Red Centre (13 page)

18

O
NE
F
ALSE
M
OVE

Alex was drenched in sweat; they all were. The inside of the plane was as hot as a greenhouse. Outside, the storm still howled and flung earth at the plane. But Pirroni sat calmly.

Alex marvelled at the terrorist's focus and determination. He never lost sight of his goal. If something went wrong he either sorted it out, or he waited for conditions that were more favourable. While they were waiting, Pirroni had drunk water and smoked one cigarette; those were the only things Alex had seen him do. Otherwise he seemed like a machine. The man had the focus of an assassin.

Not for the first time, Alex thought about his knife. Its theft was like an insult that kept stinging. He didn't know how he was going to get it back, but he would. Then he pulled himself up. He must keep calm. The mission came first.

At last the air cleared and Alex, Pirroni and Holly could see where they were. It looked like a parched forest in a Martian landscape. Brushwood in a desiccated green grew in clumps on the red soil. Termite mounds rose in irregular towers. To one side was the tree they had hit, on the edge of a shrivelled wood.

Pirroni lifted the gun from his lap and pointed it at Holly. 'Take your seatbelt off, open the door and get out.'

Holly fumbled with the belt but managed to unfasten it. She fumbled with the door handle too, before jumping out.

Pirroni turned to Alex. 'Now you.'

Alex did as he was instructed and landed on the red soil next to Holly.

Pirroni climbed out, carrying his holdall. Alex could see the outline of the Colt Commando rifle and the water bottles.

Of course, thought Alex. He wants to get as far away from the plane as possible. If they stayed there, anyone searching from the air would spot them in no time. 'Wait,' he said. 'We need water too.' He looked at Pirroni.

Under the bunk, Li waited, listening. She heard three people get out of the plane. Now one climbed back in - probably male from the weight of the footsteps. He went into the cockpit.

Then he came nearer, clambering through to the back and standing right beside her hiding place. She heard a cupboard being opened, then closed. She heard the opposite bunk lid being opened.

Li breathed very slowly and deeply. She couldn't hold her breath, because if she needed to spring out and fight for her life, her muscles wouldn't be oxygenated enough and she would tire quickly. So she took in as much air as she could as silently as possible.

If it was Pirroni, he would probably have a gun, so all she could hope for was that the element of surprise would work in her favour.

The crack where the lid met the side of the bunk widened and light poured in. She tensed like a cobra, ready to strike. A large shadow was visible. The lid was raised further. The shadow adjusted its position and an arm reached in.

Li recognized the two watches just in time. The next thing she saw was Alex's face, sideways on and very, very surprised.

Their eyes met for just a moment. Li put as much warning into her expression as she could manage, then lowered her head. Her hair spilled over her face in an inky veil and she melted back into the shadowed interior of the bunk.

Alex stood holding the bunk open. He felt like his brain had been scrambled. Li! What was she doing here?
Think,
he told himself. The important thing is not to give her away. Behave as though the bunk had nothing in it. He lowered the lid and opened a cupboard, deliberately paying the bunk no more attention. He was looking for something to carry the water bottles in. Concentrate on that, he told himself. Look for a bag, just as you were doing a moment ago, before you saw Li.

He found one and put the water bottles in it. He left some for Li, out of sight. There was a medical kit and he left that for her too. Then he got out of the plane.

'Quickly,' said Pirroni. He indicated that Alex and Holly should walk into the wood.

Alex took Holly's hand and began to walk. He didn't want to leave Li all alone in the wilderness. What would she do? But for all their sakes he had to act as if she wasn't there at all.

Li waited until she could hear no more footsteps, then opened the lid a fraction. There was no-one in sight. She opened it fully, still prepared to defend herself, then stood up cautiously.

She was alone.

She stepped out of the bunk and massaged some life back into her cramped limbs. But every moment she spent doing that was a moment when Pirroni and his hostages were getting further away. She had to get going. Her own survival, as well as Alex's, depended on it.

But first she knelt in the doorway and studied the ground for footprints. The ground was baked hard like terracotta and nothing showed. She got out carefully and moved away from the plane a little. Then it hit her. Not only was she alone; she was alone in a great wide sun-cracked earthbowl miles from anywhere. The blue sky above her seemed immense. She felt vulnerable and insignificant, like an ant.

Calm down, she told herself. You're not alone, you're following Pirroni. What would he do? He would get into the wood as soon as possible. She moved to the edge of the trees.

And there she had her proof: a footprint in a shallow gully where the soil was softer because it was sheltered from the sun. It looked like the Timberlands Alex wore.

Li smiled. Alex was leaving her a trail. They were in this together.

She hopped back into the plane to look for materials she could take. She searched the aircraft and found water bottles and a medical kit. She couldn't take all the medical kit because it was too big, but she packed the most useful items into a tool bag taking scissors, antiseptic cream, sutures and needles and strong bandages that could double as ropes.

In the bunk was the blanket she had rested on for all that time. She pulled it out. It was bright blue. She dragged it outside and laid it on the ground. It made a stark contrast to the rusty earth. Unravelling her tool bag, Li took out the medical kit scissors and cut the blanket into three strips. Then she arranged them to form a giant arrow next to the plane, weighted down with stones and pointing in the direction she intended to take through the trees. If anyone flew over and saw the wreck, they would know there were survivors to find.

She began to walk into the wood. The air smelled astringent, of eucalyptus. She looked back at the plane for a moment. Leaving it went against all her survival instincts; you didn't leave your vehicle when you were marooned in a hostile environment. She made a cut in the tree with scissors and hoped someone would find it.

Tommy Bininuwuy stopped his pick-up truck. 'We're here,' he said.

It hadn't taken Amber, Paulo and Hex long to decide they should go with Tommy. For now, they had little idea where Pirroni was, and they couldn't carry on searching without transport. This way, if they helped Tommy, they could stock up on supplies and figure out a way to get back on the trail. They might even be able to borrow a vehicle.

They looked out through the dusty windows at the settlement. A cluster of around twenty homes stood among the sparse trees; they were made from concrete breeze blocks and roofed with corrugated iron. Chickens ran between the houses. A radio provided a quiet, tinny accompaniment to their squawking. A woman sat on the veranda of the nearest home. She looked up from her sewing and waved as she saw the truck. Two other Aboriginals drawing designs on flattened pieces of eucalyptus bark checked out the new arrivals, pausing with their brushes poised over a jam-jar full of paint-cloudy water. All the people shared the same jet-black skin and profuse curls that Tommy had.

Amber, Paulo and Hex jumped down from the truck. Tommy led them onto the veranda past a woman in a blue T-shirt with large pink flowers who was bending over and talking to a little girl. Amber looked down to smile a greeting. Both the woman and the child ignored her.

Amber was taken aback. They had looked right through her as though she wasn't there.

Inside the building was a schoolroom painted pale yellow. A line of wooden tables with chairs faced a blackboard.

Tommy had not explained to them what he needed them to help with, but when they saw the front bench it was obvious. On it, in pieces, was a computer. Monitor and keyboard were intact, but the cover had been removed from the central processing unit and its green circuit boards lay exposed.

Amber laughed out loud. 'Hex - all yours!'

Hex was already peering into the open machine. 'Fantastic!' he exclaimed, his eyes gleaming with delight. 'I haven't seen a Pentium for years! How did it go wrong exactly?'

Pirroni walked slowly. Deeper into the wood, the ground was rutted. Some of the tree trunks were scorched. Ashy deposits carpeted the floor. On top of them, eucalyptus leaves were scattered like tiny scimitars. From time to time the trees thinned out and gave way to termite mounds. But this time they were not the red, bulbous mounds they had seen before. These were pale, slender wafers, set out at intervals in the clearing like ghostly tombstones. Despite the trees there was little shade; the air was suffocating and stale.

Alex noticed that Pirroni was now walking heavily. Could it be because of his lameness? A bright-green snake slithered away from under his feet and he realized the terrorist was doing it deliberately to make sure that any wildlife heard the vibrations and fled.

Alex scraped the black forest floor aside with his toe and found the red earth beneath. To delay a little longer, he tripped.

Pirroni turned round and looked at him coldly. 'If you injure yourself I will leave you.'

Of course. That was why Pirroni was taking them so slowly. In this desolate place even something as insignificant as a sprain meant a prolonged but certain death.

Alex looked behind him at the place where he had trodden. He was pleased to see the big red streak and a firm print. Then a thought came like a dark cloud and spoiled his optimism: he had been looking forward to building on skills like this in the army. He shook his head. He must keep focused on the mission.

Holly took his hand. She looked up at him and managed a smile. Her face and clothes were red with a fine layer of dust and she looked like part of the landscape. She was being very brave. Are you OK without your glasses?' he asked.

'I'm OK. A little short-sighted. Not much. I can get about . . . I know you'll get us through this,' she whispered.

He felt a great wave of protectiveness and squeezed her hand to reassure her. Then he let go, tripped again, leaving another mark, and caught up with her.

Pirroni put his hand up. 'Stop.'

He retraced his steps, looking carefully at the ground. Alex's heart was in his mouth. What if he saw his clue? It was highly visible, a red streak in the black ash, where hardly any other footprints showed. But Pirroni stopped when he found one of his own footprints and knelt down. He reached into his bag and brought out a rifle bullet.

Alex's mouth, already dry from the heat, turned to sandpaper.

Pirroni took out Alex's knife and experimentally scraped at the footprint. It was soft. He chose a spot in the middle where his heel would have been and skewered the knife into the ground up to the hilt, turning it to bore a wide hole. The brutality of the action made Holly wince. Alex felt steel in his soul.

You don't do that with my knife, he thought. Somehow, soon, I'll be taking it back from you.

Pirroni put back some of the loose earth to make the hole narrower. He searched in his pocket and took out one of the screws from the plane's GPS unit. He dropped it into the hole, checked to see which way up it had landed and packed the loose earth carefully around it. He dropped the bullet in after it. Then he smoothed the surface over the hole so that the footprint looked intact, and stood up. He drank some water, surveying his booby trap. Then he resumed walking.

Alex was in no doubt how nasty that booby trap was. If someone stepped on the hole - which was likely if they were tracking them and checking the size of the footprint - their weight would push the bullet onto the screw and fire it. The bullet would go straight up into their leg and probably take the limb off.

Before Alex set off, he picked up a twig and silently bent it in two places so that it formed a letter N, meaning negative - one of the international signals for danger. He dropped it behind him, then caught up with Holly.

But his thoughts were somewhere else. Be careful, Li, he said to himself. Be very, very careful.

19

B
EFORE
T
HE
M
AELSTROM

If Li missed Alex's next mark she could wander for ever. She picked her way carefully, scanning the ground with every step. But she saw nothing. Black ash coated the floor, and its powdery surface hardly took prints at all.

The heat sapped all her energy, making it impossible to walk energetically even if she had wanted to. The air was so warm she could hardly breathe. No matter how deeply she inhaled, it felt as if nothing was going into her lungs. She rationed her water, knowing it might have to last a long time. But one of the things she had with her was water purification tablets, so if she found another source she would be able to use it.

She had to believe she would see more tracks, but the blank ground was scary. Be logical, she told herself. You're not seeing tracks because Pirroni will be doing his best to cover them. Alex would have to be careful leaving her clues in case Pirroni noticed. She might not see one for a while. She just had to trust that there would be more.

Every so often she used the scissors to cut big arrows into trees. The scorched trunks were particularly good as the wood underneath showed up pale.

Someone else would follow; she told herself that. She had made the plane visible, and people would be looking for Pirroni. Once she started thinking about what she would do if she caught up with Pirroni on her own. She put it swiftly out of her mind. One step at a time, she told herself. Look for Alex's signs. She put all the mental strength she had developed in training into concentrating on her job.

Everywhere there were signs of recent fires: the ashy floor; the scorched trees. Her every footstep crackled as tinder-dry twigs snapped under her. Forest fires were a real possibility here.

She saw a red skid mark with a bootprint. Her spirits lifted; it didn't look accidental. She walked a little further. There was another bootprint, not a Timberland. A twisted twig lay on top of it to form a letter. She avoided stepping on the footprint; the letter N must be a warning. She was relived to see a deliberate sign. As if to comfort her even more, she heard rustling and cawing in the distance. A flock of birds had been disturbed by something large. Her quarry must be quite close. 'Bless you, Alex,' she said softly.

Hex clamped the cover of the PC back on, reconnected the monitor, keyboard and power supply and switched on. The machine hummed, the hard drive started spinning and the screen flowered into life.

Amber and Paulo were sitting with him at the bench. Paulo looked impressed. 'What was it, Hex?'

'Some of the lovely indigenous wildlife had eaten through one of the IDE cables.'

Paulo looked blank.

'The cable from the motherboard to the hard drive,' Hex explained. 'The computer thought the hard drive was missing. Most PCs have a second cable going to the CD-ROM, so I put the hard drive and CD-ROM onto the same cable, made the CD-ROM the slave device by re-jumpering the device selector and--'

Amber was pulling a face at Paulo. 'Don't you wish you'd never asked?' She took a swig of water. They now had freshly boiled water from the settlement.

Tommy sat at the working computer and beamed. 'It's marvellous,' he said.

Hex concentrated on talking to the more appreciative members of his audience. 'I also changed some more jumpers on the motherboard to overclock the system, so in effect you now have a faster PC. While I'm here I'll just have a look at your setup and data management.' His fingers flew over the keys.

More people had come into the schoolroom, among them the woman in the flowered T-shirt. They crowded around the bench. Hex was clicking through systems boxes on the screen and they exclaimed in amazement, clapping Tommy on the back.

'They seem pleased,' said Paulo.

'Yes, but have you noticed something?' said Amber. 'They're congratulating Tommy. It's as if the three of us are invisible.'

Tommy indicated the three friends. 'These are the people who had helped me make the computer work,' he said.

All of a sudden, the woman in the flowered T-shirt turned and spoke directly to Amber and Paulo. 'Hello, I'm Suzu. The computer is very important to the school. Our children need to know how to survive in a foreign culture.'

Now she was perfectly friendly, thought Amber. That one introduction had changed everything. It was as if we didn't exist until our relationship to them was explained.

Hex finished zapping boxes on the screen. 'I'm just defragmenting your hard drive and removing Findfast, which should make it run even better.' He looked at Suzu. 'How many children use this computer?'

'All the children in this outstation - around thirty.'

Hex goggled. 'Strewth, you need more machines.' He brought out his palmtop, then a small power lead. 'Do you have anywhere I could plug this in?'

Tommy pointed at the device. 'When I saw him with this I thought they could help,' he told Suzu. Hex pointed to a black box on the desk. 'Would you pass that transformer?'

Suzu handed it over. Hex inspected it, tweaked some switches on his palmtop to make it compatible, then switched the machine on. As its screen lit up, he smiled at it like an old friend, then got to work and fired off a few e-mails. First he sent a grid reference to Sergeant Powell and copied it to Amber's uncle. Then he sent a general e-mail to several of his friends: 'Does anyone want a deserving home for an old machine?' Hacker friends who used the latest technology often donated their old computers to local schools or charities.

After a few minutes he looked up from the screen. 'OK. I have three Pentium Pros for you. They can be couriered to anywhere you like.'

A look of deep gratitude spread over Tommy's face. 'And now we must do something for you. I think we might be able to help you find your friends.'

Hex was about to unplug his palmtop, but Amber stopped him. 'Before you shut that down, have you still got the co-ordinates of where we last saw Pirroni's plane?'

Hex flicked the display to a different screen and she picked up a pencil and writing pad that were on the bench and began to scribble.

Suzu bustled off. Tommy said to Paulo, 'I will drive you where you need to go. But first, you must have food.'

Paulo smiled. 'That is very kind; thank you.' He noticed Amber calling up a map on the GPS. 'Amber, what are you doing?'

'This is our current position here. We know where we last spotted Pirroni, and what his bearing was. He'd have had to land too because of the storm, so he can't be that far from where we came down.' She scribbled as she talked, doing the calculations and constructing a diagram with the results. 'We can allow for the storm because we know the wind speed reading was sixty-four k.p.h. . . .' She looked up. 'What speed were we flying at, and what speed do you reckon Pirroni would have been doing in his aircraft?'

Suzu returned with a wooden bowl. Hex's nostrils caught a delicious smell. Then he checked himself. He had heard stories about bush tucker; indeed, some of the games in the TV show involved making contestants eat revolting things.

'Oh wow!' exclaimed Paulo. He looked as though he was about to die of bliss. 'Corned beef hash.'

Amber looked up from her calculations. 'All
riiiiight,'
she grinned as Tommy handed out bowls.

In less than an hour they were ready to set off. Hex and Paulo sat on a striped rug in the back of the Toyota truck. Tommy and Amber were in the front. As they drove out of the camp, several youths carrying flaming torches headed out into the clearing. Their charcoal-coloured limbs resembled slender twigs poking out from the legs of their shorts, which was all they wore.

Amber turned to Tommy. 'What's going on?'

'A fire is coming. We burn the area around the camp to get rid of all the grass and trees. It goes out before the real fire arrives. Then the real fire cannot reach our homes.'

One of the youths touched his flame to a clump of scrubby grass. Tinder-dry, it caught immediately, sending a line of flame along the ground like a burning fuse.

Tommy took them out over the plain. There was no road, only a faint track where other vehicles had passed. Amber spread out her map on the dashboard. The calculations had come easily to her thanks to her experience navigating aboard yachts, and she was confident she had pinpointed a small area where Pirroni was likely to have landed. It was quite close to where they had come down themselves. They would patrol a radius around their own wreck and look for signs of a landing. Even if Pirroni had taken off again, he would not have gone far.

Tommy braked and the truck skidded to a halt. He called over his shoulder to Hex and Paulo, 'You must come and sit in the cab. Another dust storm is coming.'

Hex and Paulo scrambled in, jamming Amber's thigh against the gear lever. As they pulled the door shut, the sky darkened and a thick red haze cloaked the windscreen. Tommy drove on without slowing. He steered as though he could still see. Hex looked back and saw as the dust thinned that the bushman had just piloted them around a tree. He knows every tree and boulder, he thought.

Tommy's face was grim. 'Where the dust storms come, the fire comes too.'