A Yankee Flier in the Far East

by Rutherford G. Montgomery

The guard moved toward Stan and halted. He seemed to be peering into the night. Stan held his breath. He suddenly appreciated the danger a scout faced in filtering through enemy lines. The sentry lowered his rifle and leaned on it. With a low grunt he lifted the rifle and moved on across the hollow, passing less than ten feet from Stan. A bush loomed ahead and Stan wiggled toward it. He slipped behind the low clump of brush and sat up.

Crouching in the shadows he listened. The sentry was standing still. Suddenly a slim pencil of light poked toward the bush. Stan did not move. To dive flat would have caused a movement the sentry would have seen. The light poked into the dense foliage, revealing red flowers and green leaves. Then the light snapped off and the sentry moved on.

Stan crawled away as fast as he could. His objective was two big trees with low-hanging branches. Reaching the trees he seated himself against the trunk of one of them. Ahead, the ground was fairly open. He could see the temple and the grounds through the trees. The road had led him directly to the spot where he had been made prisoner by the little yellow men on his first visit to the village.

His map was in his pocket but he did not dare flash a light to look at it. He would have to work from memory. What he could see of the temple showed that the bombs from the Hudsons had done considerable damage. A pile of rocks and debris lay to the left of the building and he could make out two big craters where the parking space had been.

Rising to his feet he walked to the left. By going around the temple grounds he should reach a grove of trees. He hoped there would be underbrush in the grove, but he did not remember Kirby having shown anything of the sort on his map.

Skirting the shattered wall of the temple Stan located the trees. They were on a gentle slope at least a quarter of a mile away. Stan moved down the slope and into the grove. Beyond the trees he could see a glow of light. Working his way through the trees, he discovered a stream and beyond that a stockade made of bamboo set upright in the ground and laced together. Two powerful searchlights played over the stockade.

Stan studied the layout carefully. The Japs were not worried about marking the stockade with light. A bomb dropped on their prisoners would relieve them of the trouble of caring for them. He surmised, also, that Kirby’s escape had caused the Japs to take extra measures to guard the prisoners.

There was little undergrowth in the grove and Stan had to be very careful. The reflected light from the searchlights made a glow that penetrated the shadows under the trees. Reaching the tree nearest the stream Stan halted behind it. The light was coming from two mobile searchlights standing well up on the far bank of the stream. The stream was wide but appeared to be shallow.

The stockade itself was about fifty feet wide by two hundred feet in length. In the center there was a thatched sun shelter, while at the far end was a hut with a thatched roof. A man’s scream rang out into the night, then choked off suddenly. A few minutes later a squad of Jap soldiers came out of the lower gate of the enclosure and marched away with two ragged men tramping ahead of their bayonets. They moved toward the temple.

Stan seated himself behind the tree and watched. His eyes followed the guards as they paced back and forth. He decided the guards came from the temple grounds. That meant the only men present now were those walking in front of the stockade and along each side. But there were plenty of them. There was also a machine-gun crew stationed on a platform which gave them command of the inside of the stockade as well as the ground around it.