Papua (15 page)

He listened and when the meal was over he felt the weariness of the long day come upon him. He excused himself and went to the bedroom that Harry had set aside for him next to Erika’s. In a short time he fell into a deep and troubled sleep filled with shell bursts and dying men. It was the same old dream and the night deepened over Sydney as he twitched and sweated back in the trenches.

He was not aware of Erika’s naked body next to his when he was forced awake by a nightmare shell burst. He only became aware when a soft hand covered his mouth as the sleep rapidly fell away.

‘Be silent or your brother-in-law will hear us,’ Erika whispered in his ear as she slid her hand down his chest and onto his stomach. Stunned, Jack obeyed as he fully awoke.

In the early hours of the morning they came together in an embrace of violent, passionate lovemaking. Erika was in every way as exciting as Jack imagined she would be. For her part, Erika knew that when they lay together after their passion was spent that Jack Kelly was hers to command. And it had not been an unpleasant experience, she realised, when she remembered the strength and gentleness with which he entered her. Oh, but if it had only been Adolf in her arms, she thought, and felt the tears on her cheek as Jack slept soundly beside her. But the man that she loved was oceans away. However, the man who now slept beside her would inadvertently help her return to Germany. She had only to wait for the right opportunity and recognise it when it came.

S
erero’s canoe took them upstream. Paul was able to shoot a big bush pig, which provided them with meat, and they found a sand spit off the riverbank to camp on for the night. They travelled light. All but essential supplies went in the canoe. For Paul, that meant little more than the two rifles, the machetes and all the ammunition they had.

Towards late afternoon the next day the garrulous canoe builder indicated that they were nearing the village of his upriver kinsmen. He did not expect trouble once he explained that the white man was the reincarnation of his dead brother. But when the canoe rounded a jungle-entangled bend in the river, Serero went suddenly quiet – as quiet as the apparently deserted village. The canoe glided to a stop on a shallow bank and the party disembarked, their weapons at the ready. For the nervous porters armed with their machetes it was a case of sticking close to the head boy and boss with the guns.

Paul waded ashore with the muddy water splashing around his knees as Serero called in a wailing voice to his kinsmen. But no one answered and as they cautiously walked into the village they could see that it had been the scene of a terrible carnage. Blood had blackened on the thatch in some places and Dademo found a spent cartridge case lodged in a slatted floor of reeds. Paul recognised the shell casing as that of a Mauser rifle.

Serero squatted in the centre of the village and wailed his grief. Was it that the other evil ancestor spirits had killed his wife’s family and all his cousins? Not even their enemies had ever succeeded in accomplishing that in their interminable raids and ambushes over the years. Already the forest was reclaiming the vegetable gardens. In time nothing would exist except rotting logs to give a home to the deadly scorpions.

‘How long ago do you think O’Leary was here?’ Paul asked his head boy. Dademo stared around him and shrugged. ‘Don’t know, boss,’ he replied and turned to Serero who was still squatting and wailing. Dademo had learned many important words of Serero’s dialect and asked the question. Serero ceased wailing and sniffed. He then launched into one of his warbling monologues and at the end indicated about three weeks in European terms. Dademo relayed the answer.

‘Too bloody long ago,’ Paul muttered, realising that he had used an expression he had learned from Jack. English was the language he now used, the language of the new masters of Papua and New Guinea. ‘I think we are chasing phantoms if we continue to search,’ he spat with frustration.

The jungle, malaria and close calls with the local natives had all come to this. They were in unexplored territory along the Fly River with no charts to aid them in finding the route possibly used by O’Leary’s party. But then the Irishman probably had no charts either, Paul thought. He too must have used the river as his road into the jungle. The deduction came in a flash. All he had to do was follow the river back down to the delta and trust there was a chance that he would find O’Leary. Unless O’Leary had already reached the sea and any boat that was scheduled to pick him up.

‘Mr Paul!’

Paul swung his rifle in the direction Dademo was staring. An old woman had appeared on the edge of the village and was calling with a note of desperation to Serero. The canoe builder answered and she hobbled towards him.

‘Obvious he knows her,’ Paul said as the two greeted each other with a form of handholding. Her face was screwed up in anguish and it appeared that she was pleading with him.

‘I think she is a kinswoman,’ Dademo said as he lowered his rifle. ‘I think she is telling him what happened here.’

Dademo’s guess was right. The old woman had been left behind when the survivors of the small village fled the evil white spirits that brought the thunder and lightning death to them. But the evil spirits had taken some of the young men and women and their fate was not known although she presumed that they had been taken for their meat.

Soon enough Dademo had gleaned the story. Serero convinced the old woman that the white man was his dead brother come to protect him and supply him with bounteous and wondrous gifts from the world beyond death. Paul directed that the old woman be given food but she would still tremble uncontrollably whenever he or his men approached her. Squatting in the dirt of the village she dared not look upon the ghosts and continued to warn her nephew that he should not trust the white man. But Serero ignored her warnings and strutted about the clearing with the pipe in his mouth.

‘What could you get out of the canoe builder?’ Paul asked.

Dademo told him that as far as he could understand there was a white woman with the evil spirits. But from the way they treated her it appeared that she too was a prisoner.

‘What else did you understand from the old woman?’

‘She thinks that when the . . . Mr O’Leary and his native boys started to chain the young men and women the others tried to stop him and that’s when the shooting started. When the young men saw their dead kinsmen they did not try to resist and were taken away in chains.’ Dademo screwed up his face and Paul could see that he was thinking about something that Serero had told him. After some time he continued. ‘The old woman said that the white woman got away when the shooting started and ran away to the forest.’

Paul looked sharply at his head boy to see if he was lying. But he could not see any suggestion of untruth in his open expression. ‘Does the old woman know where she is now?’

Dademo stared at the ground. He knew that he would be asked the question and was reluctant to disappoint Mr Paul. ‘She does not know where Miss Iris is.’ It was the first time he had used her name, such was the shame he still felt at his negligence in keeping her safe. Paul stared over his shoulder at the old woman who squatted in the dirt. He could continue his search of the jungle but doubted that he would find Iris. Only the local villagers might know of her whereabouts. It was worth a try and he sent Dademo to further question Serero. From the expression on Dademo’s face when he returned, however, Paul knew the answer was not good.

‘All the villagers are gone,’ he said. ‘No one can help. Miss Iris is gone.’

Paul sighed and hefted his rifle over his shoulder. ‘Leave the old woman some food and tell the boys we are going home.’

Dademo hurried to pass on the good news and the canoe builder left his aunt wailing a dirge for the dead. They launched the canoe and used the sluggish current to aid them on their way downstream to Serero’s village.

They arrived early next morning after a night camping on the riverbank. The canoe was run ashore and the party set out along the trail for Serero’s village. Serero was the first to feel the dread. All did not sound right in the forest. He could not hear the chatter of children or the usual sounds of the villagers going about their daily routine. There was not even the grunting of the domestic pigs rooting for grubs and tubers.

As soon as he noticed the canoe builder unsling his bow and notch one of the long arrows, Paul felt for the safety catch on his rifle and signalled to his men to be wary. Serero moved forward stealthily until he could see the fringe of his small village enclosed by the jungle.

‘God in heaven!’Paul swore. ‘O’Leary must have been here while we were at the canoe builder’s kinsman’s village. But how in hell could that be when the other village was raided weeks ago?’

O’Leary and his party, Paul deduced, had been searching the jungles for villages and had decided to come down to this one on the way downstream to their rendezvous point in the delta. That meant they could still be very close. A chill ran through Paul at the thought. Had they scoured the jungle after the first raid upriver and recaptured Iris? If so, she was most probably still with them. But furthermore, the enemy was possibly only a few hours to a couple of days away. Who would lie dead in the steamy forests of the Fly River when the inevitable meeting took place? Paul considered the devastation of the village and looked towards his very small party of men. He did not like the odds. Unlike O’Leary’s, his men were not proven killers.

When Paul gave the order to paddle downstream Serero volunteered his services, with his village and kinsmen gone it was time for payback. The hunter and canoe builder was now the grim faced warrior. His wife and children were amongst the dead and their spirits would not know peace until he exacted vengeance.

Paul resorted to tactics as old as warfare itself. He gave his order to launch the canoe just on dusk and the party of seven men used the cover of night to paddle quietly downstream. Serero guided them in the dark. It was a moonless night and occasionally they bumped sandbanks or fallen trees as they made their precarious way down the slow-moving stream.

Paul had based his plan on the premise that O’Leary would be camped close to the river as the jungle and adjoining swamps would have blocked him from going very far inland. And if so, it was more than probable that the Irishman would have lit a campfire. They paddled for hours in silence with the night calls of birds and insects covering the sound of the canoe. Many times Paul considered the other possibility that O’Leary had already reached the mouth of the delta and was well on his way back to Moresby.

On one occasion the canoe slid onto a sandbank and the oarsmen were forced to wade up to their waists, dragging the canoe across. The great saltwater crocodiles were active by night, they knew, and Paul prayed that any that might be about were not hungry this night. He gripped his rifle, ready to fire in the event of one approaching nonetheless. He knew from his previous experience in New Guinea however that crocodiles struck with such speed and strength that if they snatched a man they would immediately make their death roll and snap his back. Paul had once seen a native at Finschhafen encounter a giant croc which had snatched him by the arm whilst he was fishing by a river. It had rolled with such speed that it had ripped the man’s arm cleanly from the shoulder socket. The memory of that incident chilled Paul. He was worried too that a rifle shot might alert O’Leary’s men and the element of surprise be lost.

The water was cold as Paul slid into the dark waters. His boots found the riverbed and the waters swirled around his knees. Although they were in a shallow section of the river he was still acutely aware that a croc could take any one of them as they gripped the canoe and forced it into deeper water. The boat came clear and suddenly Paul felt the edge of the sandbank disappear from beneath his feet. He found himself sliding into the depths as the water rose to his chest and had a fleeting but terrifying thought that one of the man-eaters was just inches from snatching him. The toe of his boot caught the edge of the sandbank and he scrambled with desperation to clamber aboard the canoe as it began to drift away.

‘Puk puk!’
a voice cried from the dark.

Paul knew the native word for crocodile. His desperation was rapidly turning to panic. He expected any moment to feel the great toothed jaws enclose his body and take him down to the bottom. He was not sure whether he imagined the swirl of water beneath him or whether it was real. A hand gripped his arm and he was hauled aboard the rocking canoe. For a second he saw a flash of white as eyes wide with fright greeted him in the dark.

They had been lucky and only seconds from what Paul had feared. A great croc had bumped the canoe as it turned to swim away. Paul’s heart was still pounding as he glanced at the pale green glow of his watch dial. It was close to midnight and weariness was a cloak on not just himself but also his crew. Only Serero seemed impervious to fatigue. He sat at the front of the canoe, guiding the rowers as he puffed on his prized pipe. The sweet but acrid smell drifted on the night air. Paul sat in the stern of the sturdy log canoe. He now wished that he had not been so hasty in trading his pipe to the canoe builder and wondered what the dead British officer might have thought if he had known that his pipe was now being used by a Stone Age man.

‘Mr Paul!’Dademo hissed. ‘Over there!’

Paul snapped out of his reverie to scan the shoreline. Sure enough, the dull glow of a fire flickered between the distant trees. They were on a broad stretch of the stream and the German made a rough estimate that the light was around four hundred metres distant. ‘I see it,’ he whispered his reply. ‘Get the canoe into the shore now.’

With their acute night vision the rowers had already spotted the campfire and changed direction on command. The current tended to push them closer to the location of the campfire as they rowed towards the shore. But eventually they found the river’s edge and struggled up the heavily forested bank.

In the dark amidst the overgrowth Paul made a quick head count and checked that his party was intact. ‘You will conceal the canoe here when you have just enough light to do so,’ he briefed Dademo. ‘I am going to follow the river until I come across the campfire – I want to know what we are up against. I will make my way back to you here just on last light tomorrow. You understand?’

‘But why don’t we attack them now?’ Dademo queried. ‘They do not expect us.’

Paul understood Dademo’s point of view but he was a man who was meticulous in planning. A good reconnaissance during the war had proved its worth in absolute success. He did not expect Dademo to understand his past experience. ‘We will make the raid but we will do so on our terms. Not just go charging in like a bunch of cowboys.’

‘What are cowboys?’ Dademo puzzled.

Paul grinned. ‘Men like us – but men who know what they are doing.’

Dademo shook his head, still perplexed. ‘I think I savvy,’ he replied, trying to dismiss his confusion.