Crystal Coffin (9 page)

Two minutes later, his bush relay antennae was bouncing VHF off every wired tree between his portable radio and a very cleanshaven Corporal Jennins at 6RAR, Australian Defence Force Headquarters in Dili.

‘What do you mean, you have to clear it with United Nations first?' he asked after passing on the messages. ‘Since when does ADF HQ defer field movements for elements of 6Battalion to those eunuchs at the UN?'

‘Since this morning. ADF HQ has been directed to hand custody of East Timor over to the UNTAET Forces. You should check in more often, Charlie Six,' Jennins added lightly.

‘Rules of engagement?'

‘That's the confusion. The brass don't show it, but they must be fair worked up about it to leave the communications room as a oneman show while they thrash things out with the powers that be.'

Locklin could imagine it. Until now, Australian forces had permission in East Timor to use the rules of battle engagement under Article Seven of the United Nations Act: shoot first to protect people, property and livestock, and ask questions later. United Nations forces rarely worked that way. Their actions were castrated under article six, meaning they had to let the bad guys shoot them first before returning fire. Now, the United Nations were about to take over the show and they were bringing their rule book with them.

‘So where does that leave us?' Locklin asked.

‘Interim orders for all patrols that call in are to return to Maliana for debriefing.'

‘Interim orders? Corporal, we have possible hostile contacts on the run here, with suspected hostage situation. Hostiles are probably headed for the border. If we don't act now, we could lose these civilians. I don't care if you have to shout
sir
from the window and see who comes a-running, but we need seek and pursue orders clarified now, even if they are under article six!'

‘Negative, Charlie Six. No can do. The brass left orders not to be disturbed for anything short of war. I'll pass your message on, but orders stand. No further offensive action can be authorised for patrols within twelve kilometres of the border. Repeat, no offensive action can be authorised.' He didn't have to say ‘or there'll be hell to pay'. That was standard in the army.

Locklin confirmed his orders and punched his fist into his thigh. He wondered if Corporal Jennins really was a full corporal, or just a lance corporal like himself. It didn't really matter what level of corporal you were anyway. You were never called sir, it was always corporal — even by the privates, who were the only things lower in the army pecking order than the company mascot. The only way to tell which corporal outranked another one was by insignia, or by asking him, which Lance Corporal Locklin had just determined he would do with Jennins at the very next opportunity he had in Dili.

He packed the field radio away, being careful not to take his frustration out on the only piece of equipment that could get them out of trouble in a hurry, and decided Corporal Jennins deserved a trophy from the village that he just ordered them to abandon. He was deciding on something that would be suitably gruesome, when the air cracked with three rounds of weapons fire. Instinctively, he ducked against the Timor eucalypt, judged distance and direction, then broke into a run back down the ridge towards the village.

It wasn't an Australian Steyr-88 rifle that he'd heard but a volley of M16 assault weapons.

A hundred metres out from the nearest hut, he stopped to catch his breath and listened to a forest that had fallen silent. He could see men moving between the huts, but they didn't look like anyone from Charlie Six. The weapons were darker, longer. The uniforms and faces were darker too, but they could have been Portuguese, who participated in the peace initiative for their own political reasons. Right now, Locklin would have preferred it to be them. He didn't much like the alternative.

He proceeded, using the vegetation as cover until he reached the chicken hutch. It would have been so much easier to radio for an armoured vehicle, or a Blackhawk chopper to charge in and launch a running rescue. But he had his orders. He also saw no trace of the men he'd left behind and he knew that racing in without knowing where, or who, to target first, even if he could get assistance, ran a much higher risk of ‘getting them dead' than checking it for himself first.

He edged further around the chicken hutch, ducking back when a tall man in dirty jungle browns walked past the nearest hut. His skin was a dozen shades darker than Locklin's partial Aboriginal tan, and he had an AK47 perched against his shoulder and an M16 cupped under his arm. When he was gone, Locklin slipped between the hutch and the low rubble wall.

The body of the East Timorese girl was still lying where he'd left her under the sack. But there was a new body beside her — one wearing Aussie army greens.

Locklin spotted the corporal patch on his shoulder and shuffled closer to check his pulse. When his fingers touched his patrol commander's throat, his eyes opened.

‘Ambush,' he rasped. ‘Used hostages to … get drop on us.'

Locklin kept his eyes on the huts, his face low to his mate's cheek and his ears alert to militia moving about too close for comfort.

‘Where are the others?' he asked.

‘Hut, far end … Mulhany and Rogers injured … Don't know about Harvey. Must think I'm dead … I think they're right.' He groaned but didn't move. His chest was punctured in the midriff, turning green camouflage to red.

‘Militia?'

‘Ten … I saw ten, but there may be more.'

A scream from the biggest hut died quickly. It was a woman's voice, another young one.

‘How many women?'

‘Six … sounds like five now, and eight kids. Two of the bad guys are still fighting over this girl. Others must have escaped … rounded up an' … brought back. Ooooooow, God it hurts.'

‘Save your strength, Westy,' Locklin said.

‘Reinforcements?'

‘Not coming. We've been ordered back to Maliana.'

Corporal Steven West squeezed his eyes closed from the pain as the sun began to set. ‘Looks like it's up to you,' he said as one lip curled to a final grin. ‘God help us.'

Nikki woke to the feeling that her arms and chest were cool. Her eyes opened and she looked down at a blouse that was undone down to her belly. She hurried to fasten her pearl buttons and saw that her sleeves had been completely torn away.

She screamed, but her mouth was dry and the sound that came out was barely a squeak. She struggled to her feet, grappling at her sandals as she tried to pull them on without her socks. She nearly fell over.

The cattle dog barked at her, stopping when Locklin leapt from the back of the truck and ran, skidding to a halt beside her. He was still trying to tuck the mobile phone onto his belt when she attacked him.

‘What did you do to me!' she demanded. Her broken fingernails clawed weakly at him and he gripped her forearms, holding her hands at a safe distance from his face without hurting her wrists. She kicked at him and overbalanced and he struggled not to let her fall.

‘Heat stress,' he said. ‘I did nothing. You had heat stress. I had to get you cool.'

‘What?' It took her a few moments to stop struggling. ‘Heat stress?'

‘Yes. Heat stress,' he repeated. ‘I just got you cool. Nothing else. I didn't touch you.'

‘But you …' she said, looking at her wrists, ‘… saw?'

‘Yes,' he said, letting her go and hoping a bit of space might help to calm her down. She looked ready to cry and he knew her body couldn't spare the water.

‘Want a drink?'

She nodded and he took an electrolyte sachet from his army day rations, emptied it into his canteen, put the lid back on and shook. Then he apologised for the half-empty sound that it made.

‘I had to use the other half on your shirt sleeve to swab you down,' he explained. ‘It's okay, you weren't too bad. I didn't need to take off any more if that's what you're worried about — only feet, face, arms and chest.'

But that was obviously enough. She slumped against the tree trunk and when the fizzing stopped inside the canteen, he handed it to her and watched her drain the contents into her mouth.

‘Hungry?'

She nodded and he handed her a Mars Bar, also from his army rations.

‘You should eat more,' he said, realising from the speed she ate it and from her lack of colour that she must have missed more than a day's meals. ‘The heat won't affect you so much.'

She didn't answer.

If she didn't like that question, he realised she wasn't going to like the next one. But he asked it anyway. ‘Who did that to you?'

Her eyes closed and gave him part of an answer — it wasn't an accident.

‘I did,' she said, surprising him.

She gulped from the canteen again and gagged on the taste after the chocolate bar. She sniffed the fluid and wrinkled her nose. The last mouthful smelled like five-day-old sweat and tasted even older, but it felt good going down and she drank it, then tossed the empty canteen at his chest. ‘If you'd have sent me that foul poison two days ago, you could have saved me the trouble.'

‘You hurt
yourself?
'

‘Price of freedom,' she said. ‘Nothing you have to worry about.'

Locklin doubted that. In front of him stood a girl who wore a charm around her neck that matched a set of earrings he'd found in the boathouse where his father had been murdered. She had the same last name as the corporation that employed his killer — and trouble always travelled in threes.

The dog touched Nikki's hand with its annoying wet nose again and she jumped. She hunted it away and looked at the horses standing patiently in the truck.

Nice horses, she wanted to say, but she didn't. ‘Were you looking through my bags?' she said instead, wondering what else he could have been doing in the back of the truck while he thought she was still put.

‘Only looking to see if you were taking anything', he lied. But he hadn't found any ID either, which he thought was strange. Not even in her wallet, where the only thing she had was seven dollars in loose change and a train ticket, paid for in cash from Sydney to Brisbane.

‘I'm not on drugs!' she said, screwing up her nose.

‘I meant medication,' he said, still fishing for information. ‘I was going to call a doctor, and I knew that would be the first question he asked.'

‘I told you, no doctors,' she said, not realising that her wishes had never made it past her lips. Doctors meant records and records meant someone could find her and that's all she was worried about now.

‘I'm not going to argue,' he said. ‘Time to go.'

He opened her door, motioning for her to get in, but she didn't budge.

‘I can't go like this,' she said, holding up the remnants of her sleeves.

‘You'd rather stay here?'.

‘I'd rather die than show up looking like a two dollar hooker. I'll get the sack before I start.'

Locklin's eyebrows pointed to the sky. With a name like Fletcher, he'd expected her to be the one with the power to hire and fire. ‘Thorna's not like that,' he said, playing her game. ‘She'll understand.'

‘You don't get it. Look at me! The Maitlands have little kids. Would you let something like this,' she said, meaning herself, ‘get near your kids?'

‘I guess not,' he said, surprised by her priorities. And she was right. She looked like something that Jack was doing in the back of the truck right now.

The tallest tree on the horizon began to tickle the sun and he checked his watch. No need to rush her, though. He didn't have to meet Helen and Scotty for another five hours.

Locklin went to the truck and dragged her bags closer to the rails so she could reach into them.

‘Careful, Tucker,' he said, helping the dog up into the crate again. ‘She bites.'

Tuckerbox didn't listen. His wet nose helped her choose a new shirt, but as soon as she pulled it out, Locklin saw the long sleeves and snatched it off her.

‘Hey, give me that!' she said.

‘You want to be doing this again in five minutes?' he said, holding out a thick polyester sleeve that wouldn't breathe.

‘But it's all I've got.'

‘Then roll the sleeves up.'

‘No! People will see.'

‘I saw.'

‘Yes, and that's bad enough!'

Locklin put his hands on his hips, letting his frown ask if she was going to argue all day. ‘They won't heal in this heat unless you let air get to them,' he tried to reason. ‘They'll be green maggot-magnets by morning, filled with pus. You like that idea any better?'

Her silence told him she wasn't prepared to negotiate and at this rate, he wouldn't make it to the boathouse until midnight. But he knew he couldn't let her black out again or he'd have to get her medical help, and that could blow his schedule as well as his mission.

‘Okay,' he said, waving her shirt like a lure. ‘If you roll your sleeves up, I'll loan you something to cover your wounds that won't kill you from heat exhaustion.'

‘Not bandages,' she warned, as he took a biscuit tin out from a tool box under the truck. ‘Everyone will ask what I did to myself, and I'd rather die than lie.'

‘Yeah, yeah,' Locklin said, not believing her. ‘You want a fashion statement.'

He rummaged past the shoe polish to the packet of purple, pink and white ribbons that Helen used to plait her Arabian's mane with for showing.

‘They're silk,' he said. ‘Tie them in a bow or something and take them off to let your skin dry out when you're alone.'

Nikki blinked at him, wondering if he was raised on fruitcake. ‘I'll look like I'm giftwrapped!'

‘They're soft,' he said, ignoring her as he opened the packet and gave her one ribbon of each colour for her right wrist. ‘And they dry fast, so you can wash them every night to keep them clean.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘It's that or shirt-by-shredder.'

‘Who walks around all day with ribbons hanging off their wrists?'

‘You do,' he said, handing her the packet. ‘Unless you've got a better idea.'

She didn't and he flopped her shirt over her shoulder and then turned his back so she could put it on.

‘This isn't going to work,' she complained, keeping both eyes on him to make sure he wasn't looking. ‘I can't tie bows around my wrists with one hand.'

‘Sure you can,' he said, but she huffed and pushed her wrist over his shoulder so he could do it.

He wrapped a strand of each colour around the smallest part of her wrist, providing it with support and hiding most of the red. He tied that off, leaving long bows to flop over the scratches on her hands. Then he turned around to do the left one.

Nikki's face was only centimetres from his chest and she stepped back, aware suddenly of how hot it was. She gave him her left wrist, but slowly, and at arm's length, wishing that her arms were even longer to keep him away.

‘Not too tight?' he asked.

‘No,' she said, flexing her wrists. The bows were certainly soft and oddly pretty. They also scratched less on her skin than the lace had around her sleeves.

‘Want to put a skirt on too? It'll be cooler.'

‘No,' she said. She'd only brought two skirts and after two days stuffed in a travel bag, she knew they'd be more wrinkly than an anorexic pug dog. She rolled her black corduroys up to her knees and put her short white socks into her back pocket. Then she climbed back in the truck barefoot and dropped her sandals on the floor, nodding that she was ready.

Locklin put the biscuit tin away and got out a wrench, before locking up the tool box. He used it to force her window winder around, and then he tossed them on the floor at her feet when he was finished. He slammed her door twice, making sure it was secure, and then jogged to the other side and climbed behind the wheel. The gears crunched, the truck shook, and the Bedford hauled itself slowly up the last rocky ridge into a scarlet sunset.

At the top, Nikki saw an expanse of water that looked much the same size as Sydney Harbour. The water between the catchment hills was the same dark blue, but there were no boats — not a mast anywhere — and the banks were void of grass for as far as she could see. It was even brown around the edge like the tidemark left by dirty water let too quickly out of a bath. In more than one place in the water, forests of drowned trees reached out with ghoulish fingers that clawed up from their graves.

Unlike Nikki, who seemed mesmerised, Locklin barely looked at the lake. His thoughts were on his appointment with his sister and on the train ticket that he'd seen in Nikki's wallet. Then he squeezed the inside of his lip between his teeth and frowned, hoping his search wasn't about to take him even further south, to Sydney.

At Dili military hospital, Private Harvey was recovering well for an eighteen year old who'd had the steel casing of a biro shoved through his ribs to keep him alive.

He'd been evacuated by an army Blackhawk from the small mountain village in the border region of East Timor. And while the crew had been trying to stabilise him and the three other survivors from his unit, someone had put their hand on his shoulder and felt crackling, like his skin had turned to bubblewrap. He'd been turning blue, trying to suck in air that kept escaping through a lung that had been kicked so hard that it collapsed with the change in air pressure on take-off and bloody air-bubbles had been forced into his chest cavity and skin.

‘Flailed lung!' a voice had shouted, and while one man sat Harvey up on his haunches and held his arms up over his head, another had stripped the guts out of a biro and impaled him below his armpit. Someone had said he'd even smiled as the blood and other fluids drained from his lungs into a helmet, even though he was still twenty minutes' flying time from the nearest anaesthetic.

As a Doctor, Allen had seen that kind of smile before. It was relief — the discovery that beyond agony there could still be life — and considering that Private Harvey was also suffering four broken ribs, a fractured collarbone and gunshot wounds to his knees, chest and arm, Allen figured that Harvey's smile would have been a Kodak moment fit to win a prize.

Harvey was nearly stable enough to airlift back to Australia and Allen noted on his chart for the nurse to reduce the next sedative ready for that event. Hopefully, they could allow him to regain consciousness naturally. There was a risk — as always with so much damage to a body — that Harvey might not regain consciousness at all. But the doctor had high hopes for the young Private, who had still been conscious, albeit barely, on arrival.

The unit's second in charge, a young lance corporal, had also been in and out of consciousness, but his wounds had been minor by comparison. A shrapnel fragment that had ricocheted off something else and drawn blood near his collarbone, another fragment in his left thigh above his knee that couldn't be removed, a small head contusion and light concussion. At the corporal's request, they'd patched him up and sent him back to light duties with his battalion at Maliana the next day. But the others hadn't been so lucky.

The patrol commander was dead and the other two would be discharged on a pension soon to spend the next few months in physiotherapy learning to walk again. But just like Private Harvey, Privates Rogers and Mulhany were both very lucky to be alive. They had lived against all odds, and Lieutenant Colonel Allen's biggest frustration as a doctor was that no-one seemed to know who he had to thank for that.

‘Dr Allen?' said a woman's voice over the intercom as Allen checked the progress of Private Harvey's healing biro wound. It was the nursing administrator. ‘I've got General Broxton's office on the phone,' she said. ‘They want to know if there's any news.'

Allen clicked his biro from red to blue and wrote another monitor reading on the charts. ‘Tell them no, Sally,' he said. ‘Mulhany and Rogers still claim they don't remember anything and I want to keep this one under for another few hours.'

‘Well, okay, but they won't be happy. The Prime Minister is jumping up and down that we lost one. If Private Harvey isn't conscious soon, he's requested General Broxton to put Mulhany and Rogers through another round of interrogation to figure out what happened.'

‘Sounds like they're preparing for a court martial,' Allen said.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He didn't like his patients being hounded for information when their bodies were already under stress, but even he had to suspect that Mulhany and Rogers should have remembered something about who it was who had saved their Eves. They had to be lying, he realised, but he couldn't understand why they would do that.

‘Okay,' he said reluctantly. ‘Let them come.' It might not be a complete disruption, he realised. He did have paperwork sitting on his desk — a recommendation for a service medal for the person who had risked their life to bring the men of Charlie Six back from the dead. All the document was missing was the name of the person or people responsible, and Allen hoped that another round of gentle questioning might be able to establish that.

He recorded a few more readings from the life support monitors onto Harvey's chart, then he stabbed his pen at the page, angry that being tired had also made him forgetful. He called the administrator back over the intercom.

‘Sally, what about the one we released, the lance corporal with the concussion and the shrapnel in his leg? Didn't they get any answers out of him?'

‘Uhh, no. There's a bit of a mix-up there, I think. They thought we still had him.'

‘What? He had stitches in his thigh. Hasn't he checked in with the field medics at Maliana yet to get them out?'

‘Apparently not.'

The doctor swore. ‘Tell them I want him found. Tell them I want that lance corporal found and brought back here to Dili immediately. If he's been in the fields without medical supervision for a fortnight, Lord knows how many infections he could be carrying!'

‘Yes, doctor,' Sally said. ‘I'll ring 6Battalion right away and get them onto it.'