by Anita Bell
‘All right,’ he said, dragging a lung full of nicotine from his cigar. He allowed a long silence to convey exactly how angry he was and then he blew a smoke trail towards the windscreen. ‘I’ll take care of everything,’ he said as static crackled over the line.
‘No, I’ll find it,’ Maitland said, his voice stammering now. ‘It must be there. I probably just took an empty crate by mistake. I’ll find it,’ he repeated. ‘It has to be there.’
‘You’ve got other work to do,’ Fletcher warned him. ‘Start work on the next batch as soon as you get home. No time off this time. You’ll have an extra brat to keep an eye on as well.’
‘You didn’t send her before I got there! What if she starts poking around?’
‘She has no reason to suspect anything,’ Fletcher said. ‘As far as she knows, she’s escaped police custody and found herself a nice quiet job as a housemaid under an alias and I expect you to keep it that way.’
He didn’t say ‘this is your last chance’. His stepbrother had already used his last chance when he’d reported the wrong paintings missing from the art gallery and blown a perfectly good opportunity to slip in a little insurance fraud on the side of their other operations.
‘I can do that,’ Maitland said and then Fletcher’s phone crackled and went silent — a dead spot between reception areas in the mobile net.
But it didn’t matter. Fletcher was finished with his stepbrother for the time being and not even Maitland, he hoped, could stuff things up in the meantime.
Scotty panted at the door to the verger’s office, not really interested in what Father Connolly was signing while he made another call to Locklin’s mobile phone for him. The document had a big Australian army logo on the top, but Scott was more interested in the black receiver that the priest held quietly to his ear. Connolly was obviously waiting to be answered, and he was using the time to check that nothing was missing from his application to be recalled to the army. Then he folded the paperwork into an envelope, shook his head at Scott and replaced the receiver.
‘No answer,’ he said. ‘That’s four times, but I keep getting the same recorded message saying that his phone is either switched off or not in a mobile-net area.’
‘Did you send him a message that I’m trying to get him?’
‘Yes, but you’ll just have to hope he checks what calls he’s missed.’
‘Oh man!’ Scotty said, still catching his breath after running uphill in the heat, pushing his Yamaha. ‘Can we try again from your house? We can be there in under five on my bike.’
‘You shouldn’t ride that in town, Scott,’ Connolly chided. ‘You’re too young for the roads.’
‘But I ride on the footpaths — less accidents there. Besides, I only go on the roads to stir up Knox Po-o-olice. Never mind,’ he said. ‘Can we hurry, please?’
‘No rush,’ Connolly said. ‘I can forward church calls to my house when I go home and give him a message to call you when he returns my call.’
‘But I need to talk to him now!’
‘He can’t do much from Timor, Scott.’
‘But he’s not … uh-oh.’ Scotty clamped his hand over his mouth.
‘He’s not … uh-oh?’ Connolly said, raising one eyebrow.
‘He’s not, ahhh, in East Timor forever, is he? I mean, he’s ummm … He’ll be coming home soon, yeah?’
‘March,’ Connolly said. ‘But you know that.’ He pointed up. ‘What’s that?’ he added, and Scott looked up. It was a cross — a big timber one hanging from the ceiling, with you-know-who glaring down at him.
‘From the top, Scott,’ Connolly said. ‘Spill it now.’
Scott slumped against the podium and explained everything. It only took a minute. He didn’t know that much and from the look on the priest’s face, it wasn’t really a surprise. Father Connolly was nodding.
‘Are you sure it’s the same car you saw leave the boathouse the night your uncle was murdered?’
‘No question,’ Scotty said. ‘Please Father, can we hurry? I’ve got to warn Jays, in case he … he …’ Scotty held his puffer to his mouth.
Connolly rubbed Scott’s back. ‘Calm down, lad,’ he said, putting the envelope in his pocket to post in town. ‘God’s on our side. You bring that bike of yours around front for an old man, and let’s do it.’
The old Bedford rattled over a cattle grid and the dark stallion whinnied, knowing he was home. Nikki pressed the white-gold angel on her necklace to her lips and kissed it. She’d made it too.
The property didn’t have a front gate. If it did, she would have asked to stop so she could shut it and add finality to that part of her life. Instead, there was only the grid, a hoof trap that kept lazy cattle from leaping to freedom. The grid looked like an oversized chargrill and was probably hot enough after a long day in the sun to cook steaks on. A rusted, barbed fence stretched off each side of it into a string of dusty lantana thickets, connecting the weedy scrub plants like a crooked dot-to-dot puzzle in a five year old’s colouring book.
There were a half-dozen cows standing just inside the property, under the shade of a leafless, triple-trunked bloodwood, all waiting, as if ready for their turn to be basted on a grill. Two of them looked up, turning their heads to watch the truck pass and Nikki could almost hear them talking as they looked at her with their big, black lashes and accusing eyes.
‘Look Maisy,’ one seemed to say. ‘They’ve brought us a new two-legs.’
‘Has it brought us any hay, Daisy?’
‘No Maisy, no hay. Doesn’t look like it could spare us any anyhow. It’s skinnier than you are.’
Maisy must have thought that was funny. She let out a long bellow before turning her cow thoughts back to dreams of lush pastures.
Nikki’s angel dropped from her lips and she slumped forward.
‘Oh no,’ Locklin said, dropping quickly down the gears. He grabbed her shoulder and pushed her back into the seat so her head wouldn’t hit the dashboard while he backed off the speed as fast as he could with the horses in the back. ‘Are you all right?’
Nikki’s eyes blinked slowly. ‘Oww … yes.’ She winced and shrugged his tight grip from her shoulder. ‘I’m fine.’ But she wished he’d quit gawking at her chest. What could he see with her shirt buttoned right to the collar anyway? It was done up so high it had rubbed a sweat sore under her chin.
The heat made her hands heavy and she poked her charms out of sight between her buttons with the last of her strength. She only half-noticed that she’d been sweating.
Locklin noticed. Her sleeves were soaked from armpit to elbow. In the wettest spots, the shirt was see-through. What she needed was a breeze, even a wisp. The window on her side was jammed. It had been since he was twelve years old. And the vent on her side of the dashboard was angled permanently towards her feet. So was the one on his side, but his window was wound down. His elbow rested on the sill and his shirt sleeve caught the hot breeze, channelling it up behind his shoulder to his neck. She was watching the short dark hairs on the back of his neck dancing while she melted.
‘Take your seatbelt off and shove over closer to me,’ he said, adjusting his quarter vent to point as far in her direction as possible. ‘It’ll be cooler.’
‘Not even if you were ice,’ she barely managed to say. Instead of obeying, she wrestled with the window winder on her door. The winder bent but it didn’t turn and her fingers slid off, breaking two fingernails that were already cracked. The sting made her swear and she slumped back with a long, shallow sigh.
Locklin stopped the truck.
The engine rattled impatiently in the middle of the private dirt road and Nikki let her eyes close, too hot to be angry. What did a few minutes’ delay matter, she figured dazedly, now she was safe? Even her belly was quiet. The heat throbbed so hard on her skin that she couldn’t feel the hungry pit in her stomach anymore. She felt the Bedford sway under the weight of the restless passengers in the back and she heard the driver’s door open.
Her head rolled to the right and her eyes blinked slowly open to stare blankly at the driver’s side. The seat was empty. Her door opened and she felt his hand check the temperature of her forehead, and she wondered dully why he would do that.
Locklin shoved her door open against its hinge and gave it two swift kicks to the centre. He turned the winder. The window rolled down about five centimetres and then jammed again. He kicked the door again, tried the winder again and it budged about a centimetre more. Twice more he tried and twice more it jammed, each time cooperating less and less until it ceased moving altogether at an opening only ten centimetres down from the top. He was standing there in her open door, staring at her, while her stomach couldn’t even muster a growl to warn him off.
Her head rolled back and she blinked at him.
‘Well I can smash it,’ he said, taking his shirt off to roll around his fist. ‘The house is only over that ridge. Can you make it, or do you want me to call a doctor now?’
No doctors! her mind screamed. But her lips betrayed her. In black oblivion there was only silence.
Locklin wrenched the driver’s side of the bench seat forward and hefted out the army field pack that was hidden inside the larger black rucksack behind the seat. Like him, the pack should never have left East Timor. He pushed that thought aside and rummaged out an army issue canteen and first aid pack, which he pushed across the seat towards the girl, and a non-army issue mobile phone, which he tapped to get a reception. He hurried round to the other side of the truck with the cell phone clamped to his ear.
The phone blipped two warnings as he lifted the girl’s arm over his head to take her weight. One alarm told him there were messages waiting, the other that he was outside the mobile net area. He knew that wasn’t exactly true. The entire Lockyer Valley was notorious for its dead spots. Getting a stable phone reception was like trying to see the sun as you walked through a shady forest. Two steps one way you could, eight steps the other way you couldn’t, and everything in between was just teasing.
He tossed the nearly useless phone back onto his field pack and took the full weight of Nikki’s body over his shoulder. Three metres away, he lowered her and propped her against the trunk of a solitary eucalypt. He loosened her collar, took off her sandals, pushed up the legs of her jeans and started to pull off her socks. He knew that if he could get her feet and hands damp, her body would cool quickly and more evenly once he ripped those ridiculous sleeves off. But the marks he found on her wrists and hands took him instantly back to Timor.
He was in a circular village, about ten kilometres east of the border with West Timor. The forest was rough, but familiar, much like the hill country that he’d done his training through in northern Queensland — gum trees, crocodiles, water buffalo and all.
Their five-man recon unit had been inserted by armoured vehicle about sixty clicks and four rocky ridges to the east. Their sixth man was on loan to a mobile unit but they were supposed to complete their two-day patrol the hard way — on foot.
Through binoculars, the village looked pretty much like the last four mountain communities on their patrol. Snuggled about halfway up a hillside above a creek, it was ringed with low rock walls and stick fences to help keep the livestock from wandering off at night. Walking tracks radiated into the forest on all sides but there was nothing that could even pretend to be called reliable road access to the village in wet weather.
Five of the seven huts were still standing — that was the first thing they noticed. Retreating militia had been thorough in reducing the last four villages to rubble. Nothing had been left standing, not even the animals. Here, there were two scrawny yellow dogs still sniffing between the huts, a scruffy kitten with fluey eyes kicking fleas from behind her ears near a camp oven, and a goat nipping leaves from a patch of sweet potato vines — but no sign of the villagers who would normally rush to greet them.
Lance Corporal Locklin crawled through the vegetation above a small stockyard that was woven from sticks and saw two ponies standing quietly inside it. Behind him, a black sow scratched through banana suckers and watched him signal a more gruesome find to his patrol commander twenty metres behind him.
Corporal West, the patrol commander for Charlie Six, gave the signal for the rest of his unit to move in and four minutes later, he met Locklin beside a short wall of rubble.
‘You’re bucking for promotion,’ West teased, his lips curling into a grin. ‘God help us if it was up to you, but if it was, what would you say was missing here?’
Locklin rolled the body of a skinny youth onto his back and pulled a six-foot pitchfork handle out of his stomach. At the last hut, it was an old man shot through the head in the doorway. Before that, six men slumped in a line against a stone wall. The wall was pock marked at chest height as though stabbed with a thousand daggers and the wounds cried blood over the bodies below.
Locklin watched the other three reconnaissance scouts pick their way through the remaining huts in the circle. Private Mulhany, their forward scout, looked in their direction and shook his head. Private Rogers drew a line in the air across his throat with his finger, and Private Harvey just walked back slowly with his hands on his hips. None of them had found any survivors.
‘No women,’ Locklin answered. ‘They’ve taken all the women.’
‘Except that one.’ Corporal West pointed at a body lying strangled beside a chicken hutch. Except for a few torn rags hanging off her shoulders, she was naked. She didn’t look old enough to be a woman, but her belly was swollen with an unborn child. Locklin swore and rubbed his eyes, but the image wouldn’t budge.
Then he noticed her rope burns.
Maggoty welts circumferenced her wrists where the girls he’d grown up with would have worn bracelets. Her ankles had similar injuries and her arms and back revealed whip marks that had taken more than a few months to inflict. All of which confirmed reports that militia were using small villages and camps similar to this one as bases to launch attacks on surrounding villages, raid food stores and livestock, and ambush Australian patrols. The East Timorese the militia kept here were like slaves, forced to feed and tend them. What Corporal West couldn’t figure out was why they’d abandoned the camp so suddenly.
‘You think they saw us coming?’ Rogers suggested, cooing to one of the yellow dogs that was eyeing him suspiciously. ‘That last ridge was more rocks than trees.’
‘Possible,’ West said. There shouldn’t have been any other indication their patrol was sweeping this side of Maliana today. ‘Hey, don’t pat the dog!’ he said, stopping Rogers as he reached out. ‘Rabies, remember?’
‘Oh yeah. I forgot,’ Rogers said, pocketing his hands. Then he walked off for a second look around the village.
West shook his head, wondering how anyone could forget the size of the needle that the induction course nurses had threatened them with if they were bitten by a local pet. He emptied the last potatoes from a nearby hessian sack and laid the empty bag over the pregnant girl’s face and body. ‘Less than an hour ahead of us, I’d say. What was your last radio check?’
Locklin was the one with the field radio.
‘I buzzed HQ an hour ago,’ he said, ‘back up that last ridge when we broke for lunch. Next check-in due in two.’
‘We can’t wait that long,’ West said, frowning. ‘Message to Sunray now. Confirm position. Tell them we’re in pursuit.’
‘No contact here,’ Locklin said, repacking the unit a minute later. ‘Must be minerals in the rocks. Too much interference.’
West checked his watch. ‘Satellite’s not due over for another hour. Hike back up that ridge and see if you can’t bounce a signal back to Maliana.’
‘You want me to ask for back-up?’
Corporal West took another long look around the village. Over twenty corpses in all. ‘Might as well,’ he said. ‘Looks like we’re chasing about a half-dozen raiders.’
‘We can handle that,’ Private Mulhany said.
‘Yeah,’ West sai
d, smiling. ‘But it’d sure be nice to have some help around here cleaning up. Hey, don’t give those jokers in 2Cavalry much of a picture of the mess we’ve got here, or they’ll think up some kind of an excuse for a no-show.’
Locklin grinned. ‘Yeah, like finding their own set of bad guys to chase.’
‘Or shooting themselves in the foot.’ Rogers laughed. He slapped Private Harvey on the shoulder — any opportunity to make him hop and remind him of the embarrassing fact that the first Aussie injury in East Timor had been self-inflicted.
Locklin didn’t have to salute before leaving. He just smiled and nodded and followed orders. A sweaty twelve-minute hike later, he was back at the top of the ridge. He took out a very non-army issue slingshot and used it and a small stone to peg one end of a long string up through the highest fork of a Timor eucalypt. The stone sliced bang on target between the branches and he watched it fall to earth neatly on the other side, threading the tree like a giant needle. He tied one end to a length of light-weight wire and used the string to haul the wire up the trunk, out of reach and out of sight, just as other Aussie recon teams had done in other trees throughout the region.
Two minutes later, his bush relay antennae was bouncing VHF off every wired tree between his portable radio and a very cleanshaven Corporal Jennins at 6RAR, Australian Defence Force Headquarters in Dili.
‘What do you mean, you have to clear it with United Nations first?’ he asked after passing on the messages. ‘Since when does ADF HQ defer field movements for elements of 6Battalion to those eunuchs at the UN?’
‘Since this morning. ADF HQ has been directed to hand custody of East Timor over to the UNTAET Forces. You should check in more often, Charlie Six,’ Jennins added lightly.
‘Rules of engagement?’
‘That’s the confusion. The brass don’t show it, but they must be fair worked up about it to leave the communications room as a oneman show while they thrash things out with the powers that be.’
