn’t find him in five minutes, then what?"

  "Then we’ll have to stop looking, I’m afraid. What has to be done is stop the sodding Japs from reporting what they saw."

  "Fuck you," Steve said. "I’m not going anywhere without Lieutenant Howard."

  "I’ve explained the situation, lad," Reeves said evenly.

  "So have I," Steve said. "I’m a fucking Marine. We just don’t take off and leave our people behind."

  "That’s a very commendable philosophy, I’m sure, but-"

  "I don’t give a shit what you think of it," Steve interrupted. "That’s the way it’s going to be."

  The discussion proved to be moot.

  A brown-skinned, fuzzy-haired man appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing a loincloth, a bone in his nose, and a web cartridge belt around his neck, and he was carrying a British Lee-Enfield MK III .303 rifle. He announced, in understandable English, "We have the other bloke, Mr. Reeves. He was hanging from the trees. He has broken his arm."

  At least he’s alive,Steve thought. Thank God! Then he thought, What’s he going to think when he finds out I shit my pants? My God, I can’t believe I really did that!

  A moment later, there was the sound of something moving through the muck on the forest floor. And then Lieutenant Howard appeared. His left arm was folded and strapped across his chest with his cartridge belt; his right arm was around the shoulder of a short, plump, brown-skinned, fuzzy-headed, bare-breasted woman. She was wearing what looked like a dirty towel, and carrying Howard’s Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun.

  "Jesus, I was worried about you," he said to Koffler.

  "I’m Jacob Reeves," Reeves said.

  "Lieutenant Howard, U.S. Marine Corps," Howard said.

  "Cecilia," Reeves said to the bare-breasted woman, "I want you to take this gentleman to the village. You think you can do that?"

  Cecilia smiled, revealing that her teeth were stained almost black.

  "Of course," she said. "I think one or two of the other girls are about to help, if need be."

  Christ, she sounds just like Daphne!

  "Make him as comfortable as you can. Give him some of the whiskey. When we get there, we’ll tend to his arm.

  "You better take that tommy gun, Sergeant," Reeves said to Steve Koffler, adding to Howard, "We’ll see you a bit later, then."

  "Where are you going?" Howard asked.

  Reeves didn’t answer. He started trotting off into the jungle. Steve Koffler took the Thompson and two extra twenty-round magazines from Howard’s pocket, and ran after him.

  (Four)

  Steve became aware as they moved through the forest that others were with them besides Jacob Reeves and the guy with the bone through his nose, although he had trouble getting a clear look at any of them.

  They were going downhill. Although it wasn’t like the sticky muck where they had landed, the ground was still wet and slippery. He had to watch his footing and to keep his eye on Reeves. His chest hurt from the exertion. There seemed to be a cloud of insects around his face, crawling into his ears and nostrils and mouth.

  What seemed like hours later, they stopped. According to his watch, it was only thirty-five minutes. Steve stood there, sweat-soaked, breathing hard, looking with mingled amazement and horror at his hands and arms, which were covered with insect stings.

  Reeves came up to him.

  "Do you know how to use that tommy gun?"

  "I fired it in boot camp," Steve said.

  "In other words, you don’t."

  "I qualified," Steve said sharply.

  "The way we’re going to do this," Reeves said, "the Japs will be coming down a path this way. What I would like you to do is make sure that none of them gets past you. This will be successful only if we take all of them. If one of them gets away ... You understand?"

  Steve nodded.

  "We’ll have our go at them about fifty yards up the footpath," Reeves said. "It then passes just a few yards from here. You go have a look at it, and then find yourself a place. Clear?"

  "OK," Steve said.

  "It shouldn’t take them long to get down here, so be quick," Reeves ordered.

  "OK," Steve repeated. He swung the Thompson off his shoulder. When he looked up again, Reeves was nowhere in sight.

  Steve made his way through the thick undergrowth until he found the path. He walked ten yards up it, and then ten yards in the other direction, and then backed off into the underbrush again and leaned against a tree.

  After a moment, he allowed himself to slip to the ground. This action reminded him that his shorts, and now his trouser legs, were full of shit.

  He started to think about his and Daphne’s bungalow in postwar Melbourne again.

  Shit, if I do that, I’m liable to doze off and get my fucking throat cut!

  All he could hear was the buzzing of the insects.

  And then there was noise.

  He worked the action of the Thompson and then looked down inside at the shiny brass cartridge. When he pulled the trigger, the cartridge would be stripped from the magazine by the bolt, driven into the chamber, and fired. Then, so long as he held the trigger and the magazine held cartridges, the bolt would be driven backward by recoil, hit a spring, and then fly forward again, stripping another cartridge from the magazine.

  He heard something on the trail.

  What the fuck is that? It can’t be a Jap. If it was a Jap, Reeves and the others would have been shooting by now.

  But, curious, he slowly pulled himself to his feet.

  It was a Jap. He was wearing a silly little brimmed cap on his head; and he was carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder that looked much too big for him. He was coming down the trail as if he were taking a walk through the fucking woods.

  Shit!

  The one thing he had learned at Parris Island was that you couldn’t hit a fucking thing with a Thompson the way Alan Ladd shot one in the movies, from the hip. You had to put it to your shoulder like a rifle, get a sight picture, and just caress the trigger.

  He did so.

  Nothing happened. He really pulled hard on the trigger. Nothing happened.

  The safety! The fucking safety!

  He snapped it off, pulled on the trigger, and the Thompson jumped in his hands.

  The Jap dropped right there.

  There was no other sound for a moment, and that too was scary.

  And then there was fire. Different weapons. A burp-burp noise, probably from that funny-looking little su
bmachine gun Reeves had; and booming cracks like from a Springfield, and sharper cracks. Probably from the Japs’ rifles.

  Now he could see figures moving through the trees. Not well. Not enough to tell if they were Reeves’s Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or whatever the fuck they were, or Japs.

  Jesus Christ!

  There’s a Jap!

  The Thompson burped again and suddenly stopped.

  Oh, shit! Twenty rounds already?

  He slammed another magazine in and saw another Jap and fired again, and seemed to be missing.

  Another figure appeared.

  One of the fucking Fuzzy-Wuzzies.

  And then Jacob Reeves.

  "I think that’s all of them," Reeves said. "We counted. There were eight. They usually run eight-man patrols."

  Steve came out of the underbrush onto the trail.

  "You all right, son?" Reeves asked.

  "I’m all right," Steve said.

  There was a body on the trail. Steve walked up to look at it. It was the first one he’d shot.

  He looked at the face of the first man he had killed.

  The first man he had killed looked back at him with terror in his eyes.

  "This one’s still alive!" Steve said.

  "We can’t have that, I’m afraid," Reeves said, walking up.

  Steve pointed the Thompson muzzle at the Jap’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

  I already shit my pants and now I think I’m going to throw up.

  The village looked like something out of National Geographic magazine. It was much larger, too, than Steve had expected, although when he thought about that, he couldn’t understand why he thought it would be any particular size at all.

  Brown-skinned, flat-nosed people watched as he marched after Reeves into the village. Some of them had teeth that looked like they had been dyed blue and then filed to a point. Most of the women weren’t going around in nothing but dirty towels with their boobs hanging out, like Cecilia. They were wearing dirty cotton skirts and loose blouses, some of which opened in the front to expose breasts that were anything but lust inciting.

  There were chickens running loose, and pigs with one leg tied to a stake. There were fires burning. And he saw women beating something with a rock against another rock.

  A clear stream, about five feet wide and two feet deep, meandered through the center of the collection of grass-walled huts.

  "I’ll go see about your lieutenant’s arm," Reeves said.

  "What can you do about it?" Steve asked.

  "Set it, of course," Reeves said.

  "Can you do that? I mean, really do it right?"

  "I’m not a sodding doctor, if that’s what you mean," Reeves snapped.

  "No offense," Steve said lamely.

  "I’ll have them put up a hut for you, while you’re having your bath," Jacob Reeves said after a moment. "Just leave your clothing there. The girls will take care of it for you. And I’ll send you down a shirt and some shorts to wear."

  He pointed to a muddy area by the stream, at the end of the village. It was apparently the community bath and wash house.

  I think he actually expects me to just take off my clothes in front of everybody and sit in that stream and take a bath.

  "That water’s safe for bathing," Reeves said, as if reading Steve’s mind. "But don’t drink it. I’ve been here since Christ was a babe, and I still haven’t built up an immunity to the sodding water. There’s boiled water and beer."

  Steve looked at him in surprise.

  "Well, it’s not really beer," Reeves admitted. "We make it out of rice and coconuts. But it’s not all that bad."

  Reeves walked off. And after a moment, Steve Koffler walked to the edge of the stream and started to take his clothing off.

  (Five)

  TOP SECRET

  Eyes Only-The Secretary of the Navy

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ENCRYPTION AND TRANSMITTAL TO SECNAVY

  Melbourne, Australia

  Monday, 8 June 1942

  Dear Frank:

  This will deal with the Battle of Midway, from MacArthur’s perception of it here, and the implications of it for the conduct of the war, short- and long-term, as he sees them.

  But before I get into that: Willoughby somehow found out, I have no idea how, that I am on the Albatross list; and he promptly ran to tell MacA. MacA., of course, knew; like everyone else on it, he had been furnished with the list itself. I am quite sure that MacA. brings Willoughby in on anything that would remotely interest him whenever he (MacA.) receives Magic intelligence. But Willoughby is not on the Albatross list himself, and as a matter of personal prestige (he is, after all, a major general and MacA.’s G-2), he found this grossly humiliating even before he learned that lowly Captain Pickering was on it.

  The result of this is that MacA. fired off a cable demanding that Willoughby be added to the Albatross list. Then he made a point of mentioning to me that he understands how critical it is that Magic not be compromised, and the necessity for keeping the Albatross list as short as possible. The implication I took was that he really would be happier if Willoughby were kept off the list and rather hoped that I would pass this on to you.

  I’m not sure what his motive is (motives are), but I don’t think they have anything to do with making sure Magic isn’t compromised. Quite possibly, MacA. regards the Albatross list as a prerogative of the emperor, not to be shared with the lesser nobility. He may also be hoping that if you ( "Those bastards in Washington" ) refuse to add Willoughby to the Albatross list, it will ensure that Willoughby hates you as much as the emperor himself does.

  Personally, Ihope that Willoughby is added to the list. It would certainly improve my relationship with him and make my life here in the palace a little easier. But that’snot a recommendation. Magic is so important that I refuse to recommend anything that might pose any risk whatever that would compromise it.

  Tangentially, I donot receive copies of Magic messages reaching here. I don’t have any place to store them, for one thing. I don’t even have an office, much less a secretary with the appropriate security clearances to log classified material in and out. There are four people here (in addition to MacA. and me) on the Albatross list. They are all Army Signal Corps people: the Chief of Cryptographic Services, a captain; and two cryptographers, both sergeants. There is also a Lieutenant Hon, a Korean (U.S. citizen, MIT ‘38) who speaks fluent Japanese. He is often able to make subtle changes in interpretation of the translations made at Pearl.

  When a Magic comes in, the captain calls me. I go to the crypto room and read it there. Lieutenant Hon hand-carries the Magics to MacA., together with his interpretation of any portion of them that differs from what we get from Pearl. MacA. stops whatever else he is doing and reads them-or, I should say, commits them to his really incredible memory. The paper itself is then returned to the crypto safe. Only twice to my knowledge has MacA. ever sent for one of them to look at again.

  On the subject of the Albatross/Magic list: I would like permission to make Major Ed Banning privy to Magic messages. He has managed to establish himself with the Australian Coastwatchers. He speaks Japanese, and has, I think, an insight into the way the Japanese military think. I have the feeling that with input both from the Australians and the Magic intercepts, he could come up with analyses that might elude other people-of whom I’m certainly one. He already knows a good deal about Albatross/Magic, and I can’t see where my giving him access to the intercepts themselves increases the risk of compromising Magic much-if at all. I would appreciate a radio reply to this: "yes" or "no" would suffice.

  Finally, turning to the Battle of Midway: We had been getting some rather strong indications of the Japanese intentions throughout May-not only from Magic-and MacA. had decided that it was the Japanese plan to attack Midway, as a steppingstone to Hawaii.

  I asked MacA. what he thought the American reaction to the loss of Hawaii would be. He said that it might wake th
e American people up to the idea that basic American interests are in the Pacific, not in Europe; but that if it fell, which he couldn’t imagine, American influence in the Pacific would be lost in our lifetimes, perhaps forever. Then he added that a year ago he would have been unable to accept the thought that the American people would stand for the reinforcement of England, knowing that it would mean the loss of the Philippines.