Stark

by Ben Elton

  They heard the padding first, rhythmic thudding that managed to sound both hard and soft at the same time, as if somebody wearing a boxing glove was punching the ground very hard. It was getting closer, and sounding stranger and more ominous. It reminded Mrs Culboon of something but she could not remember what. CD wondered about taking up a rifle and putting up some semblance of self-defence, but then he wondered what the point would be, and decided that there wasn’t one. Then Mrs Culboon remembered what the noise sounded like, it sounded like a camel. Shortly after which, she heard it snort and decided that it was a camel.

  225: BATTLE CAMEL

  From behind the rocks that formed the cave rode Zimmerman resplendently perched atop a great ship of the desert, like an Australian Lawrence, burnt by the sun, cloaked in white and swathed in weaponry. He made an impressive figure.

  ‘I’ve been speaking to some of the workers they laid off,’ he said, without bothering to greet them. ‘The shit is definitely about to hit the fan. We have to make our move.’

  ‘I think we’ve made enough moves,’ Chrissy said dully. ‘Walter and Mr Culboon are dead.’ Zimmerman sat on his camel in silence, his expression did not change. It was as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘That’s why we have to do something, I reckon,’ said Mrs Culboon, her face still like granite and her voice flat as the Great Sandy Desert. ‘What move did you have in mind, Zimmerman?’

  For a moment Zimmerman continued his silence, then he seemed to return from wherever it was that he had been. ‘Gotta fight, I guess,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh Zimmerman,’ Chrissy’s voice was so tired and dull. ‘How can we fight them?’

  ‘Got to fight them,’ he said and the camel snorted. ‘Isn’t a question of how, we’ve got to do it.’ He still hadn’t mentioned the death of his friend.

  ‘Walter’s dead,’ Chrissy repeated. ‘This has nothing to do with Walter, lady,’ said Zimmerman. ‘He’s doing his thing some place else. We fight for whoever’s left. That’s the way we always did it back when the sharp end was sharp. Remember the dead, sure, but defend the living.’

  Something had been bothering CD. At first he couldn’t place it, then he remembered. He knew what it was he wanted to ask.

  ‘What’s the story with the camel?’ he said.

  ‘I found her,’ answered Zimm.

  ‘You found a camel? Where have you been, Arabia?’

  ‘They have camels in Oz. They brought them over before they knew about Toyotas,’ asserted Zimm without changing his tone. ‘Some are wild, some are tame. Walter here was wild, but now she’s tame. I had to punch her in the mouth one time but camels don’t mind. She’s gonna see a heap worse than that before she gets much older.’

  ‘Walter?’ asked CD.

  ‘Yeah, her name was Sai Wan after a girl I once knew, but now it’s Walter. I can call her Walter Culboon if you’d like that, Mrs Culboon?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘although it’s a nice thought.’

  ‘Actually I’d like to,’ said Zimmerman. ‘Mr Culboon was a brother too, you know?’

  ‘OK, whatever.’

  Zimmerman sat on the ridge, on top of Walter Culboon the camel. He towered above the other three, almost black against the sun. He was clearly mad. This was why the others could handle the conversation. The world was mad, Zimmerman blended in. If he had been straight he would have been a freak. The world was about to die and Walter and Mr Culboon had gone before and now they had both come back as the same camel, and Zimmerman was sitting on them. Chrissy, who had seen a man shot to pieces and then driven for sixteen hours in temperatures that would have defrosted a frozen elephant in time for supper, felt dizzy. ‘Where’s my man lay?’ asked Mrs Culboon when the silence was finished.

  ‘Yesterday he was in Zimmerman’s back garden…‘ Chrissy could not bring herself to say ‘Walter’s as well’. Camels didn’t have gardens. ‘I guess they must have moved him by now.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘Reckon the police are pretty used to getting rid of dead blacks.’

  ‘It’s morning now,’ said Zimmerman. ‘We’ll hit ‘em an hour before dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘On a camel?’ asked CD who was staying closest to reality. Wherever that was. It was a new experience for CD to be the most together member of the team. Maybe Chrissy sensed this, she pulled herself back from the place she was drifting in and blinked the salty sweat out of her eyes.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘won’t they laugh at the camel?’

  ‘The camel can cover very rough ground at great speed,’ said Zimmerman. ‘It is incredibly hardy and has a very unfazeable personality.’

  If Walter Culboon realized how highly she was being spoken of, she did not show it. She chewed and shuffled about a bit. Perhaps Zimmerman knew what he was talking about, she certainly did not seem fazed.

  ‘It is a stealthy beast,’ continued Zimmerman in his quiet drawl, ‘with soft, padded feet and is ideal for approaching an enemy in silence.’

  Perhaps Zimmerman should have added that she had great timing, for this was the moment that Walter Culboon chose to let rip with an unfeasibly camelish bottom burp that rent the air in twain. It barked its way around the desert for a good eight seconds and rolled down into the little hollow in which the other three were sitting, leaving them knee deep in a primeval fug which made even the air of the summer of Stark seem vaguely alpine. Nobody was cruel enough to say anything, but even Zimmerman could work out what they were thinking.

  ‘Now I know, like, that you’re thinking that the farting situation kind of contradicts the stealth and silence thesis,’ he said, his voice showing some emotion for the first time since he had appeared. ‘But like, I suggest you put yourself in the position of a security guard, right? Who, whilst doing his security guarding thing, hears a camel blowing off in the still of the desert night. Like, does that guard think to himself, oh wow, bummer, the avenging hand of EcoAction is upon me? Or does he think that a camel has blown off…or maybe a lonely kangaroo?’

  Nobody had the faintest idea what to say to this and so Zimmerman explained his battle plan.

  226: A MOMENT OF DOUBT

  As Zimmerman talked of battle, listing his resources — which consisted of four people, a station wagon, a hire car and a truck; as his companions listened, becoming, in the process, almost as flatulent as Walter Culboon the camel, the fifth night of the count-down approached. On the following morning there would be three days left.

  The eight day period had been defined for purely practical reasons. Durf was in a position to trigger the remote launch procedure at any point. The time had been decided upon in order to ensure that all members of the consortium would have time to withdraw from their lives in an orderly fashion, without provoking comment, pick up their partners and make their way to Bullens Creek.

  In fact by the fifth night, most of the conspirators had arrived. They were all acutely aware that if they missed this particular bus there would not be another one along in a minute.

  Rachel and Sly lay together sweating in the heat. Sly’s work was done, there was nothing left to do but root, eat frozen lasagnes and shower about every thirty minutes.

  ‘We could root in the shower and save time,’ said Sly through the darkness. ‘Save time for what?’ Rachel’s voice replied.

  ‘We only have three days left.’

  This provoked a silence that even Walter Culboon would have felt embarrassed to intrude upon.

  ‘Oh God, Silvester, let’s not go,’ said Rachel, ‘please let’s not go. Come back with me to Carlo, we can eat ice-cream at Fernandez.’

  ‘Rachel,’ said Sly, and he held her hand, ‘I’m saving your life, I’m saving your life because I love you. Don’t you want that?’

  ‘Yes I want it,’ said Rachel, and she did want it.

  227: ORDER OF BATTLE

  During the previous afternoon, Zimmerman had done a little scouting on Walter Culboon. He had brought back encouraging news.

>   ‘Man, things are definitely no longer so tight,’ he said. ‘I reckon they’re fixing to split and they don’t want no bully boys around to put two and two together and try to hitch a ride.’

  ‘There’s no one left to fight?’ asked CD, for whom, it must be remembered, hope sprang eternal.

  ‘Shit man, a whole lot more than we could ever handle,’ answered Zimm, ‘but at least it ain’t no army no more. The security seems to be situated in an outer ring about 15 kilometres from the epicentre,’ Zimm continued. Being about to enter combat he had become lucid once again, if, in a rather manic kind of way. ‘I reckon they’re keeping the thugs away from the business end. They got a truck with a bunch of guys about every seven kilometres in a ring around the base. I got the glasses on Du Pont one time, I sure hope we get that bastard…Now,’ said Zimm, getting to the point, ‘we have to get past this ring to get right in and destroy the rockets, OK?’

  ‘Hey listen, bud,’ said Chrissy, ‘I may not be General Custer but I guess that I can figure out that we ain’t gonna knock ‘em out by going back to Perth.’

  ‘Listen, soldier!’ hissed Zimm. ‘This is combat preparation, and in combat preparation you state the obvious because that way everybody knows the same obvious, and you’d better pray your brothers and sisters do know the same obvious because when your arse is on the line, your cover needs to have his gun pointing in the same direction as you’re going.’

  ‘All right already, so make me do some push ups.’

  Zimmerman ignored this and continued. ‘Obviously they have to have some form of mission control and our job is to get in there and fuck it right up. OK, just fuck it straight to hell, just fuck that mother like the pig that swallowed a hand grenade…’

  ‘Zimmerman, please, just tell us what we have to do.’ Mrs Culboon paused and then added a second ‘please’. She, like the others had accepted that today was not a real day and that her ordinary life was still going on somewhere else. None the less Zimmerman, on full throttle, was taking freak tolerance too far.

  Somewhere in the depths of Zimmerman’s hat support structure, Mrs Culboon’s tone hit a chord. He calmed down. ‘I was psyching my head, it’s important to psyche my head. Don’t you feel that you should psyche your heads?’ he asked.

  ‘My head is psyched,’ replied Chrissy.

  ‘Me too,’ said CD, and it was clear that Mrs Culboon felt the same way.

  ‘OK, cool,’ said Zimmerman. ‘I’ll psyche my head on my own after the briefing. Everyone must do their own thing and find their own astral plane to die in. I like mine angry.’

  ‘Zimm,’ said Chrissy, ‘tell us what we have to do.’ Reality returned. In as much as their situation would allow it to, that is.

  ‘OK,’ said Zimm. ‘Now we have to hit the control centre, which means getting past the security ring. Now they have trip-wires and cameras and electronic beams running between the guard concentrations so there is no way we can slip through, like, discreetly. Unless, of course, they aren’t looking and listening. What I propose is that you cats attack our chosen guardpost directly from the front, creating a diversion, and while that’s going on I’ll slip through further up the line and then come around and attack them from behind, OK?’

  ‘How many guards in each of the concentrations, Zimmerman?’ asked Chrissy, not wishing to hear the answer.

  ‘Twelve,’ he replied, ‘but they’re lightly armed and we have the element of surprise.’

  ‘We sure are going to surprise them arriving on a camel,’ said Mrs Culboon, cracking her first joke since she had heard of the death of her husband. She remained in a daze over the tragedy. Not in as much of a daze as Zimmerman was in about Walter’s death, but then Zimm had started out way ahead of Mrs Culboon in the daze stakes. Mrs Culboon was reserving the full burden of her grief for another occasion, should one arise, when she would have the time and the peace to assemble her ruptured emotions and take stock of her loss. For the present she knew that the battle in which Mr Culboon had fallen was far from over, and that it was a time for courage and good humour, not mawkish introspection. Mrs Culboon had seen and felt suffering before. That was why she had cracked the gag about the camel.

  ‘They aren’t going to see the camel until it’s too late, Mrs Culboon,’ said Zimmerman. ‘Because of the diversion, right? What you have to do is this. At a specific time…you know, a time that is the same for all of us, right? A time, right, that we have all dug together…’

  ‘Yes, Zimmerman, at the same time,’ said Chrissy.

  ‘You got it soldier, well done,’ said Zimmerman. ‘At that time, you three hit our chosen troop concentration full on from the front with whatever we’ve got. Now so relentless will be your withering barrage,’ said Zimm, whose words were growing with his stature, ‘so pulverizing will be your symphony of death, man, that those cats out there are going to be under the impression that the whole Australian Defence Force has forgotten about the Japs and is coming at them all at once, right?’

  The others merely stared. ‘And while their attention is diverted with saying things like ‘oh fuck what are we gonna do’ and shitting themselves and stuff like that. But mainly while they are looking outwards at you, I’ll cross the wire on Walter Culboon and knock them out from behind. You dig?’

  They nodded. Despite the extravagance of Zimm’s description there was no doubt his plan appeared feasible. Three people shooting in the dark could certainly make enough noise to distract a company of twelve. After all, Zimmerman only wanted them to get the guards’ attention. He was going to kill them, it seemed.

  ‘When they’re down,’ Zimmerman concluded, ‘you come through in the station wagon and we burn for the middle. If we can’t crack them, I’ll head in on Walter Culboon and try to do it alone.’

  228: EVE OF BATTLE

  They spent the first part of the night before the battle cleaning and checking the weaponry. Zimmerman took them through the reloading and firing procedures of the pistols, the rifles, the automatic weapons and the grenades. There was only one shoulder-held launcher, so this he kept for himself.

  Around two, Zimm declared that they knew enough. There is only so much about the science of armour that can be taken in at once, besides which, according to Zimmerman’s plan, the other three were only expected to cause a huge distraction and draw the enemy fire. Zimm himself would do the precision killings.

  For the hours preceding the strike, each sat alone with his or her thoughts. Occasionally Zimm would stand upon the ridge beside Walter Culboon and stare out towards the field of battle and the target beyond, psyching his head.

  ‘I still can’t quite see how it came to this,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘the four of us defending the whole world. But I want you all to know that I’m proud to be a part of it, and proud to be alongside you all.’ It was a nice thing to say. For a moment CD wondered why Walter did not say something nice back on behalf of everybody, he normally did that sort of thing very well. Then he remembered that Walter was dead. CD went back to thinking about Rachel and what honeyed words and stirring arguments he might employ to bring her back to them once the battle was won. Who could tell? he thought, hope springing, as always, eternal. Maybe she’d be so ashamed of herself she’d let him sauce her there and then, under the big desert sky, as a penance. Yes! that was it, this was his big chance.

  BATTLE

  ‘OK let’s go,’ said Zimm in the low, almost hissing murmur that he had adopted ever since he had turned into Clint Eastwood. ‘We got just one shot at saving the world.’

  The hours of waiting had embittered Mrs Culboon.

  ‘And avenging our dead,’ replied Mrs Culboon. ‘Most of me is doing this for my husband.’

  Each had their ghosts to bury. If any of the combatants fell, they would be in good company. Mr Culboon, Walter, Linda Reeve, Toole…Rachel. CD certainly harboured the most searing sense of mission. The others had only lost the dead; he had lost the living. He was going in to save Rachel from a fate worse than death, h
e would do anything to stop the launch and give her a chance to come to her senses.

  They shouldered their arms and whilst Zimmerman mounted Walter Culboon, the other three got into the station wagon. They had decided on using the station wagon only, being shot was going to be bad enough, there was no sense having to pay for a damaged hire car as well.

  ‘Now don’t forget,’ Zimm said, ‘don’t try and take ‘em, that’s my job. Just draw their fire, I’ll be coming up behind them.’

  The proposed target was very clear, a truck and two searchlights, men hanging around, some making a desultory attempt at being guards, others just crashed out on the ground. There were two camp-fires and a number of lamps run off a little generator by the light of which some of the men were playing cards.

  ‘Well they certainly have gone to a lot of trouble to pick themselves out as targets, haven’t they,’ said Chrissy. ‘It’s nearly time,’ said CD who had been earnestly studying the luminous dials on his watch.

  They began to crawl closer. As they did so, they spread out, to about fifty metres apart. When they started shooting it was essential that the enemy believed themselves to be facing a formidable opponent. Zimm had told them to vary their weapons every few bursts, even to fire with both hands — it didn’t matter what at since they were only the diversion.

  CD fired first. From somewhere to Mrs Culboon’s right she heard the crackle of automatic fire. Almost simultaneously she opened up, as did Chrissy to her left.