Terra Australis Templar (A Peter Wilks Archaeological Mystery)

by Gregory House

  “Well I can’t be sure, but I think this one is a marsupial lion.”

  “I thought you Aussies only had tigers – look its got stripes.”

  “Yeah, well that’s a common mistake. We had them in Tassie right up until the nineteen twenties.”

  “Really? I though they all died out in the Ice Age or something.”

  “Ahh no.” Lampie gave what could be interpreted as a nervous cough. “I reckon we’d better talk about that later. Anyway I’ve seen some drawings very like this, modern sketches of a fleshed out skeleton they found in the Nullabor. They’re not sure whether this guy hunted in the day or night. Since it has stripes then, yeah I don’t know Pete.”

  Lampie’s explanation tapered off into silence as she continued her inspection of the wall. Peter tagged along. Mostly they didn’t say anything, as more in a series of figures were revealed. Peter had only had the introductory lecture from Wally but that was enough to twig that these were all Bradshaw style figures and images, and with no overlaying Wandijani. He pulled out his camera and began snapping at the different sets of rock art. Some were hunting scenes, a couple of dancing or ceremony, two had some kind of boat and most of the rest consisted of different animals. Some he thought were kangaroos, others less easy to identify.

  “Lampie, have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  His companion continued to stare at the profusion of rock art in stupefied amazement and at his question just shook her head.

  “Do you think Wally would be interested in this?”

  Now he got a nod, then Lampie turned to him eyes wide and lit up in a weird glow. It must be the refracted torch light. “Wally’ll go freckin’ ape shit over this! I don’t think it’s seen daylight for thousands of years. Pete, this is the freckin’ mother load of Bradshaws!”

  Peter slowly turned around giving the cavern another inspection. His torch didn’t do that much to punch through the darkness, but it did hint at hundreds of square feet of images. Yes Lampie could be right there. For someone with Wally’s field of interest, this could be the Tutankhamon of Gwion gwion art. “So do you want to tell him or shall I?”

  “I reckon Pete, we both should. First though, we’ve gotta find this castle of yours. The daylight’s awastin’. Let’s get a move on.”

  Peter cast a look back as they scrambled out of the hole. The Kimberleys seemed to hold so many secrets. If this was just one buried gallery, how many more lay waiting? He shook his head. That was another mystery for a possible future, that’s if they survived their current one, which wasn’t going to happen if they kept on being sidetracked. Peter shifted his pack and followed Lampie, though this time he was more cautious in his footing. Discovering another cavern by accident may grant fame but didn’t guarantee survival.

  Chapter 32 There She Blows!

  Lampie rested her elbows on the tree branch and brought the field glasses up to her eyes. The vessel coming up the channel sprang into sudden clarity, its gleaming white sides a dramatic contrast to the blue water below. A very pretty sight in the late afternoon light, the sky was tinged with the hint of the fiery orange colour to come.

  “Is that it?” The concerned voice of Pete drifted up from the base of the tree.

  “Yeah I reckon it is. There can’t be two cruisers like that in these waters, even counting the tourists.” She was pissed off, so much for the short cut they’d tried.

  “Flip, flipper and flipping hell. How did they manage to get here so fast? I thought you said they’d have to spend a week or more checking all the islands.” Peter sounded petulantly dismayed at the turn of events. Maybe he didn’t appreciate his stroll through the countryside, as much as he reckoned. Lampie left off watching the cruiser and gave her companion a speculative frown. She was still certain he was holding back on her. She didn’t know what it was, but the nagging worry was there always at the back of her mind. Thoughts of treachery were becoming a common occurrence here in the Kimberleys, especially now when impossible coincidences happened.

  “I did. Even discussed the islands option with Sid before Wallace arrived.” Suspicion prompted the next question. “You sure you didn’t tell Sid about this location idea or the crusaders?”

  “Oh by my sainted aunt, never! No, I even erased as much of my notes as possible as a precaution. All he’s got is whatever he wrote or poached which no doubt he gave to Wallace on the cruiser, and the journal of course.” Pete sounded pretty sure on that.

  Thinking back on the interplay between Sid and Pete at the dig, she could see what had prompted the English academic’s caution. Yeah, Sid had been angling for it all. He must have known or found a shit load of other information to back his choice of site and he wasn’t in a sharing mood even with her. After all the years they’d worked together that betrayal hurt. The more immediate problem was their pursers. How the hell was Wallace a step behind them or even almost level? This was damn strange. Yeah, Wallace shouldn’t have been here so fast. They’d only been at Camden Harbour a day and that cruiser had arrived off the point. Then she’d considered it a coincidence. After all there were only so many fresh water and harbour sites along the coast. A simple matter of elimination would cut out a few. Lampie felt a sudden affinity with the whole Moby Dick theme, being tracked down by a relentless Captain Ahab, ready to sacrifice all for revenge. All that was needed was for the cry to go out ‘There she blows!’ and they’d launch the whaling boats with the harpooners in the bow. Lampie gave a shudder. That was too close an analogy.

  “Pete that gestee the priest wrote?”

  “Gesta, in the manner of crusading chronicle of great deeds.”

  “Yeah that. How long did it take you to translate it?”

  “Four solid hours to get the gist of it. I still skimmed most of it as I translated. I’m a bit rusty on the dialect and it’s nothing like complete. Why?”

  “How many historians would be able to translate it?”

  “In Australia, probably a couple of dozen at the maximum. Overseas it goes up to hundreds.”

  “Okay, how fast?”

  “Well, the best could do it in a few days but that depends on what sort of incentive Wallace offers. Even with the internet, turn around time would be close to a week once it had been checked for errors.”

  Lampie frowned, going over the timings. A night to find Wally, a morning planning then Augustus Island and Camden Harbour, another day. The stroll through the bush was three days to here. Yeah well that was close, too close. Even in the limited time she’d spent in Wallace’s company, she’d twigged that he believed in the mantra of planning and didn’t leave anything to chance. The offer to her was an immediate example. If he was here, it wasn’t chance. Another nastier suspicion tweaked, one she preferred not to think about. So far they had been working from the official version of events, as if all they had seen was open and above board. Well bloody hell, it wasn’t and the reason this had all got so messy was Sid! Pete was assuming Wallace only got the info when Sid handed over the lacquer box for safe keeping. Since the ‘Road to Damascus’ event in Sid’s tent, she’d been thinking over all of her work with her former employer. Bloody freckin’ hell, she’d been naive and too trusting, all those nights Sid reckoned he’d been slaving a way on the research. Yeah, sure and probably sending it straight to Wallace. No wonder he was so cocky when Mr Smooth and Sophisticated turned up. That being so, Pete was off by a few days. Wallace was ahead of them in the translating department, which meant that the castle was around here!

  “Pete, y’ sure there wasn’t a map?” It was a hopeful question

  “Lampie, he was a flipping priest not a cartographer! Anyway any hint of a map and Sid would have been there already.”

  Lampie ground her teeth again. Yeah Pete was right there, and now they still had no specific idea of where to go.

  The cruiser cleared the channel and swung north east towards the narrower St Patrick’s Island and Lampie quietly cursed. Her mother may even have been strangely impressed since i
t was in flawless French. Any doubt about the identity vanished. Not only did the vessel lack the usual charter lettering like Odyssey Traveller along the side but her RIB was lashed to the rear footboard. What was this? Did Wallace employ bloodhounds? It didn’t matter – that was her boat and she wanted it back! The cruiser dropped anchor in the channel between St Patrick Island and the northern arm of the basin. It took the crew no more than fifteen minutes to settle the vessel at its new mooring, before launching two tinnies and her inflatable. The goons were on the move. The smaller boats made a couple of spins around the cruiser, no doubt checking that the outboards worked, before pulling in to the stern footboard. Another of Wallace’s crew came out from the half cabin at the rear. He had something in his hands. Lampie focused the field glasses on the scene, intrigued about the unheard conversation. There was a great deal of waving of arms at almost a kilometre distance. What it was all about was anybodies guess. Whatever, it ended after five minutes and all the smaller crafts headed off.

  Straight for them! Bloody whalers!

  “Ahh Lampie, why are those boats coming this way?”

  What a bloody obvious statement! Yeah, the three of them were spread out in a line a hundred metres apart but still aimed directly for their part of the ridge. This was damned infuriating. She swung down from the tree and dropped beside a worried Wilks. Luckily he wasn’t daft enough to move and stayed prone behind the shelter of a Kimberley rose.

  “I don’t know Pete. Maybe they want to invite us over for a spot of tiffin! Let’s get moving!” Keeping crouched, they moved to the south along the edge of the ridge, until they came to one of the weathered crevices that cut into the plateau. Twenty minutes later and further back from the edge of the basin, Lampie halted the retreat. She squatted in the cover of a low bush. Peter slumped down beside a bleached white rocky outcrop, resting his back in the shade. He looked done in, drawing in long steady breaths in the last of the day’s heat. Lampie however was getting extremely shat off with this running around. Damned if she was going to be some bastard’s White Whale!

  “Look, this is bloody ridiculous. This is the third freakin’ time those arsewipes have tracked us down. Once I’ll allow as luck, but three times, no way. There’s no one around here for miles, not even a lost Japanese tourist! How do they do it?”

  “Ahh Lampie, Japanese tourists, here?” Peter left off his panting and now assumed that familiar expression of confusion, the one that looked like he’d been hit him over the head with a large fish. It had been pretty common this last week.

  “What? Oh yeah. A couple of my mates in Broome reckon you can’t go anywhere inland without tripping over one. They’re all over the Nullabor. Apparently they land at Perth, hire a moped and shoot off into the bush, with a couple of litres of water and a mobile phone, Elaine reckons it’s like lemmings.”

  Peter shook his head in disagreement. “Apparently, the lemmings and cliff scenario is a common misconception. They don’t commit suicide by jumping off cliffs – it’s just the normal losses of any migrating animal when they travel in large herds.”

  Yeah no doubt about it, Pete was back to normal. “Thanks for that fascinating nature lecture Pete. I was so hanging out for lemming facts!” Lampie gave Peter yet another speculative review. Yeah he may be a bit of twit sometimes but so far he hadn’t made any mistakes to equal that of the proverbial tourist, except for maybe the wombat incident yesterday evening or the goanna the afternoon before.

  The Englishman threw down his water bottle and thumped his head with an open hand. “Oh no, I don’t believe it. I’m such an idiot!”

  “Really, y’ don’t say?” Lampie straightened up, smiling in anticipation of the show. A couple of weeks with Pete were enough to get a gist of his peculiar habits. Like this example, in the midst of conversation, he suddenly burst out with either a possible insight or another lemming dissertation. It was always hard to tell which it was going to be. Real amusing though!

  “Enemy of the State! Have you seen it? By my sainted aunt, my flipping sainted aunt, it s the answer! It has to be. There’s no other possible explanation!”

  Peter had leapt to his feet and grabbed her shoulders. Lampie patted his hands and unclasped them from her jacket. Nodding in agreement, she pushed him out of the late afternoon light into the spreading pools of cooler shade. Pete was a Pommie academic, so automatically his mental state was suspect. Just look at Newton – he was more than a few cards short of a deck. And you know what they say about genius? It’s only a short nudge away from walking around with your undies on your head and no trousers, telling people you’re pregnant with an elephant.

  “Yeah, sure Pete. How about you have a rest in the shade for a mo’?” This was just her best week – Sid losses the plot, her beautiful ketch is sabotaged, they wander around in the bush hunted by goons and now Peter goes completely ‘Mad Dog and Englishman’, raving about some freakin’ film and trippin’ out like Sid on bad mushrooms! No she was wrong, this was worse. Pete had lost the plot and was sprinting past the finish post for the crazy tourist award. It must have been the heat. That’s why the old fashioned Pommies wore those funny sun hats. Great, now she had to deal with a raving loony Brit, as well as her other problems. When it’s not a drought, it’s a flood!

  “No, Lampie don’t you get it?” Peter kept on jumping up and madly slapping his pockets, pulling out all sorts of junk. Finally he flicked open his phone and then snapped it in half and threw the rest on the ground, jumping up and down on it like a demented roo.

  “The phones in the film! Gene Hackman got Will Smith to ditch his phone because the rogue NSA chaps were tracking him with it!”

  “What? No they can’t do that can they? It’s only in the films!” Peter however, wasn’t listening. Instead he was rummaging in his pack and pulled out his laptop. All the time he was muttering something about a bloke called Freddie and he should have bloody well believed him all the way.

  “Look Lampie, back at Skaze a mate of mine warned me that the university laptops were bugged and not to use them for anything important. Well mostly I haven’t, but if Adams is devious enough to bug the network, then I believe he’d put a tracker in each of the laptops as a precaution.”

  For Lampie this was further proof that her travelling companion was ‘a little touched by the sun’. Perhaps if she knocked him out, it’d be possible to draw off those searchers and then deal with the deluded Peter Wilks later.

  “Lampie we’ve got to do this!’

  She shook her head and backed off a pace, shifting her weight for better balance. One quick move and he’d be on his back – a few spins of rope and he’d be trussed up like a steer. Peter apparently had twigged to her intention. He’d dropped the laptop and put his hand out in front, warding her off. “I need to tell you something Lampie and I don’t want you to get it the wrong way. While we were on Wally’s boat, I did some checking up on Wallace. As I said, he runs Karartha Enterprises, the lot that purchased Sid’s vase. Ahh, however I, ahh…forgot to tell you that I also found that he and vice chancellor, Adams from Skaze University, were on a few committees together.”

  What, more bloody betrayal! What was this with all the freakin’ men she met! Lampie was very tempted to punch him for this latest crucial omission. Of all the stupid mistakes, after Sid’s stunt her trust factor was way down. Now this Pom admitted he probably knew a mate of Sid’s slimy benefactor! Her anger was rising up in a choking flood. She growled out his last chance. “Wilks, you’re pushing the partnership. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t tie you up and leave you here?”

  The Pom had backed away, keeping a tree between them as he rattled off his answer. “Well if I had told you that there was a link between my university and Wallace, would you have believed I wasn’t using you? Remember you first suspected me of damaging your ketch!”

  The mounting anger eased up a bit. Her dress circle of the subconscious jumped up and down, pleading for her to listen to the Pom with cute broad shoulders and
lovely grey eyes. This once she gave in and paused. Lampie didn’t like to admit it, but maybe Pete did have something there. If he was involved with Wallace, there had to be easier ways to find the castle and anyway he just didn’t seem the infiltrator type – too naive and English with a capital ‘E’ for a start.

  “Lampie it’s got to be true. The university has access to a number of satellites for research projects. If Adams gave Wallace the codes or helped out a mate, it’d be really easy. They could track us to within five metres.”

  She considered it. The possibility sounded a bit too James Bond for her, but the GPS system used for navigating and for site plotting did something every similar. So maybe this time Pete was on the money. The last of the anger leaked away and grudgingly she conceded the point with a suspicious glare. “Okay I’ll buy it for now. What do y’ reckon needs to be done?”

  “That cave we found.”

  “You mean the one you fell into?”

  “I didn’t fall, I slipped, but ahh, yes Lampie that one. It’s what, half a kilometre back and accessible by that gorge that empties into the basin. We drop the gear in there and this lot will be off our back – simple.”

  She considered his plan for a minute. Well freckin’ hell she was impressed. That was his best idea yet and considering the terrain, their pursuers would use a boat for easier access, giving her a chance to grab faster transport. Lampie smiled. Yeah, this was going to be easy.

  Chapter 33 Treachery Tinnies and Newtonian Principles

  Lampie crouched down deep into the shielding cover of the ferns. She’d thought Pete would once more prove willing, but bush ignorant. Not so, he’d done pretty well. Snapping off stray pieces of plant, he managed to weave himself a really decent set of camo that perfectly blended into the background. Amazed, she’d asked how and why. He just shrugged and muttered some name – it sounded like Graeme someone. Well however, that didn’t matter so long as for once she didn’t have to watch over him. Finding him later might be a bit of a bugger but she’d take that chance.