by John Marsden
And now we were the spring lambs, maybe on a premature trip to the abattoir.
My daydreams suddenly got interrupted. The truck started to slow down. I felt the brakes come on, then I heard their squealing noise. They gripped hard and the truck stopped. The engine rumbled away but I couldn’t hear anything else. By then I was buried under the felt anyway, hoping the others had the sense to do the same.
There was a pause. Above the rumbling bass of the engine I heard human voices, calling to each other. It was a conversation between three voices, one of them a woman. It lasted only about a minute, probably even less. Their voices were so light and cheerful they might have been talking about the weather.
Clunk, suddenly we were in gear again and moving. But we didn’t gather speed like we had when we left the tip. We rolled along on a very smooth road, much smoother than the one before, but much slower too. I stayed under the felt. We went maybe a kilometre. Then we stopped again. The engine was switched off. There was a long and terrible silence. There were no sounds from the other trucks. All I could hear was the clicking noises as the engine cooled. They seemed magnified, which made me think we were in a shed or garage. After a few minutes I heard the driver cough. He cleared his throat and spat. I felt a little sick. I’ve always hated it when people do that, always hated the noise, let alone the sight.
Then the man got out of the truck and slammed the door. I heard his footsteps. They echoed, again making me think we must be in some kind of garage, but a big one. He sounded like he was walking on concrete. Then I heard another door slam, and that was it. Silence, except for the engine ticking.
I thought it was time for quick decisions. I threw off the prickly hot coverings and whispered, just loud enough for the others to hear: ‘Let’s check it out before they find us.’
I knew it was a risk to do that but it seemed a hell of a bigger risk to stay where we were.
No-one answered, though I could tell by the sudden stillness, the way they all stopped breathing at once, that they’d heard me. I realised that it might have to be me who did the checking out. Feeling with my hands in front of my face I made my way across to the rear door. Then Homer was suddenly beside me whispering: ‘It might be safer going through the driver’s cab.’
I thought, ‘Yes, maybe he’s right.’
We could be more secretive in the cab. If we opened the big rear door, there would be a moment when we’d be exposed to anybody out there. But by slipping into the driver’s cab we might be able to look around before anyone saw us.
So I groped my way forward again, this time with Homer close behind. There was a small sliding panel in the middle of the front wall. A crack of light showed down one side, so I had no trouble finding it. It slid to the left, and although it was stiff and hard to move I got it open. It was quite dark in the cab, which proved we were in a shed or garage. I wriggled through the hatch. I don’t think it was made for people to go through, more for the driver to open and have a look at what was happening behind him. I grinned as I landed on my head in the front seat, thinking of the trouble Homer would have. I was rapidly losing my immediate fear because there was something about this place that said ‘EMPTY’. Just the stillness of the air, the way the slightest sound echoed.
The cab stunk of humans: stale cigarettes and a bit of sweat, mixed in with last night’s garlic, the vinyl smell of the seat and the musty hessian that followed us through the hatch. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, but it had its own identity, the way a wombat hole or a rabbit warren or a dog kennel does. I felt that this guy probably spent a lot of time in his truck.
Homer came through behind me, grunting and cursing. If anyone had been there with a rifle Homer would have been an easy target as he struggled through the hole. It seemed to take him about three minutes, but it probably wasn’t that long.
OK, it was about fifteen seconds.
There we were: crouching in the cab. It was a bit late for caution, considering the noise we’d made. Or rather the noise Homer made. But we crouched there in silence, looking out over the shelf and the dashboard. There were three little soft toys hanging right in front of me. I couldn’t see them very well in the dim light, but the one my nose was bumping against was a blue and green bird with horrible pointy eyes. I felt that at any moment he would start flapping his wings and squawking to warn the soldiers we were there. I had an urge to grab him and wring his scrawny neck. I think it really dawned on me at that moment how much this war was brutalising me.
I gave my head a tiny shake to clear away these stupid thoughts. ‘It seems OK,’ I said to Homer.
‘Yeah.’
He wriggled over and quietly opened the passenger door. I mean, I know he did it quietly, it was just my overheated nerves that had me thinking it sounded like a tractor reversing over a pile of galvanised iron. I had been about to open the driver’s door but I hesitated when I heard the noise he made. ‘No point adding to it,’ I thought.
Instead I followed him. He was already outside the truck, so I quickly crawled along the seat and went through his door. As I did I caught a glimpse of Lee squeezing from the hatch into the cab.
Homer and I were standing on a vast concrete floor. This was the world’s biggest garage. One of my questions had been answered already: there was nothing this big in Wirrawee. We were somewhere else. I was puzzled though. We hadn’t been in the truck very long and I couldn’t think of any place close to the tip that was this size. Still, that was something to worry about later. At the moment keeping ourselves alive was the big priority, the only priority. I followed Homer a few steps away from the truck and did like he did: stood and gazed around, trying to see in the dim light, trying to find a way out.
It sure was big. I don’t think it was quite finished. Down one end I could see a pile of raw timber, for crossbeams maybe. There was a workbench against the wall to my left, but there seemed to be nothing else in the whole place. That’s another reason I thought it was unfinished, the fact that this huge building was so empty. I still couldn’t figure out what it was. The walls and roof were just galvanised iron. Opposite the wall with the workbench, was the other long wall that seemed to be the front of the building. I realised after looking at it for a moment that in fact it was a long door: the whole wall was a door. In the middle of that door was another little door, just the normal size for a person, but it looked pretty small in this place.
I guessed that the driver had left through the little door. I ran over there, as lightly as I could, and had a closer look. The big door was in segments on rails, so that you could slide open just one panel or every panel. If you opened up every panel you’d have opened more than half the building. Weird. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would build a place like this. It was like a mega version of our machinery shed. Maybe it was some new way of storing grain. I looked back at the truck. It seemed tiny. Everyone was out of it now. Kevin and Lee were standing by the driver’s door, arguing about something, Fi was standing halfway between me and the truck, and Homer was investigating the little door. He squeezed it open, took a tiny peep out, and quickly shut it again. Obviously that was where the action was. I ran over to him.
He looked shocked. He stared at me without saying anything. It was hard to tell in the dim light but I actually thought he looked pale, which is not easy for Homer, being Greek and all.
‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You know where we are?’ he said.
‘No, of course not. That’s why I’m asking.’
‘We’re at the bloody airfield.’
I stared back at him, equally horrified. Then I did what he had done, sneaked the door open a fraction and peeped out.
And I saw what he’d seen.
Hectares of grass and concrete runways. High-powered jets in a line on one of the runways. Buildings and building sites everywhere. And a big two-storey brick building in the distance, with a round section on top.
It hadn’t been too long si
nce I’d last seen Wirrawee Airfield. I’d been amazed then at how much it had changed in a short time. They’d expanded it from a little strip for private planes owned by cropdusters and rich graziers, into a huge military base. And from the quick look I got, it seemed they were still expanding it. This shed was evidence of that. And there was plenty of evidence outside the door. There were even more runways, even more buildings than last time. This place was bigger than Cape Canaveral. Not that I’d ever seen Cape Canaveral, but still.
I stared at Homer in horror and disbelief. This was the place we’d wanted to destroy. The place the Kiwis wanted to destroy. When they failed – at least we assumed they failed, because we’d never seen them again and there was no obvious damage to the place – when they failed, we’d had a go. And got absolutely nowhere. I wasn’t surprised now, seeing it from the inside. It looked a hell of a lot bigger from the middle.
Well, we were in the middle of it, no doubt about that. Fair and square in the middle. And no way in the world did I want to be there.
Chapter Five
I went a bit crazy with fear when I realised. We were in an awful situation, I knew that straight away. In a huge building with no cover at all, nowhere to hide, and no way to escape either. This would be the most heavily guarded area for a thousand k’s. We were in a wasps’ nest that covered one hundred and fifty hectares and we didn’t have so much as a can of Mortein between us.
Back in New Zealand Colonel Finley had explained the significance of the airfield to me and me alone. I don’t think he was exaggerating, but he said the enemy controlled half the state from this airfield. He said if it could be knocked out the skies would be opened up for the New Zealand Air Force. They would have virtually free access to half a dozen cities. Fifty or more factories could be bombed, as well as bridges, railway lines, Cobbler’s Bay, and a missile launching pad being built near Stratton. Of course the enemy had other defences besides the airfield, but this was the key to it all. Through a cloud of pipe smoke Colonel Finley said to me, ‘Ellie, if I were to bomb those factories today, I’d have forty per cent casualties. But if the airfield was taken out I’d have five per cent.’
I remember thinking how odd it was that he talked about ‘I’ and ‘me’ when he wasn’t actually going out and bombing anyone. And it sounded so coldblooded, talking about human lives in percentages.
I’d been willing for us to have a go at the airfield because I kept thinking about people like Sam and Xavier, the helicopter pilots. I could picture their faces. I saw them or their mates sitting in planes on the way to bomb targets and I saw enemy fighters screaming up behind them and the missiles, like little black darts, pouring towards the planes and I saw the planes lurch and stagger and fall sideways, and the faces of my friends as the jets spun out of control at ever increasing speeds, falling out of the sky to meet the rock-hard earth: the explosion as dirt and fuselage and trees and flames and human bodies detonated in a huge fatal horrible fireball ...
Yes, I’d been willing for us to have a go at the airfield.
But it was different then. We’d been in control. We were free agents, moving around Wirrawee in the dark, going where we decided, doing what we wanted. Now we had no control. Sure we were in the place we’d been aiming for, but we were here with no weapons, no plans, no hiding place. This huge hangar wouldn’t protect us for long.
Homer had done a quick tour of most of the building, jogging around its vast perimeter, and now he was back at the little door. Every couple of minutes he opened it a fraction and snuck another look. ‘This is the only entrance, I think,’ he said to me. ‘That’s good. Means they’ve got less chance of surprising us. We can make our plans from here, while we watch them.’
I was impressed by that. I thought, ‘You’re not bad sometimes, Homer. Right now, when there’s every reason to panic, you’re thinking about tactics and survival. A lot of people would have given up.’
And I was feeling like one of those people. But his strength gave me strength. I felt myself grow a little, get a little tougher and more determined. I said, ‘You keep a lookout. I’ll get the others.’
I ran to them and broke the news. ‘I hate to tell you guys, but we’re slap-bang in the middle of Wirrawee Airfield.’
They took it in their different ways. Lee trembled slightly and didn’t say a word, Fi put her hand to her mouth and sat on the step of the truck, and Kevin swore at me as if it were my fault. I realised a moment later that he thought it was, as he said: ‘If you hadn’t told us to get in this bloody truck in the first place ...’ He stopped and stood glaring at me. But Fi turned on him angrily.
‘How dare you? You know perfectly well there wasn’t any choice. Just because you’re scared. Well, there’s plenty to be scared about, but don’t take it out on Ellie.’
There it was, the ‘scared’ word again. It was getting quite popular.
Lee ignored all this. He was good at ignoring things he didn’t want to know about. He was probably in the world’s top ten for that. Already he was on his way to the door, to join Homer. I thought the smartest thing for me to do would be to go over there too.
We held a quick conference at the door. First the others had to open it and sneak a look through the crack, as if they didn’t quite believe me, as if they thought I’d made the whole thing up. But their pale faces and trembling lips, after they’d had their peep, made it pretty obvious that they believed me now.
Even Lee looked as though this was too much to cope with.
‘What are we going to do?’ Fi asked, as usual. Was it my imagination or was her gaze fixed on me, in the dim shadowy light? No, it wasn’t my imagination. And not only Fi. The three boys were gazing at me too, even Homer. I’m not sure when it first happened, this promotion of me to the position of the person with ideas, the person who’d get us out of tight spots, but at some stage it had happened, and now they seemed to take it for granted that I’d have inspirations on cue. It was like Homer had the positive energy and I was meant to have the positive ideas. But this time I gazed blankly back at them. Finally I said, pretty weakly, ‘Well, it should be easier to get out than in.’
‘The truck, it’s our only hope,’ Kevin said. ‘We’ll have to wait till it goes out again, and hide in it.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Lee said. ‘If he loads stuff in it here, where do we hide while he’s doing it?’
‘It might be weeks before it goes out again,’ Fi said. ‘We’d have starved to death by then.’ She looked around, wrinkling her nose. ‘There’s not even a toilet.’
‘Well, we can’t walk out,’ Kevin said. ‘And we can’t dress up in stolen uniforms and bluff it, like they do in the movies. If we don’t get out in the truck, we’re done for.’
Our meeting was suddenly interrupted. A rumbling noise outside and a slight vibration of the building were our only warnings. We looked at each other fearfully then turned and sprinted for the truck.
We tumbled into the back of it just in time. A moment later I heard the rattle of a metal door sliding open, and the low rumbling became a loud throbbing. Homer was again watching, this time through a crack in the van door. ‘There’re more trucks coming in,’ he reported, ‘... a whole bunch of them.’
It got pretty loud there for a while. The shed – or hangar I suppose I should call it, because I was beginning to realise that’s what it was – amplified the engines, causing their noise to echo around the walls. I could smell the fumes too: they seeped into our truck and made the air pretty foul for a while.
Gradually though, things started to quieten again. The engines were shut off. I could hear footsteps, and a few comments shouted as doors opened and shut. Someone walked past our truck actually drumming a tune on the side with his fingers. Fi, crouched beside me in the dark bowels of the van, half covered by felt, stiffened as though she’d had 240 volts put through her. I must admit I felt like I’d had an electric toaster dropped in my bath water.
Then there was nothi
ng for a minute, until the sound of the sliding metal door again.
Then complete silence.
It seemed we were alone once more. Maybe. Homer gently opened the back door a centimetre and had a little peep. Then he opened it about ten centimetres. Then thirty. Finally he was satisfied, and opened it the whole way. We all got out.
There were now twenty trucks in the hangar. They still seemed small in the huge shed. They were a variety of shapes and sizes, from tray-tops to semis to vans. There were some genuine Army trucks in green and khaki camouflage paint, and some from businesses in Wirrawee and Stratton. Trucks that had become part of the war souvenirs these guys had scored for themselves. I saw an old prime mover with HHA Holdings written on the side. HHA Holdings was Mr and Mrs Arthur’s company: they owned ‘Random Hills’, a property about three kilometres away from the Quinns’ place, next to the Ramsays’.
We had a quick look around the different vehicles. It didn’t seem to help us much, having them there. So we had twenty to pick from now, instead of one. Did that make any real difference? None of them had any great hiding places.
In the middle of the hangar Lee said to me, quietly, where the others couldn’t hear, ‘We have to approach this whole thing differently.’
He’d obviously been doing some thinking. More than I’d been doing. My mind was chaos: it was a mess in there. Maybe Lee was going to take over as the ideas person. He was welcome to the job.
‘How do you mean?’ I asked cautiously.
‘We have to see it as an opportunity.’
‘Oh no,’ I groaned to myself. I hate it when people talk like that. ‘Turn your negatives into positives.’ ‘Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’ ‘Become the person you dare to be.’ Iain, the leader of the Kiwi soldiers, talked like that a bit. ‘No, wait a minute,’ I thought. ‘You’re overreacting. Lee hasn’t started sounding like a preacher from a Sunday morning TV show ... yet.’
I still hadn’t spoken and when he realised I wasn’t going to say anything he went on.