Tomorrow 5 - Burning for Revenge

by John Marsden

  When we’d finished our cleaning job we gathered the five rifles and the food. We didn’t need to discuss the weapons. Homer knew what had to be done. We ran through the main dormitory again, carrying the guns, panting hard, knowing how deeply we were committed now, how those pins would keep falling. All we could do was try to push some of them in the directions we wanted. We wouldn’t be able to push them all our way, that was for sure. At the end of the day the best outcome we could hope for was that we’d be alive.

  From the door of the building we peered out. There was no movement along the road. We had to take our chances, keep going, so we put our heads down and sprinted for the hangar. As we belted in through the door another jet passed over our heads, so close I felt I could have touched it. The huge hangar acted like a sound barrier, so I didn’t really hear the plane until it was right on top of us: I sure heard it then. I thought it was going to take my head off.

  Lee and Fi were there. ‘Those planes are returning from a mission, I think,’ Lee said. They were his first words. Not ‘How are you?’ or ‘Are you OK?’ or even ‘Where have you been?’ He was focused. It was left to Fi to ask those questions, and because there was such a sense of urgency she had to ask them with her eyes. There was no time for anything but the most urgent conversation. I gave her a quick squeeze then turned to Lee.

  ‘We have to go for it now,’ I said. ‘Straight away. I just shot two officers.’

  He calmly took a rifle and looked in the magazine. At least he seemed calm. I made Fi take one too, although she was definitely not calm. I could never quite get used to Fi holding a rifle. It was like Homer holding a Barbie doll.

  Homer turned to Lee. ‘If they start refuelling the planes before they find the bodies, we’ve got a chance to do some damage ...’

  Lee cut in. ‘It’d have been better to wait till dark. But on the other hand, the planes are pouring in. There’s a heap of them.’

  ‘By dark they might have found us anyway,’ said Homer. I think he mainly said it to make me feel better.

  ‘Where are the other soldiers?’ I asked. I knew Lee had gone to see what was happening. I wanted to know what he’d found.

  ‘It’s some kind of parade. Training for something. They’re still there, marching around in slow time, doing fancy stuff with their rifles.’

  ‘They’re confident,’ Homer said. ‘They think they’re safe in here.’

  ‘They’re not,’ Lee said.

  I was stunned. It was one of the strongest state­ments I’ve heard in my life.

  This conversation was happening very quickly, in whispers. We were staring through our peepholes, try­ing to decide what was going on. There was certainly a heap of activity. A lot of planes were returning from somewhere. I could see three jets on the move: one just landing, one turning at the end of the runway to come back towards us, and one taxiing onto the apron where all the planes were parked. But it was crucial for us that refuelling started immediately. We only needed ten minutes to do what we had to do, but if the soldiers returned to their barracks after the parade and found the dead men, we wouldn’t get our ten minutes.

  ‘There’s one,’ Lee said suddenly. I looked in the direction he was pointing but I couldn’t get the right angle through my peephole. So I slipped across to his spot and he let me look. Sure enough, the first fuel tanker was already lumbering along the road towards the parked jets, like a big old dinosaur. Behind it I could see a second one nosing out of its depot. My stomach did a wild lurch, like my entire insides turned upside down. It felt like an earthquake had happened in there. These tankers were our death warrant. We wanted to see them, they represented our chance to destroy the place, but at the same time they were a death warrant. There was no getting away from that.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Homer said.

  The four of us glanced at each other. What for? I don’t know. Just a check I guess, to make sure we were all up to it, all prepared. I have no idea what I looked like but I was a bit surprised to see that the other three had identical expressions: thin lips pressed together, pale complexions, sweaty fore­heads, but steady eyes. I was encouraged by that.

  We ran for the trucks. I’d completely forgotten about Kevin although we’d talked about him when we made our plans. He was coming with us, whether he liked it or not. That probably sounds brutal, but we had no choice. How could we leave him there?

  It would have been ideal if he’d driven one of the trucks, because after me he was the best driver. But Homer was OK, and he’d have to do. Fi and Lee weren’t too crash hot. Well, that was the trouble; they were very crash hot. They were dangerous. In fact they were so dangerous maybe we should have just let them loose on the enemy: they would have run over the lot of them.

  There was no need for discussion. Fi and I ran to the furniture van, and Lee and Homer to the other truck we’d chosen, a high-sided dumpster that weighed ten or twelve tonnes and looked solid. We started them up. That moment, turning the key: it was horrible, a terrible feeling. I gave a quick glance at Fi and looked away again, just as quickly. She looked ghastly. Like someone with a terminal illness.

  Well, we were all suffering from that terminal illness.

  As I started the engine there was a cry from the back. A wail of fear, like a baby who’s burnt his hand. It had an hysterical edge to it. Like I said, I’d forgot­ten Kevin.

  I glanced at Fi again. She looked grim now. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, getting out of her seat. Before she could move, Kevin appeared at the little hatch between the cab and the main part of the van. He looked worse than Fi. Probably not worse than me, but I wasn’t looking in the mirror. He had snot hanging out of his nose and he hadn’t done his hair for about a week and a half, and during that week and a half I think he must have been running his hand constantly through it, messing it up as much as he could. His eyes were wild, staring at one of us then the other, as though he’d never seen us before.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he squealed at me. ‘What are you doing?’

  I didn’t know if we should give him any sort of answer, because I dreaded his response. But Fi said: ‘This is it Kev, we’re attacking the planes.’

  His whole face crumpled. In Science we’d done an experiment where you pump the air out of a tin can. The can crumples into a complete wreck. Well, that was Kevin. His spirit had been pumped out of him.

  He ran his hand through his hair again and cried: ‘Ellie, this is crazy. Don’t do it, please. This is suicide!’

  But I put the truck in gear. Homers dumpster was already moving towards the big door. As it stopped by the door, with a piercing squeak of its brakes, Lee jumped out. He looked across at us, waiting till we got closer before he opened us up to the outside world. Once he did that, we were com­mitted. And for the first minute or so we’d have nothing going for us but bluff. We had to hope that any soldiers who saw the trucks would assume we were on legitimate business. If they didn’t, if they knew straight away we were up to no good, we’d be wiped out before we got a hundred metres. We’d end up like feathers from a pillow when it bursts in a pil­low fight. I knew that when the door opened we had only a few minutes to live. And a few minutes was our best-case scenario.

  I didn’t blame Kevin for going to pieces. I wasn’t far off going there myself. Kevin had gone to pieces mentally and emotionally, but I figured we were all about to go to pieces physically. We’d end up looking like the dead officer in the bathroom of the barracks. I couldn’t help thinking of Robyn, and the way she’d died. I knew it was the wrong time to think of her but I thought I’d be seeing her pretty soon.

  We rolled forward. I glanced up at the rear-vision mirror to try to get a glimpse of Kevin, but then realised that of course there was no rear-vision mir­ror. There’s not much use for them in furniture vans.

  ‘Where’s Kevin?’ I asked Fi. She didn’t answer for a minute: I think she was trying to peer into the back of the truck. Then she said: ‘It’s hard to tell. It looks like he’s under a pile of packing.’
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  We were at the door. Lee gave us a nod and started to open it. ‘It’s terrible.’ I said to Fi, meaning what we were doing to Kevin, the way we were taking him to almost certain death.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is.’

  I had to assume she knew what I meant, because there was no time to confirm it, no time for anything now except killing and dying.

  The doors were sliding open. It was one of those arrangements where as you slid open one door, the next panel opened automatically. I took a quick look at Lee. He looked calm and beautiful.

  I wondered if this was the last time I would see him. Or Homer.

  The door was open enough for us to get through. I heard the loud revving of Homer’s engine. He was giving it too much throttle, but it’s hard getting used to a strange engine in a hurry, especially on a truck. The big dusty dumpster started to roll. I noticed the dust and thought it was funny on a military base, where everything was so immaculate. I followed him out, then stopped and waited for Lee. He closed the door. There were a couple of soldiers down the other end of the road, but they had their backs turned. Lee jumped into the cab, with a last wave to us. I revved my engine and followed Homer.

  Outside everything seemed bright and clear. It was like watching a very sharp movie on a very big screen. There was so much space. I swung the truck to the right, still following Homer, and peeped fur­ther to my right, to where the soldiers were parading. For a moment I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But it had to be real. A crowd of men were at the end of the road, coming our way. I thought we’d been busted already, they were attacking us. Then I realised it couldn’t be that. They must have finished their drill and were heading back to the barracks for a cup of tea and a good lie down. Bad timing. It meant the bodies of the officers would probably be found in three or four minutes. Not necessarily: they might not go into the messy dormitory, but I thought the odds were stacking even higher against us.

  As if they weren’t high enough already.

  Homer swung off quickly to the left, down a side road. That was OK; it still took us in the direction of the parked jets. I followed him equally quickly, but at the same time worrying that we were driving too fast. We couldn’t afford to draw attention to ourselves. We had to buy a minute and a half, at least, so we could get into position to cause the havoc that we wanted to cause.

  And it was havoc we wanted. Havoc, chaos, destruction. If we succeeded, this airfield would be an inferno. We had a chance to wipe out more air­craft in a couple of minutes than the New Zealand Air Force had wiped out in the last six months.

  I could see them now. God, so many of them. That was good but frightening. I’d been feeling sick for so long it shouldn’t have worried me any more, but at this moment I felt I was going to lose everything in my stomach, and what’s worse, lose it at both ends. The jets looked like hornets and I felt we were ants. Ants attacking hornets.

  There were nine tankers fuelling planes, and another four planes in a line waiting to fill up. Thirteen altogether. Unlucky number for someone. There were about forty, maybe fifty, planes parked along the apron. This all fitted with what we’d seen before. We hadn’t seen more than nine tankers out there and we suspected there weren’t any more. Their whole security depended on speed. They couldn’t afford to have planes sitting on the ground for ages with no fuel in them, or with fuel lines run­ning from trucks to planes. They were at their most vulnerable then. Colonel Finley and Iain had both made some comment like that to me, somewhere sometime.

  We drove towards them. Homer’s big truck lum­bered on in front of us. Our speed was controlled by him. If he hadn’t been there I don’t know what speed I would have accelerated to. Probably about a hun­dred and forty. But the dump truck was a bit like the kind of person Homer had become. Solid and dependable and strong.

  ‘I hope the bullets work,’ Fi said suddenly.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, just because it worked when Homer did it in a paddock with a tin can doesn’t mean it’ll work here.’

  I drove on, feeling I’d been hit over the head with a piece of four by two. Fi was right. This might be some special fuel, or they might have special shields on the tankers.

  Homer veered to the left. This was as we’d agreed. We were now only four hundred metres from the nearest jet. Our plan was simple. Homer and Lee would take the further group of planes; we’d take the closer ones. As the boys drove towards their target, we slowed down and moved out to the right, to get in the best possible position for firing.

  Up until then we’d had an amazing run. No-one had come near us or shown the slightest interest in us. But now things changed in a hurry. The next few minutes were madness: a wild sideshow ride where the winners got to live and the losers got to die.

  Chapter Eight

  The first sign of trouble was when Fi grabbed my arm. She whispered in my ear: ‘There’s a car coming.’ I don’t know why she whispered. It was hard enough to hear anyway, above the diesel rumbling of the truck. I glanced across to where she pointed and sure enough there it was: a green jeep with a canvas top, moving at high speed straight towards us. It was coming from the far side of the airfield and was still three or four hundred metres away. But there was no doubt it was after us. It was openly menacing, racing at us so directly.

  I thought fast. I had to make my mind work as fast as that car was travelling, even faster. I don’t know why your brain works sometimes and at other times it freezes up. It’s not only danger and adrena­lin; that time in Wirrawee when everything deserted me was a time of great danger and yet I fell apart. Here was another time of great danger and this time my brain functioned. But to be fair to myself, the time in Wirrawee wasn’t long after Robyn died, and not long after I’d done something I really regretted with a boy in Wellington.

  With the jeep, I didn’t hesitate. I started making a big turn, quite gentle, so it wouldn’t look suspicious, even slowing down a little, and at the same time said to Fi: ‘Get a good grip on something.’

  ‘What about Kevin?’ she asked.

  I hadn’t even thought of Kevin. ‘Tell him too,’ I said. There was no more time for conversation. Fi shouted into the back of the truck: ‘Kevin, grab a hold of something!’

  At this stage we were facing north-west. The jeep was coming from the west. When we turned they slowed, then swung hard left to come around the front of us, maybe to get onto the driver’s side of the truck, I don’t know. I hadn’t been expecting that, but it worked just as well for what I wanted. I think they still weren’t sure about us, not knowing if we were a threat to their security or there for some legitimate reason. They probably couldn’t believe anyone had got through their fantastic defences.

  I started accelerating again, gently at first, then, when I judged them to be at the right point, I charged. Foot straight to the floor. The old truck did pretty well. Probably no-one had ever asked her to do anything exciting or brave. Probably no-one had asked her to go at full speed. Whatever, she surged forward with more power than I’d expected.

  It happened so quickly that the soldiers in the jeep were caught unawares. I saw their startled faces. They were yelling at the driver and trying to get their rifles up. The driver thought he was going to get around the right-hand side of me, then did the worst thing possible: he changed his mind. He decided he wouldn’t make it – he probably wouldn’t have, it’s hard to say – and he braked, slammed it into reverse and tried to back away at the same time as he spun the wheel hard to the right. It was a terrible, stupid decision. That’s what I meant before, about how some­times our minds work and sometimes they freeze. I don’t know why he made such a bad move, such a bad call, at that moment of his life. And I’ll never know now. Fi ducked to the floor, with her hands over her eyes, and I shut my eyes for the last two or three metres. It was terrible. I was still accelerating when we hit them. Someone told me once that the police are trained to do that: accelerate when they know they’re going to hit another car. That w
ay they suffer less damage themselves. It’s horrible, but I don’t know where that leaves me, because I didn’t take my foot off the accelerator until the very last second. I wouldn’t have even then, but some reflex made me lift it off as we hit. It seemed too frightening to hit at full speed in that cold-blooded way.

  Still, we would have been doing ninety when we rammed.

  It was a massacre. The jeep fragmented; there were bits lying all over the tarmac. Some pieces were a hundred metres away. The biggest piece I saw was the door, and that wasn’t very big, being from a jeep. And I saw the engine. It was sitting on the ground like a mechanic had lifted it out with a block and tackle.

  There were bodies, too. I think there’d been four or five soldiers in the jeep, but I only saw two bodies, one lying completely still and the other sort of twist­ing from side to side, like a fish that’s been out of water five minutes and hasn’t got much left.

  And I saw some bits of bodies.

  Of course I didn’t do a major examination of the crash site. My glimpses were just that, glimpses, and I got them at high speed as we turned a big circle. I had to swing the truck around fast, so we could line up the petrol tankers while they were attached to the jets. It didn’t necessarily matter if they weren’t attached, but it was better if they were. So I put the truck into a skidding turn, hanging onto the wheel like grim death even though I thought we had a good chance of tipping. I could feel the tyres lifting on the right-hand side and I thought, ‘Hello, this is it, we’re over.’ But I didn’t bring the steering wheel back even one degree, because I knew we had to go for it, all or nothing, no slowing down for any reason.

  In a way it was like a roundabout. We got a view of everything as we spun, a full look at the entire scene. I saw the wreckage of the jeep, I saw the vast expanse of the runways and the security fence beyond them. I saw some soldiers piling out of the door of a big humpy-shaped shed near the control tower, I saw Homer and Lee’s truck swinging wide to get a good position, and I saw the rows of planes and the fuel tankers.