by Anita Bell
‘Not only that, sir. It’s more. It’s what I am, or at least who I’ve become. You figured out what happened over there, didn’t you? In the village, I mean?’
Chang nodded.
‘Then you know. I can’t stand by letting people get hurt if I can do something about it.’
‘That’s exactly what I needed to hear from you, soldier. You did what you were trained to do. You’re our responsibility. That’s why we want you back.’
‘The UN don’t want my hide? I engaged the enemy against orders!’
‘You haven’t got time to chat, Corporal,’ Chang said, nodding at the Cessna and interpreting events to suit his needs. ‘Someone in that plane fired on us as we flew over. That makes them military terrorists. Don’t let them get away.’
‘Yes sir!’ Locklin said, saluting. He bolted for Murphy’s boat leaving his Winchester behind. He hit the water hard and the nose of the boat even harder. He dislodged it from the mud, scrambled into it and kicked life into the motor. There was a hen perched on the driver’s seat, but it hopped up onto the windshield as he spun the boat about.
‘Oiii!’ someone shouted as he opened the throttle. ‘Come back with me boat!’
Locklin looked back towards the shore and grinned. Mad Murphy had been hiding in the water, hanging off his props to avoid catching another bullet. He’d been lucky the first time. The round had gone clean through his loudspeaker without shattering off any fragments that could have blown up in his face. Now he was standing in the shallows with his blue plastic boots full of water, waving his wet hat and ordering Locklin to take good care of Gerty.
‘Sorry,’ Locklin said, not realising that was the hen’s name as he aimed the boat at the plane. ‘Gerty’s history.’
Janet Slaney sang ‘Pappa Don’t Preach’ on stage to the first crowd that had actually cheered, but it took a minute before she realised they weren’t cheering for her. Behind her, in the sky over the lake, exploded the biggest set of fireworks the town had ever seen.
Corporal Beattie stood behind Chang watching the water show as an ambulance arrived behind him.
‘Who was that?’ he heard one of the cops ask the loadie.
‘Who was who?’ answered the loadie, helping the ambos load him onto a stretcher. They’d already found the guy who’d rolled out of the woods bound and gagged and they’d bundled him into the Iroquois until other cops arrived, but it was obvious whose side that guy had been on.
‘The young bloke,’ Knox insisted. ‘He was just here. He ran that way.’
‘Nobody ran that way,’ the loadie said, positioning himself so the cop couldn’t see anything on the lake. ‘Lie back now,’ he added, helping the medics roll him up into the ambulance beside Parry. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood. Your mind’s playing tricks.’
Beattie smiled and monitored the thermal imager, just in case they lost their man in the confusion on the water. He’d never seen anyone upturn an aeroplane using a hen and a speedboat before. And he had no idea that a twelve-foot shallow-hulled rescue boat could go that high into the air before it exploded.
But he was learning.
Chang used a set of night vision binoculars that he’d taken from the Iroquois to scan the surface for survivors. He chuckled to himself as he counted four and then handed the binoculars to Beattie, who could only count three heads bobbing in the lake. Beattie watched the three scramble onto the upturned hull of the plane as a horse was lifted through the trees behind him. It was slung from the belly of the Iroquois with its legs hanging out through a cargo net, but Beattie didn’t bother looking at it over his shoulder. He was busy checking the thermal imager for the position of the fourth heat source in the water.
He pointed to it on the screen, then looked out again through the Ninox binoculars, this time scanning east of where the boat debris had landed. Some of the wreckage was still burning and he was careful not to let it blind him through the magnified green haze of night vision as he spotted number four in the water.
He was swimming to shore.
‘Want me to get the pilot to pick him up on their way to the vet, sir?’
Chang shook his head, suppressing a smile. ‘Let him swim it. Looks like he’s headed for the bank below the power station. The ADGies there will be only too happy to pick him up.’ He estimated it was a five click swim and Locklin looked like he was doing it one-handed, but it was a swim in a bucket compared to the Special Forces training he was about to be signed up for.
‘Ah, sir, what’s that white thing under his arm?’ Beattie asked.
‘I think you’ll find,’ Chang said, walking away and shaking his head, ‘that’s a chicken.’
‘You ham,’ Nikki told the stallion two days later. His weight was supported from the rafters in his stall by a yellow canvas sling that went under his belly with straps around each leg to stop it from shifting. The horse had tucked his front legs up off the ground and was using his back ones to rock himself gently like a baby in a swing. He made the chains around the rafter squeak and the beam creak.
She shifted a stump with a bucket of water out from under his nose so he wouldn’t knock it over and refilled his hay net so he could reach another munch whenever he wanted. Then she stepped over Tuckerbox who was sleeping off his stay at an airbase and went back to brushing the loose hair from the stallion’s rump. She rubbed firmly around the bruised muscles as the vet had shown her, being careful not to touch the broken tissue with the curry comb as she stimulated the bloodflow into the healing wounds.
‘I’ll bet you jumped in front of those bullets on purpose,’ she cooed, ‘just to get all this attention.’
The horse snorted twice and whinnied, twisting its neck to look out the door.
‘Who’s here, boy?’ she asked, looking up. A few seconds later, Thorna walked into the stables with a basket of fresh baked scones and cream. Helen was close behind her, waddling with a full belly of baby as she carried a large pot of tea, a vase full of budding roses and a red-chequered tablecloth.
‘How’s the patient?’ Helen asked.
‘Oh, that’s spoiling him a bit,’ Nikki said, thinking that she should talk.
‘This isn’t for the sooky monster,’ Thorna said, enjoying her last peaceful hour before Bobby woke and she’d have to pick the twins up from school. ‘It’s for us. It’s a celebration.’
The dog’s collar clinked in the stall as it woke, lifting its head just enough to listen to the voices before snorting hay from its nose and going back to sleep.
‘Have you heard from Jayson?’ Nikki asked. ‘Is he okay?’
Helen frowned. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘They told me he’s back in Timor.’
‘He must be fine,’ Thorna suggested. ‘Or the army would have told you.’
‘Then what are we celebrating?’ Nikki asked, putting the horse’s rubber comb down beside the dog. Thorna seemed fit to burst.
‘Tell her,’ said Helen, grinning as she spread the tablecloth over a hay bale.
Thorna smiled with her whole face and set the scones down on the tablecloth. ‘The insurance company rang,’ she said, beaming. ‘They’re paying out Eric’s policy.’
‘And?’ Nikki asked, hearing in her voice that there was more.
‘And,’ she continued, even happier, ‘if Aaron Fletcher is convicted for my first husband’s murder, they’ll pay up on that policy too! The kids and I will be set for life!’
‘That’s great,’ Nikki said, trying to get excited.
‘Don’t you see?’ Thorna said. ‘Eric took over the mortgage on Scrubhaven and he shifted ownership over to Fletcher Corp, but now we’ll be able to buy our house back!’
Nikki laughed. ‘You can do that already,’ she said, grinning. ‘Got a dollar? Never mind,’ she added. ‘You can owe me. You can both owe me. The properties are yours. That means you too Helen. I don’t need Freeman or Scrubhaven after I go back to Sydney. I’ll have enough to do running a string of international art galleries.’
Thorna a
nd Helen looked at each other, thinking Nikki must have cracked to sell the properties for a dollar each.
‘I own them!’ she explained. ‘I inherit everything that was my mother’s, and since Aaron set up Fletcher Corporation as part of that so he could eventually take over, I get it too.’ She started giggling and couldn’t stop. ‘After everything he went through trying to rip us off, marrying Mum just to use her contacts in parliament and all …’
‘Oh my!’ Thorna laughed, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘With Fletcher in jail, you’re the only legitimate heir!’
Nikki pulled a face and Helen laughed, nearly choking on her scone. ‘Hey, are you old enough to own an international company?’
‘I am today,’ Nikki grinned. ‘It’s my birthday.’
The horse snorted and started pawing up the hay in his stall.
‘Yes, ham,’ Nikki told him. ‘You can laugh too.’
‘Hey wait,’ Helen said, setting down her scone. ‘What’s that noise?’
They all listened, hearing a tiny metal rattle between the horse’s snorts.
‘I’ve never heard him do that before,’ Helen said.
Nikki got up and put her hand on the horse’s nose to quieten him and heard it again. The three women listened harder and Thorna saw a loose leather strap vibrate against a small buckle.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘It’s the saddlebag.’
‘The vet chucked that up there,’ Nikki said, tugging it off the high hook. ‘I forgot all about it.’ She looked inside the first pocket, smiling to find the special packet of cigarettes that Locklin had given her. She remembered slipping it into his back pocket to hide her angels from her step-father, but after what Locklin had gone through at the lake, she’d thought they must have been lost forever.
She felt the bag vibrate again and checked the second pocket, reaching in quickly to answer the mobile phone.
‘Hello?’ she said, opening the cigarette packet to take out her angels with one hand. ‘Jayson Locklin’s answering service.’
‘That’s MacLeod,’ he said, sounding happy for the first time since she’d known him. ‘If you’re going to say that, get it right. My name’s Jayson MacLeod now.’
‘Come on, son!’ Nikki heard a man’s voice shout behind him. ‘I need a hand here before you leave.’
‘There in a tic, Padre,’ he told Connolly. ‘I’ve got to go soon,’ he added, speaking to Nikki again. ‘But I need you to do something for me first.’
‘Name it,’ she said, holding the phone closer to her ear.
‘Is the Bedford there?’ he asked.
‘The horse truck? Yes. Some men from the airbase dropped it back this morning.’
‘Have you looked behind the driver’s seat?’
‘No,’ she said, wondering why he’d ask that. ‘Do I need to?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and please hurry,’ but she was already on her way with Thorna and Helen close on her heels.
The Bedford was parked at the scorched base of the gum tree and she pulled open the driver’s door, wrinkling her nose at the smell of burnt ash that rose around her feet. She wrenched forward the driver’s seat with a clunk and saw a pink beach towel rolled up and stuffed behind it.
Her mouth opened as she recognised it. It was a towel from her mother’s bathroom. She realised that now that she had time to look at it properly.
‘Take it out,’ he said as if he could see it too. ‘Be careful unwrapping it,’ he added, his voice suddenly subdued. ‘There’s one corner of the towel folded through to keep a lid open so it won’t chatter or break.’
Nikki saw that was true as she unrolled the last of the thick towel away from her crystal coffin.
‘It was open like that when I found it,’ he said. ‘But I … I’m going on another mission now and I don’t want to sound superstitious but …’ His voice trailed off.
Nikki understood. She’d seen the wound on his shoulder and the other one on his leg. She knew they’d both happened around the time his father had been murdered, which was only a few days after Fletcher had killed her mother. The coffin had disappeared then and the towel meant it had probably been open the whole time that things had been going wrong for both of them. It didn’t mean he was superstitious. It just meant he needed to be careful.
She rolled the angels of her family between her fingers, feeling a similar need as she placed them inside.
‘You need me to close it,’ she said, and knew that he was nodding.
Parry left the courtroom for the first time in eight years with a smile on his face. He’d only started counting how many criminals he’d put behind bars since the death of his daughter but none of the convictions in his entire career had been as satisfying as the guilty verdict for Aaron Fletcher.
Parry limped through the dark halls of the courthouse towards sunshine and a wife who waited for him outside in the car. But in the foyer, a slender hand touched his elbow and he turned.
‘Not going to say goodbye?’ Nikki asked.
Two white-gold angels dangled from her ears and tickled the corners of her smile and a slender chain disappeared below her neckline.
Nikki smiled wider and hoisted the chain to reveal two more angels that completed the set. The first one Parry had seen. The second was a recent addition, handcrafted to hold the first in cradled arms for eternity.
‘It works, you know,’ she said. ‘If you like, I can give you the name of a decent jeweller.’
Parry laughed, realising just how long it had been since he’d done that. He looked around to make sure no-one was watching before he slid aside his tie, undid a button and showed her the source of his own newfound contentment.
The coffin on his dresser, he told her — the one he had hand blown for his little angel — was only glass. But the principle was just the same.
* * *
Anita Bell’s path to fiction has been an unusual one. Retired aged 26 to manage her investment portfolio, she produced her first manuscript just to keep herself occupied. Although her goal has always been to write fiction, she took the advice of another published author to ‘start with what you know about’. She laughed at the time, thinking, ‘That will be a short book’ — and it was. Your Mortgage and How to Pay it off in Five Years, by someone who did it in three took only two weeks to write and takes only two hours to read, but after finding a home at Random House, it has been a national bestseller ever since. Its sequel, Your Money: Starting Out and Starting Over was written in answer to the many readers who wrote in to ask for more of her radically unusual tips to handling finances and has also gone on to become a national bestseller.
It’s remarkable then to note that Your Money was written at the same time as Crystal Coffin. But it’s no revelation to learn that all of her books — both fiction and non-fiction — have the same inspirational theme. That youth is no barrier to success and the power to control it, is already in your pocket.
* * *
ADF:
Australian Defence Forces
ADGies:
Airfield Defence Guards
AV:
Armoured Vehicle
AWOL:
Absent without leave
RAAF:
Royal Australian Air Force
6RAR:
6th Battalion Royal Australian Reserves
TETUM:
Local dialect of East Timor (te-tung)
TI:
Thermal Imaging
UN:
United Nations
UNTAET:
United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor
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