The Other Side of Dawn

by John Marsden

  When the ferals couldn’t keep going any longer we stopped, in a dreary little patch of bush near the creek in one of our paddocks, Nellie’s. At that point Ryan got very serious again. I’d hardly swallowed my last mouthful of Pepsi when he asked us to get rid of the kids. Homer and Kevin took them to a clearing a bit further along the bank, so we could still see them. In my pack I always had paper and pens, so I gave them those and told them to write a story or draw a picture.

  ‘Or go to sleep,’ Homer said optimistically.

  They seemed almost relieved to have something normal to do. They’d been so pleased to see us when we came trotting into the campsite in Hell—I’d been moved by how pleased they were. Fi had got them to hide in the undergrowth, but I think they were all sure they were going to be killed. When we arrived and they realised it was safe they threw themselves at me like I was a gum tree and they were koalas.

  Led by Homer and Kevin they trudged off along the creek with their pens and paper. As soon as they were out of range Ryan said: ‘Well, they’re a real complication.’

  ‘Tell us something we didn’t know,’ I said. I guess I sounded a bit unfriendly, but I didn’t mean to be. I was still so off-balance after the terrible encounters with two patrols in as many days, plus I was nervous at what Ryan might want.

  Anyway it was no news to us that the kids were a complication. They’d been a complication ever since we first had anything to do with them.

  Ryan continued: ‘We’ll have a chat about them later and see what’s to be done.’

  I just shrugged and started picking up Kit-Kat wrappers. We didn’t talk again until the boys were back.

  ‘OK, let’s get on with it,’ Homer said, as we sat down for the big conference. ‘Why are you here?’

  By then we were busting with impatience.

  ‘OK,’ Ryan began. ‘You want to know why I’m here? Basically, it’s because Colonel Finley believes you can help us in the next phase of the war. Before I start though, I have to say that everything I tell you is absolutely top-secret. I can’t emphasise that strongly enough. If any of this reaches the wrong ears . . .’

  I sighed, closed my eyes, and leaned my head against a tree trunk. Seemed like I’d been here before. I didn’t blame Ryan though. Some stuff you just have to say, you feel you can’t go to the next stage until you’ve said it, like teachers, when we stopped for lunch on excursions, and they’d say, ‘Make sure you pick up all your rubbish; don’t go to the toilet on your own; make sure you’re back here by half past one . . .’

  So Ryan made his speech, only he got into some very heavy stuff which we hadn’t been put through before, not so specifically anyway.

  ‘If you get caught,’ he said, ‘your first line of defence is that you don’t know anything. “I know nothing.” You’re just kids acting on your own initiative. You’ve never seen me. You may have noticed that I didn’t bring any newspapers or magazines, and if you look closely at the food you’ll find all the processed stuff has got labels from Stratton, and use-by dates that suggest it was made before the invasion. That’s so if, God forbid, you get caught, there’s nothing to prove you’ve had a visit from New Zealand. You could have picked up all this stuff locally.

  ‘OK. Your second line, if they break that down, is that I dropped in here with the chopper, and I gave you certain tasks to carry out, without any explanation as to why you had to do them.

  ‘Your third line, if you’re getting desperate, is to change the details of what you’re doing, and to change them in a way that will make them convincing. That needs a bit of imagination, but you could pull it off, and it might buy you time. If you’ve ever told a fib to your parents, and they tell me it’s not unknown for teenagers to do that, you’ve probably used that technique already.

  ‘And your last line . . .’ He paused and looked at us meaningfully, like he was about to tell us where babies come from, or why we shouldn’t use drugs, or the true reason Mrs Lance had to leave the school. ‘Your last line is to tell the truth. Obviously that’s not something we’d welcome. But these people are tough and they’re ruthless and the stakes are high. If they don’t believe your other three stories they’ll put extreme pressure on you. Mental and physical pressure. They’re very good at doing that. So they might break you down.’

  I glanced at Fi who was white-faced, staring at him.

  ‘If that happens, all we can ask is that you put it off as long as possible. If you know you’re cracking up, try to hang on for another six hours. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. At this stage of the war every hour gained is critical.’

  He made us go through the four points, repeating them, to prove we’d absorbed what he said.

  Only then did he get onto the big stuff.

  ‘Have you had any news since you’ve been back here?’

  ‘Not really’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure where to start. Seems like I’ve got to be the NZBC. “And now, here is the news.” OK. In the time we’ve got I don’t think I’ll be able to give you a full history of what’s happened. But in some ways things have been going a lot better. The biggest difference is the international pressure. Sweden in particular: they’ve led the way. And France, and Japan. America, and the IMF too. They’ve been working away in the United Nations and NATO, and with the ASEAN nations. Gradually it’s had an effect.

  ‘Unfortunately though that’s not enough. We keep coming back to a military solution. For some time now we’ve been planting what the Intelligence people call “disinformation”. In practice that means we’ve been conning them, getting them to think that we’re weakening, losing our spirit, our heart, our resolve. Our Intelligence sources tell us that it’s working. Mind you, if this information’s up to the normal standards of our Intelligence Department it probably means that there’s now a few thousand Scud missiles lined up along the coast pointing at us.

  ‘Still . . . this time it seems like they might have got it right. And of course as you can now guess, the reality is the complete opposite. What’s about to break in the next couple of days is our big push. It’s the most important phase of the war. This is it. What happens in the next few weeks will decide the future history of this country. And ours. And theirs too for that matter. That’s why you’re being called into action. That’s why we’re using every resource we’ve got. That’s why I’m here.’

  Ryan lit another cigarette. It was his third already since we’d stopped our mad rush away from Tailor’s Stitch.

  ‘And it’s where you come in. Have you heard of D-Day, from the Second World War?’

  We’d all heard of it but no-one knew quite what it meant.

  ‘It’s when you launch a big attack, isn’t it?’ Kevin asked. ‘I saw that movie.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Come to think of it, I don’t know why they call it D-Day. Why not A or B or Z? Anyway, our D-Day has arrived. Every soldier we can call on, every weapon we have, will be thrown into this. It’s the counterattack that we’ve been working on for nearly six months.’

  ‘Do you mean we’re going for broke?’ Kevin asked. ‘All or nothing?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t quite put it that way. But the consequences of our being defeated would be . . .’

  Ryan searched for a word, but when I heard the one he chose, I wished he hadn’t bothered.

  ‘. . . it would be catastrophic.’

  He stubbed his cigarette out on a rock and looked at us, waiting to see our reaction. I think he was disappointed. None of us said anything, none of us showed anything.

  Eventually Homer broke the silence. ‘So we’re one of the resources, huh?’

  ‘Essentially, yes. Sounds a bit cold-blooded, doesn’t it?’

  He lit another cigarette. Fi wrinkled her nose and moved away, so she was upwind of him. ‘Sorry,’ he said to her. ‘I’m giving up after the war.’

  He continued. ‘The stuff we stored on that island is basically to let you live off the land for a few weeks, and inflict a lot of damage while you’re doing it
.’

  ‘Damage what exactly?’ Lee asked.

  For the first time Ryan looked a bit excited. He got a light in his eyes. I wondered if he really was a bit of a goer after all. It was hard to work out, after what had happened that morning. Did he really want to get involved, but was holding back because of orders, because his skills were too valuable to be risked? Or was he a wimp who used orders as an excuse to stay out of danger? I started to think it was probably the first, and the way he’d slammed his fist into the tree, up on Tailor’s Stitch, was pretty fair dinkum.

  Maybe now we were being asked to do the job he would have liked for himself.

  ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a record, and I don’t know everything you’ve done, only what I’ve read in the papers basically, but Mother of God you’ve got a record and that’s why Colonel Finley sent me. And after what you’ve told me about how you ambushed that patrol this morning, I’m getting an idea why.

  ‘What he wants you guys to do now is go totally mobile. Guerillas on the run. Bombs to go. You travel light, you pick your own targets, you hit and disappear.’

  ‘But that’s not going to make a difference,’ Fi said. ‘Not a major difference, not the kind of difference you’re talking about. The five of us aren’t going to win back a state or two in a couple of weeks.’

  Ryan waved that away with his cigarette.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘But for want of a nail a war was lost.’

  I don’t think any of us had a clue what he meant.

  He waved his cigarette again and said: ‘We’ll be coming by land and sea and air. Like I said, we’ve led them to believe that we’re too low on troops and equipment to do any more than hold our line. We’re gambling that they’ve swallowed the disinformation. The truth is that we’ve been saving a lot of stuff for just this eventuality. I can’t say any more about that.

  ‘But your mission, should you choose to accept it . . .’

  Lee laughed at that, and Ryan grinned at him, so I knew it was a line from a movie somewhere.

  ‘Your mission is to spread chaos and confusion behind their lines, in every manner, shape and form that you can, so that while we’re hitting them with heavy artillery from the front they have to keep turning round to see what’s going on behind them. Not only that, but if you’re effective, they’ll have less hitting power. They’ll be attacking us with softer punches. That’s good news for us.’

  Now we did show some emotion. Ryan quickly added: ‘You don’t have to win the war on your own. Even a few little attacks, like this morning, will help enormously.’

  ‘Little attacks,’ I thought furiously. ‘You should have been there.’ I couldn’t believe he’d said something so patronising, especially after he’d just told us what a good job we’d done.

  But he went on: ‘And you won’t be a solo act. There’ll be other groups doing the same thing in other areas. But you will be the only ones in the area I’ll assign you. So you won’t get in each other’s way. And you’re absolutely free to turn me down. Colonel Finley told me three times I had to make that clear.’

  Most of us laughed at that, me included. It was a sarcastic laugh. When was the last time we had a free choice, a really free choice, about anything?

  For a minute Ryan looked a bit offended at our laughing, then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, as free as any choice in wartime can be,’ he said.

  ‘So let me get this right,’ Homer said. ‘We’d be running all over the place, wrecking everything we can? What we’ve been doing all along, except you want us to step up the pace? Is that right?’

  ‘We want you to go for it, twenty-four hours a day. We want you to be totally destructive. To do it on as big a scale as you can manage. But with one critical difference.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Those cases I brought. The ones we hid on the island. They contain a few bits and pieces that I think you’ll find interesting.’

  ‘Bits and pieces?’ I asked.

  ‘Specifically, grenades, automatic weapons, ammunition and plastic explosives.’

  ‘No wonder they were so heavy,’ Kevin said.

  ‘What’s plastic explosive?’ Fi asked.

  ‘It’s very efficient, very adaptable, and very safe—if you can use that word in connection with explosives—and it’ll blow up anything quickly and easily.’

  ‘But we don’t know how to use stuff like that,’ Fi said.

  ‘Hey, give us some credit,’ Ryan said. ‘We chose it because it’s so simple. I could teach you in half an hour. In fact I’m planning to teach you in half an hour.’

  Fi looked worried. ‘I don’t want to carry explosives around with us,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t sound very safe. What if we fall over or drop it?’

  ‘Wait a sec,’ Ryan said.

  He went to one of the packs we’d brought. We’d already made quite a mess of it by digging into the food for our breakfast orgy. Ryan pulled out a cardboard box that had been pushed down the side. It must have gone the full depth of the pack. It had ORICA EXPLOSIVES in big blue and orange writing.

  ‘This is it,’ he said.

  The lid was taped down but Ryan ripped along the top and tipped out two big fat things that looked like salamis wrapped in plastic.

  He picked one up and waved it in front of us.

  ‘Plastic explosive,’ he said. ‘Powerpacks.’

  Suddenly he lost his grip. The salami seemed to slip from his hand. He made one grab at it, nearly got it, grabbed again, missed it, then threw himself backwards, as it dropped to the ground. I heard him yell: ‘Mother of God!’ I didn’t wait to see what the others did. I rolled across the rocks, covering my face as I went. There was a bit of a slope behind me, and that helped me roll. I went like a maniac, hoping to reach a tree I knew was there. I thought if I got behind it I might have a chance. I didn’t know how long this stuff took to go off, but I’d seen Ryan’s expression, so I knew this was serious.

  About fifteen metres from the tree I stopped rolling, got up onto my hands and knees and scuttled towards the trunk, hoping to dive for it if I could get close enough. In fact I was almost into my dive when I heard the last sound I expected.

  Laughter.

  Laughter? I rolled over in shock and looked back. Ryan was sitting on his haunches, having a good old giggle.

  ‘Bloody moron,’ I thought furiously, getting up and dusting myself off. To my left Homer was doing the same, and Fi was emerging from behind a tree. Kevin had gone for a sprint across the clearing. He’d covered a lot of ground in a short time. Lee had jumped down a series of rocks and was standing by the creek looking up at Ryan. If looks could kill, Ryan might as well have kissed his wife and kids goodbye.

  I walked slowly back. I’ve never been a big fan of practical jokes—they always seem kind of boy-y to me—and I sure wasn’t a big fan of this one. We’d seen enough real explosions in this war—a lot more than Ryan had, I’d guarantee that—and I for one didn’t need any fake ones. We had been through a terrible morning while Ryan sat under a tree getting a sun-tan. We were exhausted, stressed about the past and terrified about the future. I decided then that I didn’t like Ryan much after all.

  He wasn’t too bothered though. He didn’t apologise, just proceeded to scare the life out of me again by bashing the orangey-yellow explosive with his fist.

  Again nothing happened. Ryan grinned at Fi. ‘Does that answer your question?’ he asked.

  Fi shrugged. ‘You could have just told me,’ she said. ‘I’d have believed you.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Ryan said. ‘Nothing like seeing it with your own eyes. It gets hot quickly is all.’

  ‘So does anything make it go off?’ Kevin asked.

  Of all of us Kevin was the one most into scientific stuff, and he was getting interested in Ryan’s demonstration.

  ‘Of course something makes it go off,’ Homer said. ‘It’s a bomb, isn’t it?’

  Ryan dived into the pack again and pulled
out something I did recognise. It was a roll of fuse wire, fifty metres long at least, and with it came a box of what could have been fifty silver .303 shells, but weren’t.

  Plain detonators look a lot like .303 shells. I’d last seen plain detonators when Homer and I left some behind in the ship we destroyed in Cobbler’s Bay.

  Ryan also had new watches for all of us, and cigarette lighters that were like those trick candles for birthday cakes: the ones that don’t blow out, no matter what you do. These lighters kept their flame even when we blew hard on them. We had a bit of fun playing with them and the watches.

  His last little treasure was something I hadn’t seen before, but as soon as I picked it up I knew what it was: a pair of special pliers for handling explosives. Metal on one side of the jaws and plastic on the other, so you couldn’t accidentally strike a spark by having metal against metal.

  They would have come in handy for our attack on Cobbler’s Bay.

  Those pliers reminded me again that even plastic explosive was still explosive. Maybe you could safely bash the daylights out of it with a baseball bat. But at the end of the day it was designed to blow big targets into shreds that looked like tissues after they’d been through a washing machine.

  For the next hour Ryan gave us an intensive course in guerilla fighting. I have to admit, he knew his stuff. It wasn’t just technical information about how to use plastic explosives and grenades. It was more general: tactics and camouflage, and overall cunning. He went on and on about something called the Pimlott Principles. The only problem with the Pimlott Principles was that the guy who invented them had been killed by a hand grenade he was playing around with in his own home, in 1997. I wish Ryan hadn’t told us that.

  Anyway, the Pimlott Principles are that first you achieve surprise, then you build momentum and keep the enemy off-balance, and you always go for objectives that can be achieved. You have to concentrate on the enemy’s centre of gravity.

  ‘What is their centre of gravity?’ Fi wanted to know.

  ‘Cavendish.’

  ‘Cavendish?’

  ‘Yes, and the transport system around Cavendish. It’s the hub of a rail and road network, as well as being the biggest industrial centre in the state. We’ve bombed it but without a lot of success. Their air cover’s too strong. We lose too many aircraft.’