“Nate, get a message off to Staff. Request that Mako be sent enough beer so the crew can unwind. Damn it, if they’re going to rob us of a regular R and R the least they can do is send us some beer for the crew!”
The ceremony at which the Mako took leave of her passengers was brief. An Australian Colonel and two Majors, one a physician, welcomed the Shrewsburys. The Colonel drew himself and saluted Captain Hinman.
“Damned good job, sir! I admire the tailoring job your chaps did. Mrs. Shrewsbury just told us about it. Good chaps you have, sir, damned good chaps!”
He beamed proudly as the Shrewsburys walked down the line of Mako’s crew, speaking to each one. When Mrs. Shrewsbury came to Ginty she reached upward with her hands and pulled his scarred face down to hers and kissed him on the lips.
“Mr. Ginty,” she lisped through the gap left where her husband had pulled her teeth with a pair of pliers. “I want to thank you for the love and care you have given Deborah. She will miss you and so will I. You’re a very dear man!” She kissed him again. Ginty stood rigid, a deep blush crawling up his thick neck.
“Well, ma’am,” he finally said. “When that little lady grows up some and anyone bothers her you get in touch with me. I’ll pull their arms and legs off like they was a fly!” He scowled fiercely and she giggled.
The Reverend Shrewsbury said goodbye to Nathan Cohen. “I’ll write to you, my friend. There are some points of Christian theology you really should be put straight on.” He looked earnestly at Cohen. “You won’t be offended?”
“Of course not,” Cohen said. “But before we get to arguing by mail why don’t you ask a Rabbi to get you a copy of the Talmud? I think you’d enjoy the lovely logic and reasoning in it. Our people have scholars who devote an entire lifetime to the study of that great work and never begin to understand all the wisdom that is within it.” The Reverend Shrewsbury nodded. “I will do that. Fair is only fair, I always say. The Christian thing to do!” He chuckled and Cohen laughed with him.
The Australian Colonel turned to Captain Hinman.
“Once again, old chap, His Majesty’s Government thanks you and your crew. We’ll board our aircraft now. The High Command wallahs are quite excited at seeing these people you pulled out so neatly. I’m told your own people will arrive shortly with food and other things for you. Just hope you don’t think it’s bad manners to shove away and be off but I do have a wallah back there with pips all over his bloody shoulders who will crawl right up my back if I don’t get back!”
“I understand, Colonel, we have that kind at Staff ourselves. But I’m a bit disappointed you didn’t want to see the inside of Mako.”
“Love to, old chap, love to! It’s this bloody leg! Cork, you know, in a manner of speaking. From the thigh down. Bloody German got me with a burst from a Schmeiser at close range, over in Crete. Went into their bloody lines to kill some of their top wallahs and got caught. Stupid! Gives me a spot of trouble going up and down ordinary steps to say nothing of your vertical bloody ladders! When you come down to port where we are maybe we could get a bloody crane, lower me down and pick me up, eh?” He grinned and walked away and Hinman marveled that he walked as well as he did.
The Navy PBY landed an hour later and a Lieutenant Commander in rumpled khakis climbed down the plane’s short ladder and went over to Captain Hinman and Joe Sirocco.
“I’m Gene Puser, Captain,” he said.
Hinman nodded and introduced Joe Sirocco. “We have a mutual friend, sir,” he said to Puser.
“Yes,” Puser said with a grin. “Glad you remembered the name. Saves all that business of introduction and other stuff.” He handed Captain Hinman a thick envelope.
“Your patrol orders, sir. I’m afraid you have another special mission to perform first, then you get a quite good area.” He turned and motioned to a short, barrel-chested Australian Major who had followed him off the PBY and had been loitering about out of earshot. The Major had a bright red face and a huge, sweeping mustache at least eight inches from tip to tip.
“This is Major Jack Struthers, His Majesty’s Australian Army, Captain Hinman,” Puser said. “Major, Captain Hinman.” The two men shook hands.
“This is my Executive Officer, my second in command, sir.” Hinman said to the Major.
“Big lad, aren’t you?” Struthers said as he took Sirocco’s hard hand in his own muscled paw. “Bloody big man, I’d say!”
“Did you bring me any torpedoes?” Hinman said. “And if you did, how in the hell do we get them aboard? They don’t have a torpedo carrier truck here, you know.”
“Know that, sir,” Puser said. “They didn’t send any. They’re a bit put out that you fired two fish in heavy seas. Actually, one of the calmer heads said you could do quite well with only twenty-two fish instead of twenty-four. I did stretch my Warrant, as the Major here would say, and smuggled enough beer aboard the plane to keep your crew happy for a few hours.”
“Smuggled?” Hinman asked.
“The Admiral doesn’t approve of sailors’ drinking beer, Captain, but that doesn’t matter. What does is that we have enough beer. It’s Aussie beer, strong enough to knock a horse down! I’ve got the cases packed in ice but it won’t hold for too many more hours so if you want to get a working party over to the plane we can get that stuff off. I’ve got some other stuff, the Major’s gear that has to be off-loaded as well, sir. We’re going to be here for two days.”
“Let’s go down to my Wardroom,” Hinman said. “There are some things I don’t understand and I’d rather talk down below than up here.” He motioned to Dusty Rhodes and gave him orders to get the Major’s gear off the plane and on to the dock and to supervise the beer party.
Lieutenant Commander Puser opened his briefcase and spread a small chart on the Wardroom table.
“I’m sorry this is the best chart we could find. Actually, it’s a page out of an atlas but it does show the area for this special mission.”
“That’s what I want to hear about, this special mission,” Hinman said, his face grim.
“Well, in a nutshell, sir,” Puser began. “And mind you I’m only the messenger. Some of the idea people in Australia thought that if ships in quote unquote safe Japanese harbors could in some way be sunk, not one ship but a half dozen or more at one time, that it would upset the Jap very greatly.
“Everyone seemed to think that it would upset the Jap. The next problem was to figure out how to get into a quote unquote safe Japanese harbor. That’s when they called in Major Struthers, who is a veteran commando specialist. He came up with an idea. Build a little boat that could be disassembled and reassembled very quickly and without tools. Someone else thought of a version of the Eskimo kayak for the boat.
“The Major thought that two men could carry ten-pound limpet mines into a harbor from a submarine and place them on the ship’s hulls at anchor. With a timing device the mines would all go off after the infiltrators had left the harbor.”
“What in the hell is the sense of that!” Hinman snapped.
“Don’t look at the Major, sir,” Puser said soothingly. “He was asked how it could be done. He didn’t originate the idea of the mission.”
“Crazy bloody scheme, I call it,” the Major said softly. “Mind you, it can be done and not very hard to do, either. Dress a man in black, dye his face and hands black and in that little boat you can go right up to a ship in harbor without being seen.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Hinman snorted.
“I hate to say this,” Puser said, “but the Major took his little boat, as he calls it, and paddled under the stern of the Isabel, the Admiral’s yacht in the Swan River in Brisbane. He went up over the stern, knocked out the watch, broke into the Admiral’s quarters and gathered all the Admiral’s papers into a pile and then set them afire and left!”