Territory Read Free Page B

slowly, there was no point in running. He’d check the wreckage, he thought numbly, then he must help the others, those who lay maimed and bleeding amongst the ruins. He prayed that Foong Shek Mei had not awakened from his drug-induced state, he prayed that the gods had been kind and that his father hadknown no terror. As he stepped over the threshold into the smouldering remains of the small room which had once served as his office he saw the valuables safe. It sat upright, still locked and unscarred, apparently impervious to the Japanese bombs. With a numb sense of irony, Foong Lee walked past the safe and commenced the search for his father’s remains amongst the destruction.
    At 10.40 a.m. the all-clear sounded. The Japanese attack force had departed as quickly as it had appeared, and Darwin lay devastated in its wake.
    Fire engines and ambulances screamed through the streets. Rescue work started immediately; there were those trapped beneath rubble, the wounded and the dying.
    Foong Lee went to the aid of a child. A little boy. He was badly burned and, as Foong Lee gently lifted him, the child’s skin came away in his hands. Mercifully, the boy was dead. Foong Lee was not a man given to the expression of emotion, but he fell to his knees and wept for the human race.
    It was an army Landrover, serving as an ambulance, which transported Aggie Marshall to the hospital. She regained consciousness as they lifted her from where she lay in the street and, as she did, she realised that she was not in pain, but she couldn’t seem to move. Her body was a dead weight and yet she felt extremely light-headed. A strange combination.
    Good heavens, she thought when she saw the firemen fighting the flames which were devouring the post office. It’s gone. The post office has gone. She wondered if all of her friends who worked there had gone too, surely nobody could have survived such destruction. She wanted to ask one of the two kind men who were so gently carrying her what had happened to her friends. She raised her head and opened her mouth to say something, but then she noticed the blood. All over the stretcher, all over her clothes. Such a lot of blood. Was it hers? And she seemed to have losther left shoe, she noticed as they laid her gently in the back of the Landrover. But then she seemed to have lost most of her left foot as well. She couldn’t really tell for the blood.
    Whilst emergency rescue work and firefighting continued there was no time to ponder what had happened, or even to mourn the dead. There was so much to do that it seemed the battle was still being fought and, as if to emphasise the point, the time bomb berthed at Main Jetty suddenly exploded.
    The Neptuna had been burning fiercely for close to an hour and, at 11.15, the heat aboard the 6,000-ton vessel reached such an intensity that the high explosives aboard finally ignited.
    Giant jets of flame propelled wreckage high into the sky like an erupting volcano, showering the harbour with smouldering debris. In the town the force of the explosion shattered the windows of those buildings left standing as the whole of Darwin trembled from the impact of the shock waves.
    The gigantic black cloud which followed the explosion billowed over the harbour and the township like a huge exclamation mark. Surely it indicated the end to the battle, to the unspeakable events of the morning. But it didn’t. Barely thirty minutes later a fresh horror presented itself.
    At 11.58, two hours after the initial assault on Darwin, fifty-four unescorted land-based bombers attacked the RAAF base four miles north-east of the town. The attack lasted twenty-five minutes and the base was virtually annihilated. The gateway to the north lay ruined. The Japanese had successfully destroyed all RAAF strength in the north-western area of Australia, known as the Top End. The vast land to the south was now more vulnerable than ever.



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    From his little writing desk in the