At 7 a.m. the next morning the prisoners were awakened by the thunder of trucks moving into the clubhouse compound. They looked through a window to see hundreds of Dutch soldiers being herded into the adjoining ballroom. Before they could digest what was happening, Hoto burst into the cinema followed by six armed guards.
His manner had eroded to something menacing. He yelled for the sailors—‘Speedo! Speedo!’—to gather their things and parade outside. Bolt looked around for Red Lead, whom he had last seen moving into the cinema. He hurried there and called for her. He stepped down to the screen area. Two dead rats signalled that she was there. Then he saw her stretched out on a ledge above the screen.
He implored her to join him. To his surprise, she scuttled down the front of the screen to him. He picked her up, and placed her in his pack. He was the last sailor to move outside. Hoto, his manner at complete odds with the day before, confronted and rebuked him. Bolt eyeballed him, which further increased his ire. He removed a sword from a scabbard around his waist. Hoto ordered four guards to hold Bolt on the ground. Bolt warded them off, handed his pack to Burroughs, and then fell to his knees voluntarily.
Hoto waved the sword above Bolt’s neck, making threatening, rasping sounds. Then he kicked Bolt in the shoulder, causing him to roll onto his back. Bolt got to his feet, his expression grim yet stoic.
‘You go to Batavia for interrogation,’ Hoto said in a hoarse whisper and made a sweeping motion with his sword. ‘Then they execute you.’
The sailors were given one pint of water to be shared by all of them. The guards pushed them into a truck driven by the big corporal with the extreme short-back-and-sides haircut and tight little moustache who had shot at Red Lead two days before. The sailors had dubbed him ‘Little Hitler’. Each sailor was given a thump by an elbow or rifle butt, causing Wallis to utter one of his favourite threats: ‘You’ll keep, brother.’ He received another belt for his trouble.
Hoto did not join them but hurried off to the clubhouse ballroom for other ‘duties’ with the new batch of several hundred Dutch soldiers.
The truck was driven to the Bandung train station close to the local China-town, which had begun decades earlier when Chinese workers helped build the railway and some of the city’s early infrastructure. The sailors, who had not been fed for a day, could smell the chicken, pork, fish, beef and vegetables. They asked for something from Little Hitler. He ignored their requests and pushed each one towards the platform. They stood waiting for a train with hundreds of Indonesian travellers, and a few Japanese in suits. The long train rattled in, looking perhaps as old as the train line, which had been constructed in 1880.
Nearly all the carriages were full for the five-hour, 100-mile journey to Batavia. People spilled into the aisles. The Japanese guards rudely forced people from their seats so that they and their prisoners could sit. All the sailors except Bolt hoisted their packs onto luggage racks. He sat his pack on his lap and opened the top, allowing Red Lead to pop her head out. She wanted to get out. He pointed a firm finger at her, saying, ‘No.’ The carriage was hot and stuffy, with just two of five roof fans working.
The train pulled out. A woman sitting in a cubicle opposite the sailors pushed out a firm breast for an appreciative baby. None of the sailors had seen such a public display.
‘Oh, to be young again,’ Bright mumbled, to smiles from the now more relaxed sailors.
Red Lead wriggled free of the pack. She bounced to the floor, only to be confronted by Little Hitler. He pulled a knife from an inside jacket pocket, and made a move towards her. Bolt stood and moved in front of the cat.
‘No,’ Bolt said, pushing a stiff arm and open hand at the corporal, and staring hard at him. Burroughs and Grout got to their feet slowly. Little Hitler blinked first and put his knife away. He gripped his rifle and aimed it at Bolt. This action caused Burroughs, Bright, Farrow and Tait to stand beside Bolt. Even the antagonistic Nadler and the surly Wallis made as if to help form the phalanx of support. All the guards held their rifles pointed at their prisoners. Several Indonesians, fearing a bloody confrontation, moved away from surrounding cubicles. Keeping his eyes on Little Hitler, Bolt bent down, picked up Red Lead and placed her back in the pack.
‘Everything okay,’ Bolt said, allowing half a smile for the benefit of Little Hitler.
The sailors returned to their seats, and the guards to theirs, but the latter kept pointing their rifles. For the next half-hour, Bolt stroked Red Lead and looked out the window at the villages in the jungle by the tracks. Women were washing clothes in a canal. The scene soon gave way to rice fields and children riding buffaloes. The sight of the yellow-green earth of a big cemetery caused Bolt to glance back to his captors. Little Hitler was snoring in a corner, his rifle sitting lazily in his lap. The guards still held their rifles, but without the intent displayed earlier.
Burroughs leaned across to Bolt and said, ‘I may have to use something in my pack.’
Bolt pointed out the window at a man sitting on a platform having his hair cut, as if he were interested in the passing intermittent parade of Javanese humanity.
‘Not an option right now,’ he said with a false smile.
‘I would have used it back at the cinema, if Hoto had …’
Bolt didn’t respond.
‘You showed more courage than any man should,’ Burroughs said.
‘I thought it was over. I really did. I thought of my fiancée.’
‘Did you pray?’
‘Oh, yes, very hard; very, very hard.’ He chortled. ‘I don’t think the Lord’s Prayer has ever been said faster.’
Burroughs nodded.
‘It worked,’ he mumbled.
After a pause, Bolt said, ‘Can’t stop thinking about what Tait learned over his radio from the lighthouse operator. The lighthouse family was massacred.’
‘All of them?’ a shocked Burroughs asked.
Bolt nodded. ‘I wanted to ask Hoto but didn’t want to antagonise him. At first, I thought he was fair, but as we got to know him, especially remembering that “beheading” joke with me, I began to think he was capable of anything. He is a most indecent human being.’ He paused and patted Red Lead, who was purring. ‘That beautiful, innocent family, I want to know if …’ his voice trailed off.
Twenty miles out of Bandung, the train pulled into a 2-mile-long tunnel, plunging the carriage into darkness. Little Hitler and his men had not accounted for this, and he barked angry orders. When the train shunted out of the tunnel, the guards had their weapons once more aimed at their prisoners. Bolt nodded and smiled at them, as if to say, Relax, we won’t be trying to escape, or mutiny.
The sailors did half stand to see the valley below. The train appeared almost airborne on the rickety wooden track as its scaffolding swayed in the wind, defying gravity and all the time threatening to collapse, judging from the groans from the bamboo and wood.
An old woman with a food trolley banged her way into the carriage. She had sandwiches and pork buns. The guards bought them and coffee but Little Hitler was adamant that his prisoners could have none.
‘Heard the expression, I could die for some food?’ Grout said. The others allowed the comment fleeting smiles. They were all famished. An Indonesian couple in the next cubicle noticed their plight. They bought eight pork buns. When the train passed through another tunnel, they handed them out to the sailors, who hid them.
Each sailor in turn asked to go to the toilet and was accompanied by a guard, just in case they attempted to jump off. In the few minutes they were allowed alone each one devoured his pork bun. Bolt took Red Lead to the toilet, used it and urged her to follow. He was amazed to see her go to a corner, scrap around on the non-existent dirt, drop a deposit and urinate. He’d known dogs that did their business when walked, but not a cat, and especially not this one, who had always displayed an almost arrogant single-mindedness. For some innate reason she had complied. He would never know if it was through need or obedience. Bolt cleaned it up, washed his hands, took a good bite of his bun, wrapped it in toilet paper and returned to his seat, Red Lead snugly back in the pack.
The generous and brave Indonesian couple alighted at the next stop, and some of the sailors made sure to nod or mouth a thank you. The guards noticed but were distracted by Bolt offering them some of the sailors’ small supply of water, which they declined. The pint bottle was passed around. Bolt cupped his hands while water was dribbled into them. Red Lead lapped it up.
Little Hitler shouted at Grout, who was smiling at something said to him.
‘You shame!’ another Japanese guard yelled. ‘You should be dead. You shame!’
‘What’s he saying?’ Grout asked. ‘We are “sham”? What’s that?’
‘I think he is suggesting we have no shame because we didn’t die for our emperor, King George VI,’ Bolt explained, a slight tongue in cheek.
‘We don’t have an emperor, do we?’ Bright said, ‘I didn’t think—’
‘Yeah, we do,’ Grout interrupted. ‘He sits in a palace in London.’
‘Well strike me pink!’
‘That colour would suit you,’ Grout quipped.
Listening to this verbal ping-pong, the guard become angrier.
‘You shame!’ he shouted and stood.
‘You will die for your emperor?’ Grout asked Little Hitler.
‘Yes!’ the corporal spat. ‘I die for my country and emperor!’
‘Gee, I hope you get a chance to show us,’ Grout said, as if he was saying something respectful.
‘Hope I’m around to see that,’ Bright said with a half bow to the Japanese.
‘Yeah,’ Grout said under his breath, ‘we’ll be winning then.’
‘I’d break Little Hitler’s jaw,’ Bright muttered with a fake smile, ‘if I could find it. Have you ever seen an uglier person? He’s a big fella, but was in the back row when faces were given out.’
‘He’s like every cartoon in papers and magazines of someone from the yellow hordes coming to invade Australia,’ Farrow said.
‘They were old cartoon caricatures of Chinese, weren’t they?’
‘Whatever. Those teeth, mate!’ Farrow remarked. ‘Reckon they’d match the colour of his backbone. Look like the keys on my grandma’s ancient piano!’
The others all suppressed smiles, aware that the red-faced guard could not hear or understand what was being said, but that he could be goaded into using his rifle. Wallis shifted uneasily in his seat. He glared at Grout, then Bright and Farrow.
‘What?’ Grout said, staring back at Wallis.
Wallis grumbled something unintelligible but surely profane. Then everyone remained silent and turned their eyes to the passing kaleidoscope of green and beautiful mountainous country.
They passed languidly through two more tunnels and then several villages in alluvial lowlands. The heat caused all of the sailors to doze. Little Hitler and the guards relaxed their vigil. Bolt was able to sneak Red Lead some of the pork from his bun he’d wrapped in toilet paper. She devoured it with alacrity.
The train bumped into the Batavia’s (Jakarta’s) main station mid-afternoon in extreme heat. The sailors were made to wait with their guards inside the teak-dominated, barrel-vaulted design. They leaned against the brown ceramic walls. Wallis and Nadler lit cigarettes, and refused to offer their fellow sailors one.
‘Get your own,’ Wallis grunted at Grout. ‘You mad fucks will get us all shot!’