‘What does that mean?’
‘Maybe some sort of distress code. Somebody will be coming to find out. We’re lucky he reached for the phone and not that thing.’ She used the phone’s antenna to point to the assault rifle laid out on the table, a small stack of distinctive curved ammunition clips beside it. It was a stubby carbine, a Russian AKS-74u of the same type that had been used in the Gwardar robbery. The same gun carried by the mercenaries who had ambushed them on the road from Kalgoorlie, and the one used to shoot Ford. He felt a twinge in his shoulder at the memory. He had stopped wondering if the pain was real or an echo in his mind; it didn’t seem to make much difference anymore.
Kavanagh put the phone down and leaned over to examine the items laid neatly on the table. There was a carefully folded pile of clothes next to an olive green duffel bag. At one end was a plastic bowl and a shaving mirror, and at the opposite end a Primus stove and a nested set of aluminium cooking pots. Beside the AK were a two-way radio and a small rectangular screen that appeared to be some sort of tablet computer. Under the table a carton of tinned food sat beside a cardboard tray of bottled water shrink-wrapped in plastic. The edge of the plastic was torn where several bottles had been pulled out. Kavanagh bent and helped herself to a bottle, twisting the cap in her teeth and sucking greedily.
‘Doesn’t look like he’s been camping here very long,’ said Ford.
Kavanagh nodded as she swallowed, but didn’t speak. She put down the bottle, pulled her gun from her jeans and walked off through the door. Ford made to follow her, but she stopped him with a wave of her gun.
Instead he found his cigarettes and tapped one out of the packet. It quivered between his lips as he flipped his lighter open and held the flame. He took a long drag and held down the smoke, keeping it in his lungs and watching the cigarette dance in his shaking fingers.
Leaning across the table he picked up the computer tablet and examined it, looking for a switch to turn it on. Beneath it, still lying on the table, was a broad leather wallet. He undid the long zip and found a Canadian passport inside. The face of the dead man stared back at him, paler in the photograph. Grant Collins; thirty-two years old. Next to the passport in the wallet was a billfold. Ford pulled off the brass money-clip and counted out a thousand dollars in new fifties, and beneath it another thousand in American greenbacks. He folded them and slipped them into his back pocket.
The only other item in the wallet was a laminated photograph of a small girl. She looked the same age as his own daughter: pale skin and freckles, curly brown hair spilling from a woollen cap, smiling at the camera and squinting in bright sunshine. What little landscape could be seen behind her was pine trees and snow. It occurred to Ford that Grace had never seen snow, and he thought about why this man had also left his little girl behind. Maybe she was with family, rather than trusted to strangers, and Ford wondered how long it would take before the girl was told about her father. She would not understand what her father was doing on the far side of the world, in a place that had never seen snow.
He was still lost in those thoughts when Kavanagh returned, her boots scraping on the floorboards. ‘Nobody else in this place,’ she said. ‘Your wife was never here.’
Ford showed her the passport. She flicked through it, her shaking hand making the pages flutter.
‘It doesn’t tell us much,’ he said.
‘If you’d stayed in the car, I might have got the drop on him and been able to question him,’ she said, her face set firm, her jaw locked.
‘I saw his gun,’ said Ford.
She closed the passport and tossed it on the table. ‘It lists his profession as pilot,’ she said. ‘That tanker truck out the front is marked as carrying aviation fuel. I want to find his plane.’ She toyed with the two-way radio and then picked up the computer tablet. It was a matte black screen, with a series of switches and dials set into the frame.
‘What is this?’ she said, then found the switch and the screen grew brighter, resolving into a brightly coloured pattern that Ford recognised as a map.
‘It’s a navigation computer,’ he said. ‘Some sort of GPS. Never seen one this big before.’
Kavanagh passed it to him. ‘You’re the computer nerd,’ she said. ‘See if you can work it.’
Ford played with the buttons in the frame and watched as the map on the screen zoomed and scrolled, various dials and gauges appearing and vanishing. After a minute he thought he had a feel for it. He zoomed the map out until he could recognise the coastline. ‘There’s a few markers programmed into this,’ he said, tilting the screen for her to see. ‘Airports at Hedland and Broome are marked, and there’s a pair of markers south of Marble Bar.’ He pointed to two glowing green diamonds at the bottom of the map, then zoomed in on them.
‘This little picture of an aeroplane is a cursor marking our position. The other two markers are northwest of here, close together, maybe ten kilometres away.’
‘Then that’s where we’re headed,’ said Kavanagh.
‘Shouldn’t we search the homestead first?’
‘Roth wouldn’t have stashed anything here. It could be tracked back to McCann. He’ll have it out bush somewhere. One marker will be the plane, and I want to know what the other one is. I’m not going to hang around here waiting to see who responds to that distress call.’
She walked to the door and opened it. ‘Come on, the clock is ticking.’
Ford motioned towards the Canadian. ‘You just going to leave him?’
Kavanagh yawned. ‘Whoever he called will take care of him. Remove all trace of him from this place. I’m not doing their housekeeping for them. Don’t leave that butt behind.’
The cigarette between his fingers had burned down to the filter. He pinched the end of it and put the butt in his pocket, then picked up the AK and began to follow her. ‘Leave that,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust you with it. Just bring the shotgun and the GPS.’ She turned and stepped through the door and he heard her boots receding along the verandah.
When Ford emerged into the heat and flies, Kavanagh was walking through the weeds searching for her hat. She found it, looked up to gauge the height of the sun, then screwed the hat down onto her head. Ford walked to the LandCruiser and assessed the damage. There were two bullet holes above the front wheel arch, and another in the driver’s door. He felt under the wheel arch to where the slugs were embedded in the engine insulation.
‘Anything serious?’ Kavanagh asked as she walked to the passenger door.
‘No,’ said Ford. ‘She’s good to go.’ He brushed the broken glass off the driver’s seat and slid the shotgun along the dash. He set the GPS on the centre console and started the engine, staring at the GPS screen, trying to get his bearings.
He pulled out and circled the yard until he found a sandy road that headed west. He kept one eye on the road, the other on the GPS, and soon they were out in the dry country again, among the stunted trees and parched yellow spinifex.
Ford wiped the sweat from his brow. With the window gone, the air-conditioner was struggling but he left it on, if only for the slight trickle of cold air that blew from the dash in contrast to the hot rush of baking air from outside, bringing with it dust and flies. Ford powered down the windows in the back to create a through draught. Kavanagh fanned herself with her hat.
The road passed through a fence line and Ford slowed to read a rusted sign fixed to a fence post. It had faded in the sun so completely that the words were only visible because the paint had stopped the letters from rusting as much as the rest of the sign. It read: ‘CORUNNA WARTIME AIRSTRIP’. Ford looked at Kavanagh as he moved off and she nodded, a small smile curling her lips. She sat upright in the seat, leaning forward, one hand grabbing the handle on the dash, the other grasping the handle above the door, her body swaying back and forth with the movement of the car on the uneven road, willing them forward. She looked down at the GPS. ‘How accurate do you think that thing is?’
Ford fiddled with the controls
as he drove, zooming in on their location. The screen didn’t show any kind of runway, just blank country bounded by a river to the west.
‘These things read to the nearest few metres,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us right to it.’
She wasn’t listening. She was scanning the bush, her eyes drawn to the row of blue hills that shimmered in the heat haze along the horizon. Ford drove on, one eye watching the cursor on the screen creep closer to the nearest diamond marker. The trees had disappeared, the country changing to open grassland of buffel and spinifex, almost as tall as the bonnet of the car and brittle yellow. A pair of small black-topped hills stood above the plain to their left, and the way-marker indicated that their destination lay on the far side of them.
The road grew wider and the grass withdrew on either side until they were on a broad expanse of bare red sand that stretched away ahead of them in a straight line. ‘It’s a runway,’ said Kavanagh.
Ford nodded and checked the screen. He found a narrow track that curved away towards the black hills and followed it, just a pair of wheel ruts through the grass. It led him to the base of the hills and when the cursor on the screen passed over the diamond marker, he stopped. ‘This is it,’ he said, and turned off the engine.
The heat and the silence rushed in through the window and smothered them. They gazed at the featureless landscape, sweat beading on their foreheads, until Ford spotted something in the grass and opened his door. He found a cap under the seat, a company hat with the logo sewn on to it, and put it on, pulling the peak tight over his eyes. He walked away from the road to a rectangle of concrete devoid of grass. The perimeter of the slab was strewn with sheets of rusted corrugated iron and flakes of asbestos sheeting, the remnants of a long-demolished building. He stepped off the concrete into the grass, and tripped over something. He reached down and found a rusted steel cylinder; looking around, he saw that the ground was littered with scrap metal. Kavanagh, just behind him, pushed the rusted steel with the toe of her boot, turning it over in the grass, swatting away the flies with her hand. She walked over to an open steel frame, the size of a refrigerator, lying on its side in the grass. ‘What is all this?’ she asked.
Ford stooped to pick up the rusted cylinder he had tripped over. ‘Wartime stuff,’ he said. ‘This looks like a bomb casing, an incendiary maybe. That frame in front of you is a bomb crate, used for transporting the bombs to the plane.’
Kavanagh squatted and sifted through some of the metal. She lifted a small propeller, not much bigger than the palm of her hand.
‘Bomb spinner,’ said Ford. Kavanagh looked puzzled. ‘It rotates in the rush of air as the bomb falls, pulls out the fuse and arms the bomb.’
Kavanagh shrugged and pitched it into the grass, watching it spin as it flew away from her.
Ford picked up a handful of slug-shaped metal pieces from the ground and dropped them again, too hot to touch from lying in the sun. He pulled his sleeve down over his hand and tried again. ‘Fifty calibre bullets,’ he said, holding them out for Kavanagh to see.
‘Careful they don’t go off,’ she said, her voice not expressing any concern at all.
‘These are just the projectiles,’ said Ford. ‘The cartridges are those longer hollow brass shells on the ground.’
She eyed him from under the brim of her hat. ‘More weird stuff that you know too much about.’
‘I was fascinated by planes as a kid. All sorts of military gear. Tanks, battleships, all that.’
‘Did you used to build those little plastics kits?’
He smiled. ‘I considered joining the Royal Air Force when I was a teenager.’
She laughed at this. ‘I can’t imagine you in uniform taking orders.’
‘Neither could I,’ he said.
She turned and started walking away through the grass, stepping carefully between the twisted metal. Ford called after her. ‘So what are we looking for?’
‘Something more than we can see here,’ she said. ‘Something the pilot needed to find.’
‘His plane’s not here.’
‘There were two markers.’
Ford’s eyes followed her as she receded into the grass. He took a couple of steps in pursuit but a bright flash of light from the ground, a reflection, caught his eye. Taking a step backwards, he turned towards the sun and moved until he caught sight of the reflection again, a white flash through the long grass, bouncing off something lying among the scrap metal. He walked towards it and found the source, a sheet of glass lying flat within the rusted remains of an iron window casement. At first he thought it was part of the window, a remnant from the demolished building, but when he stepped closer he realised that was what he was meant to think. The rectangle of glass was new, only the size of a TV screen, and the black hexagonal pattern bonded to the back of it appeared to be a solar panel.
‘Over here,’ he said to Kavanagh, and knelt down. He lifted the glass, and saw where the electrical cable was connected to the panel. He took the wire in his fingers and followed it to where it disappeared into the grass. When Kavanagh reached him he had traced the wire five metres towards the foundations of another demolished building. Her eyes followed the cable back to the solar panel and she smiled again. Kneeling down next to Ford, she took the cable from his hand, the tips of her fingers grazing his palm. She then pulled hard on it and the cable sprang from the grass, revealing another five metres stretching to where the wire disappeared under a large sheet of corrugated iron. Kavanagh strode across to the spot where it disappeared and squatted down. She tried to lift the sheet, wincing at the touch of hot metal. ‘Give me a hand,’ she hissed.
The corroded iron was covered with stones and dried grass. Ford took the side opposite Kavanagh and together they lifted it onto its end, then pushed it over to let it fall into the grass. Beneath the iron there was a flat timber trapdoor. Kavanagh pounced on it, her fingers clawing at the edge of the rotted timbers. The door came up, pivoting on rusted hinges, then landed with a crash onto the sheet of iron.
A set of concrete steps led down into darkness. Kavanagh skipped down them until she had disappeared into the gloom. ‘Shit,’ she grunted. Her voice echoed back from below.
When Ford reached the bottom of the steps Kavanagh was pushing at a door, aged timber like the trapdoor, secured on one side with a bright new steel hasp and a heavy brass padlock. Kavanagh pushed Ford back up the steps, pulled the pistol from her belt and took aim at the padlock.
‘No!’ shouted Ford, grabbing her gun hand, pushing her arm down. ‘Did you ever see that work anywhere but the movies? In this tight space you’re more likely to shoot yourself with the ricochet.’
He went back up the stairs. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got gear in the car.’
He returned with a tyre lever and a rubber torch. Kavanagh stepped aside so he could examine the door’s timber. It was old, of wartime vintage, built from heavy planks that had warped and shrunk with age. The hasp and the padlock looked sound but whoever had fitted the hasp had ignored the hinges, which were secured to the timber by brass screws, green with age. The hinges were welded to a steel frame, which was cast into the concrete and corroded and flaked. Ford jammed the chisel end of the tyre lever under the metal plate of the upper hinge and leaned into it. He felt it give. It took him three hard pushes before the screws gave, the wood splintered, and the hinge peeled away from the door. After he’d done the lower hinge, he tried pushing the door. It moved slightly. He looked at Kavanagh and they both put their shoulders to it; at the fourth attempt they heard the timber split and the door swung inwards, pivoting on the hasp and scraping along the concrete floor.
Ford turned on the torch and stepped past the shattered door. The room he entered was dark, the air cool and dry, and it smelled of rat droppings. The sound of his shallow breathing filled the narrow space. The bunker was four metres long and two metres wide, the walls made from corrugated iron. Ford shone the torch around the walls. ‘Air-raid shelter, maybe,’ he said.
The wall along one side was lined with steel shelving, each shelf packed with cardboard archive boxes. The opposite wall was stacked with wooden crates and steel boxes, some of them with lettering stencilled on the side that identified them as military. The space down the middle of the bunker was barely large enough for the two of them to stand.
‘There must be a light around here,’ Kavanagh said. ‘I can’t see what I’m doing.’
Ford swept the bunker wall with the torch but could not see a switch.
‘What was the solar panel for?’ said Kavanagh. ‘Must be for light.’
Ford played the beam along the curved roof, corrugated iron like the walls, and calculated there must be at least a metre of earth above their heads. He turned around and shone the light on the arched segment of wall above the door. A crude wooden shelf had been fixed to the wall high above the door, and on it was a pair of lead-acid car batteries. Above them were a caged light bulb and a small white box with a tiny winking red light.
‘Shit,’ said Ford, under his breath. ‘Movement sensor.’ He found the point in the roof where the plastic pipe entered and followed the cable out of the pipe to the batteries, and then to a conduit that passed down the wall until it was hidden behind the open door. Ford pulled the door away to reveal the light switch, and flipped it. The light from the bulb was weak, but enough for Ford to see the equipment on the shelf, previously hidden in the shadows. The white box was a movement sensor pointed down at the door, and it was connected to a large satellite phone similar to the one the Canadian had been holding when he died.
‘We just triggered it,’ said Ford. ‘Someone will know we are here.’
‘Then we haven’t much time.’ Kavanagh snatched the tyre iron from Ford’s hand and jammed it under the lid of the nearest crate. The lid flew up and she thrust her hand into the polystyrene packing chips inside. She came up with a gun, the same stubby AK they had seen at the homestead. She opened the lid of the steel box beside it and found it full of ammunition, bullets lined up neatly in rows. She pulled out the handles recessed into the sides of the box and lifted it onto the crate so she could open the box beneath it.
Marble Bar Page 18