He poured the billy tea into his tin cup and breathed in the fragrant steam as his thoughts turned to the man whose identity he’d used for that brief encounter with Frank.

John Miller had been a good mate, and they’d shared the rigours of training, the terrors of jungle warfare and the deprivations of the camp. But John had not survived the starvation, the beatings and the repeated bouts of malaria, and he’d been buried in the makeshift cemetery behind the camp’s bamboo huts.

He finished the tea and rolled a smoke, then lay back on his coat, his head resting on the kitbag. There had been too many deaths – too many young men like John whose families had been left bereft by their passing – and he knew without a doubt that his own family had suffered when they’d received the dreaded telegram.

But in the confusion and chaos of war mistakes had inevitably been made, and it was only because Dr Philips had been an understanding man that he’d agreed to keep his survival a secret from the authorities. Better for the family to mourn him and continue to receive his army pension than to be faced with a walking dead man and have to go through losing him again.

He threw the last of his cigarette into the fire and damped down the flames by kicking dust over them. Pulling his coat round him, he tugged his hat over his face and closed his eyes so he could conjure up the images of those he loved.

The thought of home soothed the ache in his belly that always seemed to be with him now and, as sleep claimed him, the lines of weariness and pain were softened in a smile.

*

The fire raced across the mulga scrub and through the parched detritus that littered the forest floor. Driven by the hot wind, it feasted on the carcasses of dead animals, gobbled up the termite-ridden wood of shepherds’ huts and makeshift shelters and headed inexorably north-west. Towards the distant pinpricks of light that came from Carey Downs Station.

But there were two rivers of fire – and the second was rapidly spreading the other way, north-east to where Morgan’s Reach huddled in the valley beneath Eagle Rock.

9

The wooden cabin was cosy in the flickering light of the lanterns Max had placed around the single room. The atmosphere was in sharp contrast to the fury of the storm which raged outside, for the wind howled and rattled the shutters, the thunder drummed in the rafters and, as the lightning sizzled all around them, the dust and debris hit the outer walls with all the force of machine-gun bullets.