“That sounds promising,” Jock said. “Sergeant Botkin, you’re the communications expert. Would a relay station have to be manned in order to pass a message along?”
“That’s a tough one, sir,” Botkin replied. “Theoretically…provided the station’s batteries were up to snuff… it could do the relay, but only in one direction. If you could send, you couldn’t receive…and vice versa. We saw those wires…it’s a very crude system. You’d need a relay operator to have two-way communications.”
“There’s another problem,” Patchett said. “Suppose the Japs are listening in on the lines?”
“That could only be an issue way up at the tip of the Cape, a bloody long way north of Moreton,” Jillian said. “South of Moreton, the line runs well to the east. The Japs never came near it. They didn’t stray too far inland from the west coast.”
Botkin’s next words glowed with enthusiasm. “I could easily cut the circuit to the north and send a message south,” he said. “As long as there’s someone to relay it, there’ll be no problem at all.”
With that statement, the discussion arrived at an assumed conclusion. Nobody needed to say it; they were going to try to send their bomb damage assessment via telegraph from the Moreton station to Brisbane. It was just down to the details.
Patchett asked, “How many men you planning on sending, sir?”
“Let’s make it four,” Jock said, “Sergeant Hadley, are you up for another long walk?”
“Yessir,” Hadley replied with exuberant pride.
“Good. Take Boudreau with you. I know he’s up for it. Sergeant Botkin, we need you on this one. Feel like taking another walk?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Outstanding. Which one of your radiomen is fit enough to go with you?”
“McGuire, sir,” Botkin replied. “I’d take him. Savastano’s beat. He carried Doc all the way here.”
“Okay,” Jock said. “That settles that. Hadley, you’re ranking man, so you’re in charge. Be ready to leave at first light.”
Patchett wrote the names down in his notebook. “Two infantry and two sparkies,” he said. “That oughta get the job done.”
Hadley had been doing some figuring in his head. “You know, sir,” he said, “if we travel real light, we could make that walk in one day. We’d be there by nightfall. We know the terrain, so we could cover it quick.”
“Just don’t wipe yourself out,” Jock said. “Save something for the trip back.”
“No problem, sir,” Hadley replied.
“Wait a minute,” Jillian said. “What happens if the station’s batteries are dead? Then you can’t do anything, can you? And who knows…they might have taken the batteries, the generator to recharge them, even the petrol to fuel it when they left.”
“No problem,” Botkin replied. “We’ve still got two spare batteries for the radio. They were in the other Radio Flyer, the one that didn’t get blown up. I can adapt them to run a telegraph if I have to. As long as there’s still wire running there, I can make it work.”
Patchett asked, “Those batteries are heavy. They won’t slow you down, son?”
Botkin’s reply was no-nonsense: “We’ll manage, First Sergeant.”
But then, Botkin’s brow furrowed. “I’ve got one more problem, sir. Our code book…it got destroyed with the radio. Assuming we get through, they’re probably going to ask for authentication. And I’ll have to send the text in the clear, completely uncoded. Without the book, we’re screwed.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Jock said. “You’re one smart guy, Sergeant Botkin. You took the Japs off the air with just some scrap from your pockets. You’ll figure it out.”
Corporal Grover Wheatley swept the direction-finding antenna of the walkie-talkie through one final pass before giving up in disgust. He sank into a crouch and pulled the headphones off his ears. “They are just not on the air, Captain,” he said to Scooter Brewster. “I can even hear Iron Range trying to raise them, but there’s no response from Task Force Miles. Nothing at all. The poor bastards are probably all dead…”
He finished his own sentence in his head: just like we’re going to be real soon, if we don’t quit this silly chase and get our asses out of here.
The forest at night was too dark to read the expression on Wheatley’s face; there was only the faintest red glow from his flashlight as he stowed the radio. It illuminated nothing but Wheatley’s hands as he worked.
“I wouldn’t worry about them too much,” Brewster said. Secretly, though, he wished Grover Wheatley was right. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if Jock Miles and his unfortunate task force had met their demise.
Miles was a weak officer, anyway.
Another thought shot into his head: What’s the difference if he’s dead…or I just can’t find him?
Fumbling in the darkness, Brewster reached into his pack and pulled out the sealed envelope. When he switched on his flashlight’s red beam, it gave Wheatley just enough light to see what his captain was doing. His hopes began to soar that the captain was finally giving up. He’d destroy that damned envelope, and they’d reverse course, go back to Archer Bay and wait for a boat ride home.
But Brewster didn’t seem to be about to destroy anything.
“You’re not going to open those orders, are you, Captain?”
“I certainly am. That is my prerogative, Corporal.”
That was the last thing Grover Wheatley wanted to hear. “Haven’t we done all we can do here, Captain? We gave it our best shot…”
To Scooter Brewster, Wheatley sounded like nothing more than a child whining. He said nothing to his corporal as he emptied the envelope’s contents into his lap. There wasn’t much there: a typewritten sheet on division letterhead, signed by General Briley himself, a printed map of Weipa and its environs, with a number of details penciled in, and a photograph of a young, dark-haired white woman. The legend on the map indicated it was a product of the Queensland Police.
As Brewster read the instructions on the typewritten sheet, he would be the first to admit he was initially stunned. He had not expected in his wildest dreams the orders would direct an officer of the United States Army to assassinate an Australian civilian. A female civilian, at that. But this was war, and strange things happened in war.
A poem by Tennyson popped into his head. It had inspired him through the trials of West Point, and he found it just as inspiring now. His favorite lines repeated over and over again:
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die…
He was a soldier. He would do whatever his country expected. He would not ask why.
Wheatley had crept closer as Brewster read, but he could still see nothing of the envelope’s contents. Afraid of the answer, he asked anyway: “So what does it say, Captain?”
Brewster made the unnecessary gesture of shielding the page against his chest, as if the words typed on it were somehow legible in the dim red light to a man standing five feet away. “Sorry. Classified,” Brewster replied, and went back to pretending Wheatley wasn’t there.
Wheatley couldn’t care less what the orders said. With a hint of optimism, he asked, “So we’re going home, then?”
“Negative, Corporal. We’ve just gotten some new orders.”
Just when the one reason for their being in this godforsaken wilderness had seemingly evaporated, this idiot captain had created a new one. Rather than give up on Task Force Miles, Brewster would assume the mission intended for it in that envelope. And Wheatley would still have to follow him around on this fool’s quest.
Corporal Grover Wheatley stood there, mouth wide open, trying to speak, but no words came out. He expressed himself by the only means he had left. He started to weep.
Scooter Brewster looked up from the map he was studying just long enough to shoot a look of disgust Wheatley’s way. “Stop that, Corporal,” Brewster said. “You’re disgracing yourself.”
There was a final bit of administra
tion: stamped across the bottom of the page—in large block letters—were the words BURN AFTER READING. Scooter Brewster decided that would have to wait until morning:
Any flame in this darkness will have the Japs on us like stink on shit.
Chapter Fifty
Am I really watching a movie? Or is it some newsreel footage, all black and white and scratchy? And it seems to be stuck, like it’s in some kind of loop…the same stuff happens over and over again. A Jap rushes forward, points a pistol at me…I squeeze the trigger of my weapon but it doesn’t fire. Why the hell is this Thompson jamming? Didn’t I clean it well enough? Patchett will be riding my ass…I’ll never hear the end of it.
Then the film stops, like it’s waiting for me to catch up. In a second, the image flickers and vanishes as the heat of the projector lamp burns the film away...
But then it starts all over again. This time, a Jap is running at me with a sword. I squeeze the trigger…Nothing! The image freezes with the sword inches from my chest…and then the film burns again.
We’re back to the beginning…the Jap with the pistol. He’s closer this time. I can see the hairs of his thin moustache…the crazy gleam in his eye…and still my Thompson won’t fire. I can see his finger tighten on his trigger…and the film stops and burns...
It’s the sword again. I don’t have a weapon in my hands anymore. Why would I? The damned thing didn’t work, anyway. The sword’s tip is closer to my chest than the last time. The distance closes in slow motion…it’s almost touching me. I wait for the film to pause and burn, but it doesn’t stop…it just keeps slowly advancing, frame by frame, until the tip is one with my chest. It’s inside me…it’s piercing my heart. I don’t feel a thing for a second…and then…
Jillian thought Jock’s heart would burst if it beat any faster. His breathing was short, rapid, and shallow. Even in the darkness of the shack, he looked white as a sheet. She held him in her arms as they sat on the floor, his hands clutching the edges of his bedroll as if he was trying to pull it over his head. His eyes were as wide as saucers, terrified by something but seeing nothing.
“Jock…Jock,” she said in a tone too frightened to be soothing, “wake up! You’re having a bad dream.”
His hands released the bedroll and tried to clutch his chest, to see if the dream sword had left a wound. Instead, they fell on Jillian’s arms holding him tight. He was awakening, his eyes finally seeing what little they could in the slivers of moonlight filtering into the shack. It was nothing but silhouettes—his Thompson, unashamed of its failures in Jock’s subconscious, propped silent, lethal, and ready at arm’s length; Doc Green in the other corner, sleeping deeply, snoring with mechanical precision; Jillian nestled against him, the loose curls of her long hair brushing his face. His hands clutched her arms, the arms that were clutching him, pulling him back from an imagined death.
“Jill…what are you doing here?” he whispered. “What time is it?”
“It’s oh two hundred. I came to check on my patient.”
“Your patient? You mean Doc? Is he okay?”
“He’s good,” she replied. “No fever…and his sutures are holding up fine. Oh, I had to borrow your torch.”
“My what?”
One arm released him and she held up his flashlight. “This is a torch, my good man.”
He shook a few more cobwebs from his sleepy head and said, “Oh, yeah…I forgot. So fucking British.”
“No, not fucking British,” she said, miming a playful clonk on his head with the flashlight. “Fucking Australian.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you…where did you learn to stitch someone up like that?”
“Jock…silly boy…I work on a small boat in a big ocean. We’re always getting banged about. We would’ve all bled to death a long time ago if we couldn’t mend each other.” She put her other arm back around him, resting her head against his. “Besides, we’re at the end of the earth,” she whispered, her lips brushing his ear. “Medical help is not exactly abundant.”
Neither of them started before the other. The kiss was a simultaneous act, a powerful convergence of wills that gripped them both with necessity and undeniable certainty. He fell back onto his bedroll, his head on the pillow he had made of his pack, and she lay on top of him. Their mouths had yet to part.
The kiss didn’t stop until she asked, “But what about Doc? He’s right over there.”
Jock chuckled softly. “That old buzzsaw? It’d take gunfire to wake him now.”
She didn’t need much convincing. As he pulled her back down to him, he said, “It’s a pity we don’t have any music,” before she surrendered to the next deep kiss.
His hands were free to explore her. She was wearing some sort of dress—loose, simple, a shift, perhaps—like he had seen the black women wearing. It was hiked up to her pelvis as she straddled his hips. Beneath it, he found, she wore nothing at all. His fingertips sensed her arousal, without a doubt, and his gentle caresses made her longing all the more intense. Within moments, their lips parted and she slid back, struggling in the dark to undo his trousers.
“Bloody buttons,” he heard her mumble, her voice growling in frustration.
But when that task was done, as she raised her hips to take him inside her, Jock could sense other emotions flashing through her as well—a rush of anxiety, a tremor of fear. Before he was fully nestled in the warmth of her flesh, she slumped forward, her palms on the floor, her rigid arms holding her off him. Their brief union was over. Her face hung before his, hidden in the curls of her hair that had closed over it. A low wail rose from her throat, like the agony of lost love—or of pain that should be pleasure.
She rolled off and lay next to him, sobbing softly, “Why? Why? Why? Why does it have to hurt so bloody awful?”
He couldn’t think of anything to do but take her in his arms. He didn’t know what had gone wrong, everything had seemed so ready, so perfect. Only one possibility crossed his mind. He stuttered, “You’re not…you aren’t a…”
“A virgin, Jock?” Irritation had displaced the desperation in her voice for just an instant. “No, I’m not a bloody virgin.” They clung to each other in silence for a few more moments before she added, “There’s something wrong with me down there. I don’t know what it is.”
Just lying quietly in each other’s arms provided enough of the comfort they both needed, and they were soon drifting off to sleep. A few feet away, Doc Green was wide awake; he’d been that way since the first rustle of their attempted coupling, and he’d heard every word.
But I might know what it is, Jillian, Doc thought as he drifted back to sleep.
Chapter Fifty-One
Major General Samuel Briley had tried to sleep, but anxiety had kept him wide awake. Now it was nearly sunrise, and he was exhausted. He hated the feel of his body when it was deprived of sleep. It was like his insides were hollow and dirty, covered with a shell of sore, exhausted muscles that somehow managed to function but suggested with every movement they could fail with the very next attempt. Vision was painful; his dry, tired eyes felt as if pins were being driven into them. The urge to collapse to the floor, curl into a ball, and lose consciousness for as long as it took his body to recover was almost overpowering.
Samuel Briley hadn’t felt like this since the trenches of France in 1918, when sleep was a luxury afforded only in the absence of German artillery. The demon that had kept him awake all night was none other than General MacArthur, who, while enjoying the benefits of a good night’s sleep alongside his wife in their opulent Brisbane apartment, expected Briley to provide him with the bomb assessment damage from Task Force Miles the very moment the Supreme Commander awoke.
I will personally give Washington the good news you deliver to me, MacArthur had told him.
And Samuel Briley knew if good news was what the Supreme Commander wanted, good news is what you will deliver.
There was just one problem: the nightly transmission from Task Force Miles had not come th
rough. All night, every frequency had been searched over and over again as Briley paced the floor of his quarters, waiting for the phone call that would tell him what he needed to hear. But none of the many calls he received throughout the night—all from apprehensive communications officers—provided that service. Not one bit of a message, not one character of Morse code, not even a hint of a carrier wave, was received at any station around Queensland. It was as if Captain Maynard Miles and his men suddenly did not exist. The only good news Briley knew about the shaky venture on Cape York was already old news: all the bombers had returned from the raid with no serious damage to the planes and no serious injuries to the crewmen. That in itself was a cause for celebration in these dark days, but that celebration was long over. Where their bombs actually fell, Samuel Briley still had not a clue. Dawn had broken, and there was still no news at all:
And no news is good news, right?
Scooter Brewster and Grover Wheatley hadn’t slept much, either, but for entirely different reasons. Dawn had broken, and Captain Brewster was full of adrenaline, eager to accomplish the mission he had taken upon himself to assume. Wheatley, on the other hand, was scared out of his mind, and the exhaustion creeping through his body was only making the fear worse. They were going further into harm’s way, and he had not been told why. He began to believe that if he raised one more protest, this lunatic of a captain might just kill him, for no other reason than not to have to listen to him anymore.
A voice in Wheatley’s head asked the simple question: Why don’t you just murder the captain and be done with all this? There are no witnesses. Find your own way back. You can say the Japs killed him…or maybe the Aborigines.
Tempting as the thought might be, Grover Wheatley was not an optimistic man. He had never escaped blame for anything he had done in his life, and he certainly would never escape the blame for homicide—of a superior officer, at that. Somehow, he’d be in front of a firing squad in no time flat. He was sure of it. He had become more afraid of the insane asylum known as the US Army—embodied at the moment in one Captain Brewster—than he was of the Japanese, a foe he had yet to meet.
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