The noise of the engines came closer in mid morning, just after a heavy shower of rain, which left them soaked to the skin. From their position they looked down on the track into the jungle, and equally, the lower slopes of the mountain itself, where there were also rough tracks. And there, suddenly, they saw the caps of the Japanese soldiers, below them, beginning to climb.
*
Stefanie’s hand closed on Clive’s. ‘They will not take me,
Clive,’ she whispered. ‘Say they will not.’
‘They will not,’ he promised. He felt in his knapsack and took out two of the cyanide capsules. ‘Hold one of these in your hand,’ he said, ‘and if they come up here, bite it. Death is painless and in ten seconds.’
She gazed at the little capsule lying on her palm, then looked up at him. ‘Is it so easy?’
‘Only if you have to.’
The soldiers slowly came higher, and Clive could feel his nerves tightening. This was a form of warfare strange to him. On a ship one went into battle with guns blazing and surrounded by comrades. Lying here, afraid almost to breathe, watching death slowly clambering towards him, was calling for courage of a different order. He glanced at Stefanie, but her eyes were closed; she held the hand with the capsule close to her mouth.
There were shouts from below him, and splashes, and laughter. The Japanese had found the stream. Now he dared not look down, could only keep watching the crevasse by which they had gained this ledge, revolver in his right hand and cyanide capsule in the other; the moment a soldier appeared there he would fire and bite. And Stefanie would do the same. And they would go tumbling through eternity together.
The splashing stopped, but the laughter and excited chatter continued for some minutes. Clive felt sweat trickling down his face and back. Then the noise began to fade. For a moment he could not believe it, had to fight back the temptation to peer over the edge, make himself wait until the noise had almost gone altogether. Then he dared a peep over the edge, saw the men regaining the path, joined by other soldiers now. As Stefanie had said, it was too arduous a climb to be undertaken except with a definite goal in view.
Stefanie raised her head. ‘I did not expect to be alive, now,’ she said.
‘You are going to live a long time yet,’ he promised her.
She sighed, and nestled against him, while he watched the soldiers. Soon they disappeared into the forest. But now there were other soldiers to be seen. The entire area was swarming with Japanese troops. Then there were more shots, coming
from the clifftop and they knew the soldiers had found the hut, and were shooting their way into it. Then there were flames, and a good deal of shouting. Now one of the trucks came bumping along the path, and behind it a command car with two officers in it. The vehicles went as far as they could into the bush and then stopped, and the officers got out and disappeared.
‘Now they will start searching properly,’ Clive said. ‘Can we go higher?’
‘Not in daylight,’ she said. ‘But I do not think they will come up here again. To do that would be to admit they did not search properly the first time.’
Clive listened to the soldiers calling out to each other, wished he knew what they were saying. He heard more shots, sometimes volleys; they were clearly very nervous at the thought that an American or British agent might be hiding in the trees.
The officers returned, and the command car bumped its way back to the plantation. Still the searching went on, while the sun rose higher and higher.
‘God, I’m thirsty,’ Clive said.
‘We must not go down,’ Stefanie said. ‘We must wait.’ She opened her hand to give him back the cyanide capsule. ‘We will not need this until tomorrow, at the least.’
*
‘What is the matter with you?’ Hashimoto demanded.
Joan sat on the settee in the living room of the plantation house. She had been sick several times during the night time drive from the last plantation. ‘I think I have malaria,’ she said.
‘Malaria,’ he snorted. ‘Vomiting at the sight of a woman dying. You are soft, like all your people.’ He grinned. ‘Perhaps you have a baby, eh?’
Oh, God, no, she thought. No. Please let it be malaria. Please let me die.
‘Well, I will have no woman of mine vomiting,’ he told her. He went to the bar in the corner of the room, found a bottle of brandy, poured two glasses. ‘Drink.’
She supposed it would make her sick again, but oddly, it didn’t. She could even look, around her, at the neat furniture, the photographs. One was of a wedding. Presumably that of the
van Gelderens. Of course it was some twenty years old, and a trifle faded, but still …
Hashimoto stood at her shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Osawa was right. She was a pretty woman. He says she still is. I will have sport with her, when they bring her back. But that is remarkable.’
He pointed at another photograph, and Joan caught her breath. This also was of the van Gelderens, and many years after the wedding. As Hashimoto had said, Mrs van Gelderen was still a pretty woman. But what had taken her breath away was that standing with them was a young man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. A very large young man. Her brother.
‘It is a small world,’ Hashimoto remarked. He had met Clive before the war, when Lewis McGann had taken his family to Tokyo. ‘Where do you suppose that photograph was taken?’
Joan peered at it. Certainly not on the plantation, she decided; the three people were formally dressed and standing in a large garden, in front of a somewhat elaborate building, and there were people wearing European clothes in the background. ‘I do not know.’
‘I would say in Batavia, or more likely, in Surabaya. Yes, the English and the Dutch kept some ships there for a while at the beginning of 1942, before we destroyed them all. How strange that your brother should have been there. I would say he is dead, if he was with that force. As I say, we destroyed them all.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘We will ask this woman, when my men bring her in,’ Hashimoto said. ‘She will have a great deal to tell us.’
‘Excellency.’ Osawa bowed.
‘Yes?’
‘We have searched the forest and the beach, and my men have climbed the volcano. There is no sign of the woman.’
‘And the spy?’
‘There is no sign of him either, your excellency. Save for the smashed remnants of his wireless transmitter on the beach.’
‘Then they are hiding together, in the jungle. They must be found.’
‘I do not think that is necessary, your excellency. White people cannot survive in the jungle.’
‘They will be waiting for their natives to come back. We will make it difficult for them to do so. Burn this place, Osawa. Burn every building. Raze the plantation to the ground, and destroy every edible plant or root on it.’
Osawa bowed and left the room.
‘They have escaped you,’ Joan said. The brandy was making her bold. ‘She has escaped you.’
Hashimoto merely grinned. ‘That is a personal disappointment. I would have enjoyed beating her to death. But my mission has been successful. The spy’s hiding place has been destroyed, his equipment destroyed. He can harm us no longer. Now he can die in the jungle, of malaria and starvation.’ He picked up the photograph, looked at it for a moment, and then dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. ‘She can die in his arms.’
Chapter 10
New Guinea, The Solomons and New Britain — 1943
Clive McGann stood in the trees on the edge of the beach, waiting and watching. He did this instinctively, now, although he knew there were no Japanese within fifty miles of him. Indeed, there was no human being within fifty miles of him, save for Stefanie. Yet caution was the mainspring of their existence.
The beach was empty, the sand unmarked. It was not possible for him to cross it, because Japanese aircraft often swooped low over these beaches, and scuffed sand indicated human activity where t
here should be none. They had made the mistake of walking on the sand only a week after the kempei-tai had withdrawn, and within another week Peg Tamrau had again been swarming with enemy soldiers. They had not been found in their mountain retreat, but it had been a warning.
Thus he made his way through the trees until there was an outcrop of rock, and crawled across these to enter the water and see how his fish trap had fared during the night.
He had not been able to see how they were going to survive, once the little food in Stefanie’s knapsack had been consumed, in this, to him, totally alien environment, without the Papuans to help them. But Stefanie had had no doubts. In her twenty odd years in New Guinea she had been interested enough in her surroundings and her employees to investigate every aspect of their life just as she had explored the mountain. It was Stefanie who had made the fish trap, herself weaving the basket as she had watched the Papuan women do, and it was she who had decided where it should be placed. Clive did not suppose anyone could have chosen a better spot. There were five good sized fishes inside the wicker enclosure, and if he had no idea whether or not they were all edible, she would know. He took them out, still gasping and wriggling, dropped them into the knapsack, and regained the shore. He stood in the trees to allow his body to dry — he wore only a thin cloth sarong in the August heat — looking out to sea as he did so. And smiled, wryly. Approaching from the west was a convoy.
It was a large one, at least a dozen transports, escorted by four destroyers. Such convoys were fairly common, nowadays. But then, they had been common ever since he had come here. The difference was that a few months ago he would not only have reported it, he would have learned, eventually, where it was headed and what had happened to it. Now he could do none of those things. Their isolation from the outside world was as complete as any Robinson Crusoe’s. The only fact of which they were certain was that the Japanese were still sending men and material along the north coast of New Guinea, and that therefore they must still be holding this coast, and probably New Britain, and most probably the northern Solomons as well. That was not an encouraging thought. When last he had received radio news the Australians were counter attacking over the Owen Stanley Range, and the Americans were getting ready to advance from Guadalcanal. So both of those forward movements must have been forced to a halt, by Japanese resistance. Thus the end of the war, or at least the hoped for recapture of New Guinea by the Allies, had again been removed to some point in the future.
He turned away from the beach and began to climb. He did this like a native now, moved through the trees and bushes with an almost silent ease. As his skin was burned a deep brown, and he wore a two months growth of beard — nor had his hair been cut in that time — he did not suppose it was possible for him to look less like an officer in the Royal Navy. Indeed he sometimes found it difficult to accept that he had ever been an officer in the Navy, had lived his life to a routine of watches and bugle calls, parades and precision.
Or that he ever would again.
He emerged on to the cliff top, then entered the forest again to make his way to the mountain. If it was an arduous couple of hours every morning, descending to the beach to collect the fish and then regaining the volcano, he had nothing else to do, and the vigorous exercise kept him fit. That was very important. Besides, once that was done, the rest of the day was his. Theirs.
Stefanie would also have been busy, he knew, prowling through the forest and collecting such fruit and berries as she knew were not poisonous; there were even wild, or at least long forgotten, yams to be dug up, neglected hands of bananas to be picked. They had found a gulley in the mountainside, and here they could light their fire, using one of the lenses from his binoculars; once it caught, they placed a canvas shade over it so that the smoke would not be seen even by an inquisitive aircraft. The canvas, like several other little refinements to their lives, had been obtained from the burnt out plantation. The Japanese had not been terribly thorough, at least partly because their fire had hardly caught when a tropical downpour had come along and put it out. It had smouldered for several days after that, and the Japanese, their commanding officer having already departed, had not waited to relight it. Thus Clive and Stefanie had been able to return and see what they could find. There had not been much. Stefanie had hoped to discover at least a change of clothing, but the plantation house had burned well. Where they had been most fortunate were the warehouses, which had hardly burned at all. Here had been canvas, and machetes, and even some cloth. It was from this cloth that Stefanie had cut the sarong which Clive was wearing.
She had cut one for herself, as well, but seldom wore it. This was the life she had always wanted to live, a reincarnation of Adam and Eve in paradise, with only occasional visits from the serpent to be afraid of. Whether she ever thought of Bill, or her daughter in Australia, wept at the memory of them in his absence, Clive did not know.
She was already there when he arrived, kneeling beside the flames, fanning them with a banana frond. Constant exposure to the sun had given her an all over tan, just as her hair had grown and tumbled down her back; it remained dark brown, streaked with grey, and was beginning to curl.
She turned her face up for a kiss as he knelt beside her. Supposing she had been able to bury the past, there could not be a happier woman in the world, he thought. Nor, were he to allow himself, a happier man. They loved, and were as married as any two people could possibly be. He had even, crazily, wondered if they might have a child, here in the forest. But her periods were irregular. She was entering, prematurely, the change. Perhaps the circumstances of her life had something to do with that. He was just content to hold her in his arms.
Save for the guilt, that he was here, and not fighting with his father and brother. He did not even know if they were still alive.
As she understood. ‘Did you see the ships?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the sixth convoy this week. God, to be able to tell the Navy.’
She gutted the first fish, with an expert stroke of his knife, and then raised her head at the sound of the distant explosion. He did likewise, and they stood together, then dropped the fish and ran to the ledge, to look out to sea, and watch the pillar of smoke and flame rising from one of the transports. And even as they watched, another ship exploded.
‘I think they found out,’ Stefanie said, hugging him.
*
‘Take her down,’ Commander Phillips said. ‘Here come the baddies.’
USS Sea Lion sank into the depths, while the whirring of propellers above them seethed through the ocean.
‘That was good shooting, Mr McGann,’ the commander said. ‘You got two of the bastards with four shots. Pretty damn good.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Walt said; he was in charge of the bow tubes. ‘Those were the last four.’
They had had another astonishingly successful cruise; this was their sixth kill. On their earlier venture, in the spring, they had got five. But this was their first made under the cliffs of western New Guinea, as Phillips, knowing that his ship would soon need replenishing, had opted to take her into the most protected shipping lanes as a final flourish. He was a fighting captain, all right. And here off New Guinea were the richest pickings. But also, of course, the heaviest opposition.
As now. ‘Two hundred feet,’ Bristow remarked.
The submarine shook to the exploding depth charges, and the lights dimmed.
‘Take her down, Mr Bristow,’ Phillips said in a quiet voice. ‘We’ll rest on the bottom awhile.’
The lights were bright again, and Walt grinned at his torpedo crew. They grinned back. They were no longer green. They had been depth charged before. But he remained the only one of them to have had a submarine sink beneath his feet — and survive.
‘Two hundred and fifty feet.’
More explosions, but these were farther off.
‘Two seventy five feet, and on the bottom,’ Bristow announced. He was looking into his echo sounder, which w
as reading nil; but there was a thick bed of weed and it was another couple of seconds before the submarine actually came to rest, so gently as to be almost imperceptible save that there was a slight list to starboard.
‘Stop engines, and we’ll have quiet,’ Commander Phillips said.
The silence of the grave, Walt thought. The odd thing was, he did not doubt that this would be his grave, here in the noiseless eternity of the ocean, probably encased in just such an iron coffin. But not today. Never today. If the fate was inevitable, it was a long time in the future.
A louder explosion than before had the men looking at each other, anxiously. The lights went out for a moment, but came on again. ‘Not close enough to hurt us,’ Walt said reassuringly. And the next depth charges were in the distance again. In another few minutes they had ceased altogether.
‘We’ll just sit tight and relax,’ Phillips said. ‘They may be playing cute.’
The seconds ticked away into minutes, and the men sweated; the air conditioning had been turned off together with the engines. Petty Officer Clark looked at his watch. ‘Soon be lunch time,’ he told the ratings. ‘The skipper’ll have us moving again by then.’
The minutes became an hour, and there was no sound from above them. ‘Start engines,’ the commander said.
The electric motors whirred into life, and the air began to circulate. Men could breathe again.
‘Take her up, Mr Bristow,’ Phillips commanded.
Walt waited. This was always the moment he disliked most. Would she rise, or had she positioned herself in some ocean crevasse which would hold her down — forever. But a moment later the submarine had buoyancy, and within fifteen minutes she was at periscope depths.
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