Large enough for three or four people to stand or sit comfortably, the tree house was their primary observation post. Since it was normally manned from daybreak to dark, as soon as Sub-Lieutenant Reeves finished climbing up the knotted rope, he ordered the man on duty, Petty Officer Ian Bruce, Royal Australian Navy Native Volunteer Reserve, to go catch a nap.
Petty Officer Bruce was armed with a Lee-Enfield Mark I.303 rifle and two MACHETES, SUBSTITUTE STANDARD, and he was wearing a loincloth and what might be described as a canvas kilt. He was a dark-skinned man with a mass of curly hair; his teeth were stained dark and filed into points; and his chest and face were decorated with scar patterns.
"Yes, Sir!" PO Bruce replied crisply, in Edinburgh-accented English. He and many of his fellows had been educated in a mission school operated by Protestant nuns from Scotland.
He went nimbly down the rope, and then Lieutenant Joe Howard climbed up.
Howard, who wore a three-month-old beard, was dressed in Marine Corps utilities. The trousers had been cut off just over the knees, and the sleeves torn out at the shoulders. He was armed with a Thompson.45 ACP caliber machine gun and what had once been a U.S. Army Cavalry saber.
He found Reeves sitting with his back against the trunk of the tree. He was wearing a battered and torn brimmed uniform cap, an equally soiled khaki uniform tunic, the sleeves of which had been cut off, and khaki shorts and shoes, the uppers of which were spotted with green mold. His hair hung down his neck, and he was wearing a beard even longer than Howard's.
A 9mm Sten submachine gun and a large pair of Ernst Leitz Wetzlar binoculars hung from his neck on web straps.
"I passed the distillery on the way here," Reeves said. "It's bubbling merrily."
"Sugar we have, salt we don't," Howard said.
"Yes," Reeves agreed. "And what do you infer from that?"
"That we can either die drunk or go get some salt. And maybe some other things." Reeves chuckled. Despite his initial doubts, he had come to admire Joe Howard since he dropped from the sky three months before. In fact, he'd grown fond of him.
"The last time the cannibals attacked a Japanese patrol," Reeves said evenly, "they had three hundred people up here for a week."
"But they didn't find us."
"They came pretty sodding close."
"We need salt," Howard repeated. "And we really could use a couple of hundred pounds of rice. Maybe even some canned smoked oysters, some canned crab. Koffler said he would really like to have a Japanese radio. I'm not even mentioning quinine or alcohol or other medicine." "If I were the Japanese commander, and I heard that an outpost of mine had been overrun by cannibals who made off with smoked oysters, medicine, and a radio, I think I'd bloody well question if they were really cannibals."
"I think they know, Jake. By now, they must."
"And if they suspected that the cannibals were led by an Australian, or for that matter by an American Marine-and I think probably by now they've heard us talking to Pearl, which would suggest an American presence-then one thought that would occur to me would be to arrange an ambush for the cannibals the next time they came out of the sodding jungle."
"We need salt," Howard said.
"You keep saying that, mate."
"That's not debatable."
Reeves shrugged, granting the point.
"Which means we have to get some from the Japs. We would get the same reaction from stealing a fifty-pound bag of salt as we would carrying off whatever we find."
"The last time we were lucky."
"Where does it say you can't be lucky twice in a row?"
"In the sodding tables of probability, you jackass!" Reeves said, chuckling.
"I'll take Ian Bruce," Howard said. "And a dozen men. I can make it back in six days."
"No," Reeves said, smiling, but firmly.
"Jake, that sort of thing is my specialty."
"I know Buka. You don't," Reeves said. "For one thing we can't afford to lose you, Jake. If you weren't around, the natives would take off, and Christ knows, I wouldn't blame them."
"Precisely my point," Reeves said. "Except that they wouldn't just take off. There would be a debate whether they should convert you to long pig or sell you to the Japanese." `You don't mean that," Howard said.
`About the long pie. Or selling you to the Japanese?" Reeves asked. "Yes, I do, mate. Both. My use of the word `cannibal' was not to be cute. You don't think the good nuns put those scars on Ian's face, do you?" Their eyes met for a moment and then Reeves went on: "We'll leave Ian Bruce here with Steve Koffler, one or two other men, and most of the women. That'll keep the station up, and there'll be enough people to carry things off if the Nips should luck upon them while we're gone." Howard thought that over for a minute and then looked at Reeves again.
"Ian and Koffler have become friends. We'll leave Patience behind too. The two of them might just get Koffler off safe in case the Nips do come. Do you disagree?" Though Miss Patience Witherspoon was also educated by the nuns in the mission school, she immediately forgot all they taught her about the Christian virtue of chastity the moment she laid eyes upon Sergeant Steven M. Koffler, USMC. Not only were Patience and Koffler both eighteen years old, she found him startlingly attractive.
Her unabashed interest in Sergeant Koffler had not been reciprocated, possibly because Patience's teeth were stained dark and filed to a point, and her not-at-all-unattractive bosom and stomach, which she did not conceal, were decorated with scar tissue.
Lieutenant Howard did not know, and did not want to know, whether time had changed Koffler's views about Patience. And if his views had changed, whether she crawled into his bed at night.
But, he realized, Reeves was right again. If the requisitioning mission went bad, or if the Japanese should luck upon this place while they were gone, Ian and Patience were Koffler's best chance of survival. Perhaps his only chance.
"No, you're right, of course," Howard said.
"And of course, with you along with us, we will have the benefit of your warrior skills."
"Bullshit."
"I wouldn't want this to go to your head, old boy, but the chaps are beginning to admire you. Very possibly it's your beard. Theirs don't grow as long as ours. But in any event, if we both go, and if something unpleasant should happen to me, I think-I said think-that the chaps would probably come back here with you." Howard met his eyes.
"I was thinking we should leave at first light tomorrow."
"No. I think we should leave now. That way we can move the rest of the day and through the night, and then sleep all day tomorrow. " Reeves stood up.
"I'll have a word with Ian," he said. "And you can have a word with Koffler."
[Three]
HENDERSON FIELD
GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON
ISLANDS 28 AUGUST 1942
The twin-engine, twenty-one-passenger Douglas aircraft known commercially as the DC-3 and affectionately as the Gooneybird was given various other designations by the military services that used it: To the U.S. Army, for instance, it was the C-47; to British Empire forces it was the Dakota; and the U.S. Navy-and so The Marines called it the R4D.
An hour out of Espiritu Santo for Guadalcanal the crew chief of the MAG-25 (Marine Air Groups consisted of two or usually more Marine aircraft squadrons) R4D came out of the cockpit and made his way past the row of high-priority cargo lashed down the center of the fuselage. At the rear of the cabin, a good-looking, brown-haired, slim, and deeply tanned young man in his middle twenties had made himself a bed on a stack of mailbags.
The other two passengers, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel and an Army Air Corps Captain, both of whom carried with them the equipment, clothing, and weapons specified by regulation for officers assigned to Guadalcanal, were more than a little curious about the young man dozing on the mailbags, For one thing, he had boarded the aircraft at the very last moment; the pilot had actually shut down one of the engines so the door could be reopened. For another, his only luggage was a bag made out of a pillowcase, the open end tied in a knot. He was wearing khaki trousers and a shirt, the collar points of which were adorned with the silver railroad tracks of a captain, and Marine utility boots, called "boondockers." All items of uniform were brand new. In fact, the young Captain had even failed to remove the little inspection and other stickers with which military clothing comes from stock.