Ooh boy!
When they were finished with Hoffman, they were going to come looking for Pottinger and me. If they weren’t already looking.
I had to know how many of them there were.
I crawled closer, trying to see around the roots of the grass bunches that grew on the dunes.
The Mavis had four engines, one of which was blackened and scorched. Either it caught fire in the air, or someone shot it up.
Finally I got to a place where I could see the men standing in a circle.
There were four of them. They were questioning Hoffman in Japanese. A lot of good that would do. I never met an American sailor who understood a word of it.
The Japs were taking turns beating Hoffman with a club of some kind. Clearly, they were enjoying it.
The Mavis was pretty torn up. Lots of holes, maybe fifty-caliber. It looked to me like a Wildcat or Dauntless had had its way with it.
I kept looking around, trying to see if there were any more Japs. Try as I might, I could see only those four. Two of them had rifles though.
About then they whacked Hoffman so hard he passed out. One of them went for water, dumped it on him to bring him around. Another, decked out in an officer’s uniform, went over to a little pile of stuff under a palm tree and pulled out a sword.
They were going to chop off the kid’s head.
Shit!
I should never have let him go trooping off by himself.
The range was about forty yards. I steadied that pistol with a two-hand grip and aimed it at the Jap with the rifle who was facing me. I wanted him first.
I took my time. Just put that front sight on his belt buckle and squeezed ‘er off like it was Tuesday morning at the range. I knocked him off his feet.
I didn’t have the luxury of time with the second one. I hit him, all right, probably winged him. The other one with the rifle went to his belly and was looking around, trying to see where the shots were coming from. I only had his head and one arm to shoot at, so I took a deep breath, exhaled, and touched it off. And got him.
The officer with the sword had figured out where I was by that time and was banging at me with a pistol.
I rolled away. Got to my feet and ran, staying as low as possible, ran toward the tail of the Mavis while the officer popped off three in my direction.
“How many of them were there, Hoffman?” I roared, loud as I could shout.
“Four,” he answered, then I heard another shot.
I ran the length of the flying boat’s fuselage, sneaked a peek around the bow. Hoffman lay sprawled in the dirt, blood on his chest, staring fixedly at the sky.
The Jap bastard had shot him!
I sneaked back along the hull of the Mavis, thinking the guy might follow me around.
Finally, I wised up. I got down on my belly and crawled away from the Mavis.
I figured the Jap officer wanted one of those rifles as badly as I did, and that was where he’d end up. I went out about a hundred yards and got to my feet. Staying bent over as much as possible, I trotted around to where I could see the Japs I had shot.
The officer wasn’t in sight. I figured he was close by anyway.
I lay down behind a clump of grass, thought about the situation, wondered what to do next.
I had just about made up my mind to crawl out of there and set up an ambush down the beach when something whacked me in the left side so hard I almost lost consciousness.
Then I heard the shot. A rifle.
With what was left of my strength, I pulled my right hand under me. Then I lay still.
I was hit damned bad. As I lay there the shock of the bullet began wearing off and the pain started way up inside me.
I tried not to breathe, not to move, not to do anything. It was easy. I could feel the legs going numb, feel the life leaking out.
For the longest time I lay there staring at the sand, trying not to blink.
I heard him, finally. Heard the footfall.
He nudged me once with the barrel of his rifle, then used his foot to turn me over.
A look of surprise registered on his face when I shot him.
POTTINGER:
I heard the shots, little pops on the wind, then silence. After a while another shot, louder, then twenty minutes or so later, one more, muffled.
After that, nothing.
Of course I had no way of knowing how many Japanese there were, what had happened, if Hoffman or the ensign were still alive …
I wanted desperately to know, but I couldn’t make myself move. If I just sat up, I could see the tail of the Mavis … and they might see me.
I huddled there frozen, waiting for Hoffman and the ensign to come back. I waited until darkness fell.
Finally, I slept.
The next morning nothing moved. I could hear nothing but the wind. After a couple of hours I knew I was going to have to take a chance. I had to have food. I tried to move and found I couldn’t. Another hour passed. Then another. Ashamed of myself and nauseated with fear, I crawled.
I found them around the Japanese flying boat, all dead. The four Japanese and the two Americans. The Japanese officer was lying across the ensign.
There was food, so I ate it. The water I drank.
I put them in a row in the sand and got busy on a grave. I shouldn’t have let Hoffman go exploring. I should be lying there dead instead of the ensign.
Digging helped me deal with it.
The trouble came when I had to drag them to the grave. I was crying pretty badly by then, and the ensign and Hoffman were just so much dead meat. And starting to swell up. I tried not to look at their faces … and didn’t succeed.
I dragged the two Americans into the same hole and filled it in the best I could.
I was shaking by then, so I set to digging on a bigger hole for the Japanese. It was getting dark by the time I got the bodies in that hole and filled it and tamped it down.
The next day I inventoried the supplies in the Mavis. There was fishing gear, canned food, bottled water, pads to sleep on, blankets, an ax, matches.
After I’d been on the island about a week I decided to burn the Mavis. The fuel tanks were shot full of holes and empty, which was probably why the Mavis was lying on this godforsaken spit of sand in the endless sea.
It took two days of hard work to load the fuselage with driftwood. I felt good doing it, as if I were accomplishing something important. Looking back, I realize that I was probably half-crazy at that time, irrational. I ate the Japanese rations, worked on stuffing the Mavis with driftwood, watched the sky, and cried uncontrollably every now and then.
By the end of the second day I had the plane fairly full of driftwood. The next morning at dawn I built a fire in there with some Japanese matches and rice paper. The metal in the plane caught fire about an hour later and burned for most of the day. I got pretty worried that evening, afraid that I had lit an eternal flame to arouse Japanese curiosity. The fire died, finally, about midnight, though it smoldered for two more days and nights. Thank God I had been sane enough to wait for morning to light it.
With the fire finally out, I packed all the supplies I had salvaged from the Mavis and moved four miles along the south side of the island to a spot where a freshwater creek emptied into the sea. It took three trips to carry the loot.
I never did try to cross the lagoon to the wreck of the Sea Witch. On one of my exploratory hikes around the island a few weeks later I saw that she was gone, broken up by a storm or swept off the reef into deeper water.
I fell into a routine. Every morning I fished. I always had something by noon, usually before, so I built a fire and cooked it and ate on it the rest of the day. During the afternoon I explored and gathered driftwood, which I piled into a huge pile. My thought was that if and when I saw a U.S. ship or plane, I would light it off as a signal fire. I had a hell of pile collected but finally ran out of matches that would light. The rain and the humidity ruined them. After that I ate my fish raw.