Battle Cry - Leon Uris [231]
All this was very perplexing to the Seabees. Informal calls were made by various camp commanders to Two Gun to report the theft of so many hundred cases of beer. With each visit Shapiro became duly alarmed and agreed that something should be done about it. Max would sigh deeply, shake his head and say an oath against the culprits. He suggested that a shakedown raid be pulled on the natives—who after all were the only logical suspects. Many times the other commanders would cast a wistful eye at the Fox Company air raid shelters at which a round-the-clock guard stood behind machine guns. To make a sly implication that the Marines were guilty was one thing. To dare attempt to send a patrol to inspect the shelters could well mean open warfare. So Fox’s bombproofs were never investigated.
Baffled and desperate, the Seabee chaplain was sent to Fox Company to have a long heart to heart chat with its curly-haired skipper and to appeal to his finer instincts. Unfortunately the chaplain parked his jeep by the lagoon and left the ignition keys in it. He had to walk back to Lulu praying for the souls of the Marines.
Night often found the Marines indulging in prankish games with their confiscated vehicles. The tide usually washed out a major part of the lagoon and left it a glistening sand bed. It was common for ten to fifteen men to pile aboard a jeep, loaded to the gullets with brew. They’d rip out over the misty sand and reach top speed, slam on the brakes and spin round and round sending men and bottles flying to the sand of the lagoon floor. They played other games, too, buzzing down the road and weaving in and out of palm trees. A couple of broken legs ended that. Two jeeps became stuck in the sand of the lagoon during a spinning session and had to be abandoned after they were stripped for spare parts.
Alarmed at the thefts, Shapiro called his crew together in formation and warned them it must stop. However, anything found lying around loose and unclaimed might be taken to prevent it from rotting in the tropical sun. Anything so discovered must be split up and the skipper, naturally, was to get five per cent off the top.
A dozen poker games went on all the time. When Dick Hart, the battalion gambler, snuck into camp, Shapiro promptly ran him out. It was all right for the Foxes to take one another’s money but he’d be damned if George Company was going to get it.
It was Shapiro’s greed that almost upset the apple cart. He had a tremendous yen to obtain a “duck,” a vehicle that ran on both land and water and was very popular transportation over the inlets that blocked island from island. He told McQuade and some of his lads of his yearning, one evening during a poker game. Nothing was too good for the skipper, his lads reckoned, so they set out to get him a duck. If Max wanted a duck, the least they could do was to get him one. They found him the very finest. In fact it belonged to Commodore Perkins, second in command of the atoll. With tears in his eyes, Two Gun received the offering and drove it proudly into its camouflaged garage.
So enraged was Commodore Perkins at the loss of his private vehicle that he cut off Fox Company’s movies. It made little difference, for the boys were too busy drinking beer, listening to armed forces radio, playing poker, and chasing native girls to bother with movies. The nightly shows were run almost exclusively with native attendance. It was then that Perkins decided he had had enough and ordered a patrol, to be led by himself personally, to encircle and shake down the Fox Company area, including the vaunted air raid shelters.
Shapiro, however, was not without a spy system. Being extremely liberal in sharing supplies with the nearby village he had hired a half dozen native lads as an intelligence service.