Talmage Powell
Survival Exercise
Talmage Powell is a native Southerner, born in 1920, who sold his first story to the pulp market in 1943 and who is now in his fifth decade as a professional writer. He has published more than five hundred short stories and sixteen novels, and also has ten visual media credits. His books, testimony to his versatility, include a fine suspense tale, The Smasher (1959); a series of five novels about a realistically and sympathetically drawn Tampa private detective named Ed Rivers (The Killer Is Mine, Start Screaming Murder, The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer, Corpus Delectable, and With a Madman Behind Me); an acclaimed offbeat Western, The Cage (1969); and a tale of the supernatural, The Thing in B-3 (1969), for young readers. When he isn’t traveling throughout the United States and elsewhere, he makes his home in North Carolina.
To: Capt. L. G. McCabe, Intelligence Officer
5th Bn., 22nd Marines, Parris Island, S.C.
Sir:
In the event that I can’t appear in person for debriefing re Survival Exercise to which I, Master Sergeant James C. Kelly, and Privates Rodney Gordon and Sidney Finklestein were assigned, I offer the following informal report.
This may be the only means of making known the events that began at Point E. I feel that my chances are good of returning to Point E, if only temporarily. If I must abandon the location or fail to survive, the report will be there, awaiting the helicopter scheduled to pick up the Survival Exercise team.
As you know, it was to be a routine exercise to provide experience in living off the land, as would a small unit isolated in enemy territory.
Enemy territory is hardly the phrase to describe the locale in which the team composed of Gordon, Finklestein, and I found ourselves. We stepped from the normal into a delirium in which survival became a mockery — and if you find this report beyond belief I would remind you, sir, that I have no reason for deceit and am testifying on my honor as a United States Marine.
Ferried in by helicopter, the team was in top form, even by Marine standards. Young, tough, battle-ready, Finklestein and Gordon regarded the week-long exerxise as an adventuresome break in base camp routine. They fully expected to be cracking an icy beer eight days from now and telling their buddies what it was like, going into a tropical wilderness without supplies, equipped only with trench knives at their waists and matches in their pockets.
In my own case, I had been on one previous Survival Exercise, in Alaska, and I felt the coming week would be something of a camp out. After all, Florida was my native state. Even though I had never set foot in the deep interior of the Everglades, I had fished the murmuring bayous and hunted the pine forests before they were overcome by condominiums, retirement cities, expressways, Disney Worlds, and Big Mac wrappers. As a rural boy I had rubbed shoulders with Seminoles. Later, during my two years at Florida State, a Seminole had been one of my closest friends. I knew the Indian legends and lore, the basics for living bare-handedly off the lush land. You would think. Captain McCabe, that I was going into a classroom with the quiz answers up my sleeve.
But as the helicopter whirred us deeper into the ’Glades, I was reminded that it wasn’t all going to be crabcakes and beer.
Beyond the horizon the familiar planet had vanished. The uninhabited reaches overwhelmed our senses as we stared down through the Plexiglas bubble. We looked out over the limitless sweep of a watery jungle unlike any other on earth, a sun-broiled morass that could swallow the state of Rhode Island almost four times over. It was a world of molten sun reflections from shallow water, of razor-sharp sawgrass and small, low islands — hummocks — scattered wherever vegetation had reared up and rotted for a million years. It was stands of cypress older than the Crusades, burdened with heavy gray curtains of Spanish moss, providing life for the enormous, parasitic, obscenely hued wild orchids strung along the tall trunks. It was a seething incubator where mists and vapors slithered and the nights crashed and roared in the eternal struggle for survival. It was alligator, and poisonous vipers, and puma on the prowl, and stalk-legged birds, and shifting clouds of insects unclassified by the taxonomist, and deer, muskrat, fang-toothed cousins of the piranha, and creatures born to twitch in fear and die.
The chopper hovered. The pilot, a husky, weathered, gray-templed veteran, gave the team a badgering squint. “Welcome to a week in hell’s furnace, you gyrenes. I’ll go have a beer.”
He had chosen and zeroed Point Exercise, a finger-shaped hummock about a mile in length. A relative clearing, grown in waist-high grass on its eastern end, beckoned as a landing pad.
The pilot carefully rechecked readings on the electronic dials before him and clicked a switch, programming the coordinates into the mini-computer for a return to this precise spot one week from today.
He brought the chopper down feather-light, and Gordon, Finklestein, and I spilled out — three men in fatigues hunched in the flicking shadow of the idling overhead rotor.
The pilot grinned and yelled a parting, “Have fun.” And the helicopter was quickly up and away, leaving a small, empty moment.
“Home sweet home,” Finklestein said, looking around. He was twenty years old, wiry and agile.
“Bring on the girls,” Gordon added. A rawboned, slightly gawky, sandy-haired farm boy from Iowa, he listened to his words die in a muggy silence accented by the soft insect hum.
I’d spotted a probable campsite while the chopper had hovered, a shadowed glen about three hundred yards west of where we stood. “Let’s see what the Everglades Hilton has to offer.”
We strung out and walked, the grass slashing our calves. I was at point, senior in rank, age, experience — and size. I have not always been comfortable about my size. I stand six feet, seven inches, weigh in at two-forty. Gordon and Finklestein were by no means shorties, but I towered above them, and at the moment they seemed a bit grateful for my shadow.
A dozen yards, and the cloying heat swathed us in oily sweat. It was only a foretaste. Knives, matches, brains, and hands — tools for survival. Two concessions only had been made. In my hip pocket was the notebook in which I would keep a daily log — and which is now receiving this report. And Finklestein carried a portable short-wave transmitter, rigged with shoulder straps. It was insurance against the most desperate emergency.
Still, I thought of what we’d look like a week from today when we stepped aboard the helicopter. Baked out. Cheeks and noses peeling. Lumpy from insect bites. But I hadn’t the slightest doubt we’d be wearing the cocksure grin of Marines at the end of maneuvers.
The glade looked even better than it had from the air. It was sheltered by twisted pines and cabbage palms, carpeted with a soft sponge of pine needles. Two stunted trees would anchor the southern corners of a tchiki, the open-sided shelter favored by the Seminoles of old.
By sunset, we were pioneering in style. Our campfire was a friendly flicker in a muggy twilight, our bodies were tired, and the details of a busy day ran together in our minds. Or at least in mine. We’d cut pole framing and fronds for the tchiki roof. Plaited cordage from slender vines. Split bamboo for fish spears and crab traps. Gordon had turned up a fifty-pound turtle and we had him staked out alive as larder of future fresh meat. Finklestein had trapped an enormous king snake. I’d robbed a quail’s nest and climbed a cabbage palm to cut out the bud. Now we were belching pleasant echoes of a dinner of roast snake, baked eggs, and crisp, juicy palm fruit.
Under a bright moon we talked in the desultory way of men whose friendship needs little conversation. Gordon volunteered for first watch. I left him and Finklestein talking and sacked out under the tchiki. Another too-short bunk; the soles of my combat boots stuck out from the shadow of the thatch roof.