There was a pause. The major would realise that if the men were by the fire then the NVGs would flare too much to allow them to see detail that close to a light source. Another couple of minutes and the goggles wouldn’t be needed anyway. There was now an appreciable lightening of the sky and the stars that remained were bleached and fading.
‘Stand to …’
‘Sir.’
‘We’re coming in. ETA six minutes. On my command I want stun grenades sequenced from each quarter. Then hold your positions. Understood.’
‘ETA in six. Stun grenades sequenced from each quarter and then hold. Roger, sir.’ Edwards pressed comm two. ‘Read that?’
The three other teams responded instantly.
‘Sequence will be south, north, east then west. Acknowledge.’
It was a well-rehearsed drill and each of the team members knew what was required. The acknowledgments came back in the required sequence.
Edwards edged slightly closer to the brow and scooped some sand flat. Carefully he laid his grenades in front of him. The XM84s were all flash and bang, but they were guaranteed to disorient even the most well-trained soldier. From this far back the best any of them could expect was to land it within twenty-five metres or so of the target. However, eight XM84s going off on all sides, pandemonium was a guaranteed outcome. He only intended to toss one, but the other was ready in case of a malfunction.
Four minutes. It was now light enough to ditch the goggles, so he stowed them. He glanced over at Clayton and nodded approvingly at the sight of the two XM84s beside his right hand. He checked his own again and gave Clayton the thumbs up. He switched his comm set to broadcast so that when the order came each position would hear it. There was still no sound from the choppers. They would be coming in from downwind, ground-hugging to lessen the warning time. He peered through the dim light, wishing that he had a better view of the campfire and the men around it. Far away he heard a bird cry in fright, followed almost immediately by the unmistakable sound of the Hawks homing in.
‘Stand by,’ he whispered and his fingers closed around the first canister.
Seconds later came the major’s laconic command. ‘Give us the grenades, Eddy.’
Clayton, tight as a coiled spring, was reading every muscle-twitch on Edwards’ face. As the choppers came into view they moved as one, springing to their feet and throwing their grenades in unison.
For a couple of seconds there was nothing except the clang of metal hitting stone. Then the faint dawn was ripped apart by an intense white light followed by twin explosions that bounced off the sandstone ridges. Clayton and Edwards had hit the ground before the grenades and covered their eyes. The last thing they needed if a firefight broke out was temporary blindness. The grenades from the other teams quickly followed. And then the choppers were on target.
In a matter of seconds, six men fast-roped down from each chopper and the Black Hawks were banking away, staying low to avoid retaliatory fire. The campsite and bus had vanished beneath a swirling sandstorm of smoke and dust, through which sparks from the fire were flying like tracers.
There was a shouted order; a response — and then a brief stillness. Something had gone wrong. Edwards could feel it. He reached for his MP–5; a quick glance confirmed that Clayton had done the same. There was another barked order.
And then, out of the silence, a tapping sound — rhythmic, as if someone was banging two sticks together.
‘What the fuck?’ Clayton mouthed.
Edwards was about to call in the teams to report when he heard it — eerie and as disorienting in this situation as the grenades should have been — the sound of a didgeridoo. Then a second one started from away in the east, then another and another, until they were encircled by the sound of the didgeridoos pulsing and calling in a vaguely familiar rhythm.
It came to him: it was an echo of the thump of the choppers.
‘Edwards.’ The voice terse in his earpiece. ‘Sitrep?’
‘Snafu, sir.’
‘Anderson?’ The major called in the ground team-leader in the campsite. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Gotta agree with Edwards, sir. This is a full-blown clusterfuck. I think you should get in here. It’s an Aboriginal tour party, sir, and there’s a rather upset woman who I gather would like a word with the commanding officer.’
‘You have the place sanitised?’
‘Oh, it’s clean, sir. It’s just that we have a situation that you’d better see for yourself.’
But the major wasn’t convinced. ‘What about the shoulder launch —’
‘Sir …’ Anderson took a deep breath and said something so softly that the Major missed it.
‘Say again.’
‘Um … didgeridoos, sir.’
There was silence for a moment, then: ‘Coming in.’ The major went off the air.
‘Edwards, this is Anderson.’
‘Yeah, Andy.’
‘I think you’d better stand down your men. You ain’t going to believe this one.’
‘I have a feeling you’re right.’
Edwards quickly ordered the teams in and turned to Clayton, who was staring open-mouthed at the bus.
‘Snafu.’ Edwards stuffed the spare stun grenade into his kit and gathered up his pack. ‘Situation normal, all fucked up.’ But Clayton didn’t appear to be paying any attention.
Edwards followed the line of his gaze. The dust had settled, the sun was just coming over the horizon and less than one hundred metres away a group of stupefied SAS were watching a line of fully painted, bare-breasted Aboriginal women emerge from the bus. In their hands they carried small bunches of leaves.
Slowly the women formed a line in front of the smouldering fire and began to dance. Small circles of dust rose as they stamped their feet. One by one the SAS men sat or squatted in the sand.
The song went on and on, not even hesitating when a single Black Hawk returned. This time it found a landing zone some distance away and in a few minutes the major appeared. Still the music didn’t stop.
Then an older woman stepped out of the dancers and held up her hand. The rhythm sticks stopped and behind them, in the bush, the didgeridoos fell silent. The woman stepped forward and looked the major up and down. ‘Hope you have a pretty good excuse, sonny.’
The major opened his mouth, but she wasn’t finished with him.
‘We’re doin’ a rehearsal here, cause we’re gonna be on TV. You know “Message Stick”? On the ABC? Well, that’s what we’re going to be on and just now you mucked up our dance and we don’t take kindly to that. I’m gonna call our menfolk down and you can talk to them, cause I’m too cross with you fellas to keep a civil tongue in my head.’ She turned on her heel and walked back towards the three white women sitting in the shadow of the bus.
The major turned slowly to face his men. There were no grins on their faces. All of them were looking down at the dirt, silent as the didgeridoos.
Eventually the SAS were kind enough to fly Dengler out to convey his own apologies. For some reason they asked him to exit the helicopter while the rotors were still slicing the air, and by the time he reached the small circle of Aboriginals seated on the ground he was covered in dust. From then on it got worse. One after the other the men reproached him for disturbing their rehearsal. Then an elderly woman got to her feet and introduced herself as Aunty Pearl.
She looked him up and down, shook her head and spoke quietly. ‘You know we was recording that this morning?’ She paused and watched it sink in, clear as a stone in a pond. ‘Our cameraman reckons it looks like Apocalypse Now.’
‘I … I …’ Dengler was about to say that he would need to confiscate the video. But knew he couldn’t bluff this woman.
She looked at him pityingly. ‘You made one big fool of yourself, boy.’
It was back in Nhill that Dengler was forced to face the fact that he had been done over by professionals. The call to Canberra confirmed it.
‘We’ve found the bus,�
�� Rootham said.
‘Yes.’
‘They returned it to the hire company. Very clean and tidy.’
‘The hire company,’ Dengler repeated. It was not a question. He didn’t want to hear any of this. It had a nasty career-ending ring to it.
‘Rankin’s Rentals.’
‘Clean, you say?’ A minor straw-clutching exercise, really. He had heard the word; understood the implications.
‘As a whistle. Not a print on it. Not a strand of DNA.’
‘I see.’ Dengler felt the blindfold go over his eyes and the firing squad shuffle into place.
‘I asked the owner what sort of people return a bus in that kind of condition.’ Rootham was unstoppable. ‘You know what he said?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘Clean people.’ He gave a deep chuckle. ‘You have to pay that, don’t you.’
Dengler also had to pay for a car. This was one trip he didn’t think he wanted on his official expenses. But even that was no simple matter. Eventually he found a hire company that would ferry a rental car out to Nhill for him. It was going to cost an arm and a leg, but Dengler had no alternative as the SAS transport was apparently no longer available.
The nightmare is back. Rising out of the darkness and mist; small flashes — soot burning in a chimney — spreading like deadly incendiary lichen. The memories, tinder-dry and brittle. Now the beatings and pain have raked the ashes and they flare and ignite.
The black skeletal forms in the graveyard of trees mock him, speaking of perpetual winter in an orchard. Dead stick-figures of charcoal, from which nothing new will be drawn. No hand is left alive to replant this orchard.
A flurry of sparks. The smoke billows then clears — revealing the blackened carcass of a dog in a white chalk yard that has soaked up the obscene river flowing from the dog’s jagged throat. A chiaroscuro study, marred by a single slash of red. In a frightful moment of sanity he remembers having once complained of its bark. He flees, hurling himself back, away from the seeing of that which nobody should see.
Cursing Allah for having pulled him from the womb, he knows he has released the final demon. Not in cursing Allah, but in mention of the cradle from which the deaths have sprung. Womb. He screams and —
Finds himself standing before the perfect door. Rosewood and cedar. The bronze of a handle polished by ghosts. The perfect door. The stone lintel. Five men — his father one of them — had raised it. The door behind which lay fire in winter.
‘Warmth,’ he stubbornly repeats out loud.
‘Hush, brother,’ says the voice of a stranger. But he is beyond rescue here. Beyond reach. He stands on the step. Has done many times. The door behind which lies … He shudders.
He prays. It is so. He wishes for conflagration, to melt his flesh so that there is no Karim to remember.
Yet the bronze of this handle will not melt away. No mercy, this side of the door, as there was none across the threshold. He sucks in air and grasps the handle.
Turning it takes so much energy, and yet it will not be denied. The door swings open and he steps through to see his family glowing in the astonishing clarity of the late afternoon sun. In that golden silence he sees his children’s heads are severed. And his wife, her breasts sliced and her vagina a bloody pulp. It is then that the blackness comes and he sinks like a stone.
‘You have to wake up, brother.’
Karim felt the hands shaking him. He opened his eyes and blinked several times, bringing himself back to the present. The light was on, too bright. He tried to shrink back into the seat. A hand gently tugged at his sleeve.
‘Please, it is important we all go now.’ The voice was soft, the language Hazaragi.
‘I’m sorry,’ Karim said. His head was throbbing and he shut his eyes against nausea as he hoisted himself up. But the effort was too much and he fell back, feeling foolish and helpless. Then he remembered the injection in the cell at Woomera. Startled, he looked around and realised for the first time that he was no longer in the camp. This was a bus. And the people were not guards. They were Hazara.
‘Where are we?’
‘We’re free.’ The face close to him cracked in a smile. ‘We’re on the outskirts of Port Augusta.’
‘Help me.’ He extended his arms and felt them gripped firmly. ‘They injected me with something,’ he tried to explain, but knew he had only thought the words and not spoken them aloud. The man pulled him to his feet and eased him into the aisle.
‘We thought you must have been in isolation. We never saw you before. Not in the camp.’ The man steadied him.
‘They sedated me.’ This time the words came out.
‘Ah, yes, we thought you must have been drugged,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Otherwise why would you sleep through an escape?’
Karim looked around at the man. ‘We are really free?’
‘Not for long if we stand here talking. Come. They are waiting for us.’
He began to lead Karim towards the door, but Karim stopped and grasped the back of a seat for support. ‘Did any of you know Ahmed Mazari?’
There was silence and then an older man who had almost stepped off the bus turned, limped past the others and stopped in front of Karim. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘He was my father. The guards told me he died in an accident.’
This time the silence was uncomfortable.
Eventually the man took Karim’s shoulders and held him firmly. ‘He was killed.’ He looked around at the other men. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
Karim choked back the vomit.
‘Yes.’
‘He was a good man.’
‘Stood up to those bastards, though. That’s why they got rid of him.’
The clarity returned and Karim opened his eyes again. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but wasn’t certain what he was thanking them for. The men, now silent and still, were watching him and the shameful male tears rolling down his cheeks.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man. He joined the others in stepping back between the rows of seats to let Karim through. But Karim was unable to move. There is, part of his brain told him, nowhere to go.
‘Please, come.’ The young man who had first helped Karim to his feet nudged him forward. ‘They are waiting.’
Karim nodded and, without asking who they were, shuffled painfully down the bus. ‘He shall be avenged,’ he said to himself, but not quietly enough.
‘So shall we all,’ a young man said. ‘The sword of vengeance does not lose its edge.’
Outside Karim peered into the blackness. His eyes were slow to adjust. A hand steadied him.
‘You are Karim Mazari?’ a voice said in English.
Karim was struck with fear: had he been apprehended? But the man who was holding his arm in an almost tender fashion was not a guard. This Australian was middle-aged, balding, with a silver moustache and a face that looked as though it had been set in a perpetual frown. In the light spilling from the bus Karim could see the man’s eyes were filled with excitement or pleasure.
‘Come with me,’ the man urged.
Karim didn’t move. The bus was now empty, the other men hurrying to the cars. It seemed strange that most of the waiting drivers were women. He shook his head. Even when his body responded normally, his mind was careering like a drunk lurching down a passage. ‘What’s happening? I don’t understand.’ A statement only, simple fact. But the man beside him took it literally as a question.
‘We’re helping you. Come on, I’ll explain in the car.’
Karim concentrated on the ground in front of him, but it rippled and buckled in a sickening fashion and he jammed his eyes shut again.
‘I’ll get the door.’ A voice, clear yet from some far-off place.
He floated, limp in the arms of strangers, and sank down through inky blackness and landed in the rear car seat. A pillow was placed under his head and he allowed himself to drown in the darkness.
When Karim finally awoke it was dawn. The car
had stopped and a man was standing at the open door, speaking to him. Karim eased himself into an upright position. Every muscle in his body protested. He felt like a calf that had been through a bushkashi match, with one unfortunate difference: he was still alive. The man repeated something, but though the tone was friendly, Karim’s brain was not yet prepared to decipher the sounds. He looked past the man to try and gain some sense of where he was. They’d stopped outside a two-storey building, its facade painted pale green. A series of arches, delineated in a deeper green, sat either side of the entrance to … The Grand Hotel, a sign said.
Karim brought his attention back to the man. The face was familiar. ‘You helped me off the bus.’
The man smiled. ‘Ray.’ He extended his hand. ‘And you’re Karim.’
Inside the hotel a short stocky individual nodded in greeting, then came from behind the desk and wrapped Ray in a bear hug.
‘Good to see you, mate.’
He turned to Karim. ‘I don’t know where you come from, mate, and I don’t care. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m ashamed of what your lot’s been through an’ I get sick to the guts when I hear that bloody mob in Canberra going on about illegals. We’re all refugees, mate. Every bloody one of us. And when they start talking about being un-Australian … I tell you, if that’s what helping you lot is called, then I’m bloody un-Australian, mate. Know what I mean?’
Karim looked at the man with a feeling of great sadness. ‘I hate it,’ he said softly, ‘that compassion should wear such labels.’
The first thing Karim did was to eat. He opened the mini-bar fridge, took out a cling-wrapped plate of cheese and biscuits and devoured them. Then he showered and, after closing the curtains, lay on the bed. By his reckoning he must have already slept for at least five or six hours in the car, yet the knock on the door seemed to come so soon.
He opened it to find Ray standing outside, freshly shaved, moustache trimmed and his slicked-back hair still wet from the shower.
‘Will you be right to go in about fifteen minutes?’
‘Sure, I’ll just go to the bathroom.’
After shutting the door Karim went to the window and looked out. It was dusk. The day had gone and somehow he had slept through it.
The Haha Man Page 29
