Death is Forever (23 page)

To Erin it seemed like a long time before the helicopter reached the edge of the station and turned north to fly the east leg of the boundary. As she watched, more ridges and shallow troughs appeared. There were red rock hills in broken array, like a rumpled blanket thrown over the land. There weren’t any roads. She couldn’t even see any rutted tracks. The vague, random-looking lines she saw from time to time could have been cattle trails or simply runoff channels for the few months of the year when free water existed in the land. There were no buildings, no canals, no windmills, nothing to suggest that civilized man had ever existed out here or ever would.

Occasionally Erin spotted Kimberley shorthorns or kangaroos below. Cow and kangaroo alike fled from the thunderous dark shadow of the chopper skimming over the rugged land. Once she saw a small blackened circle surrounded by a ring of something that reflected sunlight in countless small silver-white flashes.

“What’s that?” she asked, forgetting that she wasn’t going to talk to Cole any more than absolute survival required.

He looked away from an intriguing geologic anomaly on the landscape and glanced where her finger was pointing. “Aborigine camp. The black is where the bonfire was.”

“What’s the shiny halo?”

“Broken beer bottles and smashed beer cans.”

She frowned and looked more closely. If people had been there last night or a week or a year ago, there wasn’t any sign of them now. There wasn’t anything but the chaotic, untamed land.

“Where are the natives?” she asked.

“They could have been gone since last night or since the last wet. I can’t tell from up here.”

“Where are their shelters?”

“In the dry, they don’t need any. In the wet, they use natural stone overhangs, unless they’re on reservation land. Then they’ll use houses the government built for them.”

The helicopter bore along its northern heading, not having completed even one leg of the Windsor station’s huge rectangle. As the minutes went by, the sheer scale of the station seeped into Erin. With it came a sense of the relentless demands the land would make on anyone who dared to walk its seamed face.

The depression inside Erin slowly grew, fed by more than her own certainty that she’d once again misjudged a man’s intentions. This time it was the land she had misjudged. Despite all she had been told, she hadn’t believed that Australia could be as harsh, as empty, as protective of its secrets as Alaska had been. She hadn’t believed that the tiny spot called the Windsor station would be physically taxing to explore. There was no ice, no untamed rivers, no jungle, no mountains, not even a real forest—nothing to hide the nature of the country itself. Surely Abe’s diamond mine could not be all that well concealed.

Erin hadn’t understood how sere the land was, how inhospitable to life. Alaska had the ocean and rivers full of salmon to provide a wealth of food for its natives. The Kimberley Plateau had neither ocean nor reliable rivers. It had no herds of migratory animals, no flocks of edible birds, no flora rich with berries and seeds.

Most of all, the Kimberley had no dance of clean, fresh water.

The longer Erin watched Windsor station unfold beneath the helicopter, the deeper her depression became. She’d been naïve about more than Cole Blackburn.

“My God,” she said finally. “How does anyone survive down there?”

“Carefully.”

She shook her head.

“It’s not as hopeless as it looks,” Cole said. “There are small seeps for water and big snakes for food.”

The sound Erin made could hardly have been called a laugh. “When you told me how static the Aborigine culture had been until the white man came, I didn’t believe it. I do now.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“When you told me the natives had been walking for forty thousand years over the biggest, purest deposit of iron ore on earth but they hadn’t discovered metalworking, I wondered why. When you told me they had literally walked over huge, pure gold nuggets and never hammered earrings or icons or even bracelets from the gold, I wondered why. I also wondered why they didn’t domesticate any animals, invent weaving or shoes, or have any kind of written language.”

He waited, watching her intently. There were shadows in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, wariness and weariness combined.

“Now I don’t wonder why,” she said. “The Aborigines were lucky to survive long enough to bear children who would also be lucky to survive and bear children, who would also be lucky to survive, world without end, amen.”

“That’s the buildup talking,” he said, looking at her flushed face and sweat-slicked skin. “When it’s this hot and sticky, life doesn’t seem worth the trouble to live. Once it rains you’ll feel different about the Kimberley.”

She glanced from the ground to the sky. The odd, distinct river of clouds that poured in daily from the distant Indian Ocean had gradually become more than a dark column. It had widened at the edges until it was a hazy lid over the land. Distinct thunderheads billowed in slow motion, lazily eating the hot sky. Searing white on top, slate gray on the bottom, the clouds promised an end to the claustrophobic humidity and heat.

“I wish the clouds would quit strutting and get down to work,” she said.

He smiled crookedly. “No, you don’t. Once the wet sets in, we won’t be able to go prospecting. We’ll be grounded.”

As he spoke, his gray glance went over the gauges. Frowning, he flicked his index finger against the fuel gauge. The needle wavered, rose, then fell steeply, only to rise once more, indicating a nearly full tank.

“Problems?” she asked.

“The pilot told me this gauge wasn’t very reliable on the top end. If I hadn’t checked the fuel level manually, we’d be heading back right now.”

“What about the bottom end?”

“He didn’t say.” He looked at her. “Don’t worry, honey. The chopper is mechanically sound.”

“How do you know?” she retorted. “You didn’t have time to go over it the way you did the Rover we rented.”

“The pilot had just flown in from Dog Three. He topped off the tank because he was expecting to fly us all over the station. I made sure he didn’t have a chance to bugger anything after he found out he was staying behind.”

Cole’s casual anticipation of sabotage startled Erin. “You really don’t trust anyone, do you?”

He shot her a sideways glance. “Neither do you. You don’t even trust me.”

“I trust you to find the diamond mine,” she said evenly.

“But not to keep my hands off Lai, is that it?”

“That wouldn’t be very bright of me, would it, considering the touching scene this morning?”

“Erin, for Christ’s sake—”

“Forget it,” she interrupted tightly. “All you promised me was your best effort at finding a diamond mine. The rest of it was just proximity and adrenaline. Subject closed.”

“Shit, lady, you’re really trying to make me lose my temper, aren’t you? If you think—”

She yanked off her headset, cutting off his words.

He came within an inch of grabbing the earphones and slamming them down over her stubborn head. The ease that she set fire to his temper amazed him. Even as he told himself to cool off, sweat trickled into his eyes. He wiped his face on his bush shirt and his palms on his shorts. Within moments, his skin was sticky with sweat once more.

It would get worse before it got better, hours and days and nights and more days of relentless heat, stifling humidity, the sun a hammer flattening everything, the air a torpid beast suffocating whatever survived the sun’s savage onslaught.

“God
damn
this weather,” Cole said viciously.

Erin didn’t hear him. Her headset remained in her lap, allowing the helicopter’s noise to cut her off from the man she’d given too much of herself. But that was the way she’d always been—all or nothing at all, life taken at full tilt or full stop, nothing in between.

Even Hans’s brutality hadn’t changed that. Nothing would. It was simply the way she was.

The world shifted sharply, almost angrily, as Cole changed the heading of the helicopter, turning it onto the short north leg of the station’s nearly rectangular holding.

Erin positioned the map to match the new direction and looked down at the land once more, watching for something new, something different, something to lift her spirits. She saw ground that was seamed, worn, bleached, a land lying exhausted beneath the combined weight of humid air, sunlight, and incomprehensible time.

Unhappily she admitted to herself that in many ways Crazy Abe’s legacy was as bitter a disappointment as finding Cole in Lai’s arms. Both Cole and the legacy had seemed to promise Erin a new world, a world where she could shed the dead weight of the past, freeing herself to explore the possibilities of life.

Both legacy and man had promised her hope.

Both had proved to be less than they seemed.

Crazy Abe’s legacy was a steamy, gritty, time-ridden hell. Cole Blackburn was a man who couldn’t resist the lure of one woman even while he was another woman’s lover.

The dream was becoming a nightmare. She was alone and unarmed in the killing fields of the diamond tiger.

Broodingly Erin unfolded another panel of the map, held it against the hot air boiling through the open doors of the helicopter, and went back to the solitary game of matching land features with marks. The only useful marks on the map were the ones Cole had carefully written in. His symbols indicated the rare seeps and important geological boundaries, the dry watercourses, and the random lumps of limestone poking through the rusty surface, bringing relief to a land worn nearly flat by time.

A line of compact gum trees showed startlingly green against the landscape, catching her eye. She looked more closely, saw that the trees traced an otherwise invisible watercourse between two ragged black lines of limestone, and checked the map. Frowning, she looked down again. After a moment she picked up her headset and put it on.

“Are we still flying the northern leg?” she asked.

Cole shot her a glance. Behind the sunglasses her eyes were unreadable shadows. “Yes.”

“Headed for Dog One?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then we have a problem.” She pointed to the trees below and then to the map. “The northern boundary is here. Dog One is here. We’re here.”

“And right here,” his finger stabbed the map, “is something I want to look at.”

“What?”

“Those limestone ridges. I think they might be remnants of an ancient reef, but they could have formed in some other way.”

“What difference does it make?” she asked.

For a moment he was tempted to ignore her cool pursuit of geological facts and make her talk about something more personal. But he didn’t. If she separated herself from him any more, she would be brought down and gutted as quickly as a lone lamb found by a wolf pack.

He and she had to stand together—if not as lovers, then as business partners.

“If the ridges were part of a reef, the coastline was nearby,” he said evenly. “Where there’s coast, there’s beach. I’d love to find another Namibia. Except the beach sands here would have been changed to sandstone, unless the sandstone has already been eroded away a grain at a time, making loose sand all over again.”

“Is that possible?”

“Where do you think the sand in the deserts came from, if not from rock?”

She blinked. “I never thought about it. You mean sand becomes sandstone becomes sand becomes sandstone?”

“World without end,” Cole said, echoing Erin’s earlier words. “The surface of the earth has been recycled again and again as continental plates meet and devour each other. Nothing survives subduction intact, not even diamonds. But the Kimberley Plateau hasn’t been recycled for a billion and a half years. It’s the oldest big land surface on earth, which means the diamonds that were eroded out of their mother pipe could still be around somewhere, rounded off and gathered into placer pockets, waiting for us to find them.”

He twisted the collective control, dropping the helicopter toward the ground between the ragged ranges of hills. As the chopper descended into a clearing in the gum trees, dust and grit boiled up from the ground.

As soon as the rotor settled into a lazy rhythm, she reached for her harness.

Cole’s hand locked around hers. “Wait.”

Eyes narrowed against the brilliant light that penetrated even the sunglasses’ deep orange tint, he looked at the patches of dappled shade thrown by trees and at the thicker shadows cast by rocky knobs.

One of the shadows separated and began to move toward them.

Cole put his hand back on the controls. “See it?” he asked.

For a time she didn’t. She stared intently at the dappled light and shade beneath the gum and acacia trees. Then her breath came in hard as she recognized the dusty black hide and thick curving horns of a water buffalo.

The animal lowered its head, preparing to drive off the interloper.

“My God,” she said. “It’s huge!”

“Mean, too.”

Cole brought up the revs and held the helicopter at a hover a few feet off the ground.

The sudden sound and movement made the water buffalo cautious. It stopped and watched balefully.

“Are there any more around?” she asked.

“No. The bulls are solitary except at mating time.”

“Like men,” she said coolly.

The bull charged before Cole could answer.

He raised the helicopter until the skids were ten feet off the ground. The water buffalo passed beneath the hovering craft, slowed, and slewed around to face its elusive enemy.

Cole held the chopper tilted in a position that sent the maximum amount of dust and grit in the animal’s eyes. After a few minutes the bull turned and trotted away in disgust.

“Reminds me of Abe,” Cole said over the noise of the engine. “Angry, alone, and working hard to stay that way.”

“When Abe’s anger wore thin, he must have been a desperately lonely man.”

“What makes you think it ever wore thin?”

“Anger always does.”

He looked closely at her face, but her sunglasses still concealed any emotion. “Is that why you left Alaska?” he asked. “Did your rage at life finally wear thin and leave you lonely?”

She tilted her head, thinking about it. “I suppose that’s part of it. What’s your excuse, Cole? What did life do to you that turned you into a solitary rogue?”

“I trusted a woman who said she loved me.”

Erin became unnaturally still. “Lai?”

“Lai,” he agreed.

“What happened?”

“The usual. She didn’t love me.”

“Did you love her?”

He shrugged. “What’s love? I wanted her.”

With that Cole landed the helicopter. Instead of getting out immediately, he cut back on the revs and watched the bush where the bull had disappeared.

Nothing moved but leaves tossed by the rotor’s artificial wind.

After a time he throttled down to an idle. No shadow came drifting up from among the trees to challenge the helicopter’s right to land.

“Stay here,” he said.

She would have argued, but without the fanning action of the rotor, the heat was unbearable. She didn’t want to get out and slog over soft ground beneath the full weight of the sun for no better reason than defying Cole Blackburn.

Keeping one eye on the bush where the bull had disappeared, Cole walked toward one of the many unremarkable dark rocks that poked through the soil. The sound of steel on stone rang through the wilderness as he chipped off a sample with his rock hammer. Beneath the rough black exterior, the stone was a smooth shade of cream. He took samples from other black rock knobs before he returned to the helicopter.

By the time he climbed in, he was as wet as if he’d been swimming.

“Well?” Erin asked.

“Looks a lot like the Windjana formation, which means a reef. I won’t know for sure until I look at these under a microscope.”

“Do you have one?”

“Back at the station. Wing is a thorough man. What he doesn’t think of, Uncle Li does.”

“Anything to keep their diamond prospector happy, is that it?” she asked, trying to keep the acid from her voice.

“That’s it,” Cole agreed curtly. “Unlike some people, the Chens know just where their bread is buttered.”

The chopper leaped into the hot, wet air and climbed to a thousand feet. Ten minutes later they descended near an irregular depression. Gradually Erin realized that the hole was man-made rather than natural. A tunnel gaped off to the side.

“Dog One,” Cole said laconically.

As soon as he turned off the engine, heat wrapped around them in a thick, invisible shroud. He peeled off his bush shirt and dropped it behind the seat. She plucked at her own top, trying to create a breeze.

“Take it off,” he suggested. “We’re the only people in a hundred miles.”

She shot him a sideways look. “I’ll survive.”

“Suit yourself.”

He bent and reached behind her seat. She looked everywhere but at the swirling masculine patterns of hair that covered his chest. When he straightened, he was holding a large canteen. He unscrewed the top and handed it to her.

“Drink.”

The water was warm and a bit stale. She quickly drank her fill and handed the canteen back to him. He shook his head.

“More,” he said. “You’re used to Alaska. Until your body gets used to the Kimberley, you’ll have to drink much more water than you think you need.”

When she’d drunk enough for his satisfaction, he took the canteen and drank. Only then did he get out and walk toward the hole in the ground that was the only sign of Sleeping Dog One’s existence. He didn’t look behind to see if Erin was following.

She yanked off her harness, grabbed her camera case, and dropped to the sunstruck ground. Instantly beads of sweat gathered all over her skin. She felt like she had just stepped into a pizza oven filled with wet socks.

There were no signs, no stakes, no fences to show that the land held anything but the random debris of a failed mining effort. Dog One had been worked, but never in an organized way. A rusty wheelbarrow stood on its pitted wheel beside the entrance. A pick and shovel had been discarded in the spinifex. The ore dump was so close it had eroded into the mine’s entrance, threatening to seal it.

“Doesn’t look like much,” she said.

“It isn’t.”

Inside the tunnel mouth, out of the sun, the air was a bit cooler. She took off her sunglasses and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. When she turned and looked back toward the entrance, the violent contrast of sunlight and the black outlines of the roughly hewn mine fascinated her. She dug her camera out of the bag and went to work, trying to capture the elemental difference between dense velvet shade and a sun that made her believe in hell.

In Alaska light and darkness had been divided into huge, nearly seamless blocks of time. In Australia, time was shards left over from a primordial explosion. The difference fascinated her in a way she could express only through photographs.

Lost to everything else, she looked at the black and incandescent world through the camera lens.

After going farther into the tunnel Cole turned to see what was keeping Erin. When he realized what she was doing, he switched on the electric lantern he’d brought and gave his attention to the tunnel wall itself. The shoring was rude but still effective. With mining, if with nothing else, Abe had been a careful man.

Satisfied that the tunnel was reasonably safe, Cole went farther in, descending with each step. Here Abe had followed the lamproite sill to a point where it spread out in a lateral dike. There Abe had stopped.

Nothing had changed since Cole’s last visit to Dog One. The walls were still dull lamproite except where Abe had misjudged the slope of the ore and had had to backtrack. The tunnel ended abruptly where Abe had lost the lamproite dike and given up, for the quality of the diamonds simply hadn’t repaid the work of digging them out. Only gem diamonds repaid the cost of mining.

As Cole retreated, he studied each dead end where the tunnel strayed from the line of the lamproite intrusion. He examined the walls of these failed tunnel offshoots carefully, looking for any sign that Abe had accidentally cut across a paleo-streambed, a paleo-beach, or any stratum that might have been laid down by moving water.

Cole didn’t find anything to raise his heart rate.

Erin’s voice floated back through the darkness. He shined the light on his watch, saw that an hour had passed, and shook his head in amusement as it occurred to him that he’d finally found a woman who wouldn’t be bored on a prospecting expedition.

“I’m coming,” he called. He flashed the light back the way he’d come and walked quickly.

“Find anything?” she asked as he emerged from the darkness, pushing a perfectly shaped circle of light in front of him.

“Nothing new.”

When he walked forward, the light glanced off a small pile of rubble that had been pushed against the wall. Something shimmered darkly in the little mound.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Cole played the light over the mound again and said, “Diamond ore.”

Erin made a startled sound and bent down to scoop up a handful of the rocks. In the yellow light of the electric lantern, the ore looked as common as mud. The few tiny crystals embedded in the ore were the color of camp coffee and nearly as opaque.

“These don’t look anything like diamonds,” she protested.

“You’re thinking of gem diamonds. Those are bort.”

For a few more moments she studied the bits of ore and minute, ugly diamonds. “I don’t see any green crystals.”

“If there were any, Abe would have been buried in diamond buyers. But they rarely came out here.”

“Didn’t Abe ever leave the station?”

“He never went beyond the store in Fitzroy Crossing. He had plenty of money for equipment and food and Fosters lager. That was as much as he needed from civilization.”

“He really didn’t like people, did he?”

“People hem you in and betray you,” Cole said. “There’s a freedom out here that’s addictive.”

“You and Abe were a lot alike. Once burned, forever shy.”

“You should know, honey. You’re backing away from the fire as fast as you can.” Cole flashed the light toward the entrance. “There’s nothing for us here. Let’s go.”

Without a word she turned and walked toward the searing sunlight that crouched at the mouth of Dog One’s tunnel, waiting for prey.