Actually, Shaftoe doesn’t mind this mission. It is certainly no worse than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still hear some of them crying out, but it’s hard to tell between the pounding of the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is surprisingly easy—but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet-shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him—he has been sighted. He is in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet, aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It’s empty. Everything is silent except for the surf, and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It’s not one of Shaftoe’s buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above the level of Shaftoe’s head. The pupil of Shaftoe’s right eye, the sights of his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and finally starts to eat him.
“Sarge! We’re here!” says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up, Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does not sound scared or excited. Wherever “here” is, it’s not someplace dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. “Shit!” he says.
“What’s wrong, Sarge?”
“I just always say that when I wake up,” Shaftoe says.
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard, or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles, and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It’s a big structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from air borne snoops. They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash and start spreading them around. There are several months’ worth of Italian newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded. Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil. Chattan’s orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe’s brain; he heaps these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will actually work: Corporal Benjamin’s table and another makeshift table they have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over, and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour’s worth of wandering around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north-south. To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead-ends in some nasty, impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour’s walk northeast of the barn and maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don’t find their way back to the barn because it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space. With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones, tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they’ve been living there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS blokes ke
ep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most of it’s old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse code.
Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an all-night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal Benjamin’s keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over Benjamin’s shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn’t crazy, and sees he’s right:
XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure certified Shit. As per Chattan’s instructions, they pour the shit in a dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter’s guides for airplanes, as well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads, and pencils.
Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him; he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn’t get particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root’s as cool as always.
“Okay,” Shaftoe says, “what did you see? When you looked through the papers we planted on the dead butcher—what did you see?”
“They were all written in German,” Root says.
“Shit!”
“Fortunately,” Root continues, “I am somewhat familiar with the language.”
“Oh, yeah—your mom was a Kraut, right?”
“Yes, a medical missionary,” Root says, “in case that helps dispel any of your preconceptions about Germans.”
“And your Dad was Dutch.”
“That is correct.”
“And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?”
“To help those who were in need.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I also learned some Italian along the way. There’s a lot of it going around in the Church.”
“Fuck me,” Shaftoe exclaims.
“But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old-fashioned to the locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something.”
“Could you sound like a priest? They’d eat that up.”
“If worse comes to worst,” Root allows, “I will try hitting them with some God talk and we’ll see what happens.”
They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples. “Well anyway,” Shaftoe says, “what did it say on those papers?”
“A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources,” Root says.
“Old convoys, or…”
“Convoys that were still in the future,” Root says calmly.
Shaftoe finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says, “Fuckin’ weird.” He stands up and begins walking back towards the barn.
THE CASTLE
* * *
JUST AS LAWRENCE PRITCHARD WATERHOUSE DEtrains, some rakehell hits him full in the face with a turn of brackish ice water. The barrage continues as he walks a gauntlet of bucket-slinging ne’er-do-wells. But then he realizes no one’s there. This is just an intrinsic quality of the local atmosphere, like fog in London.
The staircase that leads over the tracks to Utter Maurby Terminal is enclosed with roof and walls, forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates with an infrasonic throb as it is pummeled by wind and water. As he walks into the lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the full appreciation it deserves.
Wind and water have been whipped into an essentially random froth by the storm. A microphone held up in the air would register only white noise—a complete absence of information. But when that noise strikes the long tube of the staircase, it drives a physical resonance that manifests itself in Waterhouse’s brain as a low hum. The physics of the tube extract a coherent pattern from meaningless noise! If only Alan were here!
Waterhouse experiments by singing the harmonics of this low fundamental tone: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, and so on. Each one resonates in the staircase to a greater or lesser degree. It is the same series of notes made by a brass instrument. By hopping from one note to another, Waterhouse is able to play some passable bugle calls on the staircase. He does a pretty decent reveille.
“How lovely!”
He spins around. A woman is standing behind him, lugging a portmanteau the size of a hay bale. She is perhaps fifty years old, with the physique of a stove, and she had a nice new big-city permanent until a few seconds ago when she stepped out of the train. Salt water is running down her face and neck and disappearing beneath her sturdy frock of grey Qwghlm wool.
“Ma’am,” Waterhouse says. Then he busies himself with hauling her portmanteau up to the top of the stairs. This puts the two of them, and all of their luggage, on a narrow covered bridge that leads across the tracks and into the terminal building. The bridge has windows in it, and Waterhouse suffers a nauseating attack of vertigo as he looks through them, and through the half inch of rain and saltwater that is streaming down them at any given moment, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. This major body of water is only a stone’s throw away and is trying vigorously to get much closer. This must be an optical illusion, but the tops of the waves appear to be level with the plane on which they’re standing despite the fact that it’s at least twenty feet off the ground. Each one of those waves must weigh as much as all of the freight trains in Great Britain combined, and they are rolling towards them relentlessly, simply hammering the living daylights out of the rocks. It all makes Waterhouse want to pitch a fit, fall down, and throw up. He plugs his ears.
“Are you a bandsman, then, I take it?” the lady enquires.
Waterhouse turns to look at her. Her gaze is darting back and forth around the front of his uniform, checking the insignia. Then she looks up into his face and gives him a grandmotherly smile.
Waterhouse realizes, in that instant, that this woman is a German spy. Holy cow!
“Only in peacetime, ma’am,” he says. “The Navy has other uses, now, for men with good ears.”
“Oh!” she exclaims, “you listen to things, do you?”
Waterhouse smiles. “Ping! Ping!” he says, mimicking sonar.
“Ah!” she says. “I am Harriett Qrtt.” She holds out her hand.
“Hugh Hughes,” Waterhouse says, and shakes. br />
“Pleasure.”
“All mine.”
“You’ll be needing a place to stay, I suppose.” She blushes ostentatiously. “Forgive me. I just assume you are bound for Outer.” That’s Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.
“Quite right, actually,” Waterhouse says.
Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins. Inner Qwghlm is hardly even an island; it is joined to the mainland by a sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up with a causeway that carries a road and the railway line. Outer Qwghlm is twenty miles away.
“My husband and I operate a small bed and breakfast,” Mrs. Qrtt says. “We should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us.” Asdic is simply the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.
So he ends up at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt spend the evening huddled round the only source of heat: a coal-burning toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old fireplace. Every so often Mr. Qrtt opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs. Qrtt ferries out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at one point. He plays the organ—they have a pedal-powered harmonium in the parlor—and she remarks on that.
Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn’t even know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave him and the other half-dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being that if you leaned over the rail, you would almost certainly be swept overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the distinctive three-pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.