Chameleon

Joe Vukovic of 28 (Maori) Battalion is a deeply scarred casualty of WW2, but all you can see of it from the outside is a badly-broken nose. Inside, though, the experience of watching his pregnant fiancée being shot by SS partisan-hunters has left him in an agony of guilt and hatred that shapes the rest of his war, and defines his peace in post-war New Zealand. 

Driven by those feelings and haunted by memories, ‘an ordinary Joe’ reinvents himself  to overcome the postwar obstacles of immense distance, closed doors, vested interests, a series of jobs and a doomed marriage, while he hunts the sadist who put a bullet through each of his fiancée’s knees and a third through her head. 

That hunt leads him to a reclusive religious school in remote Northland, and the journey requires him to perform the impossible, think the unthinkable and recognise that the very last thing in the world he’d believe, is right in front of him. However—not only do old soldiers never die, the toughest even refuse to fade away.

Meanwhile, Joe’s interest in these things hasn’t gone unnoticed in faraway Europe . . 

“ Operation Chamäleon is an undertaking of the most desperate sort imaginable, but it is also the future itself, and will ensure the survival of all we hold dear.”

Conversation in the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, late 1944.