New identity; Justice pays a courtesy call; Women of Japan; The Letter....

Transfer by Bosun's Chair by J C Goodchild

NEW IDENTITY

DICK WORDLEY, R.A.A.F.

"Well, he's in Civvy Street now George. Remember wot ya said you'd do to him?"

JUSTICE PAYS A COURTESY CALL

It was three weeks since the latter had left Soerabaya, during, which time his only companions: had been five tall Madoerese fishermen, lithe, powerful, haters of the Japanese overlords. Madjoe was servile and pleasant.

"Labe, tuan," he called, "I hope the work makes good progress."

"It does not," Horaki told him sourly. "The natives of this village know little of shipbuilding; and as for those cursed Madoerese, I think they do not wish the prahu to be re-, paired, they work so slowly."

"Perhaps the tuan has guessed correctly. Remember they are far from their homes and sailing into strange seas. They have never before sailed east of Bali, and they are fearful."

"No doubt they are afraid; but I have orders from Rear-Admiral Otaka to deliver this cargo to the Kale Islands where it is urgently needed. Have I not been commanded to return within three months, bringing back a full complement of important passengers? I have forced these curs to sail thus far and I shall drive them the rest of the journey."

"The tuan is right. It is because of such servants that the Japanese Emperor holds sway over his far-flung domains. But might a humble servant of Japan offer a suggestion?"

"What is it, Goeroe?" Horaki asked without much interest. He had been given his task and he would do it, come what may.

"Get rid of your crew. Send them home to Aladoera by the next ship that passes."

"But they are skilful sailors. And besides, where would I get men to replace them?"

"I would arrange that, tuan. I could provide five local boys who would sail the prahu as well as these Madoerese-and much more quickly. Such a cargo must not be delayed."

"Agreed then. Get me a new crew tomorrow. My cargo is indeed an urgent one for it consists mainly of fuses for 75-mm. shells. Until it arrives there is no ammunition for the heavy guns at our bases to the east.

The bungling Army despatched a whole cargo of anti-aircraft shells without fuses."

Horaki sat in the teacher's hut and drank the sake offered him. How odd, he thought, that this teacher should be a Malay. His small body and bespectacled face were typically Japanese. Moreover he drank sake, and even played a fair game of Go. The instructions issued to Horaki at the same time as he drew a set of Dutch Admiralty charts (printed in Japan long before the war) stated that this Madjoe was thoroughly reliable and was always ready to help find rations and working parties for Japanese skippers.

"Your passengers, tuan? Doubtless you will need food for them on your return?"

"There will be twenty-six. Ensure that the rations are good, Goeroe, for they are all air-service officers:

Every man is an experienced pilot - their planes were destroyed at Hollandia and they are now needed by the Empire more than ever before."

So it was arranged. Next day a new crew was recruited from among the local natives and soon the prahu was ready to put to sea.

Horaki decided that for the rest of the journey he would sail only by night. His task was too urgent to afford the risk of any more attacks by bombers, and the craft was at sea from an hour before dusk until sunrise. With the coming of daylight she was headed into the first convenient cove, where the crew would camouflage her with boughs and then go to sleep. Good progress was made, the boys worked well, and Horaki decided that he would reward the Malay handsomely.

Then came disaster. Soon after dark on the third night out the sound of an aeroplane was heard. The Malay boys grew apprehensive, having seen leaflets dropped by Australian planes, warning them that shipping among these islands would be attacked.

Horaki sensed their fear and attempted to calm them, saying that the approaching aircraft was most probably on its way to lay mines in the shipping lanes leading to Soerabaya and would not bother them.

But the plane was turning. In a moment the five Malays leapt into the sea, Horaki yelling at them to return, threatening them with dire punishment.  They heeded him not, driven by the one impulse to get as far as possible from the prahu before the attack was opened.  Alone on board, Horaki seized the tiller and endeavoured to take evasive action, but the broad-beamed boat was slow to respond.

It was almost dark in the mountain shack. Two white men sat near a wireless set, while standing in the centre of the room was a small Malay whose clothes were still dripping from the heavy rain.

"Good work, Madjoe," one of the white men was saying. "Your information will be wirelessed to Darwin immediately. No doubt they'll send out a Catalina to intercept the vessel. I hope your boys won't get hurt."

"Have no fear. They have been instructed to dive overboard before the attack begins. And now, perhaps I may be excused for it is a slow journey down to the coast. More Japanese sailing vessels can be expected soon," he added with a faint trace of a smile, "and how would they manage without help from Madjoe, the Goeroe?"

He went out into the rain, and Sergeant Robbins said to the other Australian soldier:

"There goes our most successful agent, Jack. What do you think of him?"

"He certainly delivers the goods, Sarge. But what a mild little bloke! It's hard to imagine him as a relentless scalp-hunter."

"Not when you know the reason, Jack! In March '42 a Jap destroyer anchored off that village and sent a party ashore to claim the place for Japan. When they returned on board the skipper took Madjoe's pretty young wife with him - forcibly, of course. Madjoe has never heard of her since."

Five native boys searched the wreckage strewing the beach. Suddenly one gave a cry, pointing to a human body amid the rubble. Warrant-Officer Horaki of the Imperial Japanese Navy had gone to meet his ancestors.

J. A. KANE, R.A.A.F.

WOMEN OF JAPAN

A. J. POPPINS, A.A.M.W.S.

THE LETTER

Rain fell intermittently, in driven gusts at snarled on the tattered sac-sac thatch just above his head, dripping through the rotted thatches and snaking in an inquisitive finger through the hole in the wall that served as a door. 

It was a bush kanaka's hut, low to the ground, stinking with smoke and stale tobacco and the acrid kanaka smell, unfloored, unlin6d, with just a row of bare poles on the ground for beds. They'd been living there for the past night and day, waiting for this bloke to come. Silver had been interrogating him for the best part of half an hour, since just after sundown when he had loped into the hut, streaming water from every pore, to tell his story. Mort listened in, although Silver would have told him anything of interest later on.

"'Long morning time, masta," the man muttered, and spat a stream of red betel 'Juice on to the floor. He looked at it for a moment, wrinkling his brow, and then rubbed it into the closely packed earth with a splayed, calloused foot, and continued with his story how, in the morning, twenty Japanese left a village called Kikimogo and walked along the Government road to another kanaka place called Ramaka, reaching it at about sundown. Some of them were armed, and the rest carried packs; in some of the packs there were papers-he had seen them some time before.

"Orright, Rukwa. Talk-talk 'e finish!" Silver waved the kanaka to the far end of the hut, where their stores were stacked high to keep them out of the water, and raised his voice. "Give the coon a tin of bully and some biscuits, Bert, will you. He turned then to Mort, who looked up at him with a questioning smile.

"Well, what you think of it, Silver?"

The long man squatted down beside him, his skinny legs hunched almost to his shoulders, like the back legs of a grasshopper, and tugged at the lobe of his ear, a habit he had when he was weighing something up. The off-again-on-again flicker of the little slush-lamp splashed deep shadows around his eyes and over his gaunt promontory of a nose, and rioted in the long ash-blond hair that gave him his name. The boongs called him Masta White-grass-like the Greeks they had a word for everything.

"I dunno, Mort," he answered, drawing his brows down into a perplexed expression. "Could be O.K., could be phoney. Long way into Jap country here, you know - coon might be working for'em. Still, luluai down Samanai reckons he knows him. Could be." Could be what, he didn't say, but left it to the other's imagination. Where one word would suffice, Silver considered it a crime to use two. Mort smiled to himself. The old clam!

"Sounds interesting, china. He reckons he saw the papers go into the packs - they might be anything, order of battle, strength returns, instructions for attack or movement - anything! He says there's twenty in a patrol; well, say half of 'em are armed, one weapon to one carrier, well, we got six ... should be able to do 'em over! "

"Yeah." Silver blinked at him in the dull light. "Not just shoot and scatter, Mort. Got t' bowl 'em over, finish, otherwise they'll just go to ground other side of the track an' we'll never get near the packs, see? Hard to arrange! "

Mort picked up a stick and scratched on the hard floor between his knees. Silver watched him. A capital "D" first, with a wealth of curls

and flourishes, then a tentative "a" and then a "y". Next another "d", followed quickly by "awn". Daydawn. Daydawn Station in the Murchison, Western Australia. Home. Red soil, not black, and the stark whiteness of the river gums, not the lush unhealthy green of the jungle. Purple hills, with columns of ochrous dust holding the red plain and the pale blue sky apart. Home.

"We could get over it, Silver, easy," he said, dropping the stick and looking up. "Let them get right in amongst us, and after we open up and what's left of the pongos hit the scrub, we hurl a few grenades after them to keep their scones down and then four, say Bert, Arch, Wacka and you, keep firing, but back into the jungle. That way there won't be any danger of hitting whoever's out on the track, and it'll make the Nips keep down. Then me and Mike hotfoot it out on to the track and hurl in the packs. Then we gather as many as we can hump and leg it. Might even be able to send the coons back later for the others. The Chinese soldiers won't wake up you're firing the wrong way for a while. It's a chance."

He stopped talking; the only sound was the soft murmur of the others in the far end of the hut and the thud of rain and jungle berries on the roof. Silver sucked in his breath in a sharp, deep sigh.

"Risky, Mort. Long way from home for casualties! "

"Course it's risky - what the hell isn't? But it's not as risky as it might be, nor as other jobs we've done!"

"Wonder what the road's like there - need a fair bit of cover close in to the track! " No question or argument as to who should do the more dangerous job out on the track-  if Mort did it one day he would do it the next. It evened out in the long run.

"Soon find out." Mort looked up and called to the kanaka, beckoning him. "Quick-time!"

Rukwa put down the bully beef tin he had been eating out of, wiped his greasy hands on the dry lap-lap one of their coons had lent him, and walked over to the white men. He stood respectfully until they spoke.

"Rukwa," said Mort, taking his weed-tin and his cigarette lighter out of his pocket. One he placed on the floor and, pointing to it, said, "Kikimogo! " The other he placed a couple of feet away, rested his finger on it and, looking at the kanaka, said, "Ramaka!" Then he picked up a stick and joined the two with a plain furrow in the dirt saying, as he did so, "Guv'man road ... you got savvy?"

The big coon wriggled and grinned delightedly - they loved this sort of thing. "Yes, masta," he burbled. "Me got savvy, true!"

"Orright now. This-fella Guv'man road," Mort ran his finger along the length of the furrow, and looked questioningly at the big native. Was there plenty of timber close to the track?

"Yes, masta, 'e stap!" Rukwa nodded his head vigorously. "Japan, 'im 'e no got akis, no can rous'im dewai!"

"Go on"' Silver muttered. "So they don't keep the timber cleared away from the track, eh? I wonder why - that's asking for trouble! Orright, Rukwa, finish!"

"Perhaps because like the boong says, they got no axes!" Mort grinned. "Although I can't see that. Anyway, it's the green light, eh? "

"Start early, first light, be best?" the other decided. He wouldn't waste words by saying yes or no to the suggestion. The mere fact that he went on with the plan signified that he would be in it. "Give us time to get a good possy. Plan when we get there."

"Yeah ... O.K. Tell the others, will you, mate? "

"What you goin' t' do?

"Oh, finish off a letter . . .

Silver grinned. "Flamin' letters!" and Mort grinned back at him. As Silver, bent almost double, went to let the other men in on the plan, he took an oiled-silk roll from a long pocket he had sewn on the inside of his shirt and extracted some sheets of paper and a stub of pencil.   He licked the pencil and studied what he had written the night before. He did a bit every night, when he got the chance, and sometimes even during the day. He'd even written close on three pages of a letter once while squatting beside a track waiting for some Nips to walk into an ambush.

 It passed the time and steadied the nerves.

"I'm glad about the new tank," he'd written. "I was worried about it for a while. Thank Mr. McKenzie for doing it for you, will you? He's a good old stick. You say you're going to try some wheat? Don't overdo it, dearest we'll scratch along somehow. just be there when I get back, and never mind about the bank balance. The last photos of Graham and Merle were beauts - I've got them in front of me as I write . . ." 

he looked hungrily at the snapshot on his knee; a leggy little girl of about eleven and a fair-haired bruiser of five; behind them, grinning, obese, vigilant, Veronica, the old station gin who had looked after him when he was a kid 

"...glad the weather's been so good, it'll mean plenty of good feed. I'm toying with the idea of sinking my deferred into a good young Hereford bull after the war-polled of course. What do you think, dearest? Should go well on our kind of country . . ."

The wind scratched in the thatch and worried the tree-tops, and the slush-lamp jumped and quivered, sending grotesque shadows cavorting over the roof as moths and beetles in suicidal hordes battled its struggling flame. Acrid smoke drifted up to his nostrils from the tiny fire the kanakas had built in the far, dark end of the hut, voices murmured, a ration tin clanked, and the snaking rope of water gathered in a pool about his feet as he licked the stump of his pencil and began to write. 

"Hello, darling, it's another night, now, pretty squally outside, but we're snug as cats in a crib. I wish you could see us ... "

They moved off in the first pale light, when the pigeons were still drumming eerily in the deep jungle-"balus le crai", the boongs called it-when the pigeons cry. A long indistinct snake of men moving jerkily along the overgrown kanaka pad, silent, still numb with sleep, miserable from cold and damp. Rukwa in front to guide them, then Silver, Bert, Arch and Wacka, then three coons laden with their stores, and then Mort and Mike, who, since they were going to do the job on the track together, brought up the rear.

They wanted to hit the patrol about midway between the two villages, Kikimogo and Ramaka, to ensure the minimum chance of interference from either end, consequently they did not have very far to go from where they had been bivouacking. They found a spot, a nice, level stretch of the road that might almost have been made for their purpose, with the spoil from a shallow drainage ditch that flanked the track making a low earthwork in front of where they would lie. Silver concertinaed his long frame behind a small tree only a few feet from the edge of  the track, and just in advance of the rest them who were strung along fifteen or so yards, lying flat, partly concealed by the low embankment and partly by the leaves and ferns they had jammed down the sides of their gaiters, into their belts and under their hatbands. The boongs were a couple of hundred yards into the jungle, out of the way of stray slugs.

"Silver!" Mort whispered harshly. There was actually no call to whisper as they could see a fair bit of the track in both directions, but it was a habit, and a wise one, to do so. "You're too close, if they're on their toes!"

Silver shook his head and grinned. "Shrink when they come along-that wide!" He held up his little finger. "From funk. Won't see me! "

Mort grinned back at him, and dropped his head on to his arm. He still wasn't satisfied about Silver's spot, but, apart from dragging the old goat back by the heels, there was little he could do about it. The sun was up well and truly now, and hot. It broke through the leaves above and warmed him, then made him hot, drawing the stink out of the shirt that he hadn't had off his back for four days and nights. Yet funnily, when you took it off, the skin wasn't dirty, but clean, smooth as satin; all the dirt went into the rag, and cripes, it smelled like it! But his smell, his body-thank God he could still raise a sweat. He breathed deeply of it, acutely conscious of being alive. One day, perhaps years ahead, he would take life for granted, like he used to before the war, but not now. Now it was something that they renewed every day, not a matter of a ninety-nine year lease, and the rank smell of sweat in his nostrils was his assurance that his body was still his own, and a going concern.

Birds and insects were abroad now; the birds, flapping and squawking in the high trees, dropped half-eaten nuts and berries to the ground about the prone figures, and the insects, invisible on bark and twig all around, solemnly rubbed leg and wing together and produced a rising din of clicks and rattles that acted like a lullaby. Warm and still, lulled by the insects, he lay with the sun on his back, and presently picked up half of a red berry that had just plopped beside him and lobbed it gently against the check of the man next to him, Wacka.

"Keep nit!" he whispered. "Having a snooze! "

"O.K.! " Wacka made a circle of his thumb and first finger, grinning. "C'n sleep your ruddy head off!"

He didn't know how long he slept-it might have been an hour, it might have been a few seconds. Something touched his cheek and he was awake, like a wild thing, instantly in possession of all his senses, knowing where he was and what he was there for. Men got that way. Wacka nodded briefly along the track, and Mort heard the clatter and rattle that almost invariably preceded the Japs in the jungle. That they should move on the Government road in broad daylight was bad enough, he mused, but why make a noise like a flaming Labour Day procession? Well, it was their funeral. Yeah, their funeral, all right!

He craned his neck a little, cautiously, but could not see them yet. His eyes dropped to the ground beneath his nose, and he saw an earwig scurry out of a matted jungle of twigs and rotting leaves, its tail over its back and s pincers gaping wide. A couple of ants were conducting a struggle over a piece of seemingly valueless dry bark until, dropping it suddenly and simultaneously, they raced off busily in opposite directions. His eyes rose from the teeming mould and up his Owen to the foresight. Good old 37842, the paint long blistered off her tacky barrel, the jerry-built wooden butt worn and hacked about.

Where the heck were the ruddy Japs - they should have been in the ambush by now. . . . He peered cautiously again down the track but still could not see anything, although the noise was, if anything, even greater. He looked sideways at Wacka and saw him snake out an arm to pick up a pellet of paper that had just been flipped to him by the man one beyond him. He watched Wacka's face as he read what was written on the paper, saw the grim smile wreathe his eyes and saw his lips form a familiar oath. Then he rolled the pellet again and flipped it to Mort.

"The bastards are having a brew," he read off the grubby slip of paper. "Wouldn't it?" Wouldn't it, all right! Mort rolled the paper and carefully flipped it to Mike, the only other man on the far side of him. A cold sensation sat in his belly and loins, and his breath came a little quicker. Twenty or more Nips having a cup of tea a few yards away from the end of the ambush was not the kind of thing calculated to calm anyone's nerves. 

One of them was certain to wander off into the scrub a bit for something or other-Mort grinned bleakly as he imagined the reactions  of the Jap who first discovered an Australian soldier stretched out beneath a bush overlooking their tea-party. Well, there was nothing to do but to sit still and weather the storm; strung out as they were, like Farmer Brown's ruddy cows, they were in a bad spot if anything started-masked each other's fire and hadn't anything like a decent getaway. His eyes narrowed as he heard a burst of shrill laughter from along the track, followed by a string of guttural Japanese. "Having the time of their ruddy lives!" he thought malevolently. "Hope the ruddy tea chokes them! "

What seemed like hours passed; the sun shone hotly on his back, the birds flapped and squawked and the noise of the insects was intensified by the mounting heat. The strain was becoming almost unbearable when Wacka, without turning his head, whispered out of the comer of his mouth, "They're coming!"

Mort's eyes, strained on the track, saw a single Jap first of all, walking easily but cautiously towards the ambush, trailing his rifle and peering from side to side. Presently behind him, the rest came into view; as the boong had said, about half were armed and about half were cargo-men carrying great bulging packs that looked as if they might contain all the secrets of the Japanese Sixth Division. Mort started to feel an interest in the business again.

Suddenly, something happened. Usually their forward scouts loped along, rifle over the shoulder and quite often with a dixie of food swaying from the barrel, head down and mind somewhere in the sacred Thousand Islands. Not so this one-he walked a little way, then stopped and almost sniffed the air. He couldn't have seen anyone or anything, or  he wouldn't have stopped in the middle of the track. It was some sixth sense - perhaps the very air was so charged with anxiety at that particular spot that he'd run into it like he'd run into a brick wall. Whatever the cause, he motioned backwards with the flat of his palm without turning around, and the noisy cavalcade behind him stopped too, bunched up into a Bren gunner's dream. Mort could imagine Arch fondling the trigger of his Bren, his black and hairy cheek nestled snugly against the butt and his pale blue, murderous eye glaring through sights chock-a-block with yellow-bellies.

The forward scout was moving again now, steadily, stealthily, as though drawn by a rope around his neck to the very tree where Silver was hidden. It was uncanny. Mort could see the long man's face in profile - it was as if carved out of stone. The Nip drew nearer, and Mort could feel the intensity of the six pairs of eyes watching the scout's every move, the cold menace of the ugly muzzles trained on his chest and belly. He reached the edge of the track, peered about and took a step towards Silver's tree. Silver raised himself on one knee, gently, said softly, "Howdy, stranger!" and, almost knocking the Jap's popping eyes off with the barrel of his Owen, blew his head off with a good burst.

A split second after Silver pressed his trigger Arch was ladling it into the group down the track, supported by every weapon in the ambush. There were a couple of hoarse shouts and an animal scream of agony that crinkled the skin on Mort's spine, then an infinitesimal lull in the firing. Changing mags, his mind said, while his hands automatically unhooked a grenade from his belt. No movement from the track, as far as he could see through the swirling cordite fumes -good. A quiver in the grass on the other side - bad.

' 'Grenades! he yelled, slipping the pin out of his and holding it for a couple of seconds before lobbing it gently across the cleared space. A line of savage bursts growled and rumbled on the other side of the track, and another scream of agony split the shuddering air.

"Come on, Mike!" he shouted, and bounded out of cover, his words almost drowned as the others started to fire back into the jungle, their muzzles pointed at the tree-tops.

The cordite stung his eyes and nostrils, and he almost tripped over a ghastly sprawling body, the one that Silver got with his first burst; then another, and then a pack, lying abandoned on the ground.  "Here, Mike!" he rasped, and together they heaved it into the bushes. It weighed a ton. His eyes darted ahead; the fumes were clearing and his mind counted thirteen bodies while he thought, "Thirteen dead; that leaves seven in the grass if there were twenty", and his hands groped and swung at the packs.

They wouldn't be able to get them all - best make sure of what they had. "I'll get a couple more!" he gasped as they swung one in, "you drag the others farther in and tell Silver to get the coons up to take 'em back! Go on! " as Mike lingered a moment, and, turning his back on the other, he started to race up the track, but stopped dead.

Right in front of him there was a tree across the way, about belly high. As he crouched, staring at it for a split second that seemed like a year, he saw the crown of a khaki cap rise above the top edge of the wood until a small blood-coloured circle was disclosed and began to move stealthily, stopping and starting, along the log to the Japs' side of the track. Below the 10 he could see two black canvas, two toed shoes moving in company with the cap.

He crept swiftly to the log, raised his head and shoulders over it and poked the muzzle of his Owen into a startled, round yellow face. With his teeth drawn back unconsciously in a terrible grin, he pressed the trigger and the bolt shot forward with a futile click. Jesus! He'd forgotten to reload! Quicker than thought he swung the butt around and crashed it into the Jap's bewildered face. The yellow man slumped behind the log, groaning and whimpering, and Mort stood over him flailing at his round black skull with the butt of the weapon.

Suddenly he realized that he was in a cone of terrible silence; no birds, no insects. Only an occasional bubbling groan from the other side of the track.

"Mort, for Chris' sakes, come in out of that! " It was Wacka, his face peering urgently, uglily, from the bushes. "Come in, damn you!"

Mort stood with his Owen poised for a moment, and the Jap behind the log lurched drunkenly to his feet, blood streaming through his hands where he held them against his battered head. There was a roar at his side and a belching cloud of cordite enveloped him as he felt the slugs from Wacka's gun go past him, heard them thud into the screaming Jap, who toppled at his feet, threshed and lay still. Almost without thinking he leaned down, grasped the man's collar, and, yanking savagely, dragged him into the cover at the edge of the track.

"Oh, Jesus! you fool, you fool!" Silver was saying, but Mort hardly heard him.

"You got the packs?" he demanded, and Silver said, "Yes - yes, the coons got 'em! Come on, there's a team of 'em, must be twenty or more we didn't get. They'll wake up in a minute!"

"Frisk 'im!" Mort gritted, pointing to the dead Jap who lay hideously at their feet. "Bert, Mike, you others! Keep a lookout while we go through this bastard!" They dragged the body farther off the track into the shelter of some rank grass; he lay on his belly, one arm outstretched, the other cradling his battered head. His helmet, which must have fallen off in the terror and excitement of the first volley, lay near him.

Wacka stood in the ditch, with one foot on the low parapet, and leaned on his knee, his drawn face turned to the track, his restless eyes flickering up it and down it, in and out of the cover crowding close on the far side.  Mike was at the Jap's feet and Bert and Silver were on the other side of him.

Mort, and Arch who had dropped his beloved Bren on the grass, crouched over the body. It was a tense, fearful job; blood still oozed spasmodically from the Jap's mouth and perforated back, saturating the belt of a thousand stitches that was wound around and around his waist. They were beginning to feel the reaction from the strain of the last couple of hours, and hands were inclined to fumble a bit.

 Arch kept muttering through closed teeth, while his hands ratted the corpse: "C'mon, get out'a here! Nothin' here ... c'mon! " and when one hand became smeared with glutinous red, he wiped it convulsively on the grass, and then on the seat of his reeking pants.

Mort's hands ran expertly over the dead man's pockets-trousers, jacket, inside and out. From an inner pocket of the coat he withdrew a roll of oiled silk; it fluttered open, and a piece of white paper fell out. As he stared at the closely packed Japanese characters which covered it, he heard Arch gasp, "Grenade, duck!" and flattened on the ground as the grenade burst in the mud a few yards away. He felt the hot blast, nothing more. They weren't much worse than fire-crackers.

"You dirty yellow bastard!" Bert shouted, his voice shrill with indignation, and Mort grinned as a hail of what must have been vitriolic abuse hurtled from the other side of the track. Once, the Japs had seemed dangerously near in Malaya, then Singapore, then New Guinea. Now, across that narrow strip cleared through the jungle, they were as remote as the South Pole - but it didn't do to take chances. "Come on," he said, rolling the paper in his own oiled-silk pouch and stowing it hastily in his inside pocket, "let's get going - they're waking up! "

One by one they faded silently into the jungle behind them, treading softly, there one moment, gone the next. Wacka was the last to leave; he crouched, tense, peering up and down the track, searching the cover on the far side of the track, a green wraith hardly visible against the green behind him. Then, suddenly, he too was gone, and the dead Japanese sprawled on the trampled, reddened slush, a slight wind rustling the square of oiled silk that lay beside him.

* * * * * *

"Well, this is it," Mort said, holding up an envelope and examining the writing.

"This is what?" Silver inquired lazily from his stretcher. "What you expectin', your commission? "

They had been back in camp for four days, with only a short job two days ago to a garden a few miles away-out and back in the same day. They were beginning to feel that the war had passed them by. It was the short twilight hour before the swift tropical dark fell to hide the jungly hills and the deep ravines, the pale green sky and the wavering strings of black flying foxes that beat steadily across it. The camp was quiet, with pearly smoke from the cookhouse hanging palely amongst the towering trees. Mort slit the envelope.

"That paper we got off the Jap," he said.

"When we sent the others in, I put in a note to Bracken at Int. and asked him to send me a copy of the translation if he could get hold of one and if it wasn't too top secret." He turned the page to the light. "See what he's got to say."

He read through the first page rapidly, chasing the fading afterglow, and then came to what he was looking for.

"That Jap document you marked," he read. "It won't start or stop any ruddy wars. It was just a letter he'd written to his missus-routine stuff you married codgers give out with how's the kids, bows the crops, how's the weather? Look after the old man and all that guff. The funny part of it is that be wrote it over a year ago, and must have been carting it around waiting for a chance to post ever since -what a hope! It was in good condition, though-did he have it rolled up in oiled silk or something. . ."

Mort stopped, and looked up. Silver raised his head and sucked deeply on his cigarette, expelling the blue smoke in a luxurious cloud.

"Well," he inquired, "what's Brack got to say about it? Hot stuff?"

Mort said nothing. Since they had come in from that patrol, no boong-line had left the camp, so that no letters had gone to the coast. His eyes were fixed on a pale oblong of white on the box alongside his stretcher. He could see the address, even in the dark. Daydawn Station, Murchison, W.A. Hows the kids, how's the weather, how's the crops?

"Nothing, china," he said flatly, as he folded the pages of Brack's letter and stowed them in his pocket. "Just an old letter."

T. G. HUNGERFORD, SECOND A.I.F.

HEAD-HUNTING

BERNARD GORDON, R.A.A.F.

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