Papua (35 page)
Authors: Peter Watt
F
uji did not wait any longer for O’Leary to return. The sporadic gunfire told him that the Irishman’s luck had finally run out. He hauled up the anchors and under the power of her engine the schooner slid through the placid waters to the Gulf of Papua. He knew where he could find a buyer for the boat in the Torres Islands and expected to soon find a berth on a cargo ship steaming to Japan. There he could realise his dream and enlist in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Dademo’s body had a blanket placed over it as a sign of respect for the courageous boss boy. He would receive a funeral worthy of a warrior in his village outside of Port Moresby.
Jack lay bleeding on the floor of Paul’s house where he had been carried by Lukas and Karl. He was semi-conscious, floating in and out of a world of shadows and lights.
Paul sent Karl back to Moresby in the truck to fetch a doctor whilst Karin tended to Jack’s wound. From what she could see the bullet had entered the upper left of his back and lodged itself somewhere in his chest. Jack was breathing hard and Karin guessed that the bullet had damaged a lung.
‘Do you think he will live?’ Karin whispered.
‘Jack will live,’ Paul said without hesitation. ‘He suffered worse wounds during the war.’
‘But he is not a young man now. Will his body take the shock of losing so much blood?’
‘Jack?’ Paul asked as he bent to speak in his friend’s ear. ‘Are you going to die and cause a big mess that I will have to clean up?’
Jack heard the words and forced a grin. ‘Wouldn’t put a mate to any inconvenience,’ he croaked with some effort. ‘Of course I am going to live.’
‘See,’ Paul grinned. ‘ I told you.’
Karin shook her head in her confusion. How could men be so insensitive to another’s pain? Their humour must be born out of a war where they were forced to live with such conditions on a daily basis. It was a way of staying sane.
‘Where is Lukas?’ Jack asked with difficulty.
Paul looked around. He thought that he was somewhere in the house but he had seemed to have disappeared.
‘He must be looking after Dademo’s body,’ Paul answered. ‘I can go and fetch him if you like.’
‘No matter,’ Jack whispered. ‘I will talk to him later about disobeying my order to stay with the truck.’
‘He saved our lives,’ Paul consoled. ‘Had he not killed O’Leary I don’t know what may have happened.’
Karin had been able to quell the bleeding but dared not move the Australian lest she caused him further damage. Jack was pale and she was frightened that he may not survive through the night. If only the doctor would arrive. But that now depended on her son Karl getting to Moresby and back again safely.
The hours seemed to crawl by and the sun was just below the horizon when Karin heard the grind of the returning truck. She snapped from her dozing sleep beside Jack. ‘Is that Karl returning?’ she called out to her husband.
‘It is,’ he replied as he flung open the gauze door to the verandah. ‘God in heaven,’ he gasped when he saw the truck pull into the yard. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find young Lukas. He went off with Karl.’
Karin was slightly confused at the number of people who spilled from the truck. Along with her son, Lukas and the doctor, there was a portly man with a cigar who she did not recognise, and a pretty young lady. ‘Who are these other people?’ she asked Paul.
‘That’s the American film man we were working for,’ Paul said. ‘And Miss Duvall.’
Karin’s female instincts told her that the young woman had a great interest in the welfare of Jack. It was written in the concern on her face as she quickly pushed her way into the house. Introductions would have to wait.
Victoria came to a stop when she saw Jack lying amongst a pile of bloody rags. She dropped to her knees beside him and cradled his head in her lap. Jack opened his eyes at her touch. ‘Must have died,’ he murmured with a grin. ‘Because against all odds I’ve gone to heaven and met an angel.’
‘Jack, darling, you are far from dead,’ Victoria said, forcing back the tears. ‘Lukas came to the hotel to tell us what had happened. He said that you had asked to see me.’
Jack did not blink at his son’s lie but turned his head slightly to seek him out. He was standing a short distance away, looking guilty. But Jack smiled at his son with an expression of gratitude and love. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to leave this world without seeing your beautiful face just one more time.’
Victoria gently hugged him to her. ‘You have to take me with you to that place in Australia you once told me about that you like so much.’
‘I would except Lukas is now the captain of the
Erika Sarah
,’ Jack said, his pain exacerbated by Victoria’s loving embrace. ‘He will need the boat to make us a living.’
‘There is something I have to tell you, Dad,’ Lukas said sheepishly. ‘Joe has a friend in the States who will teach me to fly. I will have to leave the boat with you.’
‘You are going to do
what
?’ Jack asked.
Lukas shuffled his feet. ‘Joe thinks I would be a natural and I reckon the future of this country is going to be in the air.’
‘So how do I operate the lugger with you off in the States?’ Jack growled, wincing with the effort. ‘We still have a living to make.’
‘I will be your first mate,’ Victoria said. ‘I have a hankering to see more of this part of the world. And I think I am capable of looking after a crotchety old war horse.’
‘Guess I’d better not die on you then,’ Jack grinned.
‘I think that I have always loved you, Jungle Jack,’ Victoria blurted.
‘Who the bloody hell is Jungle Jack?’
‘I will tell you about that when you are better,’ Victoria said with a tearful smile. ‘In the meantime I guess I should let the doctor look at you before he hands you over to my care. I hope you like chicken soup because you will be having a lot of it.’
Jack tried to smile at her offer. He did not have the heart to tell her he hated chicken soup.
S
tanding beside Victoria with his arm in a sling, Jack waved to his son who stood on the deck of the Burns Philp steamer, sailing to Australia. Beside Lukas stood Joe, his ever-present cigar in his mouth.
‘He will be all right?’ Jack asked.
Victoria squeezed his arm affectionately. ‘Joe will look after him and he will be back before you know it. Joe has a lot of friends in many places and Lukas will have the best flying experience in the world. You will be proud of him.’
‘I am already proud of him,’ Jack said. ‘As proud of him as I ever could be.’
‘Well, Mr Kelly,’ Victoria said, ‘where are we going for your recuperation?’
‘I thought maybe a sea voyage on a slow boat to Queensland,’ Jack answered with a slow smile. ‘We might spend some time in a little village I know on the New South Wales border. The fishing is great and you don’t have to worry about crocs and malaria. There are some beautiful mountains there. Oh, I happen to own a piece of land with a wonderful view of the ocean.’
‘You’d better not leave all the cooking aboard to me,’ Victoria sighed as the ship pulled away from the wharf.
‘But,’ Jack asked with a lazy grin, ‘isn’t that a woman’s thing?’
Paul Mann reread the letter addressed to him. It was from the brother-in-law he had never met.
‘What is in the letter?’ Karin asked. ‘You look so worried.’
Paul carefully folded the letter. ‘Nothing of importance,’ he replied. ‘Nothing that will do anyone any good in the future.’
Karin knew that if Paul had chosen not to tell her what Erika’s husband had written then he had good reasons to do so. She returned to her task of sewing a dress for their daughter as Paul placed the letter in his pocket and went out to the verandah. It was another beautiful day of balmy weather and blue skies dotted with white clouds. This was the Dry season before the torrential rains would come to drench the earth.
His earth and his people, Paul reflected. Jack was a complex man, despite his seemingly easy-going ways. To learn now that he had a daughter would not be good for a man who had been brought back from the brink of death. In his opinion, Jack deserved to continue his life without this added complication. No, this was not the time to burden his friend with the surprising revelation. A good mate was someone who watched his friend’s back, Jack had often said. And Jack Kelly was his best mate.
A
cool breeze wafted through the elegant house on Singapore Island. Kwong Yu Sen paused in writing his report to reflect on the carefully coded words. He would convey the facts as he knew them for his Nazi masters. As for how the mission to kill Gerhardt Stahl had failed because of O’Leary’s impulsive impatience he would say nothing.
The Chinese businessman sighed. Although he was not by nature a gambler, in this instance he had gambled everything on his understanding of the ways of man. If anyone was capable of carrying out his personal revenge on the Irishman it would be the combined force of Paul Mann and Jack Kelly. The abduction of Iris was neither forgotten nor forgiven. Sen had not planned anything further after activating his former colleague for the mission but instead allowed fate to take its course. By his deliberate silence he had allowed luck to play its part. Now O’Leary was dead and no longer a possible source for the British to learn of Sen’s espionage activities in the Great War. His faith in the abilities of the two remarkable men had been vindicated. The fate of his sister-in-law remained the only ghost in his life. Where she was, and what had been her fate, would forever haunt him.
She sat in front of the stone building and gazed without seeing the noisy crowds of dark skinned people passing her by. It was not yet time to open her husband’s bar and cater to the thirsts of the Legionnaires from the fort. She did not like these men who pawed her after drinking the cheap wine and spirits that her husband sold them. Nor did she like this land. It was a lonely place of sand, searing heat and flies. It was a land of barrenness to Iris who had once known the beauty of the rainforests of Papua and before that the snows of her native China.
But Pierre had made his deal with his former boss who had traded her for a year’s worth of work for him. She often thought that she may have been better off in Arabia where at least the English had contact with the local tribes, growing rich on the oil beneath their sands. In North Africa the people either spoke their native tribal dialects or French. Her grasp of French was improving but she had also learned that no one was interested in the mad ramblings of a Eurasian woman claiming to have been abducted from Papua. She had become like the people who passed her by each day as she sat in front of the bar, waiting and watching for just that one face that she might trust – that one person who might take her away from her slavery, and return her to her family.
The desert was brewing a storm outside the garrison town for the French Foreign Legion. Within a few short years the storm would turn to a war that would sweep North Africa with steel and fire.
E
nau wantoks!
It is not my intention to write a history of Papua. There are sources available in most libraries that will give those interested in the history of the great island to the north of Australia the information they require.
Today the island is divided into the democratically governed Papua New Guinea on the east and the former Dutch administered territory Irian Jaya on the west, now under the control of Indonesia.
New Guinea (the northern half of the eastern side) was under German control until 1914 when it was occupied by Australian Armed Forces. Papua (the southern part on the eastern side of the island) has been under Australian control since the early part of the twentieth century. In 1975 Papua New Guinea raised its flag as a fully independent nation.
Papua New Guinea is a land of great beauty with tall, jungle covered mountains that reach into the clouds; there is even a peak that is snow covered at times during the year. The land is so rugged that for over forty thousand years many tribes evolved in complete isolation from their neighbours in the next valley. This has led to a plethora of languages. One estimate puts the number of languages originally spoken at around nine hundred. Needless to say the culture of the island has been a paradise for anthropologists and tribes were still being ‘discovered’ into the latter part of the twentieth century. Cannibalism and head hunting have been the way of life for many of the tribes and their men constitute a true warrior class.
I had the honour of working with the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary in the early 1990s and have been humbled by the courage shown by the men and women who battle every day to maintain peace in a land that still retains a greater part of its warrior culture. It is one of the most beautiful and exotic places on the planet and one that to this day is truly a frontier land, despite the incursion of western technology.
For ease of reading I have anglicised the language spoken in this novel. My characters would have spoken German, English, Police Motu, pidgin and tribal dialects. Today English is the official language of government but the people prefer to communicate in the island’s universal language of
tok pisin
. It is truly a wonderful language, one still evolving with creative colour and derived from a mixture of German, English and indigenous words.
The men and women who pioneered Papua from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth were even more colourful than I could describe in this novel. Government officials, military personnel, missionaries, precious minerals prospectors, traders, charter boat operators, fauna hunters – these are just a few of the sorts of people who went to Papua to seek adventure or fortune, or just simply escape from murky pasts. I would recommend a couple of great writers on the days of adventure in Colin Simpson and James Sinclair. Both authors’ works I drew heavily on for the historical facts and details of the way of life. A wonderful book that provided me with a strong sense of European life in early Papua was that of Dr Jan Roberts,
Voices from a Lost World
. There are many others that I read in the course of my research and I am indebted to them all.
As for the ‘file’ referring to the planned assassination of Albert Einstein, that is just a work of fiction.
Em tasol
Peter Watt
Tweed Heads, Australia
