The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11)

by Philip McCutchan

  *

  “He was,” G. K. Slattery confirmed when I was in his office a couple of hours later. “Or I reckon I should still be saying, is. Till we know what’s happened to him. Dunwoodie’s a swine, so they say, in private.”

  “In private?”

  “That’s what I said.” Slattery was a heavy, florid man, not unlike Max but around six inches taller. “Dunwoodie has two faces, see, his private one and his public one. Reckon he always nursed that public image of his. The father figure — kind, tolerant when tolerance was called for, firm when firmness was wanted, one of the boys, all things to all men — you know? Ambitious, yes, but efficient too and ambitious for Australia more than for himself. But I reckon,” Slattery added, “everyone pitied that wife of his.”

  “Did you know she was coming out?” I asked.

  “I knew that,” Slattery said. “It filtered through from the high commission in London. What’s she after?”

  “Evidence for divorce,” I told him. “I’ve warned her not to get the wires crossed, by the way.”

  “Well, good on you for that,” Slattery said heavily. I saw he didn’t like Flair’s self-interpolation. “Now, look, where d’you want to start on this thing? There’s nothing more I can tell you.” He’d already passed the information as to just where Dunwoodie had last been seen in Brisbane, which was in the Commonwealth Trading Bank, and he’d filled in on some personal details and what had been done so far to try to track down the man’s movements, and that had been just about the lot. “Want to go up to Brisbane, do you, for a start?”

  I said, “Not right away, no. I’d like to go up to Darwin.”

  Slattery grinned, and winked across at his number two, a young man who’d been introduced as Brett Cleland. “That’s where the wife got off — right?”

  “It’s where she got off, all right,” I said, “but I’m not aiming to stay in Darwin town. I want to go out to Lifeforce.” I mentioned Tracy Learoyd. “Did you know he’d had a disappearance too?” I asked.

  Slattery stared at me with his mouth open. “By God I didn’t!” he said. “Tell me more — a lot more.”

  So I told him what the girl had said. He gave a long, long whistle. “This makes things look different,” he said.

  “I thought it might. What do you know of Learoyd?”

  “Protégé of Dunwoodie’s, as you’ve been told. Real mates. Brilliant bloke, but inclined to hit the bottle … like plenty of others. They mightn’t wear it in Britain. Out here, it’s not thought so much of. But it does make Learoyd hard to handle, or so I’ve been told by those that know. Touchy when he’s had a skinful, if you know what I mean.”

  “He’s okay security-wise, I take it?”

  “He wouldn’t be the top man at Lifeforce if he wasn’t. Tell you one thing,” Slattery said reflectively. “He’s very like Dunwoodie in character. Obstinate as they come and just as much of a bastard, but not to his wife, or not any more, because she’s dead. To his staff. Scares the shit out of them, by all accounts.” He paused, rubbing a ham-like hand down the side of his face. “When d’you want to go up, then?”

  I said, “As soon as possible. I may not be there long. I’ll hold on to my room at the Australia.”

  “Right.” Slattery nodded across at Cleland. “You’d better go up with the commander, Brett,” he said. “Fix a flight right away, will you?”

  *

  This time I could see it all spread out below me under a hot, high sun. We went on a stopover, two-day flight via Condobolin and Broken Hill up to Alice Springs and beyond Alice we were right over Australia’s dead heart, the terrible burning desert lands of sand and stone and salt marsh that ran pretty well up to Willeroo in the far north and extended across Western Australia. Or had once, before Lifeforce. These were the areas that had been harsh and gritty and arid, dust bowls without hope — until the water had been piped through. It was all very different now and in fact it was wrong to speak of it any longer as the ‘dead heart’. I looked down on the huge water-vessels that were the main pipelines from Cape Scott, looked to right and left at the booster stations, saw the branch lines pencilling out into the vast, vast distances, and the outflow pipes channelling the water into the irrigation ditches that ran across the land to keep it green, to bring alive the indigenous dwarf eucalyptus, acacia, and spinifex. The land was coming back to life all over — patchy to some extent still, of course, but those green areas meant a world of progress and they would, Cleland told me, extend a good deal farther before long. Already whole new townships had sprung up and there were any number of smaller communities newly settled along the bitumen, communities that had come out with hope and real expectation to work and populate this vast and hitherto desperately lonely interior. Every mile gained now was a mile gained for ever against the desert and it made a permanent livelihood for the men and women and children who were spilling out from the overcrowded cities.

  Cleland said, “Down there, they bless Lifeforce. Well, I reckon you can imagine … They bless Dunwoodie, too. This was all his scheme basically. He’s wrapped right up in it.”

  “And it’ll all last just as long as Lifeforce does,” I murmured as I looked downwards.

  “How’s that?”

  I pointed through the plane’s window, pointed down at those great surface pipelines, six of them running in parallel down from the north, bringing the lifeblood for something like six hundred miles to feed this land. It was like a gigantic tanker-loading jetty. “The pipelines,” I said. “It all depends on them, doesn’t it?”

  “Why yes, of course.”

  “If anything happened to them …” I turned and looked at Cleland. “Get me?”

  “You think what’s happened to Dunwoodie might be a threat to all of this?”

  “Don’t you?” I asked.

  “It hasn’t come up as a theory yet,” he said. “Don’t forget, it was news to us about Tracy Learoyd.”

  “And now?”

  Slowly, Cleland nodded. “You could be right, I reckon, though I don’t see the point of knocking Dunwoodie off. I mean, if anyone meant to sabotage the pipelines, just a few explosions in the right places could do it. Why bother with Dunwoodie — or Learoyd either? Besides, Learoyd came back, didn’t he?”

  “True,” I said. “Well — it was just a thought. Can you fill me in on Lifeforce — the technicalities of the thing, I mean, the figures and all that?”

  “Sure thing,” Cleland said. He directed my attention downwards again. “To start with this end — you can see the pipes discharge underground. There’s a deep reservoir, well protected from the air, of course, and it’s planned to dig the pipes under too eventually. Now, water can be pumped at will into the canal network — reckon you can see the canals? — and that’s where the cultivation supply is. The domestic supply comes off the deep reservoir as well, of course, and everyone has tap water now, no matter how remote they are from the main communities. At seventy-mile intervals there are booster pumping stations. The branch lines run on the surface, off the booster stations, and they irrigate all along the line to east and west. Two more main sets of pipelines run southwards to the west of this lot.”

  I asked, “What’s the total output of the plant?”

  “A thousand million gallons a day.”

  I whistled. “Some job!”

  “Too right.” Cleland’s thin face was alight with enthusiasm and looking at him I saw reflected the vital importance of Lifeforce to all Australia, not just the more immediately affected interior. If I hadn’t known it before, I certainly knew it now. He went on, “The basics of the complex are a seawater distillery with two light-water pressurized nuclear-powered reactors, and besides fresh water, electricity is produced, all by atomic energy. All the power up this way, from Darwin down to and including Alice, and from Eighty Mile Beach across to the Barkly Tableland and Wollogorang, comes from Cape Scott today. You can pick up the pylons.” I could indeed. “The nuclear reactors generate 500 million kilowatts of power,
and that’s round about enough for six million people. In other words — almost enough for the whole flaming country. Mind, Lifeforce isn’t the first of its kind in the world — the Americans built the first off the south Californian coast — but ours is the biggest yet.”

  “What about the island itself?”

  Cleland said, “It covers hundreds of acres and it’s pretty well a self-supporting city, a city of the future really. It has everything … except spare women, but then that’s endemic to the outback anyway!” He grinned. “It’s built up of successive layers of rock that form a wall on all four sides, and these have a sand filling. And it’s safe, in case you’re going to ask. It’s designed to withstand earthquake damage and storm waves and it’s every bit as safe as a land location would have been. Basically, the actual processes are simple enough. Seawater is drawn in direct and circulated under pressure in the reactors, and it absorbs heat meanwhile from splitting atoms. The heat transforms another supply of water to steam, which is used to motivate the turbine generators and produce power. The desalination side is carried out by plain distillation, of course. Heat is applied to boil part of the water off the brine and then the steam is condensed into pure water. Heat for this process, it’s called multi-flash distillation, is supplied by the reactors in the form of steam. The steam heats up the saltwater, which then enters a chamber where the reduced pressure causes part of it to flash into steam, which is then condensed. All this is repeated successively in a series of other chambers at lower and lower pressures and temperatures.” Cleland added, “It’s all perfectly safe from the radiation point of view, too. No radioactivity can affect the fresh water, in fact it never touches the basic seawater — only the heat from the nuclear processes is used.”

  I looked again at Cleland’s absorbed face and said, “So that’s the technical side. How does it make out in human terms? I mean, what’s life like for a man stationed on the island?”

  “I wouldn’t really know,” he said. “I know the technics because I’m interested in that side and in what it’s done for this country, but —”

  I said, “Have a guess.”

  “A guess, eh?” The Australian scratched his head and grinned. “Well, I’ll try if you like!” He paused. “Look, you’ve been in the navy. I haven’t, not been on a ship at all, but I’d reckon life on Lifeforce must be kind of self-contained and isolated, like being aboard a ship.”

  “With the same sort of tensions that can arise aboard a ship,” I said, half to myself. “What about the wives?”

  Cleland said, “Some have ’em on the complex, some keep ’em up in Darwin. It’s optional.” He added, “How d’you mean, tensions?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just casting around for ideas, for a starting point, that’s all.”

  “I still don’t really see Dunwoodie’s disappearance having anything specific to do with the complex.”

  “Well, you could be right,” I said. I had an open mind. And I found myself thinking again about the fact that somewhere down there in the interior, off the main air routes, lay one half of the strike-back — the metalled roadways running out into the dusty countryside to the missile sites and the blastproof, bombproof underground armouries where the nuclear warheads were stored, to the radar scanners and tracking stations, to the huge communications centres, the systems where half the Western world’s defence network was co-ordinated. Again I couldn’t point to a connection, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be there somewhere.

  *

  As later the Darwin airfield came up below us I wondered how long it would be before I bumped into Flair Dunwoodie again. I didn’t want to. Not really … and maybe she would be on her way to Brisbane on a woman hunt anyhow. But all the time, at the back of my mind, was a nagging hope that she wouldn’t yet have gone. I even caught myself keeping half an eye open on the chance she might be at the airfield, but of course she wasn’t. She wouldn’t know I was coming up anyway. Brett Cleland and I took a taxi to a place called MacKinlay’s Hotel, where Slattery had booked us a couple of rooms by radio from Sydney. From the taxi Darwin struck me as a timeless sort of town, all dust and sun and inert bodies sleeping it off in the shade of weary-looking, dusty trees. On arrival at the hotel I went along to my room, which was on the ground floor, to leave my grip. My idea after that was to go along to the bar and get rid of my thirst with a nicely chilled beer and then get myself out to Cape Scott as soon as possible and call on Tracy Learoyd unannounced and play it along by ear from there. But things don’t always work out according to plan. This didn’t. The planning went badly adrift when the man with the gun stepped out from behind my door. There wasn’t much I could do about it right away because I had no time to reach into my shoulder holster before this man’s gun dug me in the spine and a voice in my ear said savagely, “Hold it, Shaw.”

  “All right,” I said. “For now, have it your way.”

  “Turn around.”

  I did so. I’d never seen the man before. I could be quite definite about that because his appearance was against him and he would be unmistakable. He had a high-domed forehead and very small, cramped-up features — the effect was rather like that of a turnip, with the features crammed into the tiny tail end; and he was excessively tall and lean. He said, “You’re coming with me.”

  “Just a moment,” I said. “Who are you, what do you want, and where is it you’re proposing to take me?”

  Sneeringly he said, “As if you didn’t know.” The accent was English and it had a trace of a whine. London, at a guess, and that didn’t help much. But I’d have said he hadn’t been long in Australia. It doesn’t take Londoners long to pick up the Australian intonation; it’s not all that different from cockney anyway.

  My response was innocence, genuine enough too, though I hardly expected the man to believe me. I said, “Really and truly, I don’t know a thing. Sorry — but there it is. How did you get here?”

  “On me two feet.”

  “I take it you’re not talking, then. Well, I doubt if I would in your place, either.” I kept my gaze on his eyes and I didn’t change my expression as I began to lower one of my arms, which were lifted Western-style. He didn’t like that and he poked the gun towards me and said something nasty, using several good Australian adjectives. He’d picked them up, all right. I didn’t change my expression but very suddenly I kicked out, and the kick took the gun-wrist and jerked it so the gun went off a fraction of a second before he let go of it, but I’d dropped to the floor as I kicked so nothing hit me. I grabbed for the gun and got it in my hand but the man was a shade too fast and before I could take any sort of aim he was up and out of the window and he’d vanished by the time I followed him out. I ran round the corner of the building and that was when I hit a big fat man wearing a sweaty shirt who was coming round the corner the other way, fast. This was the proprietor. He looked like detaining me and there was no time to explain, so I gave him a jab in the gut that doubled him up and I ran on.

  Of course, it was too late.

  I’d heard the car start up before I’d got clear of the proprietor as a matter of fact, and when I reached the front of the hotel there just wasn’t anything in sight at all. There was a left-hand turn only around thirty yards ahead and I reckon the man had taken that.

  Breathing hard I went towards the main entrance. Brett Cleland was coming out and he called, “Hear that shot, did you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was almost in the way of it, myself. Hang on, though. We have company.” The big proprietor was lumbering around the corner, looking dangerous. I called, “Sorry, but it couldn’t be helped. He got away as it was.”

  “’Oo did?”

  I said coldly, “The man that fired the shot. By the way, why were you running in the opposite direction, friend?”

  The proprietor panted to a halt. “The bloke said it was you what fired. Police, ’e said ’e was.” As if by magic a gun had now appeared in the proprietor’s hand. “Get inside, you pommy bastard,” he snapped. “T
he both of you. Sharp.”

  I shrugged. I had nothing to lose except a little time and that didn’t really matter now I’d lost that turnip-headed man. I winked at Brett and we went inside ahead of the gun. We were shepherded into the proprietor’s office-cum-living room, where a skinny teenage girl was sitting doing some darning. “Out, ’Ilda,” the man said brusquely and she shifted fast and without a word. She’d seen the gun and I heard her, offstage, yelling for her ma. I said, “I can explain everything.”