She threw her arms up over her head and closed her eyes. I smacked my palms into the dirt and put some space between our bellies. In the next three minutes she yikked a couple more times but I kept skidding her bare bottom on the dirt, a quarter of an inch at a time. She got some of my frustration, a lot of my hunger and anger and desperation and whatever kicks she was able to accumulate in practically no time at all. I lay there for a minute, sapped out and satisfied. She opened her eyes and stretched her arms a little. When I pushed up to my knees, she didn't move. I looked down at her and it wasn't much to write home about. There was a little fuzz, but it wasn't curly nor cute. It was just a weak attempt by nature to cover up-or decorate a completely un-beautiful situation. I didn't look so beautiful myself.
CHAPTER ONE
She was eighteen or twenty, I guessed, standing there against the partially crumbled wall, her hands clasped in restrained glee over her brown, Burmese belly. It made her deep, tip-tilted breasts push together like dusky, over-ripe melons. Her doll face was split with a toothy grin, squinting her black eyes and sending little quivers up and down her half-naked body. I was completely naked. I lay on the charpoy, feeling the dry grass through the jute rag under me, smelling the stink of the miserable mud hut. My unshaven jaw itched and my feet were sore and my back ached, but like most medium young soldiers, I had awakened with a sign of health that was evidently funny, or interesting to the Burma babe. All she did when I looked at her was lower her eyes for a moment. But she did not break and run out of the hut. I could hear sounds, and one of them was Zach's voice, raised in frustration because he, like Gorgoni and myself, couldn't speak a word of Burmese.
I looked at the nervous, grinning girl and decided what we were going to do didn't need talking about. I hunched at her and stretched out my arm. She didn't even glance out the low, irregular door to see if her husband or her father or whoever owned her was close. She came over like a gazelle, and fell on me with a lot more enthusiasm than style. I got one hand in the roll of her rag skirt and it came off easily.
I don't know Burmese, but I knew a little about women. She was totally woman. And I guess that she had been standing there in the doorway for a long time, deciding just how she was going to do it when I gave her the chance. I had no more than closed my hands half around her slim waist than she hit me with a big gulping motion that made our bellies smack together. Her knees fought for traction beside my straining thighs and when she was solid, she did the only thing I wanted her to do. Her arms straightened, arching her smooth back so her head was up high. Her eyes closed, her mouth gaped, and I let her dance and dance until my mind lost track of everything but her rapidly bouncing breasts and the wild, secret wave of her woman's belly. If I never had it again, I thought, I'd have to go to my grave believing that Burma girls had a third hand, made of velvet and six-jointed fingers and enough moisture to make a sound no man can withstand.
"Goddamn your brown bottom!" I gasped, and she kept on hammering until I was nearly out of my mind. Somewhere along the line her giggle started again, and I hung on to her, feeling the black silk of her tumbled hair on my face. Sweat poured off of both of us, but the drops of saliva from her pouting lips was even hotter. The heat and the smell was beginning to return when Gorgoni stuck his black jaw and tousled head in doorway.
"Damnit, sarge! Thow that bitch in the corner and let's go. The banana-warbling Japs can come in on us any minute!"
By then it was easy to turn from under the startled girl and I rolled to my feet. Gorgoni stared, not at my deflating howitzer, but at the sprawled girl. Slowly she gathered the jute rag I'd been sleeping on and covered her left breast and some of her plump smooth bottom. I drew my hand back menacingly and Gorgoni backed grinning out of the hut.
I put on my fatigue uniform, clean now because the villagers had washed our clothes during the night. My jump boots were cut and soggy from crossing the three streams between the miserable village and the high country behind us. I checked my forty-five and the subgun I'd inherited from the dead Crown Sergeant. Everything was all right. Two gutshot Japanese pickets and a village headman with a smashed jaw had convinced these borderline Burmese that three lost and desperate G.I.'s weren't fooling.
When I turned to look at the girl she was smiling her broad smile again, but it had a wistful twitch to it now. I winked and hoped I hadn't knocked her up. Then I went out into the sun and it all came back with a swear-on-the-bible certainty.
* * * * * *
They drafted me and I was a bad soldier from the first day. I'd already had ten years of civilian experience getting paid good money for the kind of work the Army Engineers decided I might be able to handle. This was an invisible bit of rank most draftees never acquired, but instead of making me happy, it had made me get my back up for the whole military mess. I did everything they asked me to do and damned little of what they ordered me to do.
I made a point of doing almost everything I was ordered not to do.
My experience and my brain kept me from getting the boot. They were a lot more tolerant of me-or too busy, than I was of them, or I'd have spent the war in a DB stockade. As it was, the two sets of very rough edges sawed away at each other for six months and we finally settled on a live-and-let-live basis which seemed to satisfy the Army and made me a little less arbitrary.
With this kind of a start, nothing but nice things could happen to me. I spent a year on the Aleutian mapping campaign. In Portland, Oregon. Then they bundled me into the hold of a big iron tub with five thousand other guys and shipped us and shipped us and shipped us until the CO said we were in the harbor at Bombay. Some more time passed and things got better and they relapsed and got better again. I quit sewing stripes on my uniform. No one really cared in a technical outfit, and I kept getting them and losing them until the sleeves of my shirts looked like a herd of mice went by.
I make these remarks, not to gain immortality, but to set the stage for the way I felt inside my chest, standing in a British transport, bundled to the eyes in gear with a very significant string attached to what some lingually inept goof called a static line. It was to be the first parachute drop I'd made in my life.
At thirty I'd been living on borrowed time for ten years, but I was quivery. The British Crown Sergeant at my back was too, and he had sixty jumps to his credit. A thousand feet below, the Burma jungle was slashed to the skin of mama earth by the wandering insecurity of the Irrawaddy Biver. Having been a pencil pusher for three years, I'd not got around to worrying about the several thousand Japs tippy-toeing through the rugged hill country on either side of the lazy Burmese river.
But some wild hair general staff heroes decided the jungle war needed some semblance of order. Generals being what they are they wanted maps and more maps on which to play their deadly little strategy games. And maps constantly need to be updated, especially in a soggy hellhole like Burma. So up we went in a tired, dirty, creeking British C-47 transport. Leo Gordon and friends, the neighborhood mapmakers feeling about as home in a parachutist's rig as a Hitler in a synagogue. We were supposed to jump over a partially completed airstrip recently captured by our British buddies. According to the briefing it was supposed to be a snap. A cinch. Ducksoup. A piece of cake. We'd go in and get the data we needed, wait until the strip was finished and then fly home to safer ground.
Only somebody screwed up.
A Limey with hot mush in his mouth yelled something and whacked the first jumper on the shoulder. One more, then another, and then my stereo man, Gorgoni, popped out of the big door like the center of a sore boil. Next, Toderoff, the operations recorder with three up and two down on his skinny arm. Then Zachary who was a math wizard. Now me, Leo Gordon, on my way and scared.
Read a book if you want to know what goes on in a man's mind on the way down. I don't know because I was barely on the chute when hell broke loose. From the pock-marked strip supposed to be held by the Allies came the damnedest barrage of rifle and machinegun fire a script writer ever set up for Robert Mitchum. Only this was for real. I looked down and I looked up. There was one chute above me which would be the Crown Sergeant. The British transport was doing a wild bank to the west and the other eight jumpers never did appear.
There was no choice but down, which was getting shorter by the second. I did remember some nonsense from the training sergeant in New Delhi about pulling harness to make yourself go one way or another. This I did. A million bullets whistled by and one of them ticked the ditty-bag on my left shoulder that counterbalanced the one on my right shoulder. Shaped like a half-squeezed jellyfish, my chute slipped west on a greased string. I saw two more chutes slipping the same direction, then I hit the mud between the river, and the jungle. Right up to my butt.
I hauled the six-inch sticker out of my belt and whacked out of the chute and high-bottomed it across the mud and into the Sal trees. The rifle and machinegun fire was letting up. I kept going. Over some dry sand and brush, through two more sloughs with slime, and finally I landed, dead beat, up against a big banyan tree which looked like a forty-legged octopus with leaves.
Xot a sound from the direction of the airstrip. I hustled the forty-five automatic out of the snap-down holster and checked it for mud and water. It was pretty good. I sat there and looked into the jungle and if I'd generated any slight affection for the British after six months of working for them, or with them, it would have puked up real easy.
The fact that I'd spent weeks making relief maps of this very area meant nothing. The jungle was a hundred feet thick and maybe visibility was thirty feet in most directions. Then I saw Gorgoni, his squat, roll-shouldered shape hunched, his face blacker than wop with mad, and his body soaked above the waist with mud and water. He'd hit the gunk, too.
"What the mother-loving hell was it?" he asked, ignoring the two stripes I had on him.
"Skeet shooters. They saw your clay head and gave it to us."
"Seen anybody else?"
"No."
He sat down beside me and worked on his breath. Finally, he noticed the forty-five in my hand, so he uncorked his and checked it out. I checked it out with half an eye, too. It was okay.
"Japs?" he asked.
"Certainly."
"But the British were supposed to have taken this two days ago!" Gorgoni complained. "Those damned stupid Limeys!"
"Most unkind," a crispy British voice said from the bush. "You'd both have been blotto if I'd been Japanese, you know. I'd suggest we move, old chaps."
Gorgoni grunted. "Leo's my ranking officer," he said. "We move, Leo?"
"Anybody else get into the woods?" I asked the Crown Sergeant.
"One more of your chaps, and one of mine," he said. "I think. Really, men, they are putting patrols across the river for us right now. We're in for it if they find us."
I stood up and chucked off one ditty bag. It held some maps, my camera and some rewound Jap reconnaisance film and some things. I let it plop into the slough and bubble down out of sight. "What screwed up, Sergeant?" asked the Britisher.
"They bloody well must have taken the strip back," he said calmly. "It was ours when we left Calcutta and theirs when we arrived. Bloody mess, if you think about it!"
I thought about it. I also let my mouth water at the sight of the lend-lease Thompson subgun the Sergeant was carrying. He was standing with his back to Gorgoni and me, the subgun under his right arm ready for whatever he thought was going to bust out of the brush. If you care to know what it takes to be a British Crown Sergeant you may also read a book. Start with Kipling. They are real pros.
I tipped my head back and with my best lung, yelled, "Play ball!"
"Christ!" Gorgoni grunted.
"I say!" the sergeant protested.
"Second base," came a faint call through the jungle.
Any cartographer thinks north and south. Zachary, like myself, could find North day or night, in jail, out West, in a whorehouse or head down in a barrel of whiskey. From the brief sound of his return call, I guessed him to be south of us and toward the river. Accordingly he thought of home plate being dead north, and I tipped my head back again and yelled: "Go to first!"
In four minutes Zachary came through the jungle, his six-foot-four, two hundred and twenty pounds of corporal busting branches like a bulldozer. At the same time we heard the crash and clatter of a Jap patrol coming at us from the river. The Crown Sergeant waved us on and he trailed, his subgun on point.
"Toderoff got it, sergeant," Zach said to me. "He never knew when he hit the muck. What happened?"
"You know, corporal, that just beats the crap out of me!
* * * * * *
At Bhamo, the Irrawaddy lies in a valley running almost due west between six thousand foot hogbacks. Fifty miles downriver the water turns south toward Mandalay one hundred and fifty miles away. Assam was west two hundred and fifty miles. Kunming, China was east another three hundred miles. North was the only friendly part of Burma, and we were chopped off. For such a small country Burma looked like a completely huge and alien planet to me.
Crown Sergeant Belton was a nice guy. He was all for going the rest of the way up the mountain and making our way north on the ridge until we reached the perimiter of the Allied lines.
"Our worst problems will be a few small patrols and a sniper or two," he announced calmly. "When we can see our troops we can come down off the bloody mountain and it's ginger beer and skittles. We'll bivouac until dawn and pop off fresh as daisies. Righto, sergeant?" he put it to me condescendingly.
This was a little bit of a laugh because I hadn't the slightest idea of where we were nor where we could be headed.
"Suits us, Jungle Jim," I agreed.
"Then we'll climb the mountain and bivouac the night."
Bivouac? K-rations, crap in the brush and fight the bugs. The mosquitoes sucked the repellant off our hide, spit it back into our eyes and stabbed us like forty-jillion sewing machines. The ground was stone, uphill, and damp. The only jungle trained member of our quartet was the Limey Sergeant.
He had four, fifty-slug clips for the subgun, and by the grace of vanity, the three of us were wearing officer-issue forty-fives instead of the thirty caliber carbines we were issued. We had no clothes, and damned little food. Those type goodies were still on that drop plane, now sitting in Calcundra, probably. On an airstrip our A Company had engineered. But if there was a kicker, it was the fact that Gorgoni, Zachary and I were not on orders. We were guests, freeloaders, strictly in Burma for laughs.
With the now dead Toderoff, we had been sent to New Delhi from our battalion as specialists to aid and abet the British Special Intelligence in a high-powered mapping operation calculated to make the second Burma campaign a hell of a lot more successful than Vinegar Joe's aborted death march. It was my detail.. They even gave me back my stripes so the snob-British would listen to what I had to tell them about making relief maps. Our system was faster and neater than theirs. They had needed us, and we had done a good job for them. As a reward the Major in charge of the operation had secured permission from our company commander to take the four of us into Burma to see what we had accomplished. That simple. So four guys who had never heard a combat shot fired, climbed on the drop plane in New Delhi, flew to Calcundra and then hopped for Bhamo. We knew we had to jump in because there hadn's been time to fill in the mortar pits left by the retreating Japs. So we jumped. At least, I thought, you had to give us an E for effort.
Forty-five hundred feet above the Irrawaddy River meant nothing. We couldn't see up, out or down. Once in a while we could look thirty miles across the valley and see the ridge on the other side of the river. Nothing more. We kept on climbing in the early morning light, and our feet were boil sore. We each had a half canteen of water, a pack or two of cigarettes apiece and no taste for K-rations. Yet.
Burmese jungle is not like in the movies. There are no tropical flowers, no lush green leaves as big as blankets, and no boa constrictors nor cobras. Just hard vines, scrubby bushes, big leafed Sal trees and bugs. We were above the bamboo levels, and there were no ferns. Just brush and bugs. And stones to trip you down the mountain if you didn't grab onto branches. By noon we were on top of the ridge which we didn't see until we burst out on a rocky hogback, eight thousand feet above the river level.
There was a road up there. It was rutted and showed the tracks of countless oxen-drawn gitmas, the springless, flat-bedded two-wheelers all the Orient uses to haul ma, pa, seven kids and the poilu, namely, hill grass for the stock or whatever. Every mountain ridge in India, Burma and south China has such a road on it. I'd-mapped a billion acres of it, so I knew. I also knew it didn't necessarily go anywhere, either.
"Looks deserted," I said to Belton. "You called the turn."
Gorgoni and Zach sat down and unlaced their jump boots. The Sergeant walked down the road a few yards, then came back and walked north an equal distance. When he came back his face was grim. We were dirty and dusty and wearing a day's growth of beard, but he still had some of the Parade look left.
"I don't like this, Gordon," he said quietly. "There hasn't been an oxen along this bloody path for many days. The chips are all dry."
I was no farm boy but I knew it took a long time to dry out a pile of bull manure. That menat the natives quit using the road because the Japs used it for a patrol line.
"How many Japs per patrol? Any idea?" I asked.
"That wouldn't matter," he replied. "Any good rifleman could pick us off before we could get this bloody brush-cutter within range. Four or five of them would blast our bloody heads off."
"There's no other way," Belton said. "We'll stretch out, fifty or sixty feet apart. I'll go point. If we keep it military they won't get us all without a fight. We could surprise them as easily as they could surprise us. Shall we go?"
We thinned out our gear and had a short drink of water. I took the rear of the four-man column, in case we were upwind of a patrol. We saw boot tracks, and the Burmese do not wear boots. I kept thinking about the British probably only a few miles north, and I was relying strongly on Sergeant Belton. After a mile or so I got to looking at the surrounding world with a little bit of interest.
A great ocean of mountains. Up a ridge, down into a valley, on both sides of our path. The rugged land stretched further than the haze would let me see. It was all coated with a dark green suit of jungle. Once in a while an ochre cliff or a black rock point thrust up out of the green, but mostly it was unbroken, dense and forbidding. We had just hiked up through that blanket, and looking up through it or down at it changed nothing. I could see Gorgoni who was twenty yards ahead of me looking at it too. Once in a while I could see Zach, but the ridge was chopped up and the path was wandering. The jungle grew right up to the ridge on both sides.
I never heard a sound. I came up a little rise and dropped over onto a long, fairly straight stretch in the road. Up ahead, Zach was kneeling beside Belton. Presently Gorgoni got there and he stood with his helmet tipped back, looking down at the sergeant. Then I got there and Zach looked up with scare all over his face. There was a small hole above Belton's left eye and blood was cutting a path through the dirt on his temple.
From the look of the hole and the angle I guessed he'd walked straight into the bullet. I picked up the Thompson subgun.
"Get his rations and his water," I said. "Kick him over the ridge to the Irrawaddy side. Move! And stay low. There's a sniper up ahead, and he's good!"
I heard the slug hit Gorgoni's helmet and whistle off into Burma. The shock knocked the Italian into a spin and he fell on his back, a look of surprise on his dirty face. I hit the brush, and Zach lay on his belly beside Belton, cursing the straps and the canteen hooks. Then he rolled over to where I was trying to spot the sniper. Gorgoni got to his hands and knees and crawled down beside us.
"That son of a bitch!" he said, rubbing his neck where the shock had been the hardest.
"I didn't hear no rifle," Zach complained.
"Belton didn't either," I reminded him.
"Oh, man, I want to go home," Gorgoni wailed.
"Now or a little bit later?" Zach asked.
"Leo, what are we going to do? That fink can knock us off one at a time. And who knows how many more are up that road! There could be a million of them in the woods."
I looked out at Belton, lying on his back in the dust. I guess I kind of expected him to sit up and say something wise and comforting, or at least intelligent. Among the three of us we had ten stripes, mostly mine, but not one of us was a soldier. Gorgoni was city bred, Zach was a country boy, corn style. I had spent a lot of years as a field engineer and boomer construction man, but not in the middle of Burma.
Despite the ten miles back down the river, I could have heard it if the British had decided to retake Bhamo. I couldn't hear bang-one. We lay there beside the road for almost an hour watching the bugs and ants work on Belton. You wouldn't believe it. A couple of vultures came soaring up the side of the mountain, winged low, then spotted us. They lifted a hundred feet or so and began to circle in a slow, impatient pattern.
I assumed the Japs knew as much about vultures as I did. The sniper might assume he'd gotten two men, because two men went down. He must have seen Zach and me but he had no way of knowing how many more there were on the ridge. But he did know that the circling vultures spelled live men, not dead men. He'd either wait or crawl down out of his tree and go back to his command post for help. Also, I'd seen recon photos of this whole area. The Allied march down the Irrawaddy was just that. They took the valley and left the mountain ridges to the Japs. This was sound military strategy because the river was the life line through Burma. But it didn't help the three of us a damned bit.
"That's making me sick," Zach said, nodding to Belton.
"We might wait until dark and sneak by them," I mused.
"Sure," Gorgoni grunted hopelessly. "Well, boy! You're over twenty-one! Take your Sunday lick!" I snapped. "Down there is Bhamo and the Japs. It's two to one the ridge is spotted with Nippos every few miles. We have food and water for two days, maybe three. Even if one of our planes spotted us, there's no way for them to reach us with anything better than a bye-bye kiss. I also doubt that we could sneak by the Japs, but like Zach, I'm up to here with Belton and those ants!"
"What's over there?" Gorgoni asked, pointing west.
I knew without looking but I looked. "Twenty ranges, just like the one we're on. Then you come to the Chindwin River. Then ten more ranges into Assam. Three hundred miles of jungle. Forget it."
"No towns?" Zach asked.
"Dozens of them. Some are Burmese, some are Jap held. You'd never know which until you were dead."
Then I relistened to my own words. Burma was basically a north and south country. All the valleys drained into the Irrawaddy or the Chindwin Rivers. Eventually it all became the Irrawaddy below Mandalay and the river met the sea at Rangoon, which was still in British possession. It wasn't feasible to cross the ranges to Assam, but we might sneak south. We could make ten miles a day on foot and a hundred miles a day on a raft down a river. There were villages for food and streams for water. We had guns and some guts. Just why I thought we might pull that kind of a Houdini when we couldn't get a mile up the ridge, I'll never know.
And I was pushed. Zach saw them first, eight bobbing, slant-eyed spooks. They were carrying rifles and jogging toward us at the ready. One officer in his pale grey uniform and seven wogs in fatigues. As they jogged they surveyed the brush on each side of the ridge.
"Go!" I husked and Gorgoni let go and started to slide down the mountain. Zach slipped after him. I debated there. I could get them with the subgun, maybe, but I hadn't fired a Thompson since special weapons training at Fort Leonard Wood, thirty months before. And not too well, then. I held the subgun high and started down after Zach and Gorgoni.
A thousand times in the next thirty-seven days I wished I'd stood up on that road and tried my luck.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the tail-end of the monsoon season so it had only rained once or twice in the valley. The heat was thick and heavy, but it had never bothered me in India, and it didn't bother me now. I looked out into the miserable six-hut village and the dozen or so Burmese men and women looked at me. A flock of little brown kids quit playing in the dirt. Zach was standing in the shade of some sixty-foot bamboo trees, his broad back against one of the barrel-thick trunks. He was fiddling with the small calibre rifle we'd inherited from the Jap I'd shot. I'd shot two of them, in fact.
I felt good, despite the fact that we'd been running down the mountain and up the next one for two days before we'd come up on the village by a fat stream. I'd led my two boys out of a Jap trap, killed two men-the first two of my career as a soldier, and the little Burmese babe had sapped all the nervousness out of my spine. The early morning sun was hot as I walked across the compound to where Zach and Gorgoni were. They were bearded, un-kept and narrow-eyed. They were scared, too, and I don't blame them.
"Leo, we got to go," Gorgoni pleaded. "A patrol went by while you were sleeping. If I hadn't had my forty-five up that headman's butt he'd have sold us out in one second! These wogs give me the creeps!"
"Canteens filled?"
"Yeah. We got a bundle of bananas and some mangoes. I was scared of the meat. It looked like wild pig but it could just as well have been one of them skinny kids with the hide skinned off."
"Burmese aren't cannibals," I growled.
"Goody for them," Zach put in. "We got two of these rifles and about sixty rounds. Think we ought to take 'em?"
"High velocity. Point blank at two hundred yards," I told him. "Ask our buddy back there on the mountain with a hole in his brains. Look, we go to the downstream of this mud mess and make a big to-do about following the stream. Just be damn sure one of us is always looking back! Then, we go. Got it?"
"Sure, sarge," Zach agreed.
They watched us. Borderline Burmese. They didn't know there was a war on, they didn't know Burma was a country, or that there was another part of the world. They were born, lived and would eventually die within twenty miles of this village. We were probably the first white men they had ever seen. But they had seen yellow men. The two Japs I'd killed were laughing and scratching with the villagers when we popped out of the bush. Their allegiance was a matter of gratuity, fear or stupidity. We stood ankle-deep in the mud and water and talked nonsense about the jungle to the south.
I looked back and swung the subgun menacingly. Then the three of us sloshed downstream. The jungle grew in a thick canopy over the water, running dirty and shallow over mud and rocks. A mile or so below the village we came to a nala, a broad, rock-covered stream bed that would run water only in the deep monsoon.
"Up there," I said, pointing to the steep rise where the nala wandered upward through the hills. "In these rocks, they won't be able to track us. But they'll try, bet on it. How you doing, Gorgoni?"
"I wish to hell I knew where we are," he grumbled.
"You lost? Hell, we just mapped this area a month ago!"
Gorgoni cursed the rocks and said nothing. It was true. We'd run one-to-twenty thousand quads on all of this country but I couldn't figure any way to get up forty thousand feet to put the land in proper perspective, so we might as well have been in Africa. I only knew three things about the country. Land form ran basically north and south, with all the tributaries eventually running into the Irrawaddy or the Chindwin river. The second item was a reasonable memory of the maximum elevations above river flow. Just under seven thousand feet. The third item was that it was Jap-controlled.
A hundred yards up the nala we lost sight of the little stream. It was rough going and our feet were sore from two days of similar ground. We walked and we watched. All of us remembered how Sergeant Belton had walked into a sniper's slug, and it was scary. It would have been a lot easier to have gone on down the stream, but I wasn't ready to head south yet. That stream wouldn't have carried a raft very far, and when we headed south it wouldn't be from a village where I'd gut-shot two Jap pickets.
"Let's rest," I said, looking down the nala. "We got a long way to go."
"And you left your muscle in that broad, huh?"
I grinned at Gorgoni, who was really a pretty good guy. "What a shock she's going to get in about nine months!"
"If it starts to drip in three days who'll get the shock?" Gorgoni laughed. "She was a good looking bitch, at that."
"Skinny legs," Zach complained. "Just like the Hindu dames. They got big knockers, a real going kiester and skinny legs. And feet like seal flippers! She any good, Leo?"
"She got the job done," I admitted. "Let's go, guys."
* * * * * *
We'd had maybe four or five hours of sleep, what with each of us standing guard, and that sleep ran out about the time the sun got straight up. It rained a couple of times, hard and soaking, then we steamed for a half hour until we were bone dry again. This didn't shake us. We'd grown accustomed to monsoons and high-noon heat after eighteen months in India. But the rocks and the climbing-which seemed endless-made our muscles turn to soap about every forty or fifty minutes. We ate the bananas which were really plantains and tasteless. But the mangoes were all right. Steak would have been better but the only game we'd seen were some gray baboons swinging through the trees like hairy ghosts. There were some little monkeys once in a while too. They screeched until Zach pitched stones at them. He could throw a country mile.
We hit the ridge top in mid-afternoon, and the country ahead looked just like the country behind. Except for a few yellow blobs deep down in the new valley.
"Village," I said, squinting through the run. "Bigger than the last one."
"Japs, maybe," Zach guessed.
"We'll plan on it. Let's cut north of it. There can't be enough water in that valley to do us any good, and we aren't hurting for food. You guys still got feet?"
"Yeah," Gorgoni replied. "Right against my boots. My socks gave out back there a ways. Leo, we're going to be shot to hell in another day. And I'm out of cigarettes!"
I checked mine. I had about half a pack left. "We'll light one and pass it around every so often. But make up your minds to one damned thing. There is no PX in that valley, nor the next nor the next. We got half a pack to kick the habit with!"
We had some suggestions about things to stick in each other's mouth to take the place of cigarettes but it worried all of us. Any smoker will tell you that the thought of running out of cigarettes is ten times worse than running out. We skirted north, riding the high side of the down-running hogbacks. There were thick and thin places in the brush, but mostly thick. We didn't butt through. We skipped around dense spots, slipping and sliding where the ground was steep. It was downhill violently, and this can raise hell with already cramped and weary leg muscles. It was getting toward six when we reached the bottom of the valley. The stream which eventually wandered through the village two or three miles south of us was just like the one we'd crossed. There was a path on each side of the water. We rinsed our faces.
There was no reason for three men as closely bonded together as we were to be modest, but we all headed in separate directions. Everybody has to hit a toilet once in a while. We hit the brush. We chose that particular place because we had already learned that leaves make a poor substitute for toilet paper. Where there's a stream, you can wash.
Zach and I were standing on the bank of the stream, tucking our sweat-moist clothes back into cartridge belt when Gorgoni came sloshing down the stream, hiking his pants. He was grinning like an ape.
"Hey, Leo. You'd better put in an allotment claim," he laughed.
"Yeah? Why?"
"You got you a dependent up there in the brush, that's what!"
"You losing your screwing mind?"
"I'm hunkered out just having me a good coming out party and I looked up for some reason. She was standing about fifteen feet away in the bushes, grinning like a damned cat!"
I looked downstream toward the village I couldn't see. "She could be from that village," I said out loud.
"I'm telling you man! I never forget a face!" Gorgoni used two hands to make looping shapes at his thick chest. "It's the dame who was riding you when I walked in on you this morning! Go see!"
"Hey!" I yelled upstream, but not too loud. I had no way of knowing 'hey' would get the job done, but if it didn't, I wasn't concerned much. It's kind of a universal call, and if she'd just found out we'd just found out, the tone of my voice should do it. If she was too stupid to catch on, she was too stupid to worry about.
She caught on. She came out of the brush about fifty feet above us and came slowly down in ankle-deep water. She had the red rag skirt on and she was balancing another rag bag on her head. Her neck was very straight and this rolling, balancing motion made her breasts swing and sway in gentle, tip-tilted audacity. I cringed. No one in my Army had ever figured out just how Hindu women and Hindu men think about people. Particularly girl people.
Low caste Hindu men will peddle their wife for ten rupees. If you're a nice guy, they'll raise a finger and she won't cost an anna, a sixteenth part of a thirty-three cent rupee. They will also stick a knife in you for molesting their women. They will sell you a ten-year-old girl, lock, stock and head rag for three American dollars if the famine is on. They'll give you a widow. In contrast, no one ever heard of a Hindu wife cheating on her husband. It was mixed up a great deal, and a lot of guys had run afoul of ignorance and strange custom. But there was one thing I knew: if a Hindu girl followed you fifteen miles through the jungle with her bag of possessions, she didn't intend to go home.
This wasn't a Hindu girl. She wasn't ten years old. She might have been a widow because someone had taught her how a man likes things. Just what the spread between Hindus customs and Burmese customs, I didn't know. But this looked familiar to me.
She looked tiny and brown and smooth as velvet. Her eyes were dead on me and she wasn't smiling. Her feet made splash-splash and her hips made wib-ble-wobble and those breasts kept jumping. She hypnotized us all, I think. We stood and watched her walk back into my life and nobody said a word.
About three feet from me she stopped and tipped the headbag off into her left hand. It rattled. It would have two brass pots and an extra skirt in it. One pot was to cook in, the other was the Oriental version of toilet paper. When you go, take along a brass pot full of water. At the moment I couldn't have cared less what was in that bag. She reached out and unslung the ditty bag from my shoulder. Then she set the bag on her pile of sily hair. It was plain to all that Leo Gordon's woman was ready to travel.
"How about that?" Zach husked, his eyes kissing her from head to toe. "How about that!"
"Beat it," I said to her. She smiled.
"Damn it, sarge, she followed us!"
"Julte karow!" I snapped at her. She turned and followed my finger, pointing back up to where we'd come from. I took two steps and grabbed her arm. It tipped the bag off her head and she caught it before it hit the mud. I snatched it away from her and repeated the Hindustani for "go quickly." Nothing happened. She didn't understand Hindu.
"Kick her in the butt," Gorgoni suggested.
"Kick her in the butt, sergeant," I reminded him.
"Aw, Leo, we got to make time. We got no time for a broad!"
"She got here as quick as we did," I thought out loud. She just kept on looking at me with no expression at all.
"S'pose the Japs jump us?" Gorgoni complained. "What then?"
"Jafoneese?" I said to her.
Her eyes widened quickly. She waved one arm in a general circle but wound up pointing south. Then she pointed sharp and said, "Bwang!" with a nod to the subgun under my arm. I looked at Gorgoni. He dragged his mouth down at the corners in appreciation and nodded his head.
"Maybe she can smell em," he suggested.
"You amaze me with your chowder head. Further than that, she doesn't look hungry. If there's anything worth eating in this screwing jungle, she'll find it. Anyway, I don't know how to get rid of her."
"She'll come in handy," Zach decided.
I looked at him, big and husky and hurting. I looked at Gorgoni and he knew why. He dropped his eyes.
"Uh-uh, men," I warned them. "Hustle your own stuff."
We started up the mountain, but before we had gone fifty feet the Burmese girl stopped, unloaded herself and promptly took the ditty bag from Gor-goni's shoulder. Zach saw her coming and swung his so she caught it by the strap. Then she unwrapped her headbag and the cloth was double-doubled. She made a new shape and plunked the three bags in with her two pots and extra skirt. She tied the four corners neatly together and picked up the thirty-five pound gob and plopped it on her head.
"I'll send you guys a bill for drayage when we get back to the battalion," I laughed. We went on.
She walked ahead of me, wibble-wobbling, breast-bouncing and bottom-hopping. She went on bare feet with about half the trouble we had in jump boots. Every once in a while she'd stop, pivot carefully and look back to be damned sure that I was following her. I was. I got to wondering how such fat little buttocks could go like that in the heat without working up a lather, and I got to thinking about a few other things, too. By the time it got dark enough to be dangerous underfoot we were nearly to the top of the next ridge.
* * * * * *
There wasn't much left of the plantains and mangoes. My girl fixed that. She got up and took off into the trees like a scalded cat.
"I wish she had a dress," Zach said. "She's driving me nuts!"
"Go into the bushes and beat it off," I told him. "You better get used to it, Zach."
I lit one of our seven cigarettes and we passed it around. We had four K-rations left, and there would be a little pack of four cigarettes in each one. Also matches. We didn't need to open the rations because the jungle kid came back with some funny looking roots that smelled like celery and tasted like potatoes. We had all been in the C B I long enough to scoff at the medics about food and water, so we ate the roots. She did too, hunkered down with her breasts inside her knees, and her butt just an inch off the ground. She had a way of folding her skirt so nothing but the shape of her showed. And it was nearly pitch dark so Zach's blood pressure didn't go too wild.
But I could see her face, her plump Burmese lips working as she chewed, her eyes picking up highlights that weren't there. I could smell her too, the heady, oily smell all Oriental people have. I guessed it was the oil in her hair, or something.
There was going to be a problem, and I couldn't blame either Zach or Gorgoni. It was already time to sleep, and I'd followd her lithe body too far up the mountain to miss getting what I wanted. Even if I hadn't made up my mind, I could remember how she'd jumped me that morning. I even considered letitng my buddies have her for a round because she really didn't mean anything to me and it was a damned cinch she wasn't uncharitable, to say the least.
Then I decided she did mean something to me. I didn't need her for sex because I needed the muscle for hiking. And in a pinch there were a hundred villages just like the one where I'd found her. Or she'd found me. But everybody in the world is flattered by the attentions of a stray cat. This one had followed me down the mountain, carried my ditty bag and hustled my food. She watched me as if I were some hair-faced god instead of a lost soldier. At the moment I stood with my ass in my hand a thousand miles from a shave and a square meal. It was fifty-fifty I'd never get any of it. In this kind of fix, I didn't feel disposed to give up a damned thing.
She solved every problem but one. When the roots were gone she untied her rag again and stacked the bags and junk to one side. When she shook out the rag it turned out to be about the size of a short sheet for a twin bed. She kicked some rocks aside, did a funny little twist and collapsed on the ground, wrapped in that rag from head to toe. She wiggled once, and never moved a muscle.
"I guess that's telling you, Leo," Gorgoni laughed.
"Who needed it?" I grunted.
"Me," Zach said. "But if you can stand it, I can!"
"I'll tell you one more thing," I said softly. "She led us up this mountain a damned sight easier than we'd have found our way. I wonder what her name is?"
"Boobsy," Zach snapped. "Any fool could figure that out."
"Goodnight, corporal," I growled.
"I'd give my butt and all its fixtures to hear that tin-lipped, split-tongued son of a mother loving bugler in A Company," Gorgoni lamented, "just one more time!"
The roots weren't so good the second time around. We took a few minutes to scratch and get rid of the biggest ground bugs in our clothing, then we decided to move out. Boobsy, and there was no reason for it not being a good name, packed up and she was waiting by the time we'd passed our cigarette around. All of us had been a long time going to sleep and none of us could forget the things we'd thought about. Tobacco nerves were coming on, too. Hunger was close and we were a mass of bug bites and we were dirty. It rained like hell as we started up the mountain. We slipped and cursed and slipped again. Boobsy's bare feet never lost a step.
The rain cut out as we reached the ridge. It seemed to me we were always reaching ridges, and I could see a dozen more we had to reach. The path along the hogback was not a very heavy one. I trid to think we were getting too deep into the hills between the two big rivers for the Japs to be very active. In three days, I guessed, we'd covered fifty or sixty miles.
"Wow!" Gorgoni observed, looking around at the world.
"Yeah!" I agreed, lighting a cigarette. I inhaled twice clear to the bottom, then handed the cigarette to Zach. In no particular frame of mind I walked over and dropped to a seat on the ground about one and a half feet from Boobsy. When I leaned back on my elbow, my nose was just under her left shoulder. When she turned to look down at me, her left breast tip bobbed a half inch from my nose and I kissed that black berry simply because I wanted to. She giggled. Zach looked over instantly.
I saw him tense without looking at him. I also saw Gorgoni stand up and stroll up the path toward a higher spot on the ridge. I actually only saw the way Boobsy's nostrils flared a little extra when my suddenly hot breath banged against her brown skin. So I looked at Zach and he popped to his feet, stood for a minute in doubt, then turned and stalked up the ridge after Gorgoni. I unsnapped my cartridge belt and rolled Boobsy over on the dirt. When I undid the metal buttons of my fatigue fly, she reached down and dragged her rag skirt up. I just rolled and she squirmed her bottom in the dirt and she yikked once when I hit her like a he-goat.
She threw her arms up over her head and closed her eyes. I smacked my palms into the dirt and put some space between our bellies. In the next three minutes she yikked a couple more times but I kept skidding her bare bottom on the dirt, a quarter of an inch at a time. She got some of my frustration, a lot of my hunger and anger and desperation and whatever kicks she was able to accumulate in practically no time at all. I lay there for a minute, sapped out and satisfied. She opened her eyes and stretched her arms a little. When I pushed up to my knees, she didn't move. I looked down at her and it wasn't much to write home about. There was a little fuzz, but it wasn't curly nor cute. It was just a weak attempt by nature to cover up-or decorate a completely un-beautiful situation. I didn't look so beautiful myself, but I felt good again and I tucked my equipment back into my fatigues and wished I had a bathroom with some soap and water. Then I stood up and I could see better. Boobsy didn't move. She lay stretched out there, her frog legs spread, her face blank. Then she turned her head and looked up the path to where Zach and Gorgoni had gone.
I reslung the subgun and picked up my cartridge belt. Then I walked up the path. Gorgoni and Zach were sitting on the high spot, looking nowhere.
"Draw straws and go get some," I said, buckling the cartridge belt on again.
"What?" Zach gasped.
"She carried your ditty bag and hustled your grub, didn't she? She wants to finish the job. Go on, stupid."
"How do you know what she wants?" Gorgoni asked gruffly.
"I know. Go one, one of you, before the ants smell her and eat her butt out!"
"You won't be sore?" Zach asked.
I made a move to drop kick him over the ledge and he scuttled down the path like a giant crab. I was shakey. I lit another cigarette and puffed hard. Then I handed it to Gorgoni and he puffed. It was down to a lip burner when Zach came walking up the path. He had that look about him.
"You could have saved a drag for me," he complained.
"Don't be so long-winded next time," I told him. "Go on, wop. If the deck's too wet for you, holler fire. I've a hunch with the control she's got she can spit it out a yard. Beat it."
Zach looked at Gorgoni going down the path, then back to me. "You're a funny bastard."
"You're a funny bastard, sergeant," I reminded him again.
"She never moved a muscle," he murmured. "I made her move."
"I didn't last long enough!" he chuckled. "What changed your mind, Leo?"
I thumbed over my shoulder to the endless hill country to the west. "That. Anyway, I finally figured out that's what she came for. What else would a stupid bush babe tag on to three raunchy soldiers for? You really want a smoke?"
"No, I'm okay. I'm fine, Leo."
"Let's go," I said, seeing Gorgoni's helmet coming up the slope. He stopped and waited when he saw us coming. He had a grin on his face and we walked closer together going back down to where Boobsy was hoisting the bundle to her head. I made a mental note to dunk her in the next stream we came to.
But she fixed me good. As we lined out and started down the hill, she took her regular place ahead of me. But not so far away that she couldn't stretch one arm back. Her fingers worked grabby-like and I finally reached forward and put my hand to hers. I guess the tension among Zach and Gorgoni and myself had been obvious to her. She was only trying to tell me I was still the man. At least, I sold myself on that kind of male vanity.
We popped out on the Myitkyina-Rangoon railroad without a word of warning, reason being that it was nothing but a single track winding and bumping along a badly graded roadbed. Once it had been the lifeline of Burma. Then it had been the chief Japanese line of supply. I knew from recon photos that there was hardly a mile of it left intact from the intensive straffing and bombing given the line by the Allied air command.
The tracks were in fair condition where we came out of the jungle. It would have been easier to walk either north or south along the roadbed, but we all had the jitters about anything that smacked of civilization. And we could run smack into a Jap outpost at any point along the tracks.
We rested, sitting on the track like blackbirds. Finally our nerves got the best of us and we took a sight on the sun and headed west again.
CHAPTER THREE
The valley was broad and deeper than the others and when we reached the inevitable stream, it was nearly fifty feet wide and deep. A riffle or two appeared above us. The path along the bank was cut deep and wide.
"Jafonese?" I asked Boobsy.
She kakked and yikked and pointed up and down the stream. I grinned and threw her into a deep pool where some rocks made a hollow. The three of us stood laughing as she puddled around in the water, her hair flowing out around her doll-face, her breasts making nice optically incorrect shapes below the surface.
"Every GI should have one," Gorgoni decided.
"A girl or a bath?" I laughed.
"Both. Think we ought to risk it, Leo?"
"One at a time," I decided. "Zach."
He unloaded his Jap rifle and his forty-five. Then he peeled his jacket and his undershirt. When he tossed the GI undershirt into the pool, Boobsy grabbed it and stood up by the rocks. In typical Oriental fashion she began to beat the undershirt on the rock. It went slap-swish-slap while Zach unlaced his boots and whipped off his rotten socks. Then his britches. Waist deep in the water he skinned out of his shorts and tossed them to Boobsy. Slap-swish-slap. Zach washed his hide with the palms of his hands. He ducked, turning his Iowa butt up as he went under. Boobsy squeezed out his underwear and reached high to drape it over a dead bush growing out of the rocks.
Her skirt came undone and dropped around her knees. She jerked it loose and threw it on a rock. Naked as a bride she went up and got Zach's socks. When he came out of the water he was half ready to grab her.
"Forty-six chest, seventeen neck, a slide rule brain and a sledgehammer to drive a tack," Gorgoni laughed.
"So let's see what the hell you're so proud of, dago," Zach demanded, picking up the Jap rifle as Gorgoni dropped his. We gave him the business as he stripped his hairy body. But he didn't wait to get into the water before he shed his shorts. Boobsy didn't even look at him. She snatched up his filthy underwear and went to work on it. Gorgoni was a sputtering type swimmer. He ducked and blew and spit and ducked again. Between times he looked at Boobsy's bare bottom as she beat his clothes on the rock. When he finally washed himself up on the bank I handed the subgun to Zach and began to undress. I thought we were pretty safe but I put my forty-five on a rock right at the water's edge.
"Big man," Gorgoni scoffed as I came out of my underwear.
"I don't need volume," I said. "I got the rank."
"Look at our little washing machine go!" Zach laughed.
The water was warm and refreshing. I swam around in a circle then pushed out into the stream. It was shallow and as I handed myself along on the bottom, my butt popped out of the water. The sun felt good and I made the decision. It was probably a tributary of the Irrawaddy, but it would join the river many miles below Bhamo. With luck and the armor we had we could do as well downstream as across the ridges, and I was tired of climbing, tired of falling down. The water seemd soft and friendly and there'd be a lot more food in the deep valley than on the high ridges.
I looked back and Boobsy was swimming-crawling toward me, her plump bottom above water just as mine had been. I pushed out across the stream and crawled up on a hot sandbar. Boobsy came right up and stretched out on the sand as if we were on a private beach at Malibu. Which was not so, not so, not so.
I looked back and Zach was standing on the bank, naked except for the Jap rifle under his big right arm. But he was watching downstream. Gorgoni was sitting on a rock looking upstream. I guess they were convinced that I'd give them another go-around if Boobsy and the sandbar proved too much for me. I swung around on the sand so all they could see was my bare back and butt. I'm not as big as Zach, but I was broad and husky and nearly six feet. I could have ridden three little Burmese girls the size of Boobsy. For the first time she touched me with her little hands.
At first it was exploratory, curious. Like all the Indian girls, she was very sophisticated about love-making. But I saw how her breast tips popped out about the same time I did. She giggled, which I knew by then was the highball for takeoff. I didn't move, except to lay my free hand out on her hip. I said some real nasty things to her, which she didn't understand.
She yikked back at me in a bird voice and I didn't understand her either.
I was ashamed to roll over on her out there in the sun, less than twenty yards from my two buddies. I knew they were waiting for me to do it, too. So was Boobsy. She looked at me with big black querilous eyes. I took my hand from her hip and pinched her rosebud mouth with thumb and forefinger. She let me make a big pout out of her lips. Then I hooked my hand behind her wet head and pulled it right down into the hollow of my groin. She curled like a brown snail and caught on instantly. To fool Gorgoni and Zach, I let my free hand go back to my own hip and scratched like a lousy slob.
I don't know what she thought was going to happen but when it did she yikked her surprise and spit into the sand. I opened my eyes after a wonderfully exhausting half minute and she decided to try it again. I pushed her away. She squirmed and told me all about it in Burmese.
"Knock it off, kid," I protested. "You'll just have to learn to help yourself at times like this. Let's go."
I rolled down off the sandbar and into the water. I needed it. It took me about three minutes to cross the fifty feet. Zach had retrieved his underwear and was half dressed when I came up out of the water. Gorgoni took one look at my belly and snorted, "He's a two-a-day man, Zach."
"The sergeant is a two-a-day man," I sighed.
"We better hit the trail," Zach worried.
So I knew they were all right. I looked back at the sandbar. Boobsy was standing up, waving one arm frantically, pointing downstream with the other. Then she kind of collapsed and slid out into the water, looking at whatever down there had alarmed her. We were moving. I got the subgun up and Gorgoni and Zach backed into the brush. Naked is no way to fight a war. The rocks hurt my feet and the butt of the machinegun was hot against my ribs.
A shout echoed through the woods. Then another, then a man laughed, a high strident laughter that sounded Oriental to me. Boobsy suddenly stood up in the shallow water. She faced directly downstream, one hand raised in a half wave to whoever it was. She was beautiful really, standing in the sun, her breasts wet and glowing, her body arched in pure relaxation.
"I'll kill that bitch!" Gorgoni snarled. "She's sold us out!"
"Hold your fire, stupid," I husked.
Then it came into sight. A bamboo raft, two trunks wide. There was a Jap soldier standing on the front end of it. Two more hunkered behind him. Behind them, two half-naked Burmese poled the remarkably bouyant craft with slow, smooth strokes. I knew instantly what they thought. They'd surprised a juicy village girl bathing after she'd done the family wash. They were more interested in her bare body than they were-in the shape of the laundry. There was much laughter and unintelligible chatter. I raised the subgun and took a bead on the standing wog.
"Go!" I snapped.
I got the patrol leader and he tipped the raft as he tumbled into the water. The other two Japs snapped up and started to fall. I let go again, and I heard the pip-pip of the Jap rifles beside me. One of the soldiers threw his rifle high and fell backwards into the water. The other spun and doubled over to get under the water. Zach's rifle went pip again and his bullet went right into the wog's butt. Cut him a new you-know-what from tail to throat.
The two Burmese men screamed and leaped into the water downstream. I gave them a double burst from the subgun and they just fell over into the water.
"Get those bodies," I snapped. "Watch down river for more!"
We ran down the path until we were abreast of the bodies. I covered downstream, sweat running down my naked back, my eyes narrowed in cornered-rat fashion. Zach and Gorgoni waded out and towed the bodies to the edge of the stream. They had a hard time finding one of the Burmese men because he'd sunk into a deep hole in the channel. Zach pulled him in while Gorgoni pushed the raft to shore.
Up above us, Decoy Dolly was standing just as she had been when I'd cut loose with the subgun. It seemed to me that for a dumb jungle cat, she knew her way through certain kinds of alleys.
"Let's get organized and get out of here!" Gorgoni gasped.
"Wait a damned minute," I said. "Look at the socks on that Jap!"
I gave Zach my sticker and he cut the laces from the first soldier's boots. He jerked the boots off. They were beautiful socks. Not a hole in them. Looked like wool, with a hard fiber mixed in. Zach squeezed the water out of them and tossed them on a rock. Then Gorgoni and I went about getting the other two wogs' socks. He looked funny from my angle. His bare butt up and his fixtures swinging. But the Italian cooed over the stout socks like a maternal pigeon.
While we were dressing, Boobsy came ashore, yikking once in a while when she stepped on a rock. I smiled big at her and the other men backed me up. Finally, when she had her rag skirt back on, she smiled too. Nothing like flattery to cheer a gal up.
"Whew!" Zach sighed when we were once more in battle dress.
"Yeah. I wish I knew whether they were going out on a patrol or coming back from one. It makes a difference which way their camp is. And how far. This chopper makes a racket like thunder."
"What do we care up or down?" Zach asked. "We're going over, aren't we?"
"I'm kinda fond of this little old stream," I said. "With that raft we could just float along. No hotfoot. Just float."
"Think it's safe, Leo?" Gorgoni worried.
"What is safe?" I countered. "We have to have water and we have to have food. I'd guess we were far enough from the big rivers to miss the troops, as it were. There'll be outposts. But the supply depots will be in the big villages. We can see the big villages as easily as they can. Anyway, I'm tired of being scared."
Zach and Gorgoni both looked down to where the bodies were wet lumps of death. I knew how they felt. I'd felt the same way after I'd cut down the two pickets in Boobsy's village. Your beard itches and you feel ten feet tall and you need a woman. Your fingers caress the cold steel of a subgun or a rifle and out of the corner of your eye you can see the butt of the forty-five on your hip. I lit a cigarette and we passed it around into oblivion.
* * * * * *
Zach poled the raft and I sat on the front end, the subgun across my knees. Boobsy hunkered behind me and Gorgoni sat behind the ragbag containing our ditty bags. About a mile down the stream there was a big clearing on the west side of the water. Right in the middle of it was a stone pagoda, about thirty feet high. It was made of brown stone and it was old. We could see the little shrine in the hollowed out front. It didn't have a gold dome nor did jewels sparkle at every corner. It was strictly a bush temple. But it meant people. I assumed it was a Buddhist shrine. Maybe a half thousand years old. But from the way the clearing was marked with foot paths, it was still in use.
I automatically used my knowledge of Hindus and India to catalogue the significance of this temple. The name of the people was different, and the religion was different, but the character of the land and the nature of the people was similar. The temple could be just outside a village, or it could have been ten miles from one. The temple was only important to us because it didn't contain a machinegun nest. But I stood up on the big bamboo trunks, ready for whatever was below the shrine.
The depth of the water and the sudden widening of the stream should have warned me. But like old dirty-neck Columbus, we poled right around a bend and there was a village. A big one, spreading out on both sides of the stream. A rattan swinging bridge was lashed to each bank where thick-trunked Banyan trees grew in clusters. There were some women along the east bank, washing clothes. The patches of bright cloth spread over rocks and bushes were kind of pretty. Maybe there were a dozen or so rafts similar to ours, half beached on both sides of the water.
Zach sunk the pole into the bottom and swung the raft broadside. The water was about four feet deep. We couldn't see into the village because there was an eight foot mud wall built from the brush right down to the water on both sides. I guessed there would be three or four hundred people in the compound.
Villages like this one had killed hundreds of American and British soldiers in the past two years in Burma. The villages were always set up the same way. Their compound walls choked the valley, from high-rise to the water. Troops had to either wade down the streams, which was like setting themselves up in a shooting gallery, or enter the compounds through the regular gates. Once inside the compounds, the huts were irregular, the streets, if the term could be used, twisted and wandered and maybe eventually came out on the down-river side. In the meantime, Japs chopped them up at will. The Allies were not at war with the Burmese. Orders at first had been to not grenade the villages. But there was no other way. The political sympathy of a village depended upon which side got there first. The other side always blew the mud huts into fragments.
"Get her by the bank," I said to Zack. I slid off into the water and Gorgoni followed. Then Zach. We crouched down behind the raft. Boobsy sat there with the ragbag and I felt a little ashamed of letting her sit up there exposed to the first bullet a Jap would fire. I grabbed her arm and jerked her into the water. The raft stood maybe six inches out of the water. We watched the washerwoman run off into the compound. Thirty seconds after we rounded the bend, not a Burmese, man nor woman, was in sight.
It takes a minute to see everything. I finally got around to looking at the rickety bamboo platform from which the swinging bridge began on the west bank. There was a four-high row of sandbags forming a little fortress on that platform. Also, there was the stub end of a machinegun over the top of the sandbags. I couldn't see the Jap, or Japs down in that nest, but they were there. They hadn't seen us yet because the gun hadn't moved. I got two flashes instantly.
"The village is friendly or the dames would have warned the wogs! Stay low and get into the brush!"
The splash of two big men making for the bank did it. The head and shoulders of an Imperial infantryman raised up out of the sandbags and the snout of the machine gun whipped around. I panicked. Raising up enough to shoulder the subgun, I cut loose at that platform a hundred and fifty feet away. I over triggered, and the Cutts Compensator on the subgun muzzle held the barrel down for about ten slugs, then it started to climb. The climb did it. The last two or three slugs knocked the Jap up and backwards. The machinegun on the platform chattered. I saw the sharp fountains of water as the Jap sought for range. He was shooting down and water is deceptive. I just went blub and dropped to the bottom of the river, subgun and all. I turned over in three feet of water and came up behind the raft. There sand. Then I hunched every muscle in my body and Gorgoni in the brush.
For a moment, the guts ran out of me like thin soup. Boobsy was floating face down on the water, her arms and legs kicking like a beheaded chicken. Blood floated all around her. I stood up and galloped over the water and mud into the brush. Just as I hit it the gunner was on my tail. I fell belly down behind some rocks, then crawled to the protection of a banyan trunk. I couldn't see Zach and I couldn't see Gorgoni. I looked out and Boobsy was under water. For good.
I figured there was about six or eight slugs left in the subgun clip, so I pulled a fresh one out of the canvas ammo sack. I shook the water out of the breach and prayed there was no mud in the Cutts. A kind of a cold, academic fury chilled my fright. I couldn't complete with a tripoded, water-cooled machinegun. I couldn't penetrate those sandbags and I couldn't run. There would be at least one or two more Japs in the village, and they would be heard from shortly.
I took a slow bead on the bamboo structure. It was lashed together with reeds. It was a marvel of structural ingenuity, but the whole thing was held in place by the weight of the bridge on one side and two big hairy reed-ropes leading back to the base of a tree. I calculated the weight of forty bags of sand. Then I hunched every muscale in my body and cut loose right at the place where the reed-ropes tied into the platform. The racket was deafening, the pull of the muzzle won after I'd got off fifteen or twenty slugs. I shut off, realigned my sights and cut out again.
I saw the bridge sag, then the sandbags slid toward the river. The Jap jumped straight up and tried to get free of the crumbling platform. Zach jumped out of the brush about thirty feet to my right and I heard his confiscated rifle go pip. I swung the subgun, steaming now, to the opposite bank. Two more Japs, one an officer by his spook gray uniform, were looking for something to shoot at. I got them both just before the subgun ran out of gas.
You could have heard a minnow jump in the shallow water. There was a distant hiss of water going through the collapsed bridge, and it was still floating downstream. Our raft was floating down too. It swung slowly, with Boobsy's ragbag a bright jewel in the sunlight. Gorgoni came out of the brush, his forty-five at ready. He walked off the bank and out to the raft. He hefted the ragbag and stalked slowly back to the bank. Once he stopped and looked down in the water and I guess he saw Boobsy's body drifting downstream with the current. Then he went on.
I reloaded the subgun with one of the two remaining clips. The breech was so hot I burned my fingers, but I didn't feel it. When I came out of the bush, Gorgoni grinned. "You okay, Sarge?"
"Crapped my pants," I exaggerated slightly.
"They got her," Gorgoni said.
"Yeah," I agreed through very dry lips.
* * * * * *
There had been six men and one officer. We found the hut where they'd set up headquarters. We went from hut to hut, poking our guns into doorways, checking the frightened occupants, feeling like a trio of Ghengis Khans. Then we went back to the Japs' hut. There was a transmitter and a receiving set, which none of us knew much about. There was food, queer looking stuff and some cold rice. There were three funny looking submachine guns, a case of miscellaneous ammunition and a case of hand grenades. They looked exactly like Army issue grenades, except that the identification specs were in Japanese.
We were tearing into some canned goods when a worried looking Burmese appeared at the doorway. Gorgoni just missed blowing his guts out before he saw it wasn't a Jap.
"Sahib soldas," the Burmese mouthed.
"Americans," I told him.
"Good Mereekans," he agreed, trying a grin. "Kill Jafonese hurry up."
"Yeah," I grunted. "What's your name and where did you learn English?"
"Namaka name, sahib. I school in Rangoon. Very good."
"Check outside, Zach," I suggested. "They could be clouding up on us while this gook stalls us."
"Namaka not gook. We friend to Mereekans, sahib!"
He pronounced 'sahib' just like the Hindus, as if it were sawb." He had hair like a girl, wrapped around the top of his head in a bun. He was no muscle man, but he looked healthy.
"Where's the headman of this village?" I asked.
"Namaka father. Very oldish, sahib. Very sick since Jafonese come."
"He speak any English?"
"Only Namaka, sahib. I school in Rangoon."
"I heard you the first time. What's it look like out there, Zach?"
"Okay, Leo. Even the women went back to their washing, and there's some guys looking at the bridge. They ain't happy."
"They aren't dead, either," I told him, more for Namaka's benefit than Zach's. "We need food, clean clothes and some rest, Namaka. This we are going to get. Malum?"
He grinned at my Hindu word for 'understand.' "lee, sahib!"
"How close are the Jafonese?"
"Not know, sahib. Many kilometers. All Burma. Much trouble."
"Buddy boy, you haven't seen any trouble yet," I told him. "We need some meat. Got any meat in this village?"
He nodded. "Most happy!"
"Corporal, see if you can find out how those Jap choppers work," I said after we'd eaten a little from the canned rations. It had tasted like mutton and glue, but it would do until the meat came, most happy.
"Gorgoni, see if you can get some help to drag those Japs off into the bush. Anybody says no or shows funny, belt 'em. I'm going to see if I can make heads or tails out of the Japs' maps. It would help to know just where we are."
I could read everything but the legend. They were pretty good quad sheets, set up and printed on a good press. There was one that showed me what I wanted to know. It had neat little circles expanding out from a spot on a blue-line tributary. It meshed with circles from another spot downstream. There were nine, inter-edged circles on the one degree quad. I was sure the center of each circle represented a Jap outpost. From the obvious scale of the map, it was about two hundred miles to the place where this stream intersected the Irrawaddy River. There were a lot of little Japanese characters at that point. I guessed there'd be a big force there. There were five more outposts down the stream first, however. None of the other streams showed circles. It was a specifically noted strategic chart of the posts along this stream. It told me how hot we were in this particular valley, but I was afraid to trust the absence of circles over the next few ridges.
The minute a routine check showed no one on the outpost radio, the circles below and the circles above would expand like wildfire.
"Find out anything, Leo?" Gorgoni asked, coming into the hut "Christ, everybody wanted to help!"
"I find out we have about four hours, plus or minus, before they come in on us like bees, sergeant. This whole stream is infested with 'em. We just got lucky coming in between outposts."
"Over the mountains again?" he asked, sorrowfully. "Where else? Where the hell is that gook with the meat?"
* * * * * *
It was overcooked duck. We at four of them, plus some rice in some kind of a curry gravy. We hauled one of the Jap charpoys outside the hut and used it for a sofa. We rested, warmed inside by the first hot food in several days, weary from tension and fear and days of jungle trek.
"She was a pretty good gal," Gorgoni said finally.
"Some dumb, but she had guts," I admitted. "There's some wild looking stuff in this village, too. They are staying out of sight, pretty much, so I guess the Japs taught 'em something."
Zach grunted. "With these Jap choppers, we're going to have a lot to carry," he observed suggestively.
"More than you think," I told him. "We can build some good jungle packs out of the junk in there. Mosquito netting, for one thing, and some soap. We need their socks, too. Too bad their goddamned boots are too small. But we ought to get out of here with some of the things we'll need. Plus some of the canned goods."
"Have we got a chance at all, Sergeant?" Gorgoni asked me.
"You better believe we have a chance! Nobody's stopped us yet. And we did a couple of foolish things we won't do again."
I looked past the dozen little naked Burmese kids standing in a big circle around us. Namaka was making like a general with some other men. That bridge was important to them if it rained. You could wade the stream now, but an hour of monsoon downpour would make it come up a couple of feet and run like crazy.
"Namaka!" I called, following it with a come hither hand.
"Sahib?" he beamed, proud of having been called.
"We need three women," I said bluntly.
His face clouded and dropped a foot. He shuffled nervously and looked around at the men he'd been talking to. I guess they understood his worry.
"Very bad," he finally said. "Is not Christian?"
"Is tired and mad and no goddamned Christian," I replied.
"Why don't we take him?" Zack asked. "He can interpret. He knows this country and he can sure pack a sack!"
"I know this country now," I said, slapping the map on my knee. "He'd trap us in a half a day. Anyway it isn't my week for boys, even if his hair does look like a girl's. Okay, Namaka, no women. All we wanted them for was to cook and carry for us."
I smiled big and he looked relieved. We went into the hut and made up three twenty pound packs out of the Jap field equipment. I took along a pair of binoculars, all the matches I could find and a lot of little things I'd probably never need. The moment the villagers saw that we were getting ready to move on, they came around like flies, laughing and yikking to each other. Namaka kept explaining things to them, pointing to our guns, our packs and to the hills around us.
We were in pretty good shape but I moved the boys into the hut for a last word. "We'll pick the biggest raft we can find. They'll follow us down to the water. If you think you're man enough to handle one, get yourself a woman as we hit the water. I don't think these chums have anything tougher than bows and arrows. Hey, mash that radio!"
Zach mashed it with the butt of his Jap rifle. He had a Jap machinegun over his left shoulder, the forty-five at his hip, and we were loaded with cartridge belts. Pancho Villa never boasted a nastier looking crew. We stalked out of the hut and walked toward the river. We each looked for a woman.
We got three, but Gorgoni had to let go of his to burn the shoreline with the Jap chopper. The wogs jumped up and down and screamed and Gorgoni ran them back into the village with the spitting thirty millimeter. Then he poled us out into the stream, when the current moved us on. We hung up once on the wreckage of the bridge, the raft swung around and I took the pole from Gorgoni. The two women cowered on the bamboo raft, arms covering their heads, legs drawn up in quivering terror.
I started to laugh. "What did we get?"
Zach lifted one of the women. She was a fright. She was round-faced, shotgun nosed and about thirty. She was husky enough, and her breasts were fat over a slightly pouched belly. She kind of wailed when Zach grinned and spatted her broad bottom. The one I'd grabbed looked up. She was maybe eighteen. She wasn't much either. One tooth was missing in front and her hair was shaggy. She had little breasts and a gob of silver jewelry around her neck. "I had the best one," Gorgoni grumbled.
"Funny. Before we left, I saw several that were dolls. I got a hunch that Namaka tipped off the goodies. All that followed us to the beach were beasts," I decided. "That one looks pregnant."
"You suppose she is?" Zach asked, his Iowa background showing. "That ain't so good, is it?"
"Throw her overboard," I told him.
He rolled her off the raft. She squealed and headed for shore like an Olympic champion. I reached down and tipped the other off too.
"Hey, she wasn't so bad!" Gorgoni protested.
"Oh brother!" I scoffed.
We coasted down another mile or two, hustled our gear ashore and kicked the raft loose. Once more, we started up a mountain, but we were a lot stronger and a lot tougher this time.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Jap map was pretty good. We got some high ground and I oriented ourselves with the world. About two valleys over, there was another blue line stream. All the rest were marked as intermediary drainage, All the rest were marked as intermediary drainage, "There's a village over the hump," Gorgoni noted looking over my shoulder. "We'd have better luck, maybe."
I pondered how easily we had acquired a habit from Boobsy, but I didn't protest. I didn't care about much of anything but staying alive and on top of some kind of a dunghill. Never much of a soldier, I had no military feeling. Even back in New Delhi, we had no real knowledge of how the war was going. All of our news was censored, a month late and as inaccurate as possible. A soldier only knows about a local situation. Ours was pretty local.
Over the hump, I relocated again. The village was probably four miles down the mountain and a little north of us. From the ground contours as laid out on the map, it would be on a drainage line running almost due west until it hit a bigger, north-south stream. We hiked north on the ridge path until we could look down the gully. We couldn't see the village and this was encouraging. The weight of our Jap packs drove up down the gully a little faster than usual. We didn't talk much. Remarks about rocks, brush, and the lineage of the rest of the world were about all.
Then we found a path and it led us down to the village. It didn't look like a village at all. It looked more like a big family. thing. There was actually a couple of rice paddies out behind the five or six huts. We stood at the edge of the sloped clearing, measuring things. There were two big humpbacked cows tied beside one of the huts. A Burmese kid was dragging a rope up out of a well. It was tied to a brown crock. He poured the water from the crock into a bigger one sitting on the ground. Then a woman came out of another hut, looked around lazily and went over to another hut. She was old.
We started down, heading for the biggest hut. It was obviously the center of things. It had a freshly thatched roof of rice stalks and this roof extended out to make a porch. We were about half way there when the kid spotted us. He stood motionless for a moment then raced on spindly legs for the big hut.
About a half dozen men poured out of the hut. One or two had sticks, but all they did was stare. Down close, I could see they were scared. Two or three of them broke and ran back into the hut. It was about seven to one they'd never seen a white skin before. Or guns, or helmets or the kind of eyes we had.
We unloaded our packs. I could hear yikking going on in the hut. I stepped toward the low hole in the mud wall and one of the Burmese men stepped in front of me. Pie was maybe fifty. He was well-fed and shaggy-headed and he looked very determined. I hit him right across the face with the barrel of the subgun. He howled and the other three men shrieked mish-mash. Then the big man shut up and so did the others. I went on into the hut. It was dark for a minute, then I began to see shapes.
There were several cowering women and nearly a dozen kids. There were two rickety charpoys with rice straw mattresses, if you didn't care what you said. On the floor were several other pallets.
I said, "Hi, kiddies," and backed out of the hut.
"Any in there?" Zach asked.
"Yeah," I grunted. "Watch the boys. I'll look at the other huts. Then we'll have 'em stand inspection!"
The first hut was empty. I went to the second. The old lady was in there with another woman. I ran them both out into the sun. The other woman was pretty good, but loop-breasted. I went on to the next. Two kids and another woman, about to have a third. I pushed them out into the sun, too. The fourth hut was empty. The fifth was jackpot. I ran the three babes out into the sun and they were real good. They stood expressionless and slouched, looking at me like I was a bag of potatoes. I winked at the taller of the three. She grinned back, then sobered instantly. I waved them toward the big hut. One went, another started and I pushed the third. Her back was as warm as blood and smoother than velvet.
At the hut. I pointed into the door and made a very positive motion to bring everybody out. The headman didn't move until I raised the subgun. He basked away, holding his face, then yikked twice into the hut.
When they were all out, I counted noses. There were fifteen women I thought should be older than sixteen, not counting the old crone. There were eight men. There were at least twenty kids under sixteen and half of them were under five. There were either some more men somewhere, or some neglected women. Unless the Burmese were polygamists, which I wasn't sure of.
"Hey, there's some neat ones," Gorgoni enthused. He walked over and stood real big and real close to one of the three I'd dug out of the fourth hut. "Hi, baby," he said coarsely.
I saw them all cringe because it was obvious to them what we had in our minds. The men looked like they wanted to do something, but the mark across the headman's face was livid, raw, frightening. None of them seemed like human being to me. They were the wrong color, they couldn't speak our language and they were part of an unfriendly, very unreal land.
"Back off, Gorgoni," I said. "She may be some guy's wife."
"Show me the guy!" he demanded.
"Back off!"
"Okay, okay, sarge!" . "He's right, Gorgoni," Zach put in. "We aren't that hard up we gotta start trouble."
I chuckled. Start trouble. It was started. I turned to the headman. "Memsahibs," I said and held up three fingers.
I was sure the word meant nothing, but my three fingers did. "Zach, go down to that end hut. Go inside and wait. Got it?"
"What for, Leo?"
"Let's see which one of these babes the headman sends when I make him choose! Go on, goddamnit!"
Zach walked slowly, his big body swinging like he was jumping stubble back on the farm. He trailed the Jap machinegun in one big hand. At the hut, he looked back and grinned. I turned to the headman. I held up one finger, pointed at the women, then at the hut where Zach had disappeared. It wasn't a decision that I would have cared to make. Not if I'd been the headman of the family. Babaje, they called them in India. The responsible father of his clan. I stood there, waiting. Suddenly he started to speak, being already sure I didn't know a word he said. I thought he was talking for the benefit of his family, not me. Several men tensed, and the old woman put her hands over her toothless face and wailed. I waited until he ran out of talk. Then I pointed to the hut where Zach waited.
"You're the coldest bastard I ever knew," Gorgoni said.
"When it's your turn you'll think I'm a screwing genius!"
"I guess we got something coming, eh Sarge?"
"We got nothing coming, you dumb slob. We are taking."
The headman abruptly turned and looked at someone in the group. She knew who she was. Without a word or gesture, the young girl turned and walked slowly toward the hut. She was about fifteen or sixteen. She had half-apple breasts and a wibble-wobble bottom and she was young enough to be cute and desirable, despite her skinny legs and thick soled feet. Every one of them watched her go to Zach. I hoped the big country boy appreciated her.
"Pick another hut, Gorgoni. I'll stand watch."
"I want that one!" he complained, pointing to the one he'd half approached.
"You take what you get, you bull-necked dago. If you ever get back to Brooklyn, you'll marry a hooknosed wop broad with a fat butt and a wide open womb who'll give you more kids than you can support and hell for every dime you spend on beer. You go, Sergeant, or I'll bust you to private!"
So he growled and lumbered off to the hut just behind the big one. I looked at the headman, one finger showing him what was required. The little cookies Gorgoni had liked tossed her long black hair and pivoted with a fine flip of her bottom. She walked after Gorgoni as if he'd lifted her purse. There was some Burmese noise, but I was thinking about how universally the female of the specie followed suite. He'd liked her. She knew it. That quickly, she wasn't about to let the headman give her soldier to someone else. You could understand all of this from the way she trotted after Gorgoni. I laughed out loud and the headman grinned. It occurred to me that the way we thought was about as primitive as the way they thought. All orientals are women stealers, so this big farmer was no different. I waved the crowd away and hunkered down in the shade of the thatched roof, subgun real loose under my arm.
That surprised them because I guessed they thought I'd go to a hut too. I was ready, but somebody had to stand guard. I did look at the tall girl who had interested me first. She was pretty. Prettier than Boobsy. She had full, out-thrust breasts and a flat belly. Her legs weren't bad either, but her feet were terrible. Her mouth was broad and full-lipped, and she had more silky black hair than two women could use. If she had a bad feature, it was her hips. They were high and meaty. A real brood mare.
I was mentally masturbating when this little kid came up and stood right in front of me, her stark naked little body as cute as a bug. She looked like a doll, all three feet of her. She had one thumb stuck in her rose-bud mouth and her eyes were as big as Black Anne cherries. I grinned. She stared. I reached over and jerked my field pack closer. It took me about a half minute to find one of our four K-rations. I got at the wax coated box and dumped the miscellaneous junk out. The foil wrapped chocolate was what I was after. I unwrapped it and bit a chunk of the rock-hard stuff. Then I handed it to the little girl. She looked and I chewed. Suddenly, she popped the rest of the little bar into her mouth.
It surprised the hell out of her. She pursed her lips, moved her mouth, then turned around and looked at the grownups behind her. Then she pivoted again and looked at me, her face all out of shape with munching. I smacked my lips and swallowed and she tried to swallow too. She made it, but for a long time, she just stood and tasted the residue in her mouth. Then very demurely, she held out her hand for more.
I made a 'no more' gesture and kept shaking my head as I showed her all the rest of the junk in the K-ration box. I repacked the stuff in the Jap equipment and straightened up to get the kink out of my knees. When I looked around the grownups had backed away. The tall girl with the crazy hair was standing under the thatched roof, but she was looking at me very hard. The headman shooed the little girl away with some funny words and his pushy hands. She went, but she kept looking at me over her shoulder.
* * * * * *
Zach came out of the hut, walked around to the side and calmly urinated onto the dry grass. Then he buttoned up and came around to the front of the shack. He leaned against the mud wall and gave me a very sloppy salute to tell me he was on guard. His little girl didn't show. I saluated back and walked right over to the tall girl. From the side, I was hit by a kicking swinging Burmese youth. He surprised me. I swung from the waist and he kind of fell over me. It knocked the wind out of him. I leaned over and pushed the Cutts Compesator about two inches deep in his back. An instant before I decided to blow his backbone out, I realized he didn't know what a chopper was. As he raised, I kicked under his hip. He rolled away, screaming yikky things, holding his groin like any civilized man would have done.
I heard Zach laugh. I heard Gorgoni laugh. He was standing in the doorway of his hut, naked from the waist down. He had on a real beauty, and as I looked, he said something to Zach and went back into the hut to his momentarily lonesome woman. The tall, smoothly brown and delightfully exotic girl returned my gaze with no sign of recognition, no sign of awareness. In the corner of my eye, I saw her boyfriend or husband or whatever, crawling back against the mud wall. He was all through.
The girl didn't look so tall when I thought it out. It was her build. She was heavy hipped and slim waisted, and her shoulders were slight. Maybe five-two, which was a few inches taller than the rest of the women, but she was no amazon. She dropped her eyes under my inspection. I looked around at the headman and he was wearing neither protest nor permission. Which was enough to tell me that she was fair game.
I reached out and hooked one hand behind her neck. The touch of her finished me. Tojo and a million infantrymen couldn't have taken her away from me. I kind of hauled her out from under that thatched roof into the sunshine. She shook free, tossed her head back proudly and started for an empty hut. I followed her. The little kid with the taste of chocolate still in her mouth followed me. We all got to the hut at about the same time.
The tall girl didn't know what to do, obviously. She got into the ten-foot square hut and just stood there. I started to unload my belts when I spotted the little kid. I picked her up, turned her and kind of scooted her out the door. I was just getting my fatigue pants loosened when she was there again. This time, I set her out from the hut about five feet and spatted her bare bottom to get her going.
I could hear Zach laughing.
Then the girl in the hut started to laugh.
The third time I put the little kid out, the entire hillside began to laugh. Killed me dead. The fourth time the little bitch came back, I picked her up and held her in one arm, explaining in very uncouth language what I couldn't do to the cute babe while she was charging around in the hut. I told her how much I needed to get some time in on the brown cookie, and how her turn would come in about ten years. She just looked at me and sucked her thumb. I carried her out into the sunshine and she was grinning around the thumb. The girl came out of the hut. I swear she was pouting but it may have been just the shape of her kiss-kiss mouth.
"Oh to hell with it!" I grouched.
Zach and Gorgoni were really giving it to me. I stood there holding the little kid, my temper already gone down the mountain.
"Load up," I snapped. "You can take 'em with you or leave 'em here. But we go. Get moving!"
Gorgoni turned and tossed his pack to the girl who had followed him out of the hut. He patted his head. She loaded the pack on her hair. Zach pushed his pack out with his foot. The girl the headman had given him looked at her people. Zach picked up his pack and banged it down onto her head. She raised one hand and rebalanced it. I looked at the tall girl. She just swiveled over and picked up my pack. There was a lot of chatter from the background. I put the little girl down and pushed her hard. She took two steps and fell to her knees in the dirt. Then I spun my untouched woman and pushed her down the slope.
No one protested, no one screamed. The three women kind of formed a line and we all started down the mountain. I had a faint sensation of being shilled. It was too easy. Being American, I simply could not understand how a Burmese could let three of his young beautiful girls be changhaied without a fight. At the edge of the clearing, I recounted. We had four girls. Shorty was trot-trotting along down the hillside, her thumb still in her mouth, her eyes glued to me. I looked back and there was a woman standing about fifty feet out in front of the rest of the Burmese. She had her hands pressed to her mouth as if to stifle a scream. I supposed it was Shorty's mother.
I stopped and looked down at the brown urchin, wondering just how far she'd follow me into the jungle before the charm of a hunk of lousy candy wore off. She was out of breath and it seemed to me she was about to cry. Zach and Gorgoni were looking back at me. I waved them down, then picked up the kid and started back up the hill. It was an oddly long walk. I could feel eyes beating on my chest and a few on my back. For a moment, I actually thought about taking the kid along. It was that stray cat thing again, I supposed.
But I finally reached the loop-breasted girl who was standing out from the huts. I gave the kid a big brushy-faced kiss and handed her to the startled woman. Then I turned around and started back into oblivion. We were never going to make Rangoon and it was three hundred hell-miles to Chittagong. It was hot and buggy; any day we could come down with malaria, diarrhea or sand-fly fever. Or all of them. One of us or all of us could catch a Jap slug. It could kill or it could wound. We could just get lost, too, and wind up dead of a number of things. I didn't feel any military responsibility for Zach or Gorgoni, but my pride did. I was a little upset when I finally reached the others. I waved them on.
I jerked the pack off of my new girl's head and threw my arm around her shoulders. We walked along that way, me watching the ground. I don't know what she watched, but she didn't need to be pulled. She even tried matching stride with me, but finally gave it up for a skippy, irregular step.
* * * * * *
It was only four-thirty when we reached the bottom of the big valley, but we were looking for an excuse to stop and play with the women. We hiked up the stream a few hundred feet until we came to a flat spot where the water pooled up. Gorgoni went nuts. He pulled his girl down and began to make love to her like he was on a roof-top in Brooklyn. He didn't care that she didn't understand kissing. He kissed her anyway. He had her skirt off in five minutes and he was digging away with his thick hand as if she'd set up a list of specifications.
The sight tripped Zach's mechanism and I don't think it slowed his woman any either. He did have the decency to walk her back into the brush a little. I heard her laughing in a minute. It got me good. None-theless, I made sure our weapons were handy and that no one had followed us. When I got through with the precautionary measures, I looked at my girl. She was sitting on a flat rock, straight and sombre, watching Gorgoni work on his girl. His hairy butt bobbed and rolled and the brown legs on each side of his rooting body were doing some dancing too.
I was shaking like a leaf. I peeled off my cartridge belts and set my helmet on the ground. The legs of my fatigues were tucked inside my jumpboots. I just unsnapped my GI belt and let my pants drop, holding them around my knees with one hand. I had to hop to get close to her, but when I did, I held her with one hand and beat her with the handiest, stiffest thing I could find. She kind of leaned into the thump and rub and pretty soon she began to push her breasts in front of the onslaught. That wasn't even good enough for her so she got hold of it and began to work it against her neck and cheeks. She acted just like I remembered some fifteen year old kids in high school. Ready, but what now, daddy?
I pushed her off the rock and kind of collapsed on her. I think she only knew what I was after by having watched Gorgoni. She hollered once when I cured her virginity, I supposed, then two or three more times in the thirty seconds I was able to stay with her. I scraped my knees and elbows in the dirt. I thought the arch in her back was odd until I found a rock as big as my fist under her. When I removed it, she arched the other way, almost lifting me off of my knees.
Except for a few little mumbles from Gorgoni, and maybe me, and some little, high pitched yiks, nobody changed formations for a long time. By dark, not one of us could" have fought off a two year old Jap with one front tooth.
Zach came back, hauling his girl by the wrist. She was naked, but she carried her skirt balled up under her arm possessively. It was kind of funny. We lit a cigarette and passed it around, talking among ourselves like schoolboys, safe in the knowledge that the three girls couldn't understand a word we said. They yikked among each other too, so we were about even when we finally rolled up in the Jap netting. We slept with our pants at half mast and the girls slept on their skirts, not in them.
I woke up in the morning first. I sat up and looked around me. Then I started to laugh. If there is anything funnier than a dirty, bearded GI wrapped up in a mosquito netting with his pants down around his ankles, I couldn't remember what it was. Particularly when he hasn't any reason for it. All three girls were gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Two days later, the roast duck at the Jap outpost caught up with Gorgoni. If bullets are deadly, tropic dysentery is worse. Fortunately, we were on the downhill side of a mountain. Before we got to the valley, Gorgoni's clothes were a stinking mess and he didn't have enough strength to walk, let alone carry his gear.
I had six bismuth pills from the junk in my ditty bag, now wrapped in the Jap field pack. He took three of them and drank a canteen of water, but we knew it was going to be hours before the bismuth stopped his diarrhea, if it did at all. It took us an hour and a half to go a couple of miles, helping Gorgoni over the rough spots. When we reached the bottom, there was the blue line river, just like the Jap map said it would be. It wasn't quite as wide and deep as the other one, but it would float a raft. If we had had a raft.
"Look, you guys," I said wearily. "This was bound to happen. We're only lucky it waited this long. And we can all go down at any moment. Even with a cork up his kiester, Gorgoni won't have enough muscle to walk for two or three days. We're all through walking. We just quit the Army and have joined the Navy! We'll sack out and build a raft in the morning."
"Out of what?" Zach asked, eyeing Gorgoni.
"Now look, big man. You had enough muscle to steal a Burmese woman, so there's no reason why you can't steal a Burmese trick. There's bamboo and there's vines. We'll make a raft."
"Bamboo is as hard as iron, even green!"
"It'll shoot in two and it'll burn in two," I said.
"This map doesn't show a village for at least ten miles in any direction."
"I'm sorry, fellas," Gorgoni murmured. "I can't help it."
We stripped out and took a bath in the stream. I opened all of the K-rations and we gave Gorgoni the two packs of cheese we found. Zach and I stuck to the K-rations, suddenly aware that if either of us got dysentery, we were in bad shape, but good. They tasted American, if not very flavorful. We all had a complete cigarette apiece, too. We flopped out for the night, but Gorgoni was up every half hour. He finally didn't bother to put his pants back on. Or he didn't have the strength, one.
And of course, logic and daylight showed us that we weren't going to either shoot nor burn a fifteen inch bamboo stalk down. I got back on the map. It showed a village about ten or twelve miles upstream. I couldn't tell what size it was, nor if there should have been a circle around it.
"Look. I'm going up to the village. Zach, you hustle this dribbling wop into the bush and stay low. You got food and ammo and five cigarettes. If I don't come back in forty-eight hours, do the best you can with the tools you have. If I can get there, find a raft and come back, I'll make it not later than tomorrow afternoon. Gorgoni, I just demote you to private. Zach is the boss until I get back-or until you can either outrun him or outfight him. Got that?"
"Can you make it alone?" Zach asked.
"Maybe better alone. But Gorgoni can't. Stay in the bushes. Don't shoot at anything unless you're shot at, or about to be shot at. Don't waylay any chance Burmese, even if she's a whizzer. Just stay put and wait."
-"Leo, you won't keep going-without us?" Gorgoni asked. "If I have to," I replied. "Good luck, Sergeant," Zach offered.
"Keep your powder dry, kids."
* * * * * *
I recognized the village at once. We had used the Catholic mission for a scale control point, it's square, mud and straw roof a definite standout in the jungle blanket. I couldn't remember the name of the little town. I didn't know whether or not the priest was still in business, or even if he spoke English. The orient was full of missionaries, and a lot of them were from European countries. But if the priest was still there, he'd be civilized enough to be helpful. But I didn't barge in. I looked for that Jap patrol base, and the machinegun nest, controlling up and down traffic on the stream. I couldn't find it. There were several rafts tied up on the beach, but the thing that made me the happiest was the old clinker-built row-boat drawn up on the mud. It had two oars shipped in the gunwales. There were maybe a hundred mud huts showing behind the compound wall, which tied into the side of the mission. I could see women and kids and a few men doing some nothing type things along the bank of the stream.
I could steal the boat after dark and go back unheralded. I could maybe find some help from the buck. At least, I could find out a little something about where I was, and where the Japs were. If the priest were dead, or gone out of the country, I could shoot up any opposition and take my chances. The debate was stupid. I had known from the minute I'd seen that cross on top of the ugly square building exactly what I was going to do. So I did it.
I got out into the open before the Burmese along the bank saw me. They scuttled for cover. Two ran into the mission, so I knew the priest was still in business. In fact, he met me at the front door. He was big and bushy and bald. His black frock was faded grey. The cross dangling from a massive rosary was solid gold. He looked at me, his eyes like firebeads under bushy white brows.
"God is good!" he announced in crisp, English accents.
"Long live the king," I laughed. We shook hands.
"I can't believe it," he roared. "An American soldier! You have come far, my son? Ah, you are tired and hungry and sick! Come in. You are safe here. There are no Japanese for at least fifteen kilometers up-river. Oh, Mary be praised," he sang. "A pilgrim!"
He must have noticed how little attention I paid to the crock of holy water and the little altar. He did his habitual bend and wig-wag and led me to his quarters behind the altar wall. He chip-chipped to a fat Burmese woman and she flew outside. He sat me down in a hand-lashed rattan chair and popped with a big bottle of wine. I took off my helmet. I leaned the subgun against my knee. I took the crockery cup of wine and it was good. He let me take a second, big and tasty swallow before he pulled up another chair and sat down, his thick body leaning forward enthusiastically.
"There will be food in minutes," he promised. "You must tell me how you have come to my lost parish! I am still in shock!"
I told him a hell of a story. I told him I was a Marauder, separated from Merrill's column many weeks before. I'd gotten lost, but had headed west by instinct, knowing India was west.
"My first thought was that you were a deserter," he admitted. "It would mean nothing to me. We will all meet our dear judge at the proper time. You're not a deserter, Sergeant?'
"Sergeant Gordon. No, father. This is good wine."
"More," he enthused.
"Take it easy! I've been a teetotaler for some time!"
"You will stay here, rest for as long as you care to. If the Japanese come, they will not find you. My people will not tell. Ah, I will be so happy to have you with me!"
"How come they let you live here?"
He shrugged. "I hurt no one. They tolerate me as they tolerate the Burmese. The Lord has been good to me and mine here."
"Sure," I agreed.
"Rest now. I will see about some hot water that you may wash. Then we will have some hot food. I have deer meat! And coffee! Drink your wine and I shall return."
I got up and walked over to a double window and looked out. Jungle. I walked around the room, looking at the trappings and little personal things. Then I got to the bookshelf. I did a double take. Every book on the shelf was titled in German. I sat down again and tried to remember his accent. All Europeans who speak English, speak it with a British accent. He hadn't said he was British. And he had known instantly I was an American. I could have been Irish, Australian, British of Canadian. I had opened my mouth and this bush-faced priest had known instantly I was a GI. I didn't think he'd been out lately, and I was damned sure no Americans had been in here. The Japs might have tolerated a German, but never an Englishman. I wished I'd waited until dark and stolen the damned boat on the Q.T.
* * * * * *
His name was Ludwig Andrew Gunther and he made no bones about being German. He was sixty-one years old and had been in the Burma bush nearly thirty-five years. I ate his food and drank his wine and worried about Gorgoni once in awhile. But I didn't change my story and I said nothing about the two tired and dirty and half-sick men in the jungle, ten miles south. There are times when only an idiot stands up and declares he is this or that, trusting in honesty and straightforward words simply because they sound good. I also did not put too much faith in his vestments. If he was sucker enough to put faith in my uniform, that was his business. I had a hunch we were both in the same boat. We stood for something, right after we took care of our own hides.
After I had a hot bath in a huge, slightly dented galvanized tub, he asked me if I wanted to shave again.
"I have a safety razor in my gear," I told him. "But I only shave when it gets to be a problem. A half inch of beard saves my face from bugs and brush."
"Ah, yes," he agreed.
He didn't miss a damn thing. If I'd been in the jungle as long as I'd said, my beard would have been three inches long. He looked at my Jap rifle, my subgun, and the field pack. I had the distinct feeling that the fewer stories I told him, the fewer lies he'd discover. He pointedly did not want to talk about the war nor the issues involved. When he heard that I had been in the CBI for nearly two years, he launched into some very interesting stories of his years in Burma. At least, his stories gave me a chance to think about what I had to do.
By the time my watch said eight-thirty, I was dead. The wine and the food and the bath had done more damage than the jungle. Gunther saw me slipping and he immediately had the fat Burmese woman set up a charpoy in the space between the altar and the rows of rough hewn benches used as pews. He casually stacked my gear, the Jap rifle and my subgun against the wall in his combination living room and study.
"You are safe here," he assured me. "You have earned the sanctuary! Tomorrow, the world will look brighter to you, and you may then consider what lies ahead. Is this not a good plan?"
"Fine, Father," I said. "But I'll sleep with Betsy, if you don't mind." I picked up the forty-five belt and the subgun with casual humor and we walked out into the church. The bed was beautiful. It had a mattress and jute sheets, slightly tan from no bleaching, and there was a pillow.
We said a lot of nice things to each other and he made a final prayer and wig-wag. The only light in the place were some oil lamps on the altar. They were hammered brass and reminded me of the story about Aladdin. I was tired, but I was vibrating with caution. I'd removed my boots before the hot bath and had been sitting in his quarters in my stolen Jap socks. I had my forty-five and the subgun and my fatigue uniform. But the pack, the rifle and my helmet were in Gunther's room. The last full clip for the subgun was also in his room. It was pretty obvious that I was stuck until morning, unless I just went in and took over.
Gunther had it in his mind that I was going to stay awhile. If my story had been true, there would have been no great reason why I shouldn't have stayed, at least until I was caught up on food and sleep. But aside from Gorgoni and Zach, lying down there in the bug infested jungle, with bad food and not enough of it, I suspected the good padre, his Burmese buddies, the whole routine. The only person I'd met since leaving New Delhi who hadn't turned out bad was now fish food, shot to hell and floating down a Burmese river, her life counting to no one but me, and only a little to me.
But I couldn't stay awake. The comfort collapsed my worry, shut off my alarm system. Fortunately, the wine I'd had set my kidneys to working and I woke up about three-thirty in the morning. The little lamps were still glowing. The chapel smelled like burning pigs. I got out of bed, slipped my fatigues back on and belted the forty-five around my waist. I was some rested, but my nerves ignored the deep weariness. On stockinged feet, I went to the front door of the chapel. It was barred on the inside and I slipped the stout Sal wood plank out of the quadruple cleats. The door opened with only a tiny squeak.
I was used to the jungle noises. No lions or tigers, just the buzz of the dollar-sized beetles, the squealing of little things, and the call of the night birds. I stood to one side of the door and added the sound of a waterfall to the cacophony. Feeling better, I looked around. A half-moon put shape to the huts and the rafts and some miscellaneous shapes of Burmese engineering. There were some poles stuck in the bank and some nets hanging from them. There was even a little dock. But the beautiful clinkerbuilt rowboat was gone.
I got mad. I could see one of the priest's faithfuls rowing upstream to the Jap outpost, yikking about the yank snoozing in the chapel. The Japs let Gunther live. In return, he might have to do them a favor or two. And everything else being equal, I didn't give him credit for wanting to risk his happy home of thirty-odd years just to save the hide of a soldier theoretically fighting his native country. He had undoubtedly caught me in a lie or two, or at least, had been aware that I wasn't telling all the truth. For all he knew, I was point-man for a column of Marauders. But mostly, I was just mad at having lost the boat.
By the time I'd sock footed it back into the chapel, logic set in and it became obvious that a runner on foot could make the Jap outpost a damned sight faster than a man could row a boat upstream. I went back out and looked at the river bank again. Both sides. No boat. I went back into the chapel, reset the door bar, then checked my forty-five. Automatic in hand, I went to the door leading into Gunther's living quarters. It was unlocked. I went in, eyes squinting to avoid furniture. I found my pack and the Jap rifle and my boots.
I sat down on the floor and laced my boots on. I holstered the forty-five and checked the silence. Then I soft-shoed it into the chapel and got the subgun. With the familiar weight of it in my right hand, I went to the door of the padre's sleeping room. I tried the through-latch and of course it wasn't locked. Inside the room, the gentle snore of the beared man reassured me. I almost backed out and went back to bed. Then I remember that boat.
With the Cutts right under his nose, I said, "Gunther!"
He just kept on snoring, but a hard thing poked right into my groin. When we were each on the end of a gun, he quit snoring and opened his eyes. I looked down at the big revolver he had raised from his side. It was a shape under the jute sheet, but it was for real.
"Be very careful, Sergeant," he warned me.
I was. I twisted like a dervish, using my hip to lever the revolver barrel past me. At the same time, I let go three slugs out of the subgun. I guess he'd neglected to cock his revolver. It fell to the plank floor. So did his hand. As I went back out through his living quarters, I snatched up the pack and forgot the Jap rifle. I went out through the chapel, flipped the doorbar and slithered out into the clearing, the subgun ready. I backed across the clearing and was into the brush before the village came alive.
I crouched in a dense, leafy tangle and waited. Burmese voices raised a din, and in a minute or two, they found the open chapel door. There were no lights so all I could make out were flailing shapes and flashing highlights. I guess maybe two dozen men rushed into that chapel. I saw a light flicker in the little windows of the dead priest's study. Some wog had carried one of the altar lights into the room.
If you can't see, you hear good. I heard the shouting change tone. It occurred to me that if I sprayed the dozen or so men now clustered around the chapel door, I could get the rest of them as they came out. I was already sure there were no firearms, except that revolver which hadn't fired, in the village. At least none of the excited Burmese showed a weapon. Then I decided that a clearing full of dead Burmese was of no value. It wasn't a question of whom I was mad at. But I figured the villagers might be real unhappy about losing their benevolent priest. I wasn't sorry for what I had done, but I couldn't help relating Father Gunther with some old tear-jerking movies I'd seen. So I waited, protected first by the brush and the darkness, and secondly by the unbelievable havoc I could raise with a Thompson submachine gun among the unarmed Burmese.
The darkness disappeared almost instantly. As the natives poured out of that chapel, the back of the building burst into flame. The din of voices suddenly became rhythmic, in a strange way, and the men spread back from the flames into a near circle. Then I could see the groups of women and kids behind the men. Sal wood and thatching make a lovely fire, especially when started in a natural chimney like the mud walls of that church. The blaze of light cast mad shadows across the stream and I could see Burmese coming out of the jungle like ants. Sparks and lightly blowing tufts of flaming thatch flew over and caught the roof of an outbuilding. No one seemed to care. There were bare, dancing backs within twenty feet of me as the heat drove the screaming natives back in an ever enlarging circle. I finally got it through my head that they were celebrating, because in the light of the fire I saw that the men were laughing as they danced.
I decided I'd never know why they were happy Gunther and his mission was burning. Maybe they resented his religion, maybe they resented him. It was obvious that I was all through in that village. They'd never go back to sleep, not until the fire died and their emotions settled. I had about as much chance of stealing a raft as Gunther had of holding mass in the morning.
I began to inch back, but caution was of no use. They knew I'd shot the priest and they knew I couldn't be very far away. But the unholy glee continued without care about where I was. The light from the fire penetrated the jungle about two hundred feet. Then I was all through. I pushed back into the brush away from the path I could no longer see and hunkered down. It would be dawn-grey in an hour or two. I felt pretty good. No matter what the bishop thought, I'd apparently made a lot of people very happy by blowing Gunther's brains all over his pillow. But I was still sore about losing that boat.
* * * * * *
The damned jungle was like a beehive. Five or six times before I'd reached the area where I thought my two boys should be, I had to hit the brush as men in twos and threes hustled upriver toward the village. I heard drums, too, for the first time since I'd hit the silk out of that transport. Several of the men carried short bows and tipped spears. In every group there was one with a bright red or yellow rag wound about his head in a loose turban. If all the other trails were as busy as mine, I guessed the village would look like Los Angeles by noon.
I wasn't sure of my destination until I came to the creekbed we'd followed down the mountain. That menat I was at least a half mile below where I'd left Zach and Gorgoni. Carefully I doubled back, trying to spot the place where they had gone into the bush. Then I saw something I'd missed on the way downstream. There was a little edge of sand along the stream. It was scuffed up. Boot tracks, big and heavy. Belonged to Zach, I was sure. I was just about to push up into the thickets when a very clear, very precise voice behind me said, "Sahib sir!"
Thigh deep in the water, his head almost hidden by the overhanging brush, stood a young Burmese. He wore a green breechclout, a short flowered half-vest and one of the brilliantly colored head rags. He was light skinned and I thought his mouth looked very vivid. He never flinched when I turned the subgun on him.
"You may cross here, Sahib," he said in perfect English. "Your men are on this side. Please not to shoot, sahib."
"Zach!" I bellowed.
"B Company!" it came back from about two hundred feet into the jungle behind the Burmese. I unbuckled the forty-five and holding it and the subgun high, sloshed out across the stream. Halfway across the forty feet of water I was up to my chin. Then it got shallow. The Burmese man was a pretty thing. He smiled and held the branches aside and I climbed up on the shore. The clinker-built rowboat was sitting there as pretty as you please. The oars were lying thwart-ships. They were dry. There was some wet in the bottom of the fourteen-foot tub. Nothing else.
I motioned for the man to go ahead of me and I followed him with the subgun aimed at the middle of his brown back. He wore thonged sandals that squished like my boots did. He went around a cluster of trees and dropped down into a hollow and there was the damndest camp of gypsies a man ever saw.
Zach was standing there, his shirt off, a big smile cutting his red beard. Gorgani was sitting with his back up against a tree, also smiling. There were two more Burmese men not quite as fancy as my guide, and five of the best looking young girls I ever saw. They were decked out in brass and silver and bright cloth, and the cloth went up over their bulging breasts.
They sat a little distance from the men, quiet and unsmiling. Their silk black hair was pilled high, Burmese fashion, and it sparkled like polished night.
"Well, excuse me for buttin' in," I said to Zach.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Gorgoni, how's your bowels?"
"Just call me goose Gorgoni," he said. "It's easing up. But I got a mouth full of fever blisters."
I turned to the Burmese who had flagged me in. "Who are you?"
"He's from the village where-"
I shut Zach up with a raised finger. "Let him tell me. If it isn't the same story he told you, he gets it! First, what's your name?"
"Vinose Kutra, sahib."
"The boat. Where did you get it?"
He raised his eyebrows. "It is Father Gunther's, of course."
"Was Father Gunther's. He's dead."
"We did not know," he said without blinking an eye.
"You saw me come into the village yesterday?"
"Yes, sahib. That is why we can be here."
"Tell me about it, bright-eyes."
"I am Vinose Kutra. He, Samthong, is my brother. And he," pointing to the squat Burmese in ragged white linen pants, "is Nokang Atma, boatkeeper. The women are from the village. We were escaping, sahib."
"Do tell. From what?"
"The evil priest, sahib. He of the mild eyes and the beautiful words. He who once blessed our people and tended our sick and made us believe in his God.
He who pretended to protect us from the Japonese, but who made us safe by bartering our women for our miserable existence. I am glad-"
"Never mind the he who's for a minute. How close is the nearest Jap outpost?"
"Upwater, some eighty kilometers, perhaps. Down-water, not less than one hundred. Where this Bingha Nam meets the brother stream and flows south to the great Irhwud River, sahib. We are safe here, sahib, have no fears."
"I'll keep my fears, if you don't care, son. Go on with your story."
It was a weird and wonderful tale he told. Evidently I had guessed correctly without any real knowledge of Gunther. He had been in the bush for more than Vinose Kutra's lifetime. Up to three years ago the bush-faced old padre had been the idol of the central Burmese hills. Vinose was wordy and his speech was flowery but I got the picture of a determined, righteous and powerful man who had carved himself a parish in the wilderness and dedicated his life to holy service. Vinose himself was a product of the old priest. He had been sent to Rangoon, educated thoroughly in academic basics, and brought back to the village to be the nucleus of a new economic way of life for the padre's parishioners. They had built a school and had made some progress. Gunther had even settled for a brand of Christianity halfway between Catholicism and paganism, more to hold his subjects than to be dogmatic.
Then the Japanese had come swarming down into the valley and the world had turned upside down.
With his back to the wall, his little empire threatened, Gunther had succumbed and traded his religion for his safety. He had been given the choice of going down the river, taking a slug in the guts, or using his control of the valley in the interests of the Imperial Japanese Army.
"I can not know how he thought, sahib. I can only know what he did. And what he did was only to save himself and his position. Left to our own devices we would have suffered no more than any other Burmese village. The Jafonese do not wage war on Burma, and our people are not unduly harassed. Our food is stolen and our women are defiled, but in the end we have our lives. Gunther gave them our food and blessed our women as he shipped them to the Jafonese. He made great sermons on the sacrifices needed by weak people in the struggle for life."
"You mean the old boy was pimping for the Japs?" I asked.
"I do not know the word, sahib," Vinose Kutra apologized. "When our village could no longer supply young women for the monthly quota, he ordered them in from the hillstations. Some came back, sad and broken and often pregnant with evil. Others reveled in the bounty provided by their shame. Others died desperately. These women were to go upwater this sunup. Nokang Atma and my brother were to take the boat and the five women to the outpost. While you, sahib, occupied the attentions of Father Gunther, we escaped."
He looked around at the other Burmese. They showed no sign of understanding what he had said, but they understood his intent.
"Sounds good," I admitted. "How come you didn't escape before, or stick a sharp rock through Gunther's head?"
Vinose looked sad. "In such times one does not know who can be trusted. Father Gunther had many spies, devious ways. And we are not fighters, sahib. Violence is not our way of life."
I thought this was reasonable, seeing as how a handful of Japs had put the choker on their country. "What were you going to do when you got downstream to the next Jap outpost?"
"No, sahib. We would not go that far. A day south would have brought us to a great gorge to the west. In that gorge we would have found safety among the hill people."
"Only they ran right smack into little of Zachary," Zach laughed. "I damned near fell over when he spoke English! Didn't give me any argument at all. Even told me he'd seen you go into the priest's joint. What happened there?"
I looked at Gorgoni who was an Italian and a Catholic, in a loose sense of the word. But he had heard the story along with Zach and me, and if it made him unhappy, it was no fault of mine. So I told them what had happened. Vinose Kutra got real excited. When he heard me describe the fire dance, he yikked wildly to the others. The women smacked their palms together and the boatman leaped to his feet and did some kind of a bow with palms pressed together.
"You murdered a priest," Gorgoni said suddenly.
"I killed an old fink who was going to hand me over to a Jap outpost. I shoved the subgun into his mouth and gave him three slugs. And just before I did it I didn't bother to ask him to bless a wife stealing, daughter humping dago who was stinking up the countryside a few miles down the trail. Now, if you feel like it, we'll all excuse you, sergeant, and you can go behind the rocks and say your beads. Use the cartridges out of the Jap belt you took off the heathen. They'll count you out of purgatory."
"Aw Leo, lay off," Gorgoni growled.
"Sure, buddy boy. But let's remember everything we learn in this world, huh? Part of it isn't enough!"
CHAPTER SIX
I didn't trust Vinose Kutra a damned inch. One, he was a Burmese and therefore spineless. Two, he was an educated Burmese which made him dangerous. Three, he had already changed flags two or three times. His crack about being able to live with the Japs had not gone unheard by my grimy ears. He wanted to go back to his village now that Gunther was dead. He made a point out of remarking how his people needed his brains and his education. He didn't look like a king to me, but he showed some of the tendencies. Which was neither here nor there. The question was, would he go back to the village, send a runner to the Japs and get himself elected headman on the strength of our perforated hides?
"You wouldn't care to try for Chittagong with us, huh?" I asked. "I'll get you a commission in the British Colonials. I might even use my influence to get you a couple of nights with the Commandant's white wife. Sound like anything, Vinose, old boy?"
"Chittagong?" he echoed with horror. "It cannot be done!"
"You don't know Leo!" Zach laughed. "We'll make it."
Vinose chattered to his brother. I looked at the five sleek cats sitting in a neat huddle. They were listening to Vinose so they didn't feel me undressing them. It didn't matter much to me what Vinose decided. I was already loading those dandy dames into the old boat. Downstream to the gorge Vinose had mentioned. Up the gorge to whatever. I almost believed what Zach had said about getting to Chittagong. And if we never got there, we'd have a short life and a merry one.
"Sahib, we must go back to our people," Vinose decided.
"So go," I told him. "The path is on the other side of the water. You make a left turn and keep going."
"We need the boat, sahib."
"Don't we all?"
"Sahib, the women cannot walk so far," he complained.
I grinned, remembering how Boobsy had wibble-wobbled through the jungle. I also swung the subgun around a little, a bit sore at the sick pitch he was trying to make.
"Vinose, this chopper made you rich," I told him. "Now, you just trot on back to your town and take over like a good lad. The two boys will keep you company. We'll keep the women."
"The women, sahib?"
"We got to have somebody to shoot in case you send for the Japs. Strikes me you'd be a highly unpopular headman if your people thought you'd got these nice girls all dead."
He'd have made a marvelous poker player. "I can not think you could use more than three," Vinose said. "Is it not logic, sahib? The Jafonese will never know, sahib. I give my word."
I knew then that he lied all the way down the line. The five women hadn't been rescued damsels. They had been bribe material so he and his brother and the well muscled boatman could get past the Japs downstream. Now, with Gunther dead he could have used the five kittens to buy his way into the top job in his village. It amused me a little. Even in a B movie he'd have been a real villian. Whom the hero should have filled full of lead on the spot. Only I was no damned hero.
"Okay, Vinose. Three it is. You explain it to them. And you haven't fooled me yet, so don't try it now, huh?"
I winked at Zach who was tongue-tied. Gorgoni rolled over on one hip and got to his feet with some difficulty. Vinose told the five girls some kind of a story. They looked at us, then at Vinose, then at each other. One of them said something to the girl beside her. I thought Vinose was going to blow his top. He leaped forward and belted the mouthy girl, knocking her off the rock. He raised his two hands, clasped them together in the manner of an Oriental about to clobber someone and Gorgoni shot him in the belly. The boom of the forty-five made the trees shake.
The girl Vinose had smacked got up, rubbed her face and spit on the bloody genius. Samthong looked down at his brother, turned and skittered off into the brush. He got away simply because there was no particular reason for killing him.
"Some country," Gorgoni growled. "Let's get out of here, Leo. I've got a notion to shoot this bastard too!"
"Easy, Zach. Take this character down to the water and make him help you float the boat. Can you make it, Gorgoni?"
"You damned right I can make it!"
"You damned right I can make it, sergeant!" I snapped.
It was time for the girls to trun. We couldn't have caught more than one of them, and I wouldn't have bet on that. They just stood looking at us. I reached down and tossed my pack at the first one. It almost knocked her over but she recovered. She had a little sack of her own. She put my pack on her head and carried hers. I pointed to Zach's pack, then to Gorgoni's. The last girl in line stepped forward and picked up one pack. The middle girl took the other one. I went over and picked up the two rag sacks left, gave one to each girl and thumbed toward nowhere. Then I started down toward the stream. Gorgoni hobbling behind, his sore butt giving him a peculiar gait. I looked back and all five girls were following us.
You never know what you're doing right or what you're doing wrong in the Orient. I had gotten to the point where I no longer cared about people, customs nor patriots. Gunther had lied, Vinose had lied. Five farm girls in the United States would have taken off like turpentined cats in the same situation. I did believe that they all followed us because whatever we offered was better than what they could expect elsewhere. It never occurred to me that we represented any girlish dreams of conquering heroes. They weren't lost in the jungle. We were. They weren't afraid of us directly because all we had done was kill a man who threatened them with hurt. But privately I had to agree with the dead Vinose. We had use for three women, but not for five.
Zach was standing in the bow of the old boat when we got down to the water. He had one oar braced in the mud to hold it to the shore. There was no sign of the boatman., "Hell, he's half way home by now," Zach said when I asked him. "Hey, all that fluff?"
"Don't kid yourself, buddy. I've a hunch we are just an escape route. The minute they can find a better deal, they're gone. Get in the damned boat, Gorgoni, and if you got to go, get it way out over the gunwale!" I turned around and looked at the chorus line. They followed Gorgoni into the boat as if they were on a string. I picked up the other oar and shipped it into the sculling lock in the transom.
"Push off, matey," I said to Zach. "And mind the reefs. Rocks to you, farmboy!"
"Aye, aye, sir," Zach laughed. The girls laughed too, but I'm sure it was just a friendly gesture on their part.
* * * * * *
My transom oar was useless. Zach could keep us straight with the oar at the bow, and we went along at maybe a mile or two an hour. It was real fine. No muscle, no fuss, no brush in the face. Gorgoni took the last three bismuth pills I had and we lit one of the last five cigarettes. Actually we had almost gotten rid of the tobacco nerves. I sat in the stern like Captain Bligh with the subgun across my knees, relying upon Gunther's statement that the Japs were way down the stream. As little trickles of sidestreams came into the main course, the water deepened and became a little swifter.
The five dollies never said a word. Finally I reached out and got a slim wrist and pulled one of them onto the transom seat beside me. By then I'd lost track of what was pretty and what was not. She was just a girl, with breasts and knobby knees and the most beautiful hair I'd ever seen. Gorgoni turned around and put his arm over the one closest to him.
My thoughts were about a half-inch wide. There was nothing in the world but now. I couldn't remember how many days had elapsed since the aborted jump. I wasn't even sure what our objective was, except to evade the Japs. With three hundred miles to make into British territory at Chittagong, we had as much business with five Burmese women as we'd have had with collie dogs or gum machines.
We thought we were lucky because we were alive. But real luck would have been paratroopers and a mess tent and a change of clothes. A hundred thousand men in the CBI would have given a year's pay to be within nose distance of a woman, and we had a girl and two-thirds apiece. Something else was bothering me too. Up to a few days ago, I'd been a technician with all the background the term implies. I had an acute sense of the law of averages. I had a hunch we were due for a miss out. It happens at all dice games, all the time.
"The berries, huh, Leo?" Zach said over his shoulder.
"You need a spell, give me a holler," I told him. "That wog said the gorge was a day south. Giving the boatman a fair hand at the oars, I'd say we ought to make the gorge by tomorrow night. By then, crappy boy here ought to be able to walk some. How about it, Gorgoni?"
He had his arm around the Burmese girl. He turned and winked. "If I can't walk tomorrow, it isn't gonna be the drizzles that stop me! I should have run into you years ago, Leo. You're the best broad hustler I ever knew!"
I tried to figure out how to talk to a guy like that and had to give up. I looked over at the woman beside me. She was just sitting, kind of hanging on to her knees, looking a hole in Gorgoni's back. I reached over and pulled her rag down past her breasts. They jumped out just like I had thought they would. Nice and round and solid. The black aureoles looked flat and kind of undisturbed and the nipples were small, tidy and pulseless. If there had been room I'd have turned her over or under or something, just to see if I couldn't make her holler. All I did was chuckle when she looked up at me.
I think that Gorgoni would have climbed his woman except that he figured his drawstring wouldn't stand the strain. She was giggling and squirming and his thick fingers were busier than a hired hand's at milking time. Real shipshape cruise, that one.
* * * * * *
It was getting very dusky when I oared the boat into a thicket on the west bank of the stream. It had become apparent that we were better off in the brush than on a beach. All afternoon we had floated easily downstream, passing one or two huts, a shrine or two and sometimes a motley group of Burmese hiking up or down the path by the stream. We learned to just pass them. It would have done no good to hide, no good to rough them up. They looked, we looked and then the current moved us on. My insolence was growing and it seemed contagious. Zach and Gorgoni kept their weapons ready, then went back to playing with the girls when the tension relaxed.
We had the finest collection of brown breasts and laughing mouths imaginable. When I beached the boat under some overhanging bushes I had to get tough long enough to make Zach and Gorgoni help me drag the boat up into the leafy cover. I found myself suddenly deserted by the troops, with three giggling, slightly excited women on my hands. I found a place where there was deep grass and good visual protection. I took off my helmet and handed it to one of the girls, making a water dipping gesture first. Then I sat down and began to unlace my boots. Another of the dollies, her long, rigid breasts hanging out stiffly, pushed my fingers away and began to take off my boots. The third girl stacked all of the packs and then stood looking and listening and giggling at what was going on out in the brush. She was smooth and brown and her silver and brass jewelry was bright against her dark skin.
The kid came back with the helmet full of water and I peeled off my Jap socks and tossed them in the pot. The one who had unlaced my boots yikked wildly and ran off toward the river. When she came back she was wet to the waist. She used the wet skirt to wash my feet. I finally reached down and jerked the roll around her waist and she came up naked. She hunkered that way and washed my feet and legs as far as my fatigue pants would roll. I looked at the way she was when she hunkered and the three girls looked at the way my fatigues bulged and we all laughed.
I reached out and took hold of the naked foot-washer. She turned limp in my hands and I stiffened her out the only way I knew how. I heard the other two chattering and murmuring, but it no longer seemed important to keep things private. Nothing seemed important except to do what I wanted to do. I don't think the gasping, squirming girl under my rough clothes got much out of it. I was too rough and too quick and a bit too much for her. When I rolled away the other two girls laughed but the little one just lay there whimpering. I noticed then that she was bald, and a decided she was neither big nor old enough, despite the way her breasts looked. But I was sure she had not been virgin.
Closing up my fatigues I reached out and kind of pulled her into the circle of my left arm and held her that way. After a moment she stilled and I beckoned the other two and pointed to the kid in my arms. They took her a few feet away and I flopped back, resting and trying to think and not doing a good job of either thing.
Zach brought his woman back first, and a minute or two later, in came Gorgoni and his woman. We decided to get our bellies filled before it got pitch dark. To fill seven bellies we had three cans of Jap hash. The girls didn't like it very much and yikked their disapproval. We didn't like it either.
"How come we don't see any game?" Zach wondered. "I'm not about to eat a damned monkey!"
"I saw something today," I told him. "I don't know what it was. Looked like a big mongoose with a black head. Kind of like a raccoon. And there were some fish in the river."
"India was full of game," Gorgoni observed. "Maybe we ought to go hunting. Like quiet and sneaky. Leo, I'm so damned hungry I could eat one of those broads!"
He needed meat and solids too. I'd been through one of those dysentry sieges and I knew how weak they left you. But I couldn't see spending time hunting game until we had left the stream for the gorge. Experience had taught us that we were a lot safer on the high ground than in the valleys. Even if it was harder going. What we really needed was a neutral village and some time to coast. I looked around at the girls, now silent shadows in the night. If we went on until they were hungry they would find food. If we didn't make them mad at us and we found a village, they might yik their way into some food.
For an hour or so we kind of forgot about food and I don't think we made any of the girls mad. I warned the boys against the little girl I'd hurt earlier. When I finally fagged out she crawled into the curve of my belly and another one curled up behind me and I wrapped us all in the Jap netting and eventually we slept.
* * * * * *
The mornings were always terrible, nearly terrifying. You'd wake up, chilled and stiff and tired of the ground. There would be bugs in your clothing and itchy spots. Sometimes tough bites and swelling, particularly around your eyes and mouth. Sweat and dirt from the previous day was set like concrete on hands, face and neck. We didn't have a comb nor a toothbrush. Most of all, we had no cigarettes, no coffee and no food. We had girls running out our ears. They didn't understand us in the morning light, but we were a lot further from understanding each other.
We had hardly gotten our gear packed when it rained. At six o'clock in the morning the jungle steamed and we grunted the boat back into the water and Gorgoni tried his hand at the bow oar. I sat in the transom, subgun over my knees, the little girl under my arm. Stray cats, rubbing their fur against a stranger. She trailed her hands in the water and washed my face as the boat drifted downstream. My beard was nearly an inch long and was curling under my chin in dark brown ringlets. I figured it would be about two feet long by the time we reached Cittagong. If we did.
This was the way we came out into the open and there were two huts on a scabby looking patch of ground showing some cultivation. Two Burmese men were standing in front of one of the huts. But the gold mine was the cow and calf tied to a short stake just behind the huts. All of us knew what a cow menat to an Oriental. The Hindus call it a sacred animal, not for its true divinity, but because in the scheme of life a cow is a Hindu's second mother. I didn't know that a cow meant so much to a Burmese, but I was sure that the cow and her calf were real important to any family living on a bald plot of ground in the middle of Burma.
"Beefsteak!" Gorgoni grunted. "Hey, Leo, look!"
"Hold your fire," I told him. "Beach us, Gorgoni."
"Oh boy, food," Zach breathed.
"Everybody stay in the boat," I decided. "I'll give the ranchers a chance first."
I swung out of the boat and splashed ashore. The two men thought about running, but didn't have the muscle. I walked up, the subgun dangling off my right hand. I smiled. Nothing happened. I walked around the hut and there was nothing but the cow and her calf and a pile of dung-chips, which I knew would make a cow-frying good fire. I looked in both huts. No one. In front of the two men, neither young, but neither old, I smacked my lips and rubbed my belly and said, "Kana-kana," the Hindu term for eat, I'm hungry, you eat, we eat and just plain food. . The older of the two shook his head. I looked back and beckoned. One of the girls jumped out of the boat and came swiveling across the flat. She started chattering before she got there. I guess hunger is a universal language, like love and hate. The two men looked like they could give us love and hate before they could feed seven hungry people. I finally got the negative gist of their conversation so I walked around and stood looking at the cow and calf. That registered with the two men too, and their excitement was a little pathetic. Or would have been if we hadn't needed food so badly.
I grabbed the calf by the scruff of the neck and hauled it toward the hut. The cow couldn't have cared less. The calf didn't care very much. It went about a hundred pounds, I guessed. I held on to the calf and pushed the girl right into the older man's arms. He pushed her back. I pushed her again. She didn't seem to care. I suppose she thought I was trying to loan her out. I was trying to trade her off. The Burmese men didn't seem to think she was worth a hundred pound calf.
"Zach, you know how to butcher a veal cutlet?" I called.
He came up the slope on the run. He was grinning from ear to ear. "Sure. But it ought to hang until the body heat gets out of it at least. It's kind of bony, but it will eat!"
I pushed the girl again and the Burmese bawled her out and pushed her back. I blew the calf's brains out with a short burst from the subgun. The cow jerked her head free of the reed rope and took off up the hill. The two Burmese men took after her and we never saw any of them again.
* * * * * *
We kind of came unraveled. We ransacked the huts and the property for enough wood to get a fire going. Zach borrowed my sticker and skinned out the calf. He hung it in the doorway of the hut to cool out and drain. I don't know why we felt safe in that clearing. Any fool with a twenty-two could have laid out in the surrounding brush and picked us off like flies. Even when we used the charpoy in the other hut to bounce the girls around, we carried a weapon. By the time Zach decided we could barbecue the calf, the girls were naked as they day they were born and getting real used to being camp followers. All except the little one. She wouldn't let Zach or Gorgoni touch her. She stood in the door of the hut and sulked when I rolled an older one a time or two.
The girls found some stuff in the hut that looked like coarse cornmeal, and there were some other things they ooed about which I thought were sweet potatoes, or yams.
Zach went over to the brush and found some forked sticks. He chunked up that calf and threaded the chunks on a long stick and began to cook a yard of meat. I'd had a hunch the girls were vegitarians but the minute that calf started to sizzle they gathered around us and sniffed and laughed and yikked something fierce. Most of the time one of us kept a sharp eye on the stream and the up-end of the clearing.
We started to get heady, as if we'd had wine or something. Big, hair-faced men with no pants on, carrying a weapon slung over a shoulder or from a strap around an arm, lying around in the hot sun with five naked girls may not sound like paradise, but it wasn't too bad. Not with the promise of food filling the air with smell. A couple of the girls were real goers. Once or twice they got in some kind of an argument when Gorgoni or myself paid too much attention to one or another, but it was kind of fun to hear them argue. Made us feel real big. Made us real careless.
Even when some Burmese headed north along the stream we just stood up and shook ourselves at them like park dandies. The girls thought that was real funny. I haven't any idea what the Burmese thought.
We damned near killed ourselves eating. The veal was wonderful, we all agreed. The girls tried it, but didn't like it like we did. They ate some of the mushy stuff one of them had cooked up in crockery pots right down in the coals. We found a little rock salt, pinkish in color in the hut and that helped. We dumped two canteens and made coffee in them from the packets in the K-rations. By three in the afternoon we were all shot down. The calf was well wrecked, we were belly full and spine weary and there were no dishes to wash.
"Let's bed down here tonight, Leo," Gorgoni suggested. "Hell, no one's gonna bother us. I'm beat out," he laughed, rolling his girl around so he could lean on her.
"Sure," Zach agreed. "We are as safe here as anywhere."
I shook my head. "We are as hot as a pistol here," I told them. "I think this stream is the up end of the Mu River. That ridge line west is the high one. The Chindwin River is on the other side of it. The gorge our good and dead buddy, Vinose was so proud of probably cuts the ridge. It's off my Jap map so I can't tell. But we have to get on the other side of the Chindwin before we can expect to find friendly country. We could go down the Chindwin but that brings us back to the Irrawaddy below Mandalay-right into strong Jap territory. We've been drifting south as we mushed west. We could be less than twenty miles from a full sized Jap battalion or whatever the spooks call their forces."
"Then we ought to go on down this Mu until we hit the gorge and cut west again, huh, sergeant?" Zach asked.
I nodded. The sun was still high and it didn't take much muscle to drift in the old boat. "Break camp. Zach, wrap up enough of that meat to give us one more meal tonight. Put it in one of the ditty bags, I guess. Here, wrap it in this map-we're about done with it anyway! Come on, babes, put on your pants and let's roll!"
One more thing bothered me but I didn't speak of it. We had come perhaps a hundred and fifty miles, cutting right through Jap controlled country. We hadn't been gentle about it, either. I could imagine the area commander, gathering in the reports from outposts about three wild Americans charging through the jungle. It was only a matter of time until a big fat patrol, or several, latched on to our tails. And the lazy column of blue smoke wafting up from our barbecue fire was probably visibile from a dozen hilltop observation posts. Thinking it out I actually scared myself.
* * * * * *
The little exercise of packing up and moving down the river was what I needed. Both Zach and Gorgoni perked up too. The girls laughed and giggled and yikked as if we were returning from a Sunday picnic. All except the little one. She sat by my left knee and leaned against me and never said a word. From my book of female standards I thought she would be about fourteen. Ignoring her breasts, she could have passed for ten in the States.
We hit the gorge in three hours. It was hard to see, but the low sun shone down through a gap in the mountains, and the size of the nala told me there was a big runoff higher in the hills.
"Zach, take the boat down stream about a half mile. Push it into the current. Leave the oars inboard. Then come on back. We'll go on up the riverbed until we're out of sight and wait for you. Okay?"
"By myself?" he asked.
"Well, even if I sent a wire, your mother couldn't get here before tomorrow noon. Take off, corporal!"
"Aw crap," he mumbled. "How about taking my girl with me?"
I pushed him toward the boat. "You aren't back in one hour we go on without you. So move!"
Zach climbed into the boat again and pushed off from the bank. He looked back, then shipped both oars in the gunwale pins and began to row. He was about a hundred and fifty feet down the river and going good when one of the girls broke from the cluster and went skippity-gallop after him.
"Damn her," I growled.
"Aw, what the hell, Leo," Gorgoni laughed.
"Plenty what the hell. But I meant what I said. One hour, and we move on without him. Let's find ourselves a hole, kiddies."
We waited two hours. It got dark. I was in a raging temper. I stood alone down below the hole in the rocks where the rest of them waited and with my hands on my hips looked down the nala until I could see nothing but the gray of the rocks between two oceans of black-green. A dozen times I decided to go after Zach, and a dozen times I settled for calling his mother and father and sundry relatives a series of highly animalistic creatures.
By the time I knew he wasn't coming back it was loo dark for us to travel. I spent the night sitting below where Gorgoni and three women were huddled in fitful sleep. The little girl stayed with me. Sometime toward dawn I fell asleep against her warm belly. I just couldn't stay awake any longer.
We never saw Zach or the girl again, and when it got about half light we found out why.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The girl awakened me. Her fingers bit into my arm hard and sharp and only my innately tight nerves kept me from yelling. As I raised my head from her belly she held me from sudden moves. I looked down the nala where I wanted to see Zach, and there were at least fifty Japanese soldiers moving about like hounds looking for a scent not more than two hundred feet away. Lying as we were beside the rocks, with the underbrush at our back, we must have looked like boulders, if they could see us at all. They weren't shouting or talking very loud. I could hear a boot scuff, now and then, but they were sneaking, not marching.
I thought about letting the girl crawl up and warn Gorgoni, but no matter what she said to the girls, no matter what they tried to get him to do, the sergeant would never move until I told him to move. Or unless he heard them shoot me up. I motioned the girl to the bush and I turned over, my nose in her bobbing bottom as she obeyed my wave. Once in the cover of the bushes I scooted past her and came up on Gorgoni like a tiger. He awakened just before I clapped my hand over his mouth.
"Spooks-a jillion of them!" I husked. "Leave everything but the guns. We're going right up that cliff, buster!"
The little girl was yikking softly to the other three. I started up the side of the hill, Gorgoni right behind me. When I reached a little flat spot, I looked back. The little girl was slithering up behind us. The other three had evidently scattered. I could see the Japs moving slowly up the riverbed. They couldn't see us because the morning sun hadn't popped and we were on the dark side of the hill. It was a nasty climb and blind going. Gorgoni's breath came like the exhaust from a donkey engine and it was fear because we hadn't climbed that far.
For once the jungle helped us. The hillside was mostly rocks and we kicked a few loose, but the undergrowth kept them from rolling far and making a big noise. The gorge was only about a hundred feet deep there, and when we got up past the erosion level, the ground was gently uphill. I waved Gorgoni and the girl back, then crawled out to the lip of the cliff to see what was going on. They had found our gear. I could hear their sing-song voices rising and falling with various emotional tones. But they were strung out now, and about ten or twelve of them were moving up the gorge. The men started up our side of the hill. Three more started up the other side. They were going to walk the top of the canyon while the main patrol scouted the hundred foot wide nala. I heard a sudden flurry of voices, a scream, then two shots. I wondered which one of the girls they'd found. It didn't matter, I decided.
I scuttled back and took out, Grogoni at my heels, the little girl skipping and wobbling along just off my left shoulder. I knew I could kill the three coming up behind us, but I thought it was better to have three of them chasing us than the whole platoon. If we could get a mile along the canyon lip, then I could kill the trio and know there was time to get some distance before the bunch in the canyon could get up on the high ground.
Once or twice, I thought about Zach and I hoped they'd shot him quick. I even felt a little grateful for the calf and the girls. The time we'd spent with both items had cost him his life, but he had gone out with a belly full of dry spine, that was certain. With half a chance, he'd probably taken some nippos with him, too.
Finally, Gorgoni's finger clawed at my back. "Leo! I got to rest! Holy christ, I'm pooped!"
We kind of went to our knees together. "There's three of them coming up behind us," I whispered. "The rest are in the canyon or on the other wall. Shall we take them? It'll give us about a half hour's start."
"I got to rest!"
"Okay. Back up into those rocks. I'll go on about thirty feet. Don't turn that chopper loose until they are even with you. Take the last one in line, and then the second-if I don't get him. Make it good, boy, because you'll only have one chance!"
"Right, sergeant!"
He generated enough steam to crab-walk back into the rocks. I assumed the Nippos would have to take the same path we had taken. I stooped over and ran up the hill about thirty-five feet, moving until I had a dead shot down the path. The little kid I knocked into some bushes with the side of my arm. I racked the subgun into order, crouched and waited. I heard them before I could see them. The tread and scuff of six boots, climbing, hesitating, then climbing. Then I saw the leader. He was carrying his rifle at ready, and he had the bayonet fixed. Right behind him was a wog with a chopper, like the one Gorgoni was going to kill with. I hoped. The third guy actually had a saber in his hand. His chopper was shoulder slung. He would be the ranking NCO of the trio. Big man. I saw Gorgoni raise out of the rocks.
Five or six slugs out of the subgun knocked the lead man over backwards. I heard the higher pitch of the Jap machinegun as Gorgoni let go. I poured lead into the second man, and when he went down they were all down. I bounded forward and the third man in the column was cursing in Japanese and squirming. He was bleeding, but the light caliber machinegun had climbed and he was chewed up in the chest, but he wasn't dead. I slung the subgun and jerked that howling Nip to his feet. As Gorgoni came down to the path I turned and stumbled down to the lip of the cliff. I looked across the three Japs on the other side. They were ready but they hadn't seen me.
I took one step further and launched that yelling Jap out into the canyon. A gun spat across the canyon, then a chopper cut some brush below me. But I was on my way. It was funny, I thought, the minute I came up to Gorgoni I discovered his breath had come back.
"That'll hold the bastards for a few minutes," he decided.
"Few is right. Let's go! Come on baby!"
I had enough brains to snatch up the lead Jap's rifle. I knew Gorgoni had some ammo for the rifle, at least at last check he'd had some. But my subgun was getting short, and you don't fight much of a war with a forty-five automatic. I took the brush-catching bayonet off and pitched it into the bush. Then we ran.
* * * * * *
They'd never let us go and I knew it. We could run and they could walk, and in the end they'd get us. Or chase us into some of their almond-eyed friends up the mountain. There'd be a walkie-talkie in that clatch down in the canyon. And for all we knew there were a dozen places to scale the canyon walls. The bright sun jumped over the eastern hills and another danger appeared. Any time we went through thin cover the trio on the opposite wall of the gorge could pot us. I kept working higher and further away from the canyon. Gorgoni was in good shape now. Every once in a while the little girl would yelp when she hit a sharp stone, but she was more like a little ape than a woman when it came to the jungle-covered hill.
Every moment or two a shot rang out across the gorge. The Nippos were shooting at shadows because none of the slugs whistled close. I wondered if the patrol was still going up the nala, but it was too dangerous to check. I couldn't hear anything behind us, but the jungle could have been to blame for that.
We finally crossed a little clearing and I called a halt on the other side. It would give us a chance to burn up anybody close on our heels and I had to decide where we were heading.
"Zach got it, huh, Leo?"
"What else? Probably floated right into them."
"How come they waited until morning to come after us?"
"They just look like animals, buddy. Their eyes are no better than ours in the dark."
"I wonder if they got the other girls?"
"One, at least. This one is sure a scampering rabbit! Hey, Shorty, come here." I reached out and she kind of cuddled under my chest. Her feet were raw, bleeding. She had some real fine scratches on the brown hide of her ribs. Her hair had long ago come loose and was full of leaves and twigs. I kissed her, which didn't even cause her to blink, it not being a form of Burmese endearment, I supposed. I hugged her and she understood that.
"Okay, let's go. Nowhere to go but up, I guess. You okay?"
"Sure. I could use some water, though!"
We had been real smart. We had used his canteen and Zach's to make coffee in and Gorgoni's was still empty. I had about three swallows in mine. A calf and five girls had just about fixed my jungle crew for good. I gave Gorgoni one swallow then we went on. A few minutes later we could have taken on enough water for ten men if he'd cared to. We came to a stream rushing down into the canyon now a half mile below us. The stream was about two feet wide and maybe four inches deep. The only trouble was that over the years it had cut itself a ten-foot wide gulch about forty feet deep. It stretched up as far as we could see and down even further.
"Boxed!" I gasped and cursed it good. "Right in a corner!"
"Maybe it's better up higher."
"Try it!"
"What lousy luck," Gorgoni muttered. "We had it made, too."
We could have gone down into the stream bed but getting up the other side was something else. I followed Gorgoni and the girl followed me. It looked to me as if other feet had followed the same course, so I was in hope we were on some sort of trail. We climbed about two hundred feet and the only thing that changed was the width of the chasm. Gorgoni stopped and looked.
"I can jump that slot," he said confidently.
"I can too," I admitted. "Rosebud here would never make it."
"So?" he asked, with true gallantry.
She knew what we had in mind. She stood there looking at that gulch, which even if it weren't the Grand Canyon, was frightening. She looked up the creek but there was nothing to cheer her up, or me. I guessed the gulch was eight feet, add a foot on either side for crumbly ground. There was even room to run a step or two before take-off.
"Jump it," I told Gorgoni.
"Think it will hold on the other side?"
"Jump it, sergeant!"
"Toss my gear over after I get there," he said.
I took his forty-five and the Jap submachine gun. He backed into the brush, crossed himself and took a couple of big breaths. Then he went clump-clump and sailed. He hit the other edge with a foot to spare. He rolled once then scrambled to his feet, grinning like an ape. "Easy! Come on!"
I tossed his gear. Then I peeled mine and tossed it. Then I turned around and hefted the little girl. I guessed ninety pounds.
"No, Leo! You'll never make it!"
I looked over my shoulder. "I'm not going to jump with the kid," I said. "I'm going to throw her!"
I squatted, holding her left arm with my left hand. I put my right palm right under her little butt, took a big breath and snapped up straight. At the right moment I let go of her arm and turned in the mightiest effort I'd ever made. That little old Burmese kid sailed. She not only went across the gulch but when she sprawled against the panic-stricken Gorgoni, she knocked him down like a ten-pin. I shook a sprained wrist and backed off. The jump was easy and I stood looking down at Gorgoni and the kid, feeling pretty good again.
"If you pick 'em little, they not only can't fight back, they fly easy. Come on, man!"
We were still going with an eighth-pole lead, but we had to get somewhere or we were dead. It was the proper time for the Marines, or the cavalry or John Wayne, and all we got was rain. The thunderheads built up in minutes and down it came. We fought the slippery underfooting, the wet branches and extra weight and kept pushing always uphill. There was no more shooting behind us, but it didn't fool me a minute. They were going to run us down or starve us down, but I felt that they felt they would win.
* * * * * *
We eased into a steady stride and I tried to think. There was no real reason why we couldn't find a hole and crawl into it. Barring bad luck a thousand Japs couldn't find us. But there was no profit in crawling into a hole to evade John-Jappanee only to shake hands with starvation. And if they missed us at some checkpoint I felt sure they were counting on, they'd back-track. I didn't think any two or three of them would try rushing us again. They knew we had machine-guns and a nasty disposition. On the other hand, no platoon leader would scare out over two men and some choppers.
The single consolation was that they weren't as close to us as they had been. The jump over the gulch might slow them up a little. The fact that both Gorgoni and myself had been hiking the jungle for I'd forgotten how many days might give us a little edge over a line soldier. I was beginning to worry about the little kid, however. She was limping bad, and sometimes fell behind until we waited for her. When we did, she just nodded and kept on going.
And we were lost, but good. The sun still told us where west was, but we had no north and south bearing. We could go until we hit the Chindwin River, but then we'd have to go south. We simply didn't have the muscle to make it over the Naga Hills to Assam. I had one hope which I did not speak to Gorgoni about. We had hit the silk because the Allies, mostly British and Australians had begun to retake Burma. We'd hit the jungle because the Japs hit back, but that didn't mean the general campaign wasn't progressing. There was a chance the British Chindits had moved down the Chindwin River to about the spot where we'd hit the valley. There was a bigger chance I was dreaming.
No soldier knows who is" winning a war. He roots for the home team, curses his outfit and keeps going. The Japs had bombed out the Burma Road and the Allies had built the Lido Road to keep the supplies rolling. Mandalay was held by the Japs and Rangoon was in the hands of the British Navy. Where the line of control wandered through Burma, I had no idea. I had made maps of the entire country and I didn't know where I was. I just knew two guys and a tired little Burmese kid were getting mighty short-haired.
We approached the first ridge very carefully. About a hundred yards below the summit the kid yanked on my sleeve. She made wild gestures which when I translated them meant she wanted to go ahead and look. I decided that a Burmese girl was a Burmese girl and the Japs might not know she was part of our little army. But I also decided they might be mad enough not to care, and I remembered how Boobsey had looked, shot up and face down in the water. I shook my head and held onto her arm.
"We have to chance it, Gorgoni," I said.
"What happened to the gorge?"
"Probably petered out. Vinose mentioned some hill people he would be safe with. Even money there was a village down there. I think we are way ahead of that bunch, however. I'm worried about what they drummed up in the way of help with their walkie-talkie."
"Maybe they didn't have one."
"You're kidding! Would you take a fifty or sixty-man patrol out looking for Yanks without a walkie-talkie?"
He didn't answer. I passed him the canteen and he took a swallow. I gave it to the girl and she hesitated until I raised it and banged the neck against her lips. There was a swallow left for me and it tasted good. After the rain it had gotten hot. The ground was dry and our clothes were stiff with sweat-salt dried in every wrinkle. I smelled like a goat, and Gorgoni was worse.
"I'm going up," I decided. "You and the kid stay here. If you don't hear me whistle, stay low and do the best you can. If I get in a shoot-out, wait for my whistle anyway. Hold on to her!"
I tucked the kid in his big hands and grinned at her. Then I started up the last of the hill. Alone, I did some dancing, taking advantage of all the cover, just like they'd taught me in Fort Leonard Wood, a hundred years ago. I watched the branches, the rocks and the thin places in the brush. When I got to the ridge there was a broad, well-rutted road and it scared me. I checked it for maybe three or four minutes and there was no sign of a Jap. I got up and crossed the red-brown dirt and looked down through a break in the brush. About ten miles down into the biggest valley of them all was a great sprawling city. At least it looked like a city after the villages I'd seen. I could even see the sun flashing from the gilded pagodas. There was a river wandering through the valley and it had to be the Chindwin. I could see small clusters of huts all over the mountainside below.
I scouted the road for a quarter of a mile each way, stealing hot looks at the civilization below every time there was a break in the brush. Somewhere down in that maze of huts and temples there would be some British sympathizers. Maybe even some colonials. I was watering at the mouth when the five planes came floating up the valley. They were too far away for me to hear their roar, and I couldn't tell what insignia they wore. I assumed it was Japanese. The air blowing up the mountain from that valley was hot and humid. I tried to remember the names of the towns and cities on the Chidwin River, but none of the names I recalled established themselves.
I crawled off the road into the brush and whistled one, high and shrill. Then I watched the road. The girl got to me at least a minute ahead of Gorgoni.
"It's clean-for the moment. Go look over the edge."
He just stood over there, his submachine gun hanging limply, his back bowed with sudden exhaustion. I knew what he was thinking.
"Must be Mawlaik," he said when he turned. "Homalin would be further north. God, Leo, we made it!"
"Made what?" I countered, the two names ringing bells instantly. "Mawlaik has been in Jap hands for months! They blew out the Chindit barracks and wrecked the town a long time ago."
"Oh," he apologized. "What do we do now?"
"Get off this road. We'll go down the mountain a little ways and hole up and rest. Maybe we can think of something."
* * * * * *
We lay on our three bellies in the weeds and listened to three different Jap patrols go along the ridge. The mountain was swarming with them. Then a military carrier of some sort went bumping along the road. We were pinned down. I lay with one arm thrown over the girl's back to keep her from moving. I wondered what she thought about it all, and I decided she didn't think. If there had been one brain in that pretty little head she would have walked off that mountain and had dinner with the first Burmese family she found. Or something equally as peaceful.
It was hot, murderously hot. Ants and beetles found us and set us all to wiggling. But there was no chance to move, and there might be no chance until dark. Presently the five planes came back with five more in a second formation behind them. We heard them this time because they were flying at about our level and off the face of the mountain a mile. They were light Japanese bombers. They circled the valley and hit an airstrip out of our sight.
"Like Toyko!" I complained.
"Dirty split-tongued sons of mother-loving rat eaters!"
"Amen," I echoed. "That goes for these damned ants, too!"
Then I started to laugh. Not loud enough to bring on the Nippos, but loud enough to make the little girl twist her head and stare at me. Gorgoni looked too.
"What's with you, Leo?"
"A couple of weeks ago we bailed out of a transport into a nest of Japs. We've been running uphill and down ever since. We have now run into a nest of Japs about ten times as big as the one we ran from. Somebody ought to give me a medal!"
"Seems kind of dopey at that," he admitted. "Sergeant."
I ignored his inflection. My instinct was to wait until dark and hightail it back into the jungle. We had been lucky and we might be lucky again. The thing to do was strike north, ducking and dodging until we crossed over into Allied territory. It was somewhere up there, I was sure of that. Even before we had left New Delhi, the word had been that the second Burma campaign was a winner. The problem was weariness, hunger, and a dirty shirt.
The sound of a motor driven vehicle, and the planes, and the lure of that sprawling city,-Jap-held or not, was like a hundred magnets. We could fight the jungle and the Japs, or just the Japs. I knew there were vast areas of that city in which there were no soldiers. They could control the roads and the communications and the public buildings. They'd have certain off-limits areas like any other army. If we could get down into the native quarters, the poverty-stricken areas, there might be a chance to hide. It even might be possible for the girl, who now knew what we were afraid of, to talk us into a hideaway.
If this were really Mawlaik, then Assam was just fifty miles west, over the southern end of the Naga Hills. Assam was no bargain, but it was still dominated by the Allies. Finally I got around to facts. Our real problem was moving a hundred feet, not fifty miles. I had about thirty slugs left in the subgun and four seven-shot loads for my forty-five. Gorgoni couldn't have been much better off. Or worse off, depending on how it was said.
Little by little we moved down the mountain, more to get away from the ants than because we were going anywhere. The brush was thinner than before, and the moment we got down to where the land was only a slope, we were in trouble. The Burmese had cultivated as high as a man could stand upright without slipping downhill. A few hundred yards below the grain fields we could could see a canal and the miles of terraced rice paddies. Every so often there was a squat hut or two. The paddies were dry at that time of the year and only rain puddles glistened in the afternoon sun. There were rough roads, fit only for foot traffic and bullocks. We could see where they went because vegetation grew along the edges of the road.
"If we could get into one of those huts without alarming the citizens we could rest up and sweat out a plan," I mused aloud.
"So let's make for that one," Gorgoni suggested, pointing to a fair sized hut with a smaller, stable-like roof attached.
It was about a half a mile down and north of us. I tried to develop a route that would give us protection from the patrols which were, if noise and experience were indications, considerably above us. Evidently the Japs didn't think we'd gotten over the ridge. There was about a hundred yards of open field to cross, then we could get down into a hedgerow and screen our movements from spotters on the ridge. It was a long hundred yards. We were also a long rifle shot from the ridge. If they spotted us we could run for it.
"Leave the helmets," I said. "Crawl on your belly and keep your head down. Go a few feet and stop. Good luck, sergeant."
"We'll make it, Leo. How about your babe?"
"Get going. I'll take care of her."
He left his helmet under a bush where the sun wouldn't glint on it. I watched him snake out across the grass. He didn't have to be told to pick the hollows. Once or twice he disappeared in an erosion rut. I let him get about fifty feet out, then I turned to the girl. I pointed to the big hut. She nodded. Then I made walking motions with two fingers on the ground. I pointed down the hill, then across the face of the slope toward the hut. Then I pointed to her. I raised my eyebrows queriously. I guess it took a minute for it to sink in. I made the walking motions again and pointed to her. I pointed to myself and did a slithering motion just like the ones Gorgoni was making out there in the weeds. Again I raised my eyebrows. She sat up and nodded and kept on nodding. She rolled her skirt down off her breasts where she had put it to protect herself from the ants and branches. She made a kind of a basket out of the front of it and threw two or three handfuls of grass into the pocket. I leaned forward and kissed her and this time it pleased her. I had the urge to roll her over and give it to her one more time, but Gorgoni was already halfway to the hut.
"Go, baby," I said. "Make it good!"
She just got up and started walking straight down the hill. Every once in a while she stopped and grabbed a handful of grass and put it in her skirt. I hit the ground and started to crawl. I didn't look at the girl anymore. I simply didn't have enough guts to watch her fall if the Japs riding on the ridge didn't like the way her breasts flipped.
When I got to the hedgerow, Gorgoni was waiting, his face and beard caked with sweat and dirt. He waited for me to lead off down the little ditch and I lead. When we finally got to the hut the girl was standing in the doorway, her face one big toothy smile. There was no one in the mud house. It showed signs of occupation but whoever lived there was out hustling the daily bread.
CHAPTER EIGHT
All of a sudden the little girl took over. She found a crock of water and we stripped to the waist and washed. Both Gorgoni and I were a mass of little welts from the ants. Then she fed us some crazy looking stuff from a bowl sitting on a flat pile of rocks in one corner of the hut. There was one charpoy with the usual straw pallet for a mattress and some useless little things around the walls. There was also a little shrine in one corner and a clay figure I assumed to be a bum job of Buddha. Out the door of the hut we could see the whole valley, and it was deceptively beautful. The hut stank like someone had urinated on a hot stove. We didn't much care.
About half sun-down the girl stood in the door and watched. I presumed she expected the occupants of the hut to show up. I lay back on the charpoy, eyes half closed, watching her. Gorgoni curled up on the floor, using a hunk of rag he'd found for a bed.
When it got dark the girl came over and sat down on the rough-hewn rail of the charpoy. She yikked at me softly, shrugging her shoulders to explain her bewilderment at no one coming in from the fields. I patted her shoulder reassuringly. Gorgoni stirred but didn't come to.
I unwound the skirt around her waist. She pushed an impression. She sat there and kind of bounced on I slid my hand over her thigh, she moved her knees apart quickly. I guessed my first try at her had left her little butt back against my hip to get closer. When the muscles of her bottom while I played with her.
My wrist was still sore so I didn't do much of a job for her.
I was really only playing until the smell of her came up. Then the same thing happened to me that happened once or twice before. The feel of her smooth young bottom, her eagerness to please, seemed the most important thing in the world. I didn't know what the Burmese name for the soft, moist velvet was, but to me it represented one small but enveloping escape hatch. I opened my fatigue pants and kind of shuffled them down under my thighs. If I thought her first experience with me had frightened her, I was wrong. She wiggled up over me and kind of vibrated tensely while she waited for me to do the delightful, important arranging. More sensible now, I realized what my first unthinking charge had probably done to her. She inhaled sharply but stayed with it. I gave her the third kiss of our acquaintance and she had learned to do that too.
Gorgoni was the mediator. To keep from awakening him I let my hips make like a tired caterpillar. The only thing that can be said for cleanliness is that it is sanitary. A dirty man and a dirty woman are twice as sensitive, twice as animalistic. The girl began to pinch my shoulders and work at it. I got both hands full of her plump bottom and the charpoy creaked and popped and I quit worrying about Gorgoni. Anyway, about the time when the world turned blue for me the girl woke him up with an ecstatic wail that ended in a jerky giggle.
"What the hell is going on?" Gorgoni asked in the dark.
"Sleeping. Can't you hear me snore?"
"You banging that little kid, Leo?" he laughed.
I felt the way she was settled down on me. She was still giggling. Still pinching my shoulders too.
"Apparently it will stretch a mile before it will tear an inch," I told him. "Want it?"
"Hell yes!"
I pushed the girl off me and she didn't fight. I didn't try to look because it was too dark, and I was too shot out. I heard it, and I remembered it, so when she let out that wail again I just waited. I heard Gorgoni muttering to himself. I heard her get up and for a moment she was a moving figure against the rectangle of dark gray where the door was.
"Where'd she go?" Gorgoni asked. "Damn, she's great!"
"Probably hit the bushes. She's loaded."
"Thanks, Leo," Gorgoni said wearily. "I'd been thinking about her some. We're buddies, aren't we, Leo?"
"I'm sorry about Zach," I said then.
"What the hell-he signed up, didn't he?"
"No. Someone signed him up."
"This screwin' war," he grumbled. "I wonder if it will ever end? Seems like it has been going on a million years."
"We'll make it, sergeant," I promised him.
"Sure, sergeant," he agreed.
She came back then and just crawled out on top of me, still giggling. I rousted her around with my fingers a little and kissed her because that was what she wanted me to do. After a little bit she climbed over me again and we fiddled around until Gorgoni was snoring again. This time all I had to do was furnish the equipment. She learned quickly, that one.
* * * * * *
I stood tense and motionless, the subgun up, my ears tuned to the pitch of voices as the little girl yikked with the two Burmese. Gorgoni stood with his forty-five up, looking across at me while we listened. I understood the shock the two men were undergoing. They had come up after daylight, prepared to do whatever they had to do at six in the morning. Out of a hut they had thought to be empty had come a bare-breasted, laughing girl, chattering like ten magpies. Understanding, sophistication, even thinking would come hard to them. Their vocabulary was limited, their concept of Japs and Americans and war was even less accomplished. If they broke and ran we'd kill them, I thought. If they stayed put, we had a chance. They stayed put. One man, a big, thick-chested Burmese in a dull red head rag and a colorless breechclout stuck his head in the door.
"Sahib sirs?" he begged.
"Hey, he speaks English!" Gorgoni exclaimed.
I shoved the subgun into his belly. "Speak English?"
"Spikin Oingeese," he agreed, eyes wide at the fierceness of us. "Not loffing Jafoneese!"
"Bully for you, buddy," I laughed.
My girl got the other man to come in. He hadn't the faintest idea what was going on. She yikked and they replied and this went on for some time. At last the big Burmese just stood and looked at us. I guess the size of us, naked to the waist and bearded from eyebrows to belt was disconcerting. But he didn't look scared. He finally said a lot of things to his friend. Afterward he looked at me with a broad, proud smile. "Soon," he announced, and I bent it into 'son."
The Burmese knew about twenty words of English, none of them connected. I left most of it to the girl. She was having a ball. She stood with her breasts pushed out and her hair in a loose roll over her forehead and she pointed this way and that and the man listened, glancing at us once in a while to see if we went along with whatever she said. When they got around to patting bellies and smacking lips, the man clouded up. Knowing Hindus, which knowledge wasn't far off base, I decided it was a question of finances.
For the first time in many days I pulled the wallet out of my back pocket. It was stiff with dirt, soaked and dried, soaked and dried until it resembled a melted down pack of playing cards. I had seven hundred Indian rupees in it. One hundred-rupeenote was as good as a million. I handed the man one.
I had expected him to look blank. He grinned. He ironed the crinkled bill in his fingers until it was soft and pliable. Spendable, too, I hoped. He showed it to his son and the son grinned. The girl yikked wildly, shook her finger in what I thought was an 'honesty is the best policy' speech and shooed the pair out.
I watched them hike off down the mountain.
"If they show that bill to the wrong shopkeeper we are in for it," I said to Gorgoni.
"They seemed hep," he replied hopefully.
"So did Gunther. So did Vinose. Could you possibly go over there in the corner and pretend that fat bellied spook is the Virgin Mary? A prayer is what we need, buddy boy!"
"You're a dirty talking man," he decided.
I shrugged.
We spent the rest of the day playing with the little girl. We never saw a Jap because we didn't look. About four in the afternoon, Gorgoni and I were out cold. We both lay on the charpoy, hip to hip and completely shot down. The girl was standing watch in the doorway. If she wasn't pregnant, she never would be.
* * * * * *
About six-thirty she awakened us with excited chatter. I came to my feet and pushed the subgun out the doorway. Coming up the mountain were our two friends and a third man. I ignored the bundles of junk the big man carried and looked hard at the stranger.
He wore a black cap, something like a military field cap, but less rakish. He wore a white, flowing skirt that ended at his knees, and below that, a billowing pair of pants ending in bare ankles and sandals. He looked plump and prosperous and friendly. I covered him with the subgun.
"Anything behind them?" I asked Gorgoni.
"No. He looks like a wheel."
"I think we're getting somewhere. I hope!"
He came right into the hut. He looked at me then he looked at Gorgoni and he smiled like toothpaste.
"Ah, gentlemen," he said in perfect English. "Welcome to Mailik! I am Sarga Goyal, of Bombay, but now of this blighted city in the golden valley. I make you welcome!"
"Shake him down, sergeant," I said to Gorgoni.
There was nothing in his clothes but fat.
"Salaam, sahib," I said gently.
"Salaam a la cuum, sahibs," he murmured in deference to my bad Hindustani. "How in hell did you get here, men?"
I felt like bawling. Gorgoni looked like he was going to wet his pants. For a moment the toughness went out of us like water. Tojo's ninth concubine could have taken us both with a sharp safetypin .
"It wasn't easy," I admitted. "How is the war going?"
He turned around and looked out the door of the hut. "It is said that the Chindits are only thirty miles up the river," he mused. "The Jafonesee are not happy." He turned back and smiled. "How may I serve you, sahibs?"
* * * * * *
He served us by taking us out of the hut about seven that night, neatly packed in a gitma with square wheels. He also took five of my hundred rupee notes, which he assured us he could negotiate when the Japs were looking the other way. It took two hours in the flat bed cart to reach Sarga Goyal's house in Mainlaik. All during the ride my girl sat up front with a Burmese, chit-chatting and giggling. Once in a while she'd reach back through the straw and feel my head. Once I bit her finger and this made her laugh in a throating, very female manner.
Goyal's house was everything nice, except the toilets. He still used a cubicle with a flat pan. But it was modern enough to contain a water tap so it wasn't necessary to carry the brass pot. Being a Hindu we never saw his wife nor any other womenfolk. And the bearers had a field day looking at my girl. One of the first things I asked Goyal was to find out what her name was.
"She is known as Manya nam-Homan, and she believes you to be the reincarnation of Bhudda," he chuckled. "She says you are like a Brahma bull and talk sweetly with your mouth."
"How about me," I chuckled. "Tell her she's the best wiggle this side of Santa Monica. How old is she?"
She was fourteen, she guessed. It took her about five minutes to tell Goyal how she arrived at this figure, during which time she winked at Gorgoni and me several times.
"She also says that if she has a son by you she will devote her life to instructing him the nature of his father. She assumes, Sergeant Gordon, that she must go back to her people when you have completely destroyed the Jafonese. Can you do this?"
"Do what? Leave her here or clean up the Japs?"
"Clean up the Japs. I know you are going to leave her here."
I grinned at Gorgoni. "Well, we'll need some help. But we've done pretty well accidentally. No telling what we could do if we put our minds to it!"
We had a bath in a galvanized tub not unlike Father Gunther's, and one of Goyal's house servants trimmed our beards and the back of our sunburned necks. Gorgoni and I smoked black, crooked cheroots until our tongues burned. I laughed at Gorgoni and he laughed at me in the white shirts and Burma pantaloons, but the soft, clean clothes were like lotion to our bug-bitten, dirt-sore bodies. Goyal convinced us that it wasn't necessary to carry the subguns around his house, but neither of us relinquished the forty-five Colts.
After food we sat around cross-legged in Goyal's luxurious quarters and talked. As in all Hindu households, women were not included. Goyal listened to my account of the past twenty days, his eyes flashing. Hindus were notoriously unphysical. In their traditions, great warriors fought heroic odds and conquered all. In actuality, a Detroit whore could whip a platoon of them. He showed great glee when I told of blowing Father Gunther's head off.
"I have heard of this man," he said. "Did you not quake at slaughtering a man of the cloth?"
"This heathen Irish bastard quakes at slaughtering nothing," Grogoni grumbled. "He even sleeps with little girls."
"Yeah," I remembered. "Where is she anyway?"
Goyal smiled. "She will be in your chamber when you are tired of talk. My women had thought to prepare her suitably."
"Gorgoni, old boy, I'd say this was your cue to go back to old lady five-fingers," I laughed. "Unless Goyal Sahib had an old wrinkled broad around for you somewhere."
"You wish a woman, sergeant?" Goyal asked pleasantly. "What?"
"It is easily arranged," Goyal told us. "Women are cheap commodities, sahibs. It is the more valuable things of life that have become difficult."
He was a little proud of his service to the American Army. He expected something more than rupees for helping us too. He did, in fact, ask us to intervene in his behalf when the Allies took Burma back from the Japanese. He admitted that he was rich. For many years lie had been the Burmese contact for importing certain goods from India. The Jap occupation of his city had curtailed his legitimate operations, but he had been running goods over the mountains from Assam, smuggling luxury items into Mailik, for which the wealthy Burmese and other colonists had paid him premium prices.
He was terribly educated. Three years in England, four in a Bombay college and many years of trading with British, German and Portugese colonists had made his English almost perfect. He had picked up some American slang somewhere, too. I suspected him of being a thorough-going scoundrel, but he was good to us. And we were stuck with Sarga Goyal.
* * * * * *
I stood in the square room, looking at the" big charpoy misted in white mosquito netting. The low wattage light bulb hanging from the exposed wiring on the ceiling wasn't elegant but the slink-back chairs and the big chest against the wall made the room look mighty good to me. Manya nam-Homan sat cross-legged on a fat rug. Her hair was done in the high, bun on bun fashion of the Burmese, and there were two jeweled pins thrust through the middle bun. She had been scrubbed and perfumed. Her big eyes, hot and black, had -rimmed with native mascara, making them look like nothing Hollywood had ever dreamed up. She was clad in white, from high over her lush little breasts to down below her knees. There were bunches of the white cloth at her waist and over one shoulder, sari fashion, but the shape of her was still obvious. On her sore feet little tip-toed sandals gleamed with silver and gold.
I had the distinct impression that she had talked too much.
No bride and groom of any country were prettier than we. I had never opened my mouth about how I felt about her. But from some impression, Sarga Goyal had decided this was the way it ought to be. The first sound was further proof of collusion. clean. Manya kind of uncoiled and slipped under my
"Leo Sahib," my girl said proudly.
"That took some doing," I decided aloud. "You are beautiful baby, and that's a fact. About half as beautiful as you were yesterday. And I don't know what to do with you. Back in the States we'd call you eating stuff. You're too clean, too put away. It was better when we were dirty and funky and death was just around the corner. You poor, ignorant little witch, somebody ought to tell you there's no tomorrow! Manya nam-Homan, you're out on a limb!"
"Leo sahib," she repeated, smiling now.
I grinned. I'd made my speech and I was a little used to her in fancy garb. I went over to the bed and kicked the mosquito netting aside. The charpoy was tightly strung and the rice-sctraw mattress was a half foot thick. The jute covers were smooth and arm. She patted the covers and yikked.
"You're right," I laughed. "It's a hell of a workbench!"
She straightened up and arched her back. The white stuff over her breasts were as tight as a drum. I reached up and peeled it down over her shoulder. I had never really looked at her breasts before, but I did then. They were fourteen-year-old breasts, alright, solid and quivering and black-tipped without the peculiar little bumps that go with age. I rang one of them like it was a doorbell, only it produced a giggle, not a buzz. It also popped out when I took my finger away.
She was actually bashful, so I guessed that the fancy clothes and the elegance of the room was effecting her too. I ducked my head and pulled off the slip-over shirt. She just stood back and giggled when my fuzzy chest came up clean for a change. Slightly out of control I peeled down the pantaloons and this made her quit smiling. I don't think she had ever really looked at my equipment before, either. She wasn't afraid of it but it made her eyes blink. For once in my life I wasn't in a hurry. I flopped out on the charpoy and put both arms up, resting my head in my palms.
She skinned out of her gossamer garb in about ten seconds. Then she picked up the scarf the Hindus call a dhoti and wound it around her waist. It looked funny, and very sexy; like a bit of chastity between her pumping breast tips and the neat way her brown tummy rolled down into a division and disappeared between the flawless smoothness of her thighs. She crawled onto the bed and I rearranged the mosquito netting, just in case there were some ambitious bombers around.
For a gal who had only been kissed three or four times she learned quickly. Her bee-stung mouth was soft, unsophisticated. For kicks I gave her my tongue as if she were a smart one. It surprised her but she caught on immediately. I lay back like the king of Siam and she worked her tongue in my mouth until she ran out of breath and we both got to giggling then. She tried to arrange herself now and I held her taut little buttocks and kept her to one side. Momentarily foiled, she got her tongue going in my mouth again, and I like the way she raped my lips.
I didn't bother to weigh the consequences. Few men had ever been exactly in my situation. I had the peculiar, lewd feeling that she'd enthuse with mad passion to anything I suggested. I thought about most of the stateside women I'd had in my thirty years. They would go for most anything, but there was always a bargain in the offing. You could get this or that done, but there was always a score on the wall, a bill to pay, one way or another. Apparently, being the reincarnation of Bhudda had some advantages, particularly with fourteen-year-olds, not too well acquainted with either gods nor devils.
I thought it was peculiar that while we were hustling through the jungle, running, climbing and starving, my mind had accepted her in one light. Now, as once or twice before I lost that ability to communicate. She was a body, a young and vibrant sex-machine, with only now as a measuring stick for doing.
If there is a reason for the poor and the insecure having five times the children they deserve, it must have been the same reason I had for being less than a gentleman with Manya. In pure sexuality lay escape, the complete eradication of fears, probabilities and certainties. I hadn't forgotten Zach and probably never would. Not had I completely erased the memory of the sound Gunther had made right after the subgun blasted him into limbo. It wasn't possible to forget that I was in the middle of a Japanese stronghold, either, but teaching Manya what I wanted her to learn blanked out the problems Leo Gordon had accumulated.
I put her down as I had Boobsy, letting my eyes and sensuality feast on the mad spectacle of her pouting, hot and wet lips, learning the shape and responsiveness of a lascivious flesh. I watched her curiosity grow into interest and become eagerness with wild fluttering pressures and greedy dragging demand. She choked herself and gagged at the massive outpouring of her own saliva. The pasionate animation of her head and shoulders and bullet-hard breast tips was nearly as devastating as her caress.
High on that good plateau where everything is feel and nothing is think, I felt her hands clawing at my hips and legs. Her unprofessional sensuality was climbing too, and without anticipation, she had begun to suffer. I hooked one hand around her slim waist and dragged her hips to me, discovering suddenly that the animation was whipping throughout her whole body. With hands detached from sensibility, I handled her furiously. It may have helped her, but I never lasted to find out. I doubt that my uncontrollable lust was even identified, and certainly was not rejected.
She hurt me, and I hurt her with rigid fingers and my convulsing strength, hoping to shut off the excruciating pain of after-goodness. Manya pushed into my fingers and never stopped, and after a minute it was good again. Defeat came to her when many miles and many days of jungle furnished no more strength.
She lay with her head cradled in my weary groin and let me finish her with little grace and great obscenity. Her cry of fulfilment was like that of a strangled cat, and after that we lay quietly, only the hiss of her breath sounding against the flat hardness of my belly.
Later, the kiss of her mouth and the softness of her body made me want her again. This time I held her down on my body and let her manage the moment. She giggled and cooed and pounded me endlessly and from the manner of her desire, whatever she had learned later was only a preliminary for the way she had known me first.
Long past two in the morning I got up and went to the miserable chamber Goyal called a bathroom. When I came back Manya was asleep, lying on her face, legs sprawled to ease the fatigue of our love-making. Her hair had tumbled out of the buns and she looked a little bit like the sleek cat I'd met in the jungle. I wondered if this were the last night we'd share and decided it well could be. The Chindits were only thirty miles up-river.
CHAPTER NINE
Along with several other architectural idiocies in Goyal's house was a cupola on the roof. It looked like a short, fat bellfrey without the spire. It was reached from the inside of the house by a rickety ladder. From the four glassless windows in the cupola, Gorgoni and I could see a fair share of Mawlaik. More important, we could see, and sense what we could not see, the military activity generated by the Japs. The main road through the town was a constantly busy thoroughfare. Army lorries, trailed field guns and platoon after platoon of precisely marching troops moved north. They didn't look so good coming back from the front. Overhead, light bombers, fighters and recon planes buzzed night and day. On the sixth day of our stay sixteen low-flying planes came through the valley and pasted hell out of the highway and the airstrip south of town. It was a combined operation. I saw four British Spitfires, four twin-tailed P-38s and four P-40s. They strafed the road, bomb-cratered it, and I had no idea what they did to the airstrip.
But instantly the Japanese got nasty with Mawlaik. The streets wre suddenly lousy with personnel carriers, and fires broke out all over the city. The following day was worse. We saw some more American and British planes, higher this time, and no doubt bound for the supply lines south of Mawlaik. The activity of the Japs was apparent, but the reason for it was not immediately obvious. It was Goyal who told us the story the evening of the seventh day.
"There is great trouble, sahibs," he said, and there was some fright in his eyes. "The Jafanesee are under severe pressure. They are being cut to pieces on the front, which is now only twenty miles north on the Homalin road. They-like all of us-know that the end is in sight. This is the problem."
"Sounds like old home week to me," Gorgoni said.
"No, sahib. Your problem is different than ours. You may rest until your soldiers enter the city and you are reunited with your friends. But you must understand our position. The Jafonese have been careful not to alienate our city. They maintained control, but were careful not to interfere too strongly with out daily life. Certainly they made demands and the stock of foodstuffs was seriously impaired. But for the most part, sahibs, they did not persecute us. Now that the end is in sight for them they have removed the velvet gloves and they are pillaging and raping our city!"
"It can't last very long," I said, hopefully.
Goyal looked at me with sad eyes. "One more day-two more days and our city will be in ruin. All that remains now is the rearguard troops, they are called. They have pillaged our shops. Many protests were silenced with bayonet and pistol. They have become vandals, and they have spirited away some two hundred women off the streets! The fires you have seen were from the shops of wailing merchants. And some homes were dead fathers and husbands failed to stand strong enough to save the women. We are afraid the Jafonesee will set fire to the entire city when the army crumbles. It is very bad, sahibs, very bad!"
We all went up on the roof and looked out into the night. We could hear the traffic on the road a half mile away but the lorries were running without lights. But there were lights in the city. I counted nine separate fires. Once we heard screams, and a fire broke out less than a block from Goyal's house.
"Can you find out how large the Jap garrison really is?" I asked Goyal. "And where the bulk of the troops are camped?"
"I suppose, sahib. As a speculation there are perhaps five thousand men and most of them are camped below the city, around the airport they have built."
"What are you thinking, Leo?" Gorgoni asked.
"Nothing at the moment. Sarga sahib, is there any danger of the Japs coming to this house? I mean, how are they operating?"
"Nothing at the moment. Sarga sahib, is there any danger of the Japs coming to this house? I mean, how are they operating?"
He shrugged. "I do not know, sahib. They seem to wander about in bands, doing whatever they fancy without pattern. A locked door is a challenge. An open door is an invitation. Tonight I am sending my memsahib and her servants to a friend's house. He lives higher on the slope and is less liable to encounter these fiends."
"You don't think the sergeant and I could protect you?"
"No sahib! But the moment your great guns speak the patrols will hear. Then all is lost! If they come it is better that you remain here on the roof. They will not mount the ladder."
"What if they set fire to the house?" Gorgani asked. "It's a long jump to the ground!"
* * * * * *
By morning there were a hundred fires in the city, and our planes went over again, ripping the road with machinegun fire and later we heard the way the light bombs boomed to the south. With Manya tucked under my arm I spent most of the next two days on the roof. Our uniforms, washed and hand ironed were stored in the cupola. In fact every trace of our presence in the Goyal house was stored on the roof against a chance invasion by a band of Jap soldiers. Once or twice they went by in the streets, laughing and breaking windows, sending women screaming into the maze of houses, pilfering from whatever buildings they entered.
The bowl-breasted girl Goyal had obtained for Gorgoni had left with the women of the household. The three of us stayed on the hot roof, prayed for rain, which always came once a day, and kept our fingers crossed. On the evening of the ninth day, Sarga Goyal mounted the ladder and there were three other prosperous looking Burmese with him.
"Respectfully, sahibs," Goyal spoke to us. "We are desperate! Yesterday we thought surely the British and Americans would break through. They are only ten miles away! But in the night the Jafonesee succeeded in reinforcing their shattered line. Today three hundred people were gunned or beaten to death in our streets! Tonight many more will die. Now only a token force remains in the encampment. Those who are not holding the line above the city have departed south to strengthen yet another delayed action. Those left in the city are resigned to their fate! It is rumored that they intend to burn the city and destroy the water and food supplies so that your soldiers will find only the charred remains! We plead, sahibs!"
"Plead? For what?" I asked, looking at the un-muscled group.
"We have succored you," Goyal went on. "We have endangered our lives, our families, our affairs to protect you and your friend from discovery and harm. Now we plead, sahib, that in our moment of need, you will help us!"
I started to laugh. I looked at Gorgoni and he was worried about something. So was Manya, and she was real cute when she worried. I hung my arm over her shoulder, which was an affection Goyal and his friends could not understand.
"So what do you want from us, gentlemen?" I asked.
"We do not know," Goyal admitted. "But we have heard many tales of the ingenuity, the audacious courage and the fearless nature of the American soldier. We felt that if you knew how your friends were about to be destroyed, you would know of something to do. Sahibs, we are desperate! All we have in the world is about to be destroyed! Save us, we beg of you!"
"These characters are nuts," Gorgoni declared.
There was a lot more talk, and through it, I tried to think. Finally, I turned away and walked to one corner of the roof where I could look slightly down onto the wounded city. I sat down behind the balustrade and rested my chin on my arm. Manya crawled under my free arm and made a warm place against my body. Then I discovered she was yikking softly at me, and I had no idea what she was saying.
Back in the cupola, I could hear the four Mawlaikians talking together. Once in awhile, Goyal would say something in English and Gorgoni's deep voice would reply.
I tried to think what would frighten me most if I were a Jap soldier-or more to the point, if I were the commander of a last ditch battalion, threatened with certain military defeat, but responsible to my Emperor for the most effective holding action possible. Not death, because the Japanese didn't think about death as an American or a Britsh soldier did. Not defeat, because they expected defeat. The only word I could use was dishonor, though I didn't quite go for the highly publicized rot about the Japs' aversion to losing face. McArthur was not too keen about losing face, either, and his had been prety much of a false one. But I had no muscle, no organization, no knowledge of any consequence. All I had was a couple of half-used machine guns, two forty-fives and one ugly sergeant.
My cue was to take Manya downstairs-or down-ladder, roll her in the hay, and blow my brains out in her wild Burmese body. And wait. In one day or five days or two weeks, a spearhead of Allied troops would enter the city and everything would come up roses. Just wait, Leo, I told myself. These wogs laid down and turned their bellies up when the Japs moved in, now they could take the rap for their own spinelessness. I was sorry for the women and the kids and the dead citizens, but I was not quite sorry enough to get like Crown Sergeant Beldon. Very dead for no reason at all.
We slept on the roof that night and about three in the morning five Jap soldiers ransacked the house, chased Sarga Goyal out a back window and made themselves generally unpopular. Gorgoni was all for giving them the business but I held off. But I did look at the house in the light of dawn and what those five Japs did, for no reason and no profit, made me mad.
Goyal broke down and cried when he saw the ruin. He came in about eight in the morning, dirty and out of breath and crushed.
"Gordon sahib," he moaned. "I am destitute!"
"You're alive, buddy, and that ain't hay, in these times."
"I was sure they had found you, sahibs!"
"They will find us later, I bet," was my only comment.
"Now what are you cooking, Leo?" Gorgoni asked wearily.
"Sergeant!"
"Yes, sergeant!
"Just checking," I told him.
"You crazy bastard," he said. "What now?"
I turned to Goyal. "The east bridge. Do you think you can find a Burmese who would be willing to run north on the ridge, or someway, and get a message to the Allied troops? Could it be done?"
"But yes, sahib!"
"Is there a civilian truck available. Any kind?" He frowned but I knew that there must be a beat up old truck in the city. Every town in India had an old British or German truck in it somewhere. Sometimes many trucks.
"Aiee, sahib, but there has been no petrol for many months!"
"Petrol we must have. And an extra fifty gallons of it," I added, with some afterthought. "In a steel drum."
"It will tax my resources-but it might be possible."
"One better than that," I said. "Is it possible to make it a Japanese lorry? How big or how small won't matter as long as it is big enough to carry a fifty gallon drum of gasoline."
"All right. Any truck will do that will run. I'll need a native who can speak enough Japanese to pass on the street."
"You have a plan, sahib?" Goyal breathed.
"No, but I know how to raise hell with the visiting fireman!'
"It shall be done!"
"Okay. Get your runner ready. I've got a note to write."
"Leo, you're out of your mind!" Gorgoni exclaimed.
I turned around and looked at him bankly. "Oh?"
I had no plan, no great master salvation for anything. But the past nine days, with the troops around and planes overhead and the smell of death in the city, my personal irritation had been considerable. I didn't count the number of dead soldiers the action ten miles north of us was costing. I just wanted to do something. Personally I had a funny feeling that I was sitting on a charmed pot. This is universal with soldiers. They all feel die same way until they fall over dead.
I talked to Coyal. He knew that the battle line was stretched across the valley and a way up both mountains. It was a changing line, fluid and uncertain, depending upon how any given sector made out against the opposition. There were perhaps two thousand Japs left to hold the city, and no telling how many Allied troops trying to punch the line. I guessed not too many at that because there were a lot of valleys and this had never been considered the most critical campaign of the war. I was most interested in this one; and the condition of the road.
"Well, sahib, I think there is no road," he said. "It has been bombed by your troops and there has been little time for repairs. In fact the defenses of the Jafonesee have been moved to each side, the road being too dangerous. Your people have concentrated great bombardments on this miserable road. I should think it is completely destroyed by five or six miles out of here."
So then I wrote my note to the Allied commander, Chindwin River offensive, dear sir: Sergeant Albert Gorgoni, 27S7432, and myself have been behind enemy lines for thirty-five days. At the approximate stroke of midnight, 7-9-45, I propose to set fire to as much of the Japanese installation in Mawlaik as I can reach. In case I goof, don't make a move until you see the flames. When you do see them, come in fast. Local troops in panic already. Signed, Leo C. Gordon, 39106206, Technical sergeant, 653rd Topographic Battalion, Company B.
I showed die letter to Gorgoni. He flipped. While he chewed and ranted I tore a set of stripes off my fatigues. I gave Goyal my last hundred rupee note, then crammed the stripes and the note into my wallet. There were a few things in it that only a legitimate American soldier would own. I gave it all to Goyal. He didn't understand.
"Your runner takes this to some one behind the line," I said. "It won't make any difference as long as he wears a British or an American uniform. Can you start him now?"
"But yes, sahib!"
"And he can get back, say before tomorrow sundown?"
"If he has fortune!"
"There may be a message to come back. Pick a good boy, huh?"
"Incredible!"
* * * * * *
There were many small arrangements and instructions. I finally got Gorgoni quieted down, but it wasn't easy. He, like myself, was aware that all the two of us had to do was lie low until the Japs eventually caved in. One day or ten-we'd make it if we just sat it out."
"I don't want to be a hero, Leo!" he wailed.
"Don't worry, you won't be. It just strikes me that we ought to do something besides lay on our butts and bang the native women."
"I ain't even got a broad, any more!"
"I bleed for you, sergeant. Mine is waiting up on the roof."
She was. During the higgle-haggle, Manya had hustled our rice straw pallet up to the cupola. I hustled it out a window and over into a corner where all I had to do was raise my head to see the street below and the city stretched out in smoking ugliness. We could hear high strident voices and occasional gunfire. And always the buzz of trucks on the road, half a mile away. Committed to complete insanity I shut it out of my mind and dragged Manya into my arms. She started to play in the way she had for many days, but I hung onto her and let it wait. About the time my nerves settled down, she was too damned physical to be held off any longer.
She had grown from a fourteen-year-old bush girl to be an accomplished woman in my arms. She knew how to kiss, with all the abandon of a practiced courtesan, her plump lips and sharp tongue tip were no longer hasty, but slow and deliberate and burning hot. She knew that I liked the feel of her, and she'd been quick to learn that my own excitement depended upon hers, and there were no reasons for her not to writhe and hunch and turn her backside up in passionate response. She handled me with equal relish, totally uninhibited because I had forgotten to explain what was in the books and what was not. With this she had acquired a taste for my skin, probably because a white man oozes more salt than heavily pigmented peoples. She had a way of licking my chest and my shoulders and my arms that always preceded more exotic areas. And she had learned to crawl over me during this near-ritual, like some soft, brown animal but with a lot more understanding of what was exciting to me than an animal could have had.
If I thought her breasts had grown and swelled, it was probably because she had learned to give them to me with strange shoulder thrusting and sensuous undulations. More wonderful, she had learned when to quit a caress, when not to kiss and when to draw away, saving me for later, for more and more. Now she knew what to anticipate from her own body, and when she had those beautiful moments of primitive personal lust, she no longer kept them private. She would rise up and arch or turn and thrust, letting me know just where to touch and send her into convulsions of complete ecstasy.
It was different than with any woman I had ever known. We cotildn't talk to each other, and the things we shared had to be things with feel and sensation. Need was expressed by guiding hands and flesh and pleasure was a satisfied kiss or gasp of acceptance. It was different than it woidd be with any other woman I'd ever known, because she had come to me with no preconceived ideas. Every part of her sensitive body belonged to me, and I had figured out something with every delectable morsel of Manya's splendid body.
We played and loved and rested, and when we tried to love again and my flesh failed, we played some more and then I didn't fail. And eventually we wearied and slept out way into a tomorrow neither of us could share.
CHAPTER TEN
The map of Mawlaik Goyal furnished us was optomistic, to say the least, but it did show me a great deal. Bad printing and a hand-drawn original made me disbelieve certain physical characteristics shown on the map, but I saw where we had to go. South of the city two miles, a friend of Goyal's had sketched in what was known of the original Japanese installations. The airstrip had been made by clearing off the dikes between rice paddies, filling in and tearing out. It was a north-south runway barely two hundred yards from the old road. The road itself went on south to Kalewa, skirting the banks of the Chindwin River. North of Mawlaik, the road ran in similar windings. Never paved, it suffered from monsoon rains, bullock carts and now, bombing runs and artillery fire from the Allied forces. All during the day we made preparations, listening to the crump-crump of field pieces a few miles north.
"If they catch us they shoot us, so it won't make any difference whether or not we wear our uniforms," I told Gorgoni. "I'd guess we would have a better chance in these Burmese togs. At least they won't look too hard at us until we start biting at them."
"Oh man, we need Zach!" Gorgoni complained.
It made me feel better to hear him beef. I'd learned that it was a sure sign he'd joined up. At dusk when an expressionless Burmese drove the old Aston-Martin six-cylinder truck into the compound behind Goyal's house, Gorgoni took it over like a hotrodder. It was piled high with bundles of rice straw, tied for thatching. Under the straw was a rusty fifty-fve gallon Shell Oil drum, nearly full of low test gasoline. To my surprise the gas tank slung under the right runningboard was also nearly full. I had Gorgoni start the truck the street for Japs. It kicked over every time. With three or four times while the Burmese driver watched signs and fingers I asked the Burmese how fast the truck would go. He pointed to sixty miles an hour on the speedometer, which I discovered was actually in kilometers. That meant forty miles an hour, and more likely thirty-five.
Wet gave our weapons a last check. I had half a clip in the subgun and Gorgoni had a little over a half load in the Jap machinegun. We belted our forty-fives under the flowing white shirts and waited until dark. As it came on I got tight. I went up the ladder to the cupola. Manya was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Her hair was up high, her skirt was down around her waist. Goyal told her what we were going to do, or as much as I had been able to tell him. Now she looked up at me with no expression. I hauled her to a limp standup. I thought that if we had ever needed to talk, now was it. Then I decided there would be nothing to talk about if we could understand each other. And I didn't have anything to give her, either.
I kissed her lips, the tip of each breast and a good smacker on the curve of her belly. Then I winked and went down the ladder.
* * * * * *
A map is one thing, a rutted, tangled mass of roads and streets is another. Gorgoni looked like a ghost, driving the truck through the dark, his black head half covered by a doti rag, his eyes popped out to see where he was going. I sat with the map on my lap, the subgun hidden under the flowing Burmese pants. Two things had made me feel better after the failure of the runner to return had made me feel bad. There had been no heavy crump-crump from the direction of the battle lines, and there had been no Allied planes over Mawlaik since noon.
It could have meant the Japs were winning, or it could have meant that the British and the Americans were waiting. I sold myself on the latter idea just because I was too scared to admit it might not be so.
"There's the road!" Gorgoni announced as we pulled out of a dark alley into a broad plaza. There were only a few Burmese in sight, wispy figures darting in and out of buildings. The Japs had inflicted a curfew several days before, and it was worth a citizen's life to get caught in the streets, even without a curfew.
"Wait," I said. "We can see up the road a little. Let an army truck go by, then swing out on the road behind him. They are running without lights, too, but you can duck what he ducks."
"What if the wogs in the back of the truck spot us?"
"They won't know we're not another Jap lorry. Here comes one!"
"GMC," Gorgoni snarled. "Made in U.S.A.!"
"Don't grouse, soldier. That's the way things are!"
"Here we go!"
He was a good driver and a hell of a man. He hung that old truck on the tail of the Jap truck and kept it there. He knew as much about where we were going as I did. Twice we had to pull over and let oncoming Jap vehicles go by. In the dark they were by us before the shape of our truck could be identified. The road was rough, but evidently the Japs had put the Burmese to work filling bomb craters after every Allied raid. I don't know what the city looked like there. Neither Gorgoni nor I took our eyes off the lorry ahead of us.
Then we were abruptly out of the city, bumping over the scarred road, eating dust from the truck ahead of us. Suddenly, the truck ahead turned into a road and I could make out the installation. There were a few lights, but mostly it was nothing but a series of low shapes in the weak moonlight. Gorgoni drove on, past the road and some trees. At the other end of the row of trees he found another road and I took a chance.
"Pull in there. Clear off the road and behind those trees."
"Kill her?"
"Dead. Then get out of the truck and go hide close by. I'm going to have a look. If a patrol finds the truck, use your own judment. Let them have it or put a few shots into the oil drum under the hay. Then see if you can get back to Goyal's place."
"Be careful, sergeant," he said, slipping out of the cab.
I flolowed the road and it came to a dead end with a pile of dirt separating it from the south end of the airstrip. I couldn't see hide nor hair of a plane, and there seemed to be no indication of activity around the buildings bordering the strip. The Jap air force had moved out. The field was full of craters. I needed something to orient myself with, so I waited. In about five minutes two trucks came off the first feeder road and went screaming across the strip. A big square rectangle of light appeared in one of the shapes and the two trucks drove in. Dozens of men climbed over the tailgates, but none of them looked too spry. The trucks backed out. The doors closed. Then I saw both trucks drive toward me a hundred yards and pull up in front of smaller buildings. I thought they were getting gassed up for another run.
I didn't know anything about demolition, but I knew gasoline burns, even blows, if the tanks aren't full. These wouldn't be. But there would be guards. It was, after all, a military establishment. I tried to check my watch and it looked like something to eleven o'clock.
Scuttling like a two-legged crab I went around the end of the airstrip, sticking close to the undisturbed paddy dikes, hiding and regaining breath when I came to the dirt piles the dozers had left when the strip was plowed out. Coming along the base of the hill toward the installation, I felt very alone. It was a hell of a mess of Jap army, last ditch stand or not.
It had taken a lot of sheet iron and mud to make operational headquarters for four or five thousand men. I could make out some details then, and there was a subdued light here and there. And soldiers everywhere. I skinned up on a half-bombed hut and lay out on the tipped thatch roof.
Two more trucks came into the area. They just drove across the north end of the strip, pulled into the sea of buildings and stopped. I waited, watching the feeder road. One more truck turned off the main road and if it stopped for a guard check, I couldn't see it. It went right into the central buildings, just like the others had done. I wished I were back on the roof with Manya.
It was the wrong rooftop, but I stayed there. Presently more lights came on. Trucks began to appear from the shadows between buildings I hadn't even noticed. They drove out onto the airstrip and foot soldiers were like fleas, everywhere.
Nine trucks pulled out on the airstrip and parked. The tail-gates were dropped and men clustered around each vehicle. Several more trucks appeared and they began to visit the gas depot. There were Japs within a hundred feet of my broken hut, but they seemed military speed, I guessed it was set for daylight, to have one thing in mind. Evacuation. Knowing about Procedure would be for the battle line to leave a skeleton force while the body of troops moved quietly back. They would burn Mawlaik, destroy facilities and join this service force for the run down the river to Kalewa, or beyond. Those who couldn't ride would take to the hills, acting as snipers and harassment groups against the oncoming British and American troops. This had been the pattern throughout Burma. Chances were that at some predetermined moment, the battle line would surrender and spend the rest of the war in a cozy prison camp, content, well-fed and not a little victorious. It was the way things were done, I thought.
I was scared and I didn't know what to do but I didn't want it to happen that way. I pushed off the broken roof and went skipping north, using the darkness and the deserted buildings for cover until I thought I didn't need it anymore. I went around the end of the strip and past the dirt piles. When I got to the old truck, Gorgoni came out of the brush thirty feet away, his chopper up. He seemed calm, but I knew he wasn't.
"Now what?" he wanted to know.
"They are getting ready to sell out," I told him.
"Good. Let's go back and go to bed."
I almost said okay, when it began to rain. And it came down real good, even for a monsoon. I couldn't see the size of the cloud but the wind blew and the ground was a bog in thirty seconds.
I watched the water run down toward the strip. I ran back to the other side of the field and the water was running down toward the barracks area, forming little rivers, puddles and mud. I could barely see the lights down by the row of trucks. I turned around and slogged back to Gorgoni.
"Sergeant Gorgoni, do you think you can drive this screwing truck out on the runway? I mean, get it up on the strip?"
"I already scouted it while you were gone. Yep, if the mud doesn't tear the axles out of her. Why?"
"Gasoline floats. If we could get this truck over on the far side of the runway as far as the rain will afford us cover, I'd be in favor of dumping that drum of petrol and letting it flow down among those nice trucks. At the proper moment I'd gamble a muzzle blast into the gasoline and run for it. Fun?"
"They'll be on us like a herd of turtles!"
"Maybe. Maybe not. Every one of those trucks is filled with gasoline, and I've no idea how much is left in the supply tanks. We might just have us a living ball, buddy."
"Let's go, before the screwing rain quits."
* * * * * *
Gorgoni almost tore the trucks guts out, but it finally plowed through the mud and came out on the relatively hard surface of the strip. I walked alongside the truck, subgun up, a soaked ghost in white. If we were spotted, Gorgoni was to step on it and haul right down through the strip and out the other end-if we could make it. He put the truck clear over against the edge of the runway and there was a hollow there, between the strip grade and the apron. If anything, it was raining harder than before. I made him back the truck within a hundred yards of the gas depot.
I got the drum wrench from the floor of the cab and we went around to the bed of rice straw. The square plug was about five inches above the bottom of the drum. I had already cracked it at Goyal's compound to be sure it wasn't rusted in beyond loosening.
"What do we do when she goes off?" Gorgoni asked as the two-inch stream of gasoline leaped out over the tailgate.
"Take to the jungle up there, buddy. We been there before, or hadn't you remembered?"
The stink was terrible. But the gas poured out, hit the wet ground and rolled merrily down to the row of trucks. I couldn't tell how much of it flowed amiss, but in fifty gallons a lot of it, perhaps enough, would reach those trucks. Once we started something there, the Jap's gasoline would help things out. I kept tipping the drum, and it seemed to me it never got a gallon lighter. But it did. We tossed the rice bundles out into the rain and made room to turn the drum down on its side. We managed it, and by rolling the drum a quarter turn, the drain was on the bottom. We got splashed a little, but not seriously.
"Get started up the slope, sergeant," I snapped. "I'm going to blow her the moment I hear the last gurgle."
"God, Leo, be careful!" he gasped. "If she backfires you'll go up with it!'
"Go on!" I spat at him. He went.
Then all of a sudden there was no more time. The stinking gasoline was down around the trucks all right, and a hundred Japs were buzzing around, looking for the leak. They couldn't tell where it came from, and they never suspected it was anything deliberate. They couldn't see through the rain any better than I could, but there were more of them to try. I backed away from the truck, trying to determine where the gasoline left off and the water began. I couldn't tell. I dragged two of the gas soaked rice bundles out considerably past the possible flow and laid them end on end. I hoped the rain hadn't diluted the gasoline, but I decided this wasn't possible. Squatting like a miler about to take off I held the subgun at arms length and let the muzzle rest on the rice straw.
I pulled the trigger with the top of my finger so it would slip off after a shot or two. The explosion knocked me rolling. I dropped the subgun and tried to keep on rolling because though it wasn't going to last all night, my petrol candle made a lovely light.
* * * * * *
It even scared me and Gorgoni told me afterwards he had messed his pants when it went. The temperature, even in the rain, must have been about ninety. The air was one big mass of gas fumes. I got up and ran with no breath in my lungs and no sense in my head. I heard the trucks start to go, then the roar of flames drowned out everything. I knew I'd barbecued a half hundred Japs, but their cries were obliterated by the booming fire and the intermittent explosions. I got up on the slope about two hundred yards when the supply tank let go. I turned around to look at what I'd done, and the whole world was in flames.
Goyal's truck was burning, and even as I watched, the tank under the fender let go. I looked up the slope and could see Gorgoni, his white figure as cleanly lighted as a choice photographer could have wished. We could see up the mountains on both sides of the valley. As far as we were, the head on our faces was like a blast furnace. And it stopped raining almost at once. The updraft from the quarter of a mile long fire must have moved the atmosphere considerably. The wind created by the fire flicked the flames back into the barracks area.
We could see the frantic Japanese soldiers running around the perimeter of the fire. They kept backing away from the blaze, out on the strip and into the rice paddies behind the burning camp.
"Okay boys," I said to the north. "There's your target!"
"Think they'll come in?"
"Depends upon the rain. But I bet they try!"
"We better find a hole," Gorgoni laughed. "If the wogs start up this mountain we could catch it!"
But we didn't find a hole. Down below the fire had reached the ammunition storage. Three sheds which had been burning lightly suddenly exploded and the fireworks were out of this world. I felt like a first class juvenile delinquent and Gorgoni was hopping with glee. Then we decided to go on up the hill because out of the dark sky to the north came the planes. About a dozen of them I guessed.
Low, noisy and happy, I thought. They raked that field with machineguns blazing. We could see the bellies of the marauders, all in perfect detail. Not a single anti-aircraft barked back at them.
If there was rifle fire, the sounds were lost in the holocaust.
The planes had made several passes when four Jap trucks screamed out onto the low end of the strip from the main road. Little gray figures poured out of the trucks and the planes let go with several of their under-wing personnel bombs. It was beautiful.
It didn't really matter about the trucks because there was no gasoline dump to furnish fuel for a getaway. And I was sure that some time around dawn a column of Allied troops would come down the road, mopping up. I was right, but long before the home team arrived, Gorgoni and I watched the rats running for cover. They came through Mawlaik in wild disorder and this only became worse as they discovered the airstrip in shambles. By the first light of dawn only a few of the buildings still burned. There was a great charred area below us, showing where the gasoline had blackened the ground, and the face of the installation was burned to cinders.
The Japanese took to the hills and a few of the high command loaded into some late arriving vehicles. They had no more than taken off down-river when the planes went over again. They cut up the few troops around the airport, then went after the command cars and personnel carriers headed for Kalewa and Mandalay.
At nine-fifteen, the point of the Allied column pushed off the road and moved into the airport. They had four half-tracks and one command car, all mounting machineguns. When these were spotted in a big four-corner square covering the airstrip, it was all over.
Gorgoni and I sat there on the hillside, looking down at the war. What had seemed so personal the night before was now distant, detached. I didn't say anything to Gorgoni, but I would have liked to have kept it that way. When you are a soldier, nothing belongs to you, and for the past thirty-seven days the world had belonged to us. It had been a hungry, bone-wrenching world, full of bugs and sharp rocks and high mountains, but it had been ours. Then I sighed.
"Let's go, sergeant," I said. "Let's earn our pay."
"Leo?"
"Forget it, Gorgoni," I snapped. "Let's see if we can get this night shirt and bloomer get-up to look military!"
We belted the forty-fives outside the flimsy costumes. I would have been grateful for the worn and seam-weary fatigues back in Goyal's house, but it was only a passing vanity. We started down the hill and four very tough looking GIs laid slugs in around our feet before we'd moved ten yards. They met us at the foot of the slope and by then they had spotted the issue forty-fives.
"Hey, they're white men!" one called to the rest.
"And I outrank you three stripes!" I grinned. "Welcome to Mawlaik! The flower girls will be along later."
* * * * * *
We were heroes for about twenty minutes. In the first place the Burmese runner had never reached the front line. The first indication that two goofy American soldiers were going to win the war for the Allied troops was the whopping fire we'd started. Already poised for the knockout blow, the commander of the assault forces had merely stepped up operations at report of the blaze. We got credit for demoralizing an already demoralized Japanese battalion, and they gave us E for effort. And a trip back to New Delhi, India.
After I reread the report it took me three days to write, I had to admit that E for effort was about all we had coming. Gorgoni and I admitted that certain aspects of our jungle trek were better left out of the report, but we drank an awful lot of beer in New Delhi without diluting it with conversation. And every time we passed a little brown-skinned babe on the city streets, we looked. Some things you lose take the hide and meat as they go.
