The Widow & Her Hero (20 page)

One Indonesian family were living on CE7A, a coconut
grove attendant who worked for the little island's owner,
and his name was Ahmed Dulib. He had with him his wife
and one young child. His chief job was to cut down
coconuts and extract the oil from them. He had a boiler,
whose fire he fed with husks, going continuously. He had
already spotted Doucette's party, each with Sten gun and
pistol, in green and khaki, and a badge – the Rising Sun
Australian army badge – on their caps. (He would thus
have made a good witness for the defence at the trial,
except there would be no defence.) In passing, Doucette
asked young Mr Ahmed to cut down some green coconuts
for them, and so they enjoyed the milk, and then they had
Ahmed split open the fruit, and savoured the meat.

On the afternoon of that same day, while boiling down
the coconut oil near their hut, Ahmed and his wife saw two
Japanese landing barges approaching their beach. They
were Kempei Tai troops, who landed and came running up
the beach and into the hinterland towards the hut. The
Japanese had a Malay interpreter who found Ahmed and
asked him about white men. Had he seen any on this
island?

Ahmed, for whatever reason of resistance against the
occupiers, or for the sake of a peaceful life, said he had
not seen any. Whatever it was, this coconut oil man and
island supervisor kept denying any sight of the fugitives,
and became stuck with his first denial and had to play it
boldly, and did so, poor fellow. A detachment took him
back to the landing barge, while the others began searching
the little tropic mole. From his encampment below the
island's slight hill, Doucette had also heard the noisy
arrival of the landing craft. He organised his party of five
around some trees and a clump of coral-like stones on the
east side of the island. They saw the Kempei Tai coming
and opened fire on them with their silenced weapons. It
was as if a silent wind had pushed down the leading
soldiers in the Kempei Tai advance. The Japanese were
terrified, disoriented.

We are told the initial gun battle lasted two hours,
before the Kempei Tai troops retreated to the clearing
around Ahmed Dulib's hut, where they laid down their
dead and wounded. At some stage in that two-hour battle,
however, Rufus Mortmain had felt the impact of a sniper's
bullet in his chest. By the time the Japanese pulled back
amidst the palm trees, Rufus must have felt cold taking
over his extremities, and a terrible uncertainty of breath. I
find it hard to think of his death without tears, because his
vanities were such boyish ones, he lolloped like a large,
lithe dog around the bonfire, and now felt the reality of
being devoured by flames. An awareness of his own death
would obviously have settled on him.

Poor Ahmed Dulib was taken away on the barge by the
Kempei Tai, but somehow his young wife, Mrs Dulib,
who had been hiding from the Japanese with her baby,
came out with her little girl and visited Doucette's group.
She bent over to feed water to the gasping Rufus
Mortmain. One of the soldiers in the Memerang group,
Private Meggitt, had a severe but less serious shoulder
wound. Doucette spoke urgently to the young woman,
telling her to take her little girl and get away, for the
Japanese would be back in greater force. She seemed to
accept what had happened calmly, which I think astonishing
and in the truest sense heroic. By which I mean, in
part, innocent and short-sighted as well.

If one wanted to be cruel, and I frequently and shamefully
did in Doucette's case, one could say Doucette now
chose his own death rather than his duty to Leo and the
others, when Leo had chosen him over me. I have to be
frank that I'd always had this argument to wage with Leo,
except he could not be reached for questioning.

Anyhow, for Doucette, things had gone messy beyond
belief, the grand Memerang plan was in tatters, and thus he
chose irresponsibly to orphan Leo and the others. In the
last hour of light, he and the two men still standing with
him gave Rufus a dose of morphine to dope him up for the
journey, loaded him and Private Meggitt into a folboat,
gave Meggitt a paddle to use one-handed and told them
to head for NC2, six miles south. Somehow, Meggitt
completed the paddle to NC2. What athletes these young
men were. But Doucette's decision was crazy. Rufus was
dying anyhow but to give him a meaningless six-mile start,
Doucette threw his own life away.

Or so it seemed to me until Leo's pencillings made things
clearer.

On NC2, Rufus and Meggitt sheltered in rocks over
which palm trees cast a shade. They were fouled with
blood, but Meggitt administered his last shot of morphine
to himself and Rufus, which helped their wounds to stop
bleeding. The next day, the Japanese found them sitting
dead but still warm on a jungle rock ledge. Though the
Allies would hide the fact from Dotty, though Lydon would
not say it until the second edition of his book, glass was in
their mouths – they had taken their suicide pills for fear of
what they might say under torture.

Still on CE7A, Doucette took a new position and
planned his fields of fire for the return of the Japanese. He
put a tall young man named Private Appin, a prominent
Victorian cricketer with a powerful throwing arm, in a
limestone ditch to the right, with a large supply of hand
grenades. He and Sub-Lieutenant Lower, the submersible
instructor, chose perches in
ru
trees with clear views along
the avenues of palms. He planned to lay down enfilading
fire with the silenced Stens. Doucette rested then, and
waited until the afternoon, when they heard the noise of
landing and patrol craft.

The garrison troops on board were commanded by a
particular Major Ninasu. He was, Hidaka told Lydon, a
tough nut, a veteran of China and all its horrors, some of
which he had himself been guilty of.

Major Ninasu's men penetrated the island in good order,
sending scouts ahead, using the available cover to creep
forward. There was no suicidal charge. But when the
Japanese moved within range, Private Appin began
throwing his grenades. In the midst of all the sudden flame
and chaos, Doucette and the young naval officer and their
silent Stens did lethal work, though in short bursts so that
the flashes did not give away their location. Ahmed Dulib,
who had been brought back on the barge and stood under
guard in his clearing, saw the Japanese wounded returning,
being laid on the beach and attended to by medical orderlies.
He would tell the war crimes investigators there were
an astounding number early – sixty of them.

As darkness came on, Ninasu sent forward some experienced
scouts to draw fire from Doucette, and thus to
discover where the Stens were in the darkness. There was
by now too much blood around these groves of coconuts
for any soldiers to proceed too calmly, but one of them got
to within grenade range and blew Doucette out of his tree,
after which the assassin was quickly shot to pieces by Sub-
Lieutenant Lower who himself, at the end of firing a long
burst, was shot dead. Private Appin was still there somewhere,
alive, but there was no triumphant charge to obliterate
him, since there was a belief amongst the attackers
that they had silenced only a portion of the fire which had
done them so much damage.

Some fifteen miles to the east, Leo and his men, who
were and would remain ignorant of what befell Doucette
and Rufus, had already come ashore at NE1 and met up
with Mel Duckworth, the caretaker of that island, dropped
earlier by the submarine. Shaped like a wine glass painted
by Salvador Dali
,
the island had a hill, Hammock Hill, not
very high at all, from where they kept watch and searched
the sea for omens, expecting to see Doucette at any time.
It would have seemed astonishing to Leo, and it sometimes
seems so to me, that a little bit of chemical could bring the
living intentions of Rufus Mortmain to a halt so easily and
promptly, or that Doucette's huge intentions could be
reduced to fragments of flesh by any weapon.

I know from Mark Lydon how unlucky Leo and his men
on Serapem, NE1, now were. Lydon, in his study of the
Japanese war files, discovered that a Japanese pilot flying a
light aircraft from North Borneo to Singapore experienced
a sudden alarm sound in the cockpit caused by lack of oil
pressure. The pilot was carrying a naval officer and the
Japanese manager of a bauxite mine in North Borneo, and
the pilot told them he would need to make an emergency
landing at the airfield on Bintan Island. He brought the
plane in safely, and began to inspect it. There seemed to be
a hole in the engine casing, which might have been caused
by gunfire. The army in Singapore took no risks. They sent
out troops to look for enemy agents and infiltrators on the
islands to the east of the emergency landing, a task which
would bring them ultimately to NE1. They sent a captain
and a full company of men.

When the Japanese arrived, they landed on the west of
Serapem, where Malay fishermen had a few huts. As his
men unloaded weapons and ammunition from the barges,
the captain, Captain Matsukata, another China veteran,
issued a severe beating to one of the fishermen, and when
that rendered him no extra information, moved inland
from the beach.

We were making lunch at the normal place under the hill –
mixing up the usual big stew of compo rations. Our life was
very ordered – we spent time on watch, and we had dug a lot
of supplies into the caches on the lower ground below
Hammock Hill. Poor old Mel Duckworth, darling Grace's
cousin, who had been here alone since we went off on the junk,
had been so pleased to see us.

I took Mel aside. I asked him what shape his Bolton radio
was in. It's good, he said. I've been cleaning the valves.

Let's signal IRD to get that sub here.

Mel looked wistful. The problem is the Boss has the code
page with him. You see, the code's based on a page from
Robbery Under Arms – IRD's got their page, and the Boss has
ours.

I wondered whether the Boss had remembered to fetch it
from the Nanjang before it blew to pieces.

We couldn't transmit in plain. The Japanese would come
straight to us.

Well, I decided in my own head, this isn't a tragedy, Leo. The
sub will come. But there was all the more reason to miss the
Boss, and daily we expected him. And there are a lot of empty
hours when you're hiding on a tropic island. That lunchtime, I
was with the cooking group. Hearing the engines of the landing
barges, we killed the fire, left the stew, and all grubbed our way
up the little knoll at Hammock Hill. About four of the blokes
were still missing – they had been excavating a new supply of
rations Mel had hidden in the swamp. I sent Chesty off to fetch
them. They came back in ones and twos, whispering, holding
their weapons.

I made a line of my fellows below the ridge, and put three
men down to the right to enfilade with a silenced Bren, and
similarly three down to the left with their Stens. We looked out
from amongst the volcanic rocks and foliage on the slope, and
we could see the Japanese landing on the wide-open rocky,
shingly beach, on the side where the coconut plantation grew
wild, and they were exposed to anyone with weapons. A few
seemed to have started a casual approach, but without any
urgency, and I said to everyone, These jokers aren't a danger.
They're ambling along. If we just hold fire and lie low.

Because we had pandanus and cactus palm and wild sago,
as well as papayas and betel nut and broad leaf banana trees
to hide behind, we could re-position ourselves better than they
could. We watched the troops come walking in an orderly way
over the volcanic rocks of the beach and into the coconut
groves. They were still highly visible. They looked strange and
innocent, spread out that way, as if you shouldn't take advantage
of them. They didn't expect anything to happen. That was
it. They looked like they might slope back to their barges at
any stage.

Could we be struck twice by the same curse? It seems we
could. The sort of thing that happens amongst recruits, but I
suppose fear and excitement made all of us recruits. Someone
slipped his safety catch while his finger was on the trigger of
his Sten – everyone knows you shouldn't do that. But the Sten
fired silently, with a little hiss. It wouldn't have mattered had
no target been struck. The Japanese might have heard a sound
like a few hard pellets of rain, that's all. Except the bullets
killed the captain that was leading, and his batman at his side.
The Japanese looked at the two of them, pole-axed, not
knowing where this damage came from. The rest of us began to
fire and made a pitiful shambles of the advancing men. Then
some of them became soldiers and hugged the ground, and
others dragged their dead captain and their wounded into
shelter. Even we could see that some were shattered, nearly cut
in two, and their blood seemed to stain everyone near them. It
was shocking what silenced Stens could do.

Another younger officer came up to take the captain's place.
He showed himself to be pretty competent. He kept his troops
down and told them to direct fire to the hill, he'd worked out
we were there. Full marks to him. He decided to stay low, and
we could hear shouted and relayed orders. The afternoon thunderstorm
rained on them and us both, clearing away the
memory of their dead captain. Out on the beach, we could see
the Japanese flogging some Malays into carrying the captain's
body to the barge. They beat the poor natives all the way
across the stones, with half an eye on the hill all the time,
worried about us, worried about our silent weapons.

I took a roll-call and two of our fellows, I discovered,
hadn't made it back through the jungle to us. They were a
young army private, Kelly, and an English fellow I hadn't got
to know so well because he had a quiet nature and seemed to
choose chiefly to talk to his fellow Pom, Rufus. His name was
Lieutenant Carlaw, and he had been assistant to Lower in
teaching us how to ride the SBs. I hoped Kelly and Carlaw
would join us on the hill once night fell. Then we could all
slip away to one of the other islands, maybe Proma NE3, and
we could hide there and creep back over here at night and
wait for the rendezvous with the sub. I could see Proma from
our position. Across the water it looked good to me– even
thicker cover than NE1. But it seemed to lack a beach, at
least on this side. Well, we'd just have to presume one existed
on the blind-side.