Cover

Dedication

For my wife, Cathy.

For everything.

Prologue

Prologue

Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, January, 1946

Carving a long white furrow, the Australian patrol boat prowled her designated section of the great river: a thirty-mile stretch below Ambunti. Despite the oppressive glare and hammer-like heat, her bare-chested, sunburned lookouts were on full alert, scanning the dense, riverine forest lining the banks through powerful Zeiss binoculars. The war had ended six months ago, but there were still plenty of Japanese soldiers who preferred to rot in the jungle rather than face the shame of surrender. Operation Housekeeping was the reluctant Allied response. No one wanted to get killed rounding up fanatics but, as colonial overlords, the Australians had a responsibility to protect the locals from theft, murder or worse. Keeping our cannibals from being eaten, or so the joke went.

Just two days ago, the patrol boat had surprised a ragged band of Japanese crossing a shallow creek mouth. The skipper blasted the horn three times and, over the tannoy, ordered them to drop their weapons. The skeletal-looking men raised rusting rifles in a weak show of defiance and began screaming ‘banzai.’ If they wanted to die, HMAS Bowen was happy to oblige. Her 20 mm Oerlikon cannons unleashed a withering burst that shook the boat to her keel. The heavy shells blew the screaming men into conveniently sized pieces for the ever-present crocs, who were enthusiastically cleaning up before the cordite smoke cleared.

The skipper, a twenty-five-year-old accountant from Melbourne, flinched as an engorged mosquito punctured the tanned skin of his forearm. It zipped away before he could swat it. The little bastard was probably teeming with malaria or dengue fever – one of the many hazards in this voracious country which would swallow you whole at the slightest opportunity and not even bother to belch. At least in the navy you only had to deal with it from the relative safety of a thirty-tonne patrol boat. Not like those poor sods in the infantry.

Suddenly, a lookout on the bow screamed, ‘Hard aport . . . object dead ahead!’

Floating debris was a constant hazard on the Sepik. Mostly it was great clumps of vegetation uprooted from the riverbanks by floods, which could easily foul a prop. But, occasionally, it was a hardwood log washed down from the great forests of the mountainous interior. One of these could rip the boat open in an instant. The skipper flung the helm over without question.

Avoiding the object by half a length, the skipper slowed the boat. Something about it had caught his eye. About four yards long, grey in colour, it was too uniformly shaped to be anything but man-made. In a wide churn of coffee-coloured foam they came about alongside the object. The mate struggled to snag it with the gaff. Finally, he located a tear in the upper surface and hauled it to the gunwale.