I slapped David’s face very hard (“Hello Brother Dear” it was not) – and the roaring instantly stopped. Had I hurt his feelings? Probably – at least, the gut-pang immediately increased in intensity. Ouch!)
“We gotta move, Dave,” I hissed at him – and David then understood that I needed his full and unquestioning co-operation.
I took his hand, as if I were leading a small child. He acquiesced.
At the same time, the Sergeant (who was a pretty big unit) efficiently overwhelmed and disarmed the third guard - and both he and Ingrid tied him up and gagged him. (He was not hurt.) There was a second exit to the building which was routinely kept locked – but it did not long remain so, once Ingrid had taken the third guard’s set of keys.
The driver of the second jeep had apparently understood what the Sergeant had meant by ‘see you later’ (what a clever guy, cleverer than me, at least) and had parked his vehicle outside that disused exit. The jeep that I had come in remained at the front of the building, still under the surveillance of the other two guards who remained quite unaware of the escape.
The driver of the second jeep got out upon seeing us emerge from the rear of the building and saluted the Sergeant. The Sergeant climbed behind the wheel of the vehicle and David and I followed him into the vehicle.
I made David ride in the back this time – that tray area was really hard and cramped. I’d felt every bump on our short ride to the prison and I did not want to be in the tray for any extended journey. But David would be okay – after all, he was just a zombie! (Yes, even brotherly love has its limits.)
Ingrid stood beside the driver, to one side of the vehicle. I fancy that she waved as we sped off with the Sergeant – but I never saw her again. I did wonder what became of her later – in view of her involvement in my and David’s escape. Would she face court martial for assisting the enemy in time of war?
No, I didn’t think so. I have a feeling that the Army hierarchy would have let the whole thing drop or simply be covered it up – once they realized the monstrous things that they had allowed the Captain to perpetrate on an innocent civilian (me). It’s just not easy to laugh off a meticulously planned attempted murder – which had only failed through Ingrid’s timely intervention. And there were plenty of clinical records to back up Ingrid’s story and multiple witnesses in the Infirmary to verify what had occurred to me.
So, I think she would have been okay – at least, in the long run.
“Where to, soldier?” asked the Sergeant.
(I still liked being called ‘soldier’. It made me feel respected.)
“Do you know the Scrub Hill area on this base?” I asked.
“I sure do,” he replied. “I had my guys training there only last week.”
“If you can get us there, we can just disappear,” I said.
He looked at me in disbelief.
“The guys here know the Scrub Hill area like the back of their hands – they train there on a very regular basis. No-one can hide there for long,” said the Sergeant.
I smiled: “I can promise you that they won’t find us – not even if they bring in a pack of bloodhounds. I know the area well too, and there are some extremely good places to hide. Besides, David and I won’t be staying there for too long – we’ve got somewhere better to go now.”
The Sergeant shrugged:
“Okay, it’s your funeral” said the Sergeant. “Scrub Hill it is. Just don’t tell me where you’re going after that. I don’t want to know.”
He shook his head in continuing disbelief and chuckled at my confidence.
We left the main base area of Puckapunyal at great speed. We just flew through the main entrance. The barriers were in the raised position and there were no guards in the gate-booths on that particular night. I still wonder if that had been arranged beforehand by the Sergeant or whether the guards had just left their posts and joined in the internecine fracas at the parade ground.
In the end, none of that matters. What matters is that we left the base completely unimpeded.
The Sergeant dropped us off precisely where I had asked, in the Scrub Hill area of the Pucka complex, wished us well and left us with a kitbag full of essential supplies to carry me through the first few days on the run. (David’s own needs would be minimal but I quickly decided that he could do the ‘heavy lifting’ of the kitbag.)
I thanked that Sergeant of the United States Army Corps – he was decent human being.
Never saw him again either.
CHAPTER 27
SANCTUARY
It was still dark and David and I had, I guessed, about an hour ahead of us, stumbling through the thick bush to gain my objective.
I hoped that my mental picture of the lay of the land – that I had formed years previously while on patrol as an Army Cadet – had remained sufficiently accurate. If not, the confidence I had just shown to the Sergeant could turn out to be mere bravado, particularly when the tracker dogs arrived from Melbourne.
Before Puckapunyal Army Base had been taken over by the military (during the first World War?) there had been a fair bit of (comparatively unsuccessful) mining activity in the area. Once the military had taken over, of course, this had all ceased –and, given the lack of genuine mineral ‘strikes’ in the area, no-one had been particularly disappointed by this government decision. People quickly forgot the modest legacy of mining that the area once had.
When I was a boy/toy soldier, leading my rag-tag squad of schoolboys through the dense bush-land of the Scrub Hill area, we got lost – naturally. We deviated from the planned route by many miles and were unable to make our way back to camp until many hours after the time allotted for the navigation exercise had expired.
The teachers and the Army Instructor were very unhappy with us – and, in particular, with me since I was nominal leader of the squad. (Lucky squad!)
Why had we gotten lost? I had absorbed keenly the navigation lessons provided to us by the regular army guys and I knew very well how to read a detailed topographic map - and I also knew how to use a modern, rugged and highly accurate prismatic compass.
What then had been the problem?
The fucking Bren Gun had been the problem! Yes, you heard it right. The Army let a bunch of stupid kids wander around the Australian bush with a Bren Gun – which, for the uninitiated, is a heavy machine gun of World War II vintage (but still absolutely lethal).
Well, on the day that me and my ‘troops’ got horribly lost, we managed not to kill anyone with the Bren Gun. But it was a heavy beast and ‘Boofa’ – the guy who had been initially assigned to carry it – got pretty sick of lugging it about, uphill and down dale in the thick bush. So, the Bren Gun got passed around all day from shoulder to aching shoulder – including to the shoulder of the guy who was holding the highly accurate, highly sensitive prismatic compass – me.
A Bren Gun is a substantial piece of metal and – objects that are magnetized are attracted to substantial pieces of metal. A compass needle is a magnetized object. So, voila! While the massive bloody Bren Gun was hanging from my shoulder, all the bearings that I read from the compass were wrong – and massively so.
Why had nobody bothered to tell us that would happen? Buggered if I know.
In any event, why am I telling you all this? Is it just another digression by an old man with a wandering mind? No – not on this particular occasion.
During the course of my squad’s misguided wanderings, we came upon a very ‘cool’ place, somewhere that, no doubt, the designers of the navigation course had intended us to avoid by a wide margin. (Oh well. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men’ - and all that.)
The ‘cool place’ was a long tunnel, a very long tunnel, driven into the side of a hill – and now completely hidden by re-growth forest. If we had walked ten metres to either side of the partly collapsed entrance to the tunnel, we would have missed it completely.
Obviously, an old, disused mine is a dangerous place, subject to collapse at any time, and
liable to trap and kill anyone foolish enough to enter it. So, did I order my squad not to go inside?
Yes, of course I did!
Did they pay the slightest bit of attention to my detailed and urgent warnings?
No. Not a bit of it. So, very soon, we were all blindly wandering about in a 100 year old tunnel, deep inside a hill, Bren Gun, compass and all.
Actually, although the entrance was badly collapsed and barely passable (Boofa and Chooka had real trouble squeezing through) the walls of the tunnel seemed to be in surprisingly good shape. The wooden props had clearly rotted and many of them lay about on the floor of the tunnel in a random fashion – but the walls themselves showed little sign of crumbling. The cool, damp rock seemed pretty firm.
We wandered about for a while – one of the ‘mummy’s boys’ had a panic attack and, I confess, this was when I first felt my first touch of claustrophobia. But I was okay and, after half an hour or so, before we actually lost anyone in what turned out to be more of a labyrinth than a mere tunnel, the squad emerged back into the daylight to resume our pointless wanderings.
Had I ever intended to go back?
No, but that’s where David and I were now headed.
o0o
I had estimated it would take David and me approximately an hour to find the tunnel. That was how long it had taken my squad to march out of the bush once my squad’s ‘rescuers’ had arrived – several years previously.
But they, unlike me, had known what they were doing.
So, this time round, it ended up taking a little longer than I had expected.
By midday next day, I was exhausted, having been stumbling about the bush for hours and, apparently, no closer to our goal.
I sat down on the hard earth and wept a little. (Okay! I was fuckin’ tired and still pretty sick! Don’t forget that I could barely walk when I’d been picked up at the infirmary and the adrenalin rush was, by now, long gone.)
David was groaning – of course.
I fell asleep in the sun – but, on this occasion (unlike my unplanned snooze in the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens), it did not lead to dire consequences. I’d say it was an hour or so later when I awoke. I could hear David groaning – not a surprise – but it was in the distance and now there was an urgency about his groaning.
I followed the groaning for, maybe, two hundred metres up the hill upon which I had been sleeping. David was standing (in triumph?) at the mouth of the tunnel, grinning and roaring.
How had the bastard known what I was looking for – and how had he found it? My own brain had been switched off for an hour or more – so he couldn’t have been tapping into me. Could he? Maybe I had been dreaming? If so, what about?
I retrieved the kit bag of supplies that the Sergeant had given us – and which David had immediately dumped when I fell asleep. We squeezed into the entrance to the tunnel – which now required a little excavation before it would let us pass – and travelled inside as far as we dared (a couple of hundred metres, maybe). Away from the entrance, we had to use the ‘touch method’ to make our way since, as far as I could see in the kit-bag supplies, we did not have a torch.
My claustrophobia returned but David, as always, was okay. I slept again. He fell into a torpor. We stayed that way, I guess, for about 24 hours since the sun was, once again, high in the sky by the time we emerged again.
CHAPTER 28
THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED
Tinned carrots and spam – that was my first meal after escaping from Puckapunyal. And I was truly grateful for it. Presumably, the Sergeant had grabbed what he could from what was lying about in the mess and had thrown it into the kit bag.
For ‘dessert’, there was a packet of rock-hard ‘dog biscuits’. Very nutritious, I’m sure, and lots of fibre - but they tasted like baked excrement. (Imagine being up to your thighs in mud, in the trenches of WWI, and then having to eat those dog biscuits. Yuk.)
I offered some spam to David. Predictably, he looked at it scornfully (inasmuch as dead eyes can be scornful), made a very disapproving noise (which sounded like flatulence) and promptly discarded it.
This was something that I would need to work on - I knew I couldn’t readily obtain a regular supply of freshly-killed human flesh. So, David would just have to find something else that suited his zombie palate. (And spam was obviously not it.)
By mid-afternoon, we decided to do a little exploring. On an adjacent hill-top, which was a trifle higher that the one into which the tunnel had been driven, there was an abandoned watch-tower – you know, one of those spindly wooden towers that fire-fighters sit in watch for any signs of smoke on the horizon or, closer by, in the bush.
This one had definitely not been in service for many years. Its structural members, made of local timber, were rotting and cracked. The whole thing had developed a discernible lean and the original cover for the platform that sat atop the look-out had been blown away a long, long time ago. (Bits of it lay about the base of the structure, slowly melting into the humus.)
Nevertheless, the tower was not entirely on the point of collapse and I was able, with some difficulty, to climb it. Just as I had suspected, this vantage point afforded me with a view not only of the surrounding bush-land for miles around but, in the distance, of the main base at Puckapunyal. Far more importantly, I could see (more or less) right along the road that led from the base to the Scrub Hill area.
While David loitered at the base of the tower, I lay on the uncovered platform – flat on my stomach to avoid being seen – and observed the road.
I knew that, for obvious reasons, Captain Mengele could not let us go quite so easily – and I could not be entirely sure that the Sergeant, upon returning to the base, would not have been forced to divulge what he knew about where he had taken us. After all, he had risked a great deal simply to free us and could not be expected to put his very life on the line by risking being found to have ‘aided the enemy during time of war’. (I think, at that time, it was still the firing squad for that sort of thing.)
In any event, with about an hour of daylight left, I observed a convoy of, maybe, fifteen vehicles streaming out from the base along the Scrub Hill Road. It must have taken all day to organise such a large search party and this, to my mind, confirmed that Captain Mengele did indeed want us back – or maybe just destroyed.
So, the search was on.
No problem. We could retreat to our bunker (our own personal ‘Helm’s Deep’?) whenever we chose – there was no rush. I continued to observe the convoy for a time.
As it got closer, and I could observe the individual vehicles, I observed the entire convoy slow at a point not far away. The leading jeep had broken down and the driver simply waved the rest of the convoy on. The convoy continued to pass him as he lifted the hood of the jeep. A cloud of steam rose immediately. Radiator problems, I guessed. If so, the driver would merely have to wait until the engine cooled sufficiently - and then refill the radiator with water from the jerry can that hung from the back of the vehicle.
(One never refills a boiled-dry radiator straight away in case the red-hot engine-head cracks from the sudden change in temperature. Thermal shock, it’s called. That sort of damage cannot be fixed while the vehicle is on the road. It’s a tow-away - and expensive - job when it happens.)
So, it was simple – just wait half an hour or so and the vehicle could limp back to base for repairs or catch up with the search convoy (assuming, as I did, that it was not going too much further anyway).
There was, however, another figure in that (formerly) leading jeep. He started waving his arms about and pointing at the driver in a distinctly unfriendly way. Naturally, both of these people were too far away for me to hear what was being said – or even to make out their uniforms – but the body language was pretty clear. The gesticulating one was probably an unhappy officer and the driver was probably just a ‘grunt’.
In any event, contrary to common sense, (i.e. just wait until the engine cools down and refill t
he radiator) I saw the ‘grunt’ driver start trudging on foot back along the road towards the base, leaving the ‘officer’ passenger behind (the rest of the convoy having long since passed by).
“What an unreasonable moron that officer must be,” I thought – but gave it no more consideration.
As I’ve said, daylight was waning and I had, maybe, 15 minutes walk to get back to David’s and my little hidey-hole. So, I started climbing, very carefully, back down the derelict and rickety watch tower. (But I must say that going down was definitely less strenuous than climbing up.)
When I neared the bottom, I leapt down the last few feet. I shouldn’t have done that because I fell heavily and, predictably, my legs buckled beneath me once again. But there was no real harm done. I picked myself up and called for David.
Brother Mine, Zombie. Page 17
