by John Marsden
"As long as we don't burn ourselves up," Fi said nervously.
"What do we actually want to destroy?" I asked. "I mean, we're not going to be able to do anything about those ships, are we?"
"Not the ones out there at anchor," Lee said. "But the ones at the jetties are possible."
"That's an oil tanker, Ellie," Homer said. "You're the petrol head, aren't you?"
"Mmm, love it. Just point me towards it and give me a box of matches."
I felt a fluttering in the stomach when I said that, though. I never felt comfortable with jokes about the things we'd done.
We sat there looking at it all. The bushfire idea was cute but I couldn't see much beyond it. A bushfire wouldn't hurt the ships, unless we fluked a few lucky-sparks landing on the tanker. As a distraction, it might get us into the place, but there was a good chance it wouldn't. And then we had to get away again afterwards. That was the most important thing, and might well be the hardest.
"Did Jock teach you about underwater bombs?" Homer asked Kevin. "Like, depth charges?"
"No, hey, it wasn't a uni degree, just a few quick lessons."
I heard a rumbling noise and looked up. A convoy was coming down the hill. There were two green Army trucks in the lead but they were followed by a motley-collection of removal vans, tabletops, semitrailers and petrol tankers. A lot of them had the names of local companies and even big national companies on them. Another Army truck brought up the rear.
We watched anxiously, to sec what the routines were for getting through the gate. They pulled up at the entrance and a group of soldiers, eight of them, spilled out of the nearest hut and went trotting along the sides of the convoy. They checked each truck that could have concealed' people, ignoring only the tabletops and tankers. It wasn't an incredibly rigorous search, but that wasn't much consolation to us because we had no idea of how we could get ourselves aboard the trucks in the first place. There was no need for them to search much if they knew that the convoy hadn't stopped anywhere.
When dusk moved in, we moved out. We went back into the hills to find somewhere to stay. And the way we played it that first night became a routine that we stuck to for the next six days. We camped in a different place each night, for security, and posted a sentry, but by day we spied on Cobbler's Bay and talked about tactics. I have to admit, though, that the main reason we stayed, the secret reason, was nothing to do with attacking the enemy. It was because Lee, without a word to anyone, went and broke into a holiday shack and came'back with an armful of fishing gear.
Well, did that set us off. The little collection of lines, hooks and sinkers gave us the best time we'd had since the invasion. It was like we had ourselves a beach holiday. We could hardly bear to wait for evening so we could start our fishing trips. We fished the mouths of the rivers, soon settling on one place that was both pretty and reliable—and safe. And the fish practically ripped the lines out of our hands. For bait we picked up worms, witchetty grubs and beetles during the day, and with them we caught Fathead, bream, mullet and a few other varieties we didn't recognise. I suppose with no one having fished the area for so many months it was easy pickings.
The fishing itself was fun but the major thing was that we suddenly had plenty of food again and it was a change from the monotony that we'd put up with for so very long. Our food supplies had been getting horribly low. We all ate a lot less these days, and we were all nicely slim except Robyn, who was too slim, but now she started to put on weight again. At around two or three o'clock each morning we lit a little fire and either fried our catch straight away or waited with mouths watering for the flames to burn down to coals, so we could bake the fish in them. After months of being starved for fresh meat it seemed that now we couldn't get enough. We never got sick of it. I'll never forget that juicy white fresh fish flesh, the way it fell away from the bones, the way the hot moist flavour gave me new strength and energy.
If you are what you eat, then after a few days of that diet I could have swum the Pacific Ocean.
We always cooked extra, so we could have some cold during the day.
We'd been living like this for four days before We found the weakness in the Cobbler's Bay security arrangements. Homer always said that there'd be a weakness somewhere; we just had to be patient. He was right, although it was only by chance that We picked it up. We were looking for a new fishing spot and at about ten o'clock at night we crossed the road to the bay. Robyn went ahead to check that the road was clear. Instead of calling us on, as We expected, she came slithering back, looking alarmed. "There's a truck at the corner," she hissed.
"Doing what?"
"Nothing. And it's got no lights. It's just sitting there."
We all crept up to have a look. We could see it easily, silhouetted against the moonlight. It was a van of some kind, about a four-tonner. After being witnesses to a horrible massacre when Harvey's Heroes had been sucked into attacking an abandoned tank, we weren't about to go rushing up to this thing to investigate. So we left it there and went to another river for our fishing.
At dawn, though, Homer and I sneaked back to check it again. It was still there, looking cold and lonely. We decided to stay for a while and sec what happened and sure enough, at 9.30, we heard the grinding of gears as another vehicle climbed the hill towards us. We shrank back into the bushes as this one went past. It was a tow truck, with a couple of soldiers on the back riding shotgun. We wriggled into a better position to watch as the tow truck reached the van and began a three-point turn that ended up as a six-point turn in the narrow road.
When it was in position in front of the van everybody got out: the two soldiers, and two men from the cab who were dressed in oil-stained overalls and carried little bags. They looked like mechanics always look: I think it's the'way mechanics slouch that gives them their special look. The soldiers went for a bit of a prowl, walking along the road one way then the other, while the mechanics started poking round in the engine of the van.
But the interesting thing was that nobody thought to look in the back section.
After half an hour, when the mechanics had tried and failed many times to start the van, they hooked it up to the tow truck. A soldier got in the driver's seat to steer, and away they went.
They still hadn't looked in the back.
We couldn't wait to get back to Fi and Kevin, who were spying on the base, to find out what had happened when the tow truck got to Cobbler's Bay.
Ten
"Yeah, they just went straight through," Kevin said.
"You sure?" I asked.
"No, I was asleep; what do you bloody think?" Kevin lost his temper, as he did quite often these days. He'd been through a lot, I kept reminding myself. So had we, but maybe what he'd been through was worse than what we'd been through. Or maybe he couldn't cope with it as well as we did. That was'no shame, everyone's different; it was just hard to imagine anyone coping with it worse than me, because I don't think I coped with it well at all.
"They went straight through," Fi said quietly. "When they got to the barrier they gave a wave to the bloke on duty and he lifted it. They towed it to that big shed on the right; the one with the petrol thingies outside. We think that's a maintenance shed for vehicles, and the one next to it's a generator shed."
"So that's a way we might be able to get in," Homer said thoughtfully.
"We can't wait six months for a truck to conveniently break down," Lee said.
"We could maybe make one break down," Robyn said. "Couldn't we?"
"How?"
Three of us asked that question at once and no one had an answer. A flat tyre wouldn't be enough and it was hard to think of any other possibility. Still, it was maybe a step forward. i' took Kevin out to look for explosives. We might have to make a proper bomb this time and, according to lock, we'd be able to find plenty of ingredients in sheds and farm buildings. I hoped he was right and I hoped he was wrong. If he were wrong, we might then have an excuse to call this crazy thing off. It seemed to be b
uilding up so quickly into an enormous operation. I'm sure heroes don't go around thinking: Hope I can find a good excuse to get out of this. I wanted to be a hero but never seemed to quite get it right.
We wandered out into a different part of the country. There weren't so many colonists in this area yet; there were still a number of empty houses. Only the best places were occupied. It was easy to tell which were in use, and to give them a wide berth. The good thing was that a lot of clearing had been going on right through this district before the war, and that made it a certainty that there'd been a lot of blasting. Cockles love messing with explosives, and any big stubborn tree stump was a good enough excuse. It's amazing that there aren't thousands of farmers walking round with only half their fingers, but I never heard of anyone blowing himself up. Dad had a few goes with gelignite when I was younger but Mum talked him into giving it a miss. I wished now that he'd taught me how to use it, and then, remembering that I was meant to be looking for excuses, was glad he hadn't.
We had a mixed morning. The first farm had nothing, the second had a dozen bags of ammonium nitrate—nearly half a tonne—and a couple of 44's of diesel. We decided to leave it all there while We checked other places. The third farm had been thoroughly cleaned out. The fourth was a big place but old and run down. We went straight to the sheds, as we had everywhere else. To my disgust, we walked straight into'a miniature battlefield. There were three skeletons in the machinery shed, their clothes still intact, except where ripped by bullets. There wasn't much left of the bodies, mainly bones.
There seemed to have been a full-scale shooting war. We saw many empty shells on the floor and there was damage all around the big dark shed: holes in the walls, shelves shattered by bullets, even the steel plates on the old tractor and header had holes in them. It was frightening to see how much damage had been done. One person had been hiding behind the header, one had been behind a heavy wooden workbench, but the other body was out in the open.
I cried for a bit. I seemed to be doing more of that these days. And there's one thing about Kevin: when a girl's upset, really upset, you see Kevin at his best. lie-was shaken by the sight of the bodies, of course, but when he saw me in tears he managed to hold himself together and give me a bit of TLC. We'd always looked after each other fairly well I suppose, even at the worst times.
"Come on, Ellie," he said, giving me a hug. "You've seen worse than this. You'll be right."
"Yeah, I know," I said, snaffling. "But you never get used to it. These poor people, just trying to look after their land."
"Yeah, it's a rotten business."
"And no one to bury them or have a funeral service or anything."
"Well, when the war's over maybe that sort of thing'll get done."
I didn't answer that, just sniffled for a bit longer. Finally I disentangled myself and said, "Come on, let's go. There's nothing we can do here and it's giving me the willies."
"No, wait," Kevin said. "This is the perfect sort of place for what we want. Let's check it out."
I was reluctant but he insisted. Occasionally Kevin had these bursts of strength. We did a quick search of the machinery shed but found nothing and with some relief went to the other buildings. We went past some concrete runs that had been built quite recently and fenced off for working dogs. We ignored the skeletons of the poor desperate dogs who'd died in them and, fifty metres further along, entered an old dark hut. And there we found what Kevin had been looking for.
"Wowee," he said. "Look at this!" He had a wooden box, about the same size as a box of shotgun cartridges, and he was holding a small shiny aluminium tube, maybe three centimetres long and five or six millimetres in diameter. It was blocked at one end but open at the other.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Plain detonator. Told you we'd find some. Look, there are dozens of them."
I picked one up and handled it curiously. It had DANGER and EXPLOSIVE written on its side, but it seemed harmless enough.
"Is this all we need?" I asked.
"Well, the ammonium nitrate and the diesel, obviously. But they're not a problem. And the fuse."
"We could make our own."
"That's what you think. Anyway, they're sure to have some here. They should have everything stored in separate sheds, but most farmers don't bother. They'll have safety fuse somewhere, which'll be better than anything we'd make. Look, here we go."
He pulled down a roll of gray-white cord, about the size of the cord in my board shorts, but with black tarry-looking stuff running through it.
"Is that it?"
"Yeah, I'd say so. It's gunpowder wrapped in a waterproof cover, more or less. We shove this in the detonator, then we'll get some pipe, to make our miniature bomb. There'll be some in that machinery shed. And a hacksaw, to cut it."
By the time we left that farm of death we had enough material, as far as I could tell, to avenge the people who'd died there. Not only did we have the pipe and the detonators and the fuse, we'd also found another six bags of ammonium nitrate. That was three-quarters of a tonne altogether. If we could find a way to blow the lot up in Cobbler's Bay then, according to Kevin, we would cause a tidal wave.
It still seemed a dream to me, though. I couldn't imagine any way we could actually do it. But excited by everything we'd seen that day—even the bodies, in a sick'sort of way —Kevin and I talked flat out as we walked back to join the others.
"Look," I said finally, "suppose we got a truck loaded with this stuff onto the jetty and set it off. How would that be?"
"I'm not sure. Obviously it'd be a huge bang, probably enough to cause a lot of damage in ships that were close enough to it, and wreck the jetty. But if you could get that truck on board the ship, down in the bowels of the ship then, because it was in an enclosed space, you'd blow the ship to smithereens."
"Seriously? The whole ship?"
"Yeah! What do you think? This Texas Bay thing, you don't realise: that one ship blew up the whole harbour, the town, and I think all the other ships that were in port with it. This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know."
"I'm starting to realise that."
The makings of a plan were coming together, but with a few vital flaws. I ran through the way I saw it so far, to Kevin: "OK, a truck breaks down. It's there all night and we load it with three-quarters of a tonne of anfo. One or two of us hide in it. That should be cool, because if it's a big enough truck they wouldn't notice a bit of extra weight. Besides, mechanics probably wouldn't know if the truck's meant to be empty or full. They tow the truck into the harbour. A bushfire starts. Thank God it's been dry again lately. The fire roars down the hill and distracts everybody. We get the truck onto a ship, light the fuse and get out. Bang! End of story, we're legends, and we sell the movie rights the moment the war is over."
Kevin didn't say anything. Maybe it was still sounding like a daydream to him, too.
"Did you spot the flaws?" I asked him.
He laughed. "Just a few. How do we make the truck break down? How do we get the truck onto the ship? How do we escape afterwards? That's three for starters."
"I think we can at least get away afterwards. If Homer and I go in with the truck, well, we're both good swimmers. We could dive into Cobbler's Bay and swim right to the other side."
Kevin brightened up a bit. I knew why, of course: for the first time he'd had a glimpse of hope, the hope that he wouldn't be one of the people doing the dangerous stuff. I wished I had the same hope, but I'm a very logical person. Swimming was our best chance, and only-two of us could swim big distances.
When we got back to the others we found, to my secret fear, that there might be a solution to the second problem, too. Two convoys of container trucks had gone through during the day'and the containers had been loaded straight into the hold of a big cargo ship that had come in that morning. It was now tied up at a jetty, next to the oil tanker.
"I'm sure there'll be more convoys," Homer said excitedly. "The ship swallowed up those two lots
like an elephant eating peanuts. And an oil tanker next to it. Oh Ellie, doesn't it make your mouth water?"
"It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth."
"But how the hell do we make a truck break down?" Lee worried aloud. He was pacing around, in and out of the trees. We were in quite thick bush, where we could just see splinters of Cobbler's Bay. Robyn was lying on her back eating stale jellybeans that she'd found in a holiday house, Fi was gazing out at the port, Homer was sitting against a tree looking at Lee, and Kevin and I were trying to concentrate on a game of racing patience.
"What can go wrong with a motor vehicle?" Lee asked a small friendly gum tree. "Flat tyre, radiator boiling, run out of oil, fuel problems, battery, ignition, alternator, carbie, brakes. Oh, it's too frustrating. Why don't the rest of von try to think of something instead of leaving it all to me?"
This was so unfair no one even bothered to answer.
Kevin played a two onto a four and gave a quick furtive glance, to see if I'd noticed. I noticed all right. That tiny little action made me furious. I threw my entire pack into a blackberry bush, screamed a string of swear words at Kevin, kicked his cards over and stormed away through the trees.
Guess we were all pretty brittle.
Eleven
We started the night with our own little convoy, and a very odd convoy it was. Though we still seemed a long way off a workable plan, we had decided to at least take the next step.
"Every journey begins with a single step," Lee said gravely, trying to'sound like an ancient philosopher.
This journey began with a roll actually. We wanted to shift the ammonium nitrate and the diesel and hide it in the bush near the road, so if anything happened we'd be in a position to swing into action. So we rounded up a mob of wheelbarrows, one for each of us, to collect the bags. It took a while to get six barrows and then a while longer to find a bicycle pump, as all the tyres were flat. Then the hard work began. We had to get not just the bags that Kevin and I had found but also another cache that Robyn and Lee found while looking for wheelbarrows. This was twenty bags, another three-quarters of a tonne, give or take. Each bag was forty kilos. We sure had the makings now.
