Doucette knew all the islands between Pandjang and Singapore, though they seemed more numerous than the stars of the Milky Way, denser than the Clouds of Magellan, and their offshore waters studded with pagars, little fishing shacks on stilts. Indeed, hardly anyone else on the Pengulling knew the names of the islands, for they all had code numbers – Pandjang was NW14, but the final island before the run into the Singapore roads and Keppel Harbour was NC11, a tiny hill of an island from which they would be able to observe Singapore before and after the raid. The boys knew how to paddle around the NWs, NCs and NEs like angels on pinheads.
They had two days of rest on Pandjang before they set out for NC11, for they needed to wait for the right moon. They spent the time moving their food dump further inland to a pile of rocks under the island’s hill in case it would all be later needed by them or by downed airmen. And so they hid, and talked very little, and sketched in their diaries and made observations of shipping.
While the first day there was still not at its hottest, a Japanese patrol boat hove around the point of Pandjang, anchored in the blue bay and sent two boats ashore. Japanese marines landed from them. Mortmain and Doucette grinned at each other. The joke was what would Nav do if he were here? Shit himself, sir, suggested Jockey. The Japanese marines cooked up some fish and rice for a brunch ashore and drank from coconuts.
Then they lay down without sentries and slept, while all the time their patrol boat swung on its anchor, and Doucette and Mortmain and Leo and Rubinsky and the rest sat by their depot and the day’s heat began to strike. After an hour and a half, a Japanese NCO woke on the beach, rose, urinated and kicked his companions’ legs. They dragged their dinghies down the beach and rowed back out to their boat, and so departed.
A more complicated test came the next morning. A fishing kolek appeared, and the Tamil fisherman who owned it began to head it in for the beach. Here was the dark side of the Doucette proposition. He sent little Jockey Rubinsky and a young rating named Skeeter Moss down into the fringes of the palms, figures who could be mistaken as fellow natives, to kill him with knives once he was ashore. They had to, went the reasoning. Their presence could not be announced by anyone – they intended to announce it themselves. And yet to think of these two: a dairy farmer’s son, a jeweller’s son born in Russia, come all the way to Pandjang to slaughter the head of a Malay family! What did Leo think of that? The first damage they would do was to an innocent! Well, we’re used to that reality from modern wars, but it was an unaccustomed thing for Leo. His training and tripping, garrotting and knifework had always had an imagined enemy as its object.
The Tamil man saved his life by detouring to another island. No one ever said though whether they were relieved or disappointed. I think they were in a way chosen for their unlikelihood to ask themselves that question. Then at dusk, their hands bloodless, our boys went swimming off one end of the beach, with Mortmain in the shadows of palms and rocks, acting as lookout, while the others played and dived with a sportive sea otter family with whom they found they shared the water. A day in the life of an infiltrator. Ashore again, they each put back around their necks a bakelite container with its cyanide tablet inside. Had I mentioned that? They had apparently each been issued one in Cairns in case pain or torture or fear of revealing too much overtook them.
Tides ran hard through the channels between these crowds of islands, and going north that night they had a difficult time against the current and were ten miles short of the island (little NC11, their last stop before Singapore) when the dawn came up. They put into a small island between two bigger ones, Bulan (NW7) and Batan (NW8), both Japanese garrisoned, and dragged their folboats – no small weight, some 700 pounds with their mines aboard – in amongst the mangrove roots and lay still all day, within sound of a village, eaten by carnivorous insects, with mud itchy on their bodies under that dreadful sun, unable to say anything. A person couldn’t put up with that sort of wait, I don’t think, unless he was able somehow to be remarkably at ease with himself inside the very kernel of the moment, or unless he lacked too much imagination. They stewed there anyhow. It’s the sort of thing I think of whenever I’ve been to Singapore. The sun is a ruthless threat – it comes down amongst the great steel towers, slapping your face aside. In the lout-less streets of that ersatz modern city, it is the lout. Anyhow, one way and another, they all proved themselves up to that sort of endurance and that stillness. Mortmain with his optic in his eye, a sort of lantern-jawed giant, the colour of mahogany but impossible not to identify as a European. Big jolly Chesty Blinkhorn, who claimed to have been thrown out of the Goulburn Convent School for being unruly yet who had the discipline for this particular classroom in the mangroves. Sergeant Bantry, veteran of the North African desert and of New Guinea, and aficionado of The Imitation of Christ. Doucette with his Chapman’s Odyssey jammed as a talisman in the breast pocket of his shirt. And Leo, of course, used from his childhood in the Solomons to this intensity of heat. A thunderstorm gave them brief comfort during the afternoon. I think that if Leo could reduce his mind down to muteness as a means of lasting out the sandflies and the heat at the apex of the day, then the rain must have come like a huge act of grace, must have carried with it, I think, elements of motherhood and rescue sufficient to endow him with confidence.
That night the currents were running their way, and they could see off to their right as they paddled past the oil refinery at Samboe, no distance at all from Singapore, and were suddenly at the little island, NC11, three days before they were to make their foray. Here there was a lot of what they called heather, but not of the Scottish variety; just enough cover for them to hide, though they would not be able to move about by day. At dusk they saw Singapore begin to glitter, a secure, wide-awake, electrically-lit city. Using Doucette’s telescope, Leo was able to read the time on the clock at the Imperial Insurance Company tower, and to see fabled Raffles Hotel, where, as Doucette said, the Japanese were drinking Singapore slings tonight. From NC11 too they could see and covet the docks of Keppel Harbour, and due ahead the core of Singapore, the Empire Docks with the superstructures of ships rising above its mole. They could see the great containers and superstructures of Samboe Oil Refinery, and dead ahead the wireless masts on top of the Cathay Building. Doucette drew their attention to the number of many native craft coming and going in those seas, without molestation, wearing their Japanese registration numbers and not having to worry about mines.
There and in the roads were many freighters and tankers, all lit up. They began in the last of the day to select their targets, always allowing that what they chose now might have moved on in three nights’ time. We need the Australian Waterside Workers, said Chesty Blinkhorn proudly, to bung on a strike. Then the bastards’d still all be there in a month.
They lay in undergrowth in the enervating tropic sun which failed to enervate them. As with any tribe, stories were always part of the day. Leo’s stories of growing up in the Solomons, barefoot, shirtless, a South Pacific motherless urchin, with a casual Melanesian nanny who allowed him the same latitude given native children. Based on tales he told me his stories dealt too with natives who trod on stingrays in the shallows and suffered an immediate, agonising cone-like excision of flesh. There were excruciating native remedies involving juice in the wound, and mysterious herbal dosages to prevent paralysis, and sometimes death. Mortmain as ever never moved far from his old repertoire of casually scatological tales of monkeys in tea plantations in Malaya who fell for plantation women, and the standbys of elephants with diarrhoea in the teak plantations of Burma. Rubinsky spoke of the Jewish quarter in Shanghai – everyone called it Little Vienna for its cafés. There were synagogues and rabbis too, and an occasional scandal when a Jewish trader’s daughter fell for a Chinese man, and a little half-Chinese Jew was born and accepted into the family of Judah. So far from home, so endangered, all the men of Cornflakes recited their favourites.