Darkness Be My Friend (21 page)

I don't know why I said that last thing, just to show I'd looked after the Landie in a responsible way or something.

They both patted me and then went out of the fernery on the side away from the tech building. What made
me laugh, and what gave Fi the giggles, was the way they'd figured out to look innocent in case anyone was watching. They walked out like lovers, hand in hand, kissing and canoodling as if they were in an old movie. So it was pretty obvious what they wanted people to think they'd been doing. Fi, who was beside me by then, squealed. "Oh how embarrassing!" she said. "Oh God, I hope no one's watching."

I had to admire their guts though, and the cleverness of it. It was a good trick.

As they got back to the building a soldier came around the corner and said something to them, but it didn't look too serious.

It reminded me, though, that we were right in the middle of the enemy's nest.

Now Fi and I were faced with another long wait. We'd decided before we arrived that we'd have to stay there till dark. But it was I—normally the patient careful one—who persuaded Fi we should leave.

"Even if we take an hour to move a hundred metres, it'd still be more interesting than sitting here all day," I argued.

Fi agreed after a bit of hesitation. She was in a different mood. It was fascinating to see how much she'd changed in that little time. She seemed to be floating, making irrelevant comments, leaving me to do the worrying, the watching out. All she wanted was to chatter nonstop about her parents. Fair enough, of course, but we were still in an incredibly dangerous situation.

We withdrew gradually from the fernery and kept on retreating through clumps of bushes and trees. At one point Fi was so distracted she leaned over and pulled
out a weed from the garden bed next to us. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Fi," I said irritably, "concentrate on what's happening, will you?"

She looked away, but didn't say anything. I felt guilty, and angry with myself.

The boys were going to wait at the school, so that's where we headed. There wasn't anything very interesting about the trip, except that from one point, near the vet clinic, we could see the airfield. I was amazed at how Wirrawee's little airfield, which before the war had been a dirt strip for Cessnas and Cherokees, for cropdusters and rich graziers, was now transformed into a big busy place, with a dozen brown and green jets parked outside a big new terminal building. There was a huge new hangar too, and a highwire cyclone fence around the entire base, and the runway was all concrete, and much much longer. And there were people everywhere. We counted eighteen, just in the short time we were watching.

No wonder the Kiwis wanted to attack it. This was a major part of the enemy's plans.

I noticed they were improving the road into the airfield, too. They had a bunch of graders and bulldozers and trucks, just like in peacetime. I was surprised and sad that everything was going on with no sign that they were scared of opposition.

As for evidence of an attack by the Kiwis or anyone else—there was nothing. Not a single hole in the fence, not a damaged plane anywhere, not even a broken window. The twelve New Zealanders had vanished without a trace.

That reminded me to check with Fi to see if she'd
asked her parents about them, but she hadn't. She'd forgotten. Which made me mad all over again, although this time I had enough self-control not to snap at her.

We couldn't stand there watching for too long. The sun was still bright in the sky and we were in cover that was very thin. So we slipped away and continued our slow journey back to the school.

When we got there the boys were much nicer to Fi than I had been. But then they hadn't spent most of the day huddled in wet ferns with her and getting no thanks for it. They crowded around asking a million questions, laughing with her. I felt very out of things. I stood there and sneezed.

Of course, I was just jealous, and missing my own parents. But that's no excuse. I could have been more generous. If anyone had a reason to feel rotten right then it was Lee. But he acted like he was really happy for Fi. Knowing Lee, I thought he was faking it. He might have been pleased for her, but underneath that, he was just plain desperate.

When things were more normal again the boys started telling us how they'd spent the time. I should have guessed what they'd do. From early morning till now they'd been discussing the airfield. They'd even done what we'd done: snuck up to a good lookout point and checked the action from there. They'd made notes of what we could do.

The first thing I told them was to get rid of the notes. If we were found with them we'd be executed on the spot as spies or saboteurs. We'd have no hope of talking our way out of that one.

Still, I listened to their ideas. Lee did most of the talking. With a few decent meals in him he'd got back a bit of energy and health but the main fuel he was running on was the thought of revenge.

I made a mental resolution to keep a close eye on him. Lee didn't care much any more if he lived or died. The rest of us still did care. We'd have to watch that Lee didn't get us in trouble by doing something crazy or gung-ho. I figured I should try to get him on his own and remind him about his little brothers and sisters. Maybe that would help him to realise that he had responsibilities.

Anyway, the boys did have two main ideas. I was kind of reluctant to listen, but I already knew I wasn't going to get much choice in the big question of whether we'd try an attack. If I didn't have a choice in that, I could at least make sure I had some choices in the smaller questions: how and when and where, and how much we attempted. I didn't want to get stuck with another rotten job, like being inside a pitch-dark container full of anfo, and taken down to Cobbler's Bay on the back of a truck. Thank you, but no thanks.

One of their ideas was quite clever, quite cute. Lee had gone past Curr's, the fuel depot in Back Street, three nights before. We all knew it because ages ago we'd taken a truck from there and used it to blow up the old Wirrawee bridge.

"Now," Lee said, looking at Fi and me like he was a teacher and we were a couple of new students. I wondered how long it'd be before I saw him smile again. Would he ever smile again? "Now, they've improved the security since then. There's a cyclone fence around it,
higher than the old one: in fact it's the same as the one at the airfield, about two-and-a-half metres tall. There are two sentries, and they walk around the inside of the fence every half hour or so. They don't look too excited about it, I must say."

"Neither would I," said Homer, "if I had to spend years of my life walking around a fuel depot."

"Then they go back into their little shed," Lee said. "It's a galvanised iron one near the main gate. It used to be the office, I suppose."

"That's right," I said. "There was a book in there. When we had to get fuel in town we'd write our names in it and how much fuel we'd taken. And the night we blew up the bridge Fi and I got the keys for the tanker from that hut."

Lee continued. "The point is that that's the fuel depot for the airfield. I saw the whole thing. These trucks marked Aviation Fuel' come in from the Stratton Road and connect their hoses to an underground tank and empty their loads into it. It must hold heaps."

"It'd be a security thing," Kevin said. "They wouldn't want millions of litres of fuel in a tank at the airfield."

"Well, I'm not blowing it up, I'll tell you now," I said. "It's not worth it. All they'd do is put new tanks in and bring in another million litres."

"I know that," Lee said impatiently. "You're not the only one with brains here, Ellie. What I want to do is something more long term, something that'll wreck the delicate engines of their beautiful jets for weeks, maybe forever. Maybe cause them to crash just after they take off."

I guessed then what he was thinking. "Sabotage the fuel?"

"Yeah. Exactly."

"What with?"

"Sugar."

"Where would we get the sugar?"

"We'd break into Tozer's."

"How do you know there's sugar in Tozer's?"

"I've seen that too. During the daytime they have the delivery dock open at the back of Tozer's, just like in the old days, and there's plenty of sugar there. Pallets of it."

"But the sugar's not the only thing," Homer broke in. "We want two different points of attack. Supposing you and Fi do that, lace their fuel. At the same time we could start another bushfire, at the bottom of that hill behind the airfield. If the wind is right, like it was the other day, it'd go right through the place in five minutes, before they got their planes in the air. They'd never get them all up in time. We could wipe out half of them."

"So if one plan failed, the other should work," Lee said. "And if they both work, so much the better. The next lot of planes they bring in, to replace the burnt ones, would get a nice load of sugar in their fuel tanks."

"But by then we'd be back in New Zealand," Kevin said.

Obviously that was the part of the plan he liked the best. Fair enough, too.

We sat there going through it all. It had a lot of attractions. One was that we could return to New Zealand
with our honour intact. Although we'd lost contact with Iain and Ursula and the Kiwis, we had to recognise that there was nothing we could do about them. They might be a thousand k's away. If they'd been caught they wouldn't still be in Wirrawee. They could have been carted off in ten different directions. Anywhere that had a maximum security prison.

And, of course, they might be dead. Dr. K. knew nothing about them, and I assumed Fi's parents knew nothing about them either, or else surely they'd have said. But if we could carry out their mission at least something would be salvaged from the wreckage. We could call Colonel Finley and order up the chopper and get out of here. I could talk to Andrea again.

Our rush to leave Hell and save the Kiwis seemed pretty naive now. For a while we'd thought we were heroes on white horses, saving the people in distress. Well, we'd ended up on horses, that part came true, but nothing else from the dream had. And our rush, throwing away our normal care and caution, had caused us the trouble we were now in. Stumbling into those kids: that had messed things up badly.

So as far as saving something from the wreckage, the boys' plan did have a lot of attractions. It had a lot of problems too, of course. The first was to get access to the sugar. Lee had made a number of little trips around Wirrawee in the middle of the night when he was sick of the cemetery, and he thought there were no guards at Tozer's. There were patrols through the town at random times, on average about half an hour apart, but Tozer's itself was just locked up the way it was in peacetime.

Assuming we could get in there, the next big problem was to get all the sugar to Curr's, the fuel depot. Getting through Curr's fence would be another risk. We could get wirecutters, from the Technology Room. They'd cut the wire OK, once they'd been cleaned and oiled. Then if Fi put the panel of wire back into place behind me when I went in, the guards shouldn't notice it.

But so many little problems worried me. If just one thing went wrong the whole plan failed. I suppose that was the case with everything we did, but it seemed even more so this time. And the same with what the boys were planning. Lighting a fire mightn't be so easy now. The long spell of hot dry weather, so early in the season, was certainly helping, and so were the dewless nights, but on the other hand the enemy knew we were loose in the district so they would be more vigilant than ever.

The petrol plan actually appealed to me more because it was kind of lateral thinking or whatever they call it. It was using brains, imagination, which seemed like a good start.

Homer quite seriously wanted us to use a golf cart, from the golf club, to carry the sugar. He wouldn't give up on it. He figured it'd be quiet, which was true, of course, because they're battery operated. But they're also slow, conspicuous, and probably hadn't been charged up since the war began. The batteries would be as dead as bricks. Homer still didn't agree. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "Are you telling me that the officers wouldn't be down at the golf club every day having a round or two? I bet you, in every army in the world the officers manage to find themselves a golf course."

I had to admit it was possible. "But you can see them
a mile off," I argued. "They're always white, and they have little flags on them. And they do make some noise."

"At three o'clock in the morning, who's going to hear them?" Homer pointed out.

He was quite obsessed with it. I couldn't help wondering if he just wanted another good story to tell when we got back to New Zealand. But sometimes when people argue long enough and hard enough you can end up losing your sense of reality and agreeing with them. They wear you down, even if it's ridiculous. So at one stage I nearly did give in.

"Look," I said, "if you can have a golf cart sitting outside Tozer's at 3.01 a.m., we'll use it. Just make sure you wipe your blood off the seat though. I don't want any mess."

I regretted that comment the moment I'd said it, of course. Homer looked a bit shaken and Lee looked like I'd hit him. We didn't normally make jokes like that. They'd stopped being funny ages ago.

"Sorry," I said. "Bad joke."

There was an awkward pause, then we went on with the plans. How were we going to break into a department store? There might be burglar alarms, although the ones at school hadn't worked. We couldn't rely on that, though. If we made a noise getting in we might alert someone. If we broke a window the patrols would notice and we'd be more busted than the window. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that could be our biggest problem.

"There is one way we could do it," Fi said. "It's a big risk, but it might work."

"Yeah?"

"Well, you know how sometimes you see an open window and you can't tell if it's open or not?"

"Like it could be glass or it could be nothing? Yeah."

"We're assuming that we'll break a window and the soldiers will see the broken glass. If there was no broken glass, though, if we cleared all the glass from the window and from the ground, then how would they know it was broken?"