by Gary Gregor
“They see a man who’s not afraid to take the rough with the smooth. A rugged out-door’s man. I’m the Bear Grylls of law enforcement. How do you think the Bear manages when he’s out in the wilderness for weeks at a time? He doesn’t carry suitcases full of fresh, clean underwear. He turns them inside out, wears them for a few more days, and then he buries them. The ladies love a resourceful man.”
“Bear Grylls is not out there in the so-called wilderness alone, Sam. Who do you think is holding the television camera? He’s got a whole team of cameramen and production crew behind the scenes. Probably got a thirty-foot, luxury, mobile home to sleep in and a truck load of clean clothes just out of camera shot. Go and get the underwear!” He glanced again at his watch. “Hurry, the store will be closed soon.”
Sam put his hand out. “What about some money?”
Foley dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “I don’t have cash on me. I’ll pay you when we get back to the Alice.”
As Foley turned and walked away, Sam said, “Oh no! Not the old ‘I’ll pay you later’ scam. I would like a dollar for every time I’ve heard that line from you.” He watched Foley cross to the opposite side of the room and remove his phone from his pocket. “Bloody cheapskate wowser!” he murmured.
As he stepped past where Richard Smart sat at his desk with a phone to his ear, Sam winked at him. “Don’t become an officer, Max,” he cautioned. “Give ‘em a little bit of authority and they want their own personal fashion designer.”
Originally established in the 1950’s as a government settlement equipped with little more than a water bore and a scattering of basic housing, Papunya offered relative sanctuary for displaced, nomadic, aboriginal tribes in the region. Once home to approximately eighteen hundred Western Desert people, today the population fluctuated around three hundred as sister settlements and out-stations attached to surrounding cattle stations developed and expanded in the region.
In his time as a Northern Territory police officer, Sam Rose had on numerous occasions attended remote, outlying aboriginal communities similar to Papunya in the course of his job. Mostly, he found them to be depressing, dispirited places offering the residents a degree of comfort amounting to a basic roof over their heads and little else in the way of facilities.
The abject poverty embracing Papunya and other settlements was palpable. Apart from a few Government employed administrators, local aboriginal Community Council workers, a school teacher, and store proprietors, there was no work for the majority of the inhabitants. Fortnightly government welfare payments were the sole source of income for the majority of the residents, and that income was quickly depleted on the grossly inflated cost of the basic necessities of life such as food and clothing.
Those who chose to live and work in communities like Papunya for an extended period of time, the outsiders as they had become known, could amass an attractive financial nest-egg over the period of their tenure, providing they were able to tolerate the remote, hot, dry, dusty, loneliness associated with such a life. The locals on the other hand, would never know what it was like to have money in the bank. They lived a hand-to-mouth existence from one government pension day to the next. “Sit-down-money” they referred to the government welfare hand-out as. They didn’t have to do anything more energetic than sit down under the shade of a tree and wait for every second Thursday to roll around and the government would give them free money.
To Sam Rose, the local, indigenous inhabitants of such settlements, at least the adult inhabitants, always looked sad. Young children were, in the main, the exception. The children, blessed with the innocence of youth and much like young children from any society, always seemed to be smiling. There was something captivating about a sparkling white smile beaming from a tiny black face.
As he made the short walk to the community store, he couldn’t help but notice the settlement looked strangely deserted. He glanced at his watch. It was late afternoon and, when he would normally expect to see people moving about, children playing after school for instance, or perhaps adults sitting around in small groups in the shade chattering in their mother tongue, there was no one. He stopped, turned around, and looked along the dusty street behind him. There was not a soul in sight. It was a surreal feeling; almost like he was the only person in the entire township. As the majority of aboriginal people were lovers of country music, he would expect to hear the twang of country guitar riffs and bright, melodious country vocals wafting from residences. There was only an eerie, all-encompassing silence.
Like its sister settlement, Haasts Bluff, Papunya was in mourning. The town was mourning for the dead bus driver, Walter Tjapanangka and for the lost children and their teacher. In Haasts Bluff, where Walter lived, there would be a traditional “smoking” ceremony. Relatives of the deceased would wail and chant while wafting smoke through his home to assist his transition to the Dreamtime. There was a solemnness about Papunya that seemed to Sam to hang heavy in the air like a dense, invisible fog.
Sam had never been a man conducive to episodes of depression. Indeed, among his colleagues in Major Crime he was generally considered as a happy-go-lucky, up-beat, carefree individual. However, there were some, albeit only a small few, among those he had worked with in the course of his career who considered his somewhat blasé attitude to be insensitive and uncaring to the point of bordering on inappropriate. In his job Sam had seen death in all its manifestations at one time or another; from the ugly and the grotesque of a brutal, senseless murder to the perfectly peaceful and natural passing as a result of old age.
With the exception of the murder of a child, death did not seem to effect Sam as emotionally as it did many of his colleagues. He believed that to be the best he could be at what he did he needed to have a degree of separation between the emotional and the reality. Perhaps the emotionality would come when his career was over and he had both the time and the inclination for reflection.
Sam Rose had been a Major Crime investigator long enough to get a feel for when a particular case would go well or drag on for weeks, or even months. The missing school bus and its passengers was one of those cases he sensed would not be quickly solved. Logic would suggest it should be easy, it had to be difficult to hide twelve hostages anywhere and avoid discovery, he thought, but Sam knew instinctively it would not be easy. There were not a lot of places in the outback, or indeed anywhere else, where you could hide twelve people and not be noticed. Outside the confines of the tiny settlements dotted throughout the region, there was nothing more substantial than several million acres of wide-open space. It was like the teacher and her students had simply disappeared into thin air.
He paused at the door to the small community store, turned and looked long and hard at the strangely silent settlement around him, and then beyond the spattering of homes at the empty land beyond the limits of the township. They were out there somewhere, they had to be, but where?
10
Of the three former soldiers, Liam Frayne, had killed the most. After the first, he was quietly surprised that he did not experience the same feelings his fellow soldiers seemed to feel following their baptism of fire. There was not the stunned, confusing, rush of numbness that washed over others immediately following their first kill. The profound, bewildering, elongated sense of silence that followed after the sound of the last shots fired had faded seemed not to be there for Frayne as it was for others. Instead, his mind was filled with a jumbled conglomeration of images and sounds he did not understand yet found strangely fascinating.
It wasn’t that he enjoyed killing; nor did he develop a strong distaste for it. Rather, the feeling was inexplicably at odds with what he expected he should feel. He did know he did not want to kill again but that was more about the distinct possibility of losing his own life while doing so as opposed to the taking the life of someone for no justifiable reason. He knew he would kill again; such was the nature of his job. He was a combat soldier in an insidious, much-maligned war and indeed, before his partic
ular role in it was over, he would kill again. Many times.
Whenever his unit was involved in a firefight with the enemy, he seemed to find himself either by subconscious design or by sheer fluke of positioning, at the forefront of the action. His feelings on the matter remained strangely benign, neither growing nor lessening in intensity. Killing simply became an automatic reaction to the situation he found himself in at the time. Despite the horrendous noise of battle raging all around him, he seemed, somehow, able to step outside the present moment, kill as many of the enemy as he could, and not be fully aware of his actions until it was over. He could also never remember feeling afraid, either before, during, or immediately after a firefight. It became an impersonal thing; happening to someone else and not to him.
The one thing Liam Frayne did learn from all the killing was that, despite the fact that he had no real desire for the experience, he could do it again and be perfectly at peace with himself for doing so. As disturbing a state of mind as most people would consider that to be, for Frayne it was perfectly normal. He was doing his job. Doing what he was trained to do; kill with efficiency and impartiality.
It was that very character trait that earned Frayne the place at the side of the outback road alongside Craig Garrett. The apparent ease with which he could pull the trigger and end a life did not escape his friends Garrett and Thomas; they had seen it many times. It was decided very early in the planning stage that the bus driver would have to be killed and Liam Frayne was perfectly comfortable with being selected for the role.
The killing of another human being, be it justified or otherwise, is considered an abhorrent act by the overwhelming majority of the human race. It’s an opinion that seems to be inherent in most of mankind, remaining at the core of their beliefs from the womb to the grave. Mark Thomas was no exception. Despite his experience at the act of killing another, an act deemed by most to be justified in the context of war, Thomas never felt at ease with his actions, unlike his friend Liam Frayne. Thomas was a lot more like Craig Garrett; he also had a strong dislike for killing. It was not a newly acquired thing, it was a perfectly natural aversion that had always been with him and was intensified now by the all too often occurrences of it as a result of combat.
Thomas didn’t know how many men he had killed, he stopped counting after the first six. Others, men like Liam Frayne, prided themselves with the numbers of casualties attributed to them. For those men, the numbers mattered. It was almost like some sort of macabre competition; like the age-old stories of the Wild West where gunslingers allegedly cut notches into the grips of their weapons; one notch for every kill. If they gave trophies for killing, Frayne would have a cabinet filled with awards.
Still, Thomas liked Frayne, they had been friends for a long time. Frayne did not openly brag about his killings; such a demonstrative display may well have changed Thomas’s opinion of him. Although he knew Frayne secretly relished in his accomplishments on the battle field, there were other personality traits that made him a good friend to have; characteristics that made it easy to overlook his somewhat bizarre preoccupation with killing enemy soldiers. Frayne had saved both Thomas’s and Garrett’s life on more than one occasion at the battlefront and Thomas figured that alone had to be a good enough reason to like the man.
Tilmouth Well Roadhouse was located approximately two hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, at the end of the only sealed section of the Tanami Road. Built and operated by the Chisolm family at the southern fringe of their vast 2,200 square kilometre Napperby cattle station, Tilmouth Well was appropriately marketed as an Oasis in the Outback. The air-conditioned cabins, sprawling green-lawn camping areas, swimming pool, restaurant, and well-stocked bar were the last real taste of civilisation the adventurous traveler was going to experience before facing approximately 800 kilometres of hot, dusty, corrugated, bone-shaking dirt road snaking north-west across the remote, unforgiving Tanami Desert.
It was also the last stop for essentials such as fuel, food, water, and mechanical spares before daring to traverse the famous cattle-droving route connecting Hall’s Creek in the north Western Australian Kimberly region to the market head in central Australia.
Liam Frayne and Mark Thomas sat at the bar adjacent to the restaurant, the cool, air-conditioned comfort incongruous yet welcome against the stifling desert heat outside. Both men sipped low-alcohol beer from cans held in individual foam holders designed to keep the beer refreshingly cool.
Neither Frayne nor Thomas could be considered habitual heavy drinkers but, like most young men in their demographic, there were occasions when both were guilty of overindulgence in the demon drink to a point where common sense was often casually and carelessly discarded and replaced by stupidity.
The consumption of more alcohol than would be considered healthy by normal community standards seemed to be a common practice among soldiers, particularly those returning from active duty. Now, albeit with some deft manipulation of the actual state of affairs, Frayne, Thomas and Garrett might consider themselves to be on active duty and, as such, self-restraint in regards to alcohol consumption was the order of the day. It was the time for abstinence at best, or extreme moderation at the very least.
Incongruently reminiscent of pre-battle procedure requiring clear heads and rational minds, they were about to extort two million dollars from the Australian government and that required focus and concentration unhindered by the effects of alcohol.
Frayne drained the last drops from his can, raised his hand and indicated to the pretty girl behind the bar to bring another two. Two beers each, per day, was the limit they all agreed on before the plan started. It was none at all, or two low alcohol beers only. No wine, no spirits, no exceptions. It was like the old rule from their days spent deployed in a war zone base camp: “Two tinnies, per man, per day - perhaps.”
The girl brought the beers, accompanied with a smile, and placed them on the bar in front of the two men. Frayne pushed some money across the bar, returned the smile and watched her walk away.
Thomas leaned his head close to Frayne. “Don’t even think about it,” he said quietly.
“What?” Frayne asked.
“You know ‘what’. No women until this is done.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about… “
“Yes, you were,” Thomas interrupted. “We can’t afford to fuck this up. No distractions, remember?”
“I was just admiring the scenery, that’s all,” Frayne explained. “It’s been a while, you know.”
“Yes, it has,” Thomas agreed. “For all of us. When this is over, you can blow your share on all the women you want but, right now, we need to stay focused on the job and that does not include bonking the brains out of some back-packer chic working her way around the country, no matter how attractive, or how accommodating she may be.”
“You think she’s accommodating?”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know, and we are not going to find out.”
Frayne picked up his beer and took a sip. “Bloody shame if you ask me. You know one you miss out on is one you never catch up on.”
“Are you sure the teacher never saw your face?” Thomas asked, diverting Frayne’s attention from the pretty back-packer.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I had my back turned the whole time, leaning over the bonnet of the car.”
Thomas took a sip of his beer. “Good,” he said.
“I still don’t see what difference it makes whether she saw my face or not,” Frayne said.
“Because she knows you, Liam!” Thomas said insistently. “We’ve been over this a hundred fuckin’ times, mate. You built the bus shelter right next door to the bloody school. She saw you almost every day. She knows your face! She knows your name! You fuckin’ hit on the girl, for Christ’s sake!”
“I didn’t hit on her,” Frayne insisted. “I just smiled at her a lot. Besides, she’s seen Craig’s face too. And yours,” Frayne said as if that was all the justification he needed.
&n
bsp; “She would never have stopped the bus if Craig’s face was hidden,” Thomas explained.
“Yeah, I know,” Frayne accepted. “Still, she sure is a looker. I would love to have had a piece of her.”
“I’m sure you’ve had knock backs before,” Thomas smiled.
Frayne sipped his beer. “Not many,” he said.
Thomas leaned closer to Frayne. “Do you really think you can kill her?” he asked quietly.
Frayne shrugged. “Sure. Killing’s not hard, mate. You know that. We’ve both done it before.”
“Yeah,” Thomas agreed. “But they were enemy combatants. It was kill-or-be-killed. This is different.”
“Different? How different can it be? Aim, and pull the fuckin’ trigger.”
“It’s different because, with all the others, we killed in self-defense. We were at war with the fuckin’ towel-heads. This is not war. The teacher is not an enemy combatant trying to kill us. She’s a fuckin’ Aussie school teacher, working out here in the middle of nowhere, just trying to make a living. Besides, you had feelings for her.”
“Yeah, right!” Frayne scoffed. “My dick had feelings for her. I never wanted to marry the girl. I just wanted to get laid!” He took another sip of his beer. “You’re not going soft on this whole thing, are you?”
Thomas paused, waiting for the pretty barmaid to pass in front of them to serve another customer at the far end of the bar. “No, I’m not going soft,” he answered just above a whisper. “I just think there must be a better way to do this without killing an innocent school teacher and all of her students.”
“We talked about this over and over again, mate,” Frayne said. “We all agreed. There’s no better way. If we let them go, they can identify both you and Craig. And,” he added. “By association the cops will very quickly put me in the frame. It won’t matter which one of us pulls the trigger. We’ll all spend the rest of our lives in an eight-by-four cell eating unidentifiable prison slop and taking it up the arse from some big fucker covered in tatts and a dick the size of a tree trunk.” He drained his beer. “What do you say we have just one more?”