He should have known there was another man involved. He said, “Your chap?”
She disentangled herself from his arms and went into the bedroom and came out with a photograph in a silver frame. “Here he is. Good, isn’t he?”
The man in the photograph wore the peaked cap of an Australian officer, and his face was lean, and he smiled both with his eyes and his mouth, and there was a suspicion of a mustache, as if he’d just started to grow it. The Australian officer was six or seven years older than Mackenzie. “Looks like a nice guy,” Mackenzie said.
“That’s my husband. My husband, Tom.”
Somehow this surprised him. He hadn’t classified Kitty as either a good girl or a bad girl, but simply as a playgirl, a gay feather whirling in the excitement on the periphery of war, and not for the solidity of marriage. “Where is he?” Mackenzie asked, not that he expected her husband to pop out of the closet, or make an unexpected entrance through a rear door, but still it was best to know.
She sniffed and laughed. “Not here, Yank. Not in Sydney. He was with the Eighth.”
“The eighth what?”
“The Eighth Australian Division. They were taken at Singapore—all of them—all who weren’t killed.”
Mackenzie said, “Ouch!” The thought of capture had always been more frightening to him than death. His worst fear, on Guadalcanal, had been that he would be wounded, and captured, and be slapped around and spat upon, and be afraid to fight back, and lose his dignity as a man. He said, “He’s safe, of course?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. Every night I listen.”
“You listen?”
“Yes. Every night the Jap wireless gives the names of five prisoners. Australian prisoners. Usually from the Eighth. I tell myself it’s silly for me to listen—that it’s only a trick to get me to take in their propaganda. They’re clever, those Japs. Yet every night I tune them in. I can’t help it.”
“What time do they broadcast?”
“There’s a program at two in the morning for us Aussies. That’s the one I always hear. Reception’s best, then, and I’m loneliest. Usually I’m lonely, that is. I don’t ask in every Yank, actually.”
He found a corkscrew in the bar, and was about to rip the seal on the bottle when she put her hand on his sleeve. “Don’t do it,” she said. “It isn’t necessary.”
He felt relieved, but he said, as a matter of form, “Sure you don’t want one, Kitty?”
“Not from that bottle, Yank. You hold that bottle fast.” She turned her face away. “I drink too much anyway. Not that it makes me forget anything.”
Just before two they went into the bedroom. Alongside the bed was a small, but powerful, Hallicrafter receiver, a present, she said, from someone in the OWI mission. They reclined on the rich, wine-colored satin of the coverlet, leaning back against the pillows propped against the wall, and tuned in JOAK, Tokyo, and listened to the smooth voice of a traitor. She was tense until the time came, at the program’s end, when the names of five live prisoners were announced. Major Turcott was not among them.
Then she relaxed, and he took her, and it was delightful, in a gentle, casual way. In the morning he caught the SCAT C-47, loaded with companions sated by Sydney, back to Noumea.
Now that he recalled her last name, he felt that he ought to write to Kitty and find out whether her husband ever did come back. He’d always be thankful to Kitty, for a number of things, and the most important of these was that she had not allowed him to open the bottle of Scotch. If he’d opened the bottle that night he’d have always felt guilty with Anne. A queer thought intruded. What if he had ever opened the bottle—ever, at all?
There was an alien and violent whoosh, the close crash of a shell like the snarl of an angry dog, and Mackenzie, even as his instinct and reactions forced him to throw himself on his face, knew that he was under mortar fire, and digging in was the wrong thing to do.
When they had you under mortar fire your only hope was to keep moving, and never give them a chance to zero in. He did not admire the Chinese tank tactics. Tanks shouldn’t be used simply, as mobile artillery, or conveyances for infantry. Tanks had a purpose of their own. And if he ever could bring their Mongol cavalry under the fire of heavy machine guns he’d soon teach them that horses were obsolete. And apparently they were novices at air war. But they knew artillery, and particularly they were adept with mortars, a simple weapon. They could plant a mortar shell in your hip pocket—if you stood still for them.
So the captain wasn’t standing still. “Come on, you men!” he shouted as he bounced from the ground. He began to run.
As he ran he swore at himself for allowing the warm luxury of recollection to betray him, and rob him of his normal caution. Here was the point of danger where the road ran alongside the ice-clad stream which he had noted a mile back. Here was the point of danger, and he had approached it with his thoughts in Australia. Somewhere in the hills to the north, a mortar crew had him under direct observation. As they watched him run down the road they would be adjusting their barrels. Another mortar shell crashed in behind him, and he could hear his men pounding and panting and sobbing close at his heels, but his mind was on the exultant Chinese officer who must be laying those guns.
The Chinese officer would have them pinioned in his glasses, and be figuring out a range to interdict them. The captain searched for cover. Four hundred yards ahead the road veered from its alliance with the stream, and joined the cliffs again, and disappeared around a jagged shoulder of rock. If he could reach that shoulder, that abrupt turn to the right in the road, he would be protected by the defilade of the hill. So the captain read the Chinese mortarman’s mind. It was necessary for the Americans to reach that point of safety. The Americans would stay on the road. Did not Americans always cling to the roads? So train the mortars to lay a barrage on the road, short of the cliff.
“This way!” the captain yelled. “Follow me!” He left the road and tore across the cracked alluvial flat, which was like an obstacle course, slick with powdered snow, where you didn’t dare trip, because you would be dead. He swerved directly for the cliff.
Behind him the mortars laid a neat pattern on the road, where Dog Company should have been, but wasn’t, and in a few minutes they were gathered together, gasping and wavering but there, under the protection of the hill.
Mackenzie leaned against a rock, his head cradled in his arms, breathing hard and trying not to let the men know that his legs were shaking, and weak, and he was about through. He did not wish to speak until he was more composed. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned and counted them. One was missing. Ackerman wasn’t there.
Beany Smith said, “Is the bottle okay, captain? You hit the ground real hard.”
Mackenzie reached into his pocket and brought out the bottle guard. He held it at arm’s length. He was aware that they all watched him, numbly. He turned it upside down and shook it. It didn’t tinkle or leak. “It’s okay,” he said, shoving it back into the parka. “What happened to Ackerman?”
“He was running right with me, sir,” said Nick Tinker. “He stumbled.”
“Hit?”
“I think so, sir.”
This was disaster. Ackerman was the bazooka man, and the bazooka was all Mackenzie’s artillery. It was his mortars, his 75-millimeter recoilless gun, and his other, lost bazookas all rolled into one thin tube. It was his sole effective weapon against enemy armor, or a road block, and he had no doubt that they would encounter armor, or a block, before they came out of this gorge. He rummaged in his musette bag, found his glasses, and crawled to a place between the rocks from where he could see, and not be seen.