W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps VII - Behind the Lines

The man's head seemed to explode.

He looked back at Everly in time to see him-far more clearly this time- repeat what he'd done in the compartment. Pulling the man's head backward by his hair to expose his throat, he used a thin-bladed knife to cut deeply into it. Blood gushed out.

Everly dropped the man's head onto the deck. As Weston watched, horri-fied, Everly ran his hands over the man's body, searching it. He put his hands in the man's pockets and came out with a pocket watch, a key, and some money, all of which he jammed into his own pocket. Finally, he stood up.

"You want to give me a hand here, Mr. Weston?"

"What?"

"Get this sonofabitch over the side. Him and the others."

"You're going to throw him overboard?"

"You want to keep them, Mr. Weston?" Everly asked.

Weston went forward and helped Everly throw the body over the rail. It entered without much of a splash. And when he gave in to the impulse to look over the side, it was nowhere in sight.

Everly was by then already aft, searching the body of "their" Filipino. From it, he took a canvas wallet and a gold locket of some sort the man had been wearing around his neck. He went into the wallet and took from it the five hundred dollars Weston had given the man on the beach. He put the money in his pocket; and then, horrifying Weston, he pulled the man's trousers off.

Everly met his eyes. "We're going to need clothes," he said, adding, "Help me get the bastard over the side."

Weston moved to help him. The body fell backward into the water, and Weston had a quick sight of the man's face, the features obscenely distorted by the.45 bullet. It would remain with him for a long time.

By the time they'd dragged the last two bodies from the compartment, searched them, stripped them, and pushed them over the side, Weston was ex-hausted, sweating, and breathing heavily. He sat down on the deck, his back against the mast, feeling sick and fighting the urge to throw up.

A few minutes later, Everly came back and sat down beside him.

"No food and no charts," Everly said. "Those bastards had no intention of doing anything but going back where we came from, with our money, and without us."

"Shit," Weston said.

After a while, he became aware that his hands were sticky. He knew why. He pushed himself away from the mast and made his way aft, knelt on the deck, and put his hands in the water. There was no sensation of movement other than a side-to-side rocking motion.

He washed his hands and arms as well as he could, and tried not to think what his chest must look like. Then he pulled himself back in the boat and brushed up against something hard, which moved. After a moment, he realized it was the tiller. There was no life to it, which confirmed his belief that they were sitting dead in the water.

If that's the case, the bodies we put over the side are likely to be floating around right next to us. We have to get out of here.

Where the hell are we?

The flashlight came on, and Everly directed it at the mast. The sail was down, which explained why they were dead in the water.

The light went out. After a moment, there was a creaking sound, and Wes-ton sensed, rather than saw, that Everly was raising the sail. Confirmation of this came a moment later, when he heard the sound of the sail filling. A mo-ment later, he felt a faint suggestion of movement.

He put his hand to the tiller, put it amidship, and felt life come into it.

Everly came aft.

The flashlight came on, and he saw Everly studying a compass.

"We're pointing north," Everly said. "We want to go southeast. You know anything about sailing a boat, Mr. Weston?"

"Only what I learned at camp when I was a kid."

"Can you turn us around, point us southeast?"

"Where are we going?"

"Mindanao," Everly said. "It's five hundred miles or so to the south-east."

"We don't have any food or any water," Weston said.

"There's a bunch of little islands between here and Mindanao. We'll just have to try to get food and water."

"I'll bring us about," Weston said. "Watch the boom. And I think you better give me that compass."

Everly handed him the compass. Weston started pushing on the tiller.

The boat began to turn.

"At least we got our money back," Everly said. "That's something."

And our lives. We 're alive, Weston thought, but said nothing. "Plus what looked like another three, four hundred," Everly added. "I don't think we were the first people these fuckers took for a boat ride."

[THREE]

When the sun came up, they were out of sight of land, alone on a gently rolling sea.

Everly's Marine Corps-issue compass showed them on a southeasterly course. Weston wondered if that were actually the case, or whether steel or iron somewhere on the boat was attracting the compass needle. On the other hand, they were not headed in the wrong direction. If the sun rises in the east, and you are headed directly for it, then south is ninety degrees to the right.

Since he was steering somewhat to the right of the rising sun-east and south (in other words, steering southeast), and this corresponded to the com-pass indications, they were probably headed on a generally southeastern course. But they weren't navigating. For the moment, of course, that was a moot point, since navigation presumes a destination, and they didn't know where they were going-except in the most imprecise terms, "to Mindanao."

Everly searched the boat as soon as there was light enough for that, but found nothing of value except two cans of pineapple slices and a bottle of Coca-Cola. No charts, no other food, and no water.

He found a bucket, too, and used it to flush the blood from the deck. But cleaning up the compartment where they were hiding, where the Filipinos tried to kill them, was impossible. He could have poured water into the compart-ment, but there was no way to pump it out.

When a sickly sweet smell began to come from below, Everly closed the hatch and they tried to ignore the odor.

They shared the Coca-Cola and the two cans of pineapple slices.

Weston thought that perhaps it wasn't wise to eat all the pineapple at once. Maybe they should have saved half for later.

Then he decided it didn't make any difference. They had to find more food and water, or they were finished.

By ten in the morning, the heat from the sun grew uncomfortable. Using a foul-smelling piece of worn canvas, they rigged an effective sunshade. But that was too late. They were already, badly sunburned.

A few minutes after three in the afternoon, they saw on their left horizon what could be land.

The question was, if it was land, and not their eyes just playing tricks on them, what was it?

It very easily could have been part of the island of Luzon, the far side of the entrance to Manila Bay. The Japanese were supposed to be all over that part of Luzon. Was that true?

Was it worth it to go through everything they'd gone through just to find themselves prisoners of the Japanese... even before that would have happened if they'd stayed on The Rock instead of deserting in the face of the enemy?

But the alternative to making for what was probably land on the horizon, Weston decided, was to continue on a course he had very little confidence in, and without food and water. For all he knew, if he kept on his present course, he could very easily be heading out into the South China Sea, with no landfall possible until long after they were dead of dehydration.

Twenty minutes later, they could see enough to know that it was indeed land on the horizon. A half hour after that, they were close enough to make out surf crashing against a solid wall of vegetation. There was no sign of civiliza-tion.

It was now getting close to five p.m.

"We don't have an anchor, and we can't get through that surf," Weston said.