Crystal Coffin (14 page)

‘Hypothetically,' Harvey repeated, no less nervous, ‘if there
had
been someone out there, someone who disregarded orders to come and get us, they'd be in a lot of trouble right now, wouldn't they?'

Broxton shook his head. ‘For saving the lives of four soldiers and thirteen women and children? I can't imagine it. Not if I have anything to do with it.'

‘But the UN are screaming for blood, aren't they? I mean, that's what this inquiry is all about?'

Broxton actually laughed. ‘You're a farmer's son aren't you, Private?'

Harvey nodded, not seeing the connection.

‘You might have been a bit young at the time I guess, but do you remember the slogan put up by the pro-gun lobby back home after the Port Arthur massacre? Most rural towns had it plastered over practically everything. I thought you would have seen it.'

Harvey shook his head. Maybe he had been too young, or maybe he was just too damn tired to remember.

‘Well, I'll tell you,' Broxton said. ‘It was ‘Gun's don't kill, people kill'. The reason I say that is because the whole gun controversy was based on the idea that it's the weapons that are the killers.'

Private Harvey wanted to say, so what? His eyelids were turning to lead and he wondered if it would be worth the court-martial to tell a four star general to rack off.

‘So,' Broxton said, obviously enjoying the moment, ‘I used that to our advantage. Just between you and me now, son,' he continued, unfolding his Tuesday edition of the
Sydney Morning Herald
and holding it up for Harvey to read.

Broxton smiled at his reaction.

‘Faulty Weapon Kills Aussie Peacekeeper,' he read aloud. ‘And people believe this?'

Broxton nodded. ‘So far, so good. Even after all this time, it's the idea that guns are dangerous that the media loves to run with.'

‘But this says he was just travelling in the AV between patrol sites when a Steyr misfired. How believable is that?'

‘You tell me, Private,' Broxton said with a hint of a smile. ‘How's your foot healing?'

‘Low blow, sir. That wasn't my fault.'

‘Hypothetically, perhaps. Now tell me son,
hypothetically
, is Lance Corporal Locklin the man we're looking for?'

Locklin sighed, disappointed to see a priest he recognised waiting outside the boathouse with Scott and Helen. But he wasn't too surprised. He knew their grandmother often sent Scott on errands to the church just to get him close to the place. And a string of phone calls from St Joseph's to his mobile within an hour of talking to his cousin should have warned him that Scott had blabbed.

Father Connolly was helping Helen out of her white station wagon — the passenger side — and Locklin realised that the old man must have driven.

Damn, Locklin thought galloping up to them. I didn't think she'd be so big already.

‘Sorry, Jays,' Scott said, apologising straight away. ‘I didn't mean to tell.'

‘Now don't blame the lad, Jayson,' Connolly said, ‘I knew you'd be back to check things out for yourself the first chance you got. This whole nonsense about your father taking his own life has been itching under my collar since I heard it. I never knew a man with more to live for.'

Locklin nodded, sliding off Jack and smelling shoe polish. He looked down to see the black polish glugged with seeds and water weed and insects off the water. In some places, white hair was reappearing down his stallion's legs and he realised he'd have to fix that in the morning. But what else could he use?

‘I've come to help,' Connolly added. ‘What good am I as a shepherd if I'm not prepared to keep the wolves at bay?'

‘But there's nothing you can do,' Locklin said.

‘You're wrong there,' Connolly answered. ‘Look at your sister. Would you rather haul me out at this hour, or her?'

Locklin frowned, unable to argue.

‘Then it's settled,' Connolly said. ‘I'll be messenger.'

Locklin rubbed his eyes, half wondering if the priest might be related to Janet Slaney. Time was short. His mates at Dili military hospital could only cover for him until the medical supply flight returned to East Timor, and if Maitland didn't get back soon from Singapore, he wouldn't be able to do much investigating by himself. The old man was right, he didn't want Helen or Scotty getting anywhere near Maitland or the kind of scum that could murder their father in cold blood.

‘All right,' he said, giving in. ‘But no-one else.'

Connolly nodded and stepped aside.

‘The cat's still away?' Locklin asked his sister.

‘And this mouse has been playing,' she said, grinning. ‘Turns out that no-one at work thought to suspend my password for access to the Main Roads licensing database while I'm on leave, so I didn't have to ask any of my friends. I just logged straight in from home and got the licence number you wanted for Maitland's car. Then I rang the security car park at Brisbane airport and told them I was his secretary and that I needed to get a repairer out to fix a stone chip in the window before he got back, so they told me what bay it was in. The bay number told me which airline he was using and then I rang the flight centre and got a list of arrival times for flights from Singpore for the next few days.'

‘Will they tell you which flight he's due back on?' Scott asked.

‘Normally,' she said. ‘But their computers were down this afternoon. I'll have to try again tomorrow.'

‘Thanks, Hel,' Locklin said, tying Jack up to the pontoon. He took the rolled-up beach towel out of his saddlebag, tucked it carefully under his arm and led them to the boathouse. There was a padlock on the door that hadn't been there before.

He swore and handed Connolly the beach towel.

‘Have you got that earring I gave you, Scott?' he asked. Helen pushed her dark curls aside to pull it out of her ear.

‘Here you go,' she said.

Locklin bent the hook of it gently flat. Then he looked around and found a metal rod that was helping to anchor the pontoon down and he used it to hold tension on the lock's keyway, while he picked it with the earring. When it popped open in his hand, he bent the hook on the earring curved again and gave it back to her.

‘Wait here,' he said, as he went inside.

The dark swallowed him until his eyes adjusted to the loss of moonlight.

There was only one room in the cabin and he remembered that Thorna's first husband, Rick, used to keep a wooden table in the centre with a kerosene lantern screwed into it to make it easy to find in the dark. The table had been there before dawn when he'd last visited the boathouse but it wasn't there now, and it took him a few seconds before he saw it in the darkest corner.

The matches should have been in the top drawer and Locklin felt his way around inside, catching his hand on a broken fishing blade before he found them. He struck a match and used its small glow to light the lantern.

The wound wasn't bad, and he rubbed the blood on his pants while he waited for the others. Scott and Helen stayed at the doorway, their faces lit by the flickering lantern light that hissed at them from across the room.

Helen rested her hand on her belly as the pair of them stared at the central beam that supported the ceiling. The rope pulley their father had been found hanging from was still there, high in the centre of the room.

Locklin heard Helen catch her breath. He looked at her face as tears ran down her cheeks and he realised that something inside him was missing. He blinked slowly, almost wishing he could share her grief, but knowing that to do so would not help him achieve his objective. If he looked back on the past, it had to be for analysis, to find a way forward.

Their neighbour's cabin could never be their secret place again. The childhood magic of a place where adults fished, oblivious of the pirates and Indians and robbers and spies who fought great battles and did great deeds behind their backs, was gone.

Now, Helen would see the boathouse as a dark place, evil and haunted, where fond memories of their childhood had died with their father and their neighbour barely a year before him. Here, their father had lived his final moments. Locklin knew he could help his sister become numb to that, but somehow, seeing her with her hand resting on her unborn child, it felt wrong to do that to her.

He could drag the pontoon to the lake for her and he could hang his feet beside hers in the water as they had done when they were children. But he couldn't talk of how he felt. He saw the need in his sister's face to share her feelings and he cursed himself for not realising that coming here would be hard for her.

‘We can do this outside?' he suggested, hurrying to her side, but she couldn't even nod.

‘This is it, isn't it?' Scotty said. ‘This is where it happened.'

Father Connolly stepped between them and whispered an impromptu blessing and Scotty kicked his foot against the doorjam. He didn't like going to church at the best of times. Usually his grandmother made him go, but with a priest as a family friend, he'd come to expect that kind of embarrassing stuff in public from time to time. Mostly, the old guy was just like a cheery grandfather and Scott tried not to notice all the churchie stuff he did. Listening to the words, though, he did remember his uncle. He did think about the good times and the happy times and he did hope that if there was a heaven, his uncle was in it now.

Scott smiled while the others stood with faces like stone. He could imagine his uncle, perched up there on a cloud — a great place to sit to drop spit bombs on Janet Slaney. Better yet, his uncle would make a great lookout for Knox Pox next time he had his bike in town. Maybe drop him a lightning bolt or something as a warning.

Now there's a funny thought, Scotty grinned, taking that thought one step further, a cop being struck in the butt with a lightning bolt.

Then he realised Father Connolly had stopped talking and his favourite cousin was unrolling a pink beach towel on the table in front of the others. Inside, was something more delicate than any of them had ever seen before.

Locklin set it on the table and stepped back for the others to see.

‘What is it?' Scott asked, and Helen flicked him by the ear.

‘That's obvious,' she teased.

The crystal jewel box on the table was a coffin.

Helen ran a long pink fingernail over the crystal ridges. ‘Where did you get it?'

‘Buried treasure,' Locklin said, pointing over her shoulder, but his sister was the only one who realised what he meant.

‘I came here this morning hoping to camp out for a while until my flight leaves,' he said, leading them to a square-shaped crack in the floor. ‘Only Maitland was already here using the place for something else.' He lifted a trapdoor the size of an oven door to explain to Scott and Connolly. ‘We used to bury pirate treasure down here when we were kids,' he added, looking at his sister.

‘Yeah,' she said, trying to smile. ‘Dad didn't let us wander far while he was here with Rick.'

‘Who's Rick?' Scott said.

‘Thorna Maitland's first husband,' Connolly said. ‘How could you forget that?'

‘Oh, yeah,' Scott said, embarrassed. He'd only ever called him Sick Stick, because his throat cancer had left him so skinny.

‘Remember the rainy days?' Helen said. ‘We had to play in here for hours while Rick and Dad made flies for fishing or did maintenance on the old rescue boat.'

Scott pointed into the shallow pit. ‘What's that?' he said, as Locklin took everything out. ‘A first aid kit?'

‘And a flare gun,' Locklin added. ‘Spares for the boat.'

‘Shouldn't they be over with Mad Murphy now?' Helen asked. ‘He got the boat after Rick died.'

‘Is that where it went?' Scott asked, opening the first aid kit for a sticky beak at the bandages. ‘I thought Maitland must have sold it.'

‘He couldn't,' Helen said. ‘It's a volunteer boat. It's owned by the community.'

‘Forget that,' Locklin said, taking the kit off Scott and closing it. He reached his hand into the pit as deep as his elbow and put his hand flat on the bottom. ‘Remember how deep this was, Helen?'

She looked in and wrinkled her forehead. The trap door was about a metre square, but she remembered the pit itself being at least half as deep as that again.

‘Didn't you hide down there after you rode Squirt over to Mad Murphy's place one time and let out all his battery hens?' she asked. ‘That's why he leaves them free range now, I heard. It took him so long to catch them, that he found out how much better their eggs taste when they're free range.'

‘Chickens have no loyalty,' Locklin said. ‘They owe me one.'

‘Hard to imagine you could ever fit down there,' Scott said. ‘You didn't tell me you were a runt.'

‘I wasn't,' Locklin said. ‘Dad had to stretch in up to his shoulder to shake me awake. But look …'

He scratched up a canvas mat at the bottom to reveal a second trapdoor. He lifted that one and stood back to let the others see.

‘That's deeper than it ever was!' Helen said. ‘I can't even see the bottom.'

Locklin unscrewed the lantern from the table and used his belt as a rope to lower it into the shadows, turning dark into light.

‘A cavern!' Scott said, trying not to shout.

‘Not a cavern, Sport. Here …' Locklin reached down into the pit and felt around the lip until his hand found a wire rope. He tugged it and it unrolled from its hidden niche into a long ladder that stretched to the bottom.

‘Are you crazy?' Helen cried. ‘I'm not going down there with this belly!'

‘I'm not asking you to. Just watch me.'

‘And me,' Scott said, climbing down after him.

Near the sandstone bottom, he heard a large drop of water fall into a puddle.

‘Wow, this is great … great … great!' Scott cried, his voice echoing off the walls. ‘Hey … hey … hey! There's an echo … echo … echo!'

Reverberations dislodged a sandstone chip off the wall and the drip became a trickle. Locklin clipped Scott across the shoulder.

‘Cut that out … out … out!' he said, almost whispering.

‘Why's it do that?' Scott asked.

‘It echoes because it's empty,' Locklin said. ‘You know, like your head.' He walked around the walls so his sister and Connolly could get an idea of how large the room was by watching how dim the lantern got as he moved further from the ladder.

‘Hey, it's not empty down here,' Scott said, looking at the timber pallets that coated the floor. He could walk right around the dug-out without getting his sandshoes wet in any of the puddles, so he did. In one corner, just above neck height in the wall, he saw a damp patch with moisture drooling from the centre. He touched it and a flake fell away, turning the drool into another trickle. He tapped the flake back on the wall, trying to plug it before Locklin saw and the trickle turned into a riverlet. And then he walked away, whistling so Locklin wouldn't hear that the cavern was now filling faster than before.

‘You could fit a lot of pirate treasure down here now,' Scott said, stretching his arms up, without reaching even halfway to the ceiling.

‘The last time I was down here,' Locklin said, going back to the ladder, ‘someone had.'

Senior Medical Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Allen pushed open the door to the recovery room to let in the other two colonels and to let out the nurse with her rattling trolley of bedpans, spare linen and water jugs.

‘No movement at the station yet,' he told the nurse, adapting the lines of his favourite bush ballad to suit the motionless door of the intensive care unit down the hall. ‘When General Broxton is finished with Private Harvey, please show him through to us?'

‘The room's ready now, Doctor. Would you like me to move Harvey over here at the same time?'

‘No,' Allen said. ‘He's had a hard night. Give him another sedative and we'll leave him where he is. No point shifting him now, if we're able to evacuate him back to Darwin in the morning.'

The nurse nodded and looked over Allen's shoulder at the two other colonels who were waiting for him. She winked at the doctor. ‘Want me to slip you a few extra sedatives?'

Allen smiled. ‘Let's hear what they have to say first.'

The nurse pulled the door closed, pushing the trolley down the hall and leaving Allen alone in the impromptu conference room with the other lieutenant colonels standing around a bed.

Allen listened while the other members of the board of inquiry brought him up to date and summarised their theories. He nodded occasionally, hoping they intended to act impartially, but wanting to be sure of it before he helped them with a witch-hunt.

‘Obviously, we're looking at a third party,' said Colonel Pike from Army Personnel.

‘Obviously,' agreed Chang from Promotions. ‘But everyone's accounted for.'

Allen's eyes were on their insignia, wondering why Broxton had chosen people from Personnel and Promotions to lead the inquiry, not Intelligence or Military Police.

‘What did the civilians say?' he asked. ‘The women and children who were rescued with our boys? Surely they can't have any reason to be involved with a cover-up?'

‘Middle of the night in the pouring rain,' Colonel Chang said, folding his arms to describe the situation. ‘They were frightened, injured and confused. Even if we assume that their versions are unrehearsed, they have to be unreliable, since there's only one point on which they all agree …'

‘That only one person was responsible for the extraction,' Allen guessed correctly.

‘One of our boys,' Chang agreed.

‘You're positive he's a he?'

‘Unconfirmed, but probable,' Chang said. ‘One of the kids said that someone carried both him and his pregnant mother across a creek with the kid on one arm and his mother on the other. And one of the dead militia had boot tracks in his face the size of a men's eleven shoe, while another one had his neck snapped by hand, the old-fashioned way. If he's a she,' Chang said, ‘then I sure wouldn't want to stiff her with the bill on any date.'

‘An SF boy, run amok?' Allen asked.

Chang shook his head. ‘Special Forces boys are all accounted for that night,' he said.

‘So we've got a mixed bag of witnesses,' Allen said, consciously including himself in the team for the first time. ‘If the reconnaissance unit and the Blackhawk flight crew say they didn't see who it was, surely one of the older civilians can point him out? The pregnant woman, for instance. She got pretty close to him.'

‘You'd think so,' Chang said, trying not to grin.

‘They say,' he said, ‘through interpreters of course, that our soldiers all look alike to them.'

Two small knocks heralded the arrival of the nurse ushering in General Broxton. She relieved him of his borrowed white coat and returned to her station.

‘Any news?' Chang asked.

Broxton sat on the bed and shook his head, waving his hand to let them know he wanted to hear the end of their conversation first.

‘So did we do a head count on the other units in the battalion?' Allen asked. ‘Is there any way of knowing if anyone was missing during the event?'

‘We're not eagles or bears,' Chang said, referring to the Americans and Russians who ran their armies by different rules. ‘We're diggers, so rollcall isn't necessarily an everyday event anymore unless we're at war.'

‘Unnecessary paperwork,' said Colonel Pike.

Allen leaned on a bedside table, thinking about that. ‘How can you be sure you haven't lost anyone?' he asked.

‘Each soldier operates within a small independent team with a unit commander,' Chang said. ‘The unit commander reports to the next up the line, and so on. If someone goes missing it doesn't take long for someone to notice and report it.'

‘Unless they think they have a reason not to,' Broxton said, chipping in and staring directly at Allen. ‘In which case, we have a serious command and discipline problem.'

Allen stiffened and stood up. As Senior Medical Officer he may have made it to the rank of lieutenant colonel, but he was a doctor before he was an officer and the doctor in him didn't like the sound of the word ‘discipline' mentioned anywhere near the discussion of who could have saved the lives of his latest patients, not to mention a dozen or more civilians.

Broxton read the doctor's thoughts through his body language and bombed a rubbish bin beside the bed with his newspaper. ‘No more guessing, gentlemen,' he said. ‘We have a name.' He summarised his theory, and then described Private Harvey's reaction to hearing Lance Corporal Locklin's name suggested hypothetically, instead of a mysterious saviour from another unit.

‘The boy went whiter than his bed sheet,' Broxton added with a satisfied grin.

‘Lance Corporal Locklin had concussion and bullet wounds to his shoulder and leg,' Allen reminded him. ‘Escaping by himself, let alone with everyone else intact, would have been next to impossible, given what we already know of the circumstances.'

‘True,' Chang said, rubbing his chin. ‘Unless he was wounded as they were leaving.'

The group fell silent, each considering the implications of that one simple idea.

‘The UN aren't going to like this,' Pike said.

‘The UN don't like this anyway,' Chang added.

‘Okay,' Allen said, deciding to get the corporal's name onto commendation papers before anyone else could issue orders for a court martial. ‘So even if we suspect
who
got them out, we're talking about a single-handed assault on an armed hostile encampment.'

‘Yes,' Chang said. ‘We need to know exactly how the extraction was achieved and what weaknesses, if any, there were so we can exploit them again. If there's a chance we can liberate more civilians from other militia camps, then we should be looking at ways to repeat the raid before they have a chance to change their strategies.'

The three lieutenant colonels nodded in unison like one head on many shoulders.

‘You're getting ahead of yourselves,' Broxton added quietly. ‘I have to bow out from the investigation from here on, so your actions are seen to be impartial. First, you have to prove that Lance Corporal Locklin is the one you're looking for. Then we can decide where to go with any information that flows from that.'

‘Actually, there is one other problem,' Allen said, not sure how Broxton was going to take it. ‘We have to find him first.'

‘How's that a problem?' Broxton asked.

‘The boy's wounded, isn't he?' Chang said. ‘How far could hego?'

‘He's been released, Pete. Two weeks ago. He's supposed to be back on patrol by now.'

‘What do you mean “he's supposed to be”?' Broxton asked, not needing to shout to intimidate. His eyes shifted targets, to the colonel from Personnel. ‘Where is he?'

Colonel Pike shifted his weight back a step and crossed his arms. ‘He's been stationed temporarily with another recon unit with 2Cavalry out of Maliana. After the handover to the United Nations Transitional Administration is complete, he'll be reassigned again, since the rest of his unit is being discharged for their injuries. I've left orders for him to report to me when he returns from patrol, but so far he hasn't checked in.'