Dead Heat

by Peter Cotton

  ‘A word about Bain,’ said Coombs, peering out the window. ‘He’s not one for idle chatter.’

  I didn’t go in for chatter either, so Bain was safe. I looked at Coombs and nodded.

  The copilot came out of the cockpit and disarmed the main door. She waited half a minute, pulled a latch, and the door swung open. She lifted a lid on a panel set into the wall, flicked a switch, and a set of steps descended to the ground.

  Coombs and I shouldered our backpacks and shuffled along the aisle to where the thick desert air had already infiltrated the cabin. We poked our heads into the cockpit, thanked the pilot, and stepped to the exit.

  Coombs paused momentarily at the top of the steps, glanced left and right, and took a deep breath. She descended the steps and I followed her. A bloke in full leathers appeared in the light from the open doorway at the front of the hangar. He studied our progress as we walked towards him. It had to be Bain. He was my height, but trim, with big arms and contoured muscles that sloped from his neck down to his bulging shoulders.

  As we moved into the light, he smiled warmly at Coombs. Then he assessed me for a few seconds. His flinty look told me I’d come up short, somehow. He stepped forward and shook Coombs’s hand, and mine. He had a firm grip, but he wasn’t a bone crusher. He didn’t need to assert himself in that way.

  ‘What’d they give you?’ asked Coombs.

  Bain smiled, obviously appreciating her commitment to task. He turned and walked into the hangar, and we followed him to where three trail bikes were lined up against the back wall.

  ‘Suzie off-roaders with all the extras,’ he said, gesturing at the bikes. ‘Long-range tanks. Radiator guards. Bash plates. Hand protectors. Five days’ provisions in the left panniers. Leathers and helmets in the right — in the sizes specified. The helmets are fitted with a short-range intercom and night-vision goggles with thermal capacity. I’ve taped the brake lights for riding dark. The middle bike is yours, Ma’am. Your helmet has the satphone and the radio. Me and your offsider here have access to the phone through the intercom.’

  So, that was how Bain saw me. As Coombs’s offsider, and definitely not an insider. He got astride the nearest bike and began flipping switches. Coombs rested her backpack on the middle bike, and I took the one that remained. I removed the leathers from the right pannier bag and put my backpack in their place. The leathers fitted me perfectly — a tribute to the military’s ability to marshal stores and deliver them in good order. We checked and holstered our weapons. Coombs and Bain packed navy-standard Brownings. I had an AFP-issue Glock 19 semi-automatic.

  The night vision goggles — four tubes attached to a swivel mechanism — sat on top of the helmet they’d supplied. I straddled my bike, put the helmet on and fastened it. As I pulled on my gloves, I was startled to hear Coombs’s voice in my ear.

  ‘You guys getting this?’ she said, sounding strangely soft.

  ‘Loud and clear,’ said Bain, in a deep voice, echoing the real thing, metres away.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll put another few minutes between us and the teams that rode off as we landed, then head east,’ she said, adjusting her leather breeches. ‘Our first rendezvous is in an hour and a half. Bain, you take the lead. I’ll take middle. And Glass, you’re in the rear. By the way, Glass, have you ridden with goggles before?’

  ‘I’ve used them once or twice, but, no, I haven’t ridden with them.’

  ‘Slide them over your eyes and I’ll talk you through it,’ she said, her voice suddenly scratchy through the intercom. ‘The function switch is on the left of the mechanism, in line with the ocular array. Middle position, where it is now, is off. Push it up and the viewfinder goes to night vision.’

  I swivelled the goggles down over my eyes and turned the switch to the ‘up’ position, and night became day in black and white. A graded road with raised edges ran from the hangar to a gap in a wire fence about eighty metres away. A large steel arch hanging over the gap displayed the name of the place in huge letters: Mt Lyle. A small settlement filled both sides of the road, about three hundred metres beyond the fence. The houses were crisp in every detail, as were the cars parked outside them.

  ‘Now, turn the switch down as far as it’ll go, for a thermal reading,’ said Coombs.

  I flipped the switch into the bottom position and my eyes were immediately drawn to the radiant image of our plane. It was so bright it illuminated the bare ground around it. Then I noticed the spaghetti-like tyre tracks from the bikes that’d just departed.

  ‘These goggles have good depth perception,’ said Coombs. ‘And they don’t cause tunnel vision, but it’s still advisable to look away from approaching vehicles at night. Bright light can distort things in the viewfinder. And, as with all goggles, it’s essential that you’re aware of where you’re riding relative to the side of the road. Any questions?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I should be fine.’

  ‘I’m sure you will be,’ she said. ‘So, finishing off our movement protocols. We maintain a three-second separation on the road. That’ll put a gap of anywhere between eighty and a hundred metres between each of us, depending on our speed at the time. We ride dark, so no lights whatsoever. And limit your use of the intercom to essential communications. Clear?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Bain.

  ‘Will do,’ I said.

  We fired up our bikes, almost as one. I switched my goggles back to night vision, and once again the night became a black-and-white day. We rolled away from the airstrip, passed an empty car park, and rattled over a cattle grid that filled the space under the steel arch.

  Coombs radioed in to confirm that we were on the road. Someone in a control centre replied, ‘Roger.’ She tested the intercom again by asking Bain and me if we were ‘there’.

  ‘Yes, Ma’am!’ we said, in unison.

  We reached the highway and turned left. Bain moved to the middle of the blacktop, we followed in behind him, and he slowly increased our speed until he had us cruising at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. Coombs maintained an even one-hundred-metre gap between herself and Bain, and I kept the same distance from her, which amounted to the three-second separation she’d dictated.

  Five kilometres into the ride, a rocky outcrop north of the highway ascended from the desert floor like a giant ramp. Within a few kilometres, it had become a massive, flat-topped escarpment, fronted by a sixty-metre-high wall of rock. The other side of the highway was all spinifex and low scrub, the tedium broken only by the odd tree and the small mammals that scurried around beside the road.

  Twenty minutes into the ride, Bain detected traffic ahead.

  ‘Vehicles approaching,’ he said, his voice tinged with alarm. ‘About two K away and closing fast. Bikes, I think. Eight, maybe nine of them. They’re not riding dark, so they’re not ours.’

  An amorphous white mass materialised in my viewfinder and quickly de-merged into two lines of motorcycles, their headlights blazing. At the speed they were travelling, I figured they’d reach Bain in less than a minute.

  The bikes that’d left the airstrip just before us hadn’t reported any problems on the road, so who was this mob coming at us? If they were hostiles, we had limited options for countering them.

  We could head into the bush to try to escape them, but, with only seconds left before they crossed paths with Bain, that’d require a dramatic drop in speed, which would mean we’d probably go arse-over-heels in the loose dirt at the side of the road, and make ourselves even more vulnerable to them. We could try to turn around, but they’d probably poleaxe us from behind before we could get up any speed. We could use our weapons, but given their superior numbers, if it came down to a fire fight they’d probably outgun us.

  ‘Drop your speed to a hundred,’ said Coombs, calmly, as if it were a routine situation, ‘and get well left.’

  As I swung my bike
to the left side of the road, my speed dropped well below the hundred Coombs had specified, increasing the distance between her and me.

  ‘Glass,’ she said in my ear, ‘keep up or you’ll …’

  She left the sentence hanging. It was clear why. The oncoming motorcycles had fanned out into a ‘V’ formation to fill the width of the road. It was a well-practised manoeuvre, given the speed with which they’d executed it.

  I could hear them now above the roar of my own machine, like a swarm of furious wasps bearing down on us. My heart began to pound, and it seemed to rise in my chest. My breathing was rapid and shallow. We were in huge trouble, and I couldn’t see a way out of it.

  ‘Bain, drop back,’ said Coombs, now sounding alarmed. ‘Glass, catch up. Mayday, mayday. On collision course with hostiles about forty K east of Mt Lyle. Request immediate assistance. Mayday, mayday. Bain, drop back! Drop back now!’ Coombs herself had dropped back so that she was now about fifty metres ahead of me, leaving Bain way out in front.

  With the bikie pack almost upon him, Bain hit both brakes, but instead of easing back towards us, he slewed off the side of the road.

  ‘No …’ said Coombs.

  Bain’s front wheel dipped and wobbled in the soft surface, and as he fought to control his machine, the rider on the outside of the oncoming pack swung something long and hard at his head. It was a precise strike, which hit Bain in the open face of his helmet. His head snapped back, but, somehow, he managed to hold onto his handlebar grips as his rear wheel flew up and over him, and the rest of his machine followed. Halfway through the arc, Bain’s hands fell from the grips, and, with his arms hanging limply, he smashed headfirst into the roadside. An instant later, the front wheel of the bike crunched into the middle of his back, and the machine bounced off him and cartwheeled end-on-end into the spinifex.

  Coombs’s reaction to Bain’s demise was wordless, but charged with absolute aggression. She swung her machine back to the middle of the road, wrapped her throttle on full bore, and opened up on the bandits with her Browning. Two of them veered off the road, but the rest kept coming, faster than ever, the glare from their headlights almost filling my viewfinder. Bullets whistled around me, and I dropped my chest to the petrol tank, my eyes fixed on Coombs.

  She jerked a couple of times as if she’d been hit, but she stayed in the saddle, accelerating straight towards the centre of the bandits. Twenty metres from them, she dropped her weapon and stood up on her back-brake pedal. Her back wheel locked up, and her bike slid around till she was skidding, side-on, on a collision course with the bikie at the front of the formation. The bikie t-boned Coombs with a cracking sound that echoed across the desert, and a split-second later there was a bang, and they were both engulfed in a huge fireball.

  Flaming bits of metal and debris flew in every direction, the force of the explosion knocking several riders off their machines. Riderless bikes skidded along the blacktop, their metal fittings shrieking and sending up showers of sparks.

  I was still going about a hundred, and I hit both brakes as I rode into the flames and smoke. I bounced over bits of bike and body parts, and braced for the fatal impact I was sure would take me out at any moment. A bike zoomed past so close it whipped up flames that nearly pushed me over. Another bike shot by on the other side, its rider on fire, his arms extended in a crucifixion pose, totally out of control.

  My front wheel clipped something solid, the left grip was wrenched from my hand, and I almost dropped the bike onto the burning road. I wound the throttle back and swung my weight to the left to keep the bike from falling as I lunged for the grip, which remained out of reach.

  As I skidded out of the crash zone, I finally got two fingers around the grip and slowly drew it into my hand. I straightened the bike and wound the revs up, but the handlebars jerked so violently I nearly lost control of it again. I couldn’t see the cause of the problem, but I assumed the front rim was buckled, so I tamped on the rear brake, wound the throttle back, and lay on the petrol tank to stabilise the front end.

  The bandits who’d survived the inferno would be after me in no time, so I couldn’t dawdle. I wound the throttle up again, but the wobble forced me to ease back immediately. I wound it up a tiny notch, and a bit more, till I had the bike rolling along as fast as it would go — about sixty-five kilometres an hour — without it wobbling out of control.

  I worked to settle my breathing and tried to clear my mind of what had just happened, but I couldn’t get rid of the image of Coombs roaring down the highway with her gun on rapid fire. And the explosion that’d taken her out. They’d killed Bain, and she and I had had little or no chance of escaping them, so she’d created a gap for me to get through. She’d sacrificed herself. Died fighting to give me a fighting chance.

  I was working through these thoughts when a small white form hopped across the highway right in front of me. A wallaby.

  I swerved to avoid it, but it went straight under my wheels. The jolt ripped the left grip from my hand. The handlebars swung around so far that the grip hit the tank, and the bike reared up and flipped, and I was catapulted through the air.

  I remained airborne for what seemed like an eternity, then I landed on my right side, my momentum pitched me forward, and I rolled over and over, through the spinifex, till my helmeted head hit something solid, and everything went black.

  QTV INTERNATIONAL

  THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER, 2.00AM AEST

  The Indonesian Army has begun lobbing tear-gas canisters into the middle of the Jayapura occupation site, an action thought to be part of a softening-up process before the troops move in to clear the area of protestors.

  At the height of the occupation, more than three hundred Australian activists were on the ground here. Now only one hundred and twenty-three Australians remain, including fifteen non-protestors like myself.

  None of the Australians who’ve vacated the site over recent days have been charged with any offence. The aircraft that flew them back to Australia a few hours ago was chartered and paid for by the Indonesian foreign office. Indonesia’s gentle treatment of these activists demonstrates its desire to minimise the international odium that’s sure to follow when its military clears the occupation site.

  In a show of bravado, an unnamed activist leader told me that the Indonesian Army was in for a nasty surprise if and when it tried to break through the barricades here in Jayapura.

  This is Jean Acheson for QTV.

  5

  I jerked in a stuttering breath. And exhaled. I jerked in another breath and exhaled again. I was lying on my back, looking up at the biggest sky I’d ever seen. Stars everywhere. Clouds of them. And lots of single ones. Big and small. All of them twinkling, like the song said.

  I felt for my goggles. They hung from my helmet by a single clasp. I rolled onto my left side and tried to push myself up, but a shock of pain in my right shoulder sent me back to the ground. I lay there and worked to relax myself. I slowed my breathing and tried to absorb the pain.

  I rolled onto my right side and pushed up to a kneeling position. A breeze played across my face. Some sort of insect click-clicked nearby. I reattached the goggles to my helmet, lowered the eyelets, and switched the unit to infra-red. I was immediately immersed in a black-and-white world of waving spinifex and low shrubs. I instinctively felt for my Glock. It was still there, thank God.

  Hot metal crackled nearby — the bike’s fins and exhaust pipes were cooling off in the night air. The undertone of the desert registered just below the crackle. An almost subliminal white noise. I tuned in and searched the soundscape for anything mechanical, but heard nothing like it.

  I probed my injured shoulder. The thing hadn’t popped, but it was very tender, front and back. I was shaking, and I felt strangely ethereal. Mild shock. I’d got off lightly though. Very lightly compared to Coombs and Bain.

  I stood up gingerly and shuffled through the
scrub to the highway. I stood in the middle of the blacktop and looked left, then right, and left again. And it suddenly occurred to me: I didn’t know which way I’d come from — the place where we’d been hit by the bikies — or the direction I’d been going when I ran over the wallaby. I had no sense of east or west. I looked up at the stars, but that was pointless. I didn’t know how to read them. My mind went blank, and through the void came a surge of panic.

  Then I remembered the escarpment. I swung around, and there it was — the brooding wall of rock that had appeared north of the highway just after we’d set out. I switched my goggles to thermal mode, turned to what I assumed would be the west, and sighed with relief.

  About fifteen metres away, a jagged trail of radiance marked where the bike had veered off the blacktop, ploughed through the soft surface at the side of the road, and headed into the bush. Ten metres beyond the roadside radiance, a dull glow in the middle of the blacktop marked the position of the hapless wallaby.

  Then my sense of relief was swamped by a disturbing realisation: my initial inability to establish my bearings meant that being knocked out had affected my thinking to a degree. This was a very bad time to be muddled, and I’d have to be even more careful with the immediate decisions I made and the actions I took.

  I stumbled up to where the bike had left the road and followed the radiant trail into the bush through low scrub and around tufts of spinifex. The crackling of the cooling fins on the bike’s engine block became louder the further in I went.

  The glow of the bike registered first, and slowly resolved into an image of the machine itself. It’d been stopped by a small tree with a fat trunk. It was hard to say which had come off worse. The tree was uprooted in a terminal way, while the collision had rendered the bike unrideable — its forks were bent, and the front wheel was completely buckled. I squatted and moved my hand around just above the engine block. The air coming off it was red-hot, a sure sign that I hadn’t been unconscious for very long.