by Shane Carrow
The wheelhouse, all the way down at the back of the barge, was a rain-blurred glow. The dark was coming on quite quickly now. Further ahead, Bundarra’s walls were looming closer.
The timber loads were pine trees, stacked together. I found a gap between some and scrambled in headfirst, scraping my exposed skin on branch stubs, pushing deeper until I was hidden from view. Rainwater trickled down through the bark. The barge honked its horn as it approached Bundarra, but didn’t slow.
And then, peering out through the end of the gap, I could see that we were inside the walls: a concrete river wall, shuttered storefronts and houses, rain drumming down on the esplanade. Soon we were passing other moored boats, and the occasional figure in a raincoat on the wharf, and I even saw what I was sure was Harrison’s boat. And then the wharves were past, and I suddenly realised that this barge wasn’t stopping in Bundarra – it was sailing right through, and was about to take me back out of the town.
I scrambled forward, elbowing through the gap between the pine logs, back out onto the exposed deck. Praying that nobody was watching, I slipped over the side and right back into the river.
I struggled towards the river wall as the barge chugged on by, the steady drum of its diesel engine throbbing through the water. Came to the concrete, reached a hand up for a corroded iron ring to hang on to while I caught my breath and assessed the situation as best I could while the rain hissed down in the water all round me.
The barge went on by. There were no shouts, no alarms. No sound at all, in fact, except the rain on the water.
I pulled myself up onto the concrete wharf. The river was lower than the town, an eight foot wall separating the wharf from the higher boulevard. An iron truss bridge ran across it, not far downriver. I pulled my jacket hood over my head, tucked my hands into my pockets, and tried to walk along the wharf with my head down as though I was just trying to shield my face from the rain. A little way down, a metal staircase led up to street level.
The boulevard was deserted, but I knew the town wasn’t – there were lights on everywhere. Electric blue streetlights, each with a glow of raindrops hurtling past them; bright lights behind some windows; fuzzier candlelight behind curtains in others. I made my way down the street, one of the only people out and about. I hoped it was just the weather, and that there wasn’t a curfew or something. I’d seen people out and about before, from my perch up in the bushland, but that had been during daylight.
I passed a few others – a couple under an umbrella, an old bearded bloke in a Driza-Bone coat. A horse trotted down the street and after a moment, in the gloom, I realised the rider was a uniformed soldier.
None of them glanced twice at me. I was soaking wet, but they couldn’t know that was from the river and not the rain.
Feeling more confident, I kept moving, staying on the river esplanade. I was near the old core of the town, 19th century buildings two storeys high, by the iron bridge. I passed a pub, huge windows spilling light out onto the rainswept street, heavy crowds standing beneath the shelter of its verandah and conversation and music projecting out through the thick curtain of rain. I kept looking at it, amazed, until I realised a lot of the men were staring back at me, and turned to face the ground again.
Nothing weird. I didn’t look suss. Just happened to be walking past.
The bullet in my shoulder was still singing with pain. I was scanning the boats tied up along the wharf at the opposite shore, trying to pick out Harrison’s. I felt faintly unsettled. I hadn’t dared hope I’d gain access to the town without incident. Now that I was here – unarmed – I hadn’t really thought about how I’d go about the next step and get the codebook back. It would have to be by stealth; I’d have to wait until later tonight, and sneak aboard. So I’d have to find somewhere to hole up and wait a while. But I was thrown by how ordinary this place seemed. Watchtowers and sentries, sure; a soldier on horseback, sure; but this was a place where people were gathering in the pub for a beer like it was any other night. I could almost feel like I was back in any old country town, last year, before this all started.
At least until I rounded the corner, and came to the town square.
It was like any other little park off the main drag in a small town – a bit of grass and a few rose bushes, a stone obelisk for a First World War memorial, LEST WE FORGET, et cetera. But this one had a wooden gantry erected around it. This one had three bodies dangling from ropes around their necks, dripping with rainwater, decaying in the elements.
There were little spotlights set into the ground here. Once they’d probably illuminated the war memorial by night; now they shone up into the rain to cast a harsh glare on the rotting bodies and the damp cardboard signs pinned to their chests. On the left, a body so rotted as to be unrecognisable, the word THIEF. On the right, a dead man, probably a few weeks old, also a THIEF.
And in the middle – only a couple of days old – was a man wearing a black combat uniform, his sleeves and chest embroidered with unit insignia, and the sign across his chest proclaiming him a TRAITOR.
I recognised his face. It was Lieutenant Sullivan. The leader of the clearance divers, from HMAS Canberra.
He must have jumped, like I had, like Rickenbacker had. Like dozens of others had, maybe. Maybe he’d seen me go out, maybe he’d been sucked out, maybe he’d jumped because he thought he stood a better chance of survival than going down with the plane. And now here he was, strung up and branded a traitor in this town which until a few minutes ago had reminded me so much of the old days.
I was standing in front of the bodies, staring up at them, the rain coming down all around me. Maybe that wasn’t wise. An odd thing to do, in that weather. Attracts attention.
A hand clapped down on my shoulder. “Hey…” a voice said.
I whirled, dropped, Sergeant Blake’s evasion training kicking in. The hand tried to snatch me but I’d scrambled away, was running past the bodies now, across the square and away from the river. A shout rang out after me and I thought I could hear somebody chasing me through the rain, but I kept running, down a side street and into an alleyway. I stumbled over a bin that I hadn’t seen, scraped my palm as I hit the ground, scrambled to my feet – but now my pursuer had caught up with me, and grabbed me by the forearm.
I turned and flung a punch at the figure, his face backlit by the streetlight behind him, but he blocked it effortlessly. I was grunting and snarling, ignoring what he was saying to me, and it was only when he shoved me up against the brick wall with an arm twisted behind my back and his mouth in my ear that I properly heard him: “For fuck’s sake, stop it, Matt! It’s me! It’s Rahvi! Joe Rahvi!”
He released my arm. I turned and squinted at him through the rain, in the glare of the streetlight. He’d cropped his hair a bit and shaved off his beard, but it was unmistakeably Corporal Joseph Rahvi of the SAS.
“Oh, man, am I glad to see you,” I breathed.
“The hell did you run off for, then?”
“I thought…”
“Never mind. Not here. Come on.”
He hustled me out of the alley, on a different route past the town square. Down the river boulevard, across the big steel bridge. I peered out through the trusses and the rain, trying to make out Harrison’s boat down by the wharf, but in the gloom they all just looked like a bunch of glowing windows bobbing in the water.
Rahvi led me down some more backstreets and alleys, across an empty parking lot, eventually ending at a nondescript metal door set into some brickwork. It was still pissing down with rain, but unlike me he was wearing a thick canvas raincoat and didn’t seem to care. He fumbled in his pocket for some keys, swung the door open, and ushered me inside down a set of stairs.
It was dark, but Rahvi had a little LED keyring flashlight and soon turned on a hissing Tilley lamp. His hideout was an old, mouldy basement, with exposed piping along the roof and discoloured patches on the walls and floor where it looked like industrial equipment had been removed. There were no windows, and it
looked like a wide doorway which might once have led to another space had been bricked over long before. There was a sink in the corner, an old workbench, a few cardboard boxes, a bedroll, and that was it.
“The hell is this place?” I said.
“Fucked if I know,” Rahvi said, lighting a few candles as well. “Some forgotten little industrial space. Lucky for me I found it. Space is at a premium in Bundarra, there’s still people sleeping in tents in the outskirts.”
He turned to look at me. “First things first. Out of those wet clothes.”
I was more than happy to – the adrenaline from the chase had worn off as we trudged through the town, and I’d found myself shivering again. “How long have you been here?” I said, as I tried on some of the ill-fitting spare clothes Rahvi had picked up.
“In Bundarra? Nearly a week. I came down not far from here, it was the first town I found.”
“That was Lieutenant Sullivan’s body. On the war memorial.”
“I know,” Rahvi said grimly. “Some bounty hunters dragged him in day before yesterday. He was already dead – they’d have taken him to Armidale, otherwise. There’s a price on all our heads. Anyone who came out of the Globemaster.”
“How many did? Do you know?”
“No,” Rahvi said. “I just – Jesus, Matt, what happened to you?”
I’d taken my shirt off, and he’d seen the bullet hole in my shoulder.
I looked down at it. “Is this a trick question?”
“Jesus Christ,” Rahvi said. “You don’t have an exit wound, either…”
“I know…”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Well, I was going to…”
Rahvi dragged me over to the sink, and started rifling through his pack for first aid stuff. “Wash that,” he said. “Use the disinfectant soap. That bullet needs to come out.”
“Uh-huh,” I said gloomily, watching him take a very large pair of tweezers out of the kit.
He made me lie on my back on the workbench, biting into a wad of cloth. Then he went to work, digging around with the tweezers and trying to massage the flesh of my shoulder to push the bullet back towards the entry wound.
It hurt. A lot. It probably only took a few minutes, but it felt like an hour. “There you go,” he said, holding a misshapen speck of lead up to the light. It seemed impossible it was so small. “Lucky boy, Matt. That was any deeper, and I wouldn’t have been able to get it.”
“And then what?”
“And then it would get infected and you’d be dead in a week. Don’t get up – I’m not done.”
He doused the wound in enough disinfectant to kill an Ebola virus, then patched it up with gauze and tape. I felt woozy, and he got me some water and food – just muesli bars and dry biscuits, but it had been so long since I’d eaten anything I could feel strength flooding back into my body. I sat on his bedroll with my back against the wall, he sat on a cardboard box, and got a notebook and some maps out of his rucksack. “All right,” he said. “From the beginning. Everything that happened since you got sucked out of the plane.”
“I didn’t get sucked out, for a start,” I said. “I jumped out after the codebook.”
Rahvi stared at me. “Sergeant Blake has the codebook.”
“He had the codebook,” I said. “When the missile hit us it got knocked out of his hands. Last I saw him the truck had tipped over and he was pinned beneath it. I saw the codebook caught at the edge of the hole, I went after it. It got sucked out at the last minute and I just kept going. I got it, though.”
“You have it here?”
“Well, no – that’s the thing – that’s why I came to Bundarra, this guy took it off me…”
“You lost it.”
“It was taken from me,” I said. “By a riverboat trader. He’s here, now, in Bundarra. He probably still has it.”
“Okay, from the beginning again, but a real quick version this time,” Rahvi said.
I told him about coming down, and calling Aaron. How I’d been advised to keep moving as quick as possible, to get the codebook out of New England territory. How I’d found the dead clearance diver, and how I’d seen Rickenbacker get captured. And then being spotted by the chopper, and the soldiers chasing me – the trick with the barn – the bushfire, and jumping into the river. And then Harrison, and his daughters, and losing the codebook and getting shot and ending up here.
“And that’s everything,” I said. “How did you find me, anyway?”
“I saw you go past the pub, and lucky for you I did,” Rahvi said. He was checking and loading a handgun, pulling his raincoat on again.
“Whoa, hang on,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere without me.” I struggled to my feet, but Rahvi put a hand on my shoulder.
“Guess again,” he said.
I wouldn’t admit it to him, but I felt dizzy. I let him sit me back down on the bedroll. “What are you going to do?” I protested. “How are you going to get it back?”
“I’m not doing anything yet,” Rahvi said. “I’m going to scout this boat out. You’re going to call Jagungal, fill them in on the situation, ask for any information they have on other Globemaster survivors – free, captured, whatever. I already know about Petty Officer Cavalli and Airman Jones – tell Jagungal they’re alive.”
“What? There’s others? Where are they?”
“Yes. Cavalli and Jones. Remember their names. They’re not here. I’ll fill you in later.”
He was halfway to the stairs, and the door back up to Bundarra. He paused and looked back at me. “Matt, seriously – don’t come after me, don’t do anything dumb. I’ll be back soon. Get some rest. I’m going to need you. It’s all hands on deck for us, understand? Call Jagungal. I’ll see you in a bit.”
He left, and I lay my head down on his pillow – actually a rolled-up pair of old jeans – and stared up at the pipe-coated ceiling. After a moment I reached out and turned off the Tilley lamp, and the room was pitch black.
I meant to call Aaron. The problem is, when you try to sink into that relaxed state – and you’re already exhausted – it’s easy to just fall asleep instead. Which is exactly what I did.
I must have slept for nearly ten hours. When I awoke, there was the faintest hint of grey light in the basement, filtering in through the floorboards above or around the edges of the door at the top of the stairs.
I panicked for a moment, unsure where I was – and when I remembered I panicked again, because Rahvi wasn’t here. A horrible thought struck me. What if he’d tried to get the codebook and had been caught? Or what if he’d successfully got the codebook, only to leave town, taking it south, abandoning me?
No. There was a note on the floor beside me.
M,
Thought it best to let you sleep. I watched the boat most of the night. No sign of anybody coming or going. No sign of contact with local authorities. Have my own theories. Will be back before seven o’clock. STAY PUT UNTIL I’M BACK. NOT KIDDING.
Found you some more clothes. More bandages in the kit if you need to change them.
R.
He had indeed left me fresh clothes – jeans, boots, a sweatshirt. I checked the bandages but they didn’t seem to need changing.
I wasn’t sure what the time was, but if it was already light it couldn’t be far off seven o’clock. I lay back down on the bedroll to do what I should have done last night – call Aaron.
A very good morning to you too, Aaron said sleepily.
I found Rahvi.
That got his attention. Dead?
No, alive, I said. He found me, really. I got into this town where Harrison’s boat is – Rahvi’s been here since he came out the plane. He’s pretty much taken the wheel now.
So what are you doing? Harrison still has the codebook?
Probably, I said. We came back here last night – he’s got a little hideout – he got that bullet out of my shoulder, I ate, slept… slept like a baby, actually. He’s gone but he left me
a note, says he’ll be back soon. He’s been surveilling the boat.
Okay, Aaron said happily. That’s good. That’s real good!
Well. Sure. Except Harrison was here 24 hours before I was. For all we know, the codebook’s already in Armidale.
You said he was a trader, Aaron said. You said he was talking about how much money he could make off it.
Yeah.
Well, doesn’t sound like the guy who’d just hand it over to the authorities, then, Aaron said. Anyway. We have to hope he still has it, because if he doesn’t, we’re kind of screwed anyway.
That’s one way of looking at it. Listen – Rahvi says he knows there are two other survivors on the ground from the Globemaster crash. Their names are Cavalli and Jones. I think he said one was Navy, the other was Air Force.
So where are they? Aaron asked.
I don’t know. I didn’t get that part. Have you heard of any others on the New England airwaves?
We know another one that got caught. Petty Officer Khoury.
I knew that name. The clearance diver who’d been injured, the one I’d dreamed about. I hadn’t see him on Moreton Island – he must have been one of the actual dive team, who’d dredged the nuke up just before the HMAS Canberra exploded, and then joined us in the insane chase across the bay to the airport. There’s another one, too, I said. Dead. Lieutenant Sullivan. His body’s strung up in the main square in Bundarra.
Jesus, Aaron said grimly. Stay safe, all right? Do what Corporal Rahvi tells you.
Yes, mother.
Seriously, Matt. I want you back here alive.
Yeah, I said. I know. I’ll talk to you later.
That was about half an hour ago. It must be earlier than I thought. Or else something terrible has happened to Rahvi. I wish I hadn’t lost my watch.
3.00pm
Rahvi returned to the bolt-hole about an hour after I’d spoken with Aaron. I’d drunk my fill from the tap but was still starving, so I was pleased that he’d come back with food. Just ration-era stuff, dry biscuits and stale bread, but as I learned all the way back in WA when Aaron and I were fleeing Perth, it only takes a few skipped meals for anything to seem like a feast.