Death is Forever (12 page)

“For this I packed my cameras and clothes and sent them to London without me?” Erin asked, disgusted.

“No,” Cole said, without looking up from his maps. “You did that to make ConMin think they had you coming to heel nicely. Confuse, mislead, and misdirect. It’s the only way to survive.”

“One more run through ‘Chunder’ and I won’t care if I survive.”

With that, Erin tossed aside the sheets of Abe’s doggerel. She’d been sitting in the window seat of their Darwin hotel, studying the poem and looking out at the lush tropical landscaping. Her body swung between sleepiness and an irritable kind of restlessness, which was her own personal version of jet lag. She’d be better as soon as she slept, but it was only five o’clock. She had to stay awake for a few more hours. Reading “Chunder” wouldn’t help her.

Cole glanced up from the desk in the living area of the suite. Transparent topographic and geological maps of Australia were spread across the hotel desk in front of him, along with maps showing the distribution of active and reserve mineral claims in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. On top of those maps lay transparencies of the Kimberley Plateau and of Western Australia. A compass, ruler, pencil, and a lined notepad were within reach. The pad was covered with cryptic notes.

He didn’t really expect to find the answer to the Sleeping Dog Mines in the maps, but they gave him something to think about besides Erin’s warm tongue and husky voice approving of his taste. He looked at the sheets of paper she’d tossed aside.

“Did you know that Chunder is Aussie slang for vomit?” he said.

“Lovely,” she said. “Old Great-uncle Abe was a real literary light, wasn’t he?”

A slight smile was Cole’s only response.
Chunder
was the most elegant of the slang contained in Abe’s doggerel. If Erin had any idea of the meaning of the words she’d been reading aloud, Cole suspected she would have blushed to the soles of her feet. Abe had been a randy bastard right up to the day he died.

“What time is it?” she asked, yawning suddenly.

“Same as it was the last time you asked—too soon to go to bed. You’d wake up a couple hours before dawn.”

“Damn. I’m finally feeling sleepy.”

“Fight it.”

Muttering, she went and stood next to him, looking over his shoulder at the maps.

“Help me stay awake. Explain some more of these maps to me.” She braced herself with a hand on his shoulder as she leaned closer. “This time I’ll try not to yawn in your ear.”

“Sit down before you fall down,” he said, gently pulling her onto his lap.

Instantly she tensed.

Ignoring her rigid body, Cole began pointing out features on the nearest map.

As he talked, Erin gradually began to relax, trusting her weight to the muscular support of his thighs and chest, feeling the heat of his body sink into hers.

Though Cole savored each small softening of her body against his, he kept talking as though nothing but the maps mattered.

“I understand topographic maps,” she said finally, “but what is this one?”

As she leaned forward to point, she shifted in his lap. The pressure of her hips against his groin made his breathing thicken. With a silent curse at his unruly body, he concentrated on the transparency she was pointing to. The clear plastic was four feet by four feet, exactly the scale of the topographic map and covered by seemingly random patterns of rainbow colors.

Deliberately Cole reached around Erin with both arms and slid the transparency over the topographic map. The motion also brushed his biceps against her breasts. The contact made her gasp. Her breath unraveled suddenly, but she didn’t withdraw. His arms moved again, caressing and freeing in the same motion. While he spoke, he traced lines with a calloused fingertip.

“The blue lines are sandstone,” he said. “There’s a lot of it in the Kimberley. The brown crosshatches are limestone. The yellow diagonals are volcanic rocks. The pink dots are water deposits. The white dots are wind deposits. It makes a difference to us, because usually only water deposits contain diamonds.”

As Erin grew accustomed to looking both at and through the transparency, she could see how the water deposits almost always coincided with rivers or beaches or low spots on the topographic map. But there were a few places where pink dots appeared without any sign of rivers or lakes or ocean.

“Is this a water deposit?” she asked. “There’s no sign of water anywhere close.”

Cole looked at the slender finger with its clean, unpolished nail. When he saw where she was pointing, he gave her full marks for quickness.

“That’s what geologists call a paleo-floodplain, a place where a flooding river used to overflow and leave silt and stones behind. The river is long since gone, but the characteristic deposits of a floodplain are still there.”

“Does that mean diamonds could be there?”

“If the ancient river flowed through diamond-bearing rock, yes.”

“Did it?”

“Probably not. It didn’t flow through any volcanic rocks.”

She frowned. “I didn’t know the Kimberley Plateau had volcanoes.”

“It does, but they’re real ancient. They’ve been eroded flat and sometimes even down beyond that, to the magma chamber itself. Nothing is left but the barest bones of what once was an awesome piece of living nature. When you’re digging for diamonds, you’re digging up a grave.”

“Lovely thought,” she said beneath her breath.

Cole reached for another transparency and drew it onto the top of the stacked maps. This time Erin didn’t flinch when his arms brushed the sides of her breasts.

“Since nothing volcanic shows on the surface,” he said, keeping his arms around her, “we have to look down below.”

“How?”

“This map outlines stations, mining claims, and mineral reserves in the Kimberley. The stations are green, active claims and reserves are red, lapsed claims and reserves are blue.”

She made a sound of dismay as she saw the network of overlapping lines. “There’s nothing left of the Kimberley. Somebody’s been over every inch of it already.”

“They’ve staked out claims and then abandoned them.”

“Because there was nothing there,” she said unhappily.

His arms tightened, shifting her subtly on his lap, allowing him to brush his lips against her soft hair. “I don’t need virgin land to find pay dirt, because most men are no damn good at what they do.”

The warmth of Cole’s breath against her neck made Erin shiver. It was pleasure rather than fear that rippled over her skin, pleasure that made her lean more fully against him.

He smiled, caressed her again, and went on speaking in a deep, slow voice, as though he had nothing more on his mind than maps.

“Most of Abe’s claims were worked over in the 1920s by men looking for gold. When they didn’t find anything worthwhile, they abandoned the claims. Since then no one has been there except an occasional jackeroo or a walkabout Aborigine.”

She stared at the piled maps, seeing lines and designs and colors and more lines and designs. And no answers at all.

“The problem isn’t that the plateau is too well known,” Cole said, pulling another transparency out and lining it up with the underlying maps, caressing Erin with every motion, every breath. “The problem is that we don’t know nearly enough.”

She tried to speak, but couldn’t. His strength, his heat, his very breath surrounded her.

Yet all she could think about was getting closer.

“This transparency shows what kind of plants grow,” he said, allowing his lips to linger against her neck. “Plants change with elevation, rainfall, and soil. They can tell you whether limestone or sandstone or volcanic rock is underneath the soil.”

He moved another transparency onto the pile. He took a lot of time stacking it, for each movement of his arms caressed another soft curve of Erin’s body.

“This shows roads, trails, dams, airstrips, towns, houses, windmills, microwave relays, and whatever else man has added to the landscape. Look at it, honey. Look at it real carefully.”

As he spoke, he released her from his touch. She stared at the final transparency, trying to gather thoughts scattered by the unexpected splinters of pleasure that had pierced her with every brush of his body against hers. Gradually she realized that the final map had the least marks of any map on the pile.

Man had touched Western Australia only lightly, and the Kimberley barely at all.

“In that pile is everything we know about the Kimberley,” Cole said. “Put your hand over a part of the map. Any part.”

Puzzled, she did as he asked.

“You have a few thousand square miles under your hand,” he said. “Lift it and tell me what we know about that piece of land.”

She moved her hand aside, looking at the transparency and then at the key that ran down the side.

“No paved roads,” she said. “One graded road, and a few station roads that are little better than wild-animal trails. Five station houses.” She leaned closer. “Three of them are abandoned. A handful of windmills.” She leaned forward even further, looking through the top map to the one just beneath. Again she looked at the color key on the map’s margin. “Lowland grasses, spinifex, scrub gum.”

Cole lifted the top two transparencies, letting her see the ones underneath more easily.

“Parts of three stations,” she continued. “About seven mineral claims sort of in a line.” She bent lower. “The claims run along a river,” she said, reading through to the topographic map. “Well, some of the year it’s a river. The rest of the time it’s dry. Dashed lines, right?”

“Right. Go on.”

Frowning, she went on to the next map. “The land is nearly flat. Sand and sandstone. No permanent water.”

“What else?”

There was a long silence while she sifted through the maps again. Finally she looked up at him. “That’s it.”

“Think about it, Erin. Thousands of square miles, and you’ve summed up man’s knowledge of it in less than three minutes.”

She made a startled sound.

“You could call the station owners pioneers and you wouldn’t be wrong,” he said. “The twentieth century is only a rumor out in the Kimberley. Western Australia is a different place, a different land, a different time. Civilization is whatever you can carry in on your back.”

After a moment she asked, “How old was Abe?”

“Had to be eighty, at least, when he died.”

“What was his health like?”

“He could walk most men into the ground. He could drink the rest right under, including me.”

She frowned. “Then there’s no place on Abe’s cattle station or on his claims that he was too old to prospect?”

“Doubt it. Not when I knew him, anyway. And he discovered his jewel box before I knew him.”

“All right, what about Sleeping Dog One, Sleeping Dog Two, and all the rest?” she asked. “What makes you so certain those mines are worthless?”

“I’ve been in Dog One. It’s a pipe mine, pure and simple, and not much of one at that. Nearly all bort. The diamonds in that tin box came from a placer mine with a high percentage of gem-quality stones.”

“What’s bort?”

“Industrial diamonds,” he said, “useful only for abrasives or drill bits.”

“No gemstones at all?” she asked.

“Nothing like your diamonds. His were all sharp edges, flaws, and yellow to brown.”

“Are all Abe’s mines like that?”

Cole smiled at the disappointment in Erin’s voice. “I’m afraid so, honey. Not one of them is located on or near a modern river course, either, which means the Dog mines just aren’t a likely source of placer diamonds.”

With a gloomy expression she looked at the maps. “What did you mean,
modern
rivers? What other kind of river is there?”

Absently Cole’s fingertips smoothed over the paper as he thought about the passage of time over the face of the land, time transforming everything it touched, wearing down old mountains and building new ones.

“Paleo-rivers,” he said finally. “Old as the hills. Older.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Kimberley Plateau has spent a billion and a half years above sea level. That makes it the oldest land surface on earth. Almost every bit of the rest of the Australian continent—and the other continents too—have been recycled top to bottom in one way or another in the last billion and a half years. Not the Kimberley.”

Cole leaned away from Erin for a moment, pulled a big opaque map of Australia from the bottom of the pile, and spread it out on top.

“Look here,” he said. “Australia is the flattest inhabited continent on earth. The driest, too. The Kimberley Plateau is about the only thing west of Ayers Rock that’s high enough to make a decent hill anywhere else in the world.”

She made a startled sound and looked at the map again.

“In the center of Australia,” he said, “the land is so flat that rain collects in circles like dew on a gigantic picnic table.” His long index finger traced the shallow rise of the Kimberley Plateau. “This area stayed high and dry, but the rest of Australia, the flat center and the even flatter southwest, have been underwater more than above. There are huge limestone and sandstone beds covering those areas to prove it.”

When Cole looked up he found that Erin was focused on the map with an intensity and intelligence that was almost tangible.

“At the edge of the Kimberley the land rumples a bit,” he continued. “The locals call them mountains. Anyone else would call them hills. They’re what’s left of a limestone reef that was buried and then resurrected by erosion.”

“‘A dead sea’s bones,’” she quoted softly, remembering a phrase from Abe’s poetry.

Cole’s eyes narrowed. He pushed the continental map aside and pulled out the map of the Kimberley Plateau. He traced the line of the Napier Range and the other limestone ranges that ring the Kimberley today, as the living reefs once ringed the Kimberley long ago. Seven of Crazy Abe’s claims straddled limestone outcroppings. Three of them were within the boundaries of the station itself. None was near a Dog mine.

“Cole?” she asked, sensing his intensity.

Instead of answering, he grabbed another map, this one showing major modern watercourses. There were no year-round rivers, but in the wet more rain came down than even the parched, porous land could absorb. The result was a series of on-again, off-again “rivers” that were little more than flood channels several miles wide.