by Anita Bell
‘Takes a bit of getting used to, hey Corporal?’ the loadmaster said, grinning.
‘Must have been the prawns,’ Beattie said, trying not to be sick in an army chopper in front of their air force associates. ‘I’ve done thirty hours in rotary wings and never had trouble. What’s with the acrobatics?’
‘Pilot’s just done three months in a Chinook,’ the loadie said. ‘Chinook flies like a double-decker bus with two giant eggbeaters on top.’
‘Oh great,’ Beattie said. ‘We put a bus conductor on the joystick to a sports car.’
‘Have you got the BCSS on line yet, Corporal?’ Chang asked, just loud enough to be heard across the cramped loading bay and the rotors.
‘Yes, sir,’ Beattie said, using his laptop to log on to the Battlefield Command Support System. More compact, mobile, and cheaper than the American satellite communication systems, the Australian BCSS was revolutionary in that it had the flexibility to hook into almost any communications network.
What Beattie liked about it was that it was based on their analogue combat-net radio, which meant it didn’t interfere with on-board electronic systems so he didn’t have to switch off in the air like he usually had to with a mobile phone. It also meant he could get full access to any resources they had on the ground without having to bug the pilot for use of his air to ground communications. And split windows meant he could access, monitor and manage more than one resource at a time. Right now he was linked to ground radar at Amberley air traffic control, a military communications beacon in Moreton Bay and a Telstra mobile-net engineer who was monitoring the civilian mobile phone network for a specific user.
‘Got him,’ Beattie said. ‘He just made a call. Processing coordinates.’
Beattie tapped the keys on his black-and-white keyboard and transferred the data from one window to the others.
‘Triangulating now,’ he said, ensuring all three resources on his screen were able to monitor the same live mobile phone frequency. Within seconds, they each confirmed direction vectors to locate direction of the source in relation to their own position and Beattie fed the three sets of vector co-ordinates into a logarithmic algorithm to triangulate a single point of transmission.
‘Rock and roll,’ Beattie said, clicking his tongue. ‘Transferring coordinates to the pilot. Assuming he’s not moving, this should put us close enough to blow the cooties out of his hair.’
‘Okay,’ Chang said, looking at Harris and the two Airfield Defence Guards sitting with him. ‘Let’s invite a few more of your ADGies to the party.’
Harris grinned. ‘A field trip under the stars. I’ll mobilise two units.’
Fletcher leaned on the packing cases full of worthless paintings and tipped some out. ‘These the ones from the farmhouse?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ Maitland said, still angry at his stepbrothers treatment of him. ‘I was going to swap them back after I pumped the pit out. Not much point in that now,’ he added, frowning as Bricker took the lantern off his table.
Bricker waved it around the floor, keen to get the other lantern lit before nightfall. ‘Was it broke when you bought it?’ he asked Maitland, rasping his spiky red hair through with his fingers. He surveyed the floor again, chasing skittish shadows from a darker corner. ‘I can’t find no valve nowhere.’
‘The light from that one will have to do,’ Fletcher said.
‘Just hold it still!’ Maitland whinged. ‘I can’t see anything with all that flickering.’
‘You’re doing all right,’ Fletcher said, walking behind him. ‘You might even have the second one done in time.’
‘The oil won’t be dry on either of them for days,’ Maitland hissed. ‘You’ll have to pack them in the plane flat with nothing on top. You can’t even use a packing case or the paint might sweat,’
‘They’re not going in the plane, Eric,’ Fletcher said. ‘We’re not trying to rip off our buyers. They’re getting the originals from now on. My galleries have the paintings on tour for another four months. There’s plenty of time for the copies to dry before the collection has to go back to the Vatican.’
Fletcher looked at his watch and then at the sky. In a little under an hour he expected to see wing lights and he didn’t want to hang around long after they left if he could help it.
Bricker saw his boss starting to pace up and down over the trapdoor. ‘You want me to go help Farran and Kirk with that internet pest for ya, Mr Fletcher?’ he asked, spinning the load cylinder on his Smith and Wesson out of boredom.
‘No. They got her laptop,’ Fletcher said, lighting a cigarette. ‘That’s more important. But you can meet them next door to help fetch Nikola and Maitland’s wife and kids over soon. He won’t fit them all in one car.’ Especially now, he realised, with unexpected passengers in their boot.
‘On second thoughts,’ he said, imagining the look on his stepdaughter’s face when she recognised men who worked for him walk in the front door. ‘I’ll go myself.’ There were still three of his men to look after Maitland or if the buyers came early — and some pleasures were much sweeter when experienced in person.
‘Where are your keys, Eric?’ Fletcher asked.
‘In it,’ Maitland snapped.
But they weren’t. Fletcher thumped his fist on the bonnet a minute later and kicked the driver’s door. He couldn’t take the packing cases next door to load the originals without the Landcruiser or making more then one trip.
‘Where are they!’ he screamed.
One of his men ran from the trees from the south.
‘Need help, Mr Fletcher?’
Fletcher looked the skinny, leather-skinned man up and down and stared at his earring, too angry to remember the man’s name. ‘Which one are you?’ he snapped.
‘Troy Ricks,’ the man said, and Fletcher nodded.
‘Can you hot-wire a car, Ricks?’
‘A car, yes,’ Ricks said, knowing he meant the Landcruiser. ‘But that thing’s a diesel. They’re wired different.’
Fletcher kicked the nearest thing to him, which happened to be the boathouse door. It slammed open against the wall and busted off one hinge as he kicked it three more times.
‘Okay,’ he said, holding his hands up as the rage drained away. He swiped his hair back neatly and adjusted his tie. ‘Come with me.’
Ricks shouldered his lever-action Winchester on command and checked that the sixteen-shot magazine was full before slipping into the passenger seat beside his boss. Dust churned from Fletcher’s Mercedes as the car took off while inside the boathouse, Bricker played with his revolver.
First the internet thing, then the lantern thing and now the car keys, Bricker thought. He rolled his weapon’s loading cylinder for the thousandth time, thinking that if there was an angel of bad luck flying around, then he might just have to shoot its wings off.
Sergeant Knox nodded to Parry and explained the circumstances around the two bizarre suicides at the boathouse at the same time as he accelerated through the culvert. The speed zone here was a hundred, but Parry seemed to think there was need for more urgency, so he nudged the unmarked maroon Falcon up, another twenty.
He saw a black Mercedes parked on Clara MacLeod’s footpath, but didn’t think anything of it. A lot of her customers had flashy cars. He just wished they’d visit the old woman more often with their wallets open.
‘If you had any doubts they might be homicides,’ Parry asked, distracting Knox before he could make a connection between the black car and where they were going, ‘how did they get reported as suicides?’ That was a lot more polite than what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of, how could a string of events like that not be suspicious?
‘The local paper put that story out,’ Knox said. ‘The rag either wouldn’t or couldn’t say who fed it to them and I haven’t had the people or the resources to follow up on it. We’re a rural station,’ he added, slowing down for a stray chicken at the roadside. ‘We service a growing region of unemployed. Nuisance calls and do
mestics are getting to the stage that I feel more like a filing clerk sometimes than a sergeant. People come in with a complaint, we stamp them with a case number and yell “next” for next person in the queue. It’s not good.’
‘I thought every station was supposed to have at least one detective?’
‘We have. This is his car. But he’s taken long service leave and we’ve had to rely on support from Ipswich, and they’re not much better off than we are. Frankly, I’m happy to give you any assistance you need, if it helps close the lid on a few of our cases.’
The police band radio interrupted with a squawk and they heard Constable Davenport call for assistance to an ambulance call-out to Wivenhoe, where the victim had suffered a suspected gunshot wound.
‘Yeah, go Jody,’ Knox answered. ‘I’m in transit that way now. Where’s the ambo headed?’
‘The ostrich farm on the flats there, Graham. It’s Clara MacLeod’s place near the culvert, copy that?’
‘I’m on it,’ he said, braking hard. ‘Sorry,’ he added for Parry as he spun the car around. ‘Duty calls.’
He got there in about the same time as the ambulance and pulled up next to the black Mercedes. He called, the licence number in to Davenport and asked her to run a check on it, but Parry followed the ambos up the front steps and found something more interesting inside the house and at the bottom of the back steps.
‘Two of Fletcher’s travelling companions,’ Parry said. ‘I saw them at the airport.’
‘Two shots to the temple and one to the cheek on this one and a broken neck on that one,’ Knox observed, stepping over one of the bodies on his way back to the lounge room. ‘You’ve had a busy day, Scott,’ he said, watching the ambos check the boy’s head and shoulder. ‘Want to tell us what happened?’
‘I’ll do that,’ his gran said, stepping between them. ‘Those two mongrels came in looking to steal my place like they did with my son’s Freeman. One of them took me out the back to kill me and I tripped him on the stairs and he broke his neck. I grabbed his gun and shot the other one,’ she said holding her wrists out, challenging them to be handcuffed. ‘And that’s the way it happened.’
Pretty good shot for an old girl, Parry thought. ‘Your phone’s busted,’ he said. ‘How did you call the Ambulance?’
‘His phone,’ Gran lied, hoping it was still lying beside the body. ‘I hate mobiles. I chucked it out there with the other rubbish,’ she said, pointing to the dead body.
Knox nodded and deputised an ambulance officer to keep the crime scene secure until back-up arrived. Then he nodded to Parry. ‘Let’s go see if we can find the rest of them.’
Locklin came out above the spillway and turned right up the highway headed home. He hit the hundred zone doing almost twice that and thumbed another number into his mobile.
‘Maternity please,’ he said and a nurse answered.
‘Helen MacLeod’s room please,’ and the phone clicked twice as she switched the call through.
‘Helen MacLeod’s room,’ a man answered.
Locklin’s gut told him the voice didn’t belong to a male nurse and that left only two options. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked hoping that what he’d told his gran about a guard on Helen’s door was actually true.
Corporal Ryan didn’t recognise the voice, but he heard the caution and took a guess. ‘Enjoying your joyride, pal?’
‘Sorry about that,’ Locklin said, relaxing. ‘I had no choice, but I don’t have much time and I have to speak to my sister. Can you put her on, please?’
‘Jeez, mate. You want apple sauce with that too?’
‘I’m serious! There could be someone on their way to kill her! I have to speak to her now!’
‘Come and make me.’ Ryan laughed. ‘I’m here all night.’
‘That’s all I needed to know, mate. Thanks,’ Locklin said and hung up. His sister was safe. A truck full of assassins couldn’t get past that ego.
‘We may have a problem,’ Corporal Beattie said, as they neared a paddock full of the biggest chickens he’d ever seen. He checked the latest vector readings and frowned, still trying to keep his dinner down. ‘He just made another call, sir. It looks like he’s moving, and I mean moving.’
Beattie translated the coordinates to a map reference and used a mouse pointer the shape of a cruise missile to indicate a midsection of highway about seven clicks north of Wivenhoe’s main spillway.
‘Typical that a navy boy would head to water,’ Harris noted. ‘He’s got two strategic targets in reach, the spillway and the powerhouse, and he can go either way round the dam to elude us.’
Colonel Chang saw that too, but he wasn’t playing with the same objectives as Harris was. He could see only one place their boy would be headed and that was a farm.
‘The spillway is the closest,’ Harris said, continuing his line of thought. ‘If you set me down there, I’ll secure it with the two ADGies until team one arrives from base, while you cut across the lake to the power station until team two can secure things over there. With a bit of luck and a tailwind we might just make it before he can paint-bomb the place.’
Chang agreed, but only because it gave him the opportunity to put the RAAF squadron leader and his twenty-year-old ADGies off before things got complicated, while still keeping them close at hand.
Four minutes later, he set the small group down a hundred metres off the centre of the spillway, putting them as close as he could to their objective without putting unnecessary down-wash air-pressure from the rotors onto the weakest point of the wall. A busted reservoir and a fifty foot tidal wave headed for Brisbane was the last thing he wanted on his plate today.
‘We don’t need any more embarrassment from navy,’ Harris said as he jumped out onto the concrete. ‘Try to catch him as far away from here as possible.’
‘Squadron Leader Harris,’ Chang said, smiling as the loadie slid the door shut. ‘That’s my plan exactly.’
Nikki leaned on the verandah railings to watch the lake turn molten black as the sun set. She wondered if the town had planned on fireworks and walked down the steps towards the stables, listening to the dry lawn scrunch under her sandals as she gazed around the sky. To her left she saw the dimmest remnant of dusk on the horizon and she climbed up on the timber rails to watch the stars appear.
A horse nickered nearby and she turned, surprised to see that it had been left tied up to the rail with its saddle still on.
‘Hello boy,’ she said, recognising it as the horse that Jayson had been riding that morning. She climbed down on the horse’s side of the rails and slid her hand along his chocolate shoulder. ‘Has he gone off somewhere and forgotten you?’
The horse nickered to her again and she patted his dark muzzle, wondering how heavy the saddle was. Then she latched the nearest gate open so she could carry it straight through to the tack room when she got it off, if she could figure out how to do that. She’d only seen a horse being saddled once, and that was a racehorse on TV for the Melbourne Cup.
She scratched her temple, studying the leather contraption, then lifted a flap near the stirrup and found three buckles that all seemed like the logical place to start. The buckles held straps that joined into one wide strap that went underneath the animal’s belly and she figured they’d have to come off before she tried anything else.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m hurrying,’ she said as the horse blew up his belly and let out a whinny. ‘Hey, let that air out,’ she said, seeing the buckles strain tighter. She heard a car skid through the gravel and poked the horse in the tummy. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘or you’ll be here all night. That’ll be Thorna back and I have to help her get the kids to bed.’
The horse whinnied again and Nikki held the saddle flap up with her head while she had another go. She heard a door slam and expected to hear kids crying as she struggled with the first buckle. The strap still wouldn’t release and she gritted her teeth to pull harder as she heard footsteps behind her.
‘No!’ Locklin shouted.
‘I need him!’
He jumped the fence and strode towards her.
‘You can’t leave a horse saddled up all day,’ she said. ‘It’s cruel.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s cruel,’ he said, pushing his arm between her face and the girth that she was trying to undo. ‘The truth. The truth is cruel, but it’s necessary. And right now I need this horse saddled every bit as much as I need the truth from you.’
His arm pushed her shoulder until she was wedged between his horse’s rump and his body. ‘Out with it, Nick,’ he demanded. ‘Aaron Fletcher. Who is he to you?’
The colour fell from her face. ‘How do you know that name?’
‘I asked you first.’
He felt her chest rise and fall faster against his and saw the charm of her angel teasing him as it rolled against her skin. He tugged it sharply before she could stop him and the chain snapped.
‘Ow! That’s mine!’ she cried as it slid away from her neck. ‘Give it back!’
‘How bad do you want it?’
‘Now!’
‘Truth first.’
‘You,’ she said, injecting venom into her words, ‘are going to look lovely in that. Take it, since I can’t stop you.’
‘I think I will,’ Locklin said, pulling out his cigarette packet and lifting the lid. ‘It will go nicely with these.’ He pulled out the baby angels. ‘What do you think?’ he said, stepping back to hold them up. ‘Make a nice set?’
‘Hey, they’re mine!’ she screamed trying to grab them, but he clenched them in his fist. ‘Give them back!’
‘Don’t you want to know where I got them? There was this little glass box —’
‘Stop teasing!’ Nikki spat, getting more confused by the second. The last time she’d seen the earrings had been in Sydney the night her mother died. ‘If you even know about that, you know it isn’t glass.’
‘Crystal then.’
There was a long silence as she let that sink in.
‘You’ve got the coffin? I thought it got smashed.’
