CHAPTER THREE

The Army pressed every available railway carriage into service with the night train taking evacuees southward to Larrimah. Many were open flat-top freight wagons and cattle transports. Soldiers had been assigned to oversee the evacuation. But the orderly boarding of the train quickly turned into a stampede when it became clear there wasn’t going to be enough room for everyone. When things began to get out of hand the officer in charge ordered the soldiers to turn back at gun point any men forcing their way past women, children and the aged.

Most of the selfish louts were young fellows but two of the worst offenders were older men. Both had the same stocky build and wore filthy, ragged clothes. Long flowing hair and unkempt beards made them almost indistinguishable from each other. Each man carried a tightly packed canvas sea-bag swung over his shoulder and used it to bludgeon a path through the crowded platform. In their free hands both men carried .303 rifles. Their belligerent progress toward the train was only halted when a young Army lieutenant fired a shot from a pistol into the air above their heads. The crowd quickly scattered leaving the men standing alone with the lieutenant’s long-barreled Luger trained on them.

‘Who are you bastards?’ the officer shouted. ‘Where did you get those rifles?’

‘I’m Nick Horan,’ one of the men replied. He cocked his hairy head toward the other. ‘This is my brother, Henry. We’re croc-shooters. We’ve had these guns since before you were born, sonny.’

The young lieutenant ignored the sarcasm. ‘Croc-shooters! Where’s your boat?’

‘Down in the swamp at Mindil Beach.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Groote Eyelandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria.’

‘Why don’t you leave Darwin by sea?’

‘Oh yeah. And sail straight into the arms of the Japs, you bloody fool.’

The lieutenant would not be drawn. ‘From what I’ve just seen,’ he said calmly, ‘you two shouldn’t have any trouble forcing your way through a few Japs.’ He turned his head slightly and shouted: ‘Sergeant?’

An armed sergeant stepped quickly to the lieutenant’s side. The officer lowered his Luger. ‘Escort these men out of the station, Sergeant. If you see them here again, blow their bloody heads off.’

*

Aki Hamada had been sitting at her sewing machine beside the window in her living room when the first Japanese warplanes swooped down on Darwin. Her small, but comfortable cottage stood on Myilly Point almost two miles from the harbor. From the window, beyond her colorful garden of flowering tropical trees and plants, she had a clear unobstructed view of the invaders as they roared in over the ocean.

When the bombs had started falling, Aki had rushed to the bedroom and taken cover under her bed where she stayed until long after the second raid had ended. When she eventually came out, she locked the front and back doors, then returned to the sewing machine at the window and stared out to sea, hoping that her son Koko and the ketch Faraway were a long, long way away.

Aki had been born in Japan in the small town of Marugame on the southern shores of the Inland Sea. She was just seventeen when she had met Hayato Hamada, a diver with the Darwin pearling fleet who had come to Japan for a few months in search of his origins. Aki and Hayato were attracted to each other the moment they met. She was captivated by his easy smile, his happy, carefree nature and was fascinated by his stories of the Australian tropics. Hayato thought Aki was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

When Hayato had told Aki’s father he wanted to marry her, her father had laughed out loud and said his daughter would never marry a foreign pearl-diver and forbade them to see each other again. But when Hayato told him Aki was already pregnant, the only way for her family to save face was to consent to the union, which they did on the proviso that the couple left for Australia immediately and remained there.

Aki soon found Darwin bore little resemblance to the idyllic tropical town that Hayato had described; its wild, frontier lifestyle couldn’t have been further removed from the quiet sophistication of the Inland Sea landscape from where much of Japan’s ancient culture had evolved. However, through the years, their love for each other and their only child had always carried them through. But in 1937, Hayato had been killed by flying debris when their home had lost its roof in the great cyclone.

Ever since then, although still an attractive woman, Aki had become a recluse, living only for her tropical garden and for the time Koko spent with her when Faraway was in port.

*

With the only evacuation options left open to the Horan bothers being a long trek southward across the Australian continent on foot, or an immediate escape by sea to the north, the decision was not hard to make. As they plodded, grumbling and cursing, through the darkened, rubble-strewn streets towards their boat at the swamp on Mindil Beach, they stopped frequently to help themselves to whatever they could carry from abandoned shops and homes along the way. With their sea-bags and rifles making it impossible to steal bulky items, their prime booty was liquor and cigarettes. Occasionally they saw police and military vehicles, but with the authorities having more urgent matters than looters to attend to, the croc-shooters were never challenged.

From time to time they stopped for a breather, put down their heavy loads and drank greedily from a whisky bottle. When they finally reached Myilly Point, the headland seemed strangely peaceful. The nearby Darwin civil hospital had been hit by bombers because of its close proximity to anti-aircraft batteries and the army barracks, but mercifully the buildings on the point itself had somehow been spared.

The brothers sat down in the moonlight on a rocky outcrop overlooking Mindil Beach and drank more whisky. From where they sat they could make out the dark shadow of their thirty foot sloop, the Groote Eylandt Lady, at the edge of the swamp. When they had abandoned the old run-down vessel earlier in the day to go ashore in the sloop’s dinghy, she had been sitting in six feet of water. Now they could plainly see the silhouette of the mast leaning over at a sharp angle after being left high and dry by the outgoing tide.

With several hours to kill before they could set sail, the croc-shooters decided to look for a more comfortable place to pass the time. Noticing a small cottage which faced out over the sea, they were surprised to find both the front and back doors locked. Most people had left the doors of their homes wide open in their haste to join the exodus from town. Horan raised a big foot and kicked hard. The back door flew open revealing a dark kitchen.

‘Anyone home?’

Both men cocked their heads and listened. There was no answer. They stepped inside and laid their gear on the floor. Nick struck a match and looked around. There was a candlestick in a jar on the kitchen table which he lit.

Holding the candle high, he led the way through a narrow corridor to the front of the little house. It was as neat as a pin with no sign of a rushed departure. In the living room, the flickering candle illuminated oriental wall pictures and polished rosewood furniture. At a window overlooking the ocean, a sewing machine stood on an ornate teak cabinet and beside it was a high-backed rocking chair. When the candlelight fell on the face of a small figure sitting motionless in the rocking chair, both men were almost startled out of their wits.

Nick was the first to recover. He lunged forward and grabbed Aki Hamada’s tiny throat in a huge hand and lifted her out of the chair. She stood eyes lowered, wearing a black silk kimono, her little body trembling with fear.

Nick’s eyes widened. ‘God Almighty, Henry. It’s a bloody Jap.’

Henry lurched back into the kitchen and groped around in the darkness. He returned almost immediately with his rifle in his hands. He leveled it at Aki. ‘All right, how many more bloody nips are in the house?’

Aki was terrified. Horan’s choking grip on her throat was so tight she could hardly breath. ‘There is no one,’ she gasped. She felt the hold on her throat ease a little and added quickly, ‘but my son will be here soon with many of his shipmates.’

Henry grinned. ‘And I suppose they are all in the bloody Imperial Japanese Navy.’ His eyes were becoming used to the candlelight now and, with his rifle pressed against his shoulder, he moved around the cottage. Just outside the living room there were two closed bedroom doors off the narrow corridor. He kicked one door open and charged inside. Finding the room empty he repeated the exercise with the second room. Satisfied there was no on else in the house, he lowered the rifle and returned to the living room.

Both men stood for a long time, their eyes appraising Aki. Without releasing his iron grip on her throat, Nick laid the candle down on a table and tore off her kimono. She was naked beneath it. As his eyes travelled over her slim, firm body he let out a whistle of appreciation.

‘Which room has the biggest bed, Henry?

‘In there.’ Henry nodded his hairy head to the first door without taking his eyes off Aki.’

Nick took his hand from Aki’s throat and grabbed her long black hair. ‘I think I’ll give this bitch a little of what the Japs gave us this morning,’ he said as he dragged her across the floor to the bedroom. ‘Keep an eye open for anyone coming, Henry. And don’t get too impatient. There’s plenty here for both of us.’

*

It was two hours before the incoming tide was deep enough to float the croc-shooters’ dinghy, and two more before there was enough water under the Groote Eyelandt Lady’s shoal draft keel to allow her to nose her way out to sea in the darkness.

In the little cottage on the headland, Aki’s torn and ravaged body lay prone on her bed, the life choked out of her by Henry Horan’s huge hands in a final act of physical debasement.