I’d seen the flash from the sniper’s rifle when he’d fired and I retaliated, my bullet finding its mark in the Japanese soldier’s forehead. He toppled headfirst from the canopy into the jungle.
Craters was hurt bad and as I carried him back to base, I willed him to live, trying desperately to somehow pass some of my life force into him and keep him alive. The medics rushed him to surgery where the doctors operated to remove the bullet from his punctured lung. It was then they found he had TB and decided to send him home.
I dug our gold up and put it in Craters’ kit bag just before he was to ship out. While he’d been in hospital, we’d worked it out. By going home early he’d have the jump on the rest of us and when I made it back to Australia, our building business would be up and running.
A last-minute swap of roster duty enabled me to race down to the wharf to see him off. He didn’t expect me there and there was so much racket, he couldn’t hear me yelling out to him but I watched him shuffle up the gangplank, our gold safe in his kit bag.
That night, March 3rd, 1944, at twenty-two hundred hours, off the coast of Australia, the hospital ship taking Craters home was torpedoed. There were no survivors.
