Fire Eye (3 page)

Jamie Kirk leans his lanky figure on the bar and lifts a beer in salute before taking a long sip. Jed acknowledges him with a similar salute. Jamie is an ex-student, doing a Masters in Environmental Science at the University of Tasmania and heading for a PhD. His background is biology and geology. He has taken a couple of gap years to tour Northern Australia, first-hand experience that will be valuable in furthering his goals. The possibilities for him in the gas and mineral developments hold a lot of promise, but he also has a passion for research.

His jeans, long curls framing strong, chiselled features and patched jacket camouflage a solid personality and keen intellect. They swap stories about the desert and hunting. Jamie retells his favourite story about bow hunting wild pigs in the Territory and Jed responds with one of his own.

“She’s too young and immature for you Jamie,” Jed offers as he sees where Jamie’s dark brown eyes are focussed. “The brunette at your four o’clock has been watching you though. She could be a bit older than you but looks like she has a brain. Could match you or even do you over when you see the book she has in her bag.”

Jamie shakes his head to flick the long flowing curls out of his eyes and reaches around to slip out his wallet. He takes the opportunity for a quick glance. The woman meets his eyes briefly, giving a quick smile before looking away to continue chatting to her girlfriend.

Jamie turns back to Jed. “Nanotechnology! That I have to explore. Let’s do business so I can cut you loose,” he says decisively. “I took a good look at the photos and slides you sent me. The geology I can see in the pictures matches the coastline of Northern Australia, west of Darwin but not east, at least not too far east. If I had to be more specific, I’d say somewhere up to one thousand kilometres starting a bit east of Darwin and sweeping west.”

Jed feels a wave of disappointment wash over him. “That’s a bit of country Jamie! Any way you can narrow it down for me?”

Jamie is reaching back to replace his wallet to justify another sweep of the room, but stops and swings his eyes back to Jed. “The vegetation in a couple of the photos is more help. The microclimate they need suggests you’re looking for a coastal bay reasonably protected, maybe by a sand spit to reduce the influence of the open sea and with protection from sea breezes by a high bluff of some kind. The bluff would provide a good balance of shade and temperature control during the day. A couple of the plants tend to grow in restricted pockets no further than about latitude fifteen south.

Jed unfolds a small map of Australia, spreads it on the bar and puts his pen on top, leaving his question unspoken. Jamie picks up the pen and lets it linger over the map.

“In strict scientific terms you have to look in this area,” he offers, drawing a line around a large area of Northern Australia. “On the balance of probabilities and a gut feeling, I would narrow it down to this area,” he finishes as he draws a smaller circle. “Now I’ve gotta go, research to do! Call me anytime and thanks for the drink.” He slides the packet of photos across the bar as he stands to leave. “And by the way, the palm tree in this photograph here,” he offers, flicking through the pile to put his finger on the one he is after, “is not native to Australia. That’s Areca, the tree that produces the betel-nut and toddy, a liquor used by the Malays. It came with the Trepang fishermen from the Indonesian islands, so my guess is that closer to Darwin is more likely. If you want to locate this plane, you need to find places where people either haven’t been or are difficult to get to because the geography discourages visitors. Have fun mate, I’m off!”

He picks up his shoulder bag, gives his hair another flick and wanders across to Miss Nanotechnology to introduce himself. Jed finishes his beer and ponders Jamie’s information.
It’s not too bad,
he decides, trying to cheer himself up as he considers the navigation issues on a flight back from the Philippines. It’s time for a closer look at a map. He deposits his glass on the bar and leaves for home.

After parking the Jeep Wrangler in the driveway, Jed flicks on the lights to reveal the research documents scattered across the living room floor. Finding the map of Southeast Asia, he gathers up a protractor, ruler and pad and spends the next hour drawing lines and calculating flight times and tracks. He makes some assumptions about the range of the Japanese Zero and Ki-27 fighters, flight times out of Del Monte in the Philippines and the likely damage that could have resulted from an attack.
It had to be a single Japanese fighter that attacked the B-25,
he concludes.
More than one and the plane most likely would have ended up in the sea. Nursing a crippled B-25 back to Australia must have been hell!

He imagines himself as Karl, possibly wounded, exhausted, flying by dead reckoning with instruments shot up and a dead crew sharing the aircraft. Jed turns the map of Australia upside down and studies it from a pilot’s perspective. Bathurst Island stands out as a clear landmark, just to the north of Darwin. Even when off course to the east, Darwin should be easy to find. Off course to the west and Bathurst Island could be missed and then it was a long flight down into the Bonaparte Gulf. Eventually, the late landfall would become obvious even navigating by dead reckoning. Karl would either spot land on the horizon to the east or turn east in the hope of making a landfall before fuel ran out. Satisfied with his logic he draws a circle around the coast on the eastern side of the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf. He excludes anything too close to civilization and marks the remaining areas with a highlighter. The result is a stretch of coastline that by his reckoning is possible for a forced landing on Australian soil.

Finally he sits down in the arm chair by the window looking out over the lights of Bellerive with a copy of
Flightpath
magazine in his hand. Over a Jack Daniels, he rereads the article on the Royce mission to refresh his memory and thinks again about the navigation issues. It is time to make a decision and he decides he is as right as he can be with the information available.

At one am he types an email to Alexander. ‘Your project has legs! Dinner in Hobart, any Friday night.’ He presses send. The adventure is rolling. He looks forward to seeing her again. There is little chance of sleep, so he takes his glass into the study, fires up the laptop and gets into Google Earth to scan the areas he has identified.

Maldini’s restaurant on Hobart’s waterfront Salamanca Place; dark wooden floor scarred by an industrial past, sandstone walls reflecting warehouse history, modern subdued lighting and the busy murmur of Friday night conversation.

Jed arrives early, leans his briefcase against the table leg and orders two glasses of champagne. He puts the flowers he is carrying onto a chair so they are not quite so obvious. Is he planning a polite gesture or succumbing to something he is less certain of being able to control? As he stands to push the flowers further out of sight he senses a presence.

“So polite of you to stand when a lady approaches the table.”

He looks up. Right height and right shape, brown eyes and blonde hair, but hardly the same woman. What a hair-style! Stunning, cheeky and slightly wild, drawn to one side, falling in a cascade over her left shoulder, projecting an aura of control, power, danger and sensuality. A clinging black dress, left strap precarious on her shoulder, and high-heeled shiny black shoes exude confidence. He scrambles for the flowers, drawing the chair out for her.

“Are they for me?” she exclaims. “How sweet.” There is a hint of something in her voice. Amusement? Sarcasm? “Do you always give girls flowers first up?”

“I am only doing the polite man-woman thing,” he blusters. “My European upbringing.”

He notices a permed and powdered lady at the next table pricking up her ears, avidly following their exchange.

“That’s good,” Alexander teases. “I thought it might be code for after-dinner sex.”

Big Ears at the next table swivels her head abruptly.

“I’ve always believed that good sex with someone you love needs lots of foreplay and anticipation. Anticipation and expectation deliver the biggest punch,” Jed says, attempting to meet her challenge and deflect attention from the perspiration breaking out on his forehead. Lucky he flicked through the latest
Men’s Health
magazine in the newsagent last week.

He notices Big Ears nod silently at his words and lean toward her husband.
Work on him, darling, maybe there’s some truth in it
. Caught off guard by the unexpected turn of events with Alexander, Jed determines to rise to the challenge. He keeps a straight face.

Alexander’s eyes spark fire as she smiles boldly at him.

Relax
, he tells himself.
Take things easy fella
.

As if in response, Alexander’s face instantly assumes a more businesslike expression. “After we’ve ordered, you might fill me in on what you’ve found out.”

Jed nods and points out the specials board. They pick up their menus and quickly settle on a seafood combination, garlic bread to share and a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

“And I’ll have a salad, a big one, and the grilled entrée,” Alexander tells the waitress. “And could we have it all arrive together please?”

Jed stares at her, amazed.

“I like food,” she says. “Have to keep the brain cells ticking over.”

“You certainly have a healthy appetite!”

Alexander picks up her glass, tilts her head, leans back in her chair and looks coyly up at him from under the sweep of blonde waves. “Aha, so now you’re saying I’m fat.”

Jed runs his eyes down her throat and breasts to her waist. A protest rises to his lips but dies away unspoken when he sees her wide grin. She’s playing him like a fish on a hook! This is a different woman from the one he first met. He looks into her laughing eyes and decides not to front the challenge they offer. Deflection is the best and safest response. Abruptly, he changes the subject. “How much do you know about World War II and the Japanese push to Australia?”

Putting down her glass, Alexander leans forward with her elbows on the table, resting her chin against her locked fingers. “Before we start,” she says, “we need to get one thing straight. I may be blonde, but do not at any stage treat me like an idiot.” Her eyes flash dangerously. “My grandfather flew the B-25C Mitchell, a five-place, twin-engine medium bomber, named after General Billy Mitchell, who was court-martialled for his insistence that airpower was the way of the future.”

Jed opens his mouth to speak but before he can get a word in she’s off again.

“By sheer chance, or perhaps fate, it carries the same name as you. I draw no conclusions from that.”

Jed winces, but this time makes no attempt to interrupt. He’s learning his lesson, and fast!

“It had a wing span of sixty-seven feet seven inches and a maximum take-off weight of thirty-four thousand pounds,” she continues.

Hell, she’s spitting out facts and figures like an automaton, beating him at what he thought was his own game.

“It had a normal range of one thousand five hundred miles with a bomb load of three thousand pounds,” Alexander goes on, “and was powered by two fourteen-cylinder, twin-row, air-cooled, turbo-charged Wright R2600 Cyclone engines, rated for one thousand seven hundred take-off horsepower. Considered one of the most successful medium class bombers of the war, it was very flexible and was adapted for many other duties, including advanced trainer and attack bomber, mapping, photography, reconnaissance, transport, radar and as a control bomber to hunt and destroy submarines—”

She’s good, bloody good. No doubt about it. Jed tries not to let her see how stunned he is.

“Do you want me to go on?” Alexander asks, clearly enjoying having wrested the advantage in this undeclared war of the sexes.

There’s a lot more to this woman,
he thinks, perspiration threatening to wash over him again. “I get your point about the research you’ve done,” he says at last. “I’ll fill you in on what I’ve come up with. Interrupt and ask any questions you like.”

“Go for it,” Alexander replies, with a smug smile.

He pours two glasses of the Pinot, taking a restorative sip. “On April 11 1942, eleven Mitchell B-25 bombers landed in Darwin. They were accompanied by three B-17 Flying Fortresses and led by an American, General Ralph Royce. At that time, General MacArthur had escaped from the Philippines and American troops were still holding out on the Bataan Peninsula. They were on their way to the Philippines with three objectives—to fly behind Japanese lines and strike shipping and airfields, evacuate an exclusive group of key personnel and generate publicity by striking back at a stage when the Japanese were overrunning most of Southeast Asia.”

“Understood,” Alexander responds with a tone of efficiency that flashes an image in Jed’s mind of the Borg humanoid Seven of Nine on Star Trek. He wisely doesn’t put it into words. “That would be about the time of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo,” she adds.

“You’ve got it. If the Doolittle raid hadn’t happened, the Royce mission would have made front page news. MacArthur was after a morale boost and thought it so important he asked Royce to lead the mission, even though there were many other demands on his generals. They got to the Philippines, harassed the Japanese with some success and made it home. However,” he pauses dramatically, “there weren’t eleven Mitchells but twelve!”

Alexander leans back and sips her wine thoughtfully. “At that time the Americans, Dutch and Australians were scrounging for any aircraft they could lay their hands on. Record keeping and ownership must have been difficult to sort out.”

“Dead right! Aircraft were being allocated to the Dutch and Australians and then taken over by the Yanks before the paperwork could catch up. This happened over and over again. That twelfth B-25 seems to have been caught up in the confusion and was flown by your grandfather. This article has a photograph of the group at Archerfield airport on departure from Brisbane. Count the aircraft.”

Alexander looks carefully and responds cautiously. “Fourteen.”

“Have another look.”

She studies the photograph again carefully and puts her finger on a clustered group taxiing out together, counting tail fins carefully. “Fifteen?”

“That’s right. The group of three in the background are actually four aircraft if you count the tails. Remember the B-25 was a twin-tailed design. After they left, one aircraft had to return and was grounded, leaving eleven B-25s as per the official records.”

He flicks through the pages of the
Flightpath
magazine until he comes to a photograph. “This photo shows the B-25 crews before departure, enough crew for twelve aircraft.”

He picks up another book out of the briefcase and opens it to a marked page. “This photo is after the raid—a few less, amounting to two crews—one that was grounded and one missing in action.”

She picks up the first photograph and scans it carefully. “That looks like Karl,” she responds, her finger on one of the images. “The B-25 couldn’t make the Philippines in one flight. They would have to land or carry extra fuel.”

“The bomb bay was filled with a long-range tank that could be taken out and replaced with bombs once they reached the Philippines. You seem to have done your research Alexander,” Jed offers respectfully.

“I have indeed. At least as much as I could! When we work together you will find I am usually right,” she says with a tilt of her head and a smile. “Even if you think I am wrong, you always need to ask yourself, what if I am right?”

He ponders for a moment and responds in a measured tone, “As an educator, I hear what you say and am open to all opinions.”

“Spoken like a true principal!” she answers in a tone as cold as ice. She picks up her glass to sip the wine and stares straight back into his eyes. “We’ll be spending a fair amount of time together on this trip. It will be more enjoyable if you don’t create the impression there is a broomstick permanently stuck up your arse!”

Jed stalls in mid-thought. What the hell has he just struck? Silence descends. Big Ears sneaks a sideways look. Jed’s first reaction is defensive. She has a fucking bloody nerve to make a snap judgement about him! Perhaps he should walk away, dump his napkin and the unnecessary disturbance to his balanced life. He doesn’t need it!

He lets his brain think it through just a bit longer. Damn it, she could be bloody right! He has responded like a principal, his reactions ingrained after twenty years of dealing with students, parents, staff, department people, politicians and anybody else who think they know about education and doesn’t bother to see him as he really is. The trite language of education speak has slid smoothly and unconsciously past his lips. The language that he actually detests! In education, political correctness determines that people have ‘conversations’ rather than open debate or even decent arguments based on strongly held values and beliefs. No one has ever delivered a slap in the face so bluntly.

He wants and even needs this adventure. Putting up with this woman is a small price to pay. He takes a deep breath to steady himself and admits there is some truth in what she said. Truth hurts but he has to face the fact that after his last personal disaster he has been using his role as a principal as a shield to hold people and emotions at bay. He takes a couple of slow, deep breaths while he thinks it through.

“I’ll give you that one Alexander,” he finally responds. Her insight has confronted him and left an uneasy feeling of transparency. Although stunned by her perception he has no intention of apologising or admitting the accuracy of her thoughts. “Maybe I’ll hammer a rubber bung into my arse so there’s no room for a broomstick!”

He sees the hint of a restrained smile on her lips. The awkwardness of the moment passes. She gives a satisfied nod and they settle into silence for a while, enjoying their meal and the wine. The atmosphere slowly clears, but both realise that something unresolved has transpired.

Jed continues with his confidence intact. “I’ve made progress. I took all the slides and placed them in order of landmarks I could recognise. What we are looking at, I think, is a trip, perhaps long service leave, from Melbourne to Adelaide, up the Stuart Highway to Darwin then west, perhaps as far as the Kimberley. I think it was a fishing and hunting trip. See this photo here,” he says, throwing one down on the table. “Through the window of the Landcruiser you can see a rack with what looks like a Winchester or Marlin lever action rifle and a single barrel shotgun. I’d say he was fishing and hunting wild pigs. I can sequence the photos for the return trip back through Borroloola, Burketown, Normanton, Longreach and down to Melbourne.”

“That’s quite a trip. Where do you think the photos of the plane were taken? It would have to be west of Darwin.”

“Right again,” he replies enthusiastically, partly unfolding a small map of the Northern Territory. “East of Darwin, the odds of being undiscovered for this long are pretty slim. My gut feeling is that west is more likely, although we would be looking for suitable pockets of difficult to access country on the coast. An ex-student of mine looked at the botany and geology and suggested west of Darwin, on the coast, but sheltered by a headland and sand bars.”

Alexander nods.

“For some reason your grandfather was off track on the return to Darwin. We could make a guess at battle damage or equipment failure of some kind. If he had made landfall to the east, my feeling is he would have reached Darwin. If he had flown back with the main group you would think help would have been available. So my guess is they left before or after the main group, most likely after and came down in this area,” he finishes, pointing to the map spread across the table.

“And how do you expect to cover that much country without spending years in the outback? I love the wild but can’t see myself living the rest of my life out there running the risk of being snack food for a crocodile!”

“I suggest we make a flight. The photos give us some idea of the terrain we need to look for. The bad news is that you will need to pay, but on the plus side I may let you fly just a little.”

“Aah, I’d forgotten you’re a pilot. That sounds like a plan. What are you proposing?”

There are a number of things he is tempted to propose but holds back. This woman is intelligent and fun, but with clear boundaries. “I can take the last week of August as leave. With two weeks school holidays and a week at the start of the next term, we have a month.”