Dead Heat Page 9

I put my helmet back on, brought the goggles down over my eyes, and switched them to infra-red. Bynder stood in the middle of the clearing talking to his leather-clad mate. It was impossible to assess his health through the goggles, but, despite what would’ve been a gruelling flight up in a light aircraft, his voice had been strong as he delivered his speech, and he seemed to move well as he hurried to join the bikies at the wall.

  I turned my attention back to the convoy. If it left the highway to look for me, things could get nasty. It’d have the superior firepower of course, but, if the bandits were able to ambush it, that might more than even up the odds. I’d alert the convoy if that looked like happening, but I was torn as to whether I should signal it that I was there, or whether I should let it pass on if that’s what it looked like it was doing. I didn’t want to be the cause of a major firefight, but nor did I want to be stuck in bandit territory when the sun came up.

  As if it’d read my mind, the drone left the vehicles it was escorting and flew high over the desert till it was within a few hundred metres of the escarpment wall. It then moved in an arc till it was flying along the line of wall towards me. Would I signal it and trigger a nasty confrontation, or would I try to get out of this place under my own steam?

  When the flying machine was seconds away, I slipped my helmet off, hunched over it, and tried to impersonate a rock. The drone’s searchlight passed over me without lingering; it raked the meeting place, and flew on, missing the camouflaged object altogether.

  Three military vehicles — probably armoured personnel carriers — passed along the highway without pausing. Their throaty harmony ebbed and slowly died. Bynder and the bikies remained pressed against the wall. It was time for me to move.

  I climbed down the rock pile, on the same side as I’d ascended it, and when I got back onto the ground, I paused. Bynder had resumed his speech, which meant the bandits were still occupied. If I were going to explore the motorcycle option, I had no time to lose. I skittled around the rocks, and as the motorcycles came into view again, a beam of light cut through the darkness inside the shelter.

  A man with a torch was leaning over the sidecar of a monster bike which was parked at the end of a line of other monster bikes. He held a drink bottle in his other hand, and he seemed to be talking to someone on the floor of the sidecar.

  I left the rock pile and circled the shelter, using a thicket of bush for cover. I merged with the shadow from the guards’ platform and ducked under the shelter’s spinifex eaves. The dirt floor deadened my footfalls as I came up behind the guy and clapped a hand over his mouth. I tapped him on the head with my Glock and lowered his unconscious weight to the ground. Then I looked into the sidecar. A young Aboriginal woman lay on the floor of the vehicle. She looked up at me with dopey eyes that flickered for a bit and then closed again. Despite her condition, I recognised her immediately. It was Jade Rawlins.

  QTV INTERNATIONAL

  THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER, 3.00AM AEST

  Indonesian Army bulldozers are trundling towards the barricades at either end of this protest site, a sure sign that the military assault aimed at ending the Jayapura occupation is just minutes away.

  Half an hour ago, an Indonesian army officer approached the barricades and used a bullhorn to offer everyone here one last chance to leave. There were no takers, as far as I know. And while the military assault was expected to begin at dawn, it now appears the Indonesians will use the cover of darkness to do the job.

  Most of the foreign protestors have joined about three hundred of their Papuan comrades in a big hall off the main square. Other Papuans have taken shelter in the buildings surrounding the square, no doubt fearing extra-rough treatment when the soldiers finally storm this place.

  The protestors here confront their fate with a mixture of fear and defiance. And whatever happens in the coming hours, all of them would say that the three-week occupation has been a success, in that it’s drawn world attention to the plight of the people of Papua and West Papua.

  This is Jean Acheson for QTV in Jayapura.

  6

  ‘My name is Darren Glass,’ I said, my hand poised over Jade’s mouth. ‘I’m a police officer and I’m here to rescue you.’

  She squinted into the darkness, her mouth quivered, and I thought she was going to speak, but she closed her eyes again and her head slumped back onto the edge of the seat. She was clearly too addled to ride pillion, so if I was going to get her out of here, she’d have to ride in a sidecar, and hopefully the one she was already in.

  I reached for the bike’s ignition and felt a fat set of keys hanging from it. My hand lingered on the keys for a moment, but I resisted the impulse to jump on the bike and take off. If I was going to maximise my chances of a successful escape, I had one more job to do.

  I moved down the two lines of bikes and grabbed every exposed fuel line and electric cable I saw and wrenched them from their sockets. I found keys in the ignitions of three of the bikes and tossed them into the darkness. Then I raced back and looked at Jade. She hadn’t moved, so I mounted the bike attached to her sidecar, closed my eyes and turned the key. To my great relief, the big machine fired up straight away. The noise roused Jade, and she opened her eyes and slowly pushed herself up onto the seat of the sidecar. Maybe she wasn’t so doped up, after all.

  A teenage boy walked out from behind the sentries’ platform. He couldn’t see me, but froze when he heard the bike and yelled at the top of his lungs. I depressed the clutch, engaged first gear, and wrapped the throttle on hard. I leant over the petrol tank and released the clutch, and we hurtled out from under the eaves of the shelter.

  The front wheel bounced as it hit the start of the rutted track, forcing me to throttle back a bit. I stayed low over the tank, expecting a spray of bullets to come at me at any moment. When I turned onto the graded road, I wound up the throttle, and the bike surged so powerfully that my guts took a moment to catch up with the rest of my body.

  As I approach the highway, I had a decision to make — one that could determine whether we lived or died. Did I go left, or did I go right? East or west? If the vehicles that’d just passed were the mob from Erldunda, should I try to catch up to them before the bandits caught me? Or should I ride east on the assumption that there’d be more teams coming from that direction?

  As I slowed to turn onto the highway, I made my decision and swung the bike towards the east. I had no idea if I’d done the right thing, but it felt good to be on the road again and to have some sort of control over my fate. I wrapped the throttle around as far as it’d go, but as the speedometer crept passed one hundred and fifteen, the sidecar began to shudder, and I was forced to drop back to a hundred and ten.

  We’d been on the road for a few minutes when a single headlight appeared dimly in the wing mirror. I assumed it belonged to a bikie who’d just turned onto the highway. That put him about five kilometres behind me. If I’d been riding solo on an unencumbered machine, five kilometres would’ve been a good buffer. But with my speed restricted by a misaligned sidecar and the extra weight of a passenger, a pursuit bike travelling at anything up to two hundred kilometres an hour would catch me in no time flat.

  If I wanted to stay ahead of the bikie, I’d have to dump the sidecar. But would the thing decouple? And if I managed to decouple it, would Jade cooperate and agree to ride pillion? And if she did agree, was she capable of sitting upright and holding on? In the end, I might have to tie her down. But where would I find the rope to do that?

  These thoughts were quickly swamped by an even bigger concern: the bikie on our tail would probably catch us before I could lose the sidecar, or he’d at least be within spitting distance before I got the bike back on the road and up to speed. My best option would be to stop, ambush him, then get rid of the sidecar. It went against my grain to kill someone by stealth, and the gunshots would pinpoint my position for the other bikies on our tail. If I killed their comra
de, they’d be even more furious with me than they were now, and regardless of the fact that I had Jade with me, they’d probably rain heavy fire on us once they had us within range. It meant Jade’s life was as much in the balance as mine. But with nothing else up my sleeve, and so little time to work with, I had no choice but to take out the guy closing in on us.

  I tamped the brakes, and when the bike had slowed sufficiently, I hit them hard and skidded off the road. My boots skimmed the gravel as I came to a halt. I jumped off the bike and studied the four bolts and the bracket that joined it to the sidecar. It would’ve been easy to decouple the vehicles with the right tools.

  ‘There’s some things in here maybe you could use,’ said Jade, pulling at a hessian bag at her feet.

  This unexpected assistance answered a big question. Jade would cooperate in our escape. I lifted the bag out of the sidecar and upended it. Among the flurry of tools that fell to the ground was a big shifting spanner that might work for the decoupling. And mixed in with the tools were a dozen short pieces of PVC pipe that’d been cut in half lengthways and painted black.

  The pieces of pipe looked innocuous, but they had a deadly application. Essentially, if you were travelling at two hundred kilometres an hour, as our pursuer was, and you clipped something solid, like this PVC, you’d lose control of your machine in a spectacular fashion.

  I gathered up the pieces of PVC and ran as fast as I could along the highway towards the oncoming bike. I covered a hundred metres in no time flat and laid the PVC across the blacktop, end to end. I threw the leftover pieces into the bush and ran a little way up the road and studied my handiwork. From fifteen metres away, the obstruction looked like a poorly buried section of water pipe, and while the bikie would probably see it, motorcycle headlights had a notoriously short range, so he probably wouldn’t see it in time to save himself.

  The bike’s stressed engine screamed as it closed in on me. I ran into the scrub and dropped to the ground. The headlight lit the pipe, but the bikie only jabbed at his brakes, as if he hadn’t believed his eyes. Then he hit them hard, but too late. The instant the bike made contact with the PVC, it flipped sideways and became airborne, the bikie fell off and hit the road with a crunch, and the bike flew on for another twenty metres before it smashed into the blacktop and tumbled into the scrub.

  I studied the motionless bikie for a moment, then I raced back to my bike and found Jade standing on trembling legs next to the sidecar. She held the shifting spanner low at her side.

  ‘You’re taking me with you, right?’ she said, as I approached her.

  ‘I told you,’ I said, relieving her of the spanner, ‘you’re the reason I’m here. Now, give me a few minutes. We need to get rid of this sidecar.’

  I removed the fuel cap. The tank looked almost three quarters full, so more than enough fuel to get us to Erldunda. I fitted the spanner onto one of the fat nuts that held the sidecar to the bike. It screwed off easily, as did the other three, though the effort aggravated the shoulder I’d injured tangling with the wallaby, and I was still grimacing with the pain as I mounted the unencumbered machine. Jade got up behind me, wrapped her arms around me and clasped her fingers together at my front. I considered tying her on somehow, maybe using my belt, but she was holding on so tight I figured the effects of the drugs had all but passed.

  Not wanting to tempt fate, I moved slowly from the gravel onto the blacktop, gradually wound the throttle on, and we were soon travelling flat out at a bit over a hundred and eighty kilometres an hour.

  More headlights soon appeared in the wing mirror about four kilometres behind us. It looked like five of them. If they were all on the same sort of machine as us, they wouldn’t be travelling any faster than we were — although we had two on our bike, Jade was small and slim, so her impact on our speed would be negligible. And riding in a group was potentially more hazardous than riding solo. It tended to make riders more cautious, and that slowed them down a bit. So being pursued by a group of bandits might actually work in our favour.

  As long as our bike remained healthy, I figured we could beat the bikies to Erldunda, though anything could happen in the two hours it’d take us to get there. And beating them there wouldn’t mean anything if there were no military types at the Erldunda roadhouse to protect us.

  I passed my phone to Jade and asked her to try for a signal. She nudged me a few seconds later.

  ‘Nothing,’ she shouted. ‘Maybe at Erldunda?’

  Maybe. And maybe not. It didn’t really matter. If there were no armed protectors waiting at Erldunda, a phone call wouldn’t get them there in time to save us.

  An infusion of light filled the eastern horizon. It meant I’d soon lose my only advantage over the bikies: my ability to ride dark under the cover of night. I’d been gambling everything on finding protection at Erldunda, but maybe it’d be better if I got off the road, concealed the bike, and found an elevated position from which to take the bikies on, if it came to that.

  The road began to ascend a rocky saddle that ran between the escarpment to the north and a high plateau south of the highway. Halfway up the rise, the bike backfired and lost power, but immediately came back to life. It backfired again, then decelerated rapidly, and we were soon limping up the hill at about fifteen kilometres an hour. This was the last thing we needed. A dodgy escape vehicle that’d decided to die on us.

  ‘We’re going to have to dump it,’ I shouted. ‘And we’ll need to hide it. Let’s hope it doesn’t conk out before we find a good place.’

  ‘I know a place,’ she said. ‘Not far from here.’

  ‘What?’ I said, doubting that she could come up with a solution so quickly.

  ‘My grandad’s spot,’ she said. ‘It’s a little way ahead.’

  ‘Your grandad’s? What sort of place is it?’

  ‘Somewhere to hide the bike. And us.’

  ‘Who knows about it?’

  ‘A few people, I guess. It isn’t a secret or anything. You have a look. See what you think.’

  I leant over and eyed her in the mirror. She had the worried look of someone with plenty to be worried about. Her saviour had run out of ideas, and her flight to freedom looked set to stall. She caught me looking at her and she smiled. A forlorn effort that barely exposed her teeth.

  ‘Where is it?’ I said, eyeing the headlights in the mirror. ‘This place of yours?’

  ‘It’s not mine,’ she said, sounding a bit irritated. ‘It’s my grandad’s, and it’s on the left up here, at the top. I’ll poke you when we’re almost there — if I can see it in this light.’

  I wouldn’t normally have taken directions from a civilian. Especially one giving vague directions to somewhere less-than-secret. I looked at her again. She’d become strangely confident, as though she was certain of what was to follow. If I did as she said, it’d either be the best decision of my life, or the worst.

  The bike spluttered and missed a couple of beats. I expected it to die at any moment. Old piles of soil and blast debris dotted the scrub on both sides of the road. At the top of the rise, the road flattened out, and we entered a long cutting with sheer rock walls that ascended to about twenty metres at their highest point. Jade jabbed me in the ribs and I hit both brakes.

  ‘We’ve passed it,’ she said, pointing back at a mottled shadow in the wall.

  I swung the bike around and headed back towards the shadow. It quickly resolved into a cavity set deep into the wall. I stopped the bike and Jade jumped off and disappeared into the space. It turned out to be a thin wall of rock that jutted out at an acute angle from the main wall to create an overlap. The space was invisible from the west, but exposed to the east. A thicket of saltbush grew in the opening, giving the space some cover.

  Jade re-emerged, and I got off the bike and wheeled it around so that it faced the east. Then, avoiding the saltbush, I backed the machine into the deepest part of the cav
ity. I rocked the bike back onto its stand, and Jade and I stood on either side of it and caught our breath.

  A few minutes later, a barrage of engine noise signalled that the pursuit bikes were ascending the rise. Our survival depended on them not checking their rear vision mirrors after they went past. A piercing, two-toned whine filled the cutting. Then two bikes flew past. Zip, zip. A third followed seconds later. Then a fourth and a fifth. Zip. Zip. Zip.

  The whine from the speeding bikes quickly died in the east and was supplanted by an overlay of more engine noise coming from the west. Jade pressed her back into the rock. The noise built as two bikes topped the rise and passed through the cutting at a leisurely pace. Perhaps this pair held some sort of rank. Maybe they were monitoring the pursuit. Or maybe they’d been assigned to carry out an execution, should that be required.

  I removed my goggles, and everything began to take shape as my eyes adjusted to the early morning light. I stepped from the cavity and looked east down the highway. A hint of engine murmur hung in the air. I assumed it was from the two bikes that’d just passed. They wouldn’t be gone long. Not once the light allowed the front riders to establish that we weren’t on the highway ahead of them. They’d all come back looking for us then, and if they knew about this cavity and zeroed in on it, that’d be the end of us. Jade crunched across the gravel at the side of the road and joined me on the highway.

  ‘So, who knows about our little hidey-hole?’ I said, nodding in the direction of the cavity.

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I only know about it because Grandad brought me out here when I was a kid. It’s where he worked back in the day. Guess he was proud of his part in building this cutting. Him and his mates used to have their smokos in the hidey-hole, as you call it, so I suppose lots of people knew about it back then. But as for who knows now, your guess is as good as mine. We don’t have much choice, though, do we? Where else do we go?’