Fire Eye (2 page)

He pushed the control column forward and to the right to dive upon the unsuspecting bomber. He tried to reduce the deflection angle as he dived down for a high tail attack because the mixture of 7.7 mm machine guns and 20 mm cannon that armed his aircraft were mismatched in trajectory. He used the manoeuvrability of the Zero to place him in a good firing position as well as to avoid the twin fifty-calibre machine guns in the top turret. As a veteran of the war in China, he didn’t need to fire any ranging shots.

As the Zero built up speed in the dive out of the sun, his thumb felt for the small rocking lever on top of the throttle that selected machine guns and cannon when pushed forward. As the range closed between the aircraft, his finger touched the firing button on the front of the throttle handle. He pressed it and watched the tracers slam into the bomber and felt the vibration of the guns. With a strong but gentle pull on the control stick he pulled through the vertical and rolled inverted for another diving, slashing attack against the bomber. He sensed the bomber skidding away from him as the pilot kicked rudder. He hit the firing button again and briefly saw some flashing strikes among the misses. He rolled upright, slammed the throttle forward for full power from the Sakae engine, working the rudder and ailerons for a steep climbing turn to position for an attack from three quarter rear to avoid the tail guns. He saw his shells punch into the fuselage of the bomber and then suddenly the stream of dancing fire stopped as the ammunition ran out.

He pulled the throttle back and kicked the rudder side to side to slow the aircraft so that he could formate off the port wing tip of the wounded bomber. He could see the dorsal gunner slumped inside the shattered Perspex of his turret, lifted his goggles and calmly lit a cigarette while he studied the aircraft. He could plainly see the damage it had sustained, the blood that splattered the inside of the dorsal turret, the shattered windscreen and the dying engine. He continued to study the bomber with its high-set gull wing and beautiful lines communicating power and purpose. He admired the punishment the aircraft had taken yet still managed to keep flying. Even he had to acknowledge that Japan’s own Mitsubishi bomber would have been a flaming wreck spiralling down to the ocean below with far less damage. He knew that after Pearl Harbour, American industry would pump out aircraft like this by the thousand. Nippon must consolidate its new empire so that American supply lines became too long to manage. He understood that peace was better for both countries, but if the war continued modern Samurai like him would do their duty.

The dying bomber was so close he could see the face of the American pilot struggling to keep it flying. Isao looked into the eyes of the other pilot. He lifted his finger in salute to acknowledge the skill with which the American had fought his aircraft, pulled a tight turn to port and set a course back to base.

He would let chance decide the fate of the bomber.

Alexander stands at the lights waiting for them to change, watching the Monaro do a U-turn and blast through the intersection as the lights turn red. The power of the car is being exploited with controlled discipline and a hint of rebellion, pushing the boundaries to the limit. She gives a slight smile as she recognises a similar spirit. Visualising herself behind the wheel, she walks across the road into the foyer of her hotel, heading straight for the lift. While she is excited about taking the first step in the project, Alexander is also uneasy. Something is stirring within her soul. Instinct warns that Jed Mitchell could be trouble, big time trouble. She finds the key card for the unit and enters the room. Throwing her bag down on the couch, she kicks off her shoes and heads for the fridge to pour a glass of champagne.

“How’d the meeting go?” asks her half brother Damian as he slouches in the armchair watching sport on the television, a coffee cup, two empty stubbies and a discarded packet of chips scattered on the floor around him.

“Fine,” Alexander replies blandly as she finishes filling the glass and flicks on the kettle to make coffee. “There’s some research to do, but he’ll get back to me in a few weeks with his decision.”

Damien flicks the remote to mute for a few seconds and calls out, “With any luck you can get on and do it and maybe sort out some issues.” He hits the button to reengage with the cricket.

In response, Alexander kicks her shoes out of the way. Picking up the glass and bottle, she walks out to the balcony, falling back into the deck chair and resting her feet on another chair. Her feet are well-shaped but marred by the damaged toes of her right foot. She gives the foot a brief glance then looks down at the beach, sipping the champagne.

She is aware of a stir of emotions she hasn’t felt before and lets them flow through her mind and body. She has learned to tease and play with men, then cut down using her incisive intellect, to leave them floundering. Attracting the desire of a man, to have them dangling in frustration at any time and place, is a victory that doesn’t need to be pursued any further. She feels that protective behaviour being threatened and is now floundering herself for an appropriate response.

Something, however, is stirring within her. She doesn’t know what it is and has no idea how to start exploring it. She has just taken a huge step back into the world. A seed has been cast, sown with the silent hand of hope. Watered gently with time and fertilised with patience and a pinch of daring, it could flower into the new life she craves so desperately. She sips her champagne and lets a jumble of thoughts race randomly through her mind.

April 14 1942, Northern Australia

Kilchelski was just about finished. The blood soaking slowly into the towel was sapping his energy and his leg shuddered under the strain of maintaining pressure to counter the drag of the dead engine. Australia emerged as a blur on the horizon, but no familiar landmarks were visible. The coastline was a low band of mangrove with reddish, rocky hills in the distant background.

The aircraft was down to four thousand five hundred feet and twelve miles out. He had no energy and little life left to even think about turning left or right to find civilisation. He knew life was draining away and that he had only minutes at best.

The aircraft was dying as well, the port engine overheating with the strain of the last few hours and only four left alive in its shattered fuselage. Two of those could not speak English and had expected to reach safety from the Japanese onslaught. Instead, they had witnessed gruesome death as Japanese shells and bullets had smashed through the plane and exploded the flesh and bone of those they had hoped would be their salvation. They could sense the agony of the pilot and the dying shudders of the bomber, but lived with the faint hope they would yet survive.

Naoji Menya cradled his six year old daughter in his arms, as he had for the last few hours amidst the mayhem—a long, lonely flight listening to the wind whistling through holes in the fuselage and the thundering roar of the engine. He had covered her eyes to protect her from the blood and gore splattering the inside of the aircraft and now sang a song from his childhood to distract her as the sorely wounded aircraft thundered on.

With his free hand he checked his shoulder bag and took out the ancient wooden box that contained the key to a new life. He had offered it to the pilot to take his daughter to freedom and could not believe that the tall American had taken a look, holding the object in the palm of his hand where the sunlight had reflected in its centre like the flickering flames of a fire, and then given it back to him.

Although he didn’t advertise it, his English was as good as his Japanese. He heard the pilot say, “I don’t need that to do what is right,” as he got on with the final checks of the aircraft.

In spite of being trapped in a dying bomber, he was grateful for even a slim chance at life and freedom for his daughter. It was more than he could have expected from the Japanese Army in the Philippines. He made a final decision, extracted the object from its nest in the box and hung the chain around her neck, tucking the stone under her blouse for extra safety. He dropped the box back in his shoulder bag before placing his arm once again around his daughter.

Kilchelski had no idea whether he was east or west of Darwin, the engine was dying and his body was giving up. He set up the descent for straight ahead, descending at five hundred feet per minute and throttled back the manifold pressure and RPM to try to keep the engine alive for as long as possible. Ahead all he could see through the crazed Plexiglass was a shoreline of dark green mangrove and rocks backed by a wilderness of bush. He maintained the descent, aiming just left of a bluff. Without intercom he could not warn anyone still alive that he was proposing a forced landing, even if his passengers could understand him. He hadn’t heard from Brown, the tail gunner, since the Zero had pounded them with cannon and machine gun fire.

Five miles out and at two thousand five hundred feet, a bay appeared to the left with an island and a flat expanse of mudflat. Kilchelski reduced pressure on left rudder and let the bomber drift to the right and then forced more left rudder to line up on the mudflat.

A hell of a way to fly an aeroplane, he thought, left rudder only to point the nose and fight the drag of a useless engine.

He gently pushed the propeller lever with his injured arm to full fine for a landing and adjusted the throttle to keep his landing spot centred in what remained of the windscreen, fighting pain and exhaustion. The port engine was running hot and oil fumes streamed out behind the wing in the airflow. He reduced power slowly, trying to squeeze the last remaining life out of the engine. At eight hundred feet the vibrations became so bad he had to shut the engine down, slamming the mixture control right back, feathering the propeller, and killing the master switch to shut down all the electrics to reduce the risk of fire and trimming for best glide speed. As a last thought, he unlatched the sliding canopy on his side from force of habit drummed into him during his training days. The pressure was building, demanding all his attention. He spared a few seconds to visualise the woman waiting for him in Brisbane, hoping desperately he would see her, and the child she was carrying, again.

With both engines now dead, he relaxed his pressure on the left rudder to relieve the killing strain on his leg. Keeping the wheels up in case they dug into soft mud, he flew his baby into a belly landing, slightly nose high. The tail touched first and slammed her down onto the mud. The plane slid across the tidal flat into the stand of trees and scrub on the slightly higher ground in the centre of the island. He had touched later and faster than intended and the thin trunks of trees on the high part of the island were bent or sliced apart by the wings as she buried her nose and most of the fuselage among the wreckage of the vegetation.

Without adequate warning to brace themselves, or even understanding what was happening, the last remaining passengers were slammed into projections inside the aircraft, shearing flesh and breaking bones to end up as shattered human hulks on the floor of the aircraft.

Brown, the waist gunner, had known what was coming and had tried to warn the survivors what to expect. Naoji Menya did his best to protect his daughter, but a forced landing was a completely new experience and he had no idea what to expect. In spite of his best efforts to secure himself, Brown was flung forward through the fuselage to smash against a bulkhead bracket, his blood leaving a splattered smear on the green-primed aluminium fuselage.

For some time only the crackling of the cooling engine disturbed the peace of the tidal swamp. When this finally stopped, there was only the wailing cry of a child. The slithering gouges of the fuselage across the mud flats would be washed away by the next high tide and soon only the natural sounds of the wilderness would surround the wreckage for the next sixty odd years.

Coming back into a high stress job after a few days away is like jumping onto a speeding train. Jed’s first day back at work is, as usual, full of the unexpected. He likes to be organised. In his job organisation is the secret to keeping his head above the turbulent, swirling rapids of school life. As usual, within moments of walking in the door everything changes.

“G’day Jed! You’ve got two teachers away but I called Manpower for relief,” yells Trish, his ever loyal executive officer. She flicks wayward strands of dark hair out of her brown eyes and continues with her briefing. “Mrs Street wants to see you about Sophie being bullied in the playground. The ride-on mower blew up and the new one is delayed. If Doug would service and use it properly that wouldn’t happen! The architect wants to catch up about the hall today and the IT man is coming down to talk about the upgrade.”

Nothing like being away for a few days!
The phone rings and Trish dives onto it while Jed makes a coffee and ponders his day disappearing.

Walking into his office, he sees the pile of mail lurking on his desk. Buried in that lot will be something worthwhile, but most will be filed in the bin. As he starts that job, he knows the emails will be building up for the daily assault so Jed fires up the laptop while ripping into the mail.

His day is unfolding with its normal unpredictability. He enjoys the challenge of the job and the intrinsic reward of watching students grow, but his sanity needs the regular diversion of adventure. As a principal, he is a problem solver extraordinaire. He has to be because the problems always keep coming relentlessly. His ability to solve problems on the run may be an asset in the job, but doesn’t always help in his relationships. It has taken him a while to realise that women don’t always like problems to be solved, just being listened to often seems to have more appeal.

On top of the day Trish has flagged, he has recess and lunch duties, a staff meeting and will need to find time to mix with students and manage a host of other unexpected issues. A lot of time spent on the small stuff important to other people along with big decisions involving money or people’s future to make in a few seconds, requiring tolerance and good judgement. In his world, every day is like this—multiple, interconnected complexities with accountability to all sorts of people but little freedom to make the decisions to support that accountability.
No wonder the desert and jungle are so attractive!
Jed thinks.

With the first day over, Jed walks in the front door of his home after a one hundred kilometre drive. He dumps his laptop, checks the slow cooker with the curried lamb shanks, opens a bottle of red and pours a drink. Medicinal purposes only.

The lounge room is huge and looks out over the park across the road and the Derwent River beyond through an expanse of windows that give a two hundred and seventy degree view. Around the room are mounted pieces of wreckage from a variety of wreck sites—a P-40 Kittyhawk from the 49
^th
Pursuit Squadron that crashed on the way to defend Darwin in 1942; a piece of ‘Starduster’, a C-47 that had a wing torn off in a thunderstorm on a flight to Brisbane; a wing inspection panel from a B-17 shot up by Japanese fighters after a raid on Rabaul; and, other mementos of adventures in aviation archaeology. Each tells a human story of courage, dedication and endurance under unimaginable conditions of combat in the South West Pacific in the early days of World War II.

On the walls hang prized examples of original art, including a stunning portrait painted by his sister of an Aboriginal elder depicting his life experience and wisdom. An Arabian Jezail, Indian matchlock musket and a Zulu Assegai stabbing spear used to hunt lion in the passage to manhood add historical contrast. There are also the antlers of Chamois taken in the wild mountains of New Zealand’s Westland, tusks of wild pigs hunted in outback Australia and a full body mount of a Tahr taken on the flanks of Mt. Sefton in New Zealand. On shelves around the room are some of his three thousand books covering aviation, ancient history, archaeology, cooking, firearms, anthropology and other subjects that have caught his interest.

He hits the power button on the music system and Fleetwood Mac kicks in while he ponders the neat piles of books, magazines, slides and photographs spread across the floor. Among all his files he can find almost anything to do with aviation history. If he doesn’t have it, he knows where to look.

Slowly piecing together the story behind Alexander’s photograph, he is filled with excitement about uncovering a story even he has not known about. A story that but for a quirk of fate would have become common knowledge and a matter of pride to Australians. Trying to identify the location of the plane will be the real problem with not much to go on in the photographs. Sipping the shiraz, he reflects on his day.
Process is important
, he concludes as he looks down at the photographs and slides spread across the floor.
Do what you do every day as a principal and make your own process.
He takes a pencil, a pad, and some books off the Australian shelf and sets to work. It is going to be a long night.

April 14 1942, Overlooking Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, Northern Australia

Even as a speck almost lost in the azure blue of the sky, the bird caught the attention of Ungondangery. His sharp hunter’s eyes picked it up far out over the big water, sweeping in from another time and place. For a long time it barely changed its position in the sky, slowly taking shape as it crept closer. As he waited with the timeless patience of his people, he could begin to see how its wings spread wide, straight and unmoving, slicing through the air to carry the bird on its journey.

He stood tall, straight and strong as he studied the approaching bird. His left foot was clamped on his right knee as he balanced himself on spears clutched securely in his left hand. Three of them were war spears tipped with the dreaded shovel-nosed blades shaped from scrap iron scrounged from the isolated homesteads dotting the vast landscape behind him. The other two were hunting spears, with barbed wooden tips hardened in the hot ashes of a camp fire. The end of the shafts rested on the hard rock of the bluff on which he stood with statuesque grace. Around his waist was a belt fashioned from human hair. Leather thongs held a handy stone-headed tomahawk nestled securely at the small of his back, two boomerangs, a throwing stick to break the wings of flying birds or the legs of small game animals and a wooden-handled knife tipped with sharp-edged mussel shell.

His skin was coloured with the sheen of charcoal, his chest and upper arms decorated with the ripples of ceremonial scars. He was a warrior-huntsman feared by all across the land, still living free and taking cattle any time he wanted. It was only a fair exchange for the occupation of his people’s land and the intrusion into his ancient culture. As he stood propped in absolute stillness, the breeze whispered gently between the rocks and scrub around him before sighing gently away to caress the rugged ranges and grassland plains that lay in silence behind him.

His face was corrugated by deep lines of age and weather, matching the gullies and ravines of his country. Depending on his mood, those lines could tighten into a ferocious snarl only the foolhardy would challenge or relax into a spontaneous winning smile. His moods could change in a flash, keeping anyone he encountered on constant alert. His eyes reflected the accumulated wisdom of his people going back to the Dreamtime and the sharpness of the hunters who had survived in this country for tens of thousands of years.

With those eyes he watched the bird sweeping in, losing height as if it was reaching exhaustion and could fly no further. As it grew slowly in size, he could see the lumps on its wings like the tumours he had seen sometimes on the animals he hunted. He realised that this was a metal bird of the white man. He had only ever seen one close up at the mission, a small one with two wings and one engine. This one was bigger and even from so far away he could sense its power. He felt the anguish of its final throes, but was still in awe of the bird as it swept in lower and lower. It reminded him of a swan sorely hit by a throwing stick and staggering away to die.

He watched as the bird descended below his height. Just as the pulsating throb of the engine began to hammer at his ears, the sound died away. He saw the paddle blades appear from nowhere, like the magic of the spirits, as the propellers stopped spinning. The bird slowly raised its nose as it prepared to alight on the mud flats. Its tail kicked a spray of mud into the air and then the nose slammed down onto the mud. The bird slid across the mudflat and scythed its way into the trees and scrub with the ripping, vicious sound of snapping trunks and branches before finally coming to rest.

After silence descended once again on his country he waited patiently, contemplating the invasion by the white man’s bird and the stories he had heard of the conflict happening beyond the horizon. Eventually, he detected movement below him as something crawled out of the bird’s belly. He heard a faint wailing cry of distress and fear.

Ungondangery, feared wild man, cattle hunter and man killer, now had a decision to make, one he pondered carefully before dropping his left foot back onto the rock of the bluff.