I held her, and gradually the shivering ceased. After a while she lifted her head and pulled away. ‘Silly of me.’ She had her handkerchief out and got quickly to her feet. ‘I’m sorry. I get these moods sometimes.’ Her voice was firmer. ‘Maybe it’s the mixed blood. We’re a bit of a mixture, you know.’ She said it with forced gaiety. ‘Come on.’ She reached down and took hold of my hand, pulling me to my feet. ‘Let’s see what that old tote road is like.’
‘It will be badly overgrown,’ I warned her. ‘Probably take us all night to reach the ship. Are you sure you want-’
‘The ship! Of course. I’d almost forgotten.’ Her face, her whole mood was suddenly brighter. ‘If we can find Jona, he can take us out of here.’
I didn’t think Jona would be much help, but I didn’t tell her so as we started down the road. The trucks were driving off now, leaving the car still parked there, just visible in the starlight. And when the glow of the trucks’ lights had finally been swallowed up in the night, there was no glimmer of light anywhere, the world a darkened silence, broken only by the distant murmur of water and the periodic croaking of frogs or toads.
Chapter Seven
We had reached the first loop of the double hairpin and were standing on the verge, trying to make out the line of the tote road, when a glimmer of light showed from down the slope towards Anewa. We stood, watching in silence, as it climbed steadily towards us. There was sudden movement where the road had been blown, three figures standing by the parked car. The sound of an engine came to us faintly as the twin lights of the approaching vehicle emerged from the trees. It was being driven fast, and soon the headlights were shining full on the three armed men, all black, their fuzzy mops of hair distinctly visible. The car stopped just short of them, the headlights dipped now.
Two men got out, and I heard Perenna give a little gasp as they moved forward into the beam of the headlights to talk to the guards. One of them wore a white shirt, and his hair was red in the lights. I couldn’t be certain who the other was, only that he was an islander. They stood there for a moment, talking, and then the whole group walked up the road to stand on the edge of the dark line where the charges had blasted the surface. The beam of a torch showed, a pinpoint of light sweeping the gap in the tarmac.
Hans Holland and his companion were there about ten minutes. Then they went back to their car. We watched as the headlights blazed on the figures of the men standing there, the weapons in their hands clearly visible, then swept the red rock of the gulley edge as the car turned. ‘So you’re right,’ I said.
Perenna nodded. ‘I said it was Hans. It had to be. Nobody from the Buka villages could have planned this.’ Her words, whispering in the night, had an undertone of excitement. It was almost as if, against her will, she admired the man for what he was doing. Pictures of Nazis, seen in old films, flickered through my mind. The figure had been tiny, but even at that distance I couldn’t help noticing a swagger in his walk.
‘For tonight,’ I said, ‘he’s a sort of Führer, a little Napoleon.’
She didn’t say anything, standing very still, gazing intently as the car’s lights dwindled, so intently that I suddenly had the feeling her mind was reaching out to him, that she was imagining herself in that car, a part of the plan he had conceived. Then she seemed to collect herself, and in a cool voice she said, ‘Better get started if it’s going to take us all night.’
I nodded, and we moved back on to the tarmac, walking quickly down to the second bend, where the old road was just visible in the starlight. To scramble down to it would be rough, the darkness of the valley full of croakings. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’ She was standing on the road, staring down into the forest growth below.
‘You couldn’t help it,’ I said, thinking she meant the drive up to the mine. But she shook her head. ‘Tim, I mean. I shouldn’t have left him. I didn’t realise-’ She hesitated. ‘It’s all so different, and now this plan … I can’t do anything for Tim here.’
But I was still thinking of Hans Holland inspecting the blown road like the commander of a military operation.
‘You think he’ll pull it off?’
‘Probably. I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘But Tim needs me. I know that — I feel it. And there’s nothing I can do, no way I can help him. Only pray …’ She looked up at me suddenly, her eyes luminously large in the dark. ‘Have you ever prayed? I mean, really prayed.’ She sensed my hesitation and added, ‘I tried prayer in Aldeburgh. But it didn’t work. I think — deep down … I found myself believing, but not in God, in something else … the powers of darkness, evil, I don’t know what, but it was there in my heart. It scared me. Even there, in England, it scared me. And now, out here-’ My hand was on her arm, and I felt a shiver run through her. ‘It’s stronger out here.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to get back to the ship, we’d better get started.’
‘Yes, the ship.’ She squared her shoulders, bracing herself. ‘Jona’s different, isn’t he? Much more practical, a seaman, no imagination …’ She forced a little laugh, and then she had stepped off the verge and started down the bulldozed debris of the steep slope leading to the shadow line of the old road. It was a hard scramble, requiring all our concentration so that we didn’t talk, either then or when we reached the tote road, for the line of it ran close below the highway and with every step down the remains of the steep track we were approaching the gulley. I dared not use the torch, so that our progress was slow. In places the track was completely obliterated by the rubble of the roadworks above, and there were muddy stretches where the rainwater lay trapped.
It took us over half an hour to reach the gulley. There were trees to our right, and it was very dark, only the sound of water to indicate that we were right below the guards. The track here dropped steeply down the face of the mountain range, and we were a long time scrambling through the tangle of new forest growth that had almost obliterated it. Finally, well hidden from the highway, I began using the torch.
I think if we hadn’t returned to the highway, we should never have made it, for the lower we went, the worse the going became, the jungle growth almost impenetrable and patches of swamp water. It was past midnight and we were both of us very tired when I finally made the decision to force our way up the slope to the road. We reached it just over an hour later, hot and dirty, our clothes torn and soaked with sweat. After that it was easy, just a long downhill walk. Twice we had to seek shelter among the trees, once for a car going up full of men and again when it came down. Presumably the guard at the gulley was being relieved.
It was during that long walk down the highway that my mind began to grapple with the implications of what was happening. Now that I was sure Hans Holland was behind it, I tried to put myself in his shoes, but the more I thought about it, the less I understood it. It was quite inconceivable that he could hold such a large and important company to ransom, a company that had international connections and a worldwide market. And if it wasn’t money but power he was after, how could he possibly achieve that with three or four old landing craft and a group of Cargo-crazy islanders? Tooley was probably correct in saying that the mine administration tried to keep clear of politics, but even if the white expatriates stood by and did nothing, there was a large workforce drawn from Bougainville and other islands in and around the Solomons. How would they react? And the fact that Papua New Guinea had only become independent a few years back would not prevent them from reacting very vigorously to the threat of secession, particularly as Bougainville provided such a large slice of their revenue. And any action they took would presumably have the moral support of the UN, the co-operation of those countries where the copper was marketed and the active support of the Australian government.