In Danger's Path (62 page)

Sweatley, thinking it over, did not immediately respond.

“The only way to get across the desert is by wagon train,” Abraham argued reasonably. “Or camels. You got any money to buy wagons? You think you could ride a camel?”

“I got some horses,” Sweatley replied. “Including spares. Pack animals.”

“Listen to me. I know what I'm talking about,” Abraham said. “There's no way you can cross the Gobi like you're on some cavalry patrol fighting Indians in the movies. It has to be crossed very slowly, maybe five miles a day. When the weather gets really bad, you don't move at all.”

Brewer joined in the attack. “We're going to have to take our meat with us, on the hoof. When we find water, we'll fill up our water barrels, because we may not find any more for another hundred miles. You getting the picture?”

Sweatley shrugged. “Your wife's Mongolian?”

“Yeah, and she speaks it, too. Which—correct me if I'm wrong—is something else you don't have, somebody who speaks Khalkha, which is what they call their language. In case you need to ask directions, for example.”

“How do you plan to get from here to the Gobi?”

“By car from here to Baotou…” Abraham said.

“That's where we have the horses,” Sweatley blurted.

“…and then by wagon from there. Across the mountains into Mongolia and into the desert.”

Sweatley grunted, then asked: “How many of the others have Nansen passports? Can you get them for us?”

“Three of us have Nansens,” Brewer replied. “And I've got one more. Blank. All it needs is a picture.”

He means
, Sweatley thought,
that I can have the blank passport. If I join up with him. Him meaning him and the Chink women and half-breed children
.

“How do you know your horses are going to be there when you need them?” Chief Brewer asked.

“Because I got two Marines with Thompson submachine guns up there, living with them in the stable.”

“How are you going to get from here to Baotou when the time comes?” Abraham asked.

“We have two trucks, International ton-and-a-halfs.”

“Two trucks for how many Marines?”

“Nine, not including me. With the two at Baotou, that makes a dozen of us.”

“Supplies?”

“Yeah, we got supplies. That's why we need two trucks.”

“And if one truck breaks down between here and Baotou?”

“Then we move our stuff from the one that broke down to the one that didn't.”

In turn, Chief Brewer was more favorably impressed with Sergeant Sweatley than he expected to be.

For a Marine
, Brewer thought,
Sweatley isn't too slow
.

“What about weapons?” Abraham asked.

“That's a problem,” Sweatley confessed. “All we have, in addition to our individual weapons, is the Thompsons and an air-cooled Browning .30. In Baotou.”

“You can't get any more from the legation?”

“There aren't any more at the legation. We got the Thompsons and the Browning from the Fourth Marines in Shanghai.”

“You heard they've been ordered to the Philippines?” Abraham asked.

Sweatley was surprised. He shook his head, “no.”

“And the Yangtze River gunboats,” Brewer chimed in.

“You know that?”

“One of our guys was a radioman first on the
Panay
,” Brewer said. “He was aboard her—'visiting'—when the word came. He's working on getting us a shortwave radio.”

A shortwave radio
, Sweatley thought,
is something else I didn't think about
.

“Do you know when they're going?”

“It has to be soon,” Brewer said.

“Then we don't have much time to get our wagon train on the road, do we?” Sweatley observed, extending his hand to first to Abraham and then to Brewer.

They left Peking, independently, on 7 December 1941, within hours of hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Taking off was much harder for Sergeant Sweatley than he thought it would be.

It wasn't even going over the hill. Over the hill meant fuck it, I'm going to party until my money runs out or the Shore Patrol finds me, whichever comes first
.

What I'm doing is fucking deserting. In time of war, which means they can shoot me if they catch me
.

And shoot everybody I'm taking with me
.

But the only alternative is not going, which means surrendering, just as soon as the Japs find time to go to the legation. If the Japs don't just line the Marines up and shoot us. Or use us for bayonet practice
.

Fuck it, Marines are supposed to fight, not surrender. This way, maybe we can do the fucking Japs some damage, somewhere, somehow, and we sure as hell can't do that if we just put our hands in the air and walk out of the legation and hope they don't shoot us, or bayonet us
.

But it was still tough to actually go to the go-down where they had the stolen (and repainted in Marine Green) International trucks, and open the doors and drive away, when everybody knew they were supposed to be in the legation, putting into execution the Plan in the Event of Hostilities.

They had the duty of burning the classified records and smashing the code machine and everything else they didn't want the Japs to get their hands on—including the stock of whisky and wine—and they weren't doing it.

They managed to get out of Peking without trouble, taking back roads to avoid the roadblocks they knew the Japs would set up on the Peking-Changchiak highway. There were roadblocks, of course, but they were manned by Chinese, who were not yet ready to challenge two U.S. Marine Corps trucks guarded by Marines in field gear and steel pots, Springfields at the ready.

It took them a long time, at low speed on dirt or mud back roads, to make it around the Japanese roadblocks and onto the Peking-Changchiak highway beyond them. And it was dark when they reached the Great Wall of China, no more than a hundred miles from Peking. That put them behind schedule, but Sweatley decided it made more sense to stop for the night rather than risk what they might find at the gate in the wall without looking at it first.

At first light, he took a long, good look with a pair of binoculars at the passage through the wall. When he saw only Chinese, no Japs, he decided they could probably bluff their way through this one the same way they'd bluffed their way through the others near Peking.

That worked, too. And by one in the afternoon—five hours after passing through the Great Wall—they were outside Changchiak. There three men stepped into the road to flag them down—scaring Sweatley more than a little. But they turned out to be Chief Brewer, Technical Sergeant Abraham, and Staff Sergeant Willis T. Cawber, Jr., U.S. Army, Retired.

Cawber had brought with him the other retirees from the 15th Infantry, along with their wives and children. One of the wives was a White Russian, and one of them a French woman. They had seven children among them.

Cawber, whom he had not met before, immediately got off on the wrong foot with Sweatley. “You were supposed to be here last night,” he complained in a sour voice.

Deciding to let that pass, Sweatley explained why he had spent the night on the other side of the Great Wall.

“You were supposed to be here last night, Sergeant,” Cawber repeated.

“You better get this straight,” Sweatley snapped. “I don't have to explain a fucking thing to you. So far as I'm concerned, you're just going along for the ride.”

And then Cawber made things worse by trying to tell Sweatley how he thought they should organize the convoy of vehicles.

“You don't listen, do you?” Sweatley said. “I've been running convoys around China for six years, and I don't need a retired doggie to tell me how to do it.”

Chief Brewer and Technical Sergeant Abraham took Staff Sergeant Cawber aside, and Sweatley proceeded to set up the convoy the way he thought it should be run.

Chief Brewer would head it up in his Oldsmobile, with another car behind him, and a Marine would be in each car. Then would come the first of the Marine trucks, with four Marines in it—including Technical Sergeant Abraham. There were seven other cars. These would follow the first truck, with either a Marine or one of the 15th Infantry retirees carrying a weapon in each. Cawber could ride in any of the cars he wanted to. The second Marine truck, carrying Sweatley and the rest of the armed Marines, would be at the tail of the convoy.

That day they met a pretty fair amount of traffic on the road; and because the Great Wall of China made a U-shaped loop to the west, they had to pass through it again. That meant they didn't reach Chining, 150 miles down the highway, until half past seven that evening. As night began to fall, Sweatley made another decision.

When Brewer stopped to talk things over, Sweatley explained that he thought it would be better to keep going and pass through Chining right now, even if it proved difficult to find someplace to stop on the other side in the dark. By morning, he explained, the Chinese might have gotten word to arrest westerners. Sergeant Abraham agreed with Sweatley, and so did Brewer. Even though Staff Sergeant Cawber didn't say anything, Sweatley sensed he didn't like it when Brewer agreed to the plan without asking him.

They spent the night parked by the side of the road. Sweatley put out a perimeter guard and spent most of the night awake, but there was no trouble.

They started moving again at first light, and made the 175 miles to Huhehot by three in the afternoon. On the other side of Huhehot, Brewer stopped the convoy again. There were problems. Three of the eight automobiles were running low on gas. Though Sweatley's trucks had more than enough gasoline, in five-gallon Texaco tin cans, to refuel them, Sweatley was opposed to doing that.

“We're going to abandon the cars in Baotou anyhow,” he said. “Hiding them will be a problem. What we should do is load the people in the trucks and other cars and get rid of the cars here.”

“You're making all the decisions, are you, Sweatley?” Staff Sergeant Cawber asked, sarcastically.

“I'll get rid of my Olds,” Chief Brewer said, nipping the argument in the bud, “and the Packard and the Buick. The more gas we can take with us, the better. And I don't think we can be sure of finding gas in Baotou.”

The supplies the Oldsmobile, Packard, and Buick were carrying were transferred to Sweatley's trucks, while the passengers were distributed among the other cars and trucks. Several miles farther down the road, they came to a narrow trail leading to the left. The cars were abandoned there, out of sight from the road. At Sweatley's suggestion, their ignition keys were left in place, but the Peking license plates were removed.

It began to snow thirty minutes after they resumed their march to Baotou. They reached the city after dark. By then it was covered with snow.

The women and children were put into a go-down Brewer had arranged for, guarded by several of the Marines and soldiers. Meanwhile, the Sick, Lame, and Lazy; the Marines; and the other able-bodied men spent the night at a stable transferring the supplies to the rubber-tired wagons and carts. The cars and trucks were then abandoned—scattered in inconspicuous areas all over Baotou.

Again, the keys were left in the ignition switches. With a little bit of luck, the vehicles would be stolen, and therefore concealed from the authorities.

Chief Brewer and Sergeant Abraham came early the next morning to the stable where Sweatley had spent the night.

“We have a couple of problems,” Brewer said. “The snowfall is heavy; under it is ice. We're going to have trouble moving.”

“We don't have any choice,” Sweatley said. “We have to get out of here before someone turns us in.”

“That's just about what I decided,” Brewer said. “But as part of that problem, the wagons are pretty heavily loaded. Some of them are likely to get stuck.”

“We worry about that when it happens,” Sweatley said. “If necessary, we just dump whatever we can't carry. Anything else?”

“You and Sergeant Cawber.”

“Fuck him.”

“We need him. You're just going to have to get along with him,” Abraham argued softly.

“Tell him.”

“I have.”

“Tell him not to start giving me, or my Marines, orders.”

“I did,” Chief Brewer said. “He said I should tell you the same thing. From now on, you want him to do something, you don't tell him, you tell either Abraham or me. Understood?”

“You're in charge, right?”

“You don't like that?”

“I'll go along with you two, just as long as Cawber doesn't think he's next in line, and over me.”