by Anita Bell
‘She could have walked through to another carriage before she got off,’ Burkett offered. ‘Unless her luggage was heavy.’
Parry studied Burkett’s face again, unable to read what he was thinking. ‘You think she did it?’ he asked.
Burkett rubbed his chin.
‘She’s five foot nothing,’ he said, ‘slight build with twigs for arms and a clean record. It took a lot of strength and a lot of anger to do what happened to her mother. So if she did it, she borrowed someone else’s body first, I think.’
Parry nodded. If the boy was crooked, he did a good job of hiding it. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You have your own theory?’
‘No sir, I mean, I do, but I try to keep my assumptions out of it at this point. Fact is, the girl’s running, either because she did it or because she thinks she’s going to wear the blame for doing it. Either way, she knows more about what happened than we do and if we want a piece of that, we have to find her, and then we have to gain her trust.’
‘Okay,’ Parry said, impressed. ‘Let’s assume she’s innocent. If she knows who did it, and if it wasn’t her, why wouldn’t she just say so?’
‘I’m not saying she knows who did it. If she did, she probably would have been screaming their names from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from day one. But she knows something. And it’s scared her enough to make her run away instead of running to us. That suggests she thinks we can’t be trusted, and frankly, I don’t blame her.’
Parry was thinking the same thing.
‘Her mother was a Commonwealth Minister,’ Burkett added. ‘The kid circulated at the top, and she can’t be a stranger to corruption and political backstabbing, even if her mum was one of the good ones. If she knows where the rot starts, chances are it’s with powerful people.’
‘That’s stretching it a bit,’ Parry said.
‘I’m a fisherman’s son, sir,’ Burkett answered honestly. ‘I cast my net wide and set loose all the rejects until I get down to the fish I want. I can’t see how you’d have a problem with that, unless you’re one of the fish that could end up in my net,’ he added, making it jokingly clear that he wouldn’t be intimidated.
Parry slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’ve got a bit to learn about diplomacy son, but I think there may be hope.’ He stepped up beside the younger detective, turning him around so they both had their backs to the train. ‘So here we are, a frightened teenager. We’ve just stepped off the train to start a life in hiding in a strange city, and what do we see?’
Burkett clutched his fingers around an imaginary bag and crouched down a little, trying to see the world from a young girl’s shorter perspective. He bent himself a little more and an advertisement nearby became visible beneath a departures and arrivals sign. He headed for the placard only two seconds behind Parry.
‘Good jobs fast, no questions asked,’ the older man read aloud. ‘Sounds too good to be true.’ He put his finger on a cross at the tip of the ‘you are here’ arrow, and traced his finger two blocks over to where ‘x’ marked the spot.
‘Too easy,’ Burkett said suspiciously, and Parry nodded.
Down the subway and onto Roma Street, they passed two taxi ranks, a bus stop, a travel agency and three ATM machines. If their hunch turned from long shot to dud, they both realised they had hours of boring work ahead of them tracking down and spooling through railway surveillance tapes, only to verify which way she went. But less than half an hour later, they were doing exactly that. The old woman at the employment agency didn’t recognise Nikki’s name or face from the ID photo Burkett showed her, but she promised to get back to them if she did.
Locklin raked his fingers through his hair and sighed heavily. He locked up the boathouse, again and clicked his tongue twice to call his horse out of the scrub. Jack trotted up dragging his rein. Locklin picked it up and adjusted the girth firmly.
‘You’re not planning on doing anything you’ll regret, I hope?’ Connolly asked, worried by Locklin’s silence.
‘No,’ Locklin said. ‘I might even enjoy it. It’ll take me about an hour to get back to Amberley from here. Plus I want to put Jack out in the hill paddock with some mares before I leave. But I figure that still gives me about two hours to beat a decent confession out of the mongrel before I go.’
‘Do that and you’ll end up behind bars, son,’ the priest said, not knowing that Locklin was headed there anyway ‘Or worse. You know what he did to your father.’
‘I’m a little more to deal with than my father,’ Locklin said. ‘The army saw to that.’
‘You sound like you have regrets.’
I do, he nearly said. But that wasn’t exactly true. ‘You realise that I’m AWOL?’
‘I suspected it,’ Connolly said. ‘Medical supply flights don’t often need an escort, not in Australia anyway. So go back,’ he said, suggesting a solution. ‘Apply for leave through the proper channels and come back later with the army’s blessing. Nothing much will change here in the meantime. Eric Maitland’s like a tick on a cow. He’s burrowed in for a while.’
‘You’re right,’ Locklin said finally. ‘It’s just that I should have been here … for Dad. If I was … If he hadn’t made me join the army, he wouldn’t be dead now.’
‘You can’t say that,’ Connolly said. ‘You could just as easily be dead too.’
‘No,’ Locklin said, shaking his head. ‘I should have been here, Instead I was …’ His voice trailed off and he buried his head in his hands.
‘Following orders,’ Connolly said, rubbing Locklin’s shoulder. ‘You were doing what was right in a …’
‘No!’ Locklin said, cutting him off. ‘No,’ he repeated less harshly. ‘That’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem.’
‘Tell me then,’ Connolly said, but Locklin only leaned his head on his saddle and stared at the ground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just discuss just like that, not even with a man who’d been an army padre for twenty years.
‘Bad?’
‘You could say that,’ Locklin said quietly.
‘Have you been counselled?’
‘There wasn’t time.’
‘Debriefed?’
‘They don’t even know it was me.’
It was Connolly’s turn to stare at the ground. There was no shortage of black missions in the defence forces, but there were always at least two officers who knew what missions the men underneath them were assigned to.
‘Okay,’ he said, realising that Locklin probably had more than one reason now to be court-martialled. ‘Was it something you had to do?’
Locklin snapped. ‘Yes!’ he swore, with all the rage that he’d buried. ‘They left me no choice!’ He looked at his hands and saw they were shaking, but they didn’t feel like his hands. They’d done things he could never have done before the army and images of it all flashed behind his eyes. He tried to block the images out, to squeeze them down into his gut where he could cope with them, but his entire body started shaking.
He fell to his knees and threw up.
Connolly stood behind him and rubbed Locklin’s shoulder. ‘There’s more than one reason why the army debriefs every man after every mission, son. Aside from the obvious technical necessity, it’s also a cleansing process. It helps you get things straight in your head so you can analyse what you did and why, and it helps you identify mistakes so you don’t make them again — so you just keep getting better and better.’
‘I’ve been through everything in my head a hundred times,’ Locklin said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘There isn’t anything I could have done any different.’
‘Have you ever heard of a soldier debriefing himself?’
Locklin shook his head, knowing exactly what Connolly wanted him to do, what he’d have to do through official channels anyway when he turned himself in. And he closed his eyes, hoping that would make it easier, but it didn’t. He had to be debriefed.
He stared at the ground to dictate the initial f
acts as if they had happened to someone else. But as he did, the dark soil between his boots turned to mud from a mountain village far away.
The short one in the middle had to be their leader. The others were circled around him, listening. He pointed towards the low rock wall that surrounded the village and three taller men ran to take up sentry positions at the three gates. Then Shorty pointed again and three pairs jogged outside the gates to search and cover the narrow clearing around the village to a depth of about twenty metres beyond the treeline.
At all times, at least one man from each pair remained visible to both his partner and the guard on the nearest gate to ensure they had backup if required.
Locklin withdrew downslope towards the creek, leapfrogging over boulders to the other side to allow the eastern team to pass, watching them without binoculars in case the dusky sun made one last attempt to pierce the heavy clouds. In the darkening forest, he realised that one reflective flash would be as noticeable to them as a flare.
He watched the pair through a thorny thicket as a light rain began to fall.
The man on cover was a dark-skinned giant who stood at the edge of the trees alert to general movement from any direction, while under his watchful eye his skinny partner probed deeper into the forest.
Skinny followed the village trail almost to the water. Locklin saw the ripple in the rock pool at the same time that Skinny did, and the jaws of a hungry crocodile snapped at empty air. Skinny fell backwards safely out of reach but he landed heavily on his rifle and bent the barrel.
Giant laughed and Skinny cursed him, then brushed dirt off his gangly legs as he picked up his weapon. He headed back to the village grumbling. Locklin assumed he went to get a replacement, because if he fired his damaged weapon now it could blow up in his face.
Locklin crossed the creek upstream from the territorial predator where a narrow trail led to a mossy tree that locals had been using as a bridge. He followed the trails back towards the village, keeping his boots just off the tracks so he left little or no sign of his passing on either earth or grass, but noticed from the footprints in front of him that the militia hadn’t taken as much care.
Trained, but not well trained, he thought with hope. It should have been a habit.
He stopped below a vegetable patch downhill from the village as the other search patrols returned. They reported immediately to Shorty, who didn’t notice Skinny swap his weapon for an undamaged one from another militiaman who had two. Then he set the six men to the task of ransacking the village, and Locklin soon recognised the pattern in their looting.
They gathered up anything of value and loaded it onto the backs of the two village ponies. Anything that didn’t fit or that could be used as a weapon, like short lengths of pipe and tools for gardening, were buried among the sweet potato vines and Locklin wondered if that meant they planned on coming back.
Outside the door to the largest hut at the north end of the circle — what he now thought of as the twelve o’clock hut — he watched Shorty place a guard with an AK47. It seemed an odd thing to do, guarding a rock and thatch hut with such a modern weapon, until Locklin realised that fear would turn those thinly-thatched walls into prison cells of bricks and bars and mortar.
The hut had a window, which was quickly filled with thick thorny branches and as Locklin progressed another hundred metres to his left he could see the same process had been completed at a smaller hut positioned at nine o’clock.
Five women and eight children, he remembered Westy saying.
Two guarded huts equalled two sets of prisoners, he figured. It made sense, but it wasn’t good news. Whatever he was going to do, he’d have to do it before any of the militia got a chance to use the prisoners as a human shield, which meant he’d have to figure out a way to be in two places at once. But he couldn’t plan anything from where he was. He could hear voices but not the words, and he needed to get closer to fix that.
He proceeded forward in short bursts through the underbrush on the lower side of the village until he reached a thick stand of bananas that had been tended by the villagers. He startled a wet kitten and watched it disappear into the forest away from the creek.
Smart kitty, he thought as voices swept to him on the breeze.
From his new position, he could see over the short rock wall, through the burned-out remains of the two nearest huts and directly into the heart of the small village. He could see Shorty standing out of the rain under a shanty roof that seemed to cover what looked like a communal cooking pit. He could see and smell the blue tinge of smoke that struggled out from the roof and upwards in the rain and could hear the heavy clunk of a lid being bumped into position over a cooking pot, just like they did it in the boy scouts when he was a kid.
He saw an old woman crumple to her knees to feed the fire and Shorty poked her with the sharp end of his Chinese SKS rifle.
‘Cook faster,’ he ordered in broken Tetum. ‘And cook good or we shoot you now instead of morning.’ He switched from the woman’s native dialect and spoke fluently to one of his men in a different tongue, then laughed and prodded her again with his rifle.
Locklin gripped the webbing across his chest and squeezed. Back at camp, the Aussie brass had pulled in a few teachers and priests from the bigger towns to help familiarise at least one man from every unit with the basics of the local dialect. Locklin had been through with the first batch. But it didn’t seem to occur to any of the bright sparks up in officer country that a few words from across the border would have come in handy too.
He could only understand what the militiamen were saying when they spoke to the villagers in their own dialect, and even then it was difficult since some of them were worse at it than he was. But their body language spoke volumes and they were following basic military procedures for securing the area, which meant he now had a pretty fair idea of what they were up to.
The rain had eased momentarily but the weather was closing in again. The tracks that radiated like tree roots from the three rickety gates on the village perimeter had already seen heavy traffic and were turning to slush. The clouds were settling on the forest canopy for the long wet night and the winds were choppy and picking up. They must have known that army Blackhawks would be grounded until at least morning for anything less than a life-or-death emergency, even if HQ realised that his recon unit had failed to check in.
Shorty was staying put for the night, but getting ready to break camp and hoof it over the border to safety before sun-up, and it didn’t sound as though they were planning on taking the women and children with them. He couldn’t tell what fate was planned for his unit, but things didn’t look good. As prisoners, alive and healthy, the militia could have held them up to the world as an example that they had a just cause being fought for in a just manner. Instead, they seemed intent on sending a different message.
As Locklin watched, they herded the women out from the twelve o’clock hut and assembled them in a semi-circle. Then they dragged the remaining three men from his unit out from the nine o’clock hut, beat them to the ground in front of the women and started shooting at their legs.
Locklin snapped his Steyr to his shoulder and stared down his sights for a clear shot on Shorty. If he took out their leader, he hoped they might be surprised enough in the confusion to let him pick off a couple more of them before they got him.
The muzzle of his Steyr wavered between the banana trees, hungry for its target, and Locklin swore under his breath. The little slime was gloating over his latest achievement by pacing inside the circle of women. The eight o’clock guard kept his weapon on them, while the others gave the Australians another beating. Locklin watched them with narrowed eyes, listening to his mates scream and paying close attention to which guards kicked the hardest.
The border with West Timor was only ten mountainous clicks away, an hour’s jog on healthy legs or closer to three hours humping wounded prisoners through hill and gully. If they were taking any of his unit with them, they’d have to
leave earlier, probably closer to three or four in the morning.
He checked his watch, figuring that gave him a window of almost ten hours to complete his objective. Shorty watched the sky regularly and that was keeping the rest of his men edgy, so the first six hours he could expect his targets to be on close to full alert. His best chance of success, he realised, was to catch them between two and three in the morning, when their metabolisms would be naturally sluggish.
But his mates were bleeding now. He couldn’t wait that long.
Twelve of them, he counted. And only one of me.
He did a quick weapons check to assess his resources. So long as he wasn’t packing any duds, he had one smoke grenade, two M26 fragmentation grenades and his rifle, a Steyr-88 with thirty rounds in the magazine and another hundred and twenty for it attached to the webbing around his waist. His rifle came with Ninox night vision goggles, which could also see through smoke as well as dark, an invisible sighting laser and a detachable bayonet.
But for nearly everything he had, they now had four times that and more.
As well as any weapons they’d brought with them, they now had the Minimi submachine gun and the body armour that Mulhany had been packing as their forward scout and the full kit from each of the four Aussie grunts, including the kit they’d raided from Westy’s body.
The only bonus he had was a Browning 9mm handgun that he’d traded his spare time for with a Special Forces major who needed a kid’s pony broken in before his daughter’s birthday. The Browning had a not-so-silent-as-movies-make-out silencer with thirteen rounds in the magazine and a spare twenty round clip in his left leg pocket.
Locklin watched the militia drag his mates back into the nine o’clock hut and prayed for heavier rain to mask the muffled thock of his Browning’s silencer. The women were herded back into the twelve o’clock hut soon after that and on a cue from Shorty, the militiamen bolted to a pile of armoury that had been confiscated from their Australian prisoners; They scrambled over them like kids raiding a Christmas tree.
