Weapons of choice

When they crested the saddle, there was no possum hunter's hut, and thus no shelter for the night.

"Damn them," cursed Ryan.

"Listen boss. Shush now."

Kari cocked an ear to the higher ground.

Ryan couldn't hear anything at first, but after a short time he noticed a faint, metallic banging, and perhaps the sounds of human voices.

"Japs," said Kari.

"Good Lord, so they are here. We'd best push on for a look-see then," said Ryan, a small surge of adrenaline flushing the fatigue from his bones.

From that point on, they slipped around through crevices and over nearly vertical naked rock faces like a bead of water running over a fat pandanus leaf. There were more banging noises and voices-definitely Japanese-as they neared the lip of the plateau. Ryan was quietly impressed that they had made it up here before him.

A stiff breeze quickly strengthened into a hard, cold wind and, within a few minutes, into a howling pitiless gale. That was good. It was blowing from their direction. Down from the peaks. The Japs wouldn't hear him approach now. They would have to take care not to run into a sentry, but he didn't think that likely. This mountain was evil. Men huddled together on its face. None would stray too far.

On hands and knees they slithered forward until he'd reached the lip of the little plateau. Crab-walking sideways until he made the cover of a small bush, Ryan chanced a peek over the edge.

About three hundred yards away, clearly visible through the thickening gloom, was a ship. A giant gray warship, sinking into the mountain, her bow pointed to the heavens.

The ship was posed as though she were about to go down, slicing through the rocky spine of the Saruwageds as she would pass through the waters of the Coral Sea on a death plunge to the ocean floor. And yet, she remained poised, knifing into the mist and the sky, as though she had always been there.

While Ryan's mind adjusted to the discovery, he began to take in other features of the tableau. The platform into which the ship was forever sinking was covered by a field of giant toadstools, thousands of them, with caps a foot or more across. The moss had colonized them, too, and presented the onlooker with the bizarre vision of a dense mat of knobbled green felt, high in the sky. An occasional granite spike thrust up out of the blanket of moss and fungi. And sheltering in the lee formed by the warship, a dozen tents strained at their ropes as the roaring wind tried to carry them away. He wondered idly how they'd been tied down.

He already knew who had raised them in this strange place. Japanese soldiers had beaten them to the scene.

19

OAHU, 0548 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

The bodies lay undisturbed for hours. They had been seen during that time, but were ignored. Three sailors on a small motor launch puttering through the bay noticed the forms entwined on the beach and assumed a hard-partying couple had fetched up there after a night on the booze. An hour and a half later an Army Air Force officer riding a motorcycle through the dunes briefly caught sight of them, but he actually had been drinking all night, and was far too inebriated to bother with the sight of a couple, necking down on the sand. He had to sober up get back to barracks and get rid of the stolen bike.

Eventually a squad of marines from the Eighty-second MEU, pounding the soft sand on an early-morning run, discovered the corpses. Sergeant Clifford Hardy, jogging a few feet in front of his men, was the first to notice the dark shapes at the water's edge a couple of hundred meters down the beach. Like the others who'd seen the bodies from a distance he immediately assumed them to be a couple flaked out after a long night. They were entwined closely enough to be lovers. Bouncing along, five kilometers into an eight-kilometer run, with sweat in his eyes, he caught just a glimpse at first, a watery blur, and was inclined to ignore the sight. If anything, he was slightly pissed at the prospect of having to detour around them, but when a stronger line of shore break closed out just a few feet from the couple and washed right over the top of them, he knew straightaway they were corpses. The bodies rolled with the white water. One of them, a much darker one, he realized then, flipped right over with the lifeless heft of the dead.

Sergeant Hardy was a twenty-year man. He was well acquainted with the dead.

"Yo! Hold up!" he yelled.

The line of marines, deep in the trance of a long-distance run, stumbled over each other at the unexpected halt.

"S'up Sarge?" cried Warlow. "Your ticker giving out. You need your pills?"

"Shut up, Warlow," Hardy said quietly, his stillness silencing the men.

They all switched instantly to a watchful keenness. They were dressed for PT, not combat. None carried weapons. One man rubbed the tips of his fingers together. Another cracked knuckles within a closed fist. All of them shifted on the balls of their feet, turning outward, scanning for threats.