Joliet turned to Bray. “Americans?”
Bray held out his hands and let three sets of dog tags dangle from their chains. He separated one from the others and read the name. “Coffman.” He pointed to the body at his feet. “He’s this one here. Just finished clearing him off.”
Hawkins moved down the line to Coffman’s body, his eyes jumping back to the jungle every few moments, looking for motion.
Bray read the rest of the tag. “Coffman. J. P. 452386 C. That’s his serial number. The ‘C’ means he was Catholic. ‘Type A.’ That’s his blood type. They didn’t do positive or negative back then. Next line is the date of his last tetanus shot. 4/1942, which is how I dated them. ‘USN’ for United States Navy. And I suspect that’s all his interrogators got out of him, too, considering his wounds.”
Hawkins had just noticed the multiple breaks in the man’s ribs. It’s possible he was punched repeatedly or just whacked a few times with whatever crushed his skull in. Straight nicks and scratches covering his arms, legs, and face; the kind caused by blades or, in the wild, claws and teeth. There was no denying the man had been tortured before he died.
“We need to cover them back up,” Bray said.
“I thought you wanted to remove the body?” Joliet asked.
“When there was just one body,” Bray said. “This isn’t simply a murder anymore. It’s a mass grave. Evidence of war crimes. Some of the guys who did this stuff during the war are still alive. Barely, but that doesn’t mean whoever did this should escape justice in the history books. Someone is going to have to search this whole island for more.”
Bray straightened suddenly as though waking from a dream. “What happened with you two? You didn’t find Kam?” He squinted at them. “And why were you running?”
Hawkins offered Bray a bullet list of everything they’d discovered: the rat, the pillbox that supported evidence of the island being populated during World War Two, the size of the island, and finally their flight from the flying lizards.”
When Hawkins finished, Bray eyed the jungle nervously. “Flying lizards? Geez. Can you describe them?”
“I can draw one for you back at the Magellan,” Hawkins said. While far from an artist, he sketched in his free time and, according to Bray, he was a “regular Picasso.” But Picasso represented the extent of Bray’s knowledge of the arts outside of the multiplex movie theater.
Hawkins stood and took the two-way radio from his pocket. He pushed the Talk button and said, “Captain Drake, this is Hawkins. You read?”
After a moment of static, the captain’s voice came from the speaker. “I read you, Hawkins. Didn’t think I’d hear from you so soon. Did you find Kam already? Over.”
“No, sir. It’s a long story and I’d prefer to give you the details in person. But the short version is that we think Kam either fell overboard … or he was taken. Whoever fled the ship and left those footprints in the sand knows this island well. Over.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Drake said.
Hawkins looked out at the pale blue hull of the Magellan. If he didn’t look at his feet, or back at the foreboding jungle behind him, the scene appeared picturesque. Real postcard material. But the beauty of this place was cosmetic. Beneath the stunning views lurked a dark and bloody past. “It’s not, sir. How are things on your end? Over.”
“Making some progress actually, hold on.”
The line went silent. During that time, Hawkins’s eyes lowered to Coffman’s body. He looked at the legs and saw that both had been fractured multiple times and allowed to heal incorrectly. He couldn’t imagine the kind of pain this man endured. What could he have known that would make him endure this kind of torture? Unless, Hawkins thought, this wasn’t torture.
Coffman had been tortured. Of that there was no doubt. But were they trying to extract information from him or simply entertaining themselves?
“This is odd,” Joliet said, bending down to the skeleton with the illusion of a third arm.
Hawkins glanced at her, but as he did, he saw something strange, too. He turned back to Coffman’s body. The left arm looked strange. He turned his head to the side, trying to get a good look at both arms at once. He knelt down and placed one hand at Coffman’s shoulder and the other at his wrist—the hand was missing. Without shifting his hands, he picked them up and moved them to the right arm. The hell? While his system of measurement was crude, he felt positive that Coffman’s left arm was at least three inches shorter than the right. The bones in the left arm were also thinner.