by Peter Watt
Paul sighed and started to the house where he could see a welcoming flicker of light through the windows. It had been Jack Kelly’s personal intervention with the principal administrator of Papua and New Guinea that had ensured that Paul and his family were released to return to their home. Jack had passionately vouched for Paul not being a threat to any war aims after he had spoken to his friend and Paul had coldly given his written agreement to remain neutral in the conflict, for the sake of his wife and daughter if not for himself.
Paul walked slowly to the house where Karin was waiting for him on the verandah with a pot of coffee and two mugs. This evening ritual of taking coffee as the sun set over the rows of coconut palms had become an established quiet time for them both. Paul smiled. Why was it that Karin was just as beautiful as the day they had met so long ago in Munich? Her long tresses of blonde hair were shot with grey but nothing else seemed to have aged about her. Her skin was still smooth, like that of a young girl, despite living in the tropics. And her eyes still danced with mirth at his feeble attempts at humour. Time had rounded her body with a natural softness that he loved when they lay in bed at night listening to the sweet, soft sounds of the bush around them. Love was a strange thing only made stronger when two people shared both hardship and the good times together.
‘Is it the letter that bothers, my husband?’ Karin asked, pouring a mug of thick black coffee. She had been with her man through a long war, a troubled post-war Germany and finally in the intervening years between the wars, in her earthly paradise of the plantation.
Paul slumped into a cane chair, accepting the coffee mug with both hands. The evening air was warm and still, suffused with a balmy peace that was just a small part of what made Papua paradise.
‘It has been years,’ Paul sighed, sipping from his mug. ‘And I may have been wrong not to tell Jack about the first letter. But I still feel that I did the right thing considering how his life had changed.’
Karin had come to learn of the letter written and posted by Paul’s brother-in-law, Gerhardt Stahl. It made mention of Gerhardt’s daughter, Ilsa, who in fact had been unknowingly fathered by Jack Kelly to Paul’s sister, Erika. The first letter had arrived just after Jack married Victoria and, fearing that its contents would disturb the happiness of his best friend, Paul chose not to answer the letter.
Years later, a second letter had arrived, this time from Ilsa Stahl in America informing the Manns of Gerhardt’s death and requesting information about Jack Kelly. Once again Paul concealed its contents from Jack. Why? Paul was not sure himself but he still chose to keep the past locked in secrecy. Maybe it was just a feeling that the past should not intrude on the present. For whatever reason, Paul realised that the arrival of this second letter weeks earlier might compound his possible mistake of the past. Had it been a mistake to hide the existence of Jack’s daughter from him? How ironic, Paul pondered, gazing across the well-kept tropical gardens at the beach below, that the daughter of Jack Kelly was his own niece, binding the two families by blood.
‘Don’t you think you should tell Jack?’ Karin asked. ‘I think your best friend has the right to know by now that he has a daughter who is almost twenty-one.’
Paul continued to stare at the sea. ‘I have made my decision,’ he responded. ‘War is not a good time to learn of such things,’ he said quietly. ‘We all have enough to worry about.’
Karin fell silent and the pair sat in the dying sunlight while Paul continued to agonise over his decision not to tell his estranged best friend that his daughter had written to her Uncle Paul asking if he knew of a man called Jack Kelly. Ilsa Stahl was a ghost of the past and should remain there, Paul concluded.
Victoria Kelly had always liked the great island of Bougainville that lay to the north-east of Papua. Although the natives still had a reputation for cannibalism they also had a respect for the European settlers and Victoria attributed this respect to the German occupation of the land prior to the Great War. The Teutonic, iron-hard discipline had enforced law and order on a warrior people and its legacy was a proud people, not quite subservient but prepared to work with the Europeans of the newer Australian administration.
Victoria stood on the deck gripping one of the three mainmasts of the schooner, Independence. The schooner was a recent acquisition, purchased when Jack had sold the smaller lugger, Erika Sarah, to meet the growing demand for cargo shipping between the islands. The Independence had been built in Delaware in 1901 of oak and Georgia pine. She was 132 feet long, gaff-rigged with clean sharp lines. Jack had the schooner fitted with the most powerful inboard marine engine he could obtain, for motoring when the wind was down, and despite the fact that she was a working sailing boat he had also relatively comfortable captain and crew quarters installed. Victoria had christened their schooner the Independence, in honour of her country and the fact that it made them free to follow their mutual dream of being their own bosses. The schooner had put them both into debt but the busy trade between the islands was rapidly paying off the overdraft. It was both a floating home and main enterprise for the couple.
From the deck Victoria could see the junglecovered shoreline disappear in the wake of the schooner as one of the native leading deckhands steered a course, south by south-east, back to the island of Papua and New Guinea. The sea was a gentle, blue-green swell with a clear blue horizon topped by white, powder puff clouds.
They had delivered their last cargo of tea, kerosene, powdered milk and precious books to a plantation on the western coast and it was time to lie back and read the package of mail that had been waiting for them at the final stop.
‘I’ve sorted it and have a mug of coffee for you,’ Victoria heard Jack call from below. ‘As usual, most of it is yours – except for the bills which are, naturally, mine.’
Victoria smiled. The usual Jack Kelly dry humour, she thought. But that was just one of the many things she loved about the man she had married. Not that she ever let him forget when the important anniversary came around each year. ‘I’m coming down,’ she called back and made her way to the hatch.
Inside the spacious cabin she saw Jack sitting behind a table, reading a letter with just a little difficulty. His male pride would not allow him to have his eyes checked and, now approaching fifty years of age, his eyesight was becoming a bit blurry. He was frowning and Victoria wondered whether it was the contents of what he was reading or his trouble seeing the words. He glanced up at her with a beaming smile. ‘Your coffee is in the pot.’
Victoria gazed for just a moment at her husband and felt a surge of love for him. He still had the hard body of a man half his age and the same face she had fallen in love with somewhere between Port Moresby and the Fly River years earlier. He was not a classically handsome man but one who had enchanting eyes and a beautiful smile. He was a man’s man, yet with a gentle and romantic side which he displayed to her all the time – well, at least when his male friends were not around. But that was the way with Aussie men, she mused. Her Yankee upbringing made her used to men pandering to her needs with flowers and polite manners. She had been able to twist American men around her little finger with her beauty. But not Jack Kelly. His love and attentiveness just came naturally to him.
Victoria was in her late thirties now and worried about things like the little lines beginning to form at the corners of her eyes, even though she knew that with her exotic high cheekbones and long jet-black hair, men still considered her beautiful. She had once made a comment to Jack on the changes time had wrought to her appearance but he had just looked at her blankly and said he could not see them. In any other man she might have considered his response as male flattery but with Jack she accepted that he truly could not see her ageing.
‘Is it from Lukas?’ she asked as she poured herself a mug of coffee from the old blackened iron pot on the stove.
‘Yes,’ Jack frowned. ‘It seems that he is planning to come back as soon as possible.’
‘I hope not,’ Victoria said, sitting down
opposite Jack. ‘He has a marvellous life in Hollywood, a life that most young men would kill for.’
‘I keep telling him that,’ Jack agreed with a pained expression in his face. ‘He wants to come back and enlist, despite all I have said to him about staying out of it.’
Victoria took a long sip of the black coffee and grimaced. Being a tea drinker by choice, one thing Jack could never do was make a decent brew of her favourite beverage. ‘I can understand his desire to return and enlist,’ she said. ‘His country is at war and he is a young man very much like his father. Besides, you helped young Karl get his commission in the army.’
‘If he had seen what we saw back in the last one he would not join up,’ Jack muttered angrily. ‘He could get himself killed in a war that we are fighting for the poms. Your country is smart in staying out of it altogether. Lukas has been in America for so long now that he even has one of your Yankee accents and as far as I am concerned the States is now his home – thanks to your friends, and Joe Oblachinski. And as for Karl, Karl was here and would have enlisted anyhow. All I did was make sure he got to be a boss – rather than a worker in the army – by getting his commission.’
‘I am not sure if Mr Roosevelt will stay out of it,’ Victoria said. ‘Our navy is already engaging U boats in the Atlantic on convoy escort. That sort of thing could draw the States into the war and it seems that your Mr Churchill and my President are quite pally. There is a lot of sympathy for the English resistance to the Germans. Back in the States I know of some young men slipping over the border into Canada to join up. Anyway, does Lukas say when he will be returning?’
‘He says he is catching a ship in June to return to Australia. At that rate we should see him up our way around August or September. Bloody fool.’
Despite her husband’s concluding comment on his son’s intelligence Victoria could see the hidden happiness in Jack’s demeanour. He missed his son, having not seen him in over four years, and she knew that Jack would be counting the days to Lukas’ return. Victoria flipped through the small pile of envelopes addressed to her. Most were from the United States of America from friends who still found her life in the Pacific aboard a schooner something very romantic and exotic. Hollywood movies depicted such life as never having to work but merely lying under a coconut tree drinking fruity cocktails whilst being cooled by dusky maidens with big ostrich feather fans or palm fronds. The calluses on Victoria’s hands contradicted that perception. Trading in the islands was hard – and sometimes downright dangerous.
She found the letter she was looking for, recognisable by the heavy but neat handwriting. It was a letter from her uncle, a high-ranking naval officer in Washington. He was a big, burly career sailor who, as a widower without children of his own, had a soft spot for his favourite niece. Victoria carefully opened the letter of thin aerogram paper and began to read the clipped sentences, so militarily precise. Jack watched his wife and wondered at the worried expression on her lightly tanned face. When she had finally read the four pages she looked up at Jack. ‘How ironic,’ she said as she reached over to take Jack’s hands in her own. ‘It seems that my Uncle Bernie will be in Australia next month. He wishes to meet me in Townsville. He writes that all my expenses will be reimbursed for the trip down to meet him.’
Jack knew of her Uncle Bernie, better known as Commander Bernard S Duvall, and the last he had known, from his wife’s chatter about her esteemed relative, was that he had something to do with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Jack did not have to ask why she had been summoned to meet her uncle. His wife was a very remarkable woman with an interesting past. Some things were better not discussed, even between spouses.
‘All going well we should be in Moresby in a couple of days,’ Jack said, folding his son’s letter. ‘It will give you a chance to make contact with the general and see what is up.’
Victoria leaned forward to hug her husband. ‘He is not a general, and you are the most wonderful man on earth,’ she said, grateful that he had not asked any questions. ‘I promise I will not be away too long.’
‘Hope not,’ Jack said gruffly. ‘I can’t afford to lose my best deckhand and captain’s mate for very long.’
Naval Lieutenant Kenshu Chuma peered through the periscope of the Imperial Japanese submarine I–47 and focused on the schooner. He could read the name; it was called the Independence and she was sailing on a course that cut across his bow. Eleven hundred yards, he calculated. It was a good time to test his crew.
‘Action stations! Prepare to engage enemy surface vessel,’ he commanded on the bridge of the confined, dank Japanese submarine.
His crew reacted quickly and with skill. In seconds they were ready to engage an enemy surface vessel from below the sea. In the bow, all six torpedo tubes were loaded and the torpedo men waited for the order. They were cruising silently on the electric engines at around seven knots although the boat was capable of eight and a half knots submerged. The I–47 was a Kaidai Type 4 submarine and her keel had been laid at the Japanese shipyards in late 1929. On the surface, powered by her 6000 horsepower diesel engine, she was capable of a further two knots of speed to push her 320 feet of length through the water. And the I–47 could dive to 200 feet if threatened.
Kenshu was very proud of his crew. They were the best of the best of the best in the Japanese navy and, as such, each man strained to prove his worth. ‘Nine hundred yards and closing … Stand down!’
The sweating crew relaxed. The passing schooner was simply an opportune target for honing their skills. But as they were not at war, they would not have wasted one of the valuable fourteen torpedoes the submarine carried in her belly on such a small and defenceless target. They would have surfaced and used the boat’s deck gun to sink the Papuan registered schooner, but the Independence sailed on, blithely unaware of the Japanese sub’s presence under the waves.
It was not in the Japanese captain’s orders to be spotted by ships of any navies. His was a long range, covert operation to put ashore, and take off, intelligence personnel of the Imperial Japanese Navy and he was en route to pick up one leading seaman, Fuji Komine, from the Papuan mainland.
Lieutenant Chuma handed over the bridge to his executive officer and went to his tiny cabin to rest. There he could dream of bigger targets in the future. Maybe a British battleship or an American carrier to fire his new and deadly torpedoes at, he mused as he lay down on his bunk. The barbarians of the West had underestimated the ingenuity of Japanese scientists in developing this new torpedo. Propelled by oxygen, it delivered a 500 kilogram warhead up to 40 000 yards. It was far superior to anything the West possessed and would help win any war at sea. But the new torpedo had one other deadly secret: as it was propelled by oxygen the rising bubbles dissolved in the water, barely leaving a wake. How the Japanese submarine commander would have loved to fire one and watch the terrible results of its impact. All his crew – from the cook in the galley to the executive officer now on watch on the bridge – knew that it was only a matter of time before the drills turned to the real thing. And when the time came, these same waters would be theirs to control for the Emperor.
THREE
Lieutenant Karl Mann lay on his stomach on the rocky ground, blistered by a searing summer sun. He held the binoculars steady to compensate for the shimmering walls of the old fort. How ironic, he thought as the shimmer danced along the walls, that he was fighting Frenchmen in Syria rather than his father’s relatives in North Africa or Crete. Maybe his father might have approved of his enlistment had he known that his estranged son would be killing his father’s former enemies.
‘Much going on, sir?’ the young soldier at Karl’s elbow asked.
‘They have machine guns at each corner and substantial barbed wire all around, Private Bell,’ Karl replied as he closed his eyes to reduce the debilitating effect of the heat glare that was magnified by the powerful glasses. ‘It is not going to be easy.’
‘Kind of strange us fighting the French Foreign Legion,’ Be
ll mused. ‘My old man fought alongside them during the last war and said they were bloody good soldiers. So it seems a bit stupid for us to fight them now.’
Karl grinned but did not let on that his own father might have been up against Private Bell’s on the Western Front. It had been difficult for many of his men to comprehend that there were now two sides to France: the Free French side under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, opposing the German occupation of his country; and the French under Petain, sworn to fight for Germany under the terms of the armistice signed in the French town of Vichy. The latter had occupied Syria and the Levant after the Great War under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In fact, Karl had trouble understanding the strategic reasons for the Australians being committed as an expeditionary force to take on the Vichy French alongside the British Army. It was all a bit of a muddle.
Karl raised the glasses one more time and caught the fleeting glimpse of a white kepi. The Legionnaires were at home and waiting for the attack. Very carefully, he and Private Bell slithered from the slight rise around 600 yards out from the stone-walled fort to make their way back to company headquarters and report on the French positions. As he made his way back he had a fleeting thought: how different was this heat baked land of craggy and desolate hills to his own home in the wet jungles of Papua. It was like comparing Hell to Eden.
Company headquarters was a carefully camouflaged series of trenches dug into the hard and rocky ground. Karl located the company commander’s shelter and found the major poring over a 1:200 000 scale map of the area. ‘Should be bloody one in twenty thou maps,’ he grumbled as Karl squatted down at the entrance of the covered trench. The company commander glanced up at Karl. ‘How did it go?’ he asked in an irritable tone. The men did not like each other. Major Jules was of French descent and had taken an instinctive dislike to Karl on account of his German blood. The animosity between superior and subordinate had dogged them ever since they had steamed from Australia to the Middle East.
