by Shane Carrow
“Keep going!” Rahvi yelled at Harrison. He ducked his head up, levelled his pistol at the wharf, and fired off a few rounds. No chance of hitting someone at that range, in those conditions – but hopefully enough to scare a few teenage conscripts back behind cover. “Keep going, Harrison, you piece of shit!”
“I’m hit,” the river trader groaned. But he kept at the throttle, pushing us forward, the boat surging upstream.
“Jess,” I whispered. “You okay?”
She was still curled up under the console, covering her head and face with her arms. “No, I am not fucking okay!” she screamed at me.
Well. She wasn’t hit, at least.
The boat chugged upriver, the lights of the town gliding past on either side, the rain swirling in through the broken windows. I could see people moving along the esplanade, shouts drifting across the water, river traders emerging from their own moored boats to watch us go past in astonishment. Occasionally more bullets would sing out, pinging off the hull or whistling through the empty windows of the wheelhouse. Rahvi was crouched alongside me, trying to keep his head down but still peer over the lip of the windowframe. “Doesn’t this thing go any fucking faster?” he hissed. Harrison merely groaned.
We passed beneath the great shadow of the iron truss bridge, just a few metres of clearance, and for a moment there was an abrupt cessation of sound as we were sheltered from the rain.
Then there was a thump on the roof. And another, and another. And then a soldier was dropping down onto the deck right outside the wheelhouse.
They’d jumped down from the bridge.
I levelled my gun at him immediately, point blank range, emptying what felt like half the clip into his chest in sheer shock. He stumbled backward over the railing, plummeting into the river. On the other side of the wheelhouse another soldier had dropped down, and I was vaguely aware of Rahvi reaching out through the windowframe and grabbing him, struggling with him. But I could see the wheelhouse door handle turning, somebody pulling it open and out, and I launched myself at it with my shoulder out, slammed into it, slammed into the soldier on the other side.
I burst right out the door on top of the guy, knocking him onto the rain-slick lower deck, and I still had my Sig-Sauer in hand and I shot him at point blank range in the head. There was a noise above me – another soldier, on the roof of the wheelhouse, slipping on the wet metal and grabbing the flagpole for balance. He had a Steyr Aug in his other hand, the strap around his shoulder, and was trying to bring it to bear on me with one hand. I levelled my own gun at him and fired, only to hear a gut-wrenching click. I was out of ammo.
Before he could catch his balance and bring the Steyr to bear I dropped the gun and reached up to grab him by one booted foot, yanking him off his feet, dragging him down off the roof. Unfortunately he came down pretty much on top of me, landing hard, the wind forced from my guts. He lashed out at me, clawing and kicking, and I did the same, everything Sergeant Blake had ever taught me about close quarters combat eclipsed in a moment of primal, animal fury. Then he rolled me sideways, swinging both of us under the railing and into the stomach-spinning void of empty space.
I expected to land with a frigid splash in the river, but instead took a nasty blow to the back as we landed with a thump on the lower deck. The soldier staggered to his feet before me, stumbling backwards, lifting up the Steyr and flipping the safety catch off. I was still on the ground. He had the drop on me. In a last, feeble effort, I pulled the knife from my belt and flung it at him. It missed by a wide margin, splashing down in the river somewhere behind him.
He was about to shoot me when there was a louder shot, a shotgun blast, and his head exploded off to the side, spilling his brains and skull fragments into the river. A moment later his body slumped to the deck like a puppet with the strings cut.
Rahvi hobbled up out of the darkness, pumping another round into the shotgun he’d presumably taken from another soldier. He handed it to me as I staggered to my feet – a heavy black combat model, police or military – and took the dead man’s Steyr for himself. “You all right?” he asked.
“Fine,” I breathed.
We staggered back up to the wheelhouse. Rahvi stopped to check the body of another soldier, the one I’d shot in the head after knocking him out the door, looting his body for weapons and ammunition. The lights of Bundarra’s main streets were beginning to slip away: we were approaching the river gate. I lurched back into the wheelhouse clutching the Steyr in both hands.
Jess was leaning over her father, trying to shake him awake. “Dad! Dad!” He’d slumped over the controls. The boat was still moving, but it was veering towards the eastern bank. I dragged him off the console. He wasn’t breathing – there was a nasty bullet wound in his back. “Do you know how to drive this thing?” I demanded.
“Yes, but…”
“Then fucking drive it!”
I dragged Harrison’s body out of the chair – not easy, he was a big man – and out of the wheelhouse, out into the rain. “He dead?” Rahvi said, coming up the stairs.
“Yeah,” I said. “Jess has got the controls – or I told her to, anyway-”
I was cut off by the familiar sound of bullets cracking past. We’d veered too close to the bank, and the soldiers there were trying their luck, firing pot shots at us. I abandoned Harrison’s body and stumbled back inside the wheelhouse, while Rahvi ducked below the railings and returned fire with his Steyr. “Get us away from the fucking banks!”
“I’m going, I’m going!” Jess screamed back.
The boat chugged back towards the middle of the river. But we weren’t far from the gate now – a stone’s throw, two sentry towers looming up on either side of the river, through the rain. Rahvi scrambled back inside the wheelhouse, keeping his head low. “Stay down!” he barked. “Get us through here as quick as possible!”
There was a spotlight shining down from one of the towers, a harsh glare, casting sudden white light over the broken glass in the windowframes and the blood smeared across the control panel and Sarah’s limp, broken body. Bullets thudded down on the roof of the wheelhouse. I don’t know what material it was, or what calibre they were using – some of the soldiers in Bundarra seemed to only have handguns, or .22 rifles. But we seemed to be safe. I didn’t feel safe. But we didn’t get hit.
The boat chugged on through the towers. And now we were outside Bundarra; outside the wall, the spotlight still trailing after us, bullets singing past and splashing into the river or thudding into the hull.
Out through the rain-streaked night, the lights of Bundarra were receding into the distance. The riverbanks on either side were dark and mysterious. There was no longer any sound but the rain drumming down on the wheelhouse roof and the throbbing of the diesel engines.
And Jess, slowly weeping. Rahvi went outside, and there was a gunshot – a round through Harrison’s head, to make sure he didn’t reanimate. Jess’ crying deepened into a sob, though she still sat at the controls, still kept the boat on a good course. Out the windows, I could make out Rahvi performing a more thorough ransacking of the dead soldiers’ bodies – though it didn’t seem like they’d been carrying much – before he dragged them to the edge and dropped them overboard.
“Hey,” I said. “We won’t hurt you. You can take us south, and we’ll let you go…”
“He’ll kill me,” she croaked.
“No,” I said. “No, he won’t…”
She kept crying.
After a moment Rahvi came back inside the wheelhouse, tearing the rag off his bleeding leg, fumbling with a proper first aid kit and tying some sutures and bandages around it. “Jess, keep driving,” he said. “Matt? A word outside.”
We went out onto the deck. The rain was beginning to ease, though it was still drizzly and blustery and freezing cold. “All right, listen up,” he said to me. “Bundarra’s a fucking nowhere town. They don’t have air support, they don’t have a lot of resources. But they will be coming after us. They will b
e radioing for help from Armidale. They won’t know we have the codebook, because Harrison’s dead and his daughter’s dead and so is that bloke back in the apartment building. But they can put two and two together. They’ll figure out we’re plane crash survivors.”
“Jess knows we have the codebook,” I said.
It wasn’t new information. I wasn’t pointing anything out to him. I just wanted to see what he thought.
“We can’t take her with us,” Rahvi said.
I didn’t say anything. That hadn’t been what I was worried about.
“Matt, for Christ’s sake, I’m not going to shoot her,” he said. “I’m not going to kill a child to buy ourselves a bit of expediency. It doesn’t make a difference whether we have the codebook or not. We’re loyalist survivors. There’s already a price on our heads. And we just killed a bunch of their soldiers. We’re hunted no matter what.”
“So what the fuck are we going to do?” I said.
“We need to get off the boat sooner rather than later,” he said. “Next half hour. We drop off in the shallows, Jess keeps going, that’ll confuse them a bit more when they eventually find her. We go south. We’ll make for the quarry for now – but I don’t think we can wait around for Cavalli and Jones. No. We’ll have to head straight south. Get out of New England, get the codebook back to Jagungal.”
I exhaled. The adrenalin was beginning to wear off, and as amazed as I was that we’d recovered the codebook and got out of Bundarra alive, the magnitude of what still lay before us was beginning to sink in.
Well. One day at a time. One kilometre at a time.
“Go search the rest of the boat,” Rahvi said. “Maps, weapons, food, whatever you can find. I’ll keep an eye on her. Get back up to the wheelhouse in fifteen minutes.”
I went below. Harrison’s office, as I already knew, was a crazy clutter of mostly useless shit. But I combed through the galley and the other cabins. I found some maps of New England, some food, some medical supplies. More disinfectant and antibiotics. Flashlights. A radio. There was so much more I would have wanted to take, if I could have found it in time. We had a long road ahead of us. But since when has anything ever been easy?
Less than half an hour after we’d escaped Bundarra, while I was still fossicking through the shit in Harrison’s office, Rahvi came down to me. “Oi,” he said. “Time to go.”
We went up on deck. The rain was just a light drizzle now, the moon shining down through the clouds, and I could make out Jess’ figure up in the wheelhouse, still piloting the boat. “We’re just going to slip over the side, all right?” Rahvi whispered. “Shore’s right there.”
“You’re not going to say anything to her?” I said.
“What? ‘Keep going upriver or I’ll shoot you?’ We can’t control what she does next. So it’s better for her not to know, exactly, when we left the boat. Come on.”
He led me down towards the stern. I took one last glance up at the wheelhouse. A weird part of me felt bad for leaving without saying goodbye.
We took a life buoy, ducked under the railings and slipped into the water. It felt surprisingly warm – warmer than the rainwater we were drenched with, I guess. A few moments later, as the riverboat continued upstream, Rahvi and I were wading ashore through the rushes, the only sound the symphony of frogs all around us.
Rahvi checked his compass. “South. Let’s go.”
We went.
I’ve had some long nights in my time, but that was a long one. It had only been about eight o’clock when we left the pub to tail Harrison; not even nine by the time we escaped the town in a hail of gunfire. Rahvi pushed us all night, through bushland and across fields, up and down hills, resting infrequently and keeping a difficult pace. I couldn’t complain – he had a leg injury and was operating on 36 hours without sleep. On the other hand, he’s in the SAS. For all I know this might not even be the worst mission he’s ever been on.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was overcast all night, barely any moonlight coming down through the clouds. Occasionally we saw lights on distant highways; once, we saw a chopper back to the north, back around where we’d been, probing along the river.
By the time the sky was turning grey in the east it was clear Rahvi was spent. I didn’t exactly feel 100% either. We found a low gully with a creek trickling through it, and an overhanging cliff of lichen-stained granite with hanging vines and ferns that would shelter us from any possible eyes in the sky. Rahvi drank heavily from the stream, then slumped down with his back to the rock face. “You still got those antibiotics?” he croaked.
“And then some, from the boat,” I said, digging the packet out of my backpack.
Rahvi took one and swallowed it. “I need to sleep,” he admitted. “I’m running on empty.”
“I’ll keep watch,” I said. “When should I wake you?”
“Give me four or five hours,” he mumbled. “No later than noon. You need sleep, too. And it’s safer to move at night. But wake me as soon as you think there’s trouble.”
“I will,” I said.
“You did really well back there,” Rahvi whispered, half asleep already. “The sarge would’ve been proud...”
Then he nodded off to sleep.
I was surprised he held out as long as did. Awake for two days, a stab wound to the thigh, and seven or eight hours moving through rough country in the dark.
The sun’s come up now. Everything is quiet. No signs of any soldiers after us, no sound of any choppers, but I’m staying alert. This is a sheltered little gully, and I’ll probably hear anyone before I see them. Nothing so far except birdsong and crickets. I’ve been spending the time writing, after I picked shards of broken glass out of my hands.
Aaron’s been trying to call me for a few hours now. Probably sensed some crazy shit was going on. But I can’t afford the concentration it takes to speak to him. I need to keep my attention on sentry duty. I’ll contact him with the good news when Rahvi wakes up.
This is going to be hard. We covered an impressive amount of ground last night (at least, I feel like we did; I’m not exactly sure where we are), but it’s a long way south, and New England’s going be damn eager to catch two RAAF refugees travelling together. Especially if Jess tells them about the codebook.
So. Between the two of us, we have two Steyr Augs, a Remington shotgun, and Rahvi’s Browning. We have a decent amount of ammunition. Enough food for a few days, and enough medical supplies to make sure we both don’t bleed out from our various injuries or get sick and infected. Both of us are injured, but my shoulder doesn’t feel too bad and Rahvi’s leg doesn’t seem to be slowing him down. It’s maybe a thousand kilometres to Jagungal, assuming we have to walk the whole way. And every soldier in the region is combing the landscape for us.
This is going to be a hard few weeks.
11.30pm
We have the PAL codes back, I said triumphantly.
It was around noon. Rahvi had woken up, and was keeping watch further up the gully while I contacted Aaron - who let out the mental equivalent of a huge sigh of relief.
So what’s the bad news, then? he asked.
I didn’t say there was any. How do you know there’s bad news?
I don’t know, Aaron said. Pattern recognition?
All right, I said. We’re somewhere out in the countryside, south of Bundarra. We’re hiding out in a gully, waiting for nightfall. Place is crawling with soldiers.
What exactly happened? Aaron asked. How did you get the codes back?
I gave him the condensed version.
Fucking hell, Aaron said. You know it’s a miracle you’re alive?
That is not even close to the craziest thing I had no right to survive, that I’ve been through lately, I said.
No kidding. I meant, like, cumulatively.
Anyway, I said. Our plan is to head south. Rahvi had organised a rendezvous with Cavalli and Jones at a quarry south of Bendeemer on the 17th. We’re probably going to skip that – we can�
��t wait around, this place is going to be crawling with soldiers. We need to get the hell out of New England.
Stay off the roads, whatever you do, Aaron said. Don’t try to get a vehicle until you’re well out of their territory. They use the roads a lot, they have supply convoys all the time and all kinds of shit.
I don’t suppose we could ask for an air extraction while we’re still inside their borders?
You know you can’t, Aaron said gravely. And if we had any air assets that could pull that off – I don’t know, Tobias was talking about some kind of diversionary attack – that’s for the Globemaster survivors with the nuke. They’re the priority. Sorry.
So they’re still on the run, then?
As far as we know. We still don’t have direct contact with them. If we can pinpoint them, your best bet might actually be to try to hook up with them.
Well, I said. Keep us posted. I’m going to try to get some sleep.
For sure. Listen, Matt? Good job. Really fucking good job.
Thanks, Dad, I said, and hung up.
I don’t know why I was being snarky. He was trying to be nice.
I drifted back into the real world - the bubbling of the creek, the chirrup of insects, the pain of cuts and bruises all over my body. I was exhausted, but between my eyelids slowly closing I saw Rahvi coming down from the lip of the gully, treading carefully with his Steyr Aug held in both hands.
“All clear up there,” he said. “What’s the word from Jagungal?”
“Keep moving south,” I murmured. “Try to hook up with the Globemaster guys with the nuke, if we can. Maybe an air evac…”
“All right. No worries. Get some sleep, we’ll move again once it’s dark.”
“Mm-hmm,” I murmured, as his voice ebbed away.
A few seconds later he was hissing in my ear. “Matt! Wake up!”
My eyes forced themselves open, and I realised with surprise that it hadn’t been a few seconds at all. The sun was nearly setting, touching the lip of the gully and lancing dust-filled orange rays through the trees. I still felt exhausted, but it was almost sunset – I must have been asleep for hours.