The Diamond Dakota Mystery
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It was agreed that van Romondt should be the first to try the results of his experiment. He lifted the can, holding it to his cracked lips, tipping it until the liquid trickled into his mouth.
‘Is it all right?’ Muller asked.
Van Romondt nodded. ‘A little salty, but drinkable.’ They were all delighted that the contraption actually worked, if only in small measure; the few drops it yielded counted towards their chance of survival. From then on, the blowlamp was kept burning night and day.
The survivors did not realise that the closest settlement was a mission post at Beagle Bay, forty kilometres to the north, and that afternoon, four men were picked to head south for help.
Before the Japanese had shot down their plane, Smirnoff had estimated that Broome was only about 100 kilometres to the south. The aerial chase had forced the plane to turn constantly to avoid the attackers, but he reasoned that Broome should be closer than when they sighted the town prior to the attack. He
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hoped it would take the men only a couple of days to reach their destination. In fact, the group was on the north side of Carnot Bay, approximately 100 kilometres north of Broome.
On foot, the bays, inlets and thick scrub would add greatly to that distance and could force an expedition off course towards the no-man’s-land of the Great Sandy Desert.
Pieter Cramerus, Jo Muller, Dick Brinkman and Hendrick
van Romondt would undertake the third attempt at finding water and civilisation. They were given half the supplies. Smirnoff took each man aside and explained that this trip was their last hope.
They should not try to return as there would be little or no supplies left and all would be weaker and more desperate. Muller clearly remembers Smirnoff touching his Luger hand gun as he spoke. ‘I don’t think he would have shot us, but we realised that we should take him seriously,’ Muller told journalist Thom Olink.
‘Good luck,’ Smirnoff said to each man as he shook his
hand. They departed when the rabid heat dulled to a swelter.
With their departure, the four remaining men and one child lay quietly watching the passing of day to night; in front of them the graves of their dead companions, and beyond the
waves at high tide crashing against the Dakota. Like the survivors, the aircraft had first been struck down by man and was now slowly being pounded by nature. But the plane would last far longer than they would.
On the fourth morning, Smirnoff decided to search the
shoreline in case the package had washed up onto the beach.
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The others had barely moved and lacked motivation. Smirnoff asked for help but no one volunteered.
‘What could be in that package that would be of any value to us?’ Gerrits scoffed.
‘Even if it were food, it would only prolong our misery,’
Vanderburg added, and Hoffman nodded in agreement.
Smirnoff set out alone. Scouring the foamy waterline he
noticed large crabs, mussels and other sea creatures. Further on he saw a large black object which turned out to be a pair of binoculars from the aircraft. Some hundreds of metres further on again was a box floating on the waves. The letters on the box had been erased by the sea. The box contained radio parts, but not enough to breathe life into the device they had used previously. There was no sign of the parcel.
Tired out, Smirnoff returned to the shelter and lay down to rest. Before he dozed off, he told Heinrick Gerrits, who was tending the blowlamp, to wake him at the end of the first watch.
Life focused around the distillery. It was at least something positive to do and much work went into attaining a thimbleful of water. As well as the pumping, it was necessary to keep the fuel topped up in the blowlamp to ensure the water stayed on the boil. For the remainder of the group left on the beach, thirst was all-consuming and they hovered around the distiller watching the tiny droplets fall into the can. Dry-mouthed, they waited for the moment when they would be assigned their
spoonfuls of the precious liquid, but when it came time to drink, the minuscule offering only increased their desire for
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more. Night and day the distillery was tended to, the day divided into watches to ensure it kept working.
Long practice caused the captain to wake on time. He looked at his watch. It was past midnight and he wondered why Gerrits had not realised his shift was up. Normally the minutes until the end of the shift were watched closely. Rising softly, Smirnoff caught Gerrits gulping down half a cup of precious water.
Furiously he dragged him to his feet, then threw him down in disgust.
‘I was just so thirsty.’ Gerrits was almost crying.
‘We’re all thirsty! Now get out of my sight,’ Smirnoff growled.
Gerrits scuttled off, finding a place to sleep well away from the group.
There was no point in making a scene, as they all might be dead in a few days, Smirnoff thought. Nobody else tried to cheat. Gerrits later assured Smirnoff it would not happen again but Smirnoff kept him on day watch, where he could keep an eye on him, in case the temptation again proved too great.
Later the next afternoon, an excited cry went up from the beach. Heaving himself up from the shade, Smirnoff limped down to the water’s edge to see what all the fuss was about. A black shape sat on the sea between the horizon and the shore.
No one was sure who had seen it first, but they hadn’t noticed it before. Could it be a ship? One man fired distress rockets into the air while the others hurriedly piled branches together and, pouring petrol over the top, set the scrub alight, sending flames high into the air. Gathering up more branches they
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worked feverishly in the hope their signal would be seen. But the shape sat unmoving on the sea and the men soon realised that it was just rocks exposed by an exceptionally low tide. Had their situation not seemed so desperate they might have laughed.
Meanwhile, over on the east coast of Australia in her temporary home in Sydney, Margot Linnet had been informed that her
husband, Captain Ivan Smirnoff, was dead. The conclusion was inevitable, what with the air raid on Broome and no sign of his Douglas DC-3 for four days. The staff of KLM and the
Netherlands East Indies Company made the necessary arrangements. Margot, unable to look upon Ivan’s spare suit and shirts, called on his friends to take them away.
The first time that Smirnoff had set eyes on the beautiful actress was at an all-night party in Copenhagen in July 1925.
He couldn’t speak Danish, nor she Russian or Dutch, and her French and English were worse than his. But he had known
from the first time he saw her that she was the one.
His friends assured him that he didn’t have a hope; Margot Linnet was the darling of Denmark. She had been in the public eye since she was a baby, when she was the subject of a custody battle between her parents and her foster parents. She was the little sweetheart of every young Dane’s dreams. As an actress, she played all the young vivacious leads on the stage and appeared in some of the first silent movies on the big screen. Known
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and loved all over the country, her pictures appeared on postcards and chocolate boxes.
Smirnoff had practised asking her to dinner in Danish but looked bewildered when Margot replied enthusiastically, in Danish, that she would love to go, and discussed the options.
The pilot didn’t understand a word. Seeing his confusion, Margot used her acting ability to mime her reply.
On visits
to Copenhagen Captain Smirnoff showered the
young actress with blood-red Dutch roses, practically living on the Copenhagen run from then on. But Margot kept her suitor at arm’s length. Four months after they first met, Smirnoff knocked at her dressing-room door to find Margot melting eye-black in a spoon over a candle by her desk. The air was thick with the languorous heaviness of greasepaint, dusting powder and perfume from the dozens of roses he had sent her. Rows of costumes lined the walls.
‘I came to tell you my news,’ Ivan said gruffly. ‘I am going to get married.’
‘Congratulations, darling! Anyone I know?’ said Margot as she looked into the mirror, applying her mascara.
Taken aback, he paused for a moment, then swept her up
in a hug that lifted her off the floor. ‘You’re her.’ They were married on 23 October 1925.
He had not always been a good husband. When Margot
was diagnosed with cancer in 1933 as Smirnoff was preparing to make his record-breaking flight to Batavia, she had never breathed a word of her illness, not wanting to take away his
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moment of glory. For Margot, it had been nine years in and out of hospital since then. He had not handled her illness as well as he might. He couldn’t bear the way cancer robbed her of her life and vitality, yet she had always been there for him and he had never stopped loving her.
That fourth night at Carnot Bay Smirnoff couldn’t sleep and, like the small child, was bordering on delirium. He could see his sisters and brothers playing in front of their childhood home in the small ancient town of Vladimir, north-east of Moscow.
It was a beautiful summer’s day and his friends joined him, fishing rods in hand. Smirnoff ’s fishing gear was the envy of the village and he proudly showed it off. An old man herding goats shooed the boys off with his cane but they didn’t care.
Through the woods with dense green fir trees and golden oaks and down into the valley they travelled, where the lake stretched out before them. He felt young and strong. They fished and climbed, whiling away the time until the sun dipped below the trees. With the recklessness of youth they sought to find a shortcut home in the woods in the twilight but became lost.
Night fell and they gave up searching for home. They built a fire and listened for wolves and bears, enjoying the freedom their folly had brought—yet at the same time, despite his outward bravado, Smirnoff felt lost and cut off.
Half awake, half asleep, Smirnoff drifted in that no-man’sland between dream and reality. He was alone again, this time
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in a ditch with grenades exploding around him. He would be the only one of the Vladimir contingent still to be fighting a fortnight after they had been sent in as gun fodder for the Germans on the Eastern Front. With bayonets fixed they had been told to take out a strongly guarded hill. The signal to advance came and, as they dashed forward, the hill burst into fire, the crackle of machine guns and the whine of bullets shrieking around them. Through potholes carved by grenades and over bodies he ran as his friends fell around him. He turned to see a fixed bayonet beside him. Instinctively, he lunged and parried as he had been trained to do. There was blood on his bayonet but he had no time to see if the man was young or old as another was heading for him. Again he fought off his enemy, and then turned to the hill. Flattening himself to the ground, he crawled up with the bullets ripping his tunic. He never knew who killed the gunners or if they fled, but he knew his job was to silence the guns, so he set about pulling them apart one after the other. There were no Germans left on the hill but now he faced a new hazard. The Russian artillery had arrived late and were strafing the hill on which he and his fellow soldiers stood. Only nineteen of the ninety-strong Vladimir contingent survived and many of those were injured.
Smirnoff was recommended for the Cross of St George.
Another memory came flooding back to block out reality—
he was the leader of a patrol bringing back information on the complicated zig-zagging enemy line at Lodz, the most mixed-up battle line on the Russian front. The patrol was caught in
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the crossfire and he was shot in the foot. He remembered the sound of the grenades exploding, the pain shooting through his body, lying in a ditch created by the grenade in the biting cold, completely alone. Machine-gun fire rang out in the distance.
No one in the world seemed to know he was there.
At the hospital, where he had been taken after crawling crab-like through the mud an agonising inch at a time until he found a Russian trench, he had refused to have his leg taken off. In the months it took him to recover, he gazed out the window at the wood and wire machines that were taking to
the skies and promised himself he would fly.
He remembered with joy sitting in the pilot’s seat, flying helmet and goggles settled, as he soared above the earth, the sound of his engine like music as he engaged in the sport of battle.
On the afternoon of the fifth day the clouds finally burst, bringing a sudden violent storm. Heavy lightning forced the men to retreat from under the wing of the aircraft, where they had been sheltering from the sun. The sand howled around
them, stinging their skin, then the wind died and the rain came.
It pelted down hard and heavy but, like the last brief shower, it was over all too quickly. Reinvigorated by the rain, the men tried to drink the brackish water as it ran down from the wings.
And then it was still again, the sea singing its eternal song.
The next morning, with the rising sun, the vivid reality of the group’s predicament hit as harshly as the bright light. It
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was their sixth day marooned on one of the most isolated and sparsely populated coastlines in the world. They barely moved from their parachute shelter. There didn’t seem any point or need. They had used up their water supplies; now they had only the droplets in the distiller.
The day dragged on agonisingly slowly. There was no wind
and no conversation, most choosing to close their eyes and rest to conserve energy. They lay listlessly in the shade, which offered little respite from the searing heat, staring at the dense thunderclouds that teased them with the promise of rain but yielded only spoonfuls instead of the cupfuls they yearned for.
During the day, the baby’s condition rapidly deteriorated.
He was delirious, his skin flushed and clammy. Smirnoff tried to wet his lips but the fevered child barely had the strength to swallow. His large blue eyes stared into Smirnoff ’s, frightened and helpless, his breathing shallow and his heartbeat rapid.
Smirnoff kept wetting his lips even when the baby had lapsed into unconsciousness. He had wished that the boy would stop crying and now he wished he would start again, but the small child just lay there unmoving.
Smirnoff couldn’t bear waiting. He wanted to get away. He told the others he believed they should leave that evening and let fate be their guide.
But the men lacked the energy and the enthusiasm to do
anything. They preferred to place their hope in the four men who had set out three days earlier.
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SURVIVAL
Survival
There are only two seasons in the north of Australia: the wet and the dry. Both are hot, but the wet is far hotter, with the temperature reaching as high as 40°C. When the rainy season hits between November and April, the land turns green, and a throng of insects is awakened. Creeks and rivers flood the plains, spilling floodwaters, sand and mud far out into the sea.
This outpouring collid
es with the sway of the tides, changing clear blue waters to a milky turquoise hue close to the shore.
Further north waterfalls cascade over rocky outcrops and spill through deep gorges, but on the Dampier Peninsula, where the Great Sandy Desert meets the ocean, there are few waterfalls or gorges, and the land away from the coast is mainly flat and featureless.
In March the rain eases but the humidity doesn’t. The air is thick and heavy. The steamy heat has been known to drive 75
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men ‘troppo’—a term used by locals to describe a state of irri-tability bordering on madness.
As Dick Brinkman, Hendrick van Romondt, Jo Muller and
Pieter Cramerus ventured south, starving and dehydrated, their heads were spinning and tempers frayed. Following the coast, the only waterfalls were the streams of perspiration that ran down their faces and necks and soaked their clothes. Mosquito and sandfly bites covered all exposed areas of their skin.
They were surrounded by vast, open grey swamps that filled only on a king tide. The mud looked hard and baked on top, but as they moved across the surface they found themselves sinking up to their knees in muck the colour of curdled milk.
Trudging on with the mud filling their boots, the group stopped before a tidal creek which cut their path.
‘Look at that,’ van Romondt remarked. ‘You can see the
water pouring into the stream, and it’s rising by the second.’
‘We’d better get moving, before it becomes impassable,’
Muller said, pulling off his boots and trousers. He stepped into the water, surprised by how deep it was. The bottom was soft and his footsteps stirred up the mud. Pieter Cramerus followed on behind, carrying his clothes high to keep them dry.
As they crossed, the surging water rose around them and
the three men who had entered the water were soon struggling against the fast-moving current. Van Romondt had not gone far and decided to return to the bank where Brinkman still stood; Muller managed to scramble up the opposite side. Only Cramerus remained in the water. He was swimming after his