Show Me a Huia!

by Chris Barfoot

  He had woken up in a sweat. It must have been someone from the Pentagon who looked like him. It could not be his Chairman, the warm, genial man with whom he often discussed the Bible on the terrace overlooking the bay, the man whose friendship had encouraged him through these three long years, who had encouraged him to believe that he was following in the footsteps of the great Christian warriors of old.

  Perhaps it was the stress.

  Though the Chairman had allowed him the special privilege of the Bible discussions, he was tired, tired of the artificial light, tired of the cold, official relationships with his colleagues and the secrecy which surrounded every operation in the base, tired of the endless white limestone walls where he spent most of his working and sleeping hours. He was homesick for the sun and the fresh air of Iowa, for the wind and the flying clouds and the blue skies, for the yellow corn, the shady trees round the homesteads and the simple, big-hearted country people. Above all, he yearned for the laughter of his grandchildren.

  Yet why should he be nervous?

  The previous day, Tuesday January 25, had seen the launching of Operation Silence. It was the first electronic non-lethal weapon ever to be perfected. Today would be his day of triumph. Today would herald the end of war and the beginning of a new era of non-violence.

  The operation was his swan song. When it was successful, when the world had recognised the greatest invention of his life, he would return to Iowa, to his country, his home and his family.

  Sir Charles Hawthorne, Q.C., looked at his watch.

  Wednesday 26th January, 11:45 hours. Carefully he synchronised it with the digital clock on the control panel. It was good that he had his own room at this time. He needed to think.

  He had worked for years for this moment. It had begun with the acquittals of the mass murderers in Africa and the agony in the eyes of his father.

  Today was his day of triumph. The Brotherhood, up till now hidden in the corridors of power, were to emerge – the healers, the saviours of Christian civilisation.

  But the enemy had broken into the sanctuary and the whole project was endangered.

  He had anticipated this and changed the plan. Now he alone was standing against the tide of pagan reversion. He alone had the courage to do what was required. That was why he had to take the power to himself.

  His plan would be just a clean surgical act, a cut with the knife, which would remove from the body the cancer which had been growing for so long. A delicious sensation came on him as he thought of the operation, so quick, so efficient, and so final. He had named it Operation Hygiene.

  He moved to the glass panels which formed a kind of picture window on the outside wall, giving a 200 degree view. He glanced momentarily down to the valley a thousand feet below and saw about fifty jungle green figures moving slowly down the river flat towards the mouth of the gorge. Above them he saw the black shapes of the defence force helicopters hovering. He felt the sensation again as he thought of the kidnappers, the trampers and the Maori vermin trapped at the mouth of the gorge. After noon he would be able to watch them being eradicated by Colonel Peter and his men.

  His eyes narrowed as he looked out ahead. Range upon range unfolded before him, fading into the blue distance. Out to the north was the Bay of Plenty. To the west and beyond the ranges lay Rotorua. It was a helicopter flight of just two hours. Operation Hygiene would begin at 14:00 hours Wednesday 25th January.

  Highway attacks in the Mamakus by the so-called Arawa republic had achieved their aim. They had filled the non-Maori people of the district with fear. As a result the Brotherhood in Rotorua included a large part of the Pakeha population. He had made sure that these people had been warned in advance but he had not told them the nature of the attack.

  At 12:00 hours the new plan would come into operation. The secret store of canisters had been taken down to the launching floor. Not even the pilot knew what was in the canisters.

  His chief scientist believed that his brain-child, Operation Silence, had been a great success. But Stephen did not know that it had now become a warning sign so that members of The Brotherhood could evacuate from the target area of Operation Hygiene. Only a wimp like Stephen would believe that jamming the power station in Rotorua could bring a country like New Zealand to its knees.

  It was only force that the enemy understood. The evil that opposed them was so great that he had to hit them, hit them so hard that they would howl for mercy. If they did not give in, he would hit them again and again and again.

  He pushed a button.

  “Sir!”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Launching is at 12:00 hours?”

  “Yes sir.”

  He had a moment’s unsteadiness, and sat down, gripping the sides of his chair.

  He switched on the TV screen and there appeared a large lake and a city alongside with little wisps of steam drifting up from its southern outskirts.

  More vermin where the ones down below came from.

  A feeling of power seized him.. The mountain appeared to be coming alive under him like a powerful steed. He was riding the mountain, and he was totally in control. Through him alone evil was about to be conquered – and he was an instrument of God’s justice.

  Suddenly he remembered he had an appointment with Stephen Deveney at 12:00 hours in the operations room to see if there was any word from the Prime Minister. It was only going through the motions, pleasing Stephen.

  He had another thought about Stephen. He opened the drawer of his desk and put a revolver into his pocket.

  The long act was over.

  11:50 hours Wednesday 26th January. Nearly 24 hours after the launch of Operation Silence.

  Stephen was standing alone in the main control room looked anxiously at his watch. The reports coming in indicated that he had succeeded. The sleepers had done their job. The power station had stopped operating. He had predicted social and economic dislocation but he thrilled with expectancy at the inevitable outcome, the first example of a war without bloodshed.

  He had anticipated that twenty-four hours of chaos due to the power outage in Rotorua would be sufficient to achieve compliance. At 12:00 hours a call was expected to say that a new Christian-based government had taken over in an undertaking to restore the power and bring back public order. At the request of this new government he would send out the order to reverse the programmes.

  A grateful, genial Chairman was to be here to receive the call.

  In the excitement of his success his nightmare had been forgotten.

  He scanned the screens. It was unusually quiet. The Chairman should have been here, directing, giving orders.

  He caught a message on the intercom. It was the Chairman’s voice, but it was not addressed to him.

  “Are you ready?”

  He was suddenly alert. He listened to the next command. It was like a knife twisting deep in a wound.

  His heart pounded as he checked on the screens the launching pads for the helicopters and then the launching deck. A helicopter was loading up with small canisters. He called the floor operator keeping his voice as calm as he could.

  “Deveney here. What is in those canisters?”

  A voice sounded behind him. “Stephen, what are you doing?”

  He turned. Towering above him was the mountain of a man that could only be the Chairman. The voice was his, but not the face.

  “What is in those canisters?” he asked again.

  There was no smile, no dimple, no kindly wrinkles. Instead there was a leer on the face and he saw the eyes – the same eyes as those of the admiral on the flight deck which he had seen in his nightmare.

  At once he realised. He had always trusted his smiling and benevolent chairman. Now all was revealed in the icy cruelty of those eyes.

  “You said you would never use violence.”

  There was no need of any words. The answer was in the eyes.

  He glimpsed on the screen the helicopter leav
ing the side of the mountain.

  “You are too late, Stephen. The anthrax is already on the way. Rotorua is just the first.”

  “But you made me a promise.”

  “You are no longer chief scientist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your work is done.”

  Stephen found himself looking into a revolver. The eyes held no mercy.

  “We no longer need you.”

  At that moment Stephen saw his own death. Worse than that he saw the Vietnam war replayed. He saw the death of everything he had believed in, the destruction of all he worked for. He saw that he had been used and was now to be thrown aside.

  He fell towards the control panel as the first shot came. As the blood spurted from his shoulder and the other shots rang out, he reached out in one last desperate lunge.

  In his dying moment he rolled forward onto the thing he had grasped and the last thing he ever felt was the pain as it thrust against his stomach.

  CHAPTER 44

  “Rewi’s last stand, eh?” said Johnny as he looked at the fort desperately thrown up at the mouth of the Waitoa Gorge.

  Tane had known the spot, and Stan and Bill had bitter memories of their recapture further down the gorge on their desperate attempt to escape and warn people. At the entrance to the gorge there was a grassy flat and above the flat a low mound rose above a high bank. Around most of this hillock the river curved in a wide arc. On the landward side, on the slopes of the mound, they had built a high barricade. A row of the trees which covered the hillock were marked and used as uprights where they stood. The gaps between them were filled with fallen trees and branches, and the remaining standing trees provided a sparse cover. The two Arawa helicopters had been flown up and stood inside the fort so that they could be used for aerial defence.

  “Ake! Ake! Ake!” chanted the men with the tattoos as they made openings in the barricade for their 303s.

  David looked at his watch. It was just after 12 on Wednesday 26th January.

  “Look up there!” Kate called out. “It’s a helicopter and it’s heading away.”

  David put down the log he was carrying and followed Kate’s pointing. There it was, about a thousand feet up, not coming towards them but flying away from the top of the Hollow Mountain,.

  “It’s heading west,” said Tane.

  “It’s a Black Hawk,” said Tom.

  Stan joined them. His face was ashen. He looked towards Johnny and the possum hunters. “Have you told them?”

  “Johnny,” said David “We think that helicopter is carrying anthrax. It’s a biological disease. It’s heading…” his voice shook “…we believe towards Rotorua.”

  “Those blokes going on holiday?” said Dick.

  “The bastards!” said Johnny.

  Tom started to move towards his helicopter. “I’m going to give it a go,” he said.

  Johnny called out. “Not fast enough to catch up. And it would be suicide too.”

  “We must do something,” said Kate.

  Johnny was grim-faced. “Tom, we’ll both go up. Follow me and cover me, but if I get shot down, will you ring Katarina and ask her to phone this fulla.” He took Tom’s hand and wrote a name on it.

  High up above the Waitoa, Johnny did not follow the Black Hawk. Instead when he was high enough, he tried the radio, silently grateful that his system was not on National Grid supply. “Thank God you’re home. This is the most urgent call I’ve ever made. I want you to ring Sergeant Matthew Piriaka at the Rotorua Police Station. Don’t speak to anyone else. Now get a pencil and write this number down, please. When you’ve contacted him, please call me back.”

  He thought marrying Katarina was the best thing he had ever done. He had told her the full story, but she had been calm, just as if he had asked her to put something on the shopping list.

  “Johnny, I’ve made contact. He believes you. There’s only one person he can ring, and he’s ringing him now.”

  “Thanks, sweetie.”

  “Take care, Johnny.”

  At 12.15 Johnny and Tom were back at the fort and Johnny looked serious. “Matthew Piriaka says there’s a man who may be able to help us and he’s ringing him.”

  “Unless that helicopter is intercepted, they’ll all be dead in two hours,” cried Kate.

  “I’ve done all I can,” said Johnny. He and Tom went over to Dick Burton and the possum hunters and they all stood with their arms around each other. “We’ve all got wives and families there.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Kate.

  Johnny broke away and shouldered a tree trunk. “Let’s get this pa finished.”

  Tane looked out towards the Hollow Mountain.

  Long magical caves plunging deep into the heart of the earth, glistening white vaults from which hung slender stalactites, floors which grew stalagmites in many-shaped sculptured artistry, soaring caverns fan-vaulted like medieval cathedrals, underground cataracts echoing unseen in deep chasms. A miracle wrought over thousands of years by the primeval forces of water and rock, a mountain whose soaring cone and verdant forest cover concealed a pristine beauty, an incomparable taonga.

  Why did it now tower above him, dark, obscene, evil, mocking, defiling and terrorising the land from which it sprang?

  Ravished the taonga, broken the tapu, trodden down the mana and the wei of the mountains.

  Instead, the curse.

  Why had he come back?

  They were all going to die – and it was because of his discovery.

  Behind him in the fort he heard a full-throated haka beginning. It sounded unbelievably heroic.

  12.20 p.m.. As David looked out from the fort, despair clutched him. The anthrax was on its way. They could not stop it. No one would believe such an impossible story.

  Worst of all, it was his action in refusing to listen to Tane three years ago that had signed the death warrant of the people of Rotorua. But it was not just the people of Rotorua who would die. It was the people who were with him. Dick and Johnny Matiu and the possum hunters who had come to rescue them. Tane, his greatest friend. And Kate – she who had stood by him, encouraged him, and shared all the dangers with him.

  It was strange, but he felt especially bad about Kate.

  Why hadn’t he stuck to his research project? He would have achieved his ambition and become a professor. Now it was too late. His career was ruined, and so were Kate’s and Tane’s.

  Why was he thinking about careers anyhow? Not only his career, but his life was almost over.

  He looked over the shingle flat. A hundred metres away he saw the fringing trees alive with moving jungle green figures. He saw the flashes of the sun upon the metal of the guns which they carried. He wondered how many. Could be thirty or even fifty? He saw three Black Hawk helicopters hovering a few hundred yards back.

  Two kilometres away loomed the Hollow Mountain, the perfect, the impregnable terrorist base. Its sides, its high bluffs could never be assaulted. Inside was an invisible honeycomb of caverns with down below an underground exit to the coast and above an aerial exit with hangar and launch pads and decks.

  Kate approached him.

  “We haven’t a hope,” he said.

  She smiled. “That’s all right.”

  “Should I surrender?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

  He shuddered. “I suppose not.”

  “I should never have started on this thing.”

  She smiled again. “Yes, you should.”

  12:25 hours. The commander looked at his watch and stroked his ginger goatee beard impatiently.

  Colonel Peter Van Ruyter had been Director of Army Intelligence working under the Government in South Africa. Because of certain incidents he and his particular army squad had found it advisable to depart the country. Since then his expertise had found a ready market among the unstable dictatorships and the ravaging revolutionary armies of warring black African states, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, depending
on the money. At last his formidable reputation had attracted too much dangerous attention, and he had had to leave Africa altogether.

  He had no illusions about the kind of men under his command. They had been cooped up so long that they were likely to go berserk when they came out of the Mountain. They would especially enjoy dealing again with those goddam trampers who had been strung up over the Raukawa Falls and who had somehow managed to escape.

  “Calling Control Room, Colonel Peter here, awaiting orders.”

  There was no reply. He listened carefully. In the background he could hear an unusual whining noise rising and falling.

  He decided to go ahead on his own. The main reason for waiting was the Chairman’s insistence in seeing the action. He felt a pleasurable sensation when he remembered his words: “There are to be no prisoners.”

  Except the girl, of course. She was to be kept alive for a short while.

  David looked at his watch. It was a few minutes to 12.30. “I wonder why they’re waiting.”

  “Something’s happening now.”

  There was a sound like a birdcall and the figures on the edge of the forest began to mass on the edge of the bush. The sun flashed on the metal of their assault rifles. The helicopter gunships began to move forward in formation until they hovered just above the soldiers.

  “OK, chaps,” called Johnny. “Here they come.”

  Kate put her hand on David’s.

  “Just pray.”

  A jungle green line emerged from the forest onto the clearing in front of the barricade with their rifles at the ready. Behind it another line began to form up.

  “Save your shots until they come close,” said Johnny.

  Now came a roar. The black line of the gunships moved forwards above the jungle green line.

  “Hell!” said Johnny.

  Suddenly there was a sound like a thunderclap right on top of them. The whole fort seemed to shudder and the top of the barricade collapsed outward down the slope of the hillock.