by John Marsden
‘We’re in an amazing situation here. By a complete accident we’ve got ourselves into the place that Colonel Finley most wants destroyed. We shouldn’t be worrying so much about getting out. We should be thinking about how we can do something huge: something that might change this war in a big, big way. You can see that can’t you, Ellie? You know that’s the way to go?’
Funny, I’d never heard him talk like that before. It was like he was begging me for support. I wondered if he wasn’t sure himself, if he didn’t know whether he had the strength and courage for it. He was talking about suicide really, about our deaths, I knew that straight away. There was no way anyone was going to attack this place from the inside and survive. You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure that out.
When I still didn’t say anything he kept going.
‘I could never look anyone in the face again if we ran out of here like scared rabbits. I mean, we’ve achieved what the Kiwis couldn’t, and all we can think about is saving our own skins. Imagine going back to New Zealand and saying to Colonel Finley “Yeah, we got in there but then we chickened out.” I don’t want to act like a frightened little mouse.’
‘Make up your mind,’ I said. ‘Are we chickens or rabbits or mice?’
I walked away from him then. I needed time to think. My skin was prickling again. It’s not an easy thing to face your own death. Not when you’re feeling young and alive and healthy. But I hardly had a moment to think before Fi came over to where I was standing. I don’t know whether she noticed the way I was shaking, but she didn’t comment on it. She just said, very quietly, so quietly that I could hardly hear, ‘Lee wants us to attack the airfield I suppose, does he?’
I nodded, hugging myself. Fi started trembling too. In the same soft voice she said, like she was whispering to herself, ‘I thought he would.’
To my own surprise I said: ‘I think he’s right.’
‘Now why did I say that?’ I thought. I didn’t know I’d already made up my own mind. Didn’t think I’d even started to make up my mind. ‘Who’s going to tell Kevin?’ Fi asked.
We both glanced across at where Kevin was poking around at the end of the hangar. He’d opened a little door and as we watched he went through it. It was so inconspicuous that we hadn’t noticed it. It looked like a storeroom or something.
Homer and Lee were talking urgently over by the main door. No prizes for guessing what they were talking about. Fi put her hand on my arm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
Kevin didn’t say anything either when we told him. And that was the first problem: we told him instead of asking him. In New Zealand, when Fi and I returned from our run and Homer told us we were coming back here with the Kiwi guerillas, I’d reacted the same way. I’d gone off like a willy-willy in a wheat field. Yet here I was, only weeks later, doing the same thing to Kevin.
Kevin took it a bit differently from the way I had back in Wellington though. It’s hard to write this, to say what actually happened, but I’ve always tried to be honest when I write this stuff, and I guess I’d better not stop now. So what happened with Kevin was that he had some kind of breakdown. Andrea, my friendly counsellor in New Zealand would have had a name for it. Nervous breakdown I guess, except I’ve never been too sure what that means.
The conversation started well, because Kevin came back quite proudly. He even cracked a little smile. All because of his great discovery. The little room he’d found contained a toilet and some cleaning stuff: a couple of big brooms, a few buckets, junk like that. Having a toilet was huge news. Funny how such a trivial thing could be so important. But the excitement didn’t last. Kevin realised something was going on. We were giving him all these congratulations for finding the toilet but he knew it was fake because he suddenly cut across what we were saying. He looked straight at me and said: ‘You guys are planning something.’
I looked straight back and said: ‘We’re going to attack the airfield.’
I’d seen a few people go pale since this war started. Fi when the soldiers at Baloney Creek had them all bailed up, for instance. Lee when he was wounded, shot in the thigh. Corrie when she started to realise that the invasion had happened. And of course Homer when he looked through that little door. They were just some of the white faces that rolled through my mind when I thought about people going pale. But Kevin went through pale, into grey. He looked like an old man. His face almost collapsed. He used to be quite fat in the face until recently, when the war turned us all into compulsory weight watchers. But for a moment his head looked more like a skull. Then he put his face in his hands and stood there with his shoulders shaking. He didn’t seem to be making any noise, just shook like he was standing on a fracture zone in an earthquake.
None of us knew quite what to do. In the end Fi took him by the arm and led him away to the truck we’d arrived in. He lay in there for the next twelve hours. I don’t think he even used the toilet that he’d been so proud of discovering. For a long time I don’t think he moved at all. Every half an hour or so someone – usually Fi or I – would go and check on him, but he seemed to be in a sort of coma. A vegetable. A Jerusalem artichoke. I mean, I shouldn’t crack jokes about it, but what else can you do? Things were so frightening, and our future seemed so non-existent, that sometimes jokes were all we had left.
When we weren’t checking on Kevin or using our nice porcelain toilet we spent our time in the most urgent, frantic conversations we’d ever had. We dreamed up a lot of different ways to attack the planes – even a couple of ways that might possibly almost work. But we also clung to the desperate hope that we could do it and get away with our lives. That was optimistic of us, greedy, but I think we felt that if we strained our brains hard enough we might come up with something. We were like people hanging over the edge of a cliff, knowing the only way we could save ourselves was to pull so hard we’d dislocate our shoulders.
We were willing to dislocate our brains if it gave us the slightest chance to survive.
While we talked we kept the closest possible watch on what was going on outside. We used a Phillips head screwdriver from the trucks to make tiny peepholes in each wall, and that gave us a 360 degree view. In twelve hours we were interrupted only three times: once when a woman came in to get something from a truck, another time when two mechanics came in and worked on an engine for half an hour. And the third time when a man came in to hide from something. I don’t know what it was, nothing too sinister I wouldn’t think, but you could tell he was hiding by the way he snuck in, looking back over his shoulder in a guilty way. Maybe he was trying to get out of some boring job. He looked pretty much the way I did when I was avoiding choir practice at school.
During each of these interruptions we hid in the same truck. I don’t know if that was a good idea, but whatever we did was a lottery: a terrible game of Russian roulette.
When we had the luxury of being able to spy on the base we learnt a few things that might be useful. There seemed to be about sixty aircraft out in the open, two-thirds of them great huge things that were probably bombers or troop carriers. The rest were little fighters, like wasps. They were in three lines along a concrete apron that stretched for close on a kilometre. They were packed in pretty tightly, and I remembered Colonel Finley saying that as fast as these people kept expanding the airfield the more planes they crowded into it.
Behind the concrete apron were three giant hangars that could have contained anything from the officers’ grog supply to another squadron of planes. It was a fair bet though that at least one hangar, probably more than one, was used for aircraft maintenance.
When a flight of bombers landed, a bunch of fuel trucks raced out to fill them up. The planes taxied to their parking spots. By the time they got there the fuel trucks were waiting. As the pilots and crews walked away the fuel was already pumping into the huge planes.
‘There’s a hundred million bucks’ worth of aircraft sitting out there,’ Homer said.
&nbs
p; He was probably underestimating. I guessed that planes like these would cost at least two or three million dollars a pop.
As it got darker we learnt the night-time procedure. When a plane landed, runway lights were switched on, but they were very dim and were only on for a couple of minutes. The moment the plane touched down, out went the lights. Too bad if the pilot couldn’t steer a straight line.
We gradually began to work out what the different buildings were, and Lee drew a rough map. I didn’t like him doing that – I was paranoid about anything being on paper, because I’d read a story when I was little about a spy in World War One being executed when they found a map stitched into his clothing. But this one time I bit my tongue. Everything was so urgent, so excruciatingly desperate, that normal rules had to be suspended. I understood that.
So we figured out that to our left was the dining room or canteen. We guessed that because of the smells, which made our mouths water, and because when it got darker, around teatime, various soldiers wandered past our hangar, all heading in that direction. Half an hour later, back they came. They looked hungry when they went there and well-fed when they came back. You can tell, somehow. I don’t know how, but you can. We snacked when we got desperate enough, with more of our New Zealand food, but we hadn’t brought much with us, as we’d wanted to preserve our little stores in Hell. And scroggin wasn’t quite as satisfying as the fried chicken I thought I could smell wafting down the road.
I found I was too nervous to eat much anyway. Only Homer seemed to have a real appetite. As I looked at the food disappearing down his throat I wondered what we’d do when the supply ran out.
To our right was a big fibro building with only a few lights. And they just seemed to be security lights, on all the time. We thought it might be a storage place. Further off was the control tower – the building with the round top – which we could see clearly, higher than everything else.
Opposite us was a long low wooden building with small windows. We worked out fairly early that it had to be a barracks. There was music blaring, shirts hung out of windows to dry, and from time to time we had glimpses of half-dressed men coming from showers or getting changed.
Beyond that were the planes.
A plan was starting to form in my head and I started talking about it to the others. We were all trying to be brave I think, except for Kevin, who disappeared into the truck and seemed unable to move. Lee was really angry at him. At one stage he said: ‘Just leave him there. Let them have him.’ I was horrified. It wasn’t the first time Lee had scared me. But this time at least I could understand his being so angry. I spent half the time feeling sorry for Kevin and half the time thinking he was gutless. I mean on one level I knew he had a big problem, like a medical or psychological problem, but at another level I was angry that he deserted us when we needed him most, leaving us to do all the work and take the risks. Of course when we were caught he would be too, but it was hard to see it that way.
We all had goes at talking to him, trying different tactics, like sympathy, abuse, common sense, encouragement. I suppose the strategies we used said a bit about us. Fi was sympathy, Lee was abuse, I was common sense and Homer, to my surprise, was encouragement. But none of them worked. The only ‘progress’ was that instead of ignoring us when we went into the truck he curled into a ball and started crying. That didn’t seem like much of a step forward.
So we just kept going with our plans, our vague half plans. My main idea rested on a bit of knowledge I’d picked up when I was little. Back when Homer was young and wild he’d sometimes have target practice with a rifle. But shooting at the usual targets, like tin cans or tree stumps, was too boring for Homer. To make it more interesting he filled the tin cans with petrol and sealed them again. I must admit I’d taken the odd shot myself, when Homer generously decided to share one of the cans. It was quite addictive. More fun than cleaning out sheep shit from under the shearing shed.
What we’d learnt back then was now the basis of our plans. But they were still only half-baked ideas when suddenly we were dragged into action.
Chapter Six
At 6 am Fi and I were both awake. Kevin may have been, I don’t know, but he was curled up in his corner of the van. Lee and Homer were asleep, stretched out near him. It was the first rest we’d allowed ourselves since being dumped in the hangar. We wouldn’t have taken that if we hadn’t been desperate, suffering from sleep deprivation.
I took one more look at them, then closed the door of the van and went back to the lookout point. I was officially on sentry but Fi and I were sharing our turns, because neither of us could sleep. We were only doing an hour each anyway, as a four-hour break was all we could afford.
Fi and I getting insomnia when we had a chance for some rest was typical of the tricks the war kept playing on us.
The only interesting thing during our combined sentry duty was that a whole lot of aircraft took off at about 5.30. I’d say there were at least twenty. They took off in waves, three at a time as far as we could tell, roaring over our hangar. We felt the ground vibrate under our feet. I had to put my hands to my ears, the noise was so extreme.
If that wasn’t enough to wake the boys, then they were certainly awake by 6.01. A PA system ran through all the buildings, and at 6.00 it played a major piece of music that was obviously meant to get everyone on their toes, ready for another good day of bombing the stuffing out of anyone they didn’t like. The music sounded kind of weird to me, but it was loud and military, so when you heard it you knew you weren’t at a Brownies’ camp.
Next thing, we heard these trotting feet. It sounded like sheep on the wooden floor of the shearing shed. Fi was already looking through a spyhole; I leapt to mine. A whole lot of soldiers were hurrying past the hangar. They were all men and some of them looked very young. They carried rifles. Within a few seconds they were gone.
By then Homer and Lee had joined us at the door. We looked at each other anxiously, wondering what was happening, what we should do. I said to Lee: ‘We’ve got to use this time. Take the chance.’
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘I’m going to follow them, see what’s going on.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Ill check out the barracks.’
‘I’ll look in the store building,’ Homer said, catching the mood quickly, realising this was our first chance, maybe our last.
‘What’ll I do?’ Fi asked.
‘Stay here,’ I said quickly, in case the boys came up with some stupid suggestion. Sometimes I had this funny wish to protect Fi, to take care of her. She’d have killed me if she’d known that.
Homer opened the door a fraction more and the three of us started to slip out through the tiny gap.
I went second, behind Lee.
‘Be careful,’ Fi said. I bit back a desire to laugh, and just nodded.
Outside, the wind felt sharp, quite cold for summer. It was only a short dash to the barracks building, but I knew I had to use the buildings and shadows for cover, as much as I could. I bent over and scurried across the roadway. It was weird because I felt I wasn’t able to breathe, somehow. Yet here I was, running, so I must have been breathing. I felt really paranoid, too, certain someone somewhere must be seeing me. I didn’t know if it would be the people in the control tower or a helicopter overhead or a soldier still left in the barracks, but I felt I couldn’t get away with this: it was too outrageous, too much, thinking I could run around in this huge and vital enemy installation doing what I liked. So I waited for the shout, the cry of alarm, the rattle of a rifle being loaded and armed and swung into position.
Then I was in the shadow of the doorway, and definitely breathing. Now my trouble was the opposite – I was breathing too hard: so noisily that anyone in the building must rush out, to see what was going on. I sounded like a set of bagpipes warming up. I sounded like Fi’s little sister when she was crashing into another asthma attack. I struggled to get control but I could only give myself a few seconds. After
about ten of those seconds I stepped out of the doorway’s shadow and into the barracks itself.
It was like a dormitory. And so clean and neat! Every bed beautifully made, every bedspread straight and symmetrical, every table and chair squared off. The place stank of disinfectant, so much that my eyes stung. The windows shone. I couldn’t believe men were this neat. I wished Homer could come and see it. This is how his bedroom could have looked but never did.
I scanned the place quickly. The slightest movement and I was in big trouble, having to make a decision to run or attack. Either way, I was cactus. I had no weapon, except for the fruit knife in my sock. But the room was still. I hurried along the gap between the beds, looking for something, anything, to help us. There were no obvious treasures. At the end of the row I pulled open two locker doors at once, one with each hand. The insides of the lockers were as neat as the outsides. Uniforms and casual clothes, neatly wrapped in plastic bags, hung on coat-hangers. Each locker had a top shelf, and on it were the soldiers’ personal possessions: photos and books and pens and cigarettes and sweets, again beautifully arranged. ‘Gosh, if Mum could see this ...’ I thought, but there was no time for that stuff. I was scared of staying too long but I didn’t want to go back to the others empty-handed either.
In the corner an open door showed the way to a little kitchenette, so I ducked in there and opened the fridge. Even it was clean and neat, but crammed with goodies. Fresh food was one of our major dreams, a full-on fantasy for us all, so I loaded up with everything I could carry that wouldn’t leave conspicuous gaps in the shelves. ‘They’ll think they’re knocking off each other’s stuff,’ I figured. ‘It’ll start a major fight and they’ll kill each other and then we can take over the airfield.’
I got an avocado, some cheese, a small rock-melon, a bag of rocket and other greens, and some stuff that looked like rissoles and smelt like fish. Then I moved my ass out of there. I was in a real hurry to be back in the hangar. I didn’t know how long it would be before the Papa Bears marched home with their rifles, to find someone had helped herself to the porridge. I did know that if they caught me I’d get treated a lot worse than Goldilocks.
