Somebody not far away was wailing for his mother in Czech. Vaclav and Halévy shared pained looks. That sounded bad, and the poor guy wouldn’t be the only Czech hurt or killed, either. The government-in-exile’s army had been a regiment when it got to Spain. It was a lot smaller than that now, and kept shrinking all the time.
CHAPTER 7
Bend your knees. Roll when you hit. Don’t let the canopy blow you all over the place. The first time Pete McGill jumped out of a C-47, he had to think about all that stuff. No more.
This was his seventh jump now. He knew what it was like to step out of a plane and come to earth under a king-sized umbrella. Somebody’d told him that was just what the Germans called them, that their word for paratrooper literally meant umbrella rifleman.
He’d discovered he enjoyed floating down out of the sky. It was as close to flying as you could come without strapping on an airplane. And you were out in the air yourself with a parachute, not inside a machine that smelled of gasoline and lubricating oil.
He was only a couple of hundred feet off the ground and bracing himself for the landing when a little bird fluttered past him. Maybe he was imagining things, but he thought he saw surprise in its beady black eyes. What was a human doing up here in bird country?
“Oof!” he said when he landed. He bent his knees. He rolled. He wrestled the canopy into submission and detached himself from it. Then he lit a cigarette while he waited for a jeep to come by and pick him up.
The C-47 from which he’d parachuted was droning off toward the horizon. When he went in for real, the transport would fly in lower, so the men inside wouldn’t have so far to drop … and so the Japs on the ground wouldn’t have long to shoot at them while they hung in the air like ripe fruit dangling from a tree.
Here came the jeep, with a couple of leathernecks already in it. Pete stuck out his thumb, as if he were hitching a ride. When the jeep stopped so he could get in, the driver asked, “Where to, Mac?”
“Take me to the nearest saloon,” McGill answered. “If it’s next door to a cathouse, that’s better.”
Everybody laughed. One of the other guys who’d gone out of the C-47 said, “That sounds good to me, too. Let’s go do it.”
“Fuckin’ comedians, that’s what you are,” the driver said.
“I want to be a fuckin’ comedian. That’s how come I asked for a bar with a cathouse next to it,” Pete said.
“Funny. Funny like a truss,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Yeah, you’ll be on the radio next week, tellin’ dumb jokes for fuckin’ Palmolive soap.”
He took them back to Schofield Barracks, as Pete had known he would. No fleshpots there. The Marines climbed aboard a bus that hauled them back to Ewa, the base west of Pearl Harbor. Before they got there, though, a roadblock manned by MPs stopped them.
“The fuck is going on?” the bus driver, a Marine himself, bawled out of the window. “What are you guys doing here?”
“Ewa’s under quarantine,” one of the MPs answered. In case the driver didn’t know what that meant, he amplified it: “Nobody in, nobody out.”
“You nuts? What for?” the driver said.
“On account of a couple of guys down there are down sick with cholera, that’s what for,” the MP said. “I hear one of ’em’s dead, but I don’t know that for sure. They don’t want it getting loose all over the place.”
“Fuck me,” Pete said to the leatherneck sitting across the aisle from him. “Didn’t we get shots for that shit?”
“I think so,” the other Marine answered. “We got so many shots, both my arms swole up like poisoned pups and my ass was too sore to sit down on it for two days. I ain’t had an ass like that since my old man used to lick me before I joined the Corps. They say the training is rough, but, man, it was a walk in the park after my pa, I tell you.”
“I know what you mean,” Pete said. His father hadn’t walloped him that hard, but he hadn’t had an easy time growing up, either. He didn’t know many Marines who had. Most guys who joined the Corps were tough to begin with, and boot camp only made them tougher.
Meanwhile, the bus driver was saying, “Well, what am I supposed to do with these guys now?”
“Take ’em to Pearl,” the MP told him. “They’ll find somewhere to stash ’em till things at Ewa get straightened away.”
“Goddamn pain in the ass,” the driver grumbled.
“Don’t blame me, buddy,” the MP said. “Blame the stinkin’ slanties. They’re the ones keep dropping that poison shit on Hawaii.”
“It’s a crock of crap, is what it is,” the driver said. “How many bombers fly outa here two, three times a week to pound the crap outa Midway? But the Japs still keep sending planes back here.”
“Write your Congressman if you don’t like it-I can’t do nothin’ about it any which way.” The MP jerked his thumb eastward, toward Pearl. “Write your Congressman after you take these apes where they gotta go.”
Since they were coming from the direction of Ewa, the sentries on the road into the Pearl Harbor naval base didn’t want to let them in. The driver threw a tantrum a four-year-old would have been proud of. The sentries had a field telephone. They spent twenty minutes going back and forth with their superiors. Finally, shaking their heads as if they were dealing with a busload of plague-carrying rats, they let the leathernecks proceed.
Pete counted himself lucky that the mess hall hadn’t closed by the time he finally walked in. The fried chicken was rubbery and the mashed potatoes were tired, but he didn’t care. By the time he finished, he had enough bones on his plate to build himself another bird.
He also didn’t care where they put him for the night. It was Hawaii, for crying out loud. He would have curled up on some grass somewhere and slept like a log till the sun woke him up come morning. No, on second thought he wouldn’t. Some damn Shore Patrol clown would have rousted him in the middle of the night.
At last, the paratroopers were given a hall in a barracks that, by the musty smell, hadn’t been used for anything for a long time. Except for the risk of prowling SPs, Pete would rather have slept outside on the grass. He didn’t get to make such choices, though. People told him what to do, and he did it. That was what being a Marine was all about.
He didn’t get to the mess hall late the next morning. Eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, coffee … He filled himself very full again. It wasn’t fancy food, but it was the kind of stuff even Navy cooks had trouble ruining.
Then he and the rest of the paratroopers had to get the brass to notice that things were screwed up for them. As far as the people at the airstrip where the C-47s took off and landed knew, they’d gone back to Ewa the way they were supposed to. As far as the brass at Ewa knew, they were AWOL. Yes, Ewa was under quarantine, but what did that have to do with anything?
They spent most of the day getting all that straightened out. By the time it was fixed, or Pete thought it was, he’d got good and disgusted. “We should’ve gone straight into Honolulu yesterday, had ourselves a spree on Hotel Street,” he said. “They still woulda figured us for AWOL today, and we coulda got smashed and laid.”
“What about the bus driver?” one of the other paratroopers asked.
“Hell, he coulda come, too,” Pete said magnanimously. “I mean, he was a Marine himself, so why shouldn’t he have a good time along with us?”
“You got all the answers,” the other leatherneck said, nothing but admiration in his voice.
“I wish,” Pete said. “If I’m so goddamn smart, how come I ain’t rich?” He stuck a hand in his pocket. A few coins clinked inside there, but only a few. Unless he got lucky rolling poker dice or something, he wouldn’t have had much of a spree in Honolulu’s red-light district.