by Peter Watt
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Peter Watt has spent time as a soldier, articled clerk, prawn trawler deckhand, builder’s labourer, pipe layer, real estate salesman, private investigator, police sergeant and adviser to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. He speaks, reads and writes Vietnamese and Pidgin. He now lives at Maclean, on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales. Fishing and the vast open spaces of outback Queensland are his main interests in life.
Peter Watt can be contacted at www.peterwatt.com
Also by Peter Watt
Cry of the Curlew
Shadow of the Osprey
Flight of the Eagle
To Chase the Storm
Papua
Eden
The Silent Frontier
The Stone Dragon
The Frozen Circle
Excerpts from emails sent to Peter Watt since his first novel was published:
‘I’ve never contacted an author before but after reading The Frozen Circle I felt I needed to congratulate you on an outstanding novel, your best yet and I’ve read them all. The way you combine your fictional characters with history is amazing.’
‘I’ve just finished reading your Cry of the Curlew series and it was absolutely fabulous! I had trouble putting the books down.’
‘I have really enjoyed all your books.’
‘I have a lot of trouble putting [your books] down. The only problem is nothing gets done around here when you write one. Can’t wait for the next.’
‘You make history come alive . . . I especially enjoy the human side of war you portray in your stories.’
‘Another brilliant read.’
‘I love the way you have intertwined the characters through all the books so far and tied them all into the early settlers in this country. The history has been great and the stories superb!’
‘I have just finished reading The Frozen Circle, [and] in my opinion this is your best work yet. I loved the way you used time and distance to bring your story to a suspenseful and unexpected end . . .’
‘I wish to convey my congratulations on the quality of your stories. I find them difficult to put down and look forward to reading the next one. Well done and may there be many more.’
‘I have now devoured every one of your books and am eagerly awaiting your next publication . . . Thank you for the hours of pleasure you have given me.’
‘[Eden is] one of the greatest books I have ever read.’
‘I have recently discovered some of your wonderful stories and have been captivated by the characters, their lives, loves and exploits. Your love for the historical adds such power to your books, you almost feel you are there. . . . [Papua] brought me to tears on more than one occasion.’
‘Keep the pen writing, my man!’
‘Thank you for your wonderful tales. I have just finished The Stone Dragon . . . You bring the characters alive and make me feel part of the story. Thank you for many, many hours of pleasure.’
‘Your books make me look forward to getting on the train in the morning. Keep up the good work!’
‘Love your work.’
‘Cry of the Curlew kept me reading into the small wee hours by candlelight . . . I was so engrossed in your story telling . . . Good on you for telling your tale . . . it has given me a greater sense of being and more so a strong ambition to impart on my children self worth and strength in their beliefs!’
TO
TOUCH
THE
CLOUDS
PETER
WATT
MACMILLAN
Pan Macmillan Australia
First published 2009 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Peter Watt 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Watt, Peter, 1949–.
To touch the clouds / Peter Watt.
ISBN 978 1 4050 3940 6 (pbk.).
A823.3
Set in 13/16 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
To Touch the Clouds
Peter Watt
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For Naomi and Monique,
with all my love
For his eyes have been full with a smouldering thought;
But he dreams of the hunts of yore,
And of foes that he sought, and of fights that he fought
With those who will battle no more –
Who will go to the battle no more.
‘The Last of His Tribe’, Henry Kendall
PROLOGUE
Glen View Lutheran Mission Station
Central Queensland
1934
His black and scarred skin hung from his skinny bones and his eyes were opaque with blindness. The old warrior’s beard was white and his teeth stained yellow from years of the white man’s tobacco. Wallarie sat cross-legged under his favourite tree as the sun rose on his face. He could smell the dry, red earth around him and strained to
hear the fading cry of the curlew deep in the brigalow scrub surrounding the mission station. He sensed his life was almost spent and he waited to join so many of those he once knew – now long gone. Locked in his memories spanning almost a century he toyed idly with the battered old wood pipe in his hand. It was empty and he hoped that someone would come and give him tobacco to light and suck the smoke into his lungs.
There was a sound and Wallarie cocked his head. The noise came from something the old Aboriginal had never seen but had smelled and heard many times in the past couple of years. An automobile, the Pastor called this new thing, that came to Glen View station carrying people on its back. It ground to a halt not far away, raising a fine film of dust to swirl around him as he sat beneath the bumbil tree.
‘Wallarie, are you well?’ the man’s voice asked politely. It was a young voice, a lad in his late teens. ‘I thought you might like some tobacco.’
Wallarie’s face broke into a broad grin as he turned his blind eyes to his visitor. ‘You got baccy,’ he replied and reached out to receive the precious gift.
Although he couldn’t see the young man squatting in front of him, Wallarie knew he was waiting patiently until the pipe bowl was plugged, tamped down and lit from a box of matches Wallarie carried with him. He could feel the warmth of the sun flow over his body. As the young man waited for him to speak he sucked contentedly on the pipe until he could feel the euphoria the nicotine brought to his old body.
‘You want to hear the rest of the story?’ Wallarie chuckled, knowing that the young man scoffed at the curse of the ancient cave on the hill at Glen View. ‘Well, it was about twenty of your years ago,’ he said, knowing that his words would mesmerise his listener, for not only was Wallarie of the Darambal people a great warrior in his youth, but in his old age he had become a wondrous storyteller. ‘It was the time before you had the Great War,’ he continued, carrying the listener back across the years with his hypnotic words. ‘They had all forgotten the curse . . . except one . . . until it touched them. I will tell you of those times when the whitefella touched the clouds and lightning came down on the earth for many years. The whitefella who flew with the eagles knew that he must learn to do this ahead of what you whitefellas called the Great War.’
1
Office of the Secret Service Bureau
London
December 1913
Alight flurry of snow was falling outside the plainly decorated office of the young, studious-looking man. He was in his early twenties, with thinning sandy hair. Before him on his desk lay sheafs of paper both in German and his own translation handwritten in English. Although the man was dressed in a well-cut civilian suit he was in fact a British naval officer and held the lowly commissioned rank of ensign. Ensign Rutherford placed his pen by the bottle of ink and rubbed his eyes. Outside his office he could hear the clop-clop of horse-drawn carriages and wagons making their way through the fall of soft snow. He had worked diligently on his translation of the German naval papers for most of the day, to ensure that he had not made any mistakes. It had been a valuable intelligence coup. The translated document had to go upstairs to the commander of the Bureau before he could sign out and join his family for the Yuletide break away from his naval service to His Majesty.
Ensign Rutherford stood to stretch his long legs. He walked stiffly to the window of his office to gaze down on the light traffic of the London street. He was deep in thought about what he had just translated and wondered how important the Imperial German naval operational order was to the welfare of the British Empire he served. After all, the documents did not relate directly to a threat to England’s naval security. He was not aware that the original volume of German papers had arrived on his desk via a tortuous path from a French brothel to the British naval attaché in Berlin, and then on to London through diplomatic couriers. They referred to a plan by the Imperial German Navy to attack specified targets in far-off Australia and New Zealand in the event of war between Great Britain and Germany. As a mere ensign who happened to be fluent in the German language, he guessed the translated documents would most probably be filed and forgotten. How important could the former colonial towns of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart be? And as for some place called Gladstone in Queensland and Westport in New Zealand, who in Hades had ever heard of them?
Ensign Rutherford returned to his desk and shuffled the papers into their respective piles. Since they were classified as Top Secret he knew that he would still have to handle the task he had been seconded to very carefully. When the papers were collated he placed them in a Bureau-issue leather satchel and left his office, locking the door carefully behind him.
‘I need to deliver these documents to the Chief,’ he said to a tough-looking former Royal Marine, now wearing civilian dress and sitting behind his desk screening people coming and going to the secretive offices of Britain’s counterintelligence.
‘Very good, sir,’ the former marine replied. ‘Just wait here.’
Obediently, Ensign Rutherford stood stiffly by the desk while the guard disappeared down a dimly lit corridor to return moments later.
‘He will see you now, sir,’ the guard said, resuming his post.
Rutherford marched smartly down the corridor. At a door he knew was the office of Commander Mansfield Smith Cumming, he knocked. A voice bade him to enter.
Rutherford stepped inside. The office was more elaborately decorated than his own and had a coal fire in the corner, warming the room sufficiently to make it comfortable. As he was in civilian dress he was not obliged to use the traditional salute, but braced as required by military etiquette.
‘What have you for me, Mr Rutherford?’ the middle-aged naval officer asked gruffly, placing a pen down beside papers he had been signing.
‘Well, sir, I have completed the translation of the German papers and gleaned that it is an operational order by the Imperial Navy concerning their intentions towards some of our former colonies in the Pacific in the event of war between Kaiser Willie and the King.’
The senior officer looked sharply at the tall young man standing before him and the young ensign regretted that what he had said could be perceived as flippant. ‘Our good regent and the German Kaiser are related, and the Kaiser deserves the respect due to him, Ensign Rutherford,’ Mansfield Cumming Smith rebuked. ‘Kaiser Wilhelm was, after all, our late Queen’s favourite grandson.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,’ Rutherford said, blushing. ‘I meant no disrespect.’
‘Anyway, man, what did you conclude from your translation?’ the head of the Secret Service Bureau asked, changing his tone.
‘Well, sir, from what I read the Germans have a plan to destroy the towns of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart using cruisers from their fleet on the China Station. They also intend to capture the coastal ports of Gladstone in Queensland and Westport in New Zealand to supply coal to their warships.’
‘Westport has a particularly high grade of coal,’ Smith Cumming muttered, looking down at the translated documents Rutherford had placed before him. ‘That will not do.’
Rutherford did not really care. His mind was already on making his way to his parents’ home in Portsmith for the Christmas festivities. ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied dutifully.
‘Anyway, Mr Rutherford, you have done a good job and please accept my good wishes for the season,’ the secret service chief said. ‘That is all.’
Rutherford braced once again, thanked the senior officer for his good wishes, turned on his heel and marched out of the office leaving the British head of intelligence to ponder the significance of what lay on his desk. An attack on the former British colonies in the Pacific region in the event of war could seriously jeopardise a British victory against the growing might of one of their main rivals in Europe. Australia and New Zealand provided much of England’s imports of primary produce, along with other essential war material. The Royal Navy might have to divert precious resources to defend the shipping channels across the Indian
Ocean, leaving the North Atlantic denuded of essential warships. Something had to be done to counter any German implementation of such an operational order.
Smith Cumming quickly scribbled a memo, signing the document in green ink with the letter C. Colonel John Hughes, currently attached to the relatively new Australian Army, was a man he had satisfactorily dealt with before. All he had to do was locate his current whereabouts and bundle off the information to him. For an army man, Hughes was relatively intelligent, Smith Cumming mused. He would leave it in his hands. Now he could also leave the office, go home for a Christmas of good cheer and look forward to 1914 as a year of goodwill towards all men.
2
April
1914
It floated rather than flew, Colonel Patrick Duffy mused as he watched the fragile Bleriot monoplane rise over the desiccated paddock. The nose of the canvas-covered, timber- framed, single-seat aircraft dropped and the tiny machine dived at a shallow angle towards the ground.
‘What the Dickens is he doing?’ Colonel Duffy asked the tall young man in his early thirties standing beside him.
‘Just watch and see, Colonel,’ the man replied in the distinctive Yankee drawl that had earned him the nickname Texas Slim from his Australian friends. He had in fact been Randolph Gates when he had been born on the vast plains of Texas to a struggling cattle rancher and his school teacher wife.
As Patrick Duffy watched he saw a small object disengage from beneath the belly of the Bleriot and hurtle on an angle towards the dusty paddock. It smashed into the earth and exploded in a puff of white powder. The aircraft was already raising its nose and drifting into a circle overhead so the pilot could observe the point of impact.
‘Not bad,’ Randolph Gates observed. ‘Looks to me he was only about five yards off his target.’
‘What caused the white dust?’ Patrick asked.
‘Matt used a bag of flour,’ Randolph answered, waving his arms above his head.