Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff

McCollom had already started to contemplate the challenge of walking the 240 kilometres to Hollandia.

      Now and then, in the inky black night, the jungle erupted with noises that sounded to the survivors like the yaps and barks of wild dogs.

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      The next morning, McCollom rose first and went to check on Eleanor Hanna and Laura Besley. As he knelt by the injured WACs, he was not surprised by what he found.

      ‘Eleanor’s dead,’ he said quietly.

      McCollom carefully wrapped her body in a tarpaulin. They had no tools for burial, and no energy to try, so he laid the remains of Eleanor Hanna at the base of a nearby tree.

      The silence was broken by Laura Besley, who had sat next to Eleanor on the plane and slept beside her all night: ‘I can’t stop shaking,’ she said.

      Hurt and in shock, chilled and wet, thirsty and hungry, sore and tired, Margaret and Decker realized that they were shaking, too.

      They couldn’t do anything about Eleanor, and there was little they could do for themselves or each other. McCollom resolved to ration their water, so they each took a few sips with a vitamin pill and a few Charms to tide them over. Their shaking continued.

      After their paltry breakfast, McCollom and Decker returned to the plane. Back in the tail section, they found two cots, another life raft, two more large yellow tarps and one small one, two compasses, a heavy cotton flying suit, more First-Aid kits, another signalling mirror, and seventeen cans of water, each one containing about one cup of liquid. Decker dug into a tool kit and brought out a roll of black electrical tape and a pair of pliers. They carried their bounty back to the ledge.

      Laura’s crying and shaking continued, though she didn’t complain of being in pain. McCollom gave her the flight suit for warmth and told her to lie on one of the cots. She was thirsty and wanted water, but each time she drank she would spit it up. She looked fine, and her burns seemed superficial. McCollom feared she had suffered internal injuries.

      Margaret took a closer look at her legs and discovered rings of burned skin, three to six inches wide, around each calf. To her surprise, they weren’t as painful as they looked. Her bandaged feet, however, hurt more with every step on the jungle floor. Margaret asked Laura if she could borrow her shoes while Laura rested. Laura gave them to her.

      In Margaret’s diary, written in secretarial shorthand on scraps of paper and cardboard from their supplies, she confessed that she did not want to return her friend’s shoes. Later, upon rewriting and expanding the diary, she wrote: ‘Secretly, I wondered if – without shoes – I would ever be able to keep up with the others. I would have to give Laura’s shoes back to her before we started down the mountain. I was frightened that I would never be able to make it through the jungle in feet covered only by half sox and a layer of cotton bandage.’

      The survivors had felt confident that Army search planes would be dispatched when the Gremlin Special failed to return to Sentani Airstrip as scheduled. That belief had been confirmed the night before when they heard a plane flying somewhere above them. But McCollom knew they were not visible in their current location. Their plane was a demolished, camouflage-painted speck in a dense swath of trees and vines. Still visible on the detached tail section was a five-pointed white star – the signature emblem of a United States military plane. But the leaves and fronds overhead made it impossible to see except from a short distance. From the air, the star was as inconsequential as a flower petal in the ocean.

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      Smoke from the wreckage might help to place the survivors’ location, but only if searchers spotted it before the flames died. Complicating matters was the fact that although Prossen’s flight plan listed his destination as Shangri-La, the Gremlin Special crashed into a mountain miles from the pass that led into the valley. Alone at the controls and consumed by trying to keep the plane aloft, Nicholson had not placed a Mayday call. In fact, no radio communication was exchanged between the plane and ground controllers at the base at any time after Prossen took off from the Sentani Airstrip.

      Decker’s wristwatch had fared better than his skull, so they knew how slowly time was passing. At about eleven o’clock on Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the crash, they heard the distinctive sound of an engine. McCollom grabbed the signalling mirror and worked it furiously to flash snatches of sunlight skyward. It was no use. The engine sound grew faint as the plane flew away.

      Still, McCollom considered it a hopeful sign. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured his companions. ‘I don’t know how, but they’ll get us out.’

      Mist settled over the mountain by mid-afternoon, and with it came steady rain. They talked about their families, and Margaret dreaded to think how her father would take the news that her plane had crashed and she was missing. Margaret told her diary she felt relieved that her mother had been spared the anxiety of learning that her eldest daughter was lost in Dutch New Guinea. It was the first time she had felt at peace with her mother’s death.

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      Margaret’s middle name was Julia – her mother’s first name. Margaret’s youngest sister believed that Margaret was their mother’s favourite. In a school essay, Margaret described her mother as ‘the sweetest, kindest and the most lovable little woman who ever lived. My father, my two younger sisters and I all lived at home, and she was the very hub of our existence. At fifty-five she was a tiny woman, with silvery white hair, pink and white skin, fine features – much prettier than any of her daughters.’

      In the essay, Margaret described how she’d learned from a doctor that her mother was seriously ill and would live no more than a year. ‘Onto my shoulders, so unaccustomed to responsibility, was thrown suddenly the problem of deciding how this crisis should be met. Should I tell my younger sisters, my father and my mother’s brothers and sisters? For days I debated the question pro and con, and finally decided to act in the way which would cause Mother the least unhappiness. I was sure she didn’t want to die – not when she was having so much fun for the first time in her life. I didn’t feel sure that I could rely on my sisters to act normally if they knew the truth, so I told only my father. To this day I don’t know whether I was right or wrong, but the decision was mine to make, and I did what I thought best.’

      Her mother died three months later.

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      At about three that afternoon, the four remaining survivors felt exhausted from their injuries, the lack of food, and the little sleep they had managed the night before. They set up the two camp beds.

      Margaret and Laura shared one, pulling a tarp over themselves and hugging tightly to keep from falling off. Margaret lay there, trying to sleep while at the same time listening for search planes overhead. Laura couldn’t stop tossing, so McCollom gave her morphine and tucked the tarp tightly around her. Margaret’s eyes burned from fatigue and she was eager to sleep, but even after the morphine Laura remained restless. Her squirms on the narrow camp bed kept Margaret awake.

      Hanging in the air was a rhetorical question Laura had posed to McCollom as he had tucked her in. Looking up from the camp bed, she had asked: ‘Everyone else is dead and we’re very lonely, aren’t we?’

      Eventually, Margaret drifted into a fitful sleep. When she awoke around midnight, she felt an unexpected stillness. Laura had stopped fidgeting. Now, pressed against Margaret on the camp bed, Laura seemed too quiet. Margaret put her hand on Laura’s chest. Nothing. She searched her friend’s neck for a pulse. Again nothing.

      Margaret screamed: ‘Please, McCollom, please come. Laura has died!’

      Roused from much-needed sleep, McCollom suspected that Margaret was overreacting. Clearly Laura was hurt, and her inability to keep down water was a bad sign. But he thought her injuries weren’t life-threatening. Decker was doubly sure, and he did not hide his annoyance.

      ‘Don’t be a dope, Hastings,’ Decker replied. ‘She’s all right.’

      McCollom walked to the cot and felt Laura’s hands. Doubt crept into his mind. He searched in vain for a pulse.