Tales of the South Pacific (39 page)

"What will we do with them?" I asked. They filled the jeep.

"They tell me there's some whiskey at Ondonga!" he replied. "Fellow flew up here yesterday."

We decided at once to fly to Ondonga to see what trades we could make. Before we took off a long-faced lieutenant from the tower came out to see us. He carried a map.

"Got to brief all pilots. Stay clear of the Professor," he said.

"Who's the Professor?" Tony asked.

"Best Jap gunner in the islands. Hangs out on a point... Right here. Shortland Islands. Knocked down three of our planes so far."

"What's his game?"

"Has a radio beam like the one at Treasury. If the sky covers up, he goes on the air. Sucks the damn planes right over him and then lets go!"

"Any tricks in clear weather?" Bus asked. Our sky looked fine.

"If you get Treasury and Shortland mixed up, he lets you get close and then pops you down. Intelligence says he's phenomenal. Stay clear of the guy."

"Let me see that aerial view of Treasury again," Bus asked. "Yeah, I was right. Two small islands with cliffs. I got it OK."

"Brother," the sad lieutenant warned. "You keep 'er OK! We bomb the Professor once in a while, but he's death on bombers. Come back all shot up! Boy, if all Jap shooters had eyes like him, this war would be plenty tough."

"You bet!" Bus agreed. "It would be plenty tough!"

With some apprehension we stowed our ice machines and started south. We circled the volcano and watched plumes of smoke rise high into the air. Behind the jagged cone, among tall mountain ranges, lay an extinct crater filled with clear blue water. Billy Mitchell Lake it was named, a strange monument to a strange man.

Beyond the lake we saw smoke from Jap encampments. There was the jungle line on Bougainvillea, the roughest fighting in the Pacific. There the great Fiji Scouts, Americals, and our only Pacific Negro battalion slugged it out in swamps, jungle heat, and perpetual gloom. We dipped low over the Jap lines, a gesture Bus could never forswear. Then we sped southeast for Ondonga.

We found no whiskey there. Just enough for their own Christmas celebration. But they thought a shipment had come in at Munda. Try the Marines on top of the hill. It was a fifteen-minute hop from Ondonga to Munda, but it was the longest fifteen minutes of my trip to the South Pacific.

We took off without difficulty and flew over Kula Gulf, where our Navy had smashed the last big Jap attempt to retake Guadal. We could see ships beached and gutted, and one deep in the water. But as we turned to fly down the channel to Munda, we started to lose altitude. The engine gradually slowed down.

Bus elected not to tell us anything, but when he started crabbing down the channel both Tony and I knew something was seriously wrong. From time to time Bus would pull the nose up sharply and try to climb, but after he nearly stalled her out, he gave that up.

"Prepare for ditching!" he said quietly over the interphone. "She'll take water easy. But protect your faces! Tony, sit on the deck and brace yourself."

I took my parachute off and wedged it over the instruments facing me. If we crashed badly my face would crack into something soft. I was sweating profusely, but the words don't mean much in recollection. Even my lungs were sweating, and my feet.

We were about two hundred feet over the water. The engine was coughing a bit. We were near Munda. Then we heard Tony calling over the interphone: "Take her in and land on Munda. You can do it, Bus!" His voice was quiet and encouraging.

"It's the carburetor, Tony!" Bus called back. "She may cut out at any minute!"

"So might a wing drop off. Take her in, I tell you. You can make it easy, Bus. Call the airfield!"

Bus started talking with Munda again. "Permission to stagger in," he said. "Got to land any way I can get in. Even cross field. I'll crash her in. Permission to stagger in!"

"Munda to 21 Baker 73. Munda calling. Come in. Field cleared!"

"Will try to make it from channel approach. Is that one ball?"

"Channel approach one ball. Wind favorable."

"Well, guys!" Bus called. "Stop squinchin' your toes up. Here we go!"

He tried to maintain altitude with the heavy TBF and swing her down channel for a turn onto the field. Before he had gone far he realized that to bank the plane in either direction meant a sure stall. That was out. He then had to make an instant decision whether to try a down-wind, no-bank, full-run landing or to set her down in the ocean and lose the plane.

"Coming in down wind. Clear everything!"

From my perch in the radio seat I could see Bus' flashing approach. The airplane seemed to roar along the tops of the trees. I could not imagine its stopping in less than two miles. Then, straight ahead gleamed Munda airfield! It was a heavenly sight. Longest of the Pacific strips, it had been started by the Japs and finished by us. In twelve days we built as much as they did in almost twelve months. To port the mountain marking the airfield rose. At the far end of the field the ocean shone green above the coral. I breathed deeply. If any field could take a roaring TBF, this one could.

But at that moment a scraper, unwarned of our approach, started across the near end of the strip. I screamed. I don't know what Bus did, but he must have done the right thing, for the old Belch vaulted over the scraper and slammed heavily onto the coral. Two tires exploded in a loud report. The Belch limped and squealed and ground to a stop.

As usual, Tony was the first out. He looked at the burred wheel hubs and the slashed rubber. He looked back at the scraper, whose driver had passed out cold, grazed by a TBF tail wheel. Then he grinned at Bus. "Best landing you ever made," he said.

It would take two days to put new wheels, tires, and carburetor in the Belch. Meanwhile, Munda had no whiskey. That is, they had none to sell. But as hosts, well. They could help us out. We stayed in the camp formerly occupied by the Jap imperial staff. It was on a hilltop, magnificent in proportions. A bunch of Marines had it now, fliers and aviation experts. They were glorious hosts, and after telling us how wonderful they and the F4U's were, they showed us to a vacant hut. We were glad to get some sleep, for Marine entertainment is not child's play.

But there was no sleep for us! Around our tent metal stripping had been laid to drain away excess water. Two days before a pig had died somewhere in the bush. All that night huge land crabs crawled back and forth across the tin.

"What the hell is that noise?" Tony shouted when he first heard the unholy rasping of crab claws dragging across corrugations.

"Sounds like land crabs!" Bus said with a slight shiver in his voice.

"Oh, my God!" Tony cried and put his pillow over his ears.

But the slow, grisly sound of land crabs cannot be erased in that manner. They are gruesome creatures, with ugly purple and red bodies as big as small dinner plates. Two bluish eyes protrude on sticks and pop in angular directions. Eight or nine feet carry the monstrous creatures sideways at either a slow crawl or a surprising gallop. A big, forbidding claw dangles in front below the eyes. This they sometimes drag, making a clacking noise. Upon tin their hollow, deathly clatter is unbearable.

Finally it became so for Tony. With loud curses he grabbed a flashlight and a broom. Thus armed he dashed out and started killing crabs wherever he could see them. A sound wallop from a broom crushed the ungainly creatures. Before long the tin was strewn with dead crabs.

"What the hell goes on?" a Marine pilot yelled from another hut.

"Killing these damned crabs!" Tony replied.

"You'll be sorry!" the Marine cried mournfully.

But we weren't. We all went to sleep and had a good night's rest. It was not until nine o'clock next morning that we were sorry.

"My God!" Tony groaned. "What's that smell?"

"Do you smell it, too?" I asked.

"Smell it?" Tony shouted. "I thought I was lying in it!"

"You'll be sorry!" Bus whined, mimicking the Marine.

"It's the crabs," Tony cried. "Holy cow! Smell those crabs!"

How could we help smelling them! All around us, on hot tin strips, they were toasting in the tropical sun. And as they toasted, they gained terrific revenge on their tormentor. We suffered as well as Tony. Our clothes would reek of dead crab for days. As soon as we could dress, we left the stinking hut. Outside, a group of Marines who had learned the hard way were waiting for us.

"You'll be sorry!" they chanted. The garbage detail, waiting with shovels, creosote, and quicklime, grinned and grinned at Tony as he tiptoed over the mess he had made.

Next morning we shoved off for home. We were disappointed. Christmas was only five days away, and we had no whiskey. In disgust Tony gave one of the ice machines to the Marines for a hot-water heater. "You can never tell what might be just the thing to get some whiskey," he explained. Dismally we flew our disappointing cargo south along the jagged shoreline of New Georgia. We were about to head into Segi Channel when Bus zoomed the Belch high into the air and lit out for Guadal.

"I'm ashamed to go back!" he shouted into the interphone.

"Where we going?" Tony asked languidly.

"Anywhere there's some whiskey."

"There's some in New Zealand," Tony drawled.

"If we have to go there, that's where we'll go!" Bus roared.

At the Hotel De Gink on Guadal we heard there were ample stores on Espiritu Santo. That was five hundred miles south. And we had no satisfactory compass on the Belch. "We'll trail a C-47 down," Bus said. "And we'll pray there's no clouds!"

I arranged a deal with a New Zealand pilot. He would wait aloft for us next morning and let us follow his navigation. It would be a clear day, he was sure.

Since we had to leave at 0430 there was not much reason to sleep so we killed that night playing Baseball, a poker game invented by six idiots. You get three cards down. Then you bet on three cards, face up. Lucky sevens are wild. Fours are a base on balls, so you get an extra card. On threes, of course, you strike out and have to leave the game. Unless you want to stay in, whereupon you bribe the umpire by matching all the money in the kitty. You get your last card face down.

Then one card is flipped in the middle. If it's a one-eyed jack, a blind umpire calls the game and you start over with a new deal and the old kitty! If a nine appears, it's a tie game, and you all get an extra card, face up. By this time it's pretty risky to bet on anything less than five nines. So the pot is split between the best hand and the poorest. Trouble is, you can't tell what the man next you is bidding on, the three queens that show or the complete bust that doesn't. It's a man's game.

At 0345 we trailed out into the tropic night. Orion was in the west. Far to the south Canopus and the Southern Cross appeared. It was a lonely and beautiful night.

Guadalcanal was silent as we left the De Gink. But as we approached Henderson Field the strip was alive with activity. Liberators were going out to photograph Kuralei at dawn. Medium bombers were getting ready for a strike. And two C-47's were warming up. The Bouncing Belch was out of place among those nobler craft. We wheeled the tired old lady into position and waited for the New Zealand C-47 to take the air. We followed, and before the transport had cleared Guadal, we were on its tail. There we stayed, grimly, during the tedious over-water flight. It was daylight long before we reached Espiritu. Eventually we saw the long northwestern finger of that strange island.

As soon as Bus was satisfied that it was Espiritu we dipped twice to the C-47. Its pilots waved to us. We zoomed off through the bitter cold morning air. We were on our own. Bus gunned the engine, which had been idling to stay back with the C-47. Now the Belch tore along, and at the same time we lost altitude. The old girl became liveable once more. The intense cold was gone.

We hurried past the great bay at the northern end of Santo, down the eastern side of the island, well clear of its gaunt, still unexplored mountains. The morning sun was low when we passed the central part of Santo, and I can still recall the eerie effect of horizontal shadows upon the thickest jungle in the South Pacific. A hard, forbidding green mat hid every feature of the island, but from time to time solitary trees, burdened with parasites, thrust their tops high above the mat. It was these trees, catching the early sunlight, that made the island grotesque, crawling, and infinitely lonely. Planes had crashed into this green sea of Espiritu and had never been seen again. Ten minutes after the smoke cleared, a burnt plane was invisible.

As if in contrast, the southern part of the island was a bustling military concentration. The Bouncing Belch sidled along the channel and sought out Luganville strip. Bus eased his adventuresome plane down, and before we were fairly stopped, Tony had wangled a jeep. How he did it one never knew. He came back much excited. He had not found any whiskey, that was true. But he was certain that, at Noumea the Army had more than a thousand cases. All we had to do was get there.

It was over six hundred miles, due south, and Bus had never flown the route before. He studied the map a minute and said, "We'll hop down to Efate. That's easy. Then we'll pick up some big plane flying the rest of the way. OK?" Who could object? At five that afternoon we were in Noumea!

This time Tony was right! There was whiskey in Noumea. Barrels of it. Using our official permit, we bought $350 worth and then tossed in all the spare cash we had. We traded our dynamotors, ice machine, electric iron, and hot-water heater for more. If we could have traded the rear end of the Belch we would have done so. We wound up with twenty-two cases of Christmas cheer. We locked it in a warehouse, gave the mechanics at Magenta two bottles for checking the engine, and set out to find some fun in Noumea.

Next morning Bus and Tony looked at one another, each waiting for the other to make the suggestion. Finally Bus gave in. "Tony," he drawled, "what do you say we fly up to Luana Pori and look around?" Fry, as if his heart were not thumping for such a trip, yawned and said casually, "Why don't we?" And I, who had never seen either Luana Pori or the Frenchman's daughter, made patterns with my toe and wondered, "Why don't they get started? They're both dying to go."