Italians, who actually
Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is surprisingly easy-but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet- shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him-he has been sighted. He is in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet, aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf, and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of Shaftoe's buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and finally starts to eat him.
'Sarge! We're here!' says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up, Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does not sound scared or excited. Wherever 'here' is, it's not someplace dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. 'Shit!' he says.
'What's wrong, Sarge?'
'I just always say that when I wake up,' Shaftoe says.
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles, and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops. They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded. Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil. Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over, and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north-south. To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead-ends in some nasty, impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space. With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones, tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
