Steve Cowan
Flinders Hotel
Freemantle Western Australia
Identification Required For Delivery
Coded Message Follows:
Something better than submarine patrol if you arrive Darwin soonest stop tell no military personnel Macarthur dislikes civilian action has no sense of humor stop We have taken over old quarantine station at East Arm now identified as Lugger Maintenance Section stop We offer fun and games and no brass End Message
Garnett
Services Reconnaissance Department
Darwin

Mission to Siberut

               Japanese bombers hit Australia.  In the first of over fifty raids nearly two hundred planes, staggered in waves, pummel the northern port of Darwin.  Throughout the Far East the armies of Nippon are surging forward, toward British India, Australia and New Zealand.  Only the forbidding jungles and soaring mountains of New Guinea form a barrier that allows Australia to mount the thinnest of defenses and the most desperate efforts to resupply it’s hard, jungle fighting, troops.  In the air, on the ground, and at sea the ANZACS fight bitterly for every mile, every yard.  If the vague northern front cannot hold a last ditch plan is made; retreat southward and allow the forbidding landscape of the north and the deserts of central Australia to slow their enemies … the Brisbane Line, (check this) a terrifying response to Japanese invasion!

Steve Cowan flies north from Port Darwin, Australia in an attempt to destroy a shipload of fighter planes that is being brokered to the Japanese.  A modern day pirate, Besi John Mataga, hijacked the freighter on it’s way from Germany to Japan with a sample shipment of fighter aircraft.  In a move of nearly insane recklessness, Mataga is offering to ransom the planes back to the Japanese, unless Cowan can stop the shipment.  Allied intelligence believes it knows where the ship is hidden and it’s race against time for the Japanese are both searching for their stolen shipment and negotiating to pay the ransom.

The ship is being held in Labuan Bajau Bay on the island of Siberut.  As the fate of Australia hangs in balance Cowan will try to sneak in along the south coast of Java, conduct his sabotage and escape before either Mataga or the Japanese discover his presence.  One thing in his favor; there is a nearly unknown inner harbor at Labuan Bajau for him to land his flying boat.  On the other hand the outer bay in known to be infested with sharks!