The survivor (4 page)

Everything was dark, and yet work was going on everywhere, so that the night was filled with all manner of sound.

Other cars, moving as slowly and carefully as his, came out of the darkness, moved a moment, disappeared. Men on foot hurried from one dark

place to another, while above all this the planes of the air patrol could be heard high and hammering in the clouds.

Adam had long ago lost his bearings and now did not have any idea where he was except that it certainly wasn't the Marine Base at Ewa. He was still in Pearl Harbor, because they had not been stopped at any gate, but none of the buildings were famihar to him now and, in the darkness, he could not even tell what types of ships were moored in the harbor.

Adam was beginning now to get a little worried. It was well known that the Marine Corps moved in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, but it was not absolutely unheard of for the corps to make a mistake. And dressing him up like this and loading him down with useless jimk and carting him aroimd in the dark of night was about the biggest mistake the Marine Corps had made since it allowed the Navy to take it over.

**You sure you got the right party, Sergeant? Tm just a happy pilot."

"I got the right party, Lieutenant,** the sergeant said in his talkative way.

**Then whaf s this all about?" Adam asked, hungry now and irritable. ^What am I supposed to do with all this junk? Who am I supposed ta shoot with that greasy gun back there? Or who am I supposed to stab with that greasy dagger?"

For the first time the sergeant explained things a little. "I imagine. Lieutenant, that your targets will be targets of opportunity, sir."

"Come onr Adam said, "I got the dagger and you got the cloak, so let's get together here/'

The jeep stopped and the sergeant said, "End of the line, Lieutenant."

"Now wait a minute," Adam said firmly. "I'm a long way from home. It's after curfew so there're no taxis—and I couldn't pay one if there were. So what do you mean, end of the Hne? I've got to get back to my squadron. After all. Sergeant, I'm in the Armed Forces too and I have duties and things like that."

"You can say that again," the sergeant said "So long. Lieutenant. Good luck."

Adam made no move to get out of the jeep. "I've got some pals out in the squadron with a real oddball sense of humor. If this is part of it, let's don't let 'em get away with it."

"This is as far as I go," the sergeant said, turning off the ignition and taking the key out.

It made Adam mad. "All right. Now wait a minute. How do I get back to my squadron?"

^TTou don't, Lieutenant."

"I do, Sergeant. So far I've gone along with this gag, but now I want to see something oflBcial. You come along and say *Get in.' Then you say 'Get out.* 'Get in. Get out.' And I wind up with a bunch of toys and a union suit in the middle of Pearl Harbor in the middle of the night. So now, who re you?"

The sergeant got out of the jeep without saying a word, walked around the back of it, and came up on Adam's side where he stood in the darkness. He stood up straight, with his legs a Httle apart and

the big gun hanging at his hip. "Personally," the sergeant said, "I'm nobody. But when I get orders from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, to bring Lieutenant Adam Land to Building Eight then I'm somebody. This is Building Eight, Lieutenant."

Adam had learned long ago how useless—and dangerous—it was to argue with a marine doing his duty. Especially when he was armed. "Okay," Adam said, getting out of the jeep, "I'll just have to take this to higher authority."

"Your gear, Lieutenant," the sergeant said, pointing toward the back of the jeep.

At least the sergeant was poHte enough to help him gather up all the stufE and arrange it so that he could carry it and move at the same time. Then the sergeant pointed to a closed door in the side of the building and got back into the jeep.

Adam struggled over to the door and banged on it wdth his knee, his hands being full at the time. Nothing happened, so at last he put down enough of the stuff to turn the knob. Beyond the door was the blackest darkness he had ever seen. It made the dark night around him look hke high noon. Gathering up his stuff again, he went into the blackness and closed the door. For a moment he stood in total blackness and then brilliant Hght came on and he saw, just ahead of him, another door.

Adam opened this and entered a bleak, narrow corridor with, in front of him, another sergeant sitting at a httle wooden desk with a gooseneck lamp on it. Adam went over to him and rested

some of the gear on the desk. "I'm Lieutenant Land, attached to Bombing Six, and I need transportation out there."

The sergeant checked a list on the desk in front of him and pointed down the corridor. "Third door on your left, Lieutenant."

^Transportation?" Adam asked.

For the first time the sergeant really raised his head and looked at him. "Transportation, Lieutenant," he said, and turned the hst face down on the desk.

Adam went down the long hall, the boondock-ers pounding hollowly on the rough wood floor, the various items of his gear clinking and clanking together as he walked, and the starched cloth creaking. The third door to his left was a plain, cheap door with no writing on it. It had never been painted either, so that the area around the knob had been stained by many hands. Adam opened it completely, so that he could get in v^thout his gear janmiing, and came into a long, bleak room. The only lights were two hanging fixtures with white enameled shades, the enamel chipped with the metal rusting through it. The bulbs could not have been more than twenty-five watts apiece, so that the long barren room was dimly Ht.

It was a depressing place. The wooden walls had never been paneled, so he could see the tar paper on the outside. The roof rafters were open and a good many spiders seemed to live up there. There were three httle windows, closed tight and covered with black cloth.

A narrow, hard, wooden bench was nailed to three walls of the room, and that was the only furniture in the place.

It didn't look much Hke a motor pool or transportation office, and Adam stood in the doorway looking at the marines sitting on the benches. There were about twenty of them, all dressed as he was in the two piece fatigues and, Hke him, without any sign of rank or rate. They might have all been generals.

Somebody said, "Shut the door."

^Transportation?*' Adam asked.

*'Shut the door."

Adam shut the door and said, *1 need transportation back to base."

The men looked at each other, amused, and one of them said, "Ain t that the truth."

"Look," Adam said, "Tm in enough trouble with my CO. already. I don't need another out-after-curfew."

**Relax," one of the men said. "YouTl get your transportation. And if what I think is right you'll have transportation up to here."

*Tou guys waiting for transportation, too?" Adam asked.

"That's what we're waiting for."

Adam clinked and clanked his way over to a deserted stretch of the bench and sat down, leaning the rifle against the bench. It slid slowly down and then feU on the floor.

Every man in the place straightened up and looked at the carbine lying on the floor. They kept

on looking at it until it made Adam uncomfortable. He picked it up and laid it on the bench. This disturbed his pile of gear. First a canteen rolled oflE the bench and hit with a hollow but dead noise, rolled a little way, then stopped. After that came the other canteen, the mess kit, and in the silent room it made an odd, long noise, the utensils inside the aluminum Idt rattling around long after it hit the floor. Then the helmet teetered on the edge of the bench for a while and at last fell with a great clang and spun around.

Adam picked the stuff up piece by piece and got them balanced on the bench.

Now he was not only hungry, he was frazzled and frustrated. He had had the dawn patrol, with a 4 A.M. take-off, then the long gunnery flight, then aU this fooUshness. But he had been in the Navy long enough to know that when they told you to wait there was absolutely nothing you could do but wait. There was no way to shorten the time of waiting, no way to avoid it Wait.

He wondered now if any marine had ever been told to wait some place and then been forgotten by whoever told him to wait. Maybe there were ancient marines scattered all over the world stiU waiting. Their beards would be down to their navels, their rifles (maybe old muzzle-loaders?) rusting away, grass growing up through their shoes—but still waiting.

Adam leaned back against the bare studs of the wall and looked, without any interest at all, around the room.

Now that he had got used to the two dim light bulbs he could see the men on the benches more clearly and, as he now looked at them, they began to impress him.

These were not ordinary men, and for a while Adam could not make up his mind as to what made them different from any other bunch of twenty men, but slowly he began to find things that distinguished these guys.

For one thing, they were the most honed-down bunch of people he had ever seen. They were bone-thin (but not skinny); so lean the bones of their faces were clear and their hands seemed to grow out from leather-covered bones. When they moved it was a smooth thing to watch, for these men were balanced in their movements and coordinated.

Their faces were different, one from another, and yet, in a way, all the same. Thin, with a certain tenseness around their mouths, and although they were all yoimg (Adam guessed that the oldest man in the room wasn't over twenty-five), they seemed much older. Their eyes were old, Adam decided. There was something in the look of their eyes that made you feel that they were old; that they had seen things you would never see.

He wondered what made these people so different from, say, the pilots in his squadron. They were about the same age—late teens, early twenties—and came from the same places, Detroit, Ocala, New York, Little Rock. Of cotuse these marines looked harder than the pilots, and Adam thought that this look perhaps came from the better physical

condition of the marines. The pilots weren't in bad shape, but they did not compare to the leaned-out, white-leather look of these men.

And then it struck him that these marines had a thing the pilots did not have at all. And the only word he could find to describe it was "dangerous." These guys looked dangerous. Not mean, not menacing. Just dangerous.

Somehow, too, they were older. They seemed to know who they were and why, and Adam knew very well that, at one time or another, every pilot (including him) had suddenly asked himself, *What am I doing here? What am I, Joe Doe, doing in this airplane, getting ready to go to war? I don't know anything about war. I don't know anything about killing anybody. WHiat am I doing here?'*

But these marines in this bleak room didn't ask themselves that. They, Adam knew, had been to war and were now waiting to go again.

Then he noticed something that surprised him. Each man in the room had exactly the same assortment of junk he had. The gun, helmet, canteen, mess kit, ammo, first aid, camouflage grease, pouches, dagger—all of it—and yet, when you looked at them you didn't see it. His gear was spread along the bench for a yard on each side of him; their gear was so coordinated with them you didn't notice it. They looked as though they had always gone around carrying all this junk, that it was part of them.

They began to interest him, and he sat on the bench and watched them, noticing first this thing

and then that. For one thing, he noticed that every one of them held on to his rifle all the time, and held it not as you would a shovel but as something vital to you. The rifles were always moving as the men held them and worked the bolts or cleaned them or tinkered in one way or another with them.

Another thing Adam noticed was that the men seemed divided into pairs. They were more or less spaced along the bench in pairs. They talked together in pairs, and if something two of them were talking about interested some others, they would talk about it all together, but briefly, and then go back to the pair thing.

There was no loud talking; even the laughter was short and quiet. By focusing on one or two of them at a time Adam could pick out a single conversation from the low murmur of the total talk.

"WiUie said to the mess cook, What you got in that pot?* and the mess cook said, 'Boiled bats,' and Wilhe said, *Oh, I thought it was something I couldn't eat.'"

A man across the room asked, 'Where'd Willie get it?"

"In the river. He managed to crawl up on a sand bar, but we couldn't get out there to him. They had it covered"

The man across the room said, "Oh, was that Wilhe? I saw a guy out tliere, but I didn't know who it was."

Adam focused on another pair. "What do you know!" one of them said, surprised. "This is my birthday."

*Teah? How old are you?"

"Twenty-five.**

"You oldr

"I don't feel so old."

"You gonna feel old."

Another was saying, "I didn't take off my shoes for eight days, and when I took 'em off, you know my socks had rotted clean away. Just rotted clean away."

''With these socks they give us it's a wonder your toes didn't rot off too. They're sure lousy socks."

Another man could hardly tell the story for laughing. "These snipers were aU up in the pahn trees and we were banging away, everybody. The Garands and BARs and the light MGs. Man, it sounded Hke Gene Krupa on a wild rip, and we weren't hitting a thing. And then Sarge came along and said, 'Stop making so much fuss.' So we quit shooting and he slung that old oughtrthree around, fiddled v^th the windage a Httle, and then, right in the middle of this Httle path, he got down in the kneeling position Hke he was instructing raw recruits and started shooting that old iron . . . pow . . . pow . . . pow. And I teU you they were falling out of those trees like coconuts."

"The o-three can shoot aU right. I don't say you can't hit with it But I want something that pours it out."

"I don't know," the other one said, dubiously. "I Hke the Garand aU right. But look how many of the old-timers stiU tote that o-three."