Rescue from Manatugo Point

Connie Kendall brings the day's mail up to Whit's office and lingers until he notices what she has already spotted: an airmail letter from England. Inside is a single line naming a place called Manatugo Point, and nothing else. Whit, who has been working on a magazine article about how very short life really is, asks Connie to leave him alone for a while, digs out his journal from 1942, and begins to read.

He is a young Navy signalman then, newly arrived on the USS Irongate off Guadalcanal. The commander lends him to the PT-211, a "mosquito boat" under Captain Westhold whose own signalman has been wounded, and gives him the mission: the Australians have lost contact with one of their coast watchers, Lieutenant Reginald Duffield, last heard from at Manatugo Point, and they fear the Japanese have found him. The boat slips in by night, and Whittaker joins Lieutenant Evans' squad on the raft trip ashore. In the jungle something keeps flickering at the edge of Whittaker's flashlight, and one of the men, McGuire, fires nervously into the bush. Their shadow turns out to be Malanga, a native boy who begs them not to shoot and asks if they are the rescue party: "Sir Reggie" is hurt, he says - the Japanese sent bombs. Malanga guides them up the hillside and then vanishes, and the squad spreads out and finds Duffield's camouflaged hut, wrecked by the shelling, with Malanga crying inside it. Sir Reggie slept there for two days, the boy says, and now he is gone.

Malanga is sure the Japanese have taken him, but Whittaker keeps asking where else he might hide, and the answer is the "tea cave" where Duffield keeps his supplies. There they find the coast watcher alive - knocked unconscious by falling debris, his radio demolished, which is why nobody has heard from him, and cheerful enough to ask whether the Yanks have brought the World Series scores. Malanga, it turns out, has bandaged his head and watched over him while he lay senseless.

Duffield leads them down a quicker path to the beach, where the hardest moment of the mission waits. Malanga wants to go with Sir Reggie, and Duffield - after calling the boy the best friend he has ever had - ends up shouting at him to go back to his village before the boy will leave. Whittaker writes that not all the casualties of war are physical: you make friends, and you lose them. The PT-211 collects the squad just ahead of a Japanese patrol, outruns the enemy shells, and gets everyone safely back to the Iron Gate, where Duffield teases Whittaker about his Scottish name and guesses they may work together again someday. It is his first encounter with Reginald Duffield, the journal says, but it will not be his last.

Back in the present, Connie comes up at nine o'clock to say good night and finds Whit has spent the whole evening reminiscing. He suspects the mysterious letter is from Reginald Duffield himself, writing after all these years, and he realizes the old story may be just the example he needs for his article - Joseph and his brothers, and Lieutenant Reginald Duffield. He decides to call it Rescue from Manatugo Point.