The Widow & Her Hero (6 page)

There and in the roads were many freighters and
tankers, all lit up. They began in the last of the day to select
their targets, always allowing that what they chose now
might have moved on in three nights' time. We need the
Australian Waterside Workers, said Chesty Blinkhorn
proudly, to bung on a strike. Then the bastards'd still all be
there in a month.

For three days they lay in undergrowth in the enervating
tropic sun which failed to enervate them. As with any tribe,
stories were always part of the day. Leo's stories of growing
up in the Solomons, barefoot, shirtless, a South Pacific
motherless urchin, with a casual Melanesian nanny who
allowed him the same latitude given native children. Based
on tales he told me his stories dealt too with natives who
trod on stingrays in the shallows and suffered an immediate,
agonising cone-like excision of flesh. There were excruciating
native remedies involving lime juice in the wound,
and mysterious herbal remedies to prevent paralysis, and
sometimes death.

Mortmain as ever never moved far from his old repertoire
of casually scatological tales of monkeys in tea
plantations in Malaya who fell for plantation women,
and the standbys of elephants with diarrhoea in the teak
plantations of Burma. Rubinsky spoke of the Jewish
quarter in Shanghai – everyone called it Little Vienna for
its cafes. There were synagogues and rabbis too, and an
occasional scandal when a Jewish trader's daughter fell
for a Chinese man, and a little half-Chinese Jew was
born and accepted into the family of Judah. So far from
home, so endangered, all the men of Cornflakes recited
their favourites.

At four o'clock in the afternoon of the appointed day,
Doucette told each team what they were to do, and the
bearing they were to take, and the targets they were to
approach, and Mortmain and Leo recited it all back. I have
no doubt at all that the mere recital of these details filled
the men with certainty. They let the dark settle and slipped
their folboats into the open at last. Mortmain and Chesty
headed due north, right through the unguarded boom gate
and into Keppel Harbour, into the very mouth of the port.
The Empire Dock was so heavily lit that they were forced
to stay in the outer harbour, choosing first a 6000-ton
heavily laden cargo vessel,
Moji Maru
, which they surmised
was carrying rubber. After placing three mines along its
length, they sidled up to the 6000-ton vessel
Tatsula Maru
– it still had its English pre-war lettering under its Japanese
title. A 5000-to-6000-ton vessel, unladen, was their next.
Fixing the limpets, the contact, the fuses, three by three
per ship, they were able to time themselves by the chimes
at St Andrew's Cathedral clearly heard across the water
every quarter of an hour. They were done in less than an
hour and a half and slipped away south for Pandjang,
as ordered by Doucette, and were greatly favoured by
the tide.

In the Singapore roads, the three boats had diverged. In
the darkness, Doucette and Bantry could find none of the
ships they had been watching and selecting over past
days. All shipping at Examination Anchorage was gone or
impossible to see out here in the fast-flowing Phillip
Channel. But Doucette found a fine big tanker, the
Tiensin Maru
, 11 000 tons, and placed all nine mines by
the engine room and along the stern and the propeller
shaft. He wanted it to explode in all compartments, to
create a Singapore sensation by being dramatically and
visibly blown apart.

Leo and Rubinsky went right into the Bukum Island
docks, a few miles south-west of Singapore, and as in
Townsville months before, heard sentries and welders
yelling jocularly to each other. It was ten o'clock, so Leo
and Jockey had the time to examine the entire length of the
wharf. They mined the dark side of the bows of a 6000-ton
freighter,
Subuk Maru
, and then, exhausted by stress and
effort, Leo wrapped an arm around the ship's anchor chain
for a while and he and Jockey rested, within earshot of the
sentries' banter and the sizzle of oxy torches. They ate
chocolate in the dark, surveying the wharf area, of which
Leo made sketches and notes as they tarried, invisible in the
shadow of the enemy's bows.

The tide changed at eleven o'clock, and they let it take
them to their next ship, a modern freighter, the
Hoshi
. A
curious thing happened to Leo and Rubinsky while they
were working on their second ship. A light went on in a
porthole above them and a face appeared, a Japanese face,
seeking the cooler night air in his sweltering sleeping
quarters. He looked right at Leo and Rubinsky but did not
see their stained faces or notice their breath. Mortmain had
taught them a technique for breathing so shallowly that an
animal three yards away would not hear them.

He was a very ordinary merchant seaman, a little bald,
certainly no warrior. But he had chosen his ship, and so he
had to be there for its destruction.

They could see their next target anchored in the stream,
and it was well laden and of a good size, but when they slid
under the dark side of its stern, and Jockey held fast and
Leo tried to affix the first magnetic mine under the water,
the ship's hull proved too rusty to take it. Leo did something
extraordinary then, either out of determination or the
obduracy of stress and excitement and frozen intent. He
drew his commando knife, reached below the water and
began scratching away patches of rust. The next time he
tried the mine held, and so he had to repeat the scratching
twice more, as Jockey played out the connecting detonation
wire. Did any merchant seaman taking his rest in the
targeted ship hear the sound? Was he too tired or accustomed
to the noises of a crowded port to report it?

The third limpet having stuck, a whistle on Bukum
signalled a change of shift. It was one o'clock in the
morning. They could get away now before the tide turned
against them. Through helpful currents Leo and Rubinsky
were in fact the first back to NC11. Next were Mortmain
and Chesty Blinkhorn, who had suffered a harder time
with currents. Then Doucette and Bantry came in, happy
but complaining only half jokingly of the impact of a collision
they had had with Mortmain in the dark the night
before, and the fact that it had affected their steering and
timing. Doucette was inspecting the problem by feel in the
last dark hour of night when they heard the first mines go
up, and then as they stood and stared during a short two
and a half hours, they heard periodic explosions all over
the Singapore roads, and sirens of patrol vessels and sub-
hunters.

In a sharp-edged early light they saw Doucette's tanker
explode beyond all possible ambition in flame and smoke
as deep-dyed and effusive as that of a volcano. Doucette
wept and smiled and wept, and no one blamed him. The
rusty third ship marked out by Leo and Rubinsky off
Bukum, already a scene of frantic alarm, seemed by full day
to erupt spontaneously and as if by its own will, not theirs.
Leo could see its bows and stern both standing clear of the
water, but only for seconds it seemed, before it accepted the
force of Leo's and Jockey's daring and disappeared. It was
a matter of awe now. Chesty Blinkhorn, muscular but very
young, and his world until recently restricted to a country
town, said, Poor bastards, as if he had not expected till
now the scope of his commando ambition, and how much
mayhem it could cause. And as repetitive explosions and
repetitive alarms enlivened and stunned their morning, they
drank their water and ate their rations and felt like the gods
and demons they had become. They hadn't only stolen fire,
they had planted it on others.

For them, exhilaration overrode all other impulses. Each
detonation enlarged their legend. Doucette was keeping
count by means of his telescope. With their rods and fuses
and magnetic make-fasts they had sunk at least 40 000 tons
of shipping and God knew what in the enemy's cargo. Leo
felt that he had nudged open his father's prison gate, that
the walls were closer to falling. And he intended to give the
walls a further nudge if asked to do so. They laughed and
wept on the cloud-feathery peak of NC11 as explosions
tore the sky. Nothing would ever be as wonderful a riposte
as this, nothing would ever be as stylish. They had intended
to steal the enemy's sense of safety, but were astonished
now they had done so.

They did not fall asleep until late afternoon, and
behind their closed eyes the wonderful explosions
recurred. With his head down, Doucette had murmured,
Did you fellows notice how easy it is for native junks and
prahu
to come and go? They slept on groundsheets on
their inured backs, and when they woke the awe at what
they had done recurred to them and authorised all their
future plans.

That night they took three separate courses back to the
meeting place at Pandjang Island. They were next to invisible
on a normal sea. They knew and believed that. With
daylight, Leo and Jockey simply turned to a convenient
island shore, hid their folboat, and found the boon of a
Chinese graveyard, where they were able to hide and rest,
having been assured by IRD that the Malays kept away
from Chinese graveyards. They needed a deeper sleep than
they were able to get amongst the dead that day, but they
were still stimulated. The tale of what they had done
fuelled them overnight, and the repetitiveness of their single
blade stroke induced in them a sort of euphoric meditation.
In the darkness they skirted
pagar
lit by kerosene lanterns
and heard fishermen within or from the shore, and they
were as unseen as their deeds entitled them to be.

A Sumatra came rushing out of the west and blinded
them with rain and jolted them about on waves, but did
not much delay them in the end. Before the next dawn, at
two in the morning, they got to Pandjang and the bay
where they had swum with the otters. The others all turned
up within the hour, the Boss still complaining of the
damage Rufus Mortmain had done to his steering.

They took turns to watch for
Pengulling
. In last light they
spotted it far out to sea, heading south as if towards home.
Nav had come back, and they had somehow missed him,
and he them.
Pengulling
looked like a vessel on which there
was no dissent now, as it moved definitely Australia-wards.

That was the night the monsoon started. They sat up
under groundsheets and discussed their situation. Maybe
they should paddle south to Pompong Island and live there
off the cache of supplies till the monsoon ended, and then
when the native
prahu
set off westwards on the trade wind,
they would capture one and sail it to India, like Doucette
had earlier. A little disappointing they wouldn't be home for
Christmas, but they'd be home in the end. And they were
not depressed, said Leo, except that he knew the marriage
would be postponed further. He confessed later that he
nonetheless had a sense I would tolerate such a thing.

They began to build a hut. An old man and his grandson
rowed in in a native
kolek
and this time Doucette went
down and negotiated with the old Malay for food – a risk,
but it had to be taken now. They completed their rough
thatch shelter, and then finished some of their tinned
rations with the fish the old man gave them for dinner, and
lay down very tired and ready for a sleep, with Rufus
Mortmain on watch.

And then at eight o'clock there was a sudden frail
density of blackness on the water.
Pengulling
was back.
The young men had made the nerve-wrecked Nav return
yet again. Doucette and his five abandoned their hut and
paddled out. The reunion – well, it can be imagined. Nav
the outsider, a bucket of worms, said Leo, talking endlessly.
When Leo and the others briefed them, a form of intoxication
possessed the men of
Pengulling
. They had all voted to
come back, they told Doucette, except for Nav, who had
been incapable of electoral activity. Yet he still got the
navigation and steering right, and so there was a kind of
admirable quality to him also.

Everyone agreed, around dinner tables afterwards, that
the trip back had been – yes,
boring
. The warrior Doucette
claimed that these were the necessary longueurs a professional
soldier had to face, and that they should be grasped
for the sake of contemplation. (As if he were not himself
the soul of impatience.) The blazing blue nothing at the
centre of each second, he asserted, had to be seized.

Meanwhile, as his sailors spoke of boredom, Doucette
knew that Ulysses did not get home without passing
through Scylla and Charybdis, Scylla being the six-headed
monster which guarded its cave by lashing forth and
devouring mariners by the half-dozen; and Charybdis being
the maelstrom. Doucette knew that in surviving Charybdis,
Ulysses lost a swathe of shipmates. Doucette's Scylla and
Charybdis were that narrow hole in the gate, Lombok
Strait. Nav was anxious about it for days before, in a
continuous frenetic state, barking at the men but fussy
about the duties of navigation which would get him safely
back between the two monstrous shores, Bali to the one
side, Lombok to the other.

During the afternoon of the approach to the strait, Nav
was in a flighty condition, repeatedly talking to himself,
said Leo, mumbling co-ordinates. In darkness he was
calmer and worked better, and he hoped to be through by
dawn. Chesty Blinkhorn, who was on lookout with his
head through the awning atop the wheelhouse, reported
the phosphorescence of the bows of another ship coming
up on them from astern and overtaking them with ease at
a distance of a mile. It looked like a Japanese minesweeper
or a patrol boat, but seventy-five yards long, he reported.
Blacked out, it had the muteness of a blind monster, but
its flag could be seen. In the wheelhouse Nav recited to
himself a continuous stream of prayers and curses. Mortmain,
naked but for a monocle, packed explosives around
the radio, enough to break the back of the
Pengulling
if they were set off. Bantry put his rosary beads around his
neck, Leo noticed, and lifted a silenced Sten gun to one of
the flaps in the after-awning. Every one of them resigned
himself to bloody, explosive death. Mortmain and Leo,
observing through glasses, could see the lookouts on the
Japanese vessel. On somebody's order, the Japanese ship
kept pace with
Pengulling
, slowing down to a crawl to do
so.