Darkness Be My Friend by John Marsden Read Free Book Online Page B

you recovered, getting hit in the face by a branch. Then Iain, behind me, would lose his footing and crash into
my back. It was like babysitting Kevin's brothers. You felt you were in a wrestling match half the time. There was no doubt about those Kiwis, though—Colonel Finley told us they'd been handpicked for their initiative and guts, and they did handle it well. Lots of jokes and stuff.

    I handled it OK, I guess, but I was pretty tired. I didn't have much to say.
    It was just before ten o'clock—2200 hours—that we "landed safe and sound, at the bottom of that terrible descent."
    Or, to put it another way, we found ourselves home again, in the depths of Hell.

Five
    I don't know what the others did that first night. I think they all went to bed. I know Fi and I did. We put up our tent—pretty roughly—crawled into it and stayed there.
    One good thing about having professional soldiers around was that we didn't have to do sentry duty. That was such a bonus. In the past we'd dragged ourselves out of warm beds and sleeping bags at all hours of the day and night, in wet weather and dry, moaning and whingeing and swearing and hating it. So far though no one had mentioned that we should do anything so uncomfortable and unpleasant. Fi and I were giggling about it that first night. We agreed that volunteering
would be silly: after all, these guys were paid to do it. And they were so gung-ho, so fired up. Half of them had never been on active service before, and the rest of them hadn't done much. It would be a pity to cut them out of their fun.

    "What do you think Iain wants to do in Wirrawee?" Fi whispered.
    We hadn't been allowed to know any details of their actual mission. Colonel Finley explained it was for everyone's protection: if we were caught, the less we knew the better. The four words "if we were caught" had me shaking and shivering when he said them. In my sessions with Andrea the main things I'd talked about, over and over, were the time in Stratton Prison and what happened to Robyn. Talking about them helped, but gradually I'd come to accept that these terrible things were part of me forever; all I could do was find ways to cope with them. At least Colonel Finley had given us some guarantees that we should be OK. Iain had strict instructions. We were only to be used as guides we were not allowed battles or "war- like activities" (Colonel Finley had shown me the first part of Iain's written orders) and we should only have to make one trip to Wirrawee to show them the way around.
    It was obvious though that they would be aiming for the airfield. Nothing else in Wirrawee was worth attacking, or nothing that we knew of anyway. Murray's Eats, the caravan that sold hot dogs in the supermarket carpark on Saturday nights, wasn't much of a target, and I think we'd made such a mess of Turner Street that it would be cactus for a long time yet.
    We discussed all this. But we also knew that none of it would get us close to our families. The New Zealanders' plans wouldn't include a visit to the Showgrounds, where we believed most of the prisoners were still kept. Showbags and dolls on long cane sticks weren't on the Kiwi shopping lists. The last information Colonel Finley had given us, two weeks earlier, before we even knew about this trip, was that people were still being released on work parties as the countryside became more secure, and as the system of hostages improved.

    I was just drifting off to sleep when Fi said something that had me feeling like spiders were crawling all over me. I sat up in my bag.
    "What did you say?"
    "I said we could sneak out of here and look for them if the Kiwis go off on their own."
    "Fi! We can't! Oh my God, do you think we should?"
    "Well, it's the only way we'll get to see them. There's no way Iain's going to let us look for them."
    "But you were telling me back in New Zealand that Colonel Finley was going to arrange everything."
    "Hmm, yes," Fi said. "But you know,