SOMEDAY SOON (58 page)

A few minutes later the train began to slow
down, then it came to a halt at a level crossing at the little town
of Espanola. Faith heard one of the passengers say 7.15 out of
Santa Fe never stopped at Espanola. Another passenger lowered a
window and stuck his head out to see what was going on.

‘It’s that fool in the pick-up,’ the
passenger said when he pulled his head back inside the carriage.
‘He’s parked the damn thing across the track at the level
crossing.’

Before long there was a commotion at the end
of the carriage and Faith saw a tall man with long black flowing
hair come striding down the aisle. He was dressed in a buckskin
jacket and blue denims and seemed to be checking the faces of the
passengers as he hurried down the aisle, oblivious to the
protestations of two elderly railway guards trotting along behind
him.

Faith smiled and stood up in wide-eyed
amazement when she realized the man was Dan. When he saw her he
hurried to her. He grinned and nodded up at the luggage rack.
‘Which ones are yours, ma’am?’

Faith pointed to two cases. ‘Those two,
there,’

Dan grabbed the luggage. ‘Follow me, ma’am.
This is where you get off.’

CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN

Lyle Hunter never saw Faith Brodie again and
the telephone call he expected from Colorado never came. Instead
Western Union delivered a telegram from her the morning after he
returned to Washington from Los Alamos. It was sent from Espanola
and simply stated that she wished to call off the wedding and would
have told him personally in New Mexico if she had seen him. A month
later she married Dan Rivers in Gallup and a year later gave birth
to the first of four children. He was named Augustus, and Staff
Sergeant Welenski travelled from Idaho to Gallup to be present at
the christening of his namesake godson. Faith never returned to
Australia.

Koko Hamada was buried in the tiny
cemetery at Borroloola. Joe and Weasel were the only mourners to
attend the simple ceremony. A team from Army Intelligence salvaged
the remains of the
Groote Eyelandt
Lady
from the MacArthur River. Radio equipment was
found aboard the wreck but no evidence of espionage of any kind.
The Army’s official report was that suspicions that the vessel was
a spy boat were unfounded and that Koko Hamada, an escaped prisoner
of war, was wholly responsible for the death of her owners of the
vessel. Corporal Joe Brodie narrowly missed being court marshaled
for negligence while in charge of a prisoner of war.

The
Walrus
was barely damaged when she rammed
the
Groote Eyelandt Lady
and
Joe and Weasel sailed her back to Darwin. On the way they landed
Monday at his home on Croker Island. As the
Walrus
slipped her moorings in Mission Bay,
Monday grinned widely when Joe reminded him that he was expected to
join the crew of his new island trader when he and Weasel returned
to the island. They sailed into Darwin Harbor on a blustery
afternoon in October just ahead of the first tropical storm of the
wet. Fifteen hundred miles to the north of Darwin another storm was
raging as General MacArthur’s forces unleashed a crushing attack on
the Japanese held island of Leyte in the Phillipines, fulfilling
his promise to return to the islands.

In November 1944 the Australian Director of
Military Operations decided that with Australia no longer under
threat from the Japanese, the Northern Australia Observer Force was
to be disbanded. Within weeks, the few remaining outposts were shut
down, its horses sold or shot and its remaining personnel including
those seconded to Army Intelligence were sent south to New South
Wales. In May of 1945 the unit officially ceased to exist. The
source of the leak of secret military information out of Canberra
was never discovered and continued until the end of the war.

The POW escape at Cowra was the largest
prison breakout in history. Two hundred and thirty Japanese
prisoners, including Yosi Yakimoto were killed and almost three
hundred and thirty escaped into the New South Wales countryside.
The Commonwealth Government successfully suppressed most details of
the escape for over twenty-five years. Two hundred and sixty-eight
Australian men and women perished in the sinking of the Australian
Hospital Ship
Centaur.
Between
February 1942 and November 1943 there were fifty eight Japanese air
raids on Darwin.

In the early morning of August 9, 1945 after
the Japanese government had ignored an Allied ultimatum to cease
hostilities, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the
Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated eighty thousand
people. Three days later with no Japanese surrender forthcoming
another atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. After the
second detonation, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. Both
bombs dropped on Japan were built in the laboratories of the Los
Alamos Project in New Mexico.

Captain Dan Rivers was just one of over three
hundred and fifty thousand American servicemen and women who saw
service in, or passed through Australia during the Pacific campaign
between 1942 and 1945. The code of the Navajo code talkers was
never cracked by the Japanese and it was only decades later that
the United States Government officially acknowledged it even
existed. As a result of the infallibility of the code, the war in
the Pacific was shortened and tens of thousands of Allied lives
were saved. For his courageous part in protecting it, Dan Rivers
was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

*

Joe Brodie and Weasel Watkins arrived back in
Darwin aboard a tramp steamer in late August, 1945. They were the
first civilians to return to the bombed ruins of the northern
outpost since the mass evacuation in 1942. When the old steamer
tied up in the harbor, Joe walked straight up to the police
barracks on the Esplanade. He was delighted to see his old friend
Sergeant Maxwell was the lone policeman on duty. Joe asked if he
and Weasel could bunk down at the station until they made the old
Brodie house habitable after which they planned to start looking
for a suitable island trading vessel.

Just after dawn the next day, Joe walked to
the old Hamada place at Myilly Point alone. He took a steel
crowbar, a shovel and a policeman’s torch with him. He found that
the cottage, like most of the dwellings in Darwin, was just a
dilapidated shell. All the windows were broken and the doors had
been smashed in, and he had to beat a path to it through the wildly
overgrown trees and shrubs in Aki’s garden. Limbs of the frangipani
tree under which Koko said Aki Hamada was buried now rested heavily
on the cottage roof.

The inside of the cottage was worse than the
outside. All the furnishings were gone as were the stove, the bath
tub and the kitchen sink. Most of the walls and ceiling were holed
and rubbish covered the floors. Joe began clearing the debris off
the living room floor with his bare hands and the shovel. Soon he
could see that the heavy hardwood floorboards beneath the rubbish
looked as if they had never been disturbed. In one corner of the
room he found what he was looking for. There, a few of the boards
were quite short and of the same length. Using the crow bar, he
pried one of them up. It was stubborn, but once it yielded, the
rest came up easily. Beneath the boards was a short flight of
stairs.

The police torch lit the way as Joe descended
the stairs into a musty cellar. A few basic furnishings and
oriental keepsakes were scattered around the room. There was a
coating of dust and grime everywhere but everything was as neat as
a pin. An old copy of Darwin’s little weekly newspaper lay over the
arm of a chair. Joe slapped the paper against his knee to knock off
the dust. It was dated February 18, 1942, the day of Australia’s
own Pearl Harbor. It was as if time had stood still.

Joe shone the light around the room. At one
end there were scores of dusty bottles in wooden racks where Koko’s
father had once kept his prized saki. At the other end there was a
curtain partitioning off a separate area. Joe moved to the curtain
and drew it back. He gasped at what he saw.

There on a table sat a short wave radio
receiver/transmitter. It was as sophisticated as the Army
Intelligence gear had been on the
Walrus
, only it was the type used by the
Japanese. And propped up between the radio and the cellar wall was
what looked to be a cardboard chart. When he had wiped the dust
from it he could plainly see it was a detailed drawing of Darwin
Harbor, showing the position and names of all the ships that had
been in port on February 19, 1942. The drawings also detailed the
harbor surrounds showing gun emplacements, fuel dumps and important
military installations ashore. Suddenly Joe realized why, in the
two horrendous air raids that infamous day, not a single bomb fell
on Myilly Point.

When Joe left Aki's cottage just before
midday, he had transferred her remains from under the frangipani
tree into a deep grave in the Hamada’s private place and had
carefully replaced the floorboards and even the rubbish which had
protected the sanctuary for so long. As he walked away, Joe hoped,
as Koko had, that she would rest there in undisturbed peace. And he
hoped too, for Koko’s sake, that what he had buried with her would
also remain undisturbed and undiscovered.