SOMEDAY SOON

'A gripping adventure.'

Newcastle Herald

'A grand historical novel..'

Brisbane Sunday Mail

Highly recommended.'

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

by David Crookes

First Published in 2000 by Hodder Headline
(Australia)

Republished Hodder Headline (Australia) in
2000

This Smashwords ebook edition published in
December 2010

by David Crookes

Copyright
©
David
Crookes 1999

The morning air was hot and steamy. It was
the nineteenth of February, 1942, nearing the end of the wet in the
Northern Territory, and already the weather pattern was building
for the inevitable afternoon tropical deluge.

Faith Brodie put down her two heavy suitcases
when she reached the wharf and loosened her light cotton dress
which clung stubbornly in places to her slim young body. An
unexpected wisp of cooling air came off the water and she felt the
sting of perspiration in her eyes. She quickly took off her
broad-brimmed hat and wiped her brow with the palm of her hand then
ran her fingers through her long fair hair. But the puff of wind
disappeared as quickly as it came and feeling the searing heat of
the morning sun on her face, she put her hat back on and looked out
over the harbor.

Although the port was crammed with
shipping but there was barely a ripple on the emerald-green water.
Australian, American and British transports were tied up at the
wharf and many more were riding at anchor among Royal Australian
Navy tenders and the American destroyer
USS
Peary.
One of the largest ships in the harbor was the
Australian hospital ship
Manunda.

Things had changed so quickly in just a few
weeks. The Japanese had devastated the American Pacific Fleet at
Pearl Harbor, destroyed General MacArthur’s air force on the ground
in the Philippines and his Army, facing certain defeat, had
withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsular on Manila Bay. Just days
earlier, the supposedly impregnable British fortress of Singapore
had fallen to the Japanese after their triumphant sweep down the
Malayan Peninsula. Now, after the rout of Australian forces in
Timor, the Netherlands East Indies and at Rabaul in New Britain,
the enemy was literally on Australia’s doorstep. The humble port of
Darwin had been transformed into a strategic allied supply base for
a new war in the Pacific.

Fearing an imminent Japanese invasion,
the Australian government had ordered the evacuation of all women
and children from Darwin and the stepping up of the remote
outpost’s meager fortifications. Already over two thousand people,
half the town’s population, had left. Faith was one of the very
last evacuees, scheduled to sail to Perth aboard the coastal
steamer
Zealandia.

Faith picked up her suitcases and began
weaving her way down the dock in and out of huge piles of war
supplies and building materials stacked high on the wharf.
The
Zealandia
lay at the far
end beyond another coastal steamer, the
Neptuna.
The area around the
Neptuna
was a hive of activity as scores of
waterside workers unloaded her cargo of munitions and high
explosives. When her holds were empty the
Neptuna
would also sail southward with the last
of the Top End evacuees.

The drone of aircraft overhead caused Faith
to look up. She saw several aircraft approaching over the harbor.
They seemed to be flying very low. Then she saw a second wave of
planes behind the first, then another behind that. Soon she could
see many times the combined total of the few RAAF Wirraways and
American Kittyhawks based at Darwin.

Faith smiled and put down her suitcases
again. There had been talk around town of more Americans coming to
Darwin. From what she’d heard and seen of the handful of flamboyant
American flyers at the RAAF station, it would be just like the
Yanks to show off the arrival of reinforcements with a low-level
fly-past. They certainly seemed to be doing it in style. Now there
were so many aircraft in the sky they were beginning to block out
the sun. Then suddenly Faith’s smile vanished when she saw the
bellies of the leading aircraft open up and start disgorging
strings of bombs.

In seconds the tranquility of the morning was
shattered by thunderous explosions. Faith was lifted off her feet
and flung through the air in a roaring blast of scorching hot air.
She landed heavily on the hardwood planking of the wharf. There
were more ear-numbing explosions and from where she lay Faith saw
the port’s huge oil storage tanks take direct hits and become
instant infernos of flame and dense black smoke. Then a rapid
series of small blasts ignited ruptured oil pipelines around the
dockside and all at once there was fire everywhere.

Faith skinned her hands and knees as she
scrambled over the rough planking to a stockpile of steel girders
at the edge of the dock and squeezed herself into a small space
between them. Crouched inside her makeshift air-raid shelter she
watched in horror as wave after wave of aircraft emptied their bomb
bays, raining death and destruction with deadly accuracy on the
sitting-duck targets riding at anchor in the harbor and lying
alongside the wharf. When the waves of bombers had droned by,
squadrons of fighter planes roared in at lightening speed. They
swooped down low over the harbor, dive bombing ships and raking
fleeing dockworkers on the wharf with machine gun fire. Some were
so low that the Japanese red moon emblems on their wings and even
the grinning faces of their pilots were plainly visible as they
banked away after their deadly strafing runs.

Apart from land-based anti-aircraft
fire, the only real resistance came from the destroyer,
USS Peary
. Faith watched wide-eyed as
the warship was hit almost immediately and repeatedly but
the
Peary’s
guns stubbornly
kept blazing until finally her magazine blew, ripping the ship
apart. As she sank, the sea around her turned into a fiery cauldron
of burning oil which devoured what was left of her hapless crew.
Then a big tanker, the
British
Motorist
, took direct hits, rupturing her cavernous
tanks and igniting millions more gallons of oil, adding to the
inferno on the harbor.

Unable to watch the horror a moment longer,
Faith closed her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears, trying
to shut out the explosions which, amplified by the steel girders
surrounding her, threatened to burst her eardrums. But there was no
hiding from the blitz. Another incredibly loud blast reverberated
through the canyons of steel which shook and shuddered around her.
Faith opened her eyes. The entire stockpile of girders was swaying.
Even the wharf beneath her seemed to be moving. But Faith heard no
sound. Everything seemed strangely serene. In terror, realized
she’d been deafened by the nightmare going on around her.

Faith peered down the wharf. Now
the
Neptuna
and the
Zealandia
were in flames and both
ships appeared to be sinking. A section of the dock beside
the
Neptuna
had vanished and
Faith knew it must have been the blast of munitions exploding in
the holds of the transport that had deafened her. When she felt the
dock beneath her move again she got up and ran for her life with
the wharf crumbling beneath her feet until she reached a grassy
slope leading towards the town's esplanade.

Halfway up the slope, Faith stopped for a
moment and looked up. The sky was still full of aircraft bombing
and strafing, not only over the harbor but all over the town. She
continued running. In a few moments she reached the Esplanade,
darted across it and ran into the courthouse where until the day
before she had worked as a stenographer. She found no one inside
the building and ran back outside onto the veranda overlooking the
harbor.

More of the bigger ships were sinking
now and many others were on fire including the hospital ship
Manunda.
As Faith watched, the
Manunda
took another hit, the huge
vessel’s prominent red cross markings ignored by the Japanese
pilots. Faith’s blood boiled in a surge of anger. She was
temporarily heartened when she saw a group of American P-40
Kittyhawks overhead engaging Japanese aircraft, but her joy was
short lived as she watched the hopelessly outnumbered American
aircraft shot out of the sky by swarms of Zeros.

Faith felt vomit rise in her throat. She
leaned forward and emptied her stomach over the veranda rail. Then,
shell-shocked and trembling, she slowly sank to the floor and
closed her eyes.

*

‘Faith… Faith….
Faith
’

The voice was faint. It seemed a million
miles away. Faith opened her eyes and saw the familiar face of
Sergeant Maxwell from the police barracks next door to the court
house.

‘Faith, are you all right?’ The sergeant eyed
her cautiously. ‘We didn’t know you were here. Everyone in the
court house and the police station dived into slit trenches just as
soon as we realized the planes were Japs. I only just saw you lying
here.’

Faith opened her eyes and looked groggily out
over the harbor. The air was filled with smoke and fires were
raging everywhere. There were no planes overhead now but crowds of
people were running and shouting along the Esplanade. Faith faintly
heard the wail of an air raid siren in the distance and was
thankful that at least she could hear again.

‘Yes, I’m all right, Sergeant. I must have
blacked out. When did the bombing stop?’

‘The fist raid ended nearly two hours ago but
then there was another by high altitude bombers. They concentrated
on the RAAF station. They’ve only just gone. We don’t think there
can be much of anything left over there. We can’t tell for sure
because all the communications are out. But we do know the hospital
has been hit too. I was just heading over there when I saw you.’
The sergeant looked at blood stains on Faith’s dress. ‘Are you sure
you’re all right?’

‘I think so, Sergeant Maxwell. Never mind the
blood. I just skinned my hands and knees down on the wharf.’

Faith moved to get up. The sergeant helped
her to her feet.

‘
Look, I’ve got to get over to the
hospital,’ he said quickly. ‘Why don’t you slip over to the police
barracks and grab a cup of tea? But be sure to jump into the slit
trenches in the back yard if those bastards come back
again.’

Faith looked at the people running down the
Esplanade. ‘Where is everyone going?’ she called out as the
sergeant hurried to his police utility standing, door open and
engine running, at the kerb.

‘A lot of people are going bush,’ Maxwell
shouted back as he climbed behind the wheel of the ute. ‘They think
the bloody Japs are going to land any minute.’

Faith watched the utility drive off down the
Esplanade. She shuddered at the thought of Japanese soldiers
landing. For weeks the newspapers had been full of speculation of
what they would do to Australian women if they did. Several girls
who worked with her at the courthouse had said they would kill
themselves if the Japs landed before they were evacuated. A surge
of panic swept through her. For a moment she was tempted to join
the runners in the street. But then she decided to take the
sergeant’s advice and seek refuge in the police barracks. Then she
changed her mind again, in favor of going home, thinking that if
the Japanese did land and she had to make a fateful decision, at
least there was a gun in the house.

The Brodie house was less than a mile from
the courthouse on a shady street just off the Stuart Highway, the
only road leading into or out of Darwin. Faith had been just twelve
years old when the family moved from Queensland to Darwin after her
father joined the Northern Territory Police Force. At first the
family felt as if they had come to a foreign land. Darwin was so
different from any other place in Australia they had ever seen. But
eventually they came to love the friendly and often boisterous,
cosmopolitan community.

After six years, their house had been all but
demolished in the great cyclone of 1937. The tropical storm also
took the lives of Faith’s mother and her father when their small
sailing boat, caught out in hundred-knot winds in Van Diemen Gulf,
capsized and sank to the bottom. After the cyclone Faith had wanted
to leave Darwin and its awful memories behind but her older brother
Joe had stubbornly rebuilt the house and persuaded her to stay.