Snatched! (Foley & Rose Book 6)

by Gary Gregor

  “Do you still think these two are our suspects?” Foley asked.

  “It’s looking more likely now,” Barker answered. ‘Could simply be a couple of carefree ex-soldier boys on an outback holiday. Seeing the sights. Doing a little bit of hang-gliding.”

  “Yeah,” Sam scoffed. “What are the odds? They’re travelling in a four-wheel-drive carrying number plates stolen from a vehicle wreck stored in a compound at Haasts Bluff. They were sighted at Tilmouth Well not long after the teacher and the kids were snatched, and they were driving that same four-wheel-drive. We know a ransom demand was sent from Tilmouth Well at about the same time these two dudes were there. We also know the ransom drop details were sent from Erldunda just before the accident a little further up the highway. Now we know that one of them, this Frayne character, worked at Haasts Bluff for a few days. I don’t think there is any doubt. These two have to be our suspects. Sounds like a slam-dunk to me.”

  “I think you’re right, Sam,” Barker said. “However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to find out all we can about Frayne and Thomas. It might lead us to their associates. There has to be at least two others involved. One to watch over the hostages, and another to pick up the ransom money. There could even be more than two others involved. There is too much we don’t yet know and we need to sit tight until we know more about the two accident victims, or until we get a message as to the location of the teacher and the kids.” He closed his phone and put it in his pocket.

  “So, what now?” Foley asked. “We sit and wait to hear from them?”

  “We’ll keep searching for a possible location of the hostages,” Barker said. “I have Task Force on standby to assist if required. I have transport and medical personnel on standby to bring the hostages home. We still have the roadblocks in place, and they will stay in place until we find Tracy and the kids. There is not a lot more we can do. The kidnappers, or those that are left of them, have their money. We should hear from them at any time now.”

  “I hope you are right,” Richard Smart murmured.

  “You okay, Max,” Foley reached out and touched Smart on the shoulder.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Sorry, I was just thinking about Tracy. She and the kids must be terrified. They must be wondering if we are ever going to find them.”

  “Tracy will know we are looking, Max. I understand she is a good teacher with a good relationship with her students. She will be doing her best to keep them settled and calm. She will know we… you, will not stop looking for them.”

  36

  As Craig Garrett went about preparing to leave the bunker system, for good this time, his mind was besieged with thoughts of Peter Cornwell. The bastard was probably curled up in his comfortable bed in Fiji, he guessed. Maybe a soft, tropical breeze would be wafting gently across his fat, ugly body as he dreamed of his share of two million dollars. The prick was going to be surprised when he found out there was no two million dollars. If there ever was a ransom drop as planned, the police probably had it by now, along with Thomas and Frayne. Or maybe Cornwell had it! If he knew that Thomas and Frayne were in police custody, maybe he travelled out to Mount Liebig himself and grabbed the ransom money. No, Cornwell wouldn’t have it, Garrett decided. Peter Cornwell was about the unhealthiest dude he had ever met. The bastard was huffing and puffing when he was outlaying the whole kidnap plan, and he was sitting in a chair at the time. No, Cornwell would not have the money.

  Garrett had only had a face-to-face meeting Cornwell once, and his dislike for the politician was immediate. He remembered shaking Cornwell’s hand and thinking it felt like a damp dish cloth. Cornwell had an air of superiority about him that Garrett found both arrogant and condescending. It was the ‘I’m in charge, this is my show, do as I say’ attitude that immediately pissed Garrett off.

  After just a few minutes into Cornwell’s plan presentation, Garrett wanted to forget the whole thing and tell Cornwell to shove his kidnapping plan up his fat arse. In hindsight, he should have just walked away but something compelled him to hear Cornwell out; perhaps it was the lack of anything in his own life resembling a bright and prosperous future that convinced him to listen; or even the lack of risk and omnipresent danger that had been so much a part of his military life.

  Garrett had never had any real interest in politics; even less since his inglorious departure from the Army. Back in the day, in the hours immediately following those times when he and his comrades were engaged in the heat of combat, they would often engage in exchanges of disparaging humour directed at the government back home. It mattered not to most of his fellow soldiers what political party was in government; they seemed to be changing every few months anyway. But, in the collective minds of the majority of his colleagues, Afghanistan, like Iraq, and all the wars dating back to the Vietnam and even earlier conflicts were wars that Australia should never have been involved in. Stupid decisions made by stupid, self-serving morons who really only cared about their outrageous salaries and their obscenely generous superannuation packages. It seemed to Garrett that Peter Cornwell slotted beautifully into the ‘stupid, self-serving moron’ category. The closest Cornwell, or any politician, ever came to life threatening combat was the cat-and-mouse ducking and weaving when hiding from persistent media jounalists, he thought.

  Cornwell knew of the existence of the bunker system in the desert; he was a ‘back-bencher’ in the government at the time the designated ‘Top Secret’ Camp Lake Lewis was constructed and became operational. It was Cornwell’s idea to keep the teacher and the children confined there until the ransom was paid.

  It was, however, never his idea to kill all of the hostages. The killing part was Frayne’s addendum to the plan, added later, without Cornwell’s knowledge. It was all very well, Frayne voiced later to Thomas and Garrett, for Cornwell to remain a silent partner in the plan and to have a water-tight alibi in place but it was he and his two fellow ex-soldiers who would be in the frame should it all go south. And it would go south if the teacher and her students were free to offer the police descriptions of their abductors.

  Garrett’s dislike for the fat, pompous politician was enhanced even further when Cornwell announced his proposed split of the ransom: seventy percent for himself and ten percent each for the three men who actually carried out the kidnapping. At the time, Garrett remembered how Thomas, Frayne and he, simply stood as one, turned their backs on Cornwell and started to walk away. It was only when Cornwell offered an even, four-way split that the three men turned and sat back down. They should never have done that, Garrett thought. They should have kept on walking. He remembered there was a look in Cornwell’s eyes, a look he recognised immediately. It was the look of a desperate man and desperate men do desperate things.

  As the self-congratulated mastermind of the whole plan, Cornwell was as guilty as the rest of them and while Garrett would love to see the fat prick sitting in a ten-by-four cell until he died of old age, or even of a long overdue heart attack before age took him, he had to hope the police did not learn of his involvement in the kidnapping. Cornwell would squeal like a pig in a trap if cornered by the cops. He would offer up Thomas, Frayne and Garrett in a heartbeat if he thought it might save him from the angry, desperate, murderous heathens he believed he would find in prison.

  Thomas and Frayne would never talk, such was the character of each, but Cornwell was a different kettle-of-fish. Despite having only met Cornwell once, Garrett quickly arrived at the conclusion that the Minister for Education was a mealy-mouthed, egotistical prick who would lie in the finest political tradition if he believed it would be in his best interest to do so.

  Garrett glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight. If he started walking now, he knew he should reach the Tanami Road before sunrise. Then, he would hitch a ride with a passing motorist back to Alice Springs. It would not be easy: it was not as if there was a constant stream of passing vehicles out in this remote country. He would have plenty of time on the walk out to formulate a believable
explanation for his walking alone in such a desolate place.

  When he got back to Alice Springs, his first priority would be to find his friends Thomas and Frayne. If he discovered they were in fact in the custody of the police, he would simply disappear. It would be hard to walk away from his friends, but he knew it would be what they would want, and he would feel the same way if the situation was reversed.

  Before he left, he stepped closer to the door leading to the third room. He had left the door slightly cracked, as he had promised Tracy he would and a faint glow from a lamp in the back of the room reached across the darkness. No sound came from the room. He reached out and placed the palm of his hand against the heavy metal door. He wanted to push it open wider but decided against it. They would all be sleeping, he decided. For just a brief moment his thoughts turned to Tracy and he wondered if, had they met under vastly different circumstances, could there have been something there between them? He turned away and, softly so as to not wake anyone in the other room, he left, resisting the urge to look back.

  Outside, at the top of the ramp, he paused and stared into the darkness surrounding him. Immediately, his breath formed in small, dense, white puffs as the freezing night air hit him in the face, the only part of his body exposed to the frigid desert air. With gloved hands he pulled the full-face, woolen balaclava, a remnant of his time in Afghanistan, down over his face and tucked it into the neck of his heavy camouflage parka.

  Although it had been a while, Garrett was no stranger to freezing cold desert nights. He and his comrades had spent many an uncomfortable night patrolling suspected insurgent territory in the darkness. The cold can kill the unprepared as surely as an enemy bullet. As a precaution, he had equipped himself with all the right clothing, from heavy-duty, steel-capped boots to the thick down-filled parka. He had hoped the need to walk out of the bunker system would never arise but he was nothing if not considerate of the possibility that everything might turn to shit and he would have to leave this place alone and under the cover of darkness. With just his eyes and mouth exposed, he strode away from the bunker system. He did not look back.

  He found the walking relatively easy in the dull light cast by a cloudless sky filled with stars and an almost full moon overhead. As he became more confident in the conditions, he increased his pace to a point where he was reasonably comfortable with his progress. He remained cautious, however, and recognised clumps of spinifex grass as small, dark mounds sitting just above the desert floor and, as long as he kept his eyes on the ground ahead, he was able to avoid each of the injuriously sharp obstacles. What was more difficult to see in the dull light were the flat, irregularly shaped gibber stones that littered the ground like billions of smooth, flat pebbles cast across the earth from a great height. Worn flat and smooth by millions of years of desert sandstorms eroding their exposed surface area, stepping awkwardly on one could easily turn an ankle, or worse. More than once, Garrett, while lifting his eyes from the ground momentarily, stumbled on a stone and almost fell as his boot slipped on the flat, uneven surface. His pace across the open, featureless landscape slowed each time he stumbled, and then increased again as he regained his confidence. He did not want to twist an ankle, or a knee, but he had to get across the desert before sunrise and did not want to be seen coming out of the desert on foot. That would arouse suspicion and put questions in the mind of the observer.

  After about an hour of walking, he stopped and drank from one of the two canteens of water he wore attached to a web belt around his waist. Before he set off again, he turned and looked back over the country he had so far crossed. It was hard to be positive in the dark, but he thought he could just see a slight rise away in the distance behind him. It would be the hill atop the bunker system, he supposed. Was he imagining it? Sometimes, the longer he stared at the dim shape, the more uncertain he was. Sometimes he could see it, and then he couldn’t.

  The luminous glow from his watch face indicated it was just after one o’clock in the morning. At this rate, he was never going to make it out of the desert before dawn. He had been walking towards the north-east, on the southern fringe of Lake Lewis, two-hundred-and-fifty square kilometres of mostly dry, sun-hardened salt-pans, hoping to exit the desert at the Tanami Road, south-east of the Tilmouth Well Roadhouse.

  He turned and looked to his left, out over the vast expanse of the dry saline lake. He remembered from his training days that the lake, at this time of the year, was usually dry. Usually! That was the operative word. He had no way of knowing if the lake was dry all the way across, hence his decision to walk around it. He knew that if it was dry, he could walk across it at a much quicker pace than he had been making across the spinifex and gibber littered desert plain. If parts of it were inundated with water flowing from from Napperby Creek however, he would never get across before sunrise. He looked again at his watch and then again at the pale expanse stretching away to his left. Was it worth the risk? It had to be, he thought. He took another sip of water and stepped out onto. the salt-pan.

  37

  Tracy could not sleep. Her mind was on overload as questions came and went in rapid progression, several crowding her thought process at once, each jostling for prominence at the forefront of her mind. Complete and utter confusion was a benign description of what was going on inside her head. Still, through the confusion of uncertainty and doubt, she was still focused enough to realise she had the welfare of eleven young children in her hands.

  Her doubts and apprehension, instigated earlier in the day by her conversation with her captor, had been at the forefront of her mind since, and now, while it was late at night, she doubted sleep would come at all. She massaged her temples with her fingers as the first signs of a tension headache began to throb behind her eyes.

  She lay on her mattress, close to the door leading to the outer room where her captor slept. It was quiet. She noticed early in her confinement in this place that the nights were eerily quiet. Whatever this place was once used for it had to be well insulated against any sound penetrating from outside as well as against the extreme temperature variations between night and day, she thought.

  She hadn’t heard the man moving about beyond the slightly cracked door for several hours and she wondered if he was still there. Perhaps he had already left, as he had said he intended. If he was gone, she would be alone with the children and for some strange reason, that frightened her even more than when he was close by in the next room. He was a kidnapper. A criminal. There hadn’t been a moment in the time they had been imprisoned in this awful place when she hadn’t felt fearful of him and what he might do to her and the children. But, if he was gone, if he was no longer just a few metres from where she lay restless on her mattress, that incongruent feeling of security was also gone. It was one thing to be left alone, stranded in the middle of the desert with eleven young children to care for, it was another thing entirely to have another adult with you, albeit a potentially dangerous adult. For Tracy, there seemed to be no genuine logic behind that particular thought process but, it was what it was. Logical, structured, well defined reasoning seemed to have escaped her, at least for the moment.

  The man had never hurt her or any of the children, over and above the mental hurt of distress and despair, and over the time they had been kept in the dark, musty complex, together with the few brief conversations she had had with him, she had developed a sense that he did not intend to physically harm them.

  It was confusing. She should hate him, but she didn’t. Hate was an emotion she could never remember feeling about anyone. There was something she saw in the man. Something in his eyes that suggested to Tracy that he might be living a life of his own making but not of his own choosing. In him she sensed there resided a deep sadness. Maybe it was grief; perhaps over the loss of a loved one. A wife? A child? Whatever it was, it was obvious to her that he felt it very deeply and she sensed it lay not far beneath the surface. Tracy had always considered herself to be a good judge of a person’s character and
she was sure that beneath the man’s gruff, authoritarian exterior there was a decent, albeit damaged, human being.

  Tracy turned on her side on the mattress and stared at the door, slightly ajar just half a metre from where she lay. There was a light beyond the door, she could see it through the gap. An oil lamp, she guessed, like the one in the far corner of the room she shared with the children. The light seeping through the narrow crack was faint and it flickered occasionally, like it might be close to running out of oil. She stared at the light for what seemed like a long time, wrestling with the pros and cons of getting up and going into the adjacent room. The desire to know if he was still there was pulling at her harder than the desire to remain where she was.

  Finally, the wondering if she was alone with the children, became too much. Carefully, she got to her knees and shuffled forward, closer to the door. Tentatively, she reached out and, with the palm of one hand flat against the cool surface of the door, she gently pushed. It was heavy, and at first, she thought there must be something behind it, something weighty preventing it from opening any wider. Now more curious than afraid, she got to her feet and stepped up closer to the door, leaned forward against it, and pushed. In the surrounding silence, the squeak of unoiled hinges startled her. She paused and looked behind her at the dark, shadowy shapes of the sleeping children. Satisfied they were all still sound asleep, she turned back to the door and resumed pushing. Slowly the door swung open enough for her to squeeze herself through the gap.

  Rather than step around the partially open door and enter the room, she decided to take a look first. Standing cautiously in the gap, her heart pounding in her chest, she peeked around the edge of the door.