The Commodore (29 page)

The jungle was slowly, tentatively, coming back to life after the obscene violence on that hillside. There were small black birds investigating the results of the Japs' attack on the station. Suddenly furious, he yelled at them. They ignored him. Life and death in the jungle. There were natural rules about that.

Then he heard what sounded like crying, somewhere inside that seemingly solid wall of jungle growth, trees, and a string ball of arm-thick vines right in front of him.

Girls, he thought. Little girls, crying. Good God, he thought.

He called out, leaning against the tree now, and the crying noises stopped in mid-whimper. He called again, hoping that they'd recognize that it was a white man calling, not a
japan,
as the natives called them. His forehead pressed against the scalloped bark of the tree, and a column of ants trickled straight up the tree, an inch from his nose. After a few minutes the bushes twenty feet away parted and two young Melanesian girls emerged, one older than the other, moving so fearfully that he almost stopped breathing so as not to frighten them. They froze when they saw him. He beckoned for them to come closer and they did, one step at a time, obviously ready for an instantaneous bolt back into the jungle.

His legs began to tremble and so he sank down with his back against the tree. Apparently that made him less of a threat, because they became bolder, advancing now, gaping at all the destruction, the crushed landscape, and the motionless forms on the hillside that brought shocked fists to their mouths. He realized he was very tired and desperately thirsty in the late-morning heat. When they looked at him again he made signs that he needed water. They looked back at him and then the older one shook her head. The younger one grabbed the older one's hand and pointed back into the jungle, gabbling away in their own language, not pidgin.

The older one finally understood and they came over and helped Sluff to his feet. Walking erratically between them, he tried not to trip and fall as they took him into the jungle on what was obviously a well-used path. They went downhill until they came to a stream like the one where David and company had rid him of his bat guano. He went down prostrate on the bank of the rushing stream and drank as much as he could hold, lost most of it, then drank again. He then washed his face and hands. He could still see the images of all those good people out on the hill, and he washed and washed as if he could make them go away. He vaguely heard a thrashing noise behind him as some people came out of the jungle on the other side. It was Jennifer Matheson and her crew. He stared up at her as she approached the bank of the stream.

“We have to talk,” he said from his prone position on the ground. “Everything's changed.”

Three hours later he was back in his makeshift hospital bed, but no longer under the black cliff at the top of the hill. Jennifer had set up a camp down under that lower ridge where the huge rock had disappeared from sight into a shattered jungle. They were hidden in a narrow canyon created by an ancient lava flow that went back into the ridge face for about five hundred feet. The gash in the rock wasn't straight, so they'd been able to set up a campfire that could not be seen from down below the ridge or out on the sea. A tiny brook bubbled through the canyon, no more than a foot across but enough to provide water for washing and drinking. One boy was tending the campfire, hovering over it and blowing on it to ensure that there was not the faintest whiff of smoke.

Jennifer had insisted on going back to the remains of the coast-watcher station, despite Sluff's protests. She'd taken two of her “boys” with her. When they returned, she was ashen-faced and tight-lipped. Her two helpers were positively goggle-eyed. She'd then given a set of clipped orders to her crew and they'd gone off in all directions. Jennifer had left the canyon and walked into the jungle for a while. Sluff thought about trying to comfort her but decided that maybe he should just sit down and be quiet. An hour later the boys started returning, bearing bags of rice, some tinned meat, a rifle, the stretcher he'd been sleeping in, and, miraculously, what looked like David's medical bag. The Kawanishi hadn't come for Sluff, and she undoubtedly knew that. “Bugger-that” Jack had brought that attack down on himself.

The question of the hour was pretty obvious: What do we do now? He thought he knew the answer. With the coast-watcher station destroyed, the only alternative was extraction.

That meant crossing to Guadalcanal.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

That night they all sat around the campfire, some eating, some not. The two boys who'd been to the site of the attack had disappeared. Nobody was talking. Everyone seemed to be totally engrossed in watching the tiny fire, whose light barely made it up the canyon walls. Sluff was sitting on his stretcher with his back up against the wall. When he could stand the silence no longer, he decided to ask the question.

“Jennifer,” he said.

“What,” she replied. Her tone of voice was not exactly friendly.

“We have to get out of here, right?”

“
You
have to get out of here,” she said, softly.

“I don't understand.”

“This island is my home,” she snapped. “The plantation is lost, my husband is dead, but this island is my home. I'm staying. I'll stay
long bush
until these goddamned
japans
either leave or we kill them all.”

“You said they were going to shut the station down and pull you out,” he said.

“What I said is that they were going to shut the station down. It was up to us to get over to Guadalcanal. As long as Jack came out with me, I was all right with that. Now I'm not.”

He nodded his head. “Can you help
me
get out then?” he asked.

“I need to think that through,” she said, after a long pause. “Because there's a problem, yes?”

“What's that?” he asked.

“The way these people see it, you have been
nogut kas
here. Bad luck. You showed up, everything went to hell, and now this disaster. Half these boys here will slip away into the bush by morning after seeing what happened at the station. Some will stay loyal and exact revenge on the
japans
when they can, but many of the others have had enough of this white man's war. I know that's unfair.
We
knew that the
japans
would eventually come for the rubber, but that's how they see it.” She stopped for a moment and then sighed. “My world has gone upside down. I'll think about it.”

With that she turned her face away. Sluff realized there was no more talking to be done. Either she'd help him get across Ironbottom Sound to the big island, or she wouldn't. He also understood that some of her anger was really directed at Jack for defying orders, getting back on the air, and thereby beaconing an attack. Stupid she was not.

He lay back down on his stretcher and observed the natives' faces. They were all still fascinated by that fire, except when they shot furtive looks at one another, and then at Jennifer. But not at him.

Oh, boy, he thought, and then the day's exertions overcame him and he slept.

The following morning he awoke to an empty camp. The fire was long out and the brook was making the only sound. He sat up in the stretcher, carefully, so as not to annoy his battered head bone. There was a small canvas bag on the ground. It contained a pound or so of rice stuffed into an antique army mess cup, a gourd canteen, a small knife, a small metal cylinder, which he hoped contained some matches, and that last bandage that David had shown Jennifer. He thought he saw something under the bag and pulled it aside. It was a large revolver, and it looked familiar. Then he remembered: Jack had been wearing it in a holster the last time Sluff had spoken to him. Jennifer must have retrieved it. He bent over the edge of the stretcher and picked it up. It was pretty heavy, but he could see six brass rims in the cylinder.

He lifted his upper body into the stretcher and lay still until his head stopped swimming. He had his answer: She and whatever remained of her “boys” had gone
long bush,
as she termed it—into the deep backcountry on this island. He, alien bringer of
nogut kas,
was on his own.

Fair enough, he thought. There'd be more battle survivors, seamen as well as airmen, who would turn up on the beaches. She, on the other hand, would have to survive for many months here, maybe even years, until the Japs were driven out. For that she depended on the boys. He was a Jonah in their eyes, and he remembered what happened when the crews of sailing ships of old decided someone was a Jonah: They put him into a boat with some water and food and cast him away.

Okay, Jonah, he thought: Time to get under way, RFS or not. He got out of the stretcher, steadied himself, and then filled the gourd with water. He drank it all and then refilled it. He put everything back into the bag except the gun, which he put into his waistband, which in turn made his khaki trousers slide right off his hips. One way to lose weight, he decided: get stranded on a hostile island. He used the knife to poke holes in his canvas web uniform belt, re-cinched the belt, and then tried again with the heavy gun. This time everything held up, literally. He picked up the bag and started walking down the canyon toward the open meadow beyond. As he approached the opening he thought he felt something.

He stopped and listened. There was a vibration, a thrumming that seemed familiar, something powerful pummeling the tropic air.

Kawanishi, he thought.

He backed into the shadow of the canyon entrance and put the bag down. He still couldn't hear the engines, but he could definitely feel them. Approaching, too. He looked up. Even though he was in the shadow of the canyon entrance, narrow as it was, he realized that from the air they might be able to see a white man standing there. He knelt down and then went prone, putting that canvas bag over his neck so that there was no white skin showing, and pushed himself up against the canyon wall. Then he waited.

Finally he could hear the actual engines as the seaplane came up the slopes of the valley and then over the ridge containing the canyon. He lay perfectly still and watched a patch of sunlight that was ten feet from where he lay. The engines got louder and louder and then the plane roared overhead and was going away, its line of motion confirmed by the black shadow that flitted briefly across that patch of sunlight. He waited for the shrill sound of an approaching bomb, but there was nothing. The sounds of the engines diminished until they were gone, somewhere out toward the western shores of the island.

He waited some more to make sure the plane wasn't going to reappear, and then got up, gathered his small pack, and stepped out into the sunlight. Before him lay an expanse of jungle in every direction. Looking out over the descending ridgelines, he could see Ironbottom Sound, with the green cone of Savo Island to his right. Beyond that in the far distance was the gray-green eight-thousand-foot-high central massif of Guadalcanal itself. He tried to remember the charts: ten, maybe twelve miles across the sound? All he needed was one of those sea canoes. After that? Piece of cake.

Right. He gathered up his meager belongings and started down the hill toward the sea.

Seven hours later, he realized that he was done for the day and started to look for a place to hole up. A walk through the jungle forest of Kalai Island was not like a walk through the forests of Minnesota. Between the intense heat, bugs, an occasional snake, the vines, mud, and razor-edged bushes, downhill hadn't always been obvious until he finally came to a fast-moving stream. By then he'd been more than ready to just sit down in the water and submerge up to his neck. Since his compass rule was to keep going downhill, no matter what, he'd decided to just follow the stream on the assumption that all streams would lead to the South Pacific Ocean. He'd cut two bamboo walking sticks, used a vine to tie his supply bag to his chest, and begun picking his way down the streambed. Even though his navigation problem had been solved, the footing had been interesting. The best part was that his water problem had also been solved.

The good news was that he was physically able to make his way down the slopes of the island. His skull was still damaged, but the lightning bolts he'd experienced when he'd first been wounded had mostly gone away. He'd elected not to change the bandage, as there didn't seem to be any indications of infection, not that there would have been anything he could do about that. He worried about malaria from the mosquitoes and dysentery from drinking water of unknown quality. Aboard ship everyone had been taking antimalaria pills, but right now there was nothing he could do about that, either.

Finally he came upon a small sandbar along the stream where it threaded its way around an enormous boulder and decided to make camp. The rock was at least twenty feet high and twice that around. He wondered if it had come down off one of the top cliffs, like the building-sized one that had wiped out the coast-watcher station along with all of his chances for rescue. He sat down with his back to the rock and wiggled his legs into the warm sand while his sandals began drying off on the bamboo poles he'd stuck into the sand. The sun was getting lower and starting to bend long shafts of sunlight through the tops of the trees. He'd been surprised to hear none of the jungle sounds one heard in the Tarzan movies. The jungle was as silent as a tomb, and he wondered if that was because of his presence. Or perhaps someone else? He strained to hear any animal sounds at all, and then he fell asleep.

When he woke up, he found four Japanese soldiers squatting in a semicircle right in front of him, staring at him. One of them laughed when he saw the horrified expression come over Sluff's face.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

They were so young, he thought, as he stared back at the soldiers. Thin, almost emaciated, dressed in khaki shirts and shorts, each holding what looked like a small-caliber rifle that appeared to be as long as they were tall. One of them had Jack's .45 pistol, which looked enormous in the man's tiny hands. They were looking at him as if trying to decide
what
he was. He was still wearing his Navy khaki uniform, with the silver eagles on his shirt collars. His officer's cap was long gone, and those eagles and his brass belt buckle were now green with tarnish. It's my face, he realized. They'd never seen an American Indian, just like the Melanesians who'd dragged him up the beach. He made as if to stand up, which resulted in four rifles being pointed at him.