«We worry about that when it happens,» Sweatley said. «If necessary, we just dump whatever we can't carry. Anything else?»
«You and Sergeant Cawber.»
«Fuck him.»
«We need him. You're just going to have to get along with him,» Abraham argued softly.
«Tell him.»
«I have.»
«Tell him not to start giving me, or my Marines, orders.»
«I did,» Chief Brewer said. «He said I should tell you the same thing. From now on, you want him to do something, you don't tell him, you tell either Abraham or me. Understood?»
«You're in charge, right?»
«You don't like that?»
«I'll go along with you two, just as long as Cawber doesn't think he's next in line, and over me.»
«Done,» Brewer said. «What we have to do, I think, is elect officers.»
«Elect officers'?»
«We'll talk about that, later. What we have to do now is start to pack essentials on wagons we know won't get stuck.»
»
We
start doing that? You and me and my Marines?»
«Everybody,» Brewer said.
«Okay.»
«The first thing we have to do is decide what has to go and what doesn't.»
What had to go with them was food, the bare necessities of clothing, the air-cooled Browning .30-caliber machine gun, and a gasoline generator and twenty gallons of gasoline to run it.
The Yangtze sailor who had been a radioman first on the
Panay
had a shortwave radio. He didn't know how well it worked, but Brewer thought that they should take it with them. Maybe they could establish contact with a radio station someplace.
They left Baotou eighteen hours later.
It took them a month to reach and cross the Altai mountain range, and then to reach the edges of the Gobi Desert.
There Brewer called a meeting; and here they all agreed to a command structure.
With the election of officers came the division of responsibility. Sweatley and his Marines, plus several able-bodied Yangtze sailors and several of the 15th Infantry retirees, provide the armed force to protect everybody. They'd be, so to speak, «the soldiers.»
The rest—under Staff Sergeant Cawber—would be responsible for feeding everybody.
The «soldiers,» in pairs, mounted on the small Mongolian ponies, went on what amounted to permanent perimeter guard duty. One pair preceded the main body of wagons. One pair moved on each side of the wagon train, left and right. And the fourth pair brought up the rear. Everybody did four hours at a time, but the reliefs were on a staggered schedule. Every two hours, one man was sent out from the caravan to relieve one of the men on each two-man team. No «guard post» was ever unmanned.
Almost as soon as they began their trek, they encountered caravans moving toward China. Most were camel caravans, but a few were like their own with ponies pulling rubber-tired wagons and carts. After the second week, they were overtaken and passed by camel caravans headed toward either India or Russia. On the one hand, they were encouraged that their caravan closely resembled so manyothers. On the other hand, they were surprised at how quickly the camel caravans overtook and passed them. They seemed to move at least twice as fast as their horse-drawn wagons.
It was three weeks before they risked having dealings with the other caravan people. When one of the perimeter guards caught sight of a caravan coming up on them, Brewer's wife and one of the other Chinese women who spoke Khalkha, would wait on the road, and half a dozen Marines would take the air-cooled Browning .30 and hide away in the rocks where they could come to their aid, if necessary. The gold they had went very far, but they didn't have much gold. They bought sheep, goats, and pigs; food for the animals; firewood; and animal fat for their lamps.
One day was much like any other.
Chief Brewer shot the sun with a sextant whenever the night sky was clear. The chart he kept showed their slow movement across the desert. They were making, on average, about five miles a day.
The radioman first did somehow manage to get his shortwave radio working, or so he thought, but there was never a response to his calls.
The women and some of the children spent most of their days scrounging for wood to feed their fires. Some of the larger wagons kept small fires burning inside on the move. People climbed in and out of these wagons to keep warm.
And there were some bad times: One of the 15th Infantry retirees died of a heart attack. The German woman committed suicide after two of her children succumbed to a sickness no one understood. Some people began to talk of just going back into China and turning themselves over to the Japanese. The Jap prison camps were supposed to be truly awful, but they couldn't be much worse than living the way they were now, at the edge of starvation, in bitter cold, and with no real hope of things ever getting better.
So when the first winter snow of 1942 came, Chief Brewer gave permission to three Yangtze River sailors, the chaplain's assistant, and two of the 15th Infantry retirees to take their families back to China. He gave them horses, wagons, and enough food to make the journey.
And then the caravan moved off again, headed for whatever it was whatever-it-was-they-were would find at the far side of the Gobi Desert.
Corporal Douglas J. Cassidy, USMC, formerly of the Marine Guard, U.S. Legation, Peking, China, rode slowly up to the third rubber-tired wagon of the caravan and swung easily out of his lambskin saddle. His horse looked hardly large or sturdy enough to carry the big Marine. Cassidy was wearing an ankle-length sheepskin coat, fur side out, a lambskin hat, the ear flaps tied under his chin, and lambskin boots. A Ml903 Springfield .30-06-caliber rifle hung, muzzle down, from his saddle. A USMC web cartridge belt hung across his chest. He tied the reins of the horse to a rope dangling from the side of the wagon, then climbed up onto it. He pushed aside the double camel skin covering the canvas body of the wagon, ducked his head, and went inside.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. There were no openings in the body of the wagon except for the one around the chimney over the stove. It was May, but it was still bitterly cold. Since the chimney did not adequately exhaust the smoke, the interior was smoky. An oil taper burning in the center of a table with very short legs provided very little light. The «chairs» for the table were pads of sheepskin.
This wagon, one of the four-wheelers, served as the command post of the caravan. Cassidy was not surprised to find the Chief, Sergeant Abraham, Staff Sergeant Cawber, and Sergeant Sweatley there. One of the four was always in here; often all four of them.
He made his way to the stove and used a government-issue mess cup to ladle tea from a large cast-iron pot into a bowl. Then he used a mess-kit spoon to add brown sugar to it. He took several sips of the tea before looking into the face of Sergeant Abraham.
«Something really weird on the road,» he announced.
«Like what?» Staff Sergeant Cawber asked, not very pleasantly.
«Two wagons, rubber-tired, each with two camels pulling—both rubber-tired, both two-wheelers. Eight more camels. Three men riding the camels.»
«What's strange about that?» Chief Brewer challenged.
«Two women and maybe five, six kids in the wagons,» Cassidy went on. «One of the women is white.»
«How do you know?»
«They stopped for lunch. One of the women watched the fire and the kids while the other went to take a piss. A piss and a crap. The one who took a crap took off her robe when she did it. She was white.»