Dark Full of Enemies(15)

Within a few months he had gotten a platoon in the 1st Marine Raiders under Lieutenant Colonel Edson. He had seen his first combat with the Raiders, an awkward, galumphing scrabble to expel the Japanese from an island off Guadalcanal before the invasion proper. Once on the Canal, he saw a solid month of patrol, ambush, and combat in the jungle with the Raiders, and lived through one long, long night on the ridge overlooking the airfield. And he had, finally, caught malaria with the Raiders.

He had never been sickly—as a child he caught a mild cold once a winter, but had never had the flu, measles, or any of the other ailments his peers seemed to catch from spring and fall, year in and year out. He decided later, in hospital, that his body had saved up all its capacity for illness for his time on Guadalcanal.

It came on a week or so after the battle on the grassy lump of land they were already calling Edson’s Ridge. First a headache, a dull one that he ignored. That was on a morning that passed for cool on that island, where it grew so hot and muggy that one could hardly breathe in the heat of the day and a man’s utilities blackened and rotted at the crotch and armpits and finally disintegrated on his body. By that evening he had a fever. Again, he ignored it. He assumed he was not getting enough to drink, and so during a break from digging slit trenches with his surviving Marines he drank four canteens of water, and another four within three hours. But with sunset the heat in his forehead remained. That night he shivered himself awake, wrapped himself in his blanket, and got no sleep. It had abandoned him again. The following morning he vomited twice, and he knew. He never threw up. It was malaria.

The corpsman gave him quinine tablets and aspirin and he stayed on. He went a week and a half on what sleep he could get in fifteen-minute stretches. Then, during a pitiful raid by no more than a squad of Japanese riflemen starving, half-wild skeletons even more pitiful looking than McKay and his ragged Marines, a bullet cut the cross-strap on his Sam Browne pistol belt, veered between three ribs—breaking two—nicked his left lung and left through his lower back. He passed out and the fever took him.

When he awoke and regained his bearing on time, on sunrise and sunset and the day of the week, he lay in a whitewashed ward. The next day, Keener visited.

The malaria had returned only once, four months ago, during the late summer. The deep sleep he had known early in his Marine days had not. He slept fitfully, or if he slept seven or eight hours at a time, he dreamt so much that he woke already depleted. A medical officer under the Colonel had offered him sleeping pills. He refused. He could not afford and would not risk dependence on medicine for sleep, not in this outfit and not with his job.

He jerked awake again, and the team looked at him. He blinked and squeezed the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes.

“How long that time?”

“It’s been some time now, sir.”

“One and one half hours,” Ollila said, and covered his watch with his sleeve.

McKay raised his eyebrows. “That’s better,” he said, and dropped off again. The team laughed.

Half an hour later, the crewman shook him awake.

“Captain—excuse me, sir,” the man said. “Lieutenant Woodruff—the pilot, sir—he needs you.”

McKay nodded, stood, and stretched as he walked up the cargo bay to the cockpit door. He leaned in and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. The pilot looked over his shoulder and removed his headset.

“Bad weather north of Edinburgh,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Reports from the ground say it looks like a blizzard to them. It’s parked on top of the mountains between there and Inverness.”

“Can you get around it?”

“Sure, but it’ll add a hundred miles or more to the flight. I can set down—”

“Do it—fly around.” McKay checked his timepiece. “You understand.”

The pilot nodded and turned back to the stick.

McKay walked back to his place in the hold. The plane rocked once and he braced himself against the fuselage. The first of many, if we aren’t lucky, he thought.

They passed over Edinburgh, banked, and bore northeast, following the coast toward Aberdeen. Night still lay over the land, but the tops of the thunderheads to the west were touched with sunlight. McKay watched them from his window, and saw three flickers in the dark bank. Lightning in winter. On any other occasion, he would have marveled.

Nothing could make him sleep now. McKay kept an eye on the weather, his watch, and his compass. They were due in Shetland no later than 1030.

Stallings, Graves, and—to a lesser extent—Ollila talked. Stallings retold a number of moonshining stories. McKay had heard all of them more than once. The stories from his time at Clemson, McKay noted, lacked key details—the narratives were streamlined, their ultimate result omitted entirely. He wondered how accurately he retold other stories.

Graves matched Stallings story for story. Unlike Stallings who—McKay noted—shared no stories from Sicily, Graves told almost nothing but war stories. After comparing the relative vulgarity and toughness of drill instructors in the British and American Marines, Graves talked about the Long Range Desert Group, the LRDG.

“That lot was mostly Aussies, Aussies and New Zealand lads,” he said. McKay noted that he seemed to have picked up most of his buddies’ slang. His accent was not purely South African—though he did, like the other South Africans McKay had met, call the continent Effrica. McKay wondered idly if he spoke Afrikaans.