Stark (32 page)

155: DAVID AND GOLIATH

T
he old biblical story of David and Goliath, in which we are reliably informed a plucky young lad bested a great big bully, is a story fraught with moral contradictions. The principal contradiction being that David only achieved his famous victory by means of superior weapons technology. His use of a sling shot (an early version of the Stinger, the Exocet and the Cruise) allowed him to floor Goliath before the big fellow even got close. The moral weight traditionally ascribed to David’s victory establishes a fairly dangerous precedent. For instance, when a mere handful of British Empire troops were able to slaughter thousands of their spear-carrying opponents by means of the Gatling Gun, was it a David and Goliath situation? When a few hundred USAF flyers attempted to ‘bomb Cambodia back into the Stone Age’ were they plucky little Davids using wit and cunning to overcome the Goliath that was the population of Cambodia? In fact Goliath was no Goliath at all but a pathetic, muscle-bound Neanderthal throwback. An elephant charging a bazooka.

Now if in that bible story, David, a small boy in a loincloth — which is the biblical version of wandering around in your underpants — had been facing a Goliath who was a multiheaded, multinational monster, richer and more powerful than any other force on earth. A monster bent on committing craven and wicked acts in the final seconds before the domesday clock strikes twelve and the dark midnight of ecological oblivion cloaks all life on earth. If that had been what David had been up against, the trick with the sling shot might have cut a little more ice.

156: DAVID

A
s Zimmerman hopped it out of the window, his friends, old and new, were hopping it out of the Culboons’ place. It was beginning to seem to Chrissy as if she had been scampering about in terror all her life.

They had decided that after Zimm had been missing for five hours, they would take a calculated risk. They would ring the police.

‘After all,’ Rachel had said, ‘maybe he just got busted, I mean arrested…‘ Even in this moment of crisis Rachel fiercely resisted the slow, insidious encroachment that Walter’s language was making on her brain. ‘It would have been a pretty serious disturbance up at the airport. Perhaps he’s just sitting in a cell waiting to get done for disturbing the peace.’

‘Listen, Rachel, I’m telling you,’ insisted Chrissy, ‘the guys Zimmerman was mixing it with run the world. When they have a problem they are not going to call the local cops.’

‘Maybe he’s in hospital,’ suggested CD.

‘Sure. Propped up in bed with a bunch of flowers signed love from the world’s billionaires,’ said Chrissy to Mrs Culboon’s laughter. ‘They’ve got him, I’m telling you, they’ve got him.’

‘Well, if they have got him,’ said Mr Culboon, sucking on his pipe, ‘they’re going to be coming after us pretty soon. I reckon Zimm won’t tell them nothing but we can’t lie low for ever.’

‘They know us blacks were involved,’ added Mrs Culboon. ‘Why there ain’t no more than fifty of us in the town, won’t take them long to get here.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Culboon, ‘we have to fuck off mates. Somewhere to think.’ It was at this point that they decided to ring the police.

‘I mean, man, if they’re going to get on us anyway, we might as well at least check that nobody knows where he is,’ said Walter. ‘You know he could be dead or dying or…or maybe he just had a little victory celebration after the fight and got done for tooting on a doobie.’

Unfortunately Chrissy was right. The police denied all knowledge of the airport incident, which meant for sure that Zimm was being held by the shadowy mega-corporation. Also it meant that the police were bought…‘And it means that that call you’ve just made, Mr Culboon,’ said Chrissy, ‘is being traced as we speak.’

‘OK let’s split,’ said Walter.

And so it was that the entire world opposition to the Stark Consortium was splitting at once. Zimmerman was climbing out of the window of Du Pont’s office. Rachel, CD, Walter, the Culboons and Chrissy were running out of the back door of the Culboons’ house. They loaded up the old station wagon with what food they could, also some spare clothes and the guns and grenades that Zimmerman had taken from the guards at the perimeter fence, and drove out of town.

157: GOLIATH

T
yron and Sly stood in the burning sun on the steps of Du Pont’s Portacabin, shouting to make themselves heard above the noise. Although as it happens they probably would have both been shouting anyway because they were so furious with each other.

Sly strongly objected to Tyron’s interfering and his casual violence. Tyron objected to what he saw as a lack of urgency in Sly’s manner. After all, there appeared to be a situation developing where it was possible that a carefully orchestrated plan of infiltration was being carried out against them. Who could tell how far it had got already.

‘We have absolutely no idea how big this thing is,’ Tyron yelled, ‘maybe it’s the Russians! Those Kremlin Ayotollahs would give their balls for a piece of what we have going here!’

‘For God’s sake, Tyron, don’t be such a dickhead!’ Sly shouted back. All around them the roar of Stark’s ghastly creation seemed to swell to match their mood. ‘We’ve run a full background make on the KGB, the OKVD, the ABC and XY fucking Z for all I know!’ Sly continued. ‘Nothing. Nobody, has a hint of what’s going on here. We have an eye in every intelligence agency there is. We pay for half of them for Christ’s sake! Durf’s on the case, he says there isn’t a major criminal, government or military establishment that we aren’t monitoring. We are too big to touch.’

‘So who’s running Rambo in there?’ Tyron jerked his thumb towards the door of the Portacabin.

‘No one’s running him! I’m telling you, Tyron. I’ve met them, they’re kids and ageing hippies; greenies. They have not got the faintest idea what’s going on. They’re just troublemakers taking a long punt on a short idea because of your stupid Nazi pogrom. Even this journalist from the States doesn’t know what she’s discovered. We have that from the report on what she told Toole. There is absolutely no reason to panic, and certainly no reason to go around slapping hippies.’

‘Know nothing!’ shouted Tyron, ‘know nothing!! Christ that damn hippy I just slapped had identified the world’s six biggest rocket silos! How much does he have to know?’

‘Yes, well he’s in our hands isn’t he? All we have to do is to try to persuade him to tell us where his friends are and then we’ll have all of them, won’t we? And let’s try to do it peacefully, eh?’

They re-entered the office to find Du Pont’s prostrate form stretched out on the floor looking like the victim of some terrible sexual liaison…

‘Oh man, we went all the way, just about bit off each other’s noses and everything.’ Whatever had happened, the prisoner was gone.

158: COUNCIL OF WAR

T
he little EcoAction team got out of the Culboon’s nice new house about ten minutes ahead of the horrible criminal squad who broke in and took the place to pieces, finding nothing but a note left by Mrs Culboon saying:

Dear Bad Fellahs, fuck you. PS could you leave the back door slightly ajar for the cat.

As it happened, by the time the leader of the search squad was presented with this note by a subordinate, the back door had already been reduced to match-wood.

Mr and Mrs Culboon knew a little place that they called their holiday home. It was about thirty kilometres in the opposite direction from the construction site; a tiny cave squeezed into the side of one of the piss-poor little hills that ringed the Bullens Creek area.

Quite a few Aboriginals, especially country ones, set a great deal of store by meditation, or dreaming, or just sitting staring into space, depending on individual mood, and the little cave in the hills was where the Culboons did their bit of drifting.

‘Reckon we’ve sat here dreaming and peaceful many a time, haven’t we, Mr Culboon?’ said Mrs Culboon.

‘Reckon so,’ replied her husband with a tinge of sadness.

‘It’ll make a nice change to sit here shitting ourselves in terror instead,’ she shrieked, and everybody laughed with her.

‘OK, you know, man,’ said Walter calling things to order. ‘It is time to assemble our thoughts; it is time to get it together man; it is time to make some kind of plan, dig?’

Of course they all dug very well.

‘The problem as I see it, you know? Right? Is that it is comparatively easy to dig the plan that we have to make a plan. It is less simple to dig the actual plan. I mean in order to do that, we have to have a plan, which we don’t. Dig?’

‘Of course we don’t,’ said Rachel, ‘but we haven’t had a plan from the beginning, have we? We’ve just followed our noses. And that’s all we can do now. It’s obvious that we have to help Zimmerman. We have to find a way through that wire and help him.’

‘I’m really sorry to be so negative,’ Chrissy replied, ‘but from my experience of these people, my guardian angel will be beyond hope by now. The guys he took on are more than a police force, or an army, or a government even. They’re money, dirty money, they are everything and they own everything, and that, I’m afraid, includes Mr Zimmerman.’

‘They don’t own Zimmerman, lady,’ said Walter. ‘He’s not a part of their world, he doesn’t even live on it. He got in a space rocket and left the minute he got back from ‘Nam.’

‘Anyway,’ Rachel asked slightly resentfully, ‘what do you suggest we do then?’ Rachel could not avoid thinking that things hadn’t been so bleak before Chrissy had turned up.

‘I don’t know,’ said Chrissy. ‘I just don’t know. We still don’t have a clue of what it is we’re really up against. Even if there was someone in authority that we could trust, we actually have nothing whatsoever to tell them. I suppose you’re right, Rachel, we will have to go in. On the million to one chance that instead of getting our butts shot off, we discover what they are up to.’

‘Hey, Chrissy, you should curb it with the blind optimism,’ CD said. ‘We don’t want to jinx ourselves.’

Mrs Culboon, of course, laughed. Nobody else did much.

‘Well, you know, I guess we should not, like, all get down on it, right?’ said Walter. ‘Because, like, if Chrissy is right and whoever goes over that fence comes out dead, I for one would like to think that maybe somebody was left around to like try and tell the tale, and also feed the Culboons’ cat. I’m serious you know? I see no reason why like the cat should have to collect the bummer that we have walked into.’

‘If somebody’s going to try and eventually alert some form of authority,’ said Rachel, ‘it should be Chrissy. She’s got a real job and credit cards and everything. What are the rest of us? Just a bunch of no-goods. Chrissy should stay.’

Chrissy had, in the previous forty-eight hours, lied and robbed her way across the world, in the process of cheating death many times. Suddenly she felt very tired.

‘Sounds good to me,’ she said. ‘I ain’t the volunteering kind.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘Chrissy’s taken most of the shit so far, and she’s best qualified to speak up for our corpses. She should stay here. I guess she’s used up a heap of luck, what with stealing and pretending to smuggle drugs.’ Mrs Culboon laughed. She had greatly enjoyed Chrissy’s account of her adventures, told during the futile wait for Zimmerman.

‘I think Mr and Mrs Culboon should stay too, you know?’ Walter said. ‘Mr Culboon’s head man of a community. A lot of liberal politico’s dig that sort of thing and they’re the only ones who are going to listen to anything as weird as what we’ve got.’

‘Afr Culboon’s head man, I’m not,’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘I’m sticking with you, Walter. Shit, I want to know what the hell they’re doing to our old homestead.’

And so it was decided. Walter, Rachel, CD and Mrs Culboon would try to get inside the wire with the twin aims of trying to find Zimmerman, and of trying to find out what was going on. Meanwhile, Chrissy and Mr Culboon would remain holed up at the holiday home.

Mr Culboon went to the back of the station-wagon and unloaded the guns. ‘You know how to use these things?’ he asked the four newly commissioned commandos. ‘Because I’ve shot various rifles in my time,’ he continued and, shouldering one of the semi-automatic rifles, loosed off a couple of rounds. He was knocked off his feet by the kickback.

‘Yes, just as I thought,’ he said. ‘It’s much the same but you have to hold it a bit more firmly.’

159: TAKING COVER

T
he years slipped away from Zimmerman. It was the early seventies again and he was just the same as he had been then, except of course that he didn’t grow his bollocks back. But, apart from that, he was the same: a cunning, ruthless, hunted man, scared and exhilarated at the same time. He lay on the roof of the Portacabin, prostrate along the guttering, listening to the furious altercation below him.

‘We should have shot the bastard!!’ yelled Tyron. ‘We should certainly shoot you!’ he added, glaring at the unfortunate Du Pont who looked a sorry sight with his huge conk turned almost sideways.

‘I just hope it rains Du Pont,’ Tyron continued, ‘because the way the guy left that trunk of yours, you’re going to drown.’

‘Leave him alone. Do you want to have to indoctrine a new security chief into Stark? What happened to Du Pont could have happened to anyone.’ Even Du Pont, who was grateful for Sly’s spirited defence, had to privately concede that this was pushing it a bit. The chances of getting your nose half bitten off by a securely bound hippy seemed pretty slim.

‘Look, he can’t have gone far,’ declared Sly nervously, ‘and he can’t get out of the compound. The whole thing’s covered by cameras, and it’s open country all the way to the wire. We’ve got fifteen choppers for Christ sake, he can’t move.’

Zimmerman had actually already presumed all this for himself, which of course was why he hadn’t attempted to move. It was fairly audacious of him to stay on top of the Portacabin, but a calculated risk. A favourite method of hiding in the jungle had simply been to stand stock still and pretend to be a tree. Any searcher will look under hedges and behind rocks; few will study the open spaces very carefully, or, for that matter, the roofs of the prisons from which a person is supposed to be fleeing for his or her life. This was the reason that Zimmerman elected to stay where he was.

‘Du Pont,’ snapped Sly, ‘I want every man on this, and I want more brought in. At the moment he is a maximum of half a kilometre away; a minimum of a few yards.’

Zimmerman went slightly cold. This bastard was a bit too clever for his liking.

‘Get on it, take the place apart, fanning out from around this Portacabin,’ Sly continued. And Zimmerman hoped that Du Pont would not take this to mean upwards as well as outwards. If he survived the next fifteen minutes, Zimmerman reckoned he was safe. He then resolved to stay exactly where he was for quite a while, long enough for them to become worried and confused. Long enough for them to begin to wonder whether he had got out after all.

Fifteen minutes later Du Pont, Tyron and Sly were gone. Zimmerman smiled to himself. He was in the shadow of the heating flue and considered it extremely unlikely that he would be spotted from the air. He was pretty safe for the time being. He curled up in the gutter with his Phantom comic. He had plenty of time and he intended to luxuriate over every page; digging all of the pictures in detail. Quite often there were little jokes and bits of drama in the drawings that it was easy to miss if you skimmed through. What’s more, after the Phantom, he also had two new Judge Dreads, he reckoned it could be a pretty good day. All he hoped was that CD had got the woman away and that they all had the sense to stay put.