When Ford looked up again Roth was leaning against the Range Rover, tall and lean, thinner than the last time Ford had seen him, carrying less muscle. His back didn’t seem so rigid, his military bearing had softened. He was wearing a khaki shirt and matching shorts, and army boots with long socks pulled up to the knee. He had a webbing belt around his waist, and it held a gun holster diagonally across his belly, the butt of a large black automatic visible.
Roth pushed another clip into the AK and smiled at both of them. ‘You can get up now, Mr Ford,’ he said. Listening to the clipped vowels of his Afrikaans accent, Ford remembered the last time they had met, pointing guns at each other in an aircraft hangar while his wife and daughter watched. ‘Go join the detective,’ said Roth. ‘Lie face down next to her.’
Ford stood up, brushed the dust from his clothes and walked slowly around to Kavanagh, his eyes fixed on the end of the gun barrel, which swung to follow him. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground. She did not look at him, her eyes also fixed on the gun. She rolled onto her belly and Ford lay down next to her, leaning on his elbows so he could continue watching Roth.
The South African pushed himself off the Range Rover and walked slowly towards them. He dragged his right foot as he walked, the sole of his boot scraping through the dirt. ‘They said I would recover full mobility, those doctors,’ he said. ‘Two shotgun pellets went deep into the cartilage, here on the hip. Just unlucky. When I got to Jakarta I had some local guy look at it and he left the joint in worse shape than when he started.’ He was standing over them now, the AK hanging around his neck on a thin strand of nylon rope. He raised his right hand and let the gun swing loose as he waggled his fingers at Ford. The first finger was missing; the third was truncated at the first joint. ‘Your handiwork too,’ he said. ‘I should have gone to Pretoria, got myself a decent white doctor, then maybe I’d still be playing the piano.’
Kavanagh lifted her head off the ground to speak. ‘Is that why you can’t shoot straight?’ she said. ‘Lost your trigger finger?’
Roth put his hand around the pistol grip of the carbine, his hand high on it, his second finger tucked into the trigger guard. He stepped over Kavanagh, and put a foot between her shoulder blades, pushing her down into the dust. ‘If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have been shooting at your tyres.’ His breathing was laboured as he leaned over her, a slight wheeze in his throat. He patted her down, lifted the hem of her shirt. He felt the lump in her back pocket and plucked out her phone and Ford’s lighter. He stood upright and held the lighter to eye level, flipped the top and examined the wick. He turned to look down the runway to where the white smoke rose in a thin column before being caught by the breeze and scattered south.
A deep booming roar came rolling like thunder down the runway as the plane exploded, a ball of flame blooming above the trees, the white smoke turning to black, a broad smudge against the clear blue sky. Roth tutted to himself and stepped across to Ford. As he was patted down, Ford rolled on his side slightly, pushing his knee into the ground, pressing the patch pocket with the diamonds into the dirt. Roth’s search was brisk and cursory. He found his phone but nothing else. ‘Where’s the gun you just fired?’ he said to Kavanagh.
She turned her head to him. ‘Still in the car,’ she said, a flurry of dust rising from the ground in front of her as she spoke.
Roth stepped backwards until he reached the open door of the Toyota, then turned to look inside. He leaned in and pulled out the shotgun. He broke it open and took out the shells. ‘Always a shotgun with you, huh?’ as he leaned the empty gun against the door. He found the pistol on the floor and examined it, turning it over in his hand. ‘One of mine,’ he said, his voice for the first time showing a bite of anger. ‘You took this from one of my men.’
Kavanagh twisted herself back into a sitting position to look at him. ‘Two of your men ambushed us in the bush after the robbery. I killed one, Ford killed the other.’ She lifted her chin, enjoying the discomfort on his face.
Roth pulled the clip from the pistol and counted the rounds, drew back the slide and checked the chamber. ‘And did you use this gun to kill my pilot?’
Kavanagh nodded.
Roth smiled now, feeling the balance change again. He slid the clip back into the gun and tucked the pistol into his belt beside the holster. ‘I don’t think you’ll be arresting anyone,’ he said. ‘Where’s your Glock, detective?’ He pulled a bandana from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead.‘What are you doing out here without back-up, in a mining vehicle, using a gun stolen from a dead man?’ He limped slowly to the back of the Toyota, opened the rear door and searched the back. He found the toolbox and opened it, rattling the tools as he went through it. ‘How did you find me here?’ he asked, his voice casual.
Ford was aware that Roth was watching them in his peripheral vision as he searched the car.
‘Somebody sold you out,’ said Kavanagh, sitting up, picking at strands of grass poking through the gravel.
‘That would be Mr Ford’s wife, I suppose,’ said Roth, closing the tailgate and opening the fuel cap. He fed the bandana slowly into the tank.
‘Where is Diane?’ asked Ford, sitting upright next to Kavanagh, putting his hand flat on his thigh to check the pouch was secure.
‘Did you think I had her?’ said Roth, stepping to the passenger door and reaching inside to pick up the GPS from the centre console. He thumbed the buttons and examined the screen, his eyes narrowing at what he saw. He spat out a few words in Afrikaans and dashed the screen against the corner of the car door, the edge of the steel punching through the glass and shattering it. He tossed the empty frame into the long grass beside the runway. The destruction seemed to soothe his temper, but his breathing was still laboured.
‘You sound a bit wheezy there, mate,’ said Kavanagh. ‘You lose a bit of lung as well?’
Roth’s face fell. He paused, adjusting his expression, then said, ‘Ford fired two shotgun shells into me from that sawn-off monstrosity he carried. The first took my fingers and put lead in my hip. The second hit my right lung and a few stray pellets hit my liver.’
‘So now you get your revenge,’ said Ford, his eyes lowered to the ground, picking gravel from the tread of his boots.
‘I think you use that term rather lightly,’ said Roth, relaxed now, his composure restored. He went back to the fuel cap and pulled the bandana out of the tank, letting it hang loose, dripping diesel.
‘I spent ten years in the Recces chasing guys across Namibia, Angola. Country not so different from this.’ He twisted the end of the bandana into a rat-tail and stood back to examine his work. ‘I’ve seen the sort of revenge that’s taken out on a whole village. That’s not what’s happening here. I made a promise to your wife not to kill you.’
‘Diane isn’t with McCann anymore,’ said Ford.
‘A promise is a promise. Alan wants her back. If I hurt her, I hurt him.’
‘You’ve seen her?’
‘Not since I left Macau.’
‘But she’s your enemy now.’
‘Another word you use loosely,’ said Roth. ‘There are no enemies, only adversaries, and they may one day be your allies, even your leaders.’
Kavanagh snorted. ‘I don’t believe you’re the sort to show mercy unless it suits you. You’ve still got a use for us.’
Roth ignored her, and kept his gaze on Ford. ‘I carry no ill will against you,’ he said. ‘You shot me because I stood between you and your family. I’ve seen that before. I should’ve known better than to underestimate a desperate man.’ He picked Kavanagh’s hat off the seat and twisted it in his hands. ‘The fortunes of war, Mr Ford. It’s what a soldier expects.’
Ford shrugged. ‘I’m no soldier.’
‘Indeed you’re not.’ Roth tossed the hat towards Kavanagh, flicking his wrist to make it spin in the air. He then picked up the two water canteens and dropped one beside each of them. Ford grabbed at it eagerly, twisted the cap and drank.
Kavanagh got to her feet and held out a hand to help Ford up. They looked at each other and Ford drew strength from the determination in her eyes. He was still holding her hand, standing alongside her, and she didn’t let it go. She gazed down the runway to the column of black smoke. ‘I destroyed your exit strategy,’ she said quietly.
‘What kind of strategy is it that only has one way out?’ said Roth. ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy.’
‘Are we the enemy?’ asked Kavanagh.
‘An adversary, maybe,’ said Roth.
‘You’ll never get the gold out by car,’ she said. ‘Not by yourself, with that limp and a bad lung.’ She waited to see his reaction, but he was cool.
‘The gold isn’t leaving,’ he said. ‘You always knew that.’
‘McCann wanted to put it back through the mine, the only way to launder it,’ she said.
‘Very good,’ said Roth, smirking. ‘I’m going to leave it there for you.’
Kavanagh stood thinking, looking at the cloth hanging out of the fuel tank. Ford could see her expression change as she worked out the angles.
‘Consider it an investment in the future,’ said Roth, flipping open the Zippo and sparking a flame.
‘You need me to get in the way of Bronson, and whoever he’s working for,’ said Kavanagh.
‘Bronson works for the Lau family,’ said Roth.
Kavanagh was starting to piece it together. ‘They’ll want you out of the way, leave McCann exposed, strong-arm him into a deal.You’re as much out on a limb as we are. Is that why McCann needs his assets, to keep the Laus at arm’s length?’
‘You’re at a crossroads,’ said Roth, staring into the flame. ‘There are several people who are going to make you an offer for your soul.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘I just did. I offered you the gold.You accepted it without question. My deal is on the table. Now you need to turn towards the end of the runway and walk away,’ he said, putting the flame to the end of the bandana.
Roth picked up the shotgun by the end of the barrel and used it as a stick to lean on. As the bandana started smouldering he limped quickly away towards the Range Rover. ‘Hurry now!’ he shouted to them.
Kavanagh tightened her grip on Ford’s hand and pulled him into a run. They had put twenty metres of runway between them and the Toyota when the fuel tank ignited and the shock wave pushed them off their feet.
TWENTY
When they stood up and looked back up the runway the LandCruiser was in flames and the Range Rover had disappeared. The wind had changed direction, moving around to the north. Not much of a breeze, but enough to move the smoke from the plane across the runway and with it the smell of burning grass and the sharp tang of aviation fuel.
‘Where are we going?’ Kavanagh said.
Ford pointed to the western end of the runway, to a dark line of trees. It was maybe a kilometre to the end of the runway, then the same distance again to the tree line. Beyond that the ground dipped out of sight, and in the far distance it rose again, bare and rocky, towards the ridge of barren hills on the horizon. ‘Those trees are the only shade I can see,’ said Ford. ‘It’s the river. I saw it on the GPS. It runs along the western edge of the airfield.’
‘And where does it go?’
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘It must run north, towards Marble Bar. Must be one of the creeks that run into the Coongan River.’
‘Will there be water?’
‘None of the creek beds we crossed on the way out here had any,’ said Ford. ‘But they all had plenty of trees growing beside them.’
He pulled up the strap of his canteen and looped it over his head to stop it swinging against his hip, then checked his new watch. It was one in the afternoon. The sun was still high, he could feel it radiating through the material of his cap. They needed to get in the shade and rest until the worst of the heat had passed. There were forty kilometres between them and the town, and they would be lucky to cover five kilometres an hour in any sort of daylight heat, and fewer at night. Eight hours of walking, more if the terrain became difficult.
However many hours it took, and however lucky they got, Roth would be long gone before they got back to town. He wondered how long Saxon would wait before he came looking for them.
‘We need to go the direct route,’ said Kavanagh, pointing east beyond the remains of their car.
Ford shook his head. ‘No shade on that road. We have about an hour’s walking in forty-degree heat before we drop, even with water. We get to shade first, and rest, then see if we can walk in the shade of the tree line.’ He set off walking, dropping his chin to make sure the cap’s peak shaded his face, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop the sun hitting his neck and ears. He didn’t look back to see if she was following, but he heard the crunch of her footsteps on the bare gravel of the runway.
His feet soon found a rhythm and his thoughts wandered. If Saxon did come looking for them there was a chance he would meet Roth on the road. He would not think to check the airfield, and certainly not the river. As he felt the sweat start to flow freely down his forehead and his back inside his shirt, his thoughts turned to Diane and where she might be, and whether all the females who were orbiting around him would ever get pulled towards him, whether he had the gravitational pull to do that, or whether all three would go spinning away, leaving him alone in empty space.
Kavanagh caught up with him and fell into step, slow and steady. Ford kept his face pointing to the ground, watching the toes of her red cowboy boots move in time with his own steel-capped work boots. They walked side by side with their heads bowed, the sun beating down on their bent shoulders. It took them twenty minutes to reach the end of the runway, where the ground sloped away to the river, the grass becoming taller before giving way to rocks and spinifex on the slope and the sandy river bed. It was a hundred metres wide, strewn with trees and boulders between sweeping patches of sand, edged on either side by paperbark trees. Kavanagh sat down on a flat red rock in the first patch of shade she found, leaning her back against the peeling trunk of the tree. She twisted the cap off the canteen and tipped it to her mouth. Ford watched her neck pulse as she swallowed.
‘Go easy,’ he said, realising as he spoke how dry his own throat was, running his tongue over his dry lips. ‘We have two litres each, and no food. It will have to last us until morning, so take one mouthful every half hour, and hope we get some standing water in the river bed.’
Kavanagh wasn’t looking at him, but at her boots, the red leather scuffed and coated with dust. She flapped her hat in front of her face at the flies, but they just looped around her and settled on her shoulders. Ford saw the anger burning in her eyes. Some of it would be directed at Roth, but he knew that most of it she kept for herself, fury at being bested, and stranded like this, while Bronson and Roth were free to play out their game without her.
‘Try to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay until the sun is lower, then walk a few hours before dark.’ He found a patch of white sand on the far side of the tree trunk, well shaded, and scraped off the top layer of hot sand with his boot, sweeping his foot sideways to gouge a shallow trench, the sand cooler. When he had finished he waved for her to lie down in it. She slid off the rock and crawled on her hands and knees towards him, dropping sideways into the trench, sighing like a dog settling. She curled up on her side with her head resting on her hands; her eyes closed and her breathing slowed. Flies settled on her face but, apart from the flutter of her eyelashes when a fly crawled too close, she didn’t move. Her face was dirty; red dust had caught in the slick sweat on her face and worked its way into the creases around her eyes. Her cheeks were reddened by exertion and the sun. Ford sat on a rock with his elbows resting on his knees, just an arm’s length away from her, and looked at every part
of her. He wanted to reach across and touch her hair, push it back behind her ear, feel the skin of her sunburnt cheek and move the tips of his fingers over her cracked lips. Instead he reached inside his pocket and found his cigarettes. He pulled out the packet and brought with it the folded money he had taken from the Canadian. He looked at it and thought about the diamonds and how they were of no use to him in this place. He put a cigarette to his lips before remembering that Roth had taken his lighter. He would gladly have traded the cash for a single smoke.
The scent of the dry tobacco mixed with the smell of fresh sweat rising from Kavanagh stirred a memory in him of the night before. He tried to picture the two of them together but the only image he could conjure was of the old bed at the Ironclad, them coiled together in it. He could never focus on an image of them anywhere else. When he tried he would see Grace and him in the house in Shenton Park, and when that picture filled his mind it didn’t take long for Diane to walk into the frame. When he thought of the three of them together he could never be sure if he was imagining the future or recreating something from the past, something he had for so long thought lost, without hope of resurrection.
He woke up with his back against the trunk of the paperbark, his body still in shade but his legs in the sun. His trouser legs had ridden up above his boots and the heat on his bare shins had woken him. He checked the position of the sun and looked at his watch, surprised by its elegant face against the dirt and grime on his hand. It was past three and the sun did not seem so fierce, a little lower and further to the west, but still full of heat. He squatted down and shook Kavanagh awake. She had put her hat over her eyes, and when he removed it she lay there blinking and trying to push her tongue between her cracked lips to part them. Recognition of who he was and where they were came slowly to her eyes.
‘We need to move on,’ he said. ‘We have three hours of daylight.’
She stood and stretched, swung her water bottle over her shoulder, and stepped out into the sunshine. He picked up his own canteen and followed her. She picked a path between the soft sand in the middle of the river bed and the rocks at the edge, a band of gravel where the ground was firmest. The trees here were widely spaced and offered intermittent shade. After an hour their creek joined another, wider watercourse. There was still no sign of water, but this bed seemed deeper, as if cut by a more urgent flow in the wet season.
Marble Bar Page 20