Unfinished Business...
WE WERE pretty much in the bag. In, but the bag was yet to be tied.
“Get down!” I ordered Sandra. I hit the ignition, found ‘drive’ - and waited.
There was no way the chopper could land in front of the house – the slope was too severe. The back was also out – too much vegetation. The nearest convenient spot was the crown of a gentle slope about eighty metres to my front right. The pilot thought likewise. He settled his machine and cut his switches, and three blokes in civvies clambered out. I was unsurprised to recognise McDowell and Heckle and Jeckle. The moment they formed up and headed in my direction, I floored the loud pedal.
The Ford left the carport in a screeching left hander, me correcting furiously as I aimed it downhill towards the cattle grid. Conversely, my pursuers came to a stop, nonplussed by my temerity. But only temporarily. With McDowell gesticulating at the pilot, they retraced their steps.
A moment later, I swore. A marked police car, blue and reds flashing and going like the clappers, was approaching from the direction of town. No way would I beat it to the road. It’d park itself over the grid and that would be that. All over, red rover. My heart sank.
And rose again. Unaccountably, the police car ignored the obvious tactic. Instead, it stopped short of the grid in a tyre-smoking halt, slewing broadside to block the road back to town. The crew was singular - a middle-aged sergeant with a girth that comes from too little exercise and too much fast food. Despite his bulk, he was out of his car and in my path before I reached the grid. I braked and poked my head out of the window.
“Move that car, mate,”
He scowled. Sergeants hate being addressed as ‘mate’ by strangers, especially strangers who just might be bad blokes. He waddled towards me, leaving me no choice for what I had to do.
I got out of the car, flashing my ID and giving him a sonorous “Sergeant Mason, Homicide.” His truculence turned to confusion, which allowed me to get much closer than he should have allowed. He realised his mistake when my left fist buried itself in his solar plexus. He gave a sort of “whoof” and began to sink. I grabbed him and helped him stumble away from the grid. It was bad enough I had to hit him; I didn’t want to run over him, too. The poor bastard was in pain but he wasn’t at death’s door. More importantly, he wasn’t going anywhere for at least ten minutes.
But then the chopper arrived. It hovered just behind the police car, nearly bowling me over with its downdraft and blinding me in a maelstrom of vicious gravel. The chopper’s side door was open, and I knew the gung-ho Heckle and Jeckle would jump the few feet and rush me if I went for the sergeant’s vehicle. For all I knew, they were planning to rush me anyway.
I dived back into my own car, subliminally aware of the two white and wide-eyed faces in the rear. The Ford fish-tailed away, throwing up some gravel of its own, with its nose pointing south-east, towards the mountains.
First order of business – lose the chopper. But just how I would lose it was a nag of a different colour. My plan, if you could call it that, was to get to the bush, but like most plans formulated on the verge of panic, it was light-on in the logic department. For one glaring example, how could I outrun the chopper while bouncing along a mountain road in territory of which I was completely ignorant? The terrain was wooded, but not so heavily that I couldn’t be seen from the air, so the pilot was having no trouble keeping abreast. He was probably enjoying himself. And calling the road a road was being charitable. It was no more than a gravelled track, certainly not meant to accommodate low-slung sedans. I remember thinking young Elliott wouldn’t be too pleased when he got his car back, if he got it back. Just to compound my problems, the gravel petered out, leaving bare, slippery earth. I suppose I was lucky it wasn’t raining.
Then another unconsidered possibility occurred to me. “Where does this road go?” I bellowed.
“To the Billarook communications tower,” Sandra replied. “About twelve kilometres.”
“And then?”
“Nothing. That’s it.”
A dead end. Great.
Then I had something else to worry about. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the chopper descending to my level. I was on an open straight stretch with a big ridge to my left and an even bigger ravine to my right. I didn’t notice at first because I was trying not to drive over the edge, but when I next glanced back, my heart convulsed – Heckle was crouched in the chopper’s doorway, gun in hand. He raised it.
I went for the brakes.
I needn’t have bothered. Before Heckle could fire, a hand appeared and knocked his gun upwards. Then I was at the end of the straight stretch and into a tree-screened turn. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I fancied it was McDowell who’d stopped Heckle from taking his shot.
If I’d disliked Heckle before, I despised him now. How dare the bastard want to shoot? It wasn’t so much him wanting to plug me, bad form though that was, it was what might have happened to Sandra and poor little innocent Angela. I chanced a quick glance in the mirror and saw the little mite clutching Pinky to herself, confused and frightened. My blood boiled that Heckle would even think of shooting, knowing who was in the car.
Or did he? Had they got close enough to see who was in the back seat, or even if there was anyone there? The sergeant might have, but he wasn’t currently interested. Which gave me an idea.
I turned the police radio to ‘local’ and snatched up the mike. “Sergeant Owens to Air One.” Thank God I’d noticed his name tag when I hit him.
“Air One.”
It was a fair bet the chopper crew didn’t know Owens from a bar of soap, so I didn’t bother disguising my voice. I just added a touch of panic, which came easily enough.
“Tell Mr McDowell there’s a woman just left the house. In a four wheel drive. Little blonde kid with her. What does he want me to do?”
I could picture the crew relaying the message to McDowell. Then the answer came.
“This is Air One. Stop her. Repeat, stop her!”
So far, so good. I held my breath. Then – hallelujah! - the chopper’s turbine went up in pitch. The machine rose, banked steeply and disappeared, in pursuit of a new quarry.
I pulled up and turned to my passengers.
“Well, that’s got rid of them for the moment.” I grinned at Angela and tickled her leg. "Good fun, huh Moppet?” Nothing like a well-crafted lie to cheer a child. She smiled bravely and nodded, then snuggled more securely inside her mother’s arm.
Sandra was less accepting. “What now?”
Good question, and one I had no answer to. “You’re sure there’s no other way out?”
“Positive.”
I drove on, not as quickly but still at a fair pace. I hadn’t much time before McDowell realised he’d been had. Even now, the chopper crew was trying in vain to raise Sergeant Owens. Another few minutes and they’d be back looking for my tail. Before that happened, I wanted to be out of sight and with time to think. I told Sandra we’d drive for a couple of minutes, find the thickest bush we could and get as far into it as possible. Almost immediately, I saw a turnoff to the left, a track even narrower and rougher than the one we were on. I stopped.
“Where does that go?”
She didn’t know. The area was full of tracks, some leading to long-abandoned gold diggings now being reworked by weekend prospectors, some to disused logging camps and some seeming to have no destination at all. Whatever, they offered better cover. I ignored the first one – too obvious, I thought – and turned into the fourth.
We were high up here. You could tell by the vegetation. Here and there were groves of wattles, but generally, the smaller trees of the lower reaches were gone. In their place were stands of soaring giants – alpine and mountain ash and sprinklings of myrtle beech. These were the monarchs of the forest, nature’s giants towering over you. Truly awe-inspiring.
Ordinarily. All I knew was that they provided great cover. So did the profusion of ferns and vines growing at ground level.
I turned into it, praying there was nothing hidden in the undergrowth that would snag the suspension or hole the sump. Luck was with us. I got about thirty metres off the track before caution warned me that going farther was foolhardy. I hauled the Ford parallel with the track, switched off and got out.
The track was invisible from where I stood, and the ground underfoot was damp but not soggy. No danger of becoming bogged. Sandra and Angela joined me in the gloom and silence.
“Why are we stopping here, Mummy?” The voice was plaintive.
Sandra hugged her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. We’re just staying here until the nasty men go away. Then we’ll all go home.” She looked at me expectantly.
“That’s right, moppet,” I confirmed in a voice that held more confidence than I felt. “When it gets dark, we’ll sneak past ‘em and head for town. Easy.”
Once again, Angela rewarded me with a small grin. “Easy,” she echoed, her naive trust shining out at me. I felt awful.
Sandra scrabbled in her shoulder bag and produced a fruit bar. “Would you like to share this with Pinky?” She slipped the mite back into car and returned to me. “It won’t be easy, will it?”
“No.” There was no point in lying. “It won’t. McDowell will know there’s no way out but past your place. He’ll know that leaves us two choices – give up, or try to get by him tonight.”
Her expression showed that she didn’t care much for the odds. I wasn’t all that thrilled, either.
“We’ll drive back as far as we dare, then hoof it. With luck, we can skirt around your place by keeping to the scrub.”
Her doubt remained. “You’re asking a lot of Angela.”
I’d already asked too much of her. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself. “I know. But listen, I don’t plan on walking all the way back to Melbourne. That little town just before your turn-off… I’ll pinch a car from there.”
Her beautiful blue eyes widened. “You can do that?”
Could I? You don’t spend a year in the Stolen Vehicle Squad without developing up a few handy talents. As I saw it, the only problem was getting back down the mountain without being rumbled.
On that depressing note, we decided to rest up. Angela had already nodded off. Sandra followed her lead, curling herself around the little one. I resumed behind the wheel, keeping one ear on “Benny Goodman 1935-1939” and the other on the police radio. The radio was silent, which could mean only one thing - the bastards didn’t want me listening in on their plans so they’d switched to another channel. I switched around the dial but couldn’t find them. Probably they’d gone to an encrypted channel, which put me out of the eavesdropping business.
I don’t know when I nodded off; probably in the middle of “I Want To Be Happy”. But when I awoke - or rather, was awakened - it was mid-afternoon, and the helicopter was back.
Sandra was awake, too. Beside her, Angela popped awake and was instantly confused by the unfamiliar surroundings. Instinctively, she moved back into her mother’s arms.
“Mummy, where are we?”
“It’s OK, sweetie,” Sandra said. “It’s OK.” Then she gave me a look that asked “Is it?”
How the hell would I know? I decided to have a closer look, on the basis that just waiting wouldn’t achieve much. “Back in a flash,” I said, and headed for the track.
It was deserted, or at least the stretch I was standing on was. I could hear the chopper. It sounded some way off still but I couldn’t see it, thanks to the trees. I moved along the track until a gap in them rewarded me with a narrow vista of the way we had come. And a sight of the chopper.
It was about half a kilometre away as the crow flies and below me - I could clearly see the silver disc its rotor blades made in the afternoon sun. For a moment, I thought it was stationary, but it was in fact slowly moving left to right, parallel with the track I was standing on. At a rough guess, I put it over the first track I had considered hiding in. But why? They’d be lucky to even see these tracks from the air, let alone anything on them. And if their quarry was off the track, they’d need X-ray vision to....
It hit me like a punch in the face. They didn’t have X-ray vision but what they did have was an infra-red scanner, a device that detected heat, including body heat. If we stayed where we were, they’d find us, trees or no trees. The corollary also hit me; if we moved, they’d also find us. I could imagine Heckle and Jeckle poised at the end of each track as the helicopter ferreted along it, waiting for us to rush out like panicked rabbits, straight into their net. I was on my way back to tell Sandra what our choices were when the bulb lit up.
I told her my plan as I ratted through the boot, looking for the first aid kit. The only way to beat the heat detector, I said, was to give it no heat to detect. She was bemused until I found what I was looking for – the foil blanket, used to prevent heat loss in cold or shocked victims. I also found a pad of toilet paper, which I handed to her. I pointed to the scrub.
“If you and Angela want to go, now’s the time.” She nodded, retrieved the moppet, and accompanied her into the privacy of the forest.
I unlocked the Ford's bonnet, spread the blanket over the engine, then closed the bonnet and piled on some fern fronds and fallen branches. Just to be on the safe side, I added a few dozen handfuls of soil. The top of the car didn’t feel warm, but I wasn’t risking it. I emptied the emergency water bottle over it and repeated my exercise with the soil. By the time the girls returned, I was ready.
I crouched in front of Angela. I’d felt awful before; this time I felt despicable. “Moppet, you are the bravest little girl in the world. Do you think you could be brave just a wee bit longer? You and Pinky?”
There was just the briefest hesitation, then a nod. “Yes, Mr Mark.”
I had to hug her. “Good girl. What we’re going to do is sit in the car again. All together. Very quietly. And no matter what happens, we stay in the car. OK?”
I got another nod, plus a hug. I hustled them into the back seat and followed, conscious of the ever-louder whine of the chopper. Sandra took Angela on to her lap and dived again into her shoulder bag, emerging with a story book. She gave me a nervous smile and began to read. It was something to do with Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and a tar baby.
The chopper closed in, scanning the third track if I was any judge. I caught a glimpse of it, nose down and crabbing right to left, its electronic feelers searching for us. It slipped from view, its roar diminishing as it slipped past, then staying constant for a few seconds, then building again as it traversed the fourth track. Our track.
It seemed to take forever to reach us. Perhaps the crew was taking a perverse pleasure in stringing out our agony, knowing how thunderously frightening the Dauphine was when you were under its belly. Sandra tried, but she couldn’t compete with the crescendo. She stopped reading, although Angela stiffening in her lap might have been the real reason. I grabbed the book and took up where she’d left off. I put my arm around her and pulled her shaking shoulders against me. At the top of my voice, I babbled on about Brer Rabbit begging Brer Fox not to throw him into the briar patch. Then, with the chopper directly over us, even I had to chuck it in.
The racket was bad enough but I hadn’t counted on the maelstrom. It was like being in a tornado. Above us, the branches tore at each other. Those that didn’t survive came swirling down to dance crazily over the floor of the forest, together with a cloud of leaves, twigs and dirt. My camouflage disappeared in seconds, but not before flailing at the windows like a demented octopus. The cacophony was awful – branches thudding against us, green vegetation slapping us, dirt and grit hammering us like machine-gun fire.
It was too much for the little one. She began to sob, and turned and put her arms around Sandra’s neck. Her eyes were big and fearful, and I could see panic coming. I enclosed both girls in my arms and hugged for all I was worth, at the same time putting my face close to Angela’s. I gave her an outrageous wink.
Sang froid, I think it’s called. Faked, in my case, but apparently well acted, because Angela held on to her courage. I could almost see her gritting her teeth as she buried her face and held on for dear life.
The chopper hovered over us for what seemed an eternity. I was ready to concede that they’d spotted us when I sensed the hurricane shifting. Sure enough, our torture was ending – the tormenting machine was moving farther along the track, still searching. A minute later, our world was calm enough for me to have a quick peek.
The car was a mess, but the tyres had survived and all the windows were intact. The foil blanket had also survived, which was doubtless why we were still on McDowell’s missing list. I removed it and got back into the car.
“You two were great!” I told them, hoping to Christ I didn’t look as shaken as they did. I gave them both a hug, made an extra fuss over Angela, then said we were going to stay put until the chopper gave up. Then we were going home.
On impulse, I looked in the glovebox. Good old sweet-tooth Elliott – he’d left a cache of chocolate bars there. While we ate them, we listened to the whine of the Dauphine, thankfully receding. I like violet crumbles, but not so much that I didn’t notice Sandra’s hand creep into mine. It might’ve been wishful thinking, but I fancied it signified more than just gratitude.
The chopper chucked it in two hours later, passing directly over us on its downhill way back to the house. By that time, we’d scoffed all the chocolate and exhausted the adventures of Brer Rabbit who, it turned out, was “born and bred in a briar patch”. I’d persuaded the car radio to drag in Magic 693, but I was outvoted in favour of Triple M, so I was relieved when, half an hour later, the sun disappeared behind Mount Buffalo. Time to run the gauntlet.
I cleared the muck off the windscreen and made sure I had a clear passage to the track. The Ford started first kick, as if eager to be on its way, and regained the track without incident.
‘Tentative’ was how I’d describe my driving, any moment expecting Heckle and Jeckle to leap out of ambush. They didn’t. After ten minutes, I was confident we were alone in the forest.
Night comes quickly in the high country. I used the headlights but I didn’t take unnecessary risks; I used them only when I had to. Fortuitously, I was blessed with a full moon and an unseasonably cloudless sky. Unless the trees overhung the road from both sides, I could see well enough where to point the wheels. Besides, I was crawling, and the closer I got to the house, the slower I crawled. The Ford was a quiet machine but these huge gullies and valleys were natural amphitheatres, and advertising our approach was not on my agenda.
It took us forty-five minutes to get within seeing distance of the house, about half a kilometre. The downhill view presented us with our dilemma laid out in stark detail.
The house was occupied, made plain enough by the lights and the occasional snatch of loud voices. Even as we looked, a match flared on the back verandah. The chopper was parked where it had first landed, and the patrol car was still broadside across the road, only this time on the other side of the grid. An unmarked sedan had appeared in our absence, so I assumed McDowell had called in reinforcements. There was no getting past the patrol car, not unless the driver was fast asleep, and even then the people in the house would have to be blind not to spot us on the road. The moon, which had helped us to get this far, was now aiding and abetting the enemy. Our only escape was to hoof it around the house to the right, keeping deep enough within the forest to avoid being seen or heard.
Easy to say but it didn’t turn out that way. There was practically no light, the undergrowth was thick and savage, and I’m no great shakes as a bushman. Even using the torch I’d pinched from the car, we were getting ripped to shreds and in danger of blundering face first into the stiff fingers of a she-oak. It was hopelessly slow going.
Then Angela, her arms around my neck as I toted her through the scrub, began to shake. Her sobs were not far away, and I wasn’t surprised. The exhausted little mite had been jerked from her day-to-day routine and flung into a staccato series of frightening episodes all beyond her ken. Now here she was being hauled through a primaevil forest in the middle of the night and sensing, if she was as perspicacious as I thought she was, the lack of confidence in the bloke who was carrying her.
It was time for a change of strategy. I kneeled and comforted her, telling her what a great job she was doing and how it was nearly all over. She responded by throwing her arms around Sandra’s neck.
I pointed to Sandra’s bag. “Please tell me you’ve got the keys to your four-wheel-drive.”
She didn’t have to look. And even in the gloom, I saw her tune in to my wavelength. “Can we...?”
“We have to. Come on.” I picked Angela up and headed for the edge of the forest.
Luck was with us; we came out adjacent to Sandra’s apple grove. Two minutes later, we were approaching the rear of the house, keeping the water tank between us and any possible observer. There were none that I could see. The TV was playing ‘Law and Order’, of all things, but I could see no movement outside the house. I indicated to Sandra that we should make for the carport.
It was only ten metres but it looked a hundred. I suddenly felt cold and realised it wasn’t the mountain air. I was sweating. And my heart, thudding against my ribs, must be audible.
We made the rear of the carport. Relieved, we eased through the bottlebrushes that screened it at the rear. Still carrying Angela, I led the way to the passenger side of the Land Cruiser. I inserted the key and turned it. Then Sandra gasped and my heart convulsed.
“Good evening, Mark,” came the disembodied voice. “I thought you might try something like this.” It was McDowell. The bastard had been standing in the darkness at the other end of the carport. As he spoke, he moved towards me in that slow swagger of his, a smirk spread wide across his face.
I don’t know which I felt more keenly, the disappointment or the anger. It must have been the anger, because as I faked a resigned shrug and returned Angela to her mother, I made a resolution. I whirled, cocking my right and stepping towards him. McDowell was expecting it. He flicked his head to the left to slip my punch and aimed his left at my temple. Only there was nothing to slip – my maneouvre was a feint. I took another step and sank my left into his solar plexus. Unlike Sergeant Owens, McDowell was reasonably trim. He didn’t go ‘whoof’ and sink. Not straight away. I had to hit him again. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. I caught him as he fell and laid him in the shadows.
I looked at Sandra and she looked at me as we held our breath. Poor little Angela looked vague and unseeing, as if she were in shock. Again we were in luck. Those inside the house were too engrossed in the TV to notice the real-life drama unfolding outside. I opened the Land Cruiser and ushered the girls into the back, then push-shut the door to the first click. I opened the driver’s door, flicked the gearbox into neutral, released the handbrake, then put my shoulder to the leading edge of the doorway. Provided I could get enough speed up, I could coast past the front of the house. After that, it was all downhill.
We made it. That left only the patrol car to deal with. My plan here relied on the way the police mind works, which is: it’s OK unless someone in authority says it’s not OK. I was hoping that the copper below me, believing that the fugitives were in the bush and his colleagues in the house, would see the Land Cruiser came calmly from the house and assume that the driver was one of his own. My plan also relied on it being dark. I ordered Sandra to lie down, clutch-started the vehicle as quietly as I could and headed for the grid.
The police car’s reading lamp went out. That meant he’d seen me. It also meant that his eyes weren’t accustomed to the dark. Thank God, because the copper was Sergeant Owens. He actually returned my cheery wave as I turned and sedately headed in the direction of Bright and freedom.
Which was when our luck gave out. I was no more than a hundred metres up the road when someone leant on a car horn. I could picture McDowell regaining his feet, then staggering to the nearest car and giving the alarm.
Shit!
I floored the accelerator and was instantly disappointed that the Land Cruiser did not have the toe I was used to. In the mirror, I saw the patrol car slew across the road as Owens began the chase.
It caught up to me within three minutes.
Then began a game of stand-off. Owens had the speed but I had the position. I couldn’t outrun him but he couldn’t get past me. Even when I hurtled through Wandiligong, simply being in the centre of the road denied him passing space. Which meant I didn’t have to risk my neck going flat out on a mountain road in an unfamiliar vehicle.
I didn’t suppose Owens was in any great hurry, either. All he had to do was keep me in sight. Sooner or later…
I tried to disable him by slowing to a walk, stopping, then reversing the Land Cruiser’s huge towbar through his grill. But Owens wasn’t having any. Street fighter he wasn’t; bloody good driver he was.
I cursed his forebears. With Owens on our tail, we had absolutely no chance. I had to shake him.
I didn’t get the chance. I came into the next corner, a blind left-hander, as fast as I dared, conscious of the unyielding granite cliff on my left and even more conscious of the black void on my right. For the briefest second, I heard the whine of the helicopter, just before its searchlight blinded me.
I can remember braking. I can remember holding my line. Paradoxically, I can also remember thinking what sort of fucking idiot pilot would do such a fucking idiot thing?
We nearly made it. Although dazzled, I had a seats-of-the-pants feeling that the Land Cruiser had faithfully done as asked. Until Owens, not expecting me to stop or perhaps dazzled himself, cannoned into my rear.
The back end reared up, and my whole being froze as the headlights briefly illuminated the depths of the rocky gully far below us.
Sandra screamed.
Then we were rolling, end over end, side over side, the windows shattering in our faces, the dashboard seeking to crush us, the front passenger door ripping off and the roof peeling back like a giant sardine can and scooping up the detritus of the forest. The steering wheel was suddenly in my face and I tasted blood. Simultaneously, I felt everything below my left knee crushed like so many sticks of chalk. There was the smell of petrol. And the noise was horrible – a screeching cacophony that overwhelmed me with terror. I wanted it to stop. More than anything I wanted it to stop.
Then, by the light of the one headlight that had somehow survived, I saw the trunk of a huge box gum, just a fraction of a second before the Land Cruiser slammed headlong into it.