“Here it is alone,” she said softly. She led him inside the shelter and pushed him gently to his knees. He reached out and felt the edge of a thick mattress.
“Japanese take much good stuff from houses and we take from them,” she said. He heard her taking off her clothes and then felt her hands at his shoelaces. He pulled off his socks and undressed and crawled up on the mattress. She snuggled in beside him and took his hand and guided it to her small breast. He put his free arm under her head and let his hand stray down her taut belly until he found the thick mat of pubic hair. She found his lips with her mouth and they lay close together, his hands caressing her. Then she rolled away from him and spread herself for him, reaching for him, guiding him into her as he covered her. She gasped and then pulled her legs up and clasped him, her hips smashing at him. He felt his own orgasm coming and fought against it, and then lost control as she cried suddenly in ecstasy and he collapsed on her, burying his head in her black hair.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “it’s been so long and it was never like this.”
“So long, too long, for me, too,” she whispered. He felt her reaching out to one side and then she was cleansing him with a towel. He felt the fumes of the rum in his head and relaxed, and was suddenly asleep.
He was wakened three times during the night by her insistent hand. The last time the early-morning sun streamed into the doorway of the shelter, and he turned his face away from the glare and slept again. She shook him awake with a coconut half-shell full of scalding tea. She put the shell down beside the mattress and reached outside and got a tin plate full of slices of cold pork.
“Eat. Drink. I must go now to my post until this afternoon. Do not go outside to walk around, only to go bathroom unless Big Man sends for you.” She kissed him tenderly. “That you should love such an ugly one as me,” she giggled, and then she was gone.
He finished the cold meat and the tea and crawled out of the shelter. A soft male voice said, “This way, sir. I show you shit place.” He followed the slight figure of a man who had a rifle slung over one shoulder to a place in the bushes. The man pointedly turned his back, and Flanagan did his business. “We go back, now,” the man said. “Sergeant Mac wants to talk with you.” He led the way deep into the bush, Flanagan following along behind.
“I don’t suppose you people on the ship got a chance to read this stuff?” McGillivray asked, waving the sheaf of orders in his hand.
“No,” Flanagan said.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” the Army Sergeant said. “Can’t have old Doug getting hit in the ass with twenty thousand Jap troops he doesn’t figure on meeting.” He looked at the orders. “Must be a pretty big invasion.”
“Captain told me the Navy would have seven hundred ships, that’s including everything, mine sweeps, LSTs, everything. Hell of a bunch of carriers and battleships.”
“They must mean business, must be coming back to stay,” the Sergeant said.
“They give you a tough job?”
“Nah,” McGillivray said. “There’s four bridges on the main road into Tacloban and three on the only other road. Bridges are over a hell of a deep valley ravine, kind of country a tank couldn’t get through in a year. We can blow those bridges, mine the roads. They won’t get any reinforcements in to Tacloban. Just to make the cheese a little more binding I think I’ll send some of our people in the night before the invasion and steal all the distributors out of their vehicles.”
“How about your own people, what have you got, about ten thousand?”
“No,” McGillivray said. “About three thousand is all. Most of them are spread around the mountains here, on the routes the Jap would have to take to get at us if he knew where we were, if he was sure of where we were. We could cut him to ribbons if he tried to come after us. When he starts down those two roads to reinforce Tacloban we’ll slice him up when he hits the first bridge we’ve blown. Mine the road, use mortars from the mountaintops.”
“No other way he can get to Tacloban, only on those two roads?” Flanagan asked.
“Oh, sure. He could build new roads. Take about three years to build a road five miles long through this stuff in these mountains.” He sat back on his heels and grinned at Flanagan.
“Wait until old Doug gets here and we go out to meet him, and his paymaster finds out I swore all three thousand of my people into the U.S. Army and Doug’s paymaster is going to have to give them all back pay! Won’t there be hell to pay?” His bright green eyes danced merrily.
“The girl. Maria,” he said. “She wants me to recruit you into our bunch. What have you submarine sailors got we foot sloggers ain’t?”
“Couldn’t say,” Flanagan said. “I might join up with you if I thought I could get away with it. She’s quite a woman.”
Offshore the Eelfish cruised submerged. Mike Brannon sat in the Wardroom with John Olsen and Bob Lee.
“If anything has happened to Flanagan,” Brannon said, “I’m going back to Australia and shoot me an Admiral and a Brigadier General.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Skipper,” Olsen said. “He said before he shoved off, didn’t he, that he might have a long walk and couldn’t get back last night?”
“Stands to reason, sir,” Lee spoke up. “That Army guy couldn’t have his camp too close to the shore, too close to Tacloban or the Jap airfield there. He’d have to be way up in the mountains, where he’d be safe.”
“If anyone could be safe surrounded by thousands of Japanese,” Brannon said. “But I’ll settle for that. I’m going to get some sleep. Wake me if you see anything at all on the periscope observations.”
Darkness fell with the suddenness that is typical in the tropics. Maria disengaged herself from Flanagan’s arms and stood up.
“It is time for you to go.” She handed him the half-shell of coconut, and he drank deeply of the rum.
“Drink now,” she said. “We have made love enough. I have your seed in me many times. I will make a strong boy to remember you by.” She bowed her head, and he could hear her sobbing. He reached out and lifted her into his lap, his arms around her.
“Maria,” he said awkwardly, “I’m a sailor. I have no parents, I’m an orphan. When this war is over, and I don’t think it will be too long now, I’ll retire and take my pension and come back here and by God, will you marry me?”
She peered at him in the darkness. “The nuns taught us never to believe a man, but I believe you.
“You come back. I will be here, near Tacloban. It is my home before the war. I will show you your son and I will carry your burdens for all of my life.” She buried her face in his shoulder, crying softly. Then she got up and went outside and disappeared.
When McGillivray came for him Flanagan had drained the coconut shell of rum and a second one he found outside the door of the shelter. He lurched upright and nodded to the guerrilla leader. They started off, going down the mountain trail. At the last cluster of bushes at the water’s edge McGillivray paused and Flanagan bumped into him. The Army man tossed the haversack Flanagan had brought with him into the rubber boat that his men had pushed out of the bushes.
“I took Betty Grable,” he said. “Shove off, sailor. See you in Manila.”
Flanagan picked up the double-ended paddle and began to move away from the shore. Then he remembered the Christmas tree Petreshock had told him about. As the boat floated on the lowering tide he fumbled with the collapsible device and finally got it pulled out and securely in its bracket. He reached for the paddle, couldn’t find it, and then discovered he was sitting on one end of it.