The Silver Serpent, page 29
After two more passes, there was nothing left to destroy down there. Not a single building was still standing, and there were barely any patches of ground that weren’t on fire. Secondary explosions were still popping off here and there as gas bottles detonated in the heat and the fuel tanks of burning vehicles ruptured. Thick black smoke poured from the fires and was dispersed by the rotor blast. It had taken them less than four minutes to reduce the entire place to rubble, wreckage and utter ruin. Even some of the hottest little battle zones Ben had seen in his SAS days had been less comprehensively flattened. If this exercise had been a punitive mission, at least in part, then he was satisfied that Wiley Cooper’s establishment had suffered just about all the punishment he could give it.
He nudged Abbie’s shoulder and pointed downwards. She nodded, understanding the signal. Swooping low over the wrecked fence she brought the chopper into a hover twenty yards from the compound perimeter and four feet off the ground, whipping up dust and stones and tearing at the bushes, just long enough for Ben to jump out, run back to the fence and leave his message.
Ben reckoned that the message would be clear enough. The simple handwritten note consisted of just four words: WILEY COOPER – CALL ME, with his mobile number below. He pinned it to the smoke-blackened wire mesh with a clothes peg from Abbie’s washing line, then ran back to the waiting chopper, leaped aboard and they took off, leaving the blazing, razed compound behind them. Within minutes the scene was far behind them in the darkness, just a faint red glow on the horizon.
‘What about the police?’ Abbie had asked him with a frown when he’d described his plan to her earlier that day. She’d had no problem with destroying Cooper’s place, but she was dubious about the wisdom of leaving a calling card. ‘What if Cooper’s got a whole bunch of cops listening in when he phones your number? You’d be laying yourself wide open to a trap.’
‘Except that Cooper’s already in a trap himself,’ Ben had replied. ‘He knows we have him by the balls for kidnap, attempted murder and enough other charges to finish him for ever. The last thing he needs is to involve the law. So when the emergency services have finished poring over the place trying to figure out what the hell happened there, even though he’ll know damn well who did this to him he won’t be inclined to point the finger at me. He’ll want to settle this his own way, and get rid of me quickly and quietly without anyone else knowing. Meanwhile, the chopper won’t be easily identifiable in the dark and with the registration marks painted out. Even the shell casings on the ground were from unregistered weapons. So the police won’t have any evidence to link us to the attack.’
‘The note itself could be evidence. If they find it before Cooper does, won’t they try calling the number on it?’
‘And risk letting the perpetrator know they’re onto him?’ Ben had said. ‘No, what they’ll do is try to trace that number. Let them. They won’t get very far.’
Now, after the event, any trepidation Abbie had felt was washed away in a flood of excitement. She talked nonstop for the whole journey back, so pumped full of adrenaline that she couldn’t stop grinning. ‘Oh, my God, did you see that? Did you see that?’
‘Now it’s just a matter of waiting for Cooper to take the bait,’ Ben said.
Chapter 46
In the meantime, the pair of them would be kept busy enough. The moment they landed back at the secret sanctuary of old man Logan’s place, the armaments had to be dismantled from the helicopter, stripped, cleaned, reassembled and put away safe. No trace could be allowed to remain of the temporary modifications they’d made to the Huey. Once the weapons and their mountings had been removed, Ben tidied out the inside of the cabin, carefully disposing of every last shell casing that might have rolled under a seat or into some nook or cranny, along with every small piece of belt linkage that the M60s had liberally spat all over the floor. In the end he had a heavy bagful of scrap steel and brass that he buried deep in a hole at the far end of the apple orchard.
By the time dawn cast its bloody light through the mist of morning, he’d finished cleaning down the outside of the aircraft, washing off the smoke stains and fired weapons residue from the dull olive-green paintwork. He kept looking up at the sky, watching the turbulent dark clouds scudding overhead and thinking that if the impending storm chose this moment to break, a deluge of rain would clean the helicopter a damn sight better than he ever could. The threat had been waxing and waning for what felt like forever – but it was close now, very close. He could feel it building by the hour, teasing the parched earth with its promise. There was a smell in the air like static electricity. We’re in for a right gully raker, Abbie had said; nobody knew the Northern Territory weather better than a keen-eyed aviator born and raised in this land, and he wouldn’t have taken a million-dollar bet that she was wrong.
After a rushed breakfast eaten on the hoof, the chopper was brought inside the barn on a moving dolly so that they could repaint the registration markings on the sides of the fuselage.
‘I still can’t believe we did it,’ Abbie chuckled as they worked. ‘Cooper must’ve blown his gasket by now.’ They’d had the workshop radio tuned to a local station all morning, but so far there’d been no mention of anything unusual having taken place in the Barkly Region overnight. There was no question in Ben’s mind that the company boss would have been roused from his bed in the early hours of that morning and been among the first at the scene of the carnage. The note clipped to the wire would soon have been discovered, and while it would lead the cops nowhere, it would mean plenty to old Wiley.
‘You did a great job,’ he told her.
‘So did this baby,’ Abbie said, fondly stroking the helicopter’s side. The veteran warrior had made its brief comeback and acquitted itself perfectly. ‘Now she’s a civvie again, I reckon the old girl’s earned herself a long, happy retirement. We’ve got an empty hangar at the airfield. She can live there, and maybe I’ll take her out for a spin now and then. She can’t just be a museum piece. Dad would have hated that.’
‘Before you hang up her spurs,’ Ben said, ‘there’s one more little mission for her to complete. I need you to fly me back to my car.’
Abbie looked at him, crestfallen. ‘Don’t tell me you’re leaving?’
He smiled. ‘You won’t be rid of me just yet.’
And Ben was right, because there was plenty more work to be done in readiness for Cooper’s next move, a lot of detailed planning to figure out, some long-distance driving to do, and some people to contact. The flight out to where he’d left the Mean Machine and the drive back to her place took several hours, and it was mid-afternoon when he returned to what was now their base of operations. He’d called the Tennant Creek Hospital from the road, to check on Jeff, Kip and Lynne. Dr Monroe sounded pleased with their recovery, especially Jeff’s, who was healing well, and said she’d be happy to discharge them all in a few more days.
Ben was glad to hear it, partly out of relief that they were doing fine and also because a few more days’ confinement in the safety of the hospital would keep them out of harm’s way while he finished what he’d started. Not even the long arm of Wiley Cooper could reach them there. Ben expected things to start happening soon, possibly within a matter of hours.
It didn’t happen. The rest of the day went by, a blur of activity spent making more phone calls and travelling more miles to and fro in preparation for the next phase of his plan, and by the end of it there had still been no contact from Wiley Cooper.
‘You know what, maybe we scared him so badly he won’t call at all,’ Abbie reflected late that evening, as the two of them sat close together relaxing on the comfortable sofa in the darkened living room, her head resting on his shoulder, his arm around hers. She was wearing a velvety dressing gown and her damp hair smelled pleasantly of fresh apples. ‘Maybe he’s scarpered off to Tasmania or New Zealand and he’ll never be seen in these parts again.’
Ben had considered that possibility, but his instinctive understanding of his enemy told him different. ‘I doubt that.’
‘Or maybe he didn’t even get the message,’ she said, raising her head from his shoulder at the thought, her eyes gleaming anxiously in the semi-darkness. ‘Is that possible?’
‘He’ll call,’ Ben said. ‘He’s just considering his options. Wondering what’s next, trying to second-guess us and making his plans, like we are. His mother didn’t name him Wiley for nothing.’
‘I don’t know, Ben,’ Abbie said uncertainly. ‘I just hope this is going to work.’
They went off to bed, and Wiley didn’t call. Long after Abbie had gone to sleep cuddled up beside him, Ben lay awake staring at the darkness and listening for the phone, but all he heard for the rest of that night were the distant calls of the nocturnal creatures through the window and the gentle, slow, steady sound of Abbie’s breathing close by, like the soft whisper of the tide that made him think of his old stretch of pebbly beach in Galway and all the many hours he’d sat there on the flat rock gazing out to sea. Those had been sadder, emptier times in his life, but simpler times; some innermost part of him yearned to be there again. Sometimes he felt so lost that he didn’t know what he wanted at all.
The phone remained silent as another red dawn crept through the bedroom window, and as Ben slipped out of the bed, careful not to wake her, to go for an early-morning run. It lay on the kitchen table between them as they sat eating breakfast a couple of hours later; and it was still resolutely mute that mid-morning as he was making some final adjustments to things in the workshop. All through that time, he never doubted for an instant that Wiley would call sooner or later. Abbie’s optimism, by contrast, was ebbing fast and the sense of anticlimax was wearing her down, making her sullen and depressed.
And then, as midday approached and those dark thunderclouds were gathering ever more ominously, blanketing the whole sky and blotting out the sunlight so that even the squawking flocks of galahs in the trees abandoned their chorus and went off to seek shelter from the coming storm, Ben’s confidence was proved to have been well founded.
He let the phone ring five times before he picked up. The caller ID was anonymous, but the moment he heard the raspy, harsh voice on the line he knew who it was.
‘That you, Hope?’ growled the voice.
‘Hello, Wiley. What’s been keeping you so long?’
‘Some piece of shit blew up my fucking place of business last night, that’s what’s been keeping me. And I’ve a feeling it was you.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Yeah, yeah, right. Well, you got my attention. So what the fucking hell do you want, Hope?’
‘To have the pleasure of meeting you face to face, so we can discuss the situation we find ourselves in,’ Ben said. ‘Something tells me you’d like that too, wouldn’t you?’
‘What’s there to discuss? You fucked me over, now I’m going to fuck you over back, a thousand times harder. This isn’t finished.’
‘I know that,’ Ben said. ‘Which is why I have a proposition for you. One that settles this thing for ever.’
A thoughtful silence on the line. Then Wiley rasped, ‘All right, Hope. I’ll meet you. Name the place.’
‘It’s somewhere I think you know,’ Ben said, and told him where it was. ‘Come alone. Five hours from now. That gives you plenty of time to get your act together.’ It also gave Ben time to finish making his own final arrangements.
‘Oh, don’t you worry, Hope. I’ll fucking be there.’
Chapter 47
Five hours later
Nothing stirred out here in the remote middle of nowhere. Nothing, except for the small gecko lizard that scuttled indignantly away among the bushes, disturbed by the approach of the strange and much larger predator that had appeared from behind the nearby mound of rocky boulders.
That predator was the toe of Ben’s dusty boot. He walked a few steps from where he’d left the four-by-four. Then he paused to light a Gauloise, glanced up at the heavy dark clouds and took a long, careful scan of the horizon, or as much as he could see of it with the towering striated red-rock monument of the Horseshoe Ridge behind him to the west, in whose shadow he would have been standing if there had been any visible sunlight on that darkening afternoon.
The ancient rock formation was well named, rising up to an inverted U-shaped plateau that stood the height of a twelve-storey building and curved for several hundred yards from its southern to its northern tips. It was mostly bare, just a few straggly bits of vegetation struggling to make a living among the barren crags. Here and there over the course of eons landslides had torn rubble-strewn paths down the concave slope of the rock face; Ben imagined it was up one of those steep, winding paths that old Mick Malloy had taken his last walkabout before he’d met his lonely end up there on the crest of the scarp.
The great reddish boulders, each one taller than a man, had once been part of the long, curving cliff face before some earthquake or landslip, maybe millions of years ago, had detached them to form the craggy mound behind which Ben had parked his vehicle. It was the same Mitsubishi Shogun, borrowed earlier that day from Hobart’s Creek, in which he and Jeff had driven to Minyerri to collect the crashed Land Cruiser. Just days ago, but it seemed like a long time had passed since then, with all that had happened.
Ben surveyed the ridge from one tip to the other. Seeing no movement of any kind up there he turned to gaze again at the apparently infinite vista of bushland north to south. In the far-off distance, more than three kilometres away to the south-east, he could just about make out the abandoned buildings of Mick’s farmstead. It was a desolate location, as empty and remote as anywhere in the Territory. And as private.
It was perfect for Ben’s needs.
He checked his watch. If Wiley Cooper meant to keep his rendezvous he would be rolling up any time now. Ben was fairly certain that he would. He was equally certain that Cooper wouldn’t come alone, as he’d been told to. The general couldn’t go anywhere without his army. And Ben expected a bigger army than the one he’d faced the night he shot Terry Napier.
Minutes passed. Ben finished his cigarette and crushed the stub into the dust, thought about lighting another but then thought better of it. The black clouds scudded slowly overhead, their unbroken canopy hanging so low in the sky that he imagined he could almost reach up and poke a hole in them with his finger. The atmosphere felt as thick and stifling as steam, the electric burning smell stronger than ever in the air. The wind had dropped to zero, and an utter silence blanketed the land from one end of the empty horizon to the other.
And then they came.
The moving white plume of dust cloud was in the east, the direction in which Ben had expected it. Still a great way off, but approaching fast, heading due west straight towards him. As it drew gradually closer he raised his binoculars and was able to make out the line of vehicles: ten of them, no, eleven of them, mostly pickup trucks and boxy off-roaders, with a black Audi at the head of the column.
He laid down the binoculars, stepped further away from the boulder mound and stood there in the open to make himself more visible, with his arms by his sides and his hands in plain view to show he wasn’t armed. When the convoy got within a hundred yards of him, they broke their line and spread out wide. The black Audi at the centre, five vehicles to each side of it, spaced evenly ten yards apart like a battle formation. They rolled closer, dirt and stone crunching under their tyres, dust drifting up in eleven separate clouds in their wake.
Thirty yards from where Ben stood waiting perfectly still, they came to a halt. Their line was a rough semicircle a hundred yards long, mirroring the curve of the ridge’s rock face opposite. Ben was trapped right there in the middle of the circle, with nowhere to run. But then, he wasn’t planning on running anywhere.
The dust drifted slowly in the still air. Doors opened. Men got out. Men with guns. Four to a car. Forty men. Forty guns. Against one unarmed opponent.
The black Audi’s doors opened last. Only two men had been riding in it. One man was big and bulky and somewhere around middle age, though his features were hard to make out through the floating dust and with the broad-brimmed leather hat shading his face. He wore jeans and boots and a check shirt, an enormous knife strapped to the left side of his belt and a holstered pistol to the right. The other man was small and shrivelled and old, with sparse white hair and a long thin face framed by elephantine ears. In a black suit and tie, he might have passed for an elderly funeral director, except that the expression on his wizened, wrinkle-etched face was anything but sympathetic.
So this was the general, Ben thought. Wiley Cooper appeared to be unarmed, though appearances could be deceptive. He took a step closer. The old man advanced a few yards, while his burly companion and the rest of the gunmen stayed where they were. All eyes were fixed on Ben. Some expressions were detached and impassive, others were hostile. The guns weren’t pointing at him yet, but they could be deployed at an instant’s notice.
‘I’m so glad you could make it, Wiley,’ Ben said. ‘Welcome to Mad Mick’s land.’
‘I know where I am,’ the old man grated savagely with a reptilian coldness on his face. ‘Think I’m a fucking idiot? And where’d you get off calling me Wiley? It’s Mr Cooper to you.’
‘Sorry, Wiley. It’s just that after hearing all those stories, I feel I know you.’
‘Yeah, well, I stopped believing in stories when I was six years old,’ Cooper growled. ‘Anyway, you got me here, Hope. You got something to say, let’s hear it, and make it snappy because I don’t have all fucking day to stand here listening to a piece of shit like you. What do you want?’
Ben held up his right hand and then moved it to his jacket pocket, very slowly and deliberately to show he wasn’t about to whip out a hidden weapon. Instead he produced the silver nugget that Sammy had let him keep, in case he needed it. Once again, the man had shown his uncanny ability to foretell the future.
