by James Phelan
They sank into the comfortable lounge suites and for a moment all was silent.
“Thought I’d spend a week or two in this sunny, tranquil, tropical paradise,” Al added lazily.
Fox fingered the swelling lump on his head again and figured that it could have been worse. Sarah, on the couch next to him, leaned over and had a look and feel of her own.
“It’s a beauty all right,” she said. “Do you have an icepack?”
“Yeah, in the freezer, keeping the vodka cool,” he replied with a Machiavellian smile. He watched intently as her lithe body moved swiftly towards his kitchen.
“So, aside from saving lives, what have you been up to?” asked Gammaldi with a grin.
“Just taking it easy, mate. Built this little number.” Fox gestured at his house with a wave of a hand.
“You built this yourself? It’s fabulous!” said the other girl. Fox smiled at her as Sarah applied the icepack to the back of his head. What was her name again? Rachel? Sonya?
“Thanks,” he said.
“Not too bad if I say so myself,” Gammaldi offered. “But if you like this, Rebecca, you’d love the homestead that I’ve restored outside of Sydney. Not a detail overlooked.”
Rebecca, aha! Fox knew his friend had slipped her name in for his sake, picking up on his frailty in the telepathic way only best friends and twins seemed to share.
“Yeah, but you should see the mess it’s in!” he quickly chided his friend, who was trying to impress Rebecca. Not that it seemed he needed to—the girl was stealing glimpses of Gammaldi’s bulging biceps whenever she could.
“Hey, I happen to like clutter, okay? It’s not normal to live in such orderliness.”
The two women giggled at the pair’s banter.
“The only reason you don’t clean is because you’re lazy and you know your mother will come around and do it for you once a week!” Fox said with a broad grin and the room filled with laughter.
“Why I stopped that thug from mashing your melon last night I’ll never know,” Gammaldi retorted.
By the next day the cyclone had passed over. Apart from a few powerlines taken out by trees and some of the older roofs lifted off houses, there was little damage.
Fox and Gammaldi were cleaning up the eastern beach of Flying Fish Cove, where masses of seaweed and man-made trash were strewn across the pristine whiteness of the fine sand.
“They were nice,” offered Gammaldi, breaking the silence the two had shared since dropping the girls off at the airport an hour and a half ago.
“Yeah,” said Fox, his voice raspy with the morning’s exertions. He reached into the cabin of the two-tonne truck, borrowed from the local council’s collection, and produced a couple of water bottles from an icebox.
As they gulped down the cool water and took in their morning’s work, Fox studied his friend. Sweat was seeping from every pore in the naval pilot’s skin and streaming off his pronounced Roman nose. His proportions were immense in their own compact way: wide shoulders, barrel chest, washboard stomach and short beam-like arms and legs.
Fox smiled to himself and took another long pull on the water bottle. “Well, are we going to just stand around here all day or do you need a rest, old friend?” he baited.
In reply Gammaldi looked at the bottle of water in his hand and then over to his mate’s. They both had about a third left and Fox knew what was coming. Gammaldi lifted his bottle to his lips competitively and Fox followed suit. It was a dead heat as they threw the bottles in the back of the truck, deftly picked up their shovels and began vigorously filling the cargo tray with more refuse from the beach.
At five in the afternoon they were on Fox’s catamaran and on their way to the northern part of the island. Whilst Fox was relaxing at the helm, the craft humming along at a lazy fifteen knots under his fingertips, Gammaldi was making the final preparations to their dive gear.
Fox slowed the vessel as they neared a small outcrop of rocks and coral about eight hundred metres from shore. This small satellite of Christmas Island had been formed over thousands of years as an underground volcano attached to the larger chain that formed the island proper. Fox had brought his friend here to see the lava tubes that mazed under the water. The almost perfectly circular tubes, which had once channelled the molten rock, were now filled with amazing marine life.
“So this is how you spend your days now?” Gammaldi said as the pair donned their diving equipment.
“Taking tourists like you out diving? Writing a local rag about refugees, diminishing fish stocks and drunk sailors tearing up the town? Sure beats diving for the navy, mate. Mind you, I miss the sixty thousand dollar re-breathers we got to play with. But there’s fewer people trying to kill me and no bureaucrats waiting at home to crucify me, so it’s a fair exchange.” Fox donned his goggles.
“Yeah, not that I’d know from piloting helicopters, huh? Closest I got to action in Timor was picking your sorry arse out of the water once or twice.”
“And that’s why you’re the fat one,” Fox said. “Ready?”
Gammaldi grinned and followed his friend off the lower aft deck into the turquoise water.
Since the onslaught of the cyclone the sea had lost much of its usual crystal-clear quality, though most of the debris and sediment churned up had settled to the sea floor once again. The pair swam down to six metres and then slid over a coral shoal, the sea undulating to a rocky bottom created by the volcano long ago. Schools of fish darted by in playful bliss like great flocks of birds, only to be herded off by a trio of juvenile reef sharks.
The two friends followed a river of igneous rock to a giant cave opening that lay partially curtained with seaweed. Inside, the cylindrical cave measured about fifteen metres and was pretty much devoid of sea life, bar a few whiting passing through. The light at the other end of the space filtered dimly towards them as they swam the distance, heading on a slight downward angle.
On exiting it was clear why the cave was short in length. The next section had collapsed in on itself for about thirty metres. Fox led back around the side of their cave and pointed to a large coral-encrusted object ahead.
After close inspection, Gammaldi signalled his opinion to Fox—it was a Boomerang fighter, an Australian-built World War II aircraft. Her port wing was blown off, the canopy open and empty. The aluminium craft was otherwise in incredible condition, with only a few crustaceans inside who had claimed it as home.
While Gammaldi was busy scrutinising the open cockpit, Fox noticed a large object, darker than anything else in the surrounding waters, some fifteen metres away.
His adrenaline began pumping as he swam towards the unknown object. At touching distance, it measured close to two metres in length and a third that in diameter. It lay deep within a coral reef, partially buried lengthways. It was evident why no one had discovered it before. The cyclone, however, had split away a large section of the coral, which must have been weakened years before by the object’s impact.
Fox felt a presence near him. In a lightning move he somersaulted in the water and produced his dive knife, only to confront a startled Gammaldi.
Relieved, he motioned to his friend to surface with him and with several swift kicks they broke into the afternoon sun.
“What the hell is that thing?” Gammaldi said.
“My guess would be a mine or maybe an underwater detection device. I’ve never seen anything like it. No markings, no protrusions, nothing. And what’s more, it’s so damned deep in the coral.”
“Well?” Gammaldi flushed his goggles in the water. “Let’s not forget that we came out here to catch some lunch too.”
Fox patted his mate’s shoulder. “Al, you’re a genius sometimes.”
Alister Gammaldi smiled a big toothy grin and his thick brow danced in confusion. “What’d I say?” he mocked dopily.
It soon became clear to Gammaldi what his reminder of fishing for lunch had in common with the black object on t
he sea floor. Fox wrapped an eighteen-millimetre thick steel cable around the ‘pod,’ as they now referred to it, which in turn was attached to a small derrick atop the catamaran’s stern.
Gammaldi slowly let the twin three-hundred-horsepower diesel engines bite into the water and took the catamaran on a straight heading, reaching a cruising speed of barely four knots. Fox watched as the one hundred metres of cable splayed out on the aft deck became taut. He felt the catamaran shudder slightly under his feet as it fought to free the inert object from its coral cocoon.
In the wheelhouse, Gammaldi altered course slightly to a point marked on one of Fox’s maps.
“What a great way to check if it’s a mine. Drag it along, bumping into things,” he said to himself.
From the stern, Fox watched expectantly for the large explosion—but none came.
Gammaldi notched the engines’ revs down and the craft slowed to a drift eighty metres past the wrecked hulk of an old phosphate transporter, which had been scuttled to form a new reef a few years ago. The inertia carried the pod a little farther under water until it clanged none too gently against the steel hull lying in ten metres of water. Again nothing happened.
Fox, his mild suspicions of the object being a mine put to rest, ordered Gammaldi to bring the catamaran back around to where the pod lay next to the sunken ship. As they passed over the targeted area, Fox worked with the three-tonne winch on the derrick, and, with a mixture of sweat, cursing and downright determination, the pod was brought back to Flying Fish Cove within an hour.
“Tell me again why the wise old Fox knows this thing isn’t a mine? Maybe it’s just broken, ready to explode any second.” It was amazing that Gammaldi did not lose any of the hamburger that was bulging from his talkative mouth.
“It didn’t look like a conventional mine,” Fox said thoughtfully. “So then I thought it might have been a hunter mine.” He paused to take a swig of water.
“Hunter mine?” Gammaldi almost paused, but then continued chewing thoughtfully.
“A hunter mine is basically an encased torpedo that is engaged when something large and metallic passes by.”
“Aha! That’s why we dragged it up to that old boat.”
“Exactly. You know, it’s not true what they say about you.”
The only retort was the further scoffing of food.
Fox got up from the deckchair on the boat and walked over to the pod sitting on the stern deck. There were no apparent fissures or openings anywhere to be seen, so he took out his dive blade and began freeing the object of the marine growth that had claimed it over the years.
The task proved easier than he first thought, and with Gammaldi’s grumbling help the job was over in less than half an hour. The clean-up revealed a seam running along the length of the pod, yet there was still no indication of how it might be opened, nor markings of any kind. Fox left the conundrum to his pal for a moment, but soon reappeared with a solution and a grin.
“Well, if it isn’t my favourite tool,” remarked Gammaldi, referring to the crowbar Fox was brandishing.
“Stand back and observe a master at work, mate.”
Gammaldi did so, and after ten frustrating minutes it became his turn to attack. Unlike Fox, who had tried to pry open the seam from numerous vantages, the stocky Italian took station a pace away from his target, raised the bar above his head and swung down with every ounce of strength he could muster.
Fox was laughing even before the collision occurred, and even louder once he saw the enormous vibrations tremor up the steel bar and along Gammaldi’s trunk-like arms to rattle his teeth. His laughter stopped when he noticed the small crack appearing along the seam, and then the pod slowly creaked open with a hydraulic hiss.
5
The cursor on the screen had been blinking for almost an hour before the sweating technician in a cheap polyester suit noticed it. It took him a further half hour to realise what the message and coordinates meant. Once the information was passed along the chain of command, he became even sweatier, until finally, almost four hours after initially finding the signal, he was standing before his President and the war cabinet in a farmhouse north of the city.
“I believe you have good news for us… Popov.” President Ivanovich had to check the notes in front of him.
“Yes, Mr President.” Popov put his hands in his pockets to stop them from trembling, for there was good news and bad. And Ivanovich was known for his explosive temper. One of the KGB’s favourite sons, he had risen to colonel in their Bureau of Interrogation and Persuasion, after leaving many a corpse on the Gulag floor.
“The homing beacon onboard one of our Dragon pods has been activated, so somebody must have found it—”
“Is your conclusion based on evidence, Popov, or are you just guessing?” inquired Mishka, the country’s Chief of Intelligence. He was a slender man with a thin rat-like beard and squinting eyes— Popov immediately disliked him.
“Sir, as you know, the Soviet rocket carrying the two pods exploded during flight just over twenty years ago. Numerous attempts to trace them failed and it was assumed they lay deep on the Indian Ocean floor. The tracking devices could not be homed in on underwater—a grave error of my predecessors, I might add.” Popov allowed himself a little comfort in making it clear where the blame lay.
“According to your report,” the Chief of the Air Force held up a three-page document faxed through prior to Popov’s arrival, “only one pod has been located.”
“Yes, comrade, one of the two.” Popov hastily unrolled a well-used map of the Indian Ocean. “Right here,” he pointed, “in the Australian Territory of Christmas Island.”
For a full minute no one spoke. Every mind in the room appeared to be focusing on solutions to the scenario. Naturally it was President Ivanovich who broke the thoughtful silence.
“Thank you, comrade Popov, your work here has not gone unnoticed. You may yet prove a hero of the nation.”
Popov stood a little straighter and the corners of his mouth lifted in the hint of a smile.
“You are now chief technician on the Dragon re-arming project,” Ivanovich said, before turning away to Mishka.
“Organise a team to retrieve the pod,” he ordered. “Find out who discovered it and how, then track down the other one. But our first priority is to get this pod back. That will buy us time to conduct a full search later. This changes everything, my friends, and proves God is on our side in this. Why, just yesterday our best hope was waging war against Iran for long enough to mine the element and reload the Dragon to attack. Now we can wipe out Tehran within days!” Ivanovich pounded a fist on the table.
He rose and made for the door—then turned to face his war cabinet.
“You have less than seventy-two hours.”
6
The plane touched down at six-thirty in the evening and five men got out. The first four figures were burly and rugged, their military crew cuts matching their alert postures. The last to emerge was Popov, unshaven and gaunt, his large dark eyes like a nocturnal animal’s. His knowledge of the target meant his services had been involuntarily volunteered on this assignment. He also suspected that he was dispensable to those warmongers back home. But then again, he consoled himself, the retrieval of the pod was of the utmost importance to his nation and the men who controlled it. Success on this mission would set him up for life.
The group entered the small airport terminal, picked up the two hire vehicles that had been arranged and sped off in the direction of Flying Fish Cove.
Gammaldi noticed them first. He was lounging in a hammock on Fox’s veranda and groggily opened his eyes after an hour’s siesta. They certainly weren’t the usual breed of tourist by their size and stance; even at a distance and in diminishing light, it looked as if four of them were clones. That, and the way they were snooping around the jetty near his friend’s boat, made him suspicious.
“Hey, Lachlan!” Gammaldi called as he swung
to his feet and stretched out his stiffness.
After a couple of minutes with no reply, he tried again. “Lach, you about?” he called into the house this time. He found Fox at the computer, just finishing an email to an old investigative journalist friend with some digital photos and measurements of the pod.
“Yeah, just sending this. What’s up, sleepyhead?”
“Did you forget to make the payments on that pretty boat of yours?”
“What are you talking about?” Fox watched as the email sped off into cyberspace.
“There’s some burly guys checking out the boats tied to your jetty, and—” Gammaldi looked over his shoulder out the open door “—right now they’re boarding yours.”
Fox jumped up and made for the door in a lightning dash.
“Now this is what holidays are for!” Gammaldi said, following just as fast.
It took less than five minutes for Fox and Gammaldi to reach the jetty, coming to a screeching halt in Fox’s lovingly restored open-top Land Rover. There was no sign of the men now, but Fox was off in a dash towards his mooring.
It was all too evident what they had been after. The aft deck lay empty, the pod taken from its place under a green tarpaulin.
The humming of a small outboard came from behind a couple of yachts and Fox ran down the jetty towards it.
“Did you see some guys hanging around here a few minutes ago?” he called out to a returning angler in a small tin dinghy.
“What was that you said, mate?” the fisherman asked, killing the engine. He was on the other side of his eighties, a salty old sea dog with a white Van Dyke beard.
“Did you see four or five men on this pier a few minutes ago, boarding my catamaran?”
“Yeah, they loaded some gear into the back of a van and headed towards town. You missed your friends, mate?”
Fox didn’t respond, just jumped back into the idling Land Rover and took off. Seconds later, an ear-shattering thunderclap ripped through the air. BOOM! Fox stomped on the brakes as the explosion echoed around the bay and off the island’s mountain ranges. He closed his eyes—he knew exactly what had happened.