Once an Eagle (79 page)

The girl's face brightened in consternation. “Gee, Mother—I'll have to pack!”

“There's no time for that,” her father told her. “You come along later. Or your mother will come get you.”

They said their good-byes with haste. MacConnadin kept his hands in his pockets with Sam, then took one out for the General. Tommy went up to Hélène and said, “I'm so sorry—I hope you'll excuse us …”

“Of course. We'll see you again soon.”

They went down the terraced steps. Sam pulled the car in close to the edge of the lawn and she swung herself into the front seat. She didn't know what she felt—her thoughts were swirling in a vat of resentment, worry, naked dread. Her father got in beside her and they pulled rapidly away down the drive. Hélène and several of the kids were standing at the top of the steps, waving, and she waved back absently. MacConnadin was nowhere to be seen.

Her forehead was hot and she took a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her temples and neck. They drove down the winding road through the big oaks, the smoky sunlight falling in racing needlepoint patterns over the car's hood, the tires shrieking softly on the curves. The radio boiled with static. The two officers were staring straight ahead, talking as though she were not sitting there between them. As though she were not there at all.

“What'll you do?”

“Pack my bedding roll and drive straight down to Ord. Ought to make it by two-thirty if I move out.”

“I'd think so.”

“What's the disposition?”

“Probably Rainbow Five.”

“Think they'll invade?”

Her father paused. “My guess is no. Not for several days, anyway. Air raids on the major cities in a week, probably; maybe less. Of course you never know, with the sons of Nippon: they may have an invasion in force all planned. It
seems
impossible … but you never know.”

“What about evacuation?”

“With five million people?” Caldwell shrugged bleakly. “Where are you going to put them? run them east—over desert down south, mountains up here? There's snow in the Sierra now …”

“Invade!”
Tommy cried suddenly; the import of all this talk, delivered in such terse, remote tones, had finally penetrated the turmoil of her mind. “The Japanese?—invade
us?
this country?”

“Yes,” her father answered calmly. “It's distinctly possible. Why—did you think there was some kind of house rule against it?” He sighed. “And if they do decide to land, God help us all. We haven't got enough thirty-caliber stuff to stop a sick cat. Few million rounds. We can run through that, and then get ourselves slaughtered. I don't know what Joe Stilwell's got down at Ord, but he can't be much better off.”

The car swooped left violently, flung Tommy forward and toward the wheel. She put her hand against the dashboard and cried, “For God's sake, Sam! What's the matter with you?”

Sam looked at her. “I'm driving too fast for your taste?”

“You're driving like a crazy drunk …”

“Would you prefer to walk it?”

“If you don't slow down and act your age—”

“Now, Tommy,” her father said, “this is a time for haste. Be reasonable.”

“Reasonable—!”
she shouted. Everything had happened so fast, so crazily, with no warning at all—everything was altered and there had been no preparation. She felt enraged, overborne—it all had seemed to spring from that row during the croquet game …

“You could at least have been civil,” she declared. “Lashing out at your host that way—how do you think Hélène feels?”

“Hélène has my profound sympathy,” Sam replied.

“You just blew off at him, said the first thing that came into your head …” A delivery wagon shot out of a side street and Sam swerved wildly, the tires wailing, swung around it and raced on. “God
damn
it, Sam!” He made no answer, just kept driving faster and faster, the car lurching on the winding, descending road, and it stung her to fury. “Cheap self-indulgence,” she said hotly; she couldn't stop herself. “Now you're going to be heroes all over again, and you think you can hurt anyone's feelings you want to. All he was doing was expressing an opinion, a point of view—but no, now you've got your fine little war and you—”

Sam stamped on the brake. The car skidded to a stop with a shriek and a lurch that flung her against the dashboard again. “Sam, if you—” she began. He had turned from the wheel and gripped her shoulders with both hands.

“Jack and Mae Lee Cleghorne are on Luzon, so are the Dehners and Pink Whitehead. Ben and Margie are at Schofield. They're maybe dead right now. Have you got that? Has it penetrated?” She stared at him, hypnotized: that look was in his eyes again—the same expression she had seen in front of the radio with Bert MacConnadin. His face looked like iron being beaten in a forge.

“Oh, sure,” he said tightly, holding her. “Sure, everyone knows—the army officer's just a playboy with a one-track mind, everybody
knows
he's just dying to stir up wars so he can get himself promoted and decorated and get every mother's son butchered like cattle at the first opportunity. Everybody knows he's nothing more than the product of the Prussian staff system—a born killer with no education, no savoir faire, no appreciation at all of all the finer things of life. Like pools and patios and stock options and foreign markets and a good return on investments. All the real, good, true, noble things …”

“There, there,” her father murmured.

“Now it's started again—the frightened kids, the dirty decisions and stink and misery and broken bodies and all the rest of it … and
he
sold them the iron for years! Good men have been dying for four years in China and now it's our turn—because he wanted to rack up a pile, play the big shot in his lousy hillside castle … ” His eyes were suddenly wet with tears. “Can't you put
any
of it together? Can't you?”

“All right, Sam,” her father was saying gently. “All right, now. Let's go along.”

Sam released her then, and threw the car in gear. The radio ran on, the voices crisp and feverish over the static. Guam was under attack, and Wake Island. Shaken, silenced, she watched the sere, burned hills, the sienna basin of the lower bay slip past them. Could it really happen? could Japanese troops be running along this road, shouting, firing into the little stucco bungalows—could such an impossible thing as that really happen?

“But he's got two boys—the older one will be drafted,” she faltered, thinking: Donny,
Donny.
And her heart tightened. “Doesn't that matter to him?”

Sam made no reply.

“Yes, it matters,” her father answered after a moment. “It matters. But apparently it doesn't quite matter enough.”

From far behind them came the soaring and descending wail of a siren; Sam pulled over sharply and a red fire-chief's car went by, its roof light flashing with trivial gaiety in the sun. She fell silent, then, and the men went on talking brusquely, in monosyllables, while they ran along the Bay shore, with the city rising up ahead of them like a lovely sliding cubist pyramid. At Market and Van Ness they cut through Golden Gate Park, which looked lush and green after the dry grass of the San Mateo hills; and now all at once there were other cars, hurrying along with them, and here and there someone they recognized. The faces all looked the same: they were all stony with tension and dread. They passed Tim and Mildred Haigler chugging along in their old Plymouth; Mildred's lips parted in a sudden flash of surprise, Tim nodded grimly. They started up the hill.

… It isn't fair, she thought. All these years of doing without, of skimping along, cut off from the country, all the just deserts and easy times. And then, just when Sam's made his light colonelcy and you've begun to get enough rank to live halfway decently, a miserable, hideous war comes and they have to go to it: go out and try to hold the line against the countries that have been preparing for it for years …

She put her hand on Sam's shoulder. “Darling,” she said, “I'm sorry.” She knew he disliked any expressions of affection in front of a third party, even her own father; but she couldn't help it. Now, here, frightened and confused, before he kissed her good-bye and hurried south to his new command, she wanted to apologize, she wanted to be forgiven. “Darling, I didn't mean to speak like that. It was stupid.”

“It's all right.” He had taken her hand, was threading his way through the crowd. Officers and men were running across the parade ground in slacks, in shorts, in sweaters; one was still carrying a golf club in his hand. “I shouldn't have blown off at you myself.”

“No, it was my fault, darling …”

“It was both your faults,” her father said amiably. “And mine for knowing Bert. Now let's go on to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Her eyes were full of tears; she looked down at her hands. No family, now: they all would be scattered to the winds. This little time together, and then these two men of hers would be flung half a world away—and this time she could not follow. I've got to see Donny, she thought, swallowing, blinking, trying not to cry, knowing they'd both be cross with her if she gave way to tears right in the middle of this violent confusion; I've got to go east and see Donny soon …

“—if there's an air raid tonight,” Sam was saying, “if they should come over in force …”

“They won't come tonight.” Her father shook his head. “Maybe in two, three days. But not tonight.”

The car had stopped. She looked up, saw the headquarters building. An officer was running up the steps. Two soldiers were pushing an ammunition cart down the street, an awkward, galloping run, their arms flexed, and a dog was sitting in a patch of grass watching them, its ears cocked. I won't cry, she told herself, I won't—

“Good-bye, Tommy,” her father said. He kissed her on the cheek. “Good luck, Sam.” They shook hands across her body, and Caldwell opened the door. “Keep in touch with me, now.”

“I will.—Sir?” Sam leaned across her.

“Yes?”

“Sir, I've never requested a favor or a change of duty before in my life … But when you're given a field command, I want to serve with you again; if you'll have me.”

The General smiled at him fondly. “Thank you, Sam,” he said. He shook his head. “I won't be given one. This is going to be a young man's war, this one: they won't want me. Perhaps it's better that way.” He pointed a quick, slender forefinger. “You'll have the field command: not I.”

“I can't believe that, General …”

“Well: we'll see.” Caldwell's lips curved in the wry, mournful little smile. “But right now let's plunge our fingers into the dike.”

He hurried up the walk with his brisk, erect stride.

4

LIANA

1

The big plane
tipped, tipped again, the frame gave a flat, cracking sound, a steel ship's timbers; and peering down through the opposite windows Damon saw the dense green mat, like a lush, terribly expensive rug against the turquoise plate of the Solomon Sea. There was a thin white scarf curving lazily south-southwest, a small boat's wake, and some pieces of island like a broken pot. All the rest was ocean.

“Looks peaceful enough.” Ben Krisler, sitting beside him on some grenade cases, wrinkled his forehead, staring down. “Nice and pleasant from up here. Caribbean playground sort of thing.”

Damon nodded. It was a neat picture from seven thousand feet: the way the world looked to gods and goddesses, swooping around, sleeping with each other and sipping ichor—it was probably how it looked to Congress or the General Staff, far away in Foggy Bottom. The long view, the smooth view, with the boundaries nicely delineated and the gaily colored little symbols for airfields and harbor facilities and the road nets bright, spidery lines, and the rectangular boxes for military organizations deployed along the boundaries …

From one of the open compartments up forward the radio operator's voice sang out: “Roger-roger-roger, Dad. Approach pattern Charlie Thuh-ree, I read you …”

The wing went up, tilting them still harder. On their right were mountains, purple under churning towers of rain cloud; on their left was the sea. They were held in a bowl of light, with the New Guinea coast sprawled in shadow below them. Sunlight slipped over the stenciled crates and boxes lashed to the cabin floor, and the plane's occupants, perched on the crates and folded tarpaulins—there were no bucket seats—began to stir restlessly and glance at one another. There was a surgeon assigned to the 477th, a captain of engineers named Hertz, and a detail of seven kids in the care of a sergeant, destined for the airfield. One of them, a towheaded boy with a soft, round face said something and several of the others laughed; but the sergeant frowned at them and they ducked their heads and began to check their equipment.

The radio operator was coming toward them. “Take hold of the straps when we set down,” he called through the pulsing roar of the motors. “Liable to be a little rough coming in.”

Ben wrapped his hands around the web straps as though they were cesti. “Well, Sam—here we go again.”

“They say it's easier the second time around,” he answered.

“Ought to be. Look at all the practice we've had.”

He grinned at Krisler tightly. The past ten months had been frustrating and bitter. The Sunday night of Pearl Harbor the regiment had marched out of Fort Ord and bivouacked among the madrone and manzanita in the hills behind Los Laureles. The next day there was a report—confirmed—that the Japanese fleet had left Pearl Harbor and was heading for California; he'd been assigned a sector of coast from Bixby Canyon to Lucia—a preposterous stretch for one battalion to defend: all at once the wide, grassy flats at Point Sur, the hazy blue expanse of the Pacific began to look treacherous and terrible. But the Japanese—if they had actually entertained thoughts of an invasion—had lost their nerve and turned west again; nothing beyond two sporadic shelling incidents by submarines had occurred.

After that everything had been alarums and excursions, as Spider Spofford put it. The world was toppling like a hill of glass. Manila fell, the Celebes, Rabaul, New Ireland, the Solomons, Singapore. MacArthur obeyed the Presidential directive and flew to Australia; and Skinny Wainwright, left holding the bag, surrendered the starved and exhausted remnants of the Bataan force. Jack Cleghorne had been killed, Mandrake Styles was missing, Bob Mayberry was believed to have died on the death march. Borneo went down, then Java, and the Japanese started down the New Guinea coast. Were they actually going to invade Australia? A terrible spring—a spring of bewilderment and grief and helplessness. Vinegar Joe Stilwell staggered out of the jungle beyond Homalin, haggard and tight-lipped, at the head of a weary little party of technicians and British infantrymen and Burmese nurses, and informed the world in no uncertain terms that they'd got their teeth kicked in. Burma was gone, the Wehrmacht opened its great summer offensive toward the Ukraine, Rommel had virtually wiped out the British armor and was rolling unimpeded toward Cairo and Suez. And here at home congressmen rose to decry the absurdity of gas rationing, and dollar-a-year men blandly assured the public there was plenty of rubber, plenty of aluminum and copper and steel—and then other dollar-a-year men said there
wasn't
plenty, there wasn't nearly enough of anything at all …

There was chaos and confusion everywhere you turned, and no time to do anything. In one period of eight days Damon had received three contradictory sets of orders, each one superseding its predecessor—and when the dust had cleared found himself back at Fort Ord, training infantry. They were cadred to death: they would just about get the regiment up to strength and functioning well when word would come down from some higher headquarters ordering them to detach all their best officers and NCOs to form a new regiment somewhere else; and they'd have to start all over again. It was no consolation whatever that old Caldwell, now a major general with Army Ground Forces in the nation's capital, wrote him one of his masterful letters predicting the turning point of the war in the final week of July, with Hitler's decision to split his Army Group A in a drive on both Stalingrad and the Baku oil fields, and the Auk's stand at El Alamein. “God knows I don't want to sound euphoric about this: the road back is going to be long and grim and bloody—a lot longer and grimmer and bloodier than some of the breezy gentry from Detroit and New York City seem to think. But I honestly feel it's the low-water mark. From now on the initiative should rest with us.”

Meanwhile he, Sam Damon, was standing in the yellow dust, teaching awkward, eager kids how to fall on the dead run, rifle butt down first so as not to foul their pieces; how to make up a combat pack; how to dig a foxhole, how to crawl rapidly without sticking their tails up in the air—and the months went by. When General Westerfeldt, bogged down at Moapora with a reinforced brigade, had wired asking him to take command of the old regiment from Beyliss, he had leaped at the chance; he'd phoned Ben, who was fuming and fussing as range officer at Tarleton; did he want to come out as Damon's exec? Did he! Give him six hours. And here they were, scant weeks later, the bitter waiting over, dropping down to Kokogela Airstrip on the Papuan coast, at the sad, bad, ragtag end of a war …

The plane was still turning; with the wheels down it seemed to lurch awkwardly, stumbling on itself through the waves of air. Now there were scars in the green mat, the snake scars of truck tracks, and here and there a hut, its nipa thatching dead and silvered against the jungle. What looked like disjointed sections of warped planking stuck out into the little bay, and beyond it the stern of a ship rose orange and scabrous out of the sea. But there was still no movement anywhere.

“Looks sort of deserted,” Ben observed. “Think everybody's gone home?”

“Wouldn't blame them if they did, Colonel,” Hertz answered.

Now the runway swung up toward them, pocked with dark round spots like stains where the bomb craters had been filled. The feathery heads of rain forest rushed toward them. The runway swung forward and out of their vision, leveling off; the wheels touched, lifted, the plane bounced jarringly, rocking and swaying, the ammunition boxes strained against their lashings. And now, pouring by on both sides, Damon saw the parade of wreckage.

“Jesus, it looks like the city dump,” someone said.

It did. There was a Kittyhawk with its wings sheared off, a P-39 with its tail assembly gone and its propeller bent like bright silver ribbon, the fire-blackened fuselage of a Marauder, a C-46 crushed like tin foil, two more wrecks burned out and unidentifiable. His eyes followed them bleakly. The airstrip was being worked over—the Japanese apparently could bomb it at will.

They were bumping along now, clumsily. A jeep with a sign that said “FOLLOW ME” was racing ahead of them, leading them past more smashed aircraft into a revetment.

“All out for Pango Pango,” the towheaded boy said.

“Shut up, Morrison,” the sergeant told him.

The crew chief knocked up the catch and swung the cargo door out—and the air hit them, heavy and foul, an efflation of pestilence and decay, overpowering in the swift, damp heat. Damon felt sweat break out on his face and neck.

“The sewage disposal problem here is terrible,” the towheaded kid said.

Damon slung his '03 rifle while the privates watched him curiously, and stepped down into the hot, foul air. His eyes met Ben's; they winked at each other at the same instant without expression.

“That your gear, Colonel?” A skinny corporal with red hair and a wide mouth was looking at him. “Those two barracks bags. That all?”

“That's the pitch.”

“I read you.” The corporal slung them into the back of a battered weapons carrier, then Ben's two bags. “Travel light and you can shag ass if the situation turns fluid. You know? Jesus, I don't mind telling you, I've seen them come out here with more junk than six men and a boy can handle. Valpacks and numbered footlockers and boxes. One character had a whole library and a refrigerator. Yeah!” The corporal laughed and swung in behind the wheel. “One of them little gray Norges, all crated up. I don't know what the fuck he thought he was going to plug it into.”

“Maybe his asshole,” Ben said pleasantly.

The corporal cackled once, his mouth halfway to his earlobes. “Hey! That's a daisy-cutter. Yeah. He didn't last long, that one. I ain't naming no names, but he went out of here like a singed flamingo, feeling real sorry for himself. I don't know
where
the reefer went.” He turned to the group milling around the plane. “Anybody else heading for the Double Seven?”

“Yes, I am.” It was Stackpole, the surgeon, a sallow-faced man with a quick, irascible manner. He had two footlockers and a barracks bag and a medical chest with reinforced metal corners, and the corporal, still sitting behind the wheel, supervised the loading, which was done by two airfield personnel. Stackpole got up in back with Ben, and Damon swung in beside the driver, who stared at his rifle with interest.

“Going hunting, Colonel?”

Damon looked back at him impassively. “No—I figured I'd trade it for some souvenirs.”

The corporal cackled again and slapped his knee. “God damn. That's a good one. I want to remember that.” Wagging his head he proclaimed: “If there's anything that gets my rocks off it's an officer with a sense of humor. You know?”

“Anything to oblige.”

Stackpole pointed to the corporal's neck, where there was a large raw sore, oozing yellow mucus. “That's a jungle ulcer.”

The corporal's eye rolled around to the surgeon. “You wouldn't jazz me, would you, Doc?”

“Why don't you get it treated?”

The corporal threw the little truck in gear and they started off. “A beaut,” he muttered between his teeth. “Oh boy. A beaut.”

There were two more smashed planes, a burned-out six-by-six and a corrugated iron shack collapsed in a tangle of twisted metal, from which smoke was rising in faint little blue whorls.

“You had a raid recently?” Damon asked.

The corporal squinted at the road. “We have a raid every afternoon, Colonel. Just like going out to the frigging ball park. Every time we see one of ours it's like finding a long-lost friend, I'm telling you.”

“But what about our air cover?” Stackpole demanded.

“Well, it's kind of uncovered, right now.”

On their right in a little clearing was a welter of crates and bales and dunnage, heaped indiscriminately, half-sunk in nearly a foot of water. Nobody seemed to be doing anything about it; no one even seemed to be guarding it. Damon stole a glance back at Ben, who was studying this morass of rotting supplies, his lips pursed. No; things definitely did not look good out here; not too enterprising, from all appearances. He started to query the driver, thought better of it. It was all here, to be seen.

The track swung into dense jungle, deep in shade, then broke out in ghostly fields of ten-foot-high kunai grass. Twice the road was under water and the weapons carrier slithered and slewed, its wheels spinning. Once they pulled over to let a hospital jeep go by; both stretcher racks were full and more wounded and medics were hanging on the frame and fenders. Farther on there was a broad slash that ran off to the southwest, covered here and there with low vegetation—perhaps some attempt by the Japanese at an airfield—and after that a mangrove swamp, an oily, treacherous slick, with the roots of the trees arching down into the water like spiders' legs. The stench was terrific.

“I do believe you get a little precipitation out here,” Ben said. The corporal shot him a glance of wild outrage—then laughed uproariously.

“Je-sus, Colonel: I guess so! You want to see a mudhole turn into a roaring creek in ten minutes you've come to the right place. I mean …”

They had left the age behind—the age of planes and faucets and slab sidewalks; they were moving back through time, held in the stink of the swamps, the damp, terrific heat. There was something infinitely oppressive about it—it was like an implacable weight on one's back. It made Luzon seem balmy …

The trail turned a corner, the harsh wall of jungle thinned a little and then off to the right, toward the sea, they heard three spaced gunshots—the unmistakable crash of an M1 rifle: the final round echoed and reechoed over the noise of the engine.

“What was that?” Stackpole said. Nobody answered him and he said, “That's pretty close, isn't it?”

“Some donkey blasting at a crocodile,” the corporal said disgustedly. “Or seeing things. You know?”