Blood Prize (26 page)

T
om heard two cracking reports above the noise of the jet’s engines; gunfire that didn’t seem to hit their craft.

He attempted to follow the helicopter’s movements, by squashing his face against the starboard window, but its jerky movement made it difficult to distinguish. Then another head started competing for some of his viewing space.

“No, Iz. They’re shooting at us.”

“Then why are you watching?”

“I …”

Another loud burst of gunfire erupted, followed by an even louder bang, causing their aircraft to rock on its axis. Tom felt pinned to his seat as the jet ascended with what seemed an almost vertical trajectory.

Once again, he tried to spot the helicopter from his window, but it disappeared from view and the shooting ceased.

“I think it’s over, Iz. I think we’re away.”

Tom looked up as Noah burst through the cabin door and into the aisle.

“Tom. Isobel. Is everyone alright?”

Tom noticed the strained look on his face. He appeared anxious despite their escape.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

“Good. Good. We should be able to relax for the next few hours. I don’t think anyone will attack us for the moment. Tom, could you come up to the cockpit for a minute. I need to discuss the flight plan with you.”

Tom stood, climbed over Isobel and began to move forward, but she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to a stop.

“Why do they exclude me, Tom? Because I’m a girl?”

“No. He respects you. I know he does. Maybe it’s just a fatherly thing … He thinks he’s protecting you, by keeping you away from the uglier side of our business.”

Isobel let go of Tom’s arm and turned her face from him.

“Yeah, whatever.”

As Tom entered the cockpit, Noah offered the co-pilot’s seat to his young protégé.

“I’ll get straight to the point, Tom. We have a problem.”

“Something too bad to tell Isobel?”

“They shot out our front tyre and some of the mechanism.”

Tom’s eyes lost focus, as he attempted to process this information.

“We’re going to crash then?”

The priest answered for Noah.

“We’ll have to make some sort of crash landing, yes. How bad it is, will depend on the skill of our pilot.”

The pilot turned and frowned at the three men. Tom didn’t think his expression conveyed a great deal of confidence.

An anxious silence lingered in the cockpit, before the priest continued.

“We have just enough fuel and a good bit of time to make our decisions. The immediate problem is our course. I have instructed the pilot to fly west and …”

Tom silenced the priest by thrusting his palm towards him and slowly shaking his head.

“Let me see the map.”

The clergyman spread the chart out over Tom’s lap and pointed to both their current position and their desired destination.

“Longreach is certainly the closest airport to the site. I think we should …”

“No. No way. You don’t make any decisions for us. Is that clear?”

He gave the priest a hard look.

“But, you’re welcome to offer advice. Your knowledge of our enemy could be helpful. For instance, will the Assembly have a presence at Longreach airport?”

“I don’t know … Perhaps.”

The priest closed his eyes and nodded several times. Without a word, he turned and left the cockpit.

Tom felt livid, as much with himself as with the priest. Their circumstances remained dire with no room for error. He needed to know the difference between the good guys and the bad. The solution came quickly to mind. He felt for the gun in his coat pocket and followed the priest out of the cabin.

He raised the weapon as he approached the priest. The man stood half way down the aisle, staring at his feet. As he shuffled forward, Tom noticed Isobel’s eyes widen with understanding as she spotted the gun.

“We need to clear a few things up, priest.”

The clergyman raised his head and nodded. Without being bidden, he moved to a seat directly across the aisle from Isobel.

“Alright. You want the truth … I’ll give you the truth, but it won’t be pleasant.”

The priest took in a long, quivering breath and began fingering his beard.

“Firstly, it must be said that in joining you, I have left a great deal of people in peril. One of which is my soul mate. If we fail, they will most certainly die, which I think gives me a rather large reason to succeed.”

Tom looked intently at the priest.

“Not good enough. If you can’t verify it, don’t say it.”

“Very well.”

Isobel joined the conversation.

“She’s your wife?”

“Unofficially … Secretly. Catholic priests can’t have wives.”

Tom wasn’t sure if he felt annoyed, or just confused by the gentle tone in Isobel’s voice, but the priest continued talking, before he could express his bewilderment.

“Perhaps I should start at the beginning. At seven years of age, I found my parents hanging in our living room; both murdered. Not long after, a prominent Italian family took me in, treating me as one of their own. They provided my religious education and eventually brought me into the priesthood.”

Tom still held the gun, but it rested on his knee.

“For many years I performed my priestly duties with due diligence, unconcerned about most earthly endeavours, until the day I discovered who killed my parents.”

The priest stopped speaking and lowered his head into his hands. His chest expanded with oxygen before slowly expelling it as a ragged sigh.

Isobel spoke to him, gently prompting him to continue.

“Who did it? Who killed them?”

“Even after all of these years, I still find it difficult to talk about. You see, for most of my childhood I gave my affections to a high ranking Assembly family; the same family who carried out the murder of my mother and father. You can’t imagine my guilt … It ate away at my soul and overwhelmed me with grief.”

He stopped talking and Tom noticed his pained expression. He seemed to be searching the back of the fuselage for some hidden past that only he could see.

“I suppose I’ve changed somewhat since then. Over the years I’ve tried to justify it, but in the end, guilt becomes hate and hate needs its revenge.”

T
he Shikra landed in a small valley to the west of Kapooka Military Barracks, eight kilometres from the city of Wagga Wagga.

Vogel jumped from the helicopter, rushing bent over, until he ran out of range of the still-spinning rotors. An out of season frost covered the landscape, which crunched under the soles of his men’s feet, as they followed their captain to join him.

Vogel spotted his contact slouching against a waiting troop carrier and his body stiffened at the sight.

Don’t overreact. Be nice to the man. You need him.

He considered him a stereotype; a big, exceptionally tough squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force. Frederick hated the way he swaggered, the way he tossed his fringe from his face and the gravelled mix of guttural and cultured speech; each aspect creating the archetypical impression of the heroic officer in uniform.

I can see right through you … You bastard.

Frederick knew him as an unpleasant and arrogant man with no scruples at all; a man to fear on every level and a total displeasure to know.

“I hear your worth has changed, Vogel.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t play with me. Our boys just got a
hands-off, on an Assembly jet and here you are in the Shikra that attacked it. I could sell that pelt on your head to the Assembly for a fortune.”

“You owe me
.
”

“Yeah … One phone call to Rome and I could retire.”

He laughed and withdrew a knife from his belt, testing its sharpness with the edge of his thumb.

“Don’t threaten me. There are quite a lot of us.”

“Don’t sweat it, Vogel. I pay my debts. Get this rag-tag lot in the back of the troop carrier … Weapons unloaded and stored before we leave.”

Vogel’s captain strode forward.

“The guns stay loaded. We don’t answer to you.”

The squadron leader laughed and it held such menace that both Vogel and his captain backed away several paces.

“Vogel. Do what I bloody-well-tell-you, or piss off. Got it?”

_____________

Wolf’s aircraft banked to the north on its approach to Darwin, turning south between Nightcliff and East Point.

He felt relaxed as he watched the dark objects swimming below the surface, as they came in low over the clear aqua water off Coconut Grove.

Hammerheads by the hundreds. Not a good place for a swim.

He hated sharks, especially the human variety, like Vogel and the mystery woman.

For the moment, his current schedule appeared to be achievable. The timing depended on how quickly he could determine the enemies’ route and ultimate destination. Once known, the net closed to a secondary point, until Fox recovered the Prize. Then it closed completely, capturing their quarry.

He selected Darwin as his first stop, mostly because it sat on the top of the jet’s north-south axis point of escape. Three attack helicopters awaited his orders at Richmond Airbase, west of Sydney, covering all southern regions and three more at Rockhampton, covered the north.

The enemy could only land in so many places, with no realistic way of escape; the air remained their only sanctuary, but only as long as their fuel supplies lasted.

It’s a fail-safe mission.

Barring an intervention from God himself, he could conclude this mission without delay. His only real concern remained the two miscreants following Fox.

_____________

As they approached the RAAF airfield on the eastern side of Wagga Wagga, Frederick noted the surrounding paddocks and the grazing sheep; there appeared to be no other activity at the base.

As they neared the security check-point, he could see that the boom-gates stood up and open; the entire area, including their hangar unoccupied.

“My debt’s paid, Vogel. If there’s ever a next time, I’ll mount your precious anatomy above my bar, without you attached. Don’t hurry back.”

Frederick forced his lips together and nodded. He could feel a flush of anger heat up his cheeks, but he gave no retort.

Handle it. Don’t react. He might be arrogant, but he delivered the goods.

The transition from truck to aircraft occurred swiftly and uneventfully thanks to the squadron leader. No-one came near or seemed to notice their endeavours.

“Get going, Vogel. Before I change my mind.”

Frederick wanted to shoot the man. It irked him not having the last word. Normally, he let no-one get away with such insolence.

Keep your mouth shut … Control yourself.

Without the squadron leader’s contribution, he could never have continued his pursuit of Fox. The man just supplied him with a fully fuelled Royal Australian Air Force G39 Landsborough troop carrier, with a range of new weaponry and an abundance of extra ammunition.

I’m back and in a better position than before.

He tried to laugh, but he felt too tired to sustain his mirth.

The squadron leader’s contribution also included a lovely charade. The outgoing tower log-books listed an RAAF aircraft leaving Wagga Wagga on a secret in-house undercover operation, requisitioned by the highest authority; the orders routed through RAAF headquarters in Canberra.

No-one can interfere with our progress.

In the air he remained untouchable. He could follow Fox to the Prize with no resistance.

“Look at their new coordinates, captain
.
Fox has turned to the north-west. That only leaves a few possibilities, but I’d be willing to bet your life on Longreach as their destination.”

N
oah groaned, stumbling from the cockpit, as the jet dipped through a pocket of turbulence.

“I’ve lost my air legs.”

Isobel smiled at him, but quickly turned her attention back to the priest.

“You mentioned earlier that the Assembly killed your parents?”

“Yes. I discovered their bodies as a boy, yet didn’t discover the truth until adulthood.”

“So what did you do?”

“I changed. I began to question my place in the scheme of things and to pursue answers.”

Tom felt his anger rising as he listened to the priest’s narrative. It’s similarities to his own story creating an ache in his chest.

“I don’t understand. How could you live with the people who supposedly murdered your family?”

“Live with them. What does that mean?”

“You cohabitated with the killers.”

“Yes, Tom. I understand that you mean revenge, but for me the need for revenge grew into the need for justice. And, despite what you might think, revenge and justice are very different. I couldn’t just wipe out an entire family and then another and another. No. I needed to beat them at their own game … For a better cause.”

“This is your reason for working with them; with the Angels?”

“No. I had no choice in the matter, but something good came out of it.”

Isobel looked over at Tom and raised her brow.

“Something good; I don’t get it?”

“In my search for truth I found a group who shared my beliefs. They became my real family, even though they were being persecuted by the Church and the Assembly. Amongst this group, I could be myself. I could be a man, as well as a servant of God. So naturally, I helped them.”

Isobel nodded and smiled.

“Ah, so this is where you met her; the soul mate you mentioned earlier?”

“Yes. Very perceptive, young lady. She’s the other reason I worked for them. The Assembly discovered my participation in this … unlawful gathering. I helped them with the Angels to spare the group; to save her.”

Tom’s voice sounded harsh, even to him.

“What went wrong? I mean, you’ve risked those people to be with us?”

“When the Angels began to decline, the Assembly started threatening me with the murder of the group to make me comply. I pretended to obey until we could safely hide them and bring you into this awful game. You, ultimately changed everything.”

“Me? How?”

“You provided me with an opportunity to defeat them, which became paramount. Their threats became beatings and then disappearances. How long do you think I could wait, before these monsters came for her?”

The priest seemed to be lost for a moment in his own private world. Tom didn’t trust this man for many reasons, mostly because he needed someone, an actual person, to blame.

Perhaps he’s telling the truth. No-one could fake the look in his eyes.

“What should I call you?”

The priest looked up at Tom and searched his eyes.

“My full title is Father Dominico Rossi. You can call me Nico if you like.”

“Well Nico, if what you say is true, then it seems you’re part of our pathetic little family.”

“Our family …?”

Isobel gave Tom a questioning look, but the priest answered for him.

“You, Tom and I, have all been orphaned by the same people and for the same purpose. That makes us connected.”

The priest turned and pointed towards Noah.

“As for substantiation of my story, perhaps you should be asking him. Noah has been my closest friend for over three decades.”

Tom looked over at Noah and then at Isobel. She looked totally bewildered.

“What do you mean friends? How could that be, Noah?”