The Last Supper (14 page)

Nevertheless, Wolkowicz found his way home. When he arrived at the base, starving and dehydrated, three days later, he found Waddy Jessup seated on a chair in front of his hut, drinking tea.

“Back at last?” Waddy said to his exhausted second-in-command. “Never mind. Have some tea. Sit down. I’ve been ruminating, my dear Barnabas. There’s a lesson in our
last action. One really can’t beat the Jap by letting
him
kill
you
. The Jap sets up his machine gun, shakes out his riflemen, and waits for the impetuous white man to blunder
into his hail of lead. No, no, hot for Force Jessup.”

Thereafter, Waddy led his Kachins on several long patrols, moving foot by foot through the jungle, shunning the trails. It was hot, hard, fruitless work. Often the Kachins had to cut a passage
through the bush with machetes.

The Kachin headman had an unpronounceable name. Waddy called him N.S., short for Noble Savage. N.S. did not understand Waddy’s tactics. Each night, after the force made camp, the headman
demanded to know when Waddy intended to attack the Japanese. “The Japs are on the trails,” the headman said. “We must get back on the trails.”

Waddy would listen, a pleasant smile on his lips, affectionate mockery in his eyes. But he would not go near the trails. Finally, the Kachins threatened to take their arms and join another band
that saw more action. It was then that Waddy had revealed his plan to capture elephants.

“Elephants?” Wolkowicz had said. “What the fuck for?”

Waddy gave him a pitying glance. “Let me explain, my dear Barnabas,” he said. “How does Force Jessup move? Through the jungle. What is the main impediment to moving through the
jungle? Why, the jungle itself. If, however, we had elephants, we could flatten the jungle and move through it at will.”

Waddy unrolled a map and weighted it down with his samurai sword, Japanese strongpoints along the jungle trails were marked on the sweat-stained paper in red pencil.

“Look here,” Waddy said. “We know the Jap has a machine gun dug in here, aiming south. The Jap wants us to march north, around this bend in the trail, into the muzzle of his
gun. Instead, we follow our elephants up the trail to this point, just before the bend. Then we nip into the jungle and, moving with amazing swiftness and stealth, cut across the bend and strike
the enemy from behind. Then we melt back into the jungle. If the Jap follows, we lie up and wait and wipe him out.”

Waddy straightened his back and peered into the expressionless faces of Wolkowicz and those of the Kachin headman. “Brilliant but simple,” he said.

“Captain,” Wolkowicz said, “do you know how to ride an elephant?”

“I’ve been riding all my life. But
I
won’t be riding them. We’ll liberate their bloody mahouts along with the elephants.”

Now, on the hilltop above the Shweli River, Waddy wriggled backward into the jungle and handed his binoculars to the Kachin who carried them for him. He cut a map of the enemy camp into the dirt
with the tip of his sword and briefed Force Jessup on his plan of attack. It was a model of simplicity and aggressiveness.

“I count twelve Japs on foot, three in the tank,’ Waddy said, carving out the positions. “The tank must be neutralized before they can get it into action. It’s inside the
log position the elephants built. We have to keep it there. Barnabas, you are our demolition expert, so you and this splendid-looking Buddhist will go in first, wiggling on your bellies, and plant
charges in the treads and under the tank. When you hear a burst of Thompson fire, at precisely 2300 hours, blow it up. Then start shooting. I’ll be coming in from the river with half the
force while old N.S. charges down the trail from the rear with the rest of the troops, cutting off the Jap’s retreat. Do not, repeat do
not
shoot the elephants. Kill all fifteen Japs
and cut off their dinguses.”

“What about taking some prisoners?” Wolkowicz said.

“My dear Barnabas, it’s elephants we’re after, not apes. We
have
apes.”

Waddy, rolling up his map, grinned at Wolkowicz. “Hit the line for dear old Kent State,” he said. Wolkowicz was a graduate of Kent State College in Ohio; he had majored in music.
These facts deeply amused Waddy Jessup. In the falling twilight, Wolkowicz could read the word
Yale
on the chest of Waddy’s blue track jersey. He turned away and rummaged in a pack for
explosive and detonators.

— 2 —

In seven hours of hacking and marching, Force Jessup covered the half-mile of jungle between the hilltop and the Japanese outpost. Wolkowicz and the Kachin, laden with
explosive, wire, and weapons, began crawling toward the Japanese emplacement at 2130 hours. By 2215, they had dragged themselves about fifty yards, moving a fraction of an inch at a time, and were
only ten yards or so from the logs.

The tank’s turret was a darker silhouette against the black night. Even now, three hours after the sun had gone down, the temperature was at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sweat seeped from
Wolkowicz’s crawling body. He had been soaking wet with perspiration ever since he struggled out of his parachute harness, two minutes after hitting the ground in Burma. This disgusting body
that he inhabited in the jungle, slippery with its own fluids like an intestine turned inside out, did not seem to be his own. He was wracked with dysentery. He had had to stop several times during
the crawl to relieve himself. Between bowel movements, he had a tendency to break wind. The noise worried him. He was afraid it would arouse the Japanese. An excruciating cramp began just behind
the base of his penis and spread, growing stronger with every second it lasted and every inch it traveled up his entrails. He rolled over on his back and pressed his buttocks into the dirt,
squeezing the cheeks together to muffle the explosive sound of escaping gas.

In thirty minutes, he covered the ten paces that had separated him from the rear end of the tank. He could see the metal glistening in the dark and smell the oil on the machine. He put up a hand
and touched warm steel, then felt the treads of the tank. One of the Japanese was inside. Another was on guard in the turret. Where was the third? Wolkowicz farted powerfully, and the remaining
member of the tank crew, standing six feet away yet utterly invisible, laughed. Wolkowicz thought, He’ll smell me. But the sentry did not stir again.

Wolkowicz took off his pack and got out the TNT and the detonators. Doing this simple thing in absolute silence, doing it so slowly that he could not possibly betray his position by even the
flicker of a movement, required the use of every cell in Wolkowicz’s brain and the control of every nerve in his body. He wedged the TNT between the tread of the tank and the bogie wheel, and
inserted a detonator.

Then, crawling again, he moved away from the tank, paying out wire as he went. He had lost track of the Kachin who had crept into the outpost with him. Then he heard a gasp, not loud, like air
being let out of a bicycle tire. Wolkowicz froze. Someone was crawling along the ground toward him. Wolkowicz drew his .45 automatic from its shoulder holster and waited. When the crawling man was
six inches away, Wolkowicz recognized him: it was his Kachin comrade. The Kachin, his grin white in the ink of the jungle night, thrust his knife, reeking with the blood of the Japanese sentry
whose throat he had just cut, under Wolkowicz’s nose.

At precisely 2300 hours, Waddy Jessup fired a burst of tracer ammunition from his tommy gun into the Japanese outpost. Wolkowicz twisted the handle on his detonator box, and while Waddy’s
weapon was still emptying lazily into the darkness, the charge under the Japanese tank went off. The explosion looked like three cans of paint, red and yellow and white, smashing one after the
other against the black wall of the night. The ammunition inside the tank went off in a series of shattering explosions and the tank burst into flames. In the jittery light, Wolkowicz could see
Kachins leaping about, firing their weapons. Japanese soldiers scooted like rodents through the firelight and were cut down by bullets. The elephants trumpeted, shrieks of outrage amid the hoarse
coughs of the heavy American weapons and the titter of a Japanese light machine gun. Wolkowicz heard no human voices.

Abruptly, as if someone had turned off a loud radio, the firing stopped. In the firelight, the Kachins were working, teeth and knives flashing, on the stripped corpses of the Japanese. The
elephants, still trumpeting, threw themselves against the chains wrapped around their front legs. Their mahouts danced around them, shouting what Wolkowicz supposed were reassurances. A chain broke
and the end whipped a mahout across the kidneys, folding his body back on his spine like a strip of cardboard. The elephant dashed down the trail, away from the burning tank, dragging his clanking
chain behind him.

Waddy Jessup stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the outpost, waving his samurai sword.

“Stop the elephant!” he cried in Kachin. “You three men, fetch me that elephant!”

The Kachins, busy with their mutilation of the dead, paid no attention to him. Waddy didn’t really seem to expect them to. He walked over to a little group of them and watched them as they
butchered the dead, his jaunty smile fixed to his lips. There had been no sign of Waddy up to this point, and Wolkowicz had wondered, fleetingly, if he might have been killed or wounded; now he
suspected that Waddy had lain hidden in the darkness until the firefight was over: there was something false in the captain’s nonchalance. Wolkowicz approached him.

“Ah, the mad bomber,” Waddy said, looking Wolkowicz up and down. “Good show, Barnabas. Let’s have a look at our elephants.”

“I think we ought to clear out of here, Captain.”

“Do you really, wojjig?” Waddy said. He turned on his heel and strode across the beaten dirt of the track toward the elephants.

One of the beasts lay on the ground, weakly lifting its trunk, then letting it fall. Blood oozed from a row of wounds in the elephant’s side; the animal had been machine-gunned. The
remaining elephant stood over the fallen animal, nudging its body gently with its face. The two trunks touched and intertwined. The unwounded elephant uttered a mournful trumpet note.

“Bad luck,” Waddy said, gripping the shoulder of a weeping mahout. “Is this elephant going to die?”

Waddy spoke in Kachin, but the mahout, a black-skinned Dravidian Indian, did not understand this language. Waddy gazed for a long moment into the native’s tear-stained face. Then he drew a
.45 caliber pistol and shot the wounded elephant in the forehead.

The elephant, screaming in torment, leaped to its feet and charged. Waddy dove into the fringe of the forest. The elephant tore at the underbrush with its trunk and tusks. The mahout, sobbing
and shouting, danced beside the elephant, dodging the great round feet that stamped the ground, groping for Waddy in order to crush the life out of him. Waddy rolled around on the ground, samurai
sword in one hand, pistol in the other. A young Kachin darted in front of the elephant, planted his bare feet, and grinning happily, fired an entire twenty-round magazine from a Thompson submachine
gun, every third bullet a tracer, into the elephant’s brow. The animal fell, uttering no sound except for the shuddering thud that its great scruffy body made when it struck the ground.

Waddy leaped to his feet. “Jesus!” he said, rolling his eyes. He was trembling. The Kachin who had killed the elephant calmly reloaded his tommy gun. The unwounded elephant,
trumpeting, was loping away down the path, its mahout on his head. The sight of this beast escaping infuriated Waddy.

“Stop that man!” he shouted.

Though he spoke no English, the Kachin understood his meaning. He lifted his weapon and knocked the mahout off the elephant with a five-round burst. Then he seized the surviving mahout and
dragged him down the trail in pursuit of the fleeing elephant.

“Shit,” Waddy said.

He might have said more, but the Kachin headman trotted out of the darkness and began to speak to him.

“Not
now
, N.S.,” Waddy said, and moved away, so as to peer down the trail after the escaping elephant. A smile crossed his face. The elephant was coming back with the mahout
and the Kachin on its back. The headman caught Wolkowicz’s eye and pointed his bare arm at the flames of the burning tank. Half a dozen Japanese soldiers, brandishing their immensely long
Arisaka rifles with their glittering sword-bayonets, were leaping over the log barrier and advancing into the camp. They were killed almost immediately by fire from the Kachins.

Waddy, who had begun to trot down the trail in the opposite direction to meet the returning elephant, skidded to a stop, then turned around and ran at top speed toward the burning tank.
Wolkowicz, assuming that Waddy was charging back to meet the enemy, felt anger erupt in himself: he hated this evidence of his commander’s bravery.

Then Wolkowicz looked farther down the trail. Beyond Waddy’s sprinting figure in its Yale track shirt, beyond the clumsy galloping bulk of the elephant, a whole platoon of Japanese
infantry, led by an officer who waved a bright samurai sword, were trotting down the trail, firing as they advanced. The outpost was being counterattacked from two directions. Waddy, shouting at
the top of his lungs for his troops to follow him, started to run into the forest. A machine gun winked among the trees. The Japanese had outflanked them through the jungle as well.

More enemy soldiers were entering the outpost from the direction of the burning tank. Kachins, falling back as they fired, ran into a hail of bullets from two other directions, and were cut down
one after the other.

Wolkowicz fell to his knees and began firing his BAR at the Japanese officer. The man fell, his sword spinning out of his hand. As the Japanese officer died, gouts of blood flying from his
spinning body, Wolkowicz saw a map of Burma in his mind—the Shweli River flowing out of China to the north between two green mountain ranges, and all the vast impenetrable wilderness that lay
to the south and west between him and the sea, between him and India, where he would be safe. Wolkowicz believed that his life was over. The Kachin leader was kneeling too, his back pressed against
Wolkowicz’s, firing in the opposite direction. Wolkowicz felt a tremor in the body of the other man, and then felt—he always remembered this—a brief cold puff of wind against his
sweating back, as if a door had been opened a crack on a wintry day and then slammed shut, as the headman fell away, a bullet through his brain.