Snatched! (Foley & Rose Book 6)

by Gary Gregor

  “Alright, Max?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Smart answered.

  “Thinking about, Tracy?”

  “Yeah. I’m concerned we haven’t heard from the kidnappers yet.”

  “Well,” Sam began to explain. He indicated the panoramic scene around them. “There’s a lot of country out there. A lot of nothing. Get away from the community and there’s a lot of wide, open country. If Tracy and the kids are out there somewhere, the kidnappers would want to give themselves plenty of time to get away.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Smart nodded. “But what if they’re not out there?”

  “Where else can they be, Max?”

  “Maybe they got through before the roadblocks were put in place,” Smart suggested.

  “I doubt that,” Sam said. “Think about it, they have twelve hostages they have to take with them wherever they go. Twelve hostages have got to be bloody hard to hide. They would have to stay away from populated areas. This thing is all over the news. They have to be somewhere where no one ever goes. They can’t take the risk of someone seeing them.”

  “Yeah, I know you’re right,” Smart agreed. “Still, the waiting sucks.”

  “She pretty, this girl?” Sam asked.

  “Very,” Smart confirmed.

  “Sounds to me you like you might have it real bad for her,” Sam said.

  Smart shrugged. “Yeah, you could be right,” he responded.

  “She feel the same way?”

  “I think so,” Smart answered.

  “You don’t know for sure?” Sam asked. “You ever ask her how she feels about you?”

  “No, I’ve never asked her.”

  “When she gets back, maybe you should.”

  Smart smiled, a little embarrassed. “Maybe I will.”

  Sam placed a hand on Smart’s shoulder. “You know, Max, there are those who would say I am somewhat of an authority on the female of the species.”

  “I’ve heard of your reputation,” Smart said.

  “Well, let me assure you that, as lovely as they are, women are very strange cattle. When you think you know them, you need to think again. If you assume a lady feels the same way about you as you feel about her, you better clarify it. Ask her. They are unpredictable creatures and will confuse you at every turn in your relationship with them. When Tracy gets back, ask her.”

  “I just might do that,” Smart smiled.

  “Don’t get me wrong, mate,” Sam continued. I love ladies. God knows I have been with more than my share of them over the journey and still I’m often outplayed by them.”

  “I heard your wandering eye has settled somewhat in recent times,” Smart said.

  “You heard?”

  “It’s the police force, Sarge. The rumor mill is as bad here as it is everywhere else.”

  “Worse sometimes,” Sam confirmed. “But, it’s not really a rumor. “It just may be that I have finally found the right one.”

  “May be?” Smart queried. “Are you saying you are not sure?”

  “You can never be completely sure, mate,” Sam answered. “But in this case, I am as sure as I will ever be that Sarah is a keeper. What I am certain about is that it has been one hell of a ride finding out.”

  Smart, his demeanor once again pensive, returned his focus to the community and the desert beyond. “When do you think we will hear from the kidnappers?” he asked Sam.

  “I’m sure we will hear today,” Sam answered. “I expect you will have Tracy back before nightfall.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Smart murmured.

  Behind them, Russell Foley stepped out onto the verandah. “What’s happening, lads?” he asked, joining Sam and Smart at the railing.

  “Max and I were just discussing the financial implications on the Australian economy if we were to ban all imports and exports from China,” Sam answered.

  “Bullshit!” Foley chuffed.

  “What’s happening with you?” Sam asked.

  “We got a phone call from one of the cattle station owners,” Foley began. “They have almost completed their mustering and he has offered to conduct another fly-over later this afternoon.”

  “Good,” Sam said. “We sure need a break in the case.”

  “Yeah,” Foley agreed. “It’s frustrating, but we’ve had frustrating cases before. You just have to keep going and hope the break will come, sooner rather than later.” He looked at Smart. “How you holding up, Max?”

  “I’m okay, sir,” Smart answered. “I was hoping we would have heard by now. They picked up the ransom hours ago.”

  “I’m sure we’ll hear something soon,” Foley said.

  “Max is concerned they might have slipped through before we got the roadblocks in place,” Sam said.

  “I doubt it,” Foley said. The two lads who found the bus driver found him within half an hour of the bus leaving Haasts Bluff. Our chaps found the bus burnt out on the Tanami Track, and even if they transferred the hostages to another vehicle, they could never have made it through before the roadblocks were set up. The time frame just doesn’t fit.”

  “I know this place pretty well,” Smart added. “I don’t know of any place out there in the desert where they could be held for so long. There’s twelve of them, plus the kidnappers, they would need good supplies of food, and water. I just don’t know where they could be.”

  Foley stepped closer to Smart and patted him on the back. “We’ll find them, Max. I expect we will get a phone call at any moment.”

  The sound of a phone ringing from inside the office startled them.

  “This could be it,” Foley said.

  Followed closely by Sam and Smart, Foley turned away and entered the station.

  Cameron ‘Yap Yap’ Barker was pacing back and forth across the confined space behind the small reception counter. “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me!” he said into the phone. “How did it happen? When? Are you sure it’s him? Is it all there?”

  Foley, Sam, Smart, and Sparrow gathered together and listened to the one-way conversation with growing interest. Barker spoke for several minutes before he hung up the phone and looked up at the four blank, confused faces staring at him.

  “You’ve all heard of Peter Cornwell I assume?” he asked, finally.

  “Yes,” Foley answered. He’s the the Minister for Education, isn’t he?”

  Barker nodded. “Yeah, I had the displeasure of his presence my office a couple of times in the last few days. He was pretty pissed off that the kidnapping interfered with a planned jaunt to Fiji.”

  “What about him?” Foley asked.

  “He’s dead,” Barker announced.

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah, Russ,” Sam interjected. “You know, like in not breathing anymore – ever.”

  Foley threw Sam a look that silently said – ‘don’t be a smart-arse’.

  “What happened?” Foley asked Barker.

  “The manager at the casino rang the station about a half an hour ago. The room-cleaning staff found him in his room, fully clothed and slumped forward on the end of his bed.”

  “How did he die?” Sam asked.

  “Probably had a heart attack,” Barker surmised. “Fat prick couldn’t change his mind without puffing and blowing.”

  “Can we assume from that comment that you and the Minister of the Crown were not best buds?” Sam asked.

  “He was an egotistical, pompous arsehole,” Barker responded.

  “So, I take it he’s no longer on your Christmas card list?”

  “Never was,” Barker said. ‘I don’t have a Christmas card list.”

  “That would explain why I have never received a card from you,” Sam responded.

  Ignoring the remark, Barker continued. “There’s more, gentlemen,” he announced. “He had the money.”

  “The money?” Foley asked.

  “Yeah, he had the ransom money. In a bag at the foot of his bed.”

  “What?’ Foley exclaimed inc
redulously. “I don’t understand. Cornwell had the ransom money? Are you sure?”

  “The bag was open. Packed to the brim with nice neat bundles of one-hundred-dollar notes. It fits the description of the bag the ransom was packed in.”

  “What the fuck was Cornwell doing with the ransom money?”

  “Apparently his shoes, and the legs of his trousers, were covered in dust. Like he might have been walking around in the dirt somewhere,” Barker answered. “And, he was driving a rental car and it was also covered in dust. Looked like it may have been driven off-road recently.”

  “Recently? Like this morning?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe,” Barker answered.

  “Lot of dirt and dust out at Mount Liebig,” Sam commented.

  Foley turned to face Sam. “You think Cornwell picked up the ransom money?”

  “Just a thought,” Sam said with a shrug.

  “Why? Why would he pick up the money?”

  “How about because he was up to his fat neck in the whole kidnapping thing,” Sam suggested.

  “In his role as Minister for Education, he had to know where the ransom drop site was,” Foley mused. He turned to Barker. “Did he say anything when you met with him that might arouse your suspicions?”

  “No, not that I recall,” Barker said. “But then I have to admit that, most of the time, I wasn’t taking a great deal of notice of anything he said. However, he did seem annoyed that we have a ‘no ransom’ policy. He was very adamant we should pay the money.”

  “How much do we know about Cornwell?” Sam asked.

  “There’s no criminal record,” Barker answered. “If there was, he wouldn’t be in politics. The lads back in the Alice are going over his background as we speak. He’s become a bit of a media target over the last couple of years with hints of misuse of tax-payer funds in regards to overseas travel etcetera, but nothing has been proved, as yet. Personally, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. If there’s anything substantial there, we’ll find it. In the meantime, we have to wait. There has to be at least one, maybe more perps holding the hostages. We are not releasing news of Cornwell’s death at the moment, so whoever is holding Tracy and the kids will think they have gotten away with it and notify us of where to find the hostages.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Foley said.

  41

  Tracy slowed and looked at her watch. It was just a few minutes past midday. She called the children to a halt and waited until all the children had stopped and were sitting, gathered haphazardly together on the hot desert floor. This was the third rest break they had taken since they left the place that had been their prison for the last five days. With the back of her hand she wiped at the perspiration running freely down her face and into her eyes.

  The ground was hot and uncomfortable to sit on but the children needed to rest. A few even laid down, their heads in the crook of their arms and their eyes tightly closed shutting out the glare of the scorching midday sun.

  The water reserves they carried with them were getting alarmingly low and, despite the moans and groans of protest, she had to be firm with the rationing of it, allowing each child just two shallow sips. They still had a long way to go and running out of life-giving water would mean the end for them all.

  When they first set out from the bunker, the pace was quicker than Tracy would have preferred and when a few of the younger children began to drop back, unable to keep up with the two leading boys, she found herself adjusting her own pace to accommodate the slower ones and this allowed the two leaders, Toby Miller and John Jabaldjari, to pull away from the group. These two young tearabouts and best mates seemed to have boundless energy. It comes from being locked up in a very small box for almost a week and then suddenly set free, she supposed.

  Tracy always knew walking across the desert was going to be uncomfortably hot, but the degree and relentlessness of the heat surprised her. There was simply no respite from it. No trees offering even a modicum of shade, no water holes to replenish their rapidly dwindling supplies, nothing. Just persistent, burning heat, beating down upon them, sapping their energy and rapidly degrading their resolve.

  She shaded her eyes and looked towards the horizon in the distance. There was nothing there to guide them. No hills, no trees, nothing. Just endless kilometres of burning desert dirt and razor-sharp spinifex grass. She had been relying on the compass to keep them heading in the right direction but the truth was, she couldn’t remember if she was accurately following the directions given to her by her captor. It was a brief lesson in something she had never before had any reason to use. The thought that she might actually be directing her children deeper into the desert instead of out of it frightened her.

  She could not let her fears consume her. She had to stay focused and in control. There were eleven young, innocent lives depending on her. She cast her eyes over her class, slumped, heads bowed, thirsty and tired. She had to get them out of here and, as exhausted as they all may be, she couldn’t do that while they were not moving forward. She looked at the compass, checking the alignment, and pushed herself to her feet.

  “Okay, children. We need to keep moving. I know you are tired but we have to keep going. Everybody on your feet now, let’s go.”

  Groans of discontent rippled through the group and it seemed to take forever for the children to respond. Slowly, one after another, and totally lacking in anything resembling enthusiasm, they climbed to their feet. Some pulled their hats lower on their heads, others just stood heads bowed, staring listlessly at the ground.

  Tracy wanted to cry. She loved her children, every last one of them and to see them like this, so disheartened and physically beaten, broke her heart. As if being snatched at gunpoint and confined and locked in a tiny room for five days was not enough, now they had to endure the life-sapping heat of the day as they trudged across the burning desert looking for freedom that they almost certainly believed they would never find.

  This time, Tracy decided to take the lead, instructing Toby Miller and John Jabaldjari to follow at the rear and help those among them who started to drop behind the main group. Her instructions earned her a brief look of disdain from each of the boys before they moved reluctantly to the rear of the disheveled cluster of their exhausted classmates.

  As they continued, the hourly rest breaks became half-hourly. They were now into the afternoon and the sun was hotter than at any other time of the day. Tracy began to have real fears that they were never going to get out of the desert.

  Behind her, the children were no longer walking confidently. It was now more a case of two or three normal paces forward followed by several shuffled, scuffing steps. Little children’s shoes scuffing at the dirt sending tiny clouds of dust into the air around their feet. They were so exhausted they couldn’t lift their feet for more than a few steps.

  On one of the many times Tracy turned to check on her children, even Toby Miller and John Jabaldjari, at the rear of the group, had slowed. Both boys were no longer striding forward with the same enthusiasm they started the journey with. Now they were, like their classmates, shuffling along, heads down and defeated.

  Tracy called for another stop. This time she decided to rest longer; half-an-hour as opposed to the usual fifteen-minute breaks. No one spoke. The usual potpourri of animated conversations, a feature of their days in confinement and at the beginning of the trek, was long gone. They were all too tired to talk.

  Some of the children fell asleep immediately. They had been walking for many hours, their progress restrained by the relentless heat and, as weariness morphed into utter exhaustion, sitting or lying on the ground was an automatic, uncontrollable invitation to sleep.

  Tracy heard someone calling her name. The voice sounded distant, and anxious. She thought she recognised the voice but it was too far away for her to put a name to the caller.

  “Miss Tracy!” the voice called. “Miss Tracy!”

  Like many of the children, she too had unintentionally fall
en asleep. She sat facing away from the children, her head lowered and her chin resting against her upper chest, trapped in a fragile, dream-like state of awareness. Suddenly, from somewhere, she felt a nudge on her arm and her eyes slowly opened. Absently she wiped at a thin thread of sleep-drool that ran down her chin. She lifted her head. “Wh… what? What is it?” she mumbled, blinking against the sudden glare of bright sunlight.

  Before her, looming close, John Jabaldjari stared down at her from wide-open, brown eyes. “Miss Tracy,” he said.

  Suddenly alert, Tracy sat upright and focused on the young aboriginal boy. “John, what is it?” she asked.

  “Dere’s a plane, Miss,” Jabaldjari said.

  “What?”

  “Dere’s a plane, Miss,” Jabaldjari repeated. He looked up and pointed to the sky. “Up dere, Miss. Dere’s a plane.”

  “A plane?”

  “Yes, Miss. Dere’s a plane. It bin flyin’ round and round up dere.”

  Tracy scrambled to her feet and scanned the sky above her, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sun. She heard the plane before she saw it. It was a deep drone from somewhere above her, seemingly getting louder as she searched the sky. Then she saw it. A small, fixed-wing aircraft, circling high above the small group.

  By now, all the children were awake, milling around in a tight group, looking up into the cloudless sky at the plane as it spiraled in wide circles, getting lower to the ground with each circuit.

  Tracy had never in her life felt as relieved to see an aircraft as she did at the moment. The children, suddenly realising the potential consequences of the plane’s presence, became animated and excited, chatting and pointing at the sky. A few even attempted tiny jumps of joy from tired, aching legs.

  As she watched her beloved class and their awkward displays of excitement, Tracy smiled. The effort hurt. Her lips, parched and cracked by hours and hours of exposure under the hot sun started to bleed but she didn’t care. If sore and cracked lips were the only physical injuries she walked away from this ordeal with, she was more than okay with that.