Wildfire cr-2

by Chris Ryan

  Sergeant Kowalski and his two men pursued the pair a little way out into the scorching sunshine. They were racing towards the perimeter fence. The three soldiers stopped, steadied their AK-47s and fired a salvo of single rounds towards the perimeter fence. Plumes of dust rose as the bullets bit into the red sand.

  The running figures changed direction abruptly like startled fish.

  The sergeant spoke into a radio on his lapel. ‘Sergeant Macy, stand by, they’re heading your way. We’re following from behind.’

  ‘Roger,’ came the reply.

  Even though the base did not have intruder alerts very often, they still had protocols in case it happened. Spies and saboteurs could do a lot of damage and had to be apprehended.

  Sergeant Kowalski shipped his weapon back onto his shoulder, letting it hang casually on its sling. ‘Take it easy, boys, we don’t need to knock ourselves out. Look at ’em go. They won’t be able to keep that up for long in this heat.’

  Ben and Kelly were still running like the wind. Now they were alongside the dome. They were easy to spot — two tiny figures against a gleaming white background. They raced around the dome’s curved perimeter until they were out of sight.

  Kowalski spoke into his radio again. ‘Macy, I think we can take our time. Where are they going to go? It’s nothing but desert out there.’

  About four hundred metres away, near the other entrance, Sergeant Macy’s men were jogging towards the dome, ready to take up the chase. Like greyhounds on a racetrack, in a moment they would come running out the other side.

  None of the soldiers noticed the cloud of dust blowing up on the other side of the dome. They didn’t even take much notice of the noise — a tinny buzz like the engine of a lawnmower or a tiny boat.

  But then a machine rose into the air above the dome. It was a spindly collection of struts like a First World War plane. Two figures sat in the tiny cockpit. The plane climbed, cleared the perimeter fence by a whisker and soared away into the blue sky.

  The two GIs watched, speechless.

  ‘Aw, nuts,’ grunted Kowalski.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bel had a searing headache. She trudged along past buildings that were blackened and dripping with water. They still smelled hot and the water was slowly turning to steam.

  The whole street was blanketed in a thick smoky fog.

  The road surface was soft under her feet like freshly baked cookies, and the metal rails of the tram tracks had expanded in the heat and burst out of the hilly tarmac.

  Those tram lines might be what saved her, Bel thought. She knew that they ran towards the west side of town — and the sea. She couldn’t see more than a few metres in front of her now, but she could follow the tram lines.

  She passed a traffic light lying in the street, a vaguely oblong block of melted black plastic, with circles of red, amber and green, like a piece of sculpture by Salvador Dali.

  The heat was making her head throb like a bass drum and the yellow protective coat didn’t help. It was stiff and heavy to move in. Her entire body was running with sweat, her shirt and skirt wringing wet.

  She angrily pulled open the coat’s Velcro fastenings and took it off, but as soon as she did so, her back, chest and arms started to scorch. It felt as though she had peeled her own skin off. She put the coat back on, fastened it all the way to the top and walked on.

  Ahead of her she saw a phone box — a mess of blackened plastic like a burned-out shower cubicle. The fire brigade had ringed it with yellow caution tape. That meant there was a body inside. Bel averted her gaze, but couldn’t help catching a glimpse of what was inside. A blackened figure was hunched, bent over the phone. Bel knew from her work in other disaster areas that when somebody burned to death they curled up like a cooked prawn.

  A noise behind her made her jump: it was the sound of a vehicle moving. She peered through the smoke and steam — was it coming towards her or going away? Red brake lights, enlarged to blobs by the smoky air, looked like a dot of colour on wet blotting paper. She started to run towards them, waving her arms.

  ‘Hey! Help! Help!’

  The driver of the army truck wanted to get out of the burning streets as fast as possible, but he had to be careful as debris kept looming out of the fog. He had a truck full of rescued civilians and the last thing he needed was to damage the truck and strand them all.

  In the seats behind him, a bedraggled-looking group sat in a silent row. They looked like they had come from a set of Happy Families cards — a vet, a decorator, a postman, a jockey and two people wearing tattered golf clothes.

  Victoria, Troy and their embattled companions had been rescued at last. By chance, they had run into the path of the rescue truck. They would look back on this as the day they’d beaten the odds.

  But Bel wasn’t so lucky. Victoria was gazing, exhausted, out of the back of the truck. The streets went past in a dream of fog. The heavy thrum of the truck’s diesel engine was lulling her to sleep. She didn’t hear the woman calling, just caught a brief glimpse of movement. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but it was only a fluorescent yellow smudge in the gloom, a trick of the light. She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes.

  Fate had flipped a coin.

  Bel ran fast, but she couldn’t run fast enough to catch the Jeep. The red gleam of the rear lights gradually dissolved into the smoky air. Bel’s eyes were blurred with stinging smoke and her tears of desperation.

  Suddenly, behind her, she heard a sound like the growl of a waking giant and a shockwave threw her to the ground. She landed heavily on her knees and elbows, and for a moment crouched, stunned with pain. When she looked, up the smoke hung around her so thickly, it was as though her face was draped in a grey curtain. There was a ringing in her ears and she became aware of a weight pressing down on her. As she moved, pieces of rubble slid off her back. Broken masonry was all around her: bricks and shattered concrete, black and greasy from fire.

  What on earth had happened? Unable to take it in, she sat down amongst the rubble for a few moments, recovering from the shock.

  The dust gradually settled, and when she turned and saw the scene behind her, Bel couldn’t believe her eyes. Where moments before there had been a building, there was now a hole like a missing tooth. The façade had collapsed into the street. If Bel hadn’t been running after the Jeep, she would have been right underneath it when it came down

  Fate had flipped another coin.

  Her ears were ringing so loudly she didn’t notice the sound of her phone.

  Up in the microlight, Ben looked at his phone in the hands-free cradle on the dashboard. The display gave the message he had been longing to see: ‘Calling’. The dialling tone came through strongly in his and Kelly’s headsets.

  They looked at each other, excited.

  ‘A little more throttle,’ said Kelly. Her voice was hushed, hardly daring to speak in case Bel’s voice came through.

  They were sharing control of the microlight while Kelly mapped out their route. She operated the pedals and kept her forearm on the stick, while Ben adjusted the throttle and tried the mobile phones.

  ‘The lines must be back up,’ said Kelly. ‘She’ll answer in a minute.’

  She stiffened in her seat and looked down at the map and then out of the windscreen. ‘Oh my goodness. That’s Adelaide.’

  A dark smudge had been growing on the horizon. At first it was barely noticeable — just a grey speck in the blue evening sky. But now it was getting wider, like ink spreading through the clouds.

  Ben had a cold, ominous feeling. How much of the city had burned in order to turn such a big patch of sky dark like that? A story Bel had told him many years ago came back to him. She had been visiting some place after a volcano had erupted. He was too young to remember the details, but she had told him that the ash in the air turned the sky dark as night.

  Bel’s phone continued to ring unanswered, and as the microlight drew closer to the pall of smoke, its two passengers
felt very uneasy.

  ‘Where are we going to land?’ asked Ben.

  Kelly looked down at the map. ‘There’s an airfield a little way down the coast. We can head for there. It should be well away from the fire area.’

  They were nearly safe, but Ben felt far from relieved. Why didn’t Bel answer?

  Kelly’s phone rang. She automatically went to pick it up, then waved her bandaged hands in frustration. ‘Quick! Answer it!’

  Ben hooked his phone out of the cradle, put Kelly’s in and pressed answer.

  ‘Kelly?’ It was the major’s voice.

  ‘Dad!’ exclaimed Kelly. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In Melbourne. Where are you?’

  ‘Melbourne? Is that where the kidnappers have taken you?’

  ‘What kidnappers? I got picked up by the army.’

  Kelly and Ben exchanged puzzled looks. ‘But you said some protestors had kidnapped you,’ said Kelly. ‘When you called me.’

  ‘When I called you …? I only called you to see if you were all right. But, oh, you mean the protestors at the conference centre. I told you about them. But they weren’t kidnappers. They tried to get a statement from me. One of them was a little crazy — he pulled a knife.’

  ‘A knife! Dad …’

  ‘I wasn’t in any serious danger, sweetheart. He was just young and frustrated. I kept calm and let him boil off the worst of his anger, and once his friends started arguing with him he soon gave it up. Once they realized they weren’t going to get me to say anything, they didn’t hang around.’

  Ben’s phone was on his knee. It flashed up a message. ‘Cannot connect’. He had been timed out. He stabbed the CALL button again. Would it work a second time? Had that been his only chance?

  It started ringing again.

  ‘So why,’ Kelly was saying, ‘did you call me and say you were on the Ghan?’

  ‘The Ghan?’ repeated the major. ‘I didn’t say that.’ There was a pause as he obviously tried to remember what he did say. ‘I was on the gantry outside. They brought me out of an emergency exit onto the top of the fire escape. I was trying to let you know Bel needed help — she was still inside. Have you heard from her? Did she get out OK? I’ve been asking the fire department here but it’s total confusion, as you’d expect.’

  Kelly looked over at Ben, who shook his head. Bel still wasn’t answering.

  ‘We’re still trying to get in touch with her,’ said Kelly.

  ‘And where are you?’

  ‘We’re in the microlight. We’re fine, we’re safe.’

  ‘Good. I’ve gotta go, sweetheart. Other people need this connection. See you later.’ He cut the call.

  Ben swapped the phones over in the cradle again. The sound of his phone ringing came through on their headsets.

  ‘We were wasting our time chasing the Ghan,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, my mum—’

  He choked, unable to say more. Kelly couldn’t think of any words. She was so relieved to hear from her father, but she could hardly say that. Not while Ben was worrying if his mother was alive or dead.

  In any case they had other things to think about now. The black cloud was leaking into the sky around them, turning the deep blue to grey. The phone displays and the lights on the dashboard shone brighter. But when they looked away from the fire, the evening sky was still light. The immense pall of smoke was creating an effect like an eclipse.

  ‘What’s our plan?’ said Ben, looking at the wall of smoke ahead of them. ‘Go through the middle?’

  ‘Are you nuts? It’s heaving with thermals. We go around it. You’ll have to take the stick — we need fine control. Move right and make sure we don’t lose speed and height.’

  Ben guided the plane to the right while Kelly balanced with the pedals.

  ‘We have to be very, very careful,’ said Kelly. ‘Even this far out from the city, we could still be hit with thermals.’

  The smoke formed a definite column to their left, like a charcoal tower in the clouds.

  As they concentrated on the view, they had almost tuned out the ringing sound from Ben’s phone, but suddenly it was answered.

  ‘Ben? Where have you been?’ Bel’s voice sounded hoarse and rasping.

  ‘Mum!’ Ben’s heart leaped. ‘I’ve been ringing you for ages. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m on the roof of the tram terminus.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s in the middle of Adelaide. I was trying to get out to the coast but I went the wrong way. I can’t get out.’

  The middle of Adelaide. She was still right in the heart of the inferno!

  ‘Mum,’ said Ben, ‘I’m coming to get you. I’m in the microlight. I can fly in.’

  Kelly was getting this on her headset too. ‘We can’t do that,’ she spluttered.

  Bel heard her voice. ‘Is that you, Kelly? You can’t come and get me in a microlight. I’m stuck on a roof. It’s twenty metres long. You can’t land a microlight on a roof. It’s not like one of your computer games, Ben.’

  Ben interrupted. ‘Mum, I don’t think it’s anything like a computer game.’

  Kelly took over the conversation. ‘Stay where you are, Dr Kelland. We’ll send help. The roof of the tram terminus, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Bel. ‘And be quick. I don’t know how long this building will last.’

  Ben cut the call and dialled 000. ‘Lines are busy,’ droned the recorded message.

  Suddenly the microlight dropped like a stone, flipping their stomachs. They had hit the thermals.

  Ben had forgotten how bad that felt. His buttocks left the seat and the seat belt pressed into his lap. For a moment he was floating. The top of his head hit the roof of the cockpit, and his stomach seemed to join it.

  They emerged from a cloud into bright sunshine again, flying along smoothly. Down below was the sea, and the west coast of Adelaide. In the gaps between the dark clouds Ben could see hundreds of boats bobbing on the water — boats where people had taken refuge. Further inland, the city was a mass of black clouds, dotted with huge flickers of orange like burning coals.

  Ben dialled 000 again. The display continued to say the same message: Lines are busy.

  ‘We’ve dropped forty feet,’ said Kelly. ‘Pull up.’

  Instead of climbing as she had instructed him, Ben pushed the nose of the microlight down.

  Kelly shrieked, ‘Are you crazy? I said up!’

  Ben kept his hands firmly on the controls and they bumped along for a few more minutes. When he was next able to gather his thoughts and speak, his voice was grim. ‘The tram terminal’s in the centre of town, right? It’s just a ten-minute ride from the coast. I looked it up when I was waiting in the hotel. Well, ten minutes in a tram is barely a couple of minutes in the air. We can go there ourselves.’

  ‘No,’ said Kelly firmly. She groaned as the microlight dropped again, but Ben managed to anticipate and accelerated out of the dive.

  Once he’d steadied the plane, Ben hit redial on his phone, but still the display gave the same message. Lines are busy.

  He waved a hand at his phone. ‘Look at that. We can’t get through to the emergency services. If we try and go for help, it will take ages for anyone to get to her — we may be flying over her head right now.’

  Kelly swallowed, then spoke slowly and deliberately, as though explaining something to a dim child. ‘You can’t land in the town, Ben. The buildings will set up thermals and cross-winds everywhere.’

  Ben circled the plane round. It was now possible to distinguish the shapes of buildings in the blackened mass below. He could feel the heat radiating up from them. Sweat ran down his forehead and back.

  ‘We’re at four hundred feet,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start looking for a place to land. Do you think I should be higher or lower?’

  Kelly refused to answer.

  This was absolutely typical of Bel, thought Ben. She marched through life without a thought for the emotional wreckage she left behind — li
ke she had when she walked out on him and his dad. Whenever he tried to spend time with her, he got into terrible scrapes. He knew it hadn’t been her fault, but last summer he’d gone to London to see her and ended up fighting for his life in a flood! Hell and high water, he thought grimly. Well, he’d done high water; now it was time for hell.

  ‘Kelly, my mother is down there. I am taking this plane down, one way or another. Do you want me to guess what to do and make a mess of it, or will you help?’

  Kelly spoke in a small voice. ‘Keep at this height, but increase your speed a little so we’ve got the power in case we need to climb.’

  She was no longer fighting him. She had given in. In a way that made Ben more nervous, but he couldn’t let Kelly see that, otherwise she’d take over and make him abort the plan. He had to seem confident and determined. For all their sakes.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ben watched their height drop steadily on the altimeter, then glanced out of the window. The ground was a mass of dark cloud. Some buildings were still burning, throwing flames and smoke high into the sky. He was surprised by how smooth their descent was. Maybe the buildings were all the same temperature and weren’t throwing out the isolated currents that played havoc with the plane. It wasn’t that there were no thermals; more that the town was now just one giant furnace.

  As if wanting to punish him for his optimism, the microlight lurched upwards. Ben gritted his teeth and waited for the sickening sensation to pass.

  ‘I told you the thermals would be bad,’ said Kelly.

  ‘Just find me somewhere to land,’ said Ben. The plane began to wobble like a trembling hand.

  Kelly looked out of the window. ‘Let’s take a look at that park. It’s quite close to the tram station. Turn left.’

  Ben shifted the controls correctly but the microlight soared upwards again as it caught another thermal.