They rode through the settlement with
Snow bringing up the rear leading the packhorses. About half a mile
outside the settlement they saw a cluster of horses standing in the
shade of tall gums in a paddock beside the MacArthur River. Just
beyond the paddock, four khaki tents were pitched on the riverbank.
Each tent had
US ARMY
stenciled in large black letters
on the side. As the patrol approached the camp, a young, clean
shaven Australian Army lieutenant in a smart clean uniform stepped
out from one of the tents and challenged them.
‘You are on Commonwealth Government
property,’ the lieutenant shouted. ‘What is your business
here?’
‘Private Peters and Private Watkins from the
Eagle’s Nest post at Rosie Creek,’ Smokey said as he and Weasel
swung down from the saddle. ‘We’ve got orders to pick up our
supplies here.’
‘
You mean you’re Nackeroos?’ the
lieutenant said incredulously. He looked disparagingly at Smoky and
Weasel’s long hair and beards, and at their filthy tattered clothes
and shook his head. ‘You look more like Ned Kelly’s bloody
gang.’
Smokey eyed the young officer dubiously. ‘We
have extreme conditions at Eagle’s Nest, sir.’
‘Maybe so. But don’t you even know enough to
salute an officer?’
Snow led the horses to the paddock and the
lieutenant took Smokey and Weasel into one of the large
insect-screened tents. Compared to the bark huts at Eagle’s Nest
the interior of the tent was palatial with tidy camp beds neatly
spaced around the wooden slatted floor.
‘We have a patrol out at the moment,’ the
lieutenant said. ‘so you men can use this tent overnight. There’s a
hut down in the paddock where your Aborigine can sleep. Don’t let
him near my men. The blacks carry malaria, you know.’
Smokey eyed the lieutenant with open disdain
.
‘After you’ve seen to your horses, I suggest
you shave and clean yourself up,’ the lieutenant snapped. ‘There’s
a latrine and ablution shed down by the river and you’ll find new
uniforms in the shipment of supplies for Eagle’s Nest, so you had
better put some on. Dinner is at eighteen hundred hours sharp. Try
and present yourself like soldiers in the Australian Army, will
you?’
The officer turned to leave, then stopped.
‘By the way, who’s in charge of your section?’
‘Corporal Brodie, sir,’ Smokey replied.
The lieutenant’s mouth stretched into a tight
smirk. ‘Just as I thought. Even in the extreme circumstances that
may exist at Eagle’s Nest, a commissioned officer would never allow
his men to deteriorate into such a slack, unkempt and undisciplined
mob as you lot.’
Weasel came quickly to Joe’s defense. ‘Even
in extreme circumstances at headquarters, sir, I don’t reckon
they’d ever send a commissioned officer to such a bloody hellhole
as Eagle’s Nest’.
The lieutenant glowered but allowed the
remark to pass. ‘Just be out of here as early as you can in the
morning,’ he called out as he stalked away.
Smokey and Weasel were clean shaven and
spruced up in new gear when they arrived at the mess tent for
dinner. Only the patches on their white faces where their beards
had been a couple of hours earlier made them look any different
from the C Company Nackeroos in the mess tent when they sat down to
eat.
Weasel was glad when one of the soldiers told
him that the lieutenant always ate alone in his own tent. The meal
was the best Smoky and Weasel had had since leaving Katherine—real
fresh beef, fresh vegetables and proper bread. Both of them went
back for seconds. As soon as Weasel had finished, he took a plate
of food down to Snow at the little hut in the paddock. When he
returned to the mess tent he found everyone playing cards.
‘Don’t you blokes go down to the pub, at
all?’ Weasel asked.
‘The lieutenant doesn’t let us drink there,’
one of the soldiers said. ‘But we can buy beer and bring it back
here. Trouble is, it costs almost a day’s pay for a bottle of beer
in Borroloola and sometimes they don’t have any anyway. So we make
do without.’
Weasel frowned. He turned to Smokey. ‘I’m
supposed to take a crate back to Eagle’s Nest. I hope I’ve got
enough money.’
‘You go on down and get it,’ Smokey said. He
pulled what money he had from his pockets and gave it to Weasel.
‘I’ll stay here and play a few hands.’
The bar in the old pub smelled badly of stale
cigarette smoke, sweat and beer. The light from a kerosene lamp
only made the small room a little brighter than the moonlight
outside. Wall to wall cigarette burns scarred the filthy linoleum
floor. Just one of three tables was occupied. Six or seven loud
drunks sat at it quaffing beer and intermittently roaring with
laughter. Weasel walked up to the bar, read the price list on a
small blackboard behind it and checked how much money he had.
After a moment a man wearing a dirty,
sweat-stained vest and three or four days stubble identified
himself as the landlord and asked Weasel what he wanted. Weasel
ordered a dozen beer to go. When the landlord lifted a crate onto
the counter, Weasel paid his money and finding he had a little left
over decided to have a quick pint at the bar before leaving.
‘Does the lieutenant know about this, son?’
the landlord asked.
Weasel grinned. ‘What the lieutenant don’t
know won’t hurt him, will it, mate?’
The landlord shrugged and drew Weasel a beer.
It was the first Weasel had had since Mt Isa and it tasted good. He
downed it in two long swallows and asked for another. While he
waited for the refill he turned toward the noisy crowd at the
table. Two big bearded men with long hair seemed to be the centre
of attention. On the table in front of them, amongst a sea of
spilled beer, lay several saturated banknotes and lots of small
change. It was plain the two big men were doing the buying and the
local bar-flies were doing the listening and most of the
laughing.
The landlord laid a fresh beer in front of
Weasel, who drank it almost as quickly as the first. Soon he began
to feel the alcohol and suddenly the world seemed a better place.
He checked his money again and found he had just enough for one
more. Weasel was beginning to get light-headed and when the third
pint came he sipped it slowly, leaning against the bar and
listening to the drunks at the table. One of the two big men
signaled for another round and the landlord hurried over with a
full tray.
‘Look like big spenders, those two.’ Weasel
said when the landlord returned to the bar.
‘They’re the Horan brothers,’ the landlord
said. ‘They’re croc-shooters. They come here a couple of times a
year. The general store acts as agent for a mob in Melbourne that
buys the croc skins. They stay here a couple of days, let off a
little steam, tell the locals a few tall stories, then bugger off.
I appreciate the business. It’s not often you find sea-tramps with
a little cash.’
‘It’s over twenty miles to the coast,’ Weasel
said. ‘Can a boat get upstream this far on the river?’
‘No, they get their sloop up as far as Black
Rock Landing, about thirteen miles away. Then they bring the skins
up here in a dinghy from there.’
‘A sloop?’ Weasel’s eyes widened. ‘Do you
know it’s name?’
‘It think she’s called the
Groote Eyelandt Lady
.’
Weasel was stunned. Joe had told him
many times of
Groote Eyelandt Lady
and her sadistic crew. He blinked and focused his eyes on the
Horan bothers as they sat noisily downing beer with the crowd of
local river-rats. He felt his anger rising as he stared long and
hard at the men who had left Joe to drown in the Gulf of
Carpentaria. Then suddenly the raucous voices and loud guffaws
ended and the room fell silent when Nick Horan looked up and saw
Weasel staring at him from the bar.
‘What are you staring at, you ferret-faced
little runt?’ Horan roared
With almost three pints of Dutch courage
under his belt, Weasel was tempted to be belligerent, but decided
against it and said nothing.
‘Well, you little bastard?’ Horan pushed his
chair back and lurched toward the bar. ‘I asked you a
question.’
Weasel, dwarfed by the huge croc-shooter
towering above him, remained silent.
Horan jabbed his finger into Weasel’s little
chest. He sneered and turned to the drunks at the table. ‘See what
the Army’s putting up against the bloody Japs. Bloody ferret-faced
little dwarfs.’ He turned back to Weasel. ‘Or were you full-size
and wore your legs off running down here when the rest of the Army
ran away from Darwin as soon as the Japs came calling?’
There was a loud roar of laughter from the
locals.
Weasel’s anger rose again and his discretion
deserted him. ‘Listen, mister,’ he shouted defiantly. ‘I’m a
Nackeroo. We’re in the Territory to kill Japs not to run away from
them.’
‘Haven’t you heard, mate,’ one of the
river-rats called out. ‘there’s no Japs left in the Top End. Not
even any Jap Sheilas. Nick and Henry screwed the last one to death
in Darwin over a year ago.’
The significance of the remark wasn’t lost on
Weasel. As another roar of laughter subsided he shouted angrily at
Nolan, ‘You’re a rotten bastard—you and your pig of a brother.’
Weasel quickly tried to swung his knee up
into Horan’s groin but the big man stepped deftly aside, grabbed
Weasel by the hair with a huge hand and slammed his head down
repeatedly into the top of the hardwood bar. It was only when blood
from Weasel’s broken face was streaming onto the floor and the
landlord threatened Horan with a length of steel pipe that the
vicious beating finally ended.
When Smokey and a couple of other Nackeroos
came down to the bar more than an hour later to see what had
happened to Weasel, they found him lying unconscious in the street
outside the pub.
*
Dan awoke in a cold sweat. His head ached and
his skin itched and there were pains in his arms and legs. But the
fever seemed to have passed. Once again he knew that he had somehow
survived another attack of malaria. He lay on coconut matting in
the corner of a grass hut. He was naked except for the remains of
filthy underwear, the only clothing that had not been stripped from
him by the Japanese the day he was pulled from his plane. He
couldn’t remember how long he had been in Purgatory. But it seemed
like an eternity.
He heard the crackling of the field radio on
a table on the other side of the hut and turned his eyes towards
it. As always, the diminutive Colonel Toki was sitting at the
table, listening intently, pencil in hand, paper at the ready. Toki
was the senior officer of one of the many contingents of shamed
Japanese soldiers banished in disgrace to Purgatory with little or
no food, clothing or medical supplies. As a former communications
officer, the colonel’s crime against the Emperor had been supplying
grossly inaccurate intelligence after misreading enemy radio
signals.
The flawed information had resulted in the
decimation of almost an entire Japanese unit by a superior force of
Americans soon after the Marines first landed on the island. The
only survivors of the ill-fated unit were twenty-five soldiers who
had turned and fled in terror when they had found themselves vastly
outnumbered and under intense machine gun fire. Retribution had
been swift for Colonel Toki. With his uniform stripped of all
insignia of rank he had been exiled to the lower slopes of Mt
Austen with the twenty-five dishonored soldiers who had fled in the
face of the enemy.
Toki turned his head and saw Dan was awake.
‘Ah, Captain Rivers,’ he said in perfect English, ‘you have decided
to join us again.’ The colonel quickly silenced the static on the
radio, stood up and walked over to Dan with a sheet of paper in his
hand. ‘I must warn you, Captain,’ he said sternly, ‘I cannot keep
you alive forever. My men resent what little food we give you and
also the quinine it takes to control your malaria. Now, from the
reports of my lookouts on the higher slopes of the mountain and
from the increased traffic on the radio, we think the Americans are
ready to launch a final offensive to drive what remains of our
forces off Guadalcanal.’ Toki thrust the paper in his hand at Dan.
‘If you are ever to see your loved ones again you must cooperate
now.’
Dan looked up at Toki and took the paper from
his outstretched hand. The colonel was a little man of about forty.
Only his small physique fitted the usual description of a Japanese
officer. Beneath the ragged uniform, unshaven face and malnourished
body was a quiet, refined and educated man, who so far had never
shown any tendency to violence. From the beginning, even in his
reduced circumstances, Colonel Toki had always treated Dan with the
courtesy and respect which international military convention
demanded be extended to a captured officer.
Dan remembered the day he had regained
consciousness after the crash landing. He had heard Toki’s calm,
soothing voice speaking to him from beyond the void, urging him
back to wakefulness. Dan had been filled with relief, thinking he
was in American hands. Toki had spoken reassuringly, telling Dan he
was quite safe and that he had spent most of the past twenty-four
hours talking incoherently in a language he didn’t understand. Dan
had murmured that he must have been speaking in Navajo, his native
tongue. When at last his eyes had focused clearly and he saw the
little Japanese Colonel standing over him, Dan had thought his mind
was playing tricks on him. But Toki explained that he had spent
several years in the United States studying communications.
Toki told Dan that it was because of fond
memories of United States that he had refused to allow his men to
kill him and had ordered that his cuts and bruises be properly
treated. It was only later, when Dan heard a stream of meaningless
words coming over the Colonel’s field radio in the Navajo language,
that he realized Toki had stumbled onto something very important
when he’d heard his prisoner talking in his sleep. Dan understood
then that the little colonel saw him as the key to unlocking a US
Marine voice-code and he realized what the Cactus Air Force Major
had been referring to when he mentioned the Navajo signallers on
Guadalcanal.