Ten minutes later, David had finished. At the same time he gave the revolver to the pilot. “Well, you’ve heard it all. If we are still crims, take us prisoner and bring us out.”
The pilot chuckled. “I can’t understand your story, but I understand that. You’re on the level, mate.” He handed back the revolver. “And Tom’s the name.”
As the sun rose higher over the camp David was again drowsing when he heard the roar.
“It’s that pilot again!” he exclaimed. Then he saw Tom emerging from the tent.
“Take cover!” he yelled.
They plunged back into the bush and took shelter in the deep fern, just hoping that their tents under the trees and the camouflage net on the helicopter would not be seen.
The roaring increased. It seemed to be coming directly towards their camp and a moment later it became deafening. Then he saw it, a large black helicopter without markings, only a hundred feet or so above the trees.
The ominous black machine passed over their camp. The roar lessened.
“They’re following the river down,” said Tane.
“Looking for us. Police?”
“I’m not sure,” said Tane. He turned to the pilot. “What do you think, Tom?”
“First of all, it was a big ’copter, real big,” he replied in his slow drawl. “It looked like a Black Hawk troop carrier, the sort the army used to use on operations and now they use for logging and spraying. But it didn’t have any markings, so it could be doing something illegal.” He shook his head. “It might be huia poachers.”
“Pretty big helicopter for poaching,” said David.
Tane broke in. “Like hell it’s poachers! That helicopter was coming down the valley from Devil’s Peak. On the other side of the Peak is the watershed of the Waitoa.”
“The Waitoa,” David whistled. Do you think it was coming from the Waitoa?”
“The huia sanctuary,” said Kate softly, “where no human beings are allowed.”
David was listening again. “It hasn’t gone far! The motor’s stopped.”
“I think it’s landed,” said Tane.
“Do you think they know where we are and they’re coming up?” asked Kate.
“Wait!” said Tane “They’re doing something down there.”
They listened, but could hear nothing. After about fifteen minutes they heard the motor spring into life and a few minutes later the roar broke on them again. They hid as the helicopter swept above them and went on upward towards the headwaters.
David came out and they all stood looking up the valley. Their Shangri La was no longer magical. It felt cold. The birds were no longer singing.
“I think we should reconnoitre,” he said. “Will you stay here, Tom?” The pilot nodded. The others got their boots on. David looked at Tane. “Lead on, but be careful.”
Before they had gone far, suddenly Tane stopped. “Hear that?”
They listened.
“Just the river,” said David.
“Listen again.”
David heard it. A low, continuous roar. “The falls?”
“Two hundred feet high. They’re the highest in the Raukumara.”
Shortly afterwards, when the roar was becoming much louder, they came out into a small clearing.
“That’s where it landed,” Tane said pointing to the skid marks.
He dropped into the riverbed. “Someone’s just been down here.” He pointed to wet boot marks on a rock.
“Be careful,” said Kate.
“It’s all right. The tracks come back too.”
Now Tane stalked noiselessly, nimbly among the boulders. In a moment he was out of sight.
Then they heard above the roaring an agonised yell. “Help! Help!”
They came round the bend and the river just ended. The water leapt into nothingness. The horizon collapsed. Spray was wetting them like rain. There was thunder all around them echoing and resounding from the black, sheer cliffs.
Tane was on the edge of the drop, pointing down. They saw it. A rope leading down into the falls. A climber’s rope. With horror David saw that the rope was taut and passed tightly over a rock near the edge. The rock was sharp and little strands of rope were spinning off.
“Hold me!” Tane motioned, and advanced towards the edge.
They formed a chain, bracing themselves as they could against any footholds they could find. Tane leaned over the very edge and grasped the rope just below the frayed part.
“One – two – three – HEAVE!” he called.
The rope did not move. Tane wedged his foot into a crevice. “Try again.”
This time the rope moved upwards an inch.
“That’s it! Again!”
Now it moved six inches. Tane stepped back from the edge. “Again!”
Inch by inch the rope came up.
They cried out in horror. A hand was coming over the edge clenched to the rope, then an arm, a head and shoulders. Sodden, white, blood-flecked, numb.
“Don’t let go! There’s another!” cried Tane.
It was true. A second man came up. The hands had to be prised loose from the rope.
They seized both men and brought them to the bank, wrapping them round with their jerseys and parkas. Tane flung himself on one and started to rub his limbs furiously. David hugged the other in a desperate attempt to impart warmth.
David never forgot the moment when the eyes of the half-drowned man opened and looked at him. He was back in the Geology vestibule talking to a stranger with a square face and piercing eyes under short, greying hair.
And he heard the voice of Kate crying brokenly.
“Stan! It’s Stan McTaggart!
CHAPTER 38
“Get it out!”
An urgent shout broke the stillness of the summer mid-afternoon.
David couldn’t believe his eyes. A person whom an hour ago he had seen as the half-dead victim of a staged accident was out of Tane’s sleeping bag and limping frenziedly towards the camouflaged helicopter.
“Get it out!” he shouted again as he started pulling away the net with his bandaged hands.
The shouts woke the other tramper. “Nice toy,” he said casually. “Arawa Lines. Hughes 500. Hunting registration Number One. Aircraft registration JM. How did you get hold of that at a thousand dollars an hour?”
David saw Tom looking anxiously at the tramper attacking his helicopter. “We sort of borrowed it. He’s the pilot.”
The exertion had proved too much for Stan. He was leaning against the machine and breathing heavily. “Start it up!”
His laconic, lantern-jawed companion did not move out of the sleeping bag he was in, but calmly lit a cigarette. “Give it a rest, Stan. You’ve hardly noticed the people who saved your life, and all you can think of is pinching their helicopter.”
“I should have introduced Stan’s friend,” put in Kate. “This is Bill.”
Bill’s words had their effect. “Kate, is that you?” Stan limped back towards them. “Is this an Ornithological Society expedition?” Then without waiting for an answer, he eyed David closely.
“I’m David Corbishley, Geology Department. You called on me just before Christmas”
“Doctor Corbishley. You had a colleague who disappeared.”
He nodded towards Tane. “This is him.”
“I thought you didn’t want to know about him. I must have got it wrong.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“So you’ve come to do a survey. ‘There’s great potential even though it’s a Forest Park,” he mimicked.
“I don’t feel that way now,” said David.
Stan turned his gaze to Tane. “The lost colleague. You came in here, didn’t you? You found something?”
It was time to change the subject. “What’s the hurry?” David asked.
Stan looked towards his companion who was still in Tane’s sleeping bag, then he sat down and buried his face in his hands. “There’s a madman loose. Ten thousand people – ar
e going to die.”
They all looked at Bill in horrified silence. “It’s true,” he said.
“We know about the Hollow Mountain and the uranium,” David said. “Is there a base there?”
“You’re all too late!” Stan laughed hysterically.
“Cool it, Stan!” said his companion. “I must apologise for my cobber. He’s not the most tactful chap. But I can tell you there is a base and it’s run by an underground international group called The Brotherhood.”
“But what about the limestone caverns?” asked Tane anxiously.
“That’s where the base is.”
Tane groaned, but he felt David’s hand on his shoulder.
“But how do you know about this?” asked Kate.
“After we were captured a fortnight ago, we convinced them that we agreed with their aims and we were allowed to join them.”
“But we heard they were a white supremacist group? Surely Stan …” spluttered Kate.
Bill grinned. “He just had to shut up and let me do the talking. It was the hardest thing he’s ever done, but it was the only way we could find out what they were up to.”
“I don’t understand. You mean there is no huia?”
Stan started laughing again, but at a look from his companion he stopped.
“Kevin’s one of them,” said Bill quietly.
This time Stan spoke. He seemed to have heeded Bill’s words for his voice was calmer. “Do you remember Stephen Deveney?”
“You mean the American military scientist who resigned during the Vietnam War?” said Tane. “I really admired that man.”
“He’s the chief scientist at the Hollow Mountain.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“The US Government were about to present him with a Congressional medal for his development of selectively targeted electronic strikes. But he resigned because they were being used to target and kill the Viet Cong in a very cruel way. Now he works for the Brotherhood and he’s devised a way to disable the power stations throughout New Zealand. They’ve got sleepers throughout the country to hack in to the key stations. They’re going to start at Rotorua. It’s not only the closest, but happens to have more Maori than other cities. Once the station is sabotaged the sleepers in the Cabinet and across the House will stage a coup by promising to restore power. If it doesn’t work with one, they’ll start on the others.”
“But isn’t Stephen a pacifist?” Kate asked. “How could he possibly work for a racist group like The Brotherhood?”
“He thinks he’s discovered a non-violent way of waging war. Otherwise he doesn’t know what’s really going on.” He glanced at Tane. “You see, he’s only a scientist.”
It was a cruel comment and she deflected it. “But I still don’t see. If it’s just the disabling of the power system, why must ten thousand people die?”
“Because the Chairman doesn’t think it will be enough and he’s changed the plan.”
“So he has a nuclear weapon?” said David.
Stan shook his head. “The process was impossible. They’re exporting the uranium secretly – underneath the cargoes of granite.”
It all fitted in, David thought. The loading by night without lights. The sound of railway wagons.
“They’re trading it for a weapon that’s far more effective for their purpose, something that doesn’t involve property damage.”
There was an eerie silence. The cicadas seemed to have stopped singing. The birds no longer sang or chirped or fluttered around them. Even the river paused in its gentle shrilling.
The voice continued, so detached now that it seemed hardly a part of its owner. “In the Hollow Mountain there are secretly stored the germs of a plague, a disease normally picked up in handling animals, which is fatal, and for which there is no known cure. It’s in the form of a white powder that’s dropped in canisters from a plane, and when it hits the ground the canister bursts and spreads as a cloud. The worst thing is that people don’t realise they’ve got the disease. They think it’s something like flu, and when it seems to turn to pneumonia, it’s too late.”
“What’s its name?” asked Kate.
“Anthrax.”
His listeners gasped involuntarily.
“Surely no one would ever use it,” Kate asked, but her voice faltered.
There was no reply.
“When will it happen?” asked David.
“After a twenty-four-hour warning to the members of The Brotherhood in Rotorua so that they can evacuate.”
“How will the warning be given?”
“By the sabotage of the Rotorua power station.”
“But when?”
“It may already have happened.”
Numbly Tane glimpsed the tragedy which was engulfing Stephen Deveney. “Surely a man like that would never agree with… genocide? He can’t be that naïve. He must have noticed.”
“He only knows half the story. He trusts his leader absolutely. In fact he studies the Bible with him. He thinks Dr Hawthorne is a Christian hero, the pioneer of non-violent war.”
“But who would trust such a man?”
“Didn’t you?”
Stan looked directly at him and this time those relentlessly piercing eyes told him that everything about his own past was known.
He buried his face in his hands.
Blind! Blind!
When Stan had finished his story, he was conscious of a dull ache throughout his body and of sharper pain in his hands and arms where the bandages covered the rock and rope abrasions. But it wasn’t only the physical pain that racked him. When he had hung over the falls and looked into the face of death, his whole life had flashed before him. He saw how stubborn he had been in pursuing his own ambitions. The valley that he sought was not forgotten at all. His search for it had been nothing but an ego trip, a senseless chasing after a figment of his own imagination.
Not only this. His anger at having his ambition thwarted had led him and Bill into the Waitoa, into captivity, then to a hopeless escape and almost to a terrible death. He saw that he was up against strange and frightening forces, where his once prized physical and mental energy was as effective as a pin against the hide of a rhinoceros.
The fair-headed young lecturer to whom he had once been so rude was looking towards him. “Thank you for trying.”
But he who had tramped the ranges for nearly thirty years could strive no longer. His head was shrunk into his shoulders, his body bowed. He felt old and tired. Before him he saw the futility of all he had been passionate about.
“I’ve been a bloody fool.”
Kate was already racing towards the helicopter. “We’ve got to get out and tell people, right now!”
“It’s no good, Kate,” David said. “It won’t work.”
“You coward!” she screamed at him. “Are you going to let all those people die?”
“It’s an impossible story. No one will ever believe it, especially when it comes from hijackers, huia poachers and kidnappers.”
“We tried to escape yesterday because the anthrax strike was about to happen,” said Bill. “It’s now a day later and what are we doing to stop it?”
“From what Stan and Bill have just told us the Hollow Mountain base must be impregnable, with sensors, radar and probably one of the most advanced systems of electronic warfare in the world, not to mention a fleet of highly armed helicopters and biological weapons?”
Kate took off her glasses and looked at him the same way as she had at the end of their conversation on One Tree Hill. “Really, David – aren’t you going to fight Goliath?”
CHAPTER 39
It was a mutiny. Kate had called him a coward. She was right in that he was placing his own and his party’s safety before the lives of the people of Rotorua. Could he and his party live with that?
There was a long silence. He looked around at them. Their faces, even the face of Tom the pilot, gave him their answer. “It’ll be safer after dark,” he said, “but do yo
u think you can find your way there, Tom?”
“It depends on the moon. The route is as shitty as it gets.”
“We’ll guide you. Tane and Stan and Bill have been through the gorge,” said David. “And this time when you ring your boss, tell him that we’re going into the Waitoa but keep it to people he can trust.”
“How much do I tell him?” asked Tom.
“Tell him everything. We need all the help we can get.”
Tom managed to get his base from their ridge-top camp at 21:00 hours on Monday 24th January.
At ten o’clock that night the full silver moon rose over the fearsome horn of Devil’s Peak. In the great sweep of the Milky Way the stars twinkled brighter than any stars David had seen. The moonlight filtered through the trees, painting the leaves with a magical silver sheen and making ghostly luminescent patches in the forest clearings. In the unearthly stillness of the night the moreporks sounded and resounded. Far down in the valley he caught the low and distant roar of the Raukawa Falls.
It was a brittle night.
Tom raised his thumb. “It’s OK.”
Up the Raukawa Valley they flew without lights, guided by the horn of Devil’s Peak which lifted up into the night as if questing the mysteries of that luminous, star-studded vault. Then, breasting the watershed ridge, they felt their way down into the Waitoa headwaters looking for the specks of moonlit water. Soon the specks disappeared and the moonlight glistened on the sides of huge rock bluffs.
“Sheer hell!” Stan peered down into the blackness. “Took us three days.”
“You wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of the gorge, even if it was daylight,” said Tane.
“It runs in a slit in the rock,” said Bill, “but the slit is a thousand feet deep.”
Kate shuddered, but she wondered whether this way was any better. At least they would have been able to see the dangers.
In fact the trip was a nightmare for everyone except Tom who appeared to revel in it. Black shapes below them, black shapes beside them, black shapes above them, they soared and fell, veered and swerved like a roller coaster. When they seemed to be in almost uncontrollable spin, the cockpit would suddenly stand still, then rise gently upward, while Tom would give a low whistle.
Show Me a Huia! Page 21