Prohibited Zone (34 page)

We walked together up the spur to the pull-in.

‘I won't hand him over to the cops,' said Hindmarsh as we walked. ‘You'll have to take delivery of him yourself. Then you can do whatever you like with him.'

‘Fine. Where is he?'

Hindmarsh looked at me and grinned. It was the first time I'd seen him show any sense of humour. He nodded vaguely north.

‘Back up there. Woomera. In the prohibited area. We've got a long drive ahead of us.'

‘What sort of shape will he be in?'

‘Alive.'

I drove Rolley's car to Luke's house, Hindmarsh following in his white Land Cruiser. On the way I called Baz.

‘Looks like they've stashed Amir in a bunker somewhere near Woomera,' I told him. ‘Hindmarsh, the ASIO bloke, is taking me there.'

‘Why would he do that?' asked Baz.

I told him about Janeway's incriminating phone. ‘The point is, Amir might be in a bad way. Don't want to come along, do you? Give me some backup?'

Baz was silent for a minute while he thought it over.

‘Well, I've got to head up in the next day or so anyway to get back to work,' he said. ‘Maybe I can meet you there.'

I looked at my watch; it was five in the afternoon. We agreed to meet at Spuds at three the next morning.

‘Thanks, Baz.'

‘Don't mention it, brother.'

At Luke's I packed my overnight bag, stashing Janeway's gun in it, and grabbed my swag. I left a scribbled note for Luke and called Kara to let her know what was happening.

‘If all goes well, Amir will be in police custody within twenty-four hours,' I said. ‘Baz is meeting us up there and we'll head out together. It'll be nice to have some backup.'

Kara said she would tell Saira the good news, then call Kat and keep trying to convince her to go with the rape story in preference to the terrorism story. And she told me to stay safe. I liked that bit most.

26

H
INDMARSH AND
I
DIDN
'
T TALK MUCH
on the way up. He chain-smoked, mainly to annoy me, I reckoned. I kept my window open, mainly to annoy him. He tuned the radio to the local ABC, which had a signal almost strong enough to be picked up in outer space, and kept it there. The news finished and an evening presenter came on, passing the time with banal conversations with listeners. I called Tarrant to tell him it would all be sorted within twenty-four hours. He didn't sound impressed. I asked him to trust me. He said he would sooner trust his mother-in-law.

The sun was almost down by the time we bypassed Port Wakefield. Dust blowing down from the desert refracted the light, giving us a spectacular sunset. The westernmost part of the hemisphere was lit with a bright gold, which turned to orange, red, pink and purple further to the east. Streaks of cloud were caught in the same spectrum of colours, and remnants of blue graded into blackness on the eastern fringes of the sky.

‘Not a bad sunset,' I said.

‘Fuck the sunset,' said Hindmarsh.

‘Fair enough. Fuck the world, fuck everything, eh.'

As we passed Snowtown I attempted an even longer conversation.

‘You were tracking me in Adelaide, weren't you? You stuck a tracking device on my car, probably in Port Augusta. Come to think of it, that's probably why you king hit me, to give yourself time to install it.' Hindmarsh didn't respond. ‘You knew where I spent Saturday night, you knew about Lucy. When things didn't work out at Sellicks you told Janeway about her, didn't you? You told him to use her to get me.' Still no response. He had his eyes focused on the road, his face empty of expression, empty of remorse. ‘You're an arsehole,' I said. ‘You're responsible for what happened to Lucy. You're responsible for this whole goddamned mess.'

We ate dinner at the Pastoral Hotel in Port Augusta. Hindmarsh ordered a T-bone steak and sat at a table in the corner, watching the local clientele, gnawing his bone and occasionally glaring at me. I had steak as well – it was generally the safest bet in outback diners – and washed it down with lemon squash rather than beer. We were in for a long night and I wanted to stay awake for it.

‘So who's babysitting Amir?' I asked.

‘You don't need names.'

‘Fine. How many, then?'

‘Three.'

‘Know what they're doing, do they?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Let them know we're coming, have you?'

He looked at me with his mean little eyes.

‘Yeah. They're putting out the good cutlery as we speak.'

By eleven we were back on the road and by two we were fuelling up at Spuds.

‘We'll leave at three,' said Hindmarsh. ‘No point getting there while it's dark.'

‘Rice will be here by three,' I said.

‘I didn't agree to take anyone else out there.'

‘He'll come anyway.'

He paid for the fuel and drove to the car park in front of the bar. It was deserted. He switched off the engine and sat there drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He looked at his watch. I put my seat back and tried to catch a power nap, but it was a forlorn hope. Hindmarsh fidgeted, chain-smoked and refused to speak. I went for a walk to save my lungs, circling Spuds without going in. I found a rock a hundred metres or so from the car and sat on it. I could see the glow of Hindmarsh's cigarette when he inhaled, a waxing and waning pinprick of orange light. I wondered about him, of the mess he had made because of the power he had, or thought he had, or thought he should have. He reckoned he was hard but he was just mean. I had told him he was just as dangerous as a terrorist. Was it true? Dangerous to whom? He sat implacably in his own cloud of smoke, a pinprick of a man.

Baz arrived just before three, looking a lot fresher than I felt. Hindmarsh had walked over to the service station, probably to buy more cigarettes, which gave me the chance to brief Baz in more detail.

‘I don't know what to expect out there,' I said. ‘But I don't trust this prick.' I showed him the gun in my overnight bag. ‘You know how to use one of these things?'

Baz nodded. ‘Point and shoot,' he said.

‘I didn't know you were an expert.' We walked to the side of the car to put it between us and Hindmarsh and I gave him the gun. ‘Just don't shoot me, alright?'

Baz grinned. ‘Would hardly even have occurred to me.' He studied the gun. ‘An old Luger.' He ejected the magazine, peered at it in the dim moonlight and put it back. ‘Fully loaded. Where did you get it?'

‘Someone dropped it the other night.'

‘And of course you just picked it up, eh?' He held the gun up so he could see it more clearly. ‘German. Obsolete. They basically didn't make any after the Second World War.' He sighted along the barrel. ‘Good pistols, though. This probably still works.'

‘You actually look like you
do
know what you're doing with it.'

‘Of course I do. Part of the training for a highly skilled detention centre guard such as myself.'

Hindmarsh was walking back towards us, checking his phone as he did. Baz slid the magazine home and put the pistol into his jacket.

‘Have you met Hindmarsh?' I asked.

‘Yes, I've had that pleasure.'

I looked at him in surprise. Baz just shrugged.

‘Hindmarsh has been sniffing the ground in Woomera for at least a couple of months.'

‘In that case I won't bother introducing you.'

Hindmarsh joined us and nodded curtly to Baz.

‘So you've brought your own bleeding-heart security,' he said. ‘He'd better know what he's doing. You fuckwits don't know what the hell you're getting yourselves into.'

‘Let's go,' said Baz.

We agreed that Baz would follow us out so that he and I had a vehicle in which to ferry Amir back. I decided to travel with Hindmarsh, mainly because I didn't trust him alone. We waited for Baz to refuel his car at the service station.

‘Everything okay with your pals?' I asked. Hindmarsh didn't reply. When Baz was ready we drove west, fast, along the Stuart Highway, tyres drumming urgently on the road. Hindmarsh continued to chain-smoke and I continued to keep the window down. There was a dry desert chill in the air.

‘How far is it?'

Hindmarsh just shrugged and flicked his cigarette out my window. The wind caught it and it bounced off my forehead before disappearing into the black night.

‘You know, I'm glad the safety of the country is in your hands,' I said.

After twenty minutes he slowed the vehicle and we turned off the raised formation of the highway onto a dirt track, crossing a sheep grid as we did. He engaged four-wheel drive. I looked behind to see if Baz was following; a set of headlights turned in behind us and then was diffused by dust into a general glow at our tail.

We had entered the Woomera Prohibited Area, a tract of arid, largely uninhabited country that sprawled over 127,000 square kilometres in a widening arc from Woomera to the north-western corner of South Australia. It was, I had once been told, the world's largest land-based weapons-testing range. It was mostly flat and strewn with stones – gibbers – but there were also salt lakes, systems of sand dunes, stunted flat-top hills, a few radar dishes and, it seemed, a secret interrogation centre. Most of the prohibited area had been off limits to civilians for more than fifty years, although a handful of pastoralists in the eastern part of the area somehow managed to run sheep among the saltbush and the occasional unexploded ordinance.

The track was rough and got rougher the further we went. From what I could see in the headlights, the terrain was low and miserable. Saltbush that was stunted even by saltbush standards, tracts of sand that looked pale and grey and as cold as the moon. We crossed shallow creek beds that were crusted with salt and probably hadn't flowed in a decade. Hindmarsh had turned off his navigation system but I figured we were driving south to the west of Island Lagoon, a salt pan several kilometres wide that had once hosted the American spy station. To the west would lie Lake Gairdner, another salt lake, ten times bigger. The track started to undulate as we traversed a field of sand dunes that varied between about five and ten metres high. Hindmarsh was driving fast, the engine straining as the tyres struggled for traction. We roared up and crashed down; we could have been riding a storm on the ocean.

‘What's the hurry?' I asked, but Hindmarsh had given up talking. At the top of each dune the headlights beamed out across the landscape, illuminating the tips of the dunes ahead. Then we plunged down to the floor of the desert, bottomed out and attacked the next one. The process repeated itself for mile after mile. I gripped the Jesus bar and tried to think about what might happen when we got there, wherever ‘there' was. Every now and then I looked behind to check that Baz was still with us. He always was. I knew I could rely on Baz.

We drove without speaking for two hours, the roar of the engine the only noise. There was a hint of new light in the sky, the first grey stirrings of dawn. From time to time Hindmarsh glanced at his watch, and our pace slowed. Now it was after six and it was broad daylight. The track levelled out as we came to a small, dry salt lake, flat and white. Hindmarsh drove fast across it. At the far edge the track turned left between two sand dunes. We took it fast, nearly too fast. The Land Cruiser wobbled and lurched to the right but stayed upright. We rounded the bend and almost ran head-on into an oncoming car. It was another Land Cruiser, white, headlights off. There was a confusion of sand as Hindmarsh swerved, violently, to the right. At the same moment the oncoming vehicle swerved to our left. Instinctively I flinched as my door swiped one of the side panels of the other vehicle. There was a smack of steel on steel.