WHERE THEY FALL, page 29
They saw Jake’s prized camper trailer, abandoned in the sand. The tyres had already been partially covered by the relentless windswept sand. Any signs of struggle, any evidence of execution or kidnapping no longer existed, swept away and covered by the ever-changing red sand. Joel Watson shifted the vehicle into 4WD as they navigated a series of small sand hills.
Jonesy regained consciousness. He found himself sandwiched between Holland and Victor. Sand, blood, sweat, and desperation filled the tray beside them.
“This is madness,” he called from the back, his voice laced with weakness and muffled by the tray’s canopy. “Pull over! Let us out! I’m a damn federal police officer, for fuck’s sake. This is assault!”
Cole leaned out the rear window and spoke into a small Perspex window on the black canopy covering the tray. “You deserve everything you get, man. I trusted you. We trusted you. Whatever happened to friendship? To loyalty? What made you side with these treacherous people?”
Jonesy wiggled himself into a position where he could make eye contact with his former friend. “Don’t take it personally, Cam. It’s money. Money makes the world go round. Money can be a pretty convincing motivator.”
“Then be man enough to deal with the consequences. Where you’re going, you won’t be able to touch that money.”
Jonesy laughed. “You’re an idiot if you think you fools can just drive into Project Alpha? You’ll be dead before you get out of the truck.”
Cole had finished listening to his traitorous friend. He slammed the small Perspex window closed and lowered himself back inside beside his partner.
Blake took Cole’s hand in hers. “Don’t listen to him. He’s desperate.”
“That was a little too close back there, wasn’t it? I kinda thought it was the end?”
“It’s unlike Mister Cameron Cole to give up.” She forced a laugh. “You’re a stubborn bastard at the best of times. I knew we would somehow find our way out of that mess.”
“Jeez, clearly I wasn’t so optimistic.”
“Well, snap out of it and dig deep for that optimism. We’re going to need it. This won’t be easy.”
The surrounding desert flattened off, devoid of all life. No spinifex. No saltbush. Cracks spread across the ground in an endless web of flakes—a ground tortured by the sun’s harsh hostility. Across a slight depression in the sand, glistening with salt residue in the morning sun, Jake pointed to a mound of sand.
“That looks unnatural,” he said. “Like someone has made it?”
“Well, if they’ve dug underground, I suppose the dirt would have to go somewhere?”
Joel Watson turned towards the distant mound and dropped the gear back to third. He drove across the crusty saltpan and noticed tyre tracks. Jake Gibbs saw them too.
“We have to be close,” he said with nervous excitement.
A ramp materialised before them. It descended into a concrete structure of some sort, only wide enough to fit a single vehicle. The ramp came to an abrupt stop beneath the desert surface. A concrete wall blocked their thoroughfare.
“Well… this isn’t ideal?”
Cole leaned back out the window and yanked the Perspex back up.
“How do we get in?”
None of them responded.
“I swear to god if you three don’t start being a little more complaint I’m gonna leave you in the desert to rot!”
“You wouldn’t. You don’t have the balls,” Holland replied.
Drysdale sat crammed in the backseat with Cole and Blake. He opened his door and moved to the tailgate. He pulled it open and grabbed Victor by the ankle. In a swift, emotionless motion, he dragged Victor from the tray and watched the captive fall to the compacted concrete ramp. He winced as he hit the ground, gasping for air as the impact knocked it out of him.
Drysdale leaned down and shoved his finger into the bullet wound in Victor’s shoulder. Victor wailed, screeching louder than when Watson had shot him.
“How do we get inside?”
Tears filled Victor’s scrunched eyes. The man who had displayed a constant level of authoritative leadership and fearlessness over the years of Project Alpha’s operations now grimaced like a frightened child. Prime’s international reach and influence in government wouldn’t help him now. He knew he was nothing more than a guy on the ground with a bullet wound. Prime’s leaders sat in comfortable offices in Shanghai and Stockholm. In Wan Chai and Washington. For all intents and purposes, for Victor, Project Alpha might as well have been on Mars.
“A fob,” he cried. “There’s a fob in the driver’s side foot well.”
“Shut your mouth, Victor,” Holland demanded.
Drysdale leaned into the tray and hit Holland over the head with the butt of his handgun. It didn’t knock him out, but it silenced him long enough to allow Victor to talk.
“The top button opens and closes the outer seal. The bottom button activities the elevator.”
“Elevator?”
“Yes.”
The soldier returned his finger to the bleeding hole beside Victor’s collarbone.
“And what should we expect inside?”
Victor yelped. He tried to wriggle away from the pain. Drysdale’s knee planted firmly on Victor’s chest made it impossible. “A garage. It’s guarded. There’s an entire team of guards inside.”
“How many?”
“Ten. Maybe more. Maybe less. The fact that we’re in Sebastian’s truck means some are off site...”
Drysdale wiped his bloody finger on the thigh of his fatigues and left Victor lying on the ramp, his blue suit tarnished with red dirt stains. He closed the tailgate and returned to the car.
“Are you just going to leave him out there?” Blake asked as he squeezed back inside the truck.
“Where’s he going to go? His wrists and ankles are zip-tied together. If he frees himself, good luck to him out there.”
Joel Watson didn’t protest. He reached forward into the foot well and searched. His fingers struck a small plastic device mounted to the inner wall beside his left leg. He pressed down on the top button. The only sound they heard was Victor’s whimpering as the wall before them parted on silent axles.
“Who’s got a phone?” asked Cole.
“I do,” Ryan replied. “But I’ve got no service.”
“I know that. But get it out. Film this. Film all of it. We need concrete evidence. We cannot let corruption sweep this under some political rug.”
Ryan pulled his Samsung from the pocket of his jeans and held the camera up, documenting the entrance to Project Alpha.
“Can you believe this?” he mumbled to the other six people crammed inside the Hilux.
No one replied. They stared, trance-like, waiting to see what might greet them on the other side. Ryan kept filming as Watson inched the Hilux forward. They entered a small, square concrete box. Other than some yellow text stencilled on the walls and a dark stain on the floor, possibly from leaking oil, the box was featureless.
Once inside, away from the brutal glare of the mid-morning sun, the temperature and light dropped right off. The silence carried an eerie weight to it. Unnatural. The darkness consumed the Hilux and its passengers.
“Weapons ready,” Watson said as he pressed down on the bottom button.
The door rolled closed behind them. Watson flicked the headlights back on. Cole, Blake, Jake Ryan, Joel Watson and his two soldiers all flinched in unison as the concrete cell groaned to life. They felt gravity shift underneath them.
They all tensed in their seats as they descended into the belly of the beast.
After twenty seconds of silence, a door opened before them.
FIFTY-THREE
Sharon Harvey had heard nothing from the police in days.
Lachlan’s disappearance had been at the forefront on most mainstream media for the first two days, but now it seemed both public and police interest had dropped off. For her and their daughter, Allie, this only heightened their sense of helplessness. Two detectives had showed up, asked questions and made accusations, and since then, she hadn’t heard from them.
Sharon felt abandoned. She demanded more. After going through high school and university with Superintendent Casey McArthur’s husband, Aaron, she knew the senior police leader better than most people. While Allie stayed home, nestled on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and the television remote both planted firmly on her lap, Sharon climbed up into the driver’s seat of the family Toyota Prado and left their Sandringham home.
Two suburbs over, she came to the driveway of Casey and Aaron McArthur. Thoughts raced. Desperation clawed at her worried mind. She had run out of tears to cry. She felt both a crushing sense of sorrow but a rising sense of anger. How could the police be so apathetic? Did her friendship with Aaron and Casey mean nothing?
Still wearing her brown ugg boots and Country Road tracksuit pants, Sharon stormed across their flawlessly manicured front lawn, past their neat Australian native garden, and banged on the frosted window beside the front door. After a minute of rising frustration, the lock clicked and Aaron pulled the front door open.
“Shaz!” His face morphed into a confused combination of a smiling mouth and questioning eyebrows. His black eyebrows were flawless, plucked to perfection. His jawline was strong and clean-shaven. Aaron, pushing fifty, had the physique and healthy skin of someone pushing forty. Even with a receding hairline, Aaron’s blonde hair never had a strand out of place. “It’s so good to see you, hun. What brings you here?”
“I’m not here for a social visit, Aaron. Where’s Casey?”
“He’s out the back. Something about a leaking irrigation system. Here, come on in, hun.”
Sharon Harvey stepped inside, and Aaron closed the door behind her. He gave her a welcoming hug and left his potent cologne lingering on the shoulder of her hooded sweater. He had always been overzealous with cologne.
Sharon knew her way around the McArthur house well enough. She didn’t wait for Aaron’s invitation. She stormed down the hardwood hallway, bypassing the living room and lounge and thundered through the back bi-fold doors. Casey McArthur was not tinkering with the irrigation. He stood on the back deck with his phone in one hand and his iPad in the other. Seeing Sharon Harvey step out on the deck, he mumbled something to whoever was on the other end of the call and hung up.
“Shaz?”
“Why have I heard nothing? Why have those detectives not told me a thing? Casey, you owe me more than this. What the hell are you doing to find Lachy?”
Superintendent Casey McArthur placed both his phone and his tablet on the wooden table beside him. He picked up a Corona and took a healthy swig. It was then that Sharon noticed the concern etched into his face. The worry lines appeared more noticeable than normal. His face seemed devoid of colour.
“Sharon, I might have learned of some valuable information regarding Lachy. I think you should sit down.”
FIFTY-FOUR
The guards at C5 looked up as Lachlan turned the corner.
Sweat beaded on his brow. Blood covered both his hands. Noticing this, the guards stepped forward and reached for their weapons. Lachlan drew on his best efforts learned from Year 12 drama class all those years before.
“Help,” he forced out. “A subject has lost his mind. He’s hurt Stephen. There’s no one else around. Please help.”
The wary stares of suspicion faded, replaced with scowls of concern. “Where?”
“In the control room. Hurry!”
Lachlan turned and led the way back to the control room, making it up as he went. He clutched Lawrence’s all-access security fob in one hand. The two mercenaries followed behind him. Could his crazy plan work? If it didn’t, it would be certain death.
Something more powerful than himself surged through Lachlan Harvey. Survival instinct caused actions to occur without his usual analytical approach. His body did things before he processed them, something very much out of character for the synthetic biologist.
He entered the control room. A puddle of vomit covered the tiles in the room’s centre. The whisky bottle stood in the centre of the control table. The mercenaries noticed smears of blood and signs of struggle. Their eyes gravitated towards the cell with Stephan and Lawrence inside, both lying still on the floor.
“In there,” Lachlan said. “They’re in there. They need help.”
“Where’s the subject?”
“I don’t know. He ran off. Please, they need medical attention.”
The taller and more senior of the two mercenaries, Danny, rushed into the small cell as the door rolled open. The second stayed in the control room beside Lachlan.
Shit!
Danny checked both men’s vitals and then saw Stephen’s face. Blood covered much of it. His cheek hung open with a gaping gouge halfway to his ear.
“Holy shit, they’ve mauled Stephen.” He turned to look at Lachlan Harvey. The mercenary studied Lachlan’s pale complexion. His eyes gravitated to Lachlan’s bloodied hands and the stains around the nail beds on his fingers.
Lachlan sensed Danny’s suspicion return.
So he acted on this newfound instinct. He needed to survive. He wouldn’t let it all come crashing down. Not now. He vowed to see his daughter’s face again. Even if it meant more violence. As the closer guard watched the scene before him, Lachlan swiped the whisky bottle from the control table and swung. The bottle shattered as it hit the back of the mercenary’s head. Before the dazed mercenary hit the ground, Lachlan reached up at the control panel with the electronic fob. The door to the cell rolled closed. Danny didn’t get two steps before the glass retracted, confining him inside with the bodies of the two scientists. The other, unknown mercenary lay on the control room floor with a gash in the back of his head, shards of glass poking out through his bloodied and wet hair.
Lachlan opened the bottom drawer of the control room table and pulled out a roll of black duct-tape. His heart hammered. His hands shook unsteadily as he tried to peel the tape off the roll. As the mercenary lay lifeless on the floor, Lachlan started wrapping the tape around his wrists. His victim groaned with unconscious discomfort. After Lachlan wrapped his wrists tight with layers of tape, he moved to his ankles.
Layer after layer, Lachlan rolled the tape until he was certain the restraints would hold. He had never touched a gun before. Shit, he had never even seen one. He pulled the weapon from the man’s holster and held it. Heavy and cold in his quivering grip; he studied the weapon with fast eyes. He found the safety switch easily enough. He flicked it. Then he located another small button. Pressing that, the magazine slipped out the bottom of the grip. He shoved it back in. Lachlan had seen enough movies to know that if he wanted to load a bullet into the chamber, he needed to cock the slide back. Not just yet. He flicked the safety back on and shoved it into the waist of his bloodied trousers.
Danny had been slamming his fists against the glass the whole time, yelling blasphemous threats at Lachlan Harvey. He pulled his matching M1 nine millimetre pistol from the holster on his belt and aimed it at the glass separating him from Lachlan, shaking with adrenalin mere metres from him.
“I wouldn’t,” Lachlan pleaded.
Danny didn’t listen. He pulled the trigger. A bullet exited the gun and bounced off the bulletproof glass, lodging itself into Stephen’s thick body mass, lying lifeless on the floor. Stephen, already unconscious, didn’t make a sound.
“Don’t!”
Danny fired again. He might have been a seasoned mercenary and skilled in combat, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. The second bullet lodged itself in the wall behind him, missing his own head by centimetres and sending brick shrapnel splintering through the small cell.
“It’s bulletproof, you idiot,” Lachlan roared through the glass. He stood and turned to leave.
“You’re a dead man, Lachlan Harvey.”
He didn't reply. Instead, he turned and left Danny standing in the cell, gripping his useless weapon. The other guard lay taped up and bound on the floor as Lachlan took off at a jog. He swallowed, fighting rising nausea. He reached the door to C5 and used Stephen’s fob. The door rolled open. A heavy chemical smell hit Lachlan as he entered. It burned his nose, a mixture of overpowering cleaning products and something more dreadful.
Cells lined the corridor. Many had open doors. Many didn’t.
“Girls! Girls, where are you?” His screams echoed down the empty hall.
Nothing.
Lachlan came to the first closed door on his left. He used the fob. A red light flashed. He tried it again. Nothing. He slammed the butt of the gun against the door and felt the helplessness reverberate along his arm.
“Is anyone in there?”
Muffled stirring. Then a hoarse voice replied. Undoubtedly female. “Help.”
Lachlan kicked the door. The steel didn’t budge. Fear left him. The need to do his part, to make good for the sins he had committed, overpowered any worries of Alana or the mercenaries. They had violated innocent women. He had assisted with it. If he were ever to find redemption, if he could ever absolve himself of the guilt, he needed to save them.
“Stand back,” he yelled through the door, unaware if the room’s tenants could do so. Perhaps they were restrained? Chained to the wall? Tied to the bed? He flicked the safety switch and, for the first time in his sheltered existence, he pulled the trigger of a firearm.
He flinched as the deafening roar bounced off the walls of the corridor. Steam bellowed from the gun’s barrel. Lachlan realised he had squeezed his eyes closed. He opened them to see a hole right through the digital lock. Turning the handle, he watched as the door swung open.
“It’s okay,” he pleaded. “I’m here to rescue you.”
Two women cowered in the corner. Both were naked. He recognised one as the women they extracted the eggs from. The other, a slender brunette with tanned skin, a toned body and fiery eyes, wrapped her arms around the victim of their inhumane surgery, offering her friend protection. They both stared at Lachlan with caution, doing their best to conceal their private parts from his busy eyes.
