WHERE THEY FALL, page 26
Chung nodded. “That’s Sebastian.” Her jaw hung open in disbelief. “And Marc…”
“What has happened here?”
“Jesus Christ,” Blake announced, seeing inside the van. “This was no accident. Someone has placed that body in there.”
“No shit, Rach. His hands are bound and he has a bullet wound to his chest.”
“Is he dead?” Chung asked with a low, almost child-like whisper.
Cole reached into the van and checked the closest body for a pulse. There wasn’t one. The bound victim was dead. The four other bodies in the back had a mix of injuries. Some indicative of a car accident, others with gruesome stab wounds and missing eyes. Cole could tell from their pale, almost bluish complexion and their wide, dilated pupils that death had claimed them.
“This is getting weirder,” Cole said, turning to Blake. “Should we contact someone? This isn’t just a crime scene. This is a murders spree. We need cops on it.”
“Cops like who?” Blake said. “You can’t call it in. Who knows what’ll happen if you do?”
Chung sobbed in the background. She had been quite close to Sebastian. He had been at the Project since the beginning. They had shared stories. They had shared lunch. Once, several years ago, they had even shared a bed.
“We should go.”
It was Chung that said it. She stood behind Cole and Blake and inched back towards their own van.
“Surely we won’t leave a van full of bodies in the middle of the highway,” said Blake. “It feels so wrong.”
“Rach, everything we have done from the second we opened the PO box has felt wrong. Look where we are, for fuck’s sake. I’ve got a burner phone. We’re outside our jurisdiction. We’ve kidnapped Alex Chung.”
“So what do we do?”
“We stick to the plan. We get to Jonesy and his team and let him call it in to the AFP. Unless someone passing by calls it in first.”
Blake looked both ways along the highway, the white lines swallowed by the darkness.
“I don’t think anyone is passing by out here.”
“Then come on. Chung’s right. We should go.”
Blake nodded. Cole returned to the driver’s side of the van, apprehension weighing down each step. The dirty burden of guilt clung to his skin, making it crawl with unease. Cole’s intentions had always been pure. He had always strived to do what’s right. Finding Harvey was right. Exposing corruption in the police force was right. Leaving a van full of bodies to rot in the desert heat wasn’t right. He hated himself for doing it. He felt ashamed.
“Eyes on the prize,” he whispered to himself. “Jonesy can call it in.”
Cole didn’t slow down as they went through Lyndhurst.
A handful of ramshackle farmhouses hugged the west side of the road. Not a single light glowed in any of the dwellings. Windswept sand covered much of the bitumen. Saltbush crawled out onto the verge, the only living thing present for kilometres. A dingy service station occupied the central real estate of the town. Chung has requested to stop there to use the toilet and get some water. She insisted, almost suspiciously. Even after Cole gave her his answer, she pleaded they stop. Blake gave Cole a look. Cole knew what it meant. They’d worked together long enough to read each other’s expressions.
Caution.
They would never know the atrocities that took place inside the hallways of that service station. Chung knew who owned it. She also knew that Prime lined his pockets to keep him as a watchman, someone to provide information on people passing through. She had wanted to stop and raise the alarm. Cole didn’t allow it. It didn’t matter, though. The watchman was dead.
Cole almost missed the turnoff to the track. Outside the yellow glow of the Ford's headlights, the oil-black night sky swallowed everything. The clouds swamped the moon. The stars were in hiding. After leaving town, the bitumen ended, and the corrugated dirt road sliced through the desert before them.
Anticipation. Fear. Redemption. Cole’s mind was a manic mess, his thoughts frenzied by his own self-analysis. He questioned his motives. He doubted his actions. He gripped the steering wheel as the van bounced across the rutted dirt and forced his mind to stay focused. Get to Mount Hopeless. Liaise with Jonesy. It will all be over soon.
An hour passed. Chung slipped into a light sleep again. Cole’s eyes scanned the road with vigilance. Blake did the same. Seeing the graphic crime scene on the highway had pumped their fatiguing minds with much needed adrenalin. Whatever was happening out here in the great expanse needed to be uncovered. Now, at the eleventh hour, they both felt like they were on the home stretch.
Another hour came and went. The wreckage of Jonas’ caravan lay in the saltbush to the south of the track. The van’s headlights, even on high beam, didn’t pick up the wreckage, hidden by the angle of the road. Unbeknown to him, he drove straight past the resting place of two innocent victims caught up in Alpha Numerix’ brutal efforts to cover up their crimes.
Blake’s watch passed the witching hour. Four am came and went. Cole brought the van to a slow crawl as the headlights reflected off a rusted sign ahead. They edged towards the sign, the change in speed waking Chung in the back. Like everything else in the desert, the sign had a layer of red dirt covering it, the faded writing difficult to read in the headlights.
Mount Hopeless Road
Mount Hopeless: 18 kilometres.
Lake Callabonna: 42 kilometres.
“Eighteen k’s to go,” Blake said with a yawn. “If I have to stare at much more of this desert, I think my eyes are going to fall out of my skull.”
“Yeah, look,” Cole replied. “If I had to look back at some of the stupider things I’ve committed to, driving across a quarter of our country non-stop would be up there. I think I’ve got bedsores forming on my arse from sitting down too long.”
Blake laughed and then winced as the hardened scabs on her face stretched to their threshold. Chung even forced a slight giggle from the back, an organic response to Cole’s sarcasm.
The van had less than half a tank of fuel. Cole assumed they might get a ride in Jonesy’s chopper, thus bringing their journey in the Alpha Numerix vehicle to a well-deserved end. He turned south onto Mount Hopeless Road, which could barely be called a road. Two tyre tracks cut through the sand, snaking their way through a boulder field free from vegetation. They pulled into a flat patch of graded gravel at the start of the Mount Hopeless trailhead. To call it a parking lot would have given it too much credit. Regardless of what to call it, these were the coordinates that Jonesy had. There was no helicopter there.
“They’ll be here,” Cole said, sensing the worry on Blake’s face. “Trust me. Jonesy won’t let us down.”
Cole turned the ignition off and stepped outside the vehicle. The blood flow returned to his legs, causing pins and needles to tickle his toes. He stared south along the trailhead, struggling to imagine what Mount Hopeless may look like. In a place so flat, he struggled to accept that somewhere in the darkness to the south, a mountain rose out of the plains.
He shared the last of their water with Blake. He offered Chung a sip, and she gulped from the plastic bottle in Cole’s hand. Chung warmed to the pair the longer they spent together. She spoke of the subjects and the testing that Alpha Numerix did on those subjects. She spoke of Alana, the head scientist at the project. The floodgates opened. Chung didn’t hold back. Accepting her fate, she had picked a side. She would rather be a snitch and give Cole and Blake what they wanted than sit in a pool of piss any longer.
Both detectives paced with nervous anticipation. Chung sat on the tailgate of the van. They hadn’t eaten properly in a day, yet given the circumstances; it didn’t seem to bother them. Hunger had been subdued by the underlying tones of survival, of preparation for a fight.
First light appeared to the east. They’d been there for thirty minutes. Perhaps more. The thinning clouds caused the morning light to cast bluish green tones across the desert scape. Cole realised, staring to the east, that he had never seen a desert sunrise. Its beauty captivated him. For a moment, he forgot about Harvey. He forgot about Chung’s handcuffs and the bodies leaking blood in the shattered van. Blues, pinks, purples and reds stained the open canvas as it came to life before him. Features became visible. The silhouette of Mount Hopeless appeared on the horizon, nothing more than an underwhelming lump of dirt in the distance. Freedom and brutal beauty embodied the morning glow. Deep silence only enhanced the feeling. Cole felt insignificant, a tiny organism within a sea of endless sand.
Something interrupted the silence. A distant purr intensified into the roar of an aircraft. Cole looked up and spotted the navigational lights on either side of the craft. Even in the darkness, he noticed the silhouette of the helicopter’s rotating blades, their cacophony casting a piercing howl across the early morning sky.
Chung shuffled with nervousness, her reality impossible to ignore. Blake joined Cole on the roadside and together they watched the helicopter swoop overhead before performing a gut-wrenching arc to the north that seemed to defy physics. The pilot then brought the aircraft down on the gravel with seasoned efficiency. The rotating blades sent red sand spraying across the clearing. Blake and Cole forced their eyes closed as the chopper descended, the grains slapping their faces like hundreds of tiny needles.
The blades slowed down. The pilot had landed the craft in front of the van, the black Federal Police decals lit up by the van’s headlights. A sense of relief washed over Cole. They weren’t alone any longer. They had the support they so desperately needed. Rescuing Harvey and bringing Project Alpha down was now within their reach.
He smiled. Exhausted, he turned to his partner. She smiled too.
Relief.
The side door of the chopper slid open on smooth rails. Cole watched his old friend leap from the opening and land with suede boots in the red sand. He wore civilian clothing—a pair of stonewashed jeans and a caramel colour bomber jacket. His hairstyle hadn’t changed since two decades prior, when he first started university with Cole. Before joining the force, Cameron Cole had attempted to study Human Movement. One year into the course, they both realised it wasn’t for them and they decided the police force would be their calling.
Jonesy had more facial hair than Cole remembered. He had a well-maintained beard, dark in the silver morning light. He looked towards Blake and Cole standing beside the black van. Cole smiled, an involuntary reaction to seeing his old friend. Jonesy didn’t smile back. He remained stoic beside the chopper as another man descended the collapsible ladder mounted to the aircraft’s frame. Cole studied the navy-blue suit and the caramel-brown dress shoes. The man was Asian. He wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses and his hair, as black as death, gelled to the side in a slick comb-over.
A strange sense of dread overcame Cole. Blood rushed to his face. The Asian man made eye contact with Chung. She smiled. It didn’t take a detective to sense they knew each other.
The desert shrank around them as Cole turned back to the chopper. A third man descended the ladder. Brown sports jacket. Bald head. Thick moustache. The man turned to the two detectives standing in shock beside the stolen van and formed a menacing grin.
The colour drained from Cole’s face. Blake fell to her knees.
“What the fuck?”
Cameron Cole couldn’t muster another word as he stared across the parking lot at Inspector Jasper Holland.
FORTY-SIX
Reality drained hope from Cole’s bones.
He felt powerless, sick with realisation as Jonesy pulled an automatic rifle from the helicopter’s cabin. He aimed it towards the two Major Crimes detectives.
“I told you to forget about Lachlan Harvey,” Holland hissed, pulling his service weapon from a holster inside his jacket. “I told you to let it go, but you had to be heroes.”
Cole ignored Holland and stared at his old friend. He narrowed his eyes and clenched his hands into two tightened fists. The betrayal felt like a bullet had lodged in his stomach, almost forcing him to keel over. “C’mon, man. How could you do this? We were best mates.”
Jonesy cackled as he approached with the rifle raised. “How could I do this? Easy! The money, Cam! Anyone who says they can’t be bought hasn’t been given the right offer.”
Tears welled in Cole’s tired eyes. Reality set in. He cast a quick glance at Blake. She, too, knew just how dire their situation was. There wasn’t an easy way out. “What about our friendship? What about doing what’s right?”
“Fuck all that,” Jonesy cackled. “This is bigger than you and me, mate. This is unstoppable.”
“Now throw your weapons in the dirt,” Holland demanded. “There’s only one way this thing ends.”
Cole hesitated before pulling his Smith & Wesson from the waist of his chinos and flinging it into the desert sand. Blake did the same.
“Victor? Please pat them both down. We don’t want any surprises.”
The Asian man in the navy suit approached Cole. He patted both detectives down, finding no threats in their pockets. Victor pulled a cheap service station mobile phone from the pocket of Cole’s chinos and dropped it to the gravel. He stomped on it, crushing the screen with his expensive shoes.
Chung walked forward, no longer a prisoner. Excitement forced her strides to double in pace. “Victor, am I glad to see you,” she said. “Can you please get these damn cuffs off me?”
Victor stepped away from Rachael Blake and turned to face his colleague. The distressed look of acceptance had left her face, replaced with a new sense of hope. Her eyes had brightened. The lines beside her eyes had vanished. Victor stopped beside a pile of loose gravel—his brown dress shoes an odd accompaniment to the desert dirt. He pulled a pistol from inside his jacket. The movement was fast, too fast for Cole to process. The deafening roar of the gun being fired echoed across the desert. Cole flinched. From the corner of his eye, he saw the back of Chung’s head explode as she fell to the sand. Blood pooled beside her leaking skull, an entry wound visible in the centre of her forehead.
“Jesus,” Cole yelled. “What did you do that for, you animal?”
Victor returned his weapon to the holster inside his suit, leaned forward and brushed dust from his shoes. He looked up at the Major Crimes detective with a stone-cold, unreadable expression. “The psycho-analysis we did on Alexandra when we recruited her gave us a ninety percent assurance that she would snitch if authorities apprehended her. I’d be interested to know how much she told you, Detective? As I’m sure she didn’t keep her mouth shut.”
“Well, now she’ll never be able to tell you,” Blake yelled. “This is insane. How can you just go around killing people? She was one of your own!”
“There is no such thing as one of our own. There is only the Project. Everyone that’s part of the Project is expendable. The science will continue without Alex. It will continue without Lachlan Harvey. It will continue without the two of you…”
Cole’s eyes narrowed once more. “You’re a piece of shit.”
Holland and Jonesy laughed from behind Victor, entertained by Cameron Cole’s defiance.
“Cam, does anyone else even know you’re out here?” Jonesy asked. It was rhetorical. “We located your car in Elizabeth. We traced your phone to Adelaide’s eastern suburbs. No one, other than Holland, Victor and me, even knows you’re here. Pretty easy to dispose of you nosy fuckers, if you ask me.” He cackled again.
Holland approached. He buttoned up the front of his brown jacket. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” False sincerity dripped from his words. “I like you two, I do. But you should have just worked on the ATM robberies and left this alone. Now get on the ground.”
“Get on the ground?”
“Did I stutter, Rachael?”
“Get on your knees, Detectives. You have inconvenienced us, but Victor is correct, the Project will continue.”
Cole refused to move. He stood still, unwavering, as Jonesy aimed his Heckler & Koch G36 rifle at his stone-cold face.
Holland approached Cole and backhanded him with an almighty whack. Cole almost lost his footing. He stumbled for a few steps, and then regained his balance. He rushed forward and hit Holland as hard as could in the stomach, forgetting about the weapons aimed at him. Holland buckled over and dropped to his knees, crumpling like a house of cards in the wind. Fire burned from Cole’s eyes. Survival, anger, and retribution bubbled behind those blue irises. Victor swung his handgun and hit Cole over his sweaty, shaven head. The blow slowed him down. His knees shook beneath him. He felt the warm trickle of blood cascade over his eyebrow.
“Get on the ground, Cam.” Holland clutched his stomach with one hand and shoved the barrel of his handgun into Cole’s bloody forehead. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. Don’t make me bring Jenny into this.”
“You fuckin’ wouldn’t.”
“There are many things I’m capable of,” Holland replied. “Hurting children is not something I enjoy, but put it this way, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Tears fell from Cole’s eyes. Blake’s skin tone had changed a few shades lighter. Cole looked at his partner, his best friend, his rock. Defeat embodied that stare. Acceptance. Guilt. Regret. Blake’s worry extinguished the fire that burned within Cole. They couldn’t win. “I’m sorry, Rach,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I dragged you here with me.”
Blake cried. Her bloodshot eyes tightening as the floodgates opened.
“Now kneel!”
Blake knelt first. She lowered herself slowly until her knees rested on the sharp gravel. She didn’t care. Pain was purposeless in a time like this. She looked to the east and watched the colours of the sunrise leak across the plains. Instinctively, as a last attempt to fight, she scooped a handful of gravel into her functioning hand. The act went unnoticed.
Cameron Cole was a stubborn motherfucker. But he seemed to accept how dire his situation was. He knew defeat when he saw it. He joined Blake on the gravel as he thought of Jenny. Of her innocence and her smile. Of the attitude that every day reminded him of his wife. His thoughts turned to Lizzie. The idea of leaving Jenny behind, of not saying goodbye, broke him. His breathing became short and erratic. The only solace he found was that he would see his wife again sooner than he had planned. He thought of Lizzie’s smile. Of her eyes. Her touch. He prayed, as he knelt and faced the rising sun, that he would be in her arms soon.
