Dark Horse (15 page)

The boltcutters were hard to carry. Sarah slid the long, heavy tool into her backpack. The zip wouldn’t close all the way, the black handles stuck out the top. She tossed up for a moment whether or not to take the tool; the jack alone was heavy enough. If the jack failed for some reason though, and they needed the extra power of the jockey wheel, she’d never forgive herself for leaving the boltcutters behind. Sarah also slid the trail cam into her backpack, nestled it safe in its own pocket. She loaded the box that held the rest of the cameras onto the passenger seat and locked up the car.

Spinners Creek was a grey gash through the mountainside below. Fallen trees were snagged along its banks. Dirty water was moving down the creek, a trickle compared to what had caused the destruction. Tansy was drinking from a puddle on the plateau and Sarah was back in the saddle. Much further down, at the base of the mountain, were the tiny rooves and the miniature-sized park of Lauriston. The township had not washed away. Wind blew and feathered Tansy’s mane. The horse swung her head up and listened for a moment, before lowering her nose again and tearing the top off a tuft of grass beside the puddle. When the wind swung in a certain direction it carried with it the soft sound of earthmoving equipment. Beeps and clanks and the whine of hydraulics; it was faint, down there on the creek somewhere.

Another sound was suddenly detectable – a helicopter.

Sarah looked up. She couldn’t see the aircraft, the wind pushed and scattered the noise and the clouds, but it was there – that distinctive chopper throb she’d been listening for every day. The sound was coming from high on the mountain, near the summit.

Sarah galloped Tansy to the fork, but she didn’t take the hut route. The helicopter changed things. If they were at the camping site they could save Brody much quicker than Sarah could. But first they needed to know he was trapped. She steered her horse down the mountain. Tansy was happy to go this time. It was four kilometres to Spinners Bridge. The road was wider and the going was easier, the gradient was more manageable, they were able to travel fast.

E
xcavators and front-end loaders were working on the bank, clearing away sludge and uprooted trees. A crane was lifting in a new concrete section of bridge. Behind the earthmoving machinery smaller vehicles were parked – SES utes and two four-wheel-drive police cars. All the activity was contained to the other side of the creek, a busy hive of vehicles and men in fluoro safety vests. The big tree that had somersaulted and smashed apart the bridge was in two pieces, sawed through below the leafy canopy, its head chopped off, its dissected pieces dragged to the side and out of the way. The road behind the works was freshly graded and topped with new gravel. Another vehicle arrived.

Sarah and Tansy slowed as they approached from their isolated side of the creek. A small team of SES workers were gathered on a knoll by the riverbank. They were pointing upstream. Two men with them were dressed in black, and had on harnesses and safety helmets. There were rifles strapped to their backs. A regular police officer stood amongst the group, and he peeled off from the pack as the new vehicle arrived. It was a TV news crew. Two uniformed officers climbed from the nearby police troop carrier. As a posse, the three law enforcers approached the media.

The machines, the men, the police, the TV crew, the effort underway, the sheer scale of it, played out like a silent movie in front of Sarah – there was sound, but a mechanical monotone of it, toneless floodwaters and colourless wind ripping through the trees. The scene was not as real as she had hoped. Sarah didn’t feel any nearer to civilisation. The men were dwarf figures. Their machines were slow. Catching in the wind, the concrete slab was cumbersome, swaying like a pendulum. Devil Mountain continued to assert its power.

She spurred Tansy closer. The mechanical roar got louder and drowned out her horse’s steps and the slap of reins, the gentle give of leather stirrup straps as Sarah rose in a trot. She stopped Tansy a safe distance back from the soft edges of the caved-in creek bank. There was a thirty-metre drop down to the water. The creek was like a soft-sided canyon. She was only fifty metres from rescue, freedom was the length of a swimming pool away, but there was no easy way to bridge the gap.

A man operating the front-end loader was the first to spot her. He cut his engine and scrambled down from his cab. Sarah’s gaze followed him. He ran towards the group of SES men, shouting and waving, pointing across at her. The men looked over. An SES man broke away from the group, shouting and waving too, like the first man had; he ran up beside the other earthmoving rigs, making a slicing action across his throat.

Engines were cut one by one. Sarah was light-headed with the idea that all this was related to and, in part, for her. Each motor idled a moment as it cooled and then fell silent. The drivers opened the doors of their cabs but they didn’t climb out. A policeman, the designated spokesman, ran to the bank directly opposite Sarah.

Sarah was suddenly conscious of how gaunt she’d become, her paper-thin respirations, her dirt-caked fingernails, cracked lips, windblown hair, her gaze felt bright and distressed, while inside she was flatlining.

‘Sarah Barnard!’ the policeman shouted above the sound of wind and water.

‘Yes,’ Sarah said, too softly.

‘Are you injured?’

She gave him the thumbs up, indicating she was unharmed.

With his hands cupped around his mouth, he said, ‘Sarah, stay where you are. Is there anyone with you?’

Sarah shook her head.

This caused consternation. The spokesman looked behind him. Other officers were standing back, almost out of sight. Something was quickly discussed.

‘Sarah,’ the spokesman called turning to her, ‘is there a man with you?’

‘He’s trapped in the hut. Tell them in the helicopter.’ She pointed up the mountain. ‘They have to look for him in the collapsed hut.’

‘Can you hear me? Is there a man with you?’

‘He’s trapped in Hangman’s Hut,’ she shouted louder. Her voice was weak though. It was whipped away in the wind. ‘Tell them up there. He needs to be rescued.’

Stealthy, like a pack of jackals, the camera crew were sneaking up. They began filming from beside the excavator. They were hunched, the sound guy peering up at his microphone and boom, careful not to poke it up where it might be seen by the excavator driver. Not to be outdone, and maybe ruining their scoop, the crane operator was covertly filming the action on his phone – that telltale flat-screen filming pose, his hand up beside his shoulder, checking the vision on screen between nervous glances around him.

‘Sarah, can you hear me?’ the spokesman was shouting.

He was interrupted by another officer passing him a loudspeaker.

It was the way that the second officer was craning forward from his sheltered position, at pains to stay back, that made Sarah alert to a couple of things. The normal policemen had dropped back. The officers that she could see now were from some kind of special unit. The spokesman was wearing a flak jacket beneath his black coat. He was wearing dark-coloured cargo pants and hiking boots. Along the riverbank, the SES men in their fluoro vests had disappeared, and those machinery operators weren’t staying put in their cabs because it afforded them a bird’s-eye view of the action (with the exception perhaps of the YouTube-fame-seeking crane driver), they had been told to stay put; and, one at a time, as Sarah watched, another flak-jacketed officer in black was climbing up to the cabs, using himself as a shield, ushering the drivers down and away.

‘We need to know where the man is,’ the spokesman called, not yet using the loudspeaker he’d been given. ‘Is he with you now?’

Tansy fidgeted. She took a few nervous steps back. Her head flicked high.

In the bush behind the knoll where the SES men had been, something caught Sarah’s eye. A gust of air moved the undergrowth and revealed the crouched shape of a police officer. He was watching Sarah through binoculars, while talking into a device cupped in the palm of his hand. There was a second man lying beside him, with a black helmet on, rifle on a low tripod in front of him, not pointing the weapon, but it was ready and waiting to be aimed.

The weight and discomfort of the tools on Sarah’s back reminded her that the handles of the boltcutters were sticking up over her right shoulder. It was perhaps the shape of the tool that was causing the panic. She went to reach for it, about to lift out the boltcutters, to show them it wasn’t a weapon, but her hand froze by the side of her head when she saw the reaction her movement brought – the men ducked, they drew their weapons.

Tansy backed up further.

Using the megaphone, the spokesperson said, ‘Sarah, lower your hand. Get down from the horse.’

The burst of amplified voice added to Tansy’s agitation. She shied and turned away. Sarah steadied her and swung her around to face the creek again.

‘Sarah, do not move. Stay where you are.’

‘He’s in the hut!’ she cried. ‘He’s trapped. Tell them in the helicopter.’ Her voice in her own ears was small and whipped away in the gusts.

‘Get down off the horse.’

‘He’s under all the tin, they won’t know. You have to save him.’

It was becoming harder to hold Tansy still. Sarah pulled on the reins to try and get her to face the creek; her mare didn’t want to.

Further upstream, where the SES men had been pointing, Sarah noticed guide wires spanning the creek, a top one and a bottom one, and a harness, a pulley system attached to a tree. Tansy reared up. Sarah clung on, as she did, she saw amongst the bush leading up to the road on her side of the creek, the two men who had been dressed in harnesses, guns strapped to their backs, approaching with speed, moving without fear through the undergrowth towards her.

It speared through Sarah then – just because the helicopter was up there didn’t mean it could land, or drop rescuers in. She’d made a mistake, done exactly what Heath had told her not to. She’d let him down. Her heart stopped a moment.

Through the megaphone the spokesman said, ‘Sarah, do not move.’

T
ansy bolted. Sarah hung on tight. They hit full gallop up the track, towards the fork. They moved as though the ride down the mountain had been the warm up. Now they’d race the clock.

Once at the fork, though, Tansy pulled up short.

Three men dressed in black with helmets on, holding rifles across their chests, stepped out of the bush and spread out across the road, blocking the way up to the hut. Tansy circled and whinnied. One man walked forward. Sarah could feel her mare’s hair-trigger tautness, scarcely held fear running through her. The man eyed the mare’s flighty movements. He stopped a few paces back. This man was proper size, no canyon between him and her. He was real, effectual and intimidating. He had wide shoulders and a wide gait to match. He had a broad, oriental face. Steady brown gaze. Tansy shuffled, her unsettled bulk shifting under Sarah.

The man was near enough to see that what Sarah had in her backpack wasn’t a gun. He signalled this to the other men, by pointing to his own back and then waving his hand through the air. The other two officers kept their weapons held across their bodies though.

‘The man you’re worried about is trapped in Hangman’s Hut,’ Sarah said catching her breath.

‘Brody,’ the officer stated.

‘Yes. I tried telling them down there. He’s inside it. Brody.’ Sarah stammered slightly saying it, adjusting to his new name. ‘You need to tell them in the helicopter that he’s trapped, and where to look.’

‘Dismount.’ It was somewhere between an order and a question.

‘He needs saving. Tell them in the helicopter.’ She could hear the aircraft louder now, hanging in the sky above them. ‘Did they find him? Have they got him?’

‘The hut has collapsed.’

At first she thought he was confirming the worst, the hut was flattened, but there was something about the way the men were standing so solidly on the ground, no dirt on their boots, the crispness of their shirts, that made Sarah realise they’d been in the helicopter, dropped in to the spot they were standing only moments before. ‘Have you flown over it? Did you see if the chimney is down?’

‘Dismount from your horse.’

‘Why won’t you listen to me!’

The man’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t like being questioned or disobeyed. He also didn’t give very good explanations. ‘Brody is not at the camping ground. Do you know where he is?’

‘Inside the hut!’

‘It’s collapsed.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you. He’s in there!’

Something was relayed to the man through an earpiece, within his helmet. He watched her while he listened.

‘Dismount,’ he said, his full attention back on her. ‘You’ll be flown up there.’

‘What about my horse?’

‘Sarah Barnard, get down from the animal.’

The animal? Compounding Sarah’s concern beyond all doubt was the laser dot that danced over her mare’s ears and between them, zipping away. Sarah couldn’t believe she’d seen it. She had to have imagined it? Was it a mistake? They would shoot Tansy out from under her?

The other men over by the track had their rifles lifted, at the ready. The laser sight wasn’t coming from either of them. It meant a sniper, positioned somewhere in the bush, was aiming the red dot on Tansy.

All Sarah knew was that if she climbed down from the saddle, these men would, at best, turn her horse loose, at worst, shoot her. Sarah suddenly wondered –
is the laser dot dancing between my eyes?
She touched her forehead, as though she might be able to feel the red beam with her fingertips, she looked down at her chest, expecting it to appear there.

The broad-faced man was nodding at an order he was receiving through his earpiece. Sarah didn’t hang around to find out what the order was.

When balancing on a tightrope the wisdom is
don’t look down
. When running from a police swat team, Sarah decided the wisdom should be
don’t look back
. She didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder. She sprinted Tansy towards the plateau. She could guess well enough how they reacted to her defiance and departure: three barrels pointed in her direction. If they shot at her, what would she do? What
was
she doing?

Only one other thing on the mountain had the speed to catch Tansy and Sarah. It banked low and flew in behind them as they galloped towards Brody’s car. It was like the flash flood – a loud, terrifying thing racing towards them. Sarah noticed the stippled red and white skin on her knuckles, the greeny-blue colour of the veins in the backs of her hands, her mouth was open in shock, the air tasted of the machine, its oil and grease. Each spin of the blades caused a pressurised and painful
whomp
in her eardrums. Tansy didn’t gallop – she flew, around the pile of logs, around Brody’s car. Sarah steered her up what was little more than a goat’s track into the bush. Trees closed in over the top of them. Like an angry, thwarted blowfly, the helicopter zipped high and its buzz died away. A bank rose before Sarah and Tansy. Grass and topsoil were absent. This was a trappers track, a section of mountain too steep for horses, a near vertical shortcut to the hut. Sarah leaned over her horse’s neck. It was going to be a close and intimate ride, uphill rides always were. Her body moulded down over Tansy’s, her face was near enough to see the individual hairs on her horse’s neck, she could smell the animal’s scent, feel her heat, Sarah’s feet in the stirrups were angled back, she could appreciate the strength in each muscled leap up the bank.