Stark (33 page)

160: THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF A DARK INTENT

Z
immerman of course hoped in vain. For as the sun set, in all its blazing desert glory, and as the billions of volts of Moorcock lighting came on, almost eclipsing it, the little EcoAction commando unit moved out.

The first major clash of the titans was at hand, for the two armies were approaching each other. Du Pont’s men, dogs, trucks and helicopters were heading for the wire from within, spreading ever outwards, looking for Zimmerman.

Meanwhile, from the opposite direction, outside the wire, the resistance forces were rushing to their fate; a huge peace freak, a lovesick dickhead, a born again environmentalist and a middle-aged woman with a degree in sarcasm. The last of these was driving and she was having some difficulty, because they had elected to travel without lights in an effort to sneak up on their quarry.

‘That’ll fox ‘em right enough,’ said Mrs Culboon, pursuing her preferred line of humour. ‘If we turn the lights off they’ll never see us. After all, they only rule the world.’

Progress was being rendered more than unusually difficult by the weaving, flickering lights on the horizon. The distant sky was a blaze of eerie, unnatural colour. This turned the pitted, wind shaped desert floor into a mass of treacherous shadows, any one of which could be deep enough to snap a twenty-five-year-old axle. Even more disconcerting was that occasionally one of the shadows turned out to weigh ten stone and be capable of jumping sixteen feet. It was a tense situation, Rachel’s car was a soft top and they had visions of being joined from above by a kangaroo.

‘There just isn’t room back here,’ CD said, ‘it will have to sit in the front on your lap, Walter.’

They abandoned the car about a kilometre from the perimeter wire and, carrying their guns and a set of wire clippers, began to slowly approach the scene of what they realized could be their destruction. They recalled all too vividly the trigger-happy encounter on their previous visit to the wire. This time there would be no Zimmerman to miraculously save them. In fact, it seemed, there was a good chance that Zimmerman was already dead. The things they had learnt from the new comrade, Chrissy, had been shocking and fearful. Billionaires plotting together; ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who got on their trail. They crept up to the brightly lit wire with an almost fatalistic detachment.

‘Oh man!’ whispered Walter, pointing. ‘Closed circuit TV in the desert! These people are unnecessarily paranoid.’

He had spotted a camera mounted high on a pole. It was turning slowly towards them. That was it, he, CD and Rachel thought. The moment it focussed on them the game was up.

‘The thing probably has a death ray fitted as standard,’ Walter whined.

Mrs Culboon raised the night-sighted rifle that she was carrying and destroyed the camera with a single shot. There was a surprised silence — silence that is, apart from the humming din emanating from the centre of the construction site. ‘Well done, Mrs Culboon,’ said CD after a pause, ‘I was thinking of doing that myself.’

‘Hey, Mrs Culboon, I was never hip to the fact that you could shoot,’ said Walter, excited and impressed.

‘Mr Culboon hates the fact that I can out shoot him every time so I try not to rub it in,’ Mrs Culboon laughed modestly. And there was momentary elation at their minor victory until Rachel reintroduced a touch of realism.

‘I reckon pretty soon somebody will be beginning to wonder why a screen’s gone dark and start thinking about looking into it,’ she reminded everybody. ‘So I think we should make the most of our small advantage.’

‘Dig,’ said Walter.

They cut the wire, which was not electrified. This had been a deliberate decision on Sly’s part, the last thing he wanted was a load of barbecued kangaroos drawing the unwelcome attention of animal lovers.

For a moment the scared little group stood on the outside, staring at the hole that they had made. Then, with hearts beating nineteen-to-the-dozen, and bowels struggling to maintain some semblance of control over the situation, they climbed through.

At first they had it very easy. They walked for an hour, covering maybe four kilometres and did not see one truck, one guard or one helicopter. Of course they didn’t realize it but this was because the security people were not worrying about intruders that night. In fact, nobody had even noticed the dead camera that Mrs Culboon had destroyed. They were all looking for Zimmerman, every single one of them. The four intrepid Eco-commandos had not yet reached the exapanding area covered by the search, but they soon would.

‘Well, you know, man,’ said Walter, lazily rolling a cigarette as he sauntered along, his hunched lope growing looser and more relaxed with every step. ‘I guess maybe the chick Chrissy has lived too long in the US of A. I guess maybe, like a few Yankees I’ve met, her paranoia dial is set to double ape-shit. I make this observation because we have been strolling in the lion’s den so to speak for the space of five whole cigarettes now and, as I hope you have noticed, we are by no means dead.’

‘Yeah,’ added CD. ‘You know, if I’d known that terrorist infiltration was going to be as easy as this I would have taken it up long ago. Don’t you think, Rachel, I mean, we could have skipped all those peace bazaars and stuff and just strolled into the White House and kidnapped the President.’

‘Listen you two idiots,’ Rachel snapped, causing CD to shiver with frustrated urgings. Such was his monumental desire for a passionate encounter with Rachel that CD relished any display of emotion towards him on her part, even when it was derogatory. He would have got a hard on if she’d tattooed ‘what a wanker’ on his forehead while he was asleep.

‘I love it when you’re bitching,’ he observed irritatingly.

‘Colin please try to be less pathetic,’ said Rachel, causing tense little sparks of suppressed sauciness to pitter patter up and down CD’s trousers. ‘You’re both being pathetic,’ she continued. ‘We haven’t done anything yet, we haven’t found anything out, we haven’t rescued Zimmerman, in fact we haven’t started. Still being alive is the absolute minimum we could have achieved. So don’t be so bloody smug.’

‘Ha ha, I reckon Rachel told you boys,’ said Mrs Culboon, and even with the ever present industrial roar in the distance her voice could still shatter granite. ‘Here’s you two congratulating yourselves like we’ve saved the world and all we’ve done is take a walk under the stars.’

‘All I’m saying, man, is that maybe the people we’re up against are not such a terminal bummer as we had imagined, dig? All I’m saying,’ insisted Walter, ‘is that maybe these people aren’t as big as they’d like to think they are, maybe they ain’t so tough and all powerful, and maybe we’re a match for them. Is that so dumb?’

And Walter’s question was answered because shortly after he had made this monumentally optimistic observation, they came to the edge of a small ridge in the land and the full and majestic scale of their opponent was revealed to them in all its roaring, burning, terrible beauty.

They had been climbing very gently since crossing the wire and were now crossing the little undulating hills which had once ringed the Culboons’ quiet, dingy existence and now ringed the central axis of the Stark conspiracy. From where they now stood, the desert floor swept down into a very shallow valley, a valley which was in fact really little more than a dip in the vast, flat desert.

In the middle of this place, a place of ancient peace; a place which had slept almost undisturbed since the waters of prehistory subsided: a place untouched by human hand, save for those few souls who had scratched out a meagre living on its barren surface. In the midst of all this, boring deep and spreading wide, lay the Stark construction site. Hissing, steaming and glaring into the still desert night.

It wasn’t that the area covered was particularly huge, it was more the intensity of the activity that struck the little group of conspirators dumb. Stretched out below them were six burning bright areas of weaving lights and towering cranes or at least they seemed like cranes, perhaps they were towers of some kind. These hellish patches on the desert floor were arranged not in a circle but in an asymmetric, almost haphazard way, like great fluorescent lilies spread across a pond. From each of these six places came constant blasts and explosions; first an eerie silent flash and then, moments later, a dull crump that could be felt deep in the belly. The exploding lilies were connected by snakes of orange light, along which travelled other lights, some white, some red. Above it all hovered helicopters throwing their own beams downwards in a seemingly futile effort to add to the orgy of illumination. All light soon blended and was lost in the great and terrible glow. A glow that had a strange, translucent quality, induced by the clouds of dust and steam that were constantly being thrust upwards into the shuddering air.

It was like Hell’s kitchen on the day that all seven deadly sins had come to dinner and the Devil was trying to do a complex Taiwanese banquet that he’d never attempted before. In silence they began to descend down the long, shallow, featureless slope. It took a lot to shut up CD and Mrs Culboon, but for once neither of them had anything to say. They were all thinking much the same thing; which was that any group of people who could organize the Devil’s kitchen that they were now approaching, could probably handle four ecologically concerned individuals.

‘Still think that Chrissy’s paranoid, Walter?’ said Rachel.

A moment later the little group finally met up with the outer limits of the expanding search for Zimmerman. The phoney war was over. It all seemed to happen at once. Above the general roar, the gutteral rat-a-tat-tat of a helicopter emerged as a single and definitive sound; and it was getting louder. Soon they could see it, in the distance, its searchlights scanning the ground below.

‘Take cover!!’ snapped Rachel.

‘Where?’ replied Walter, and he had a point.

161: THE GREAT SANDY DESERT

T
he Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia is not known for its prominent features. If it were, perhaps it might have had a slightly more interesting name. It might have been called ‘The great, sandy and with lots of interesting little nooks and crannies and rocks and caves and great places to hide in Desert.’

But it wasn’t called that because there are virtually no nooks, crannies, rocks or caves. All there is, across 99 per cent of its surface, is space and sand. It is a great and sandy desert. Never was a place more aptly named.

162: BATTLE AND CAPTURE

T
he four frightened fugitives stared around them looking for somewhere to hide and there was nowhere. Or at least there was nowhere that they could see. Had Zimmerman been with them he would have calmly told them to crouch stock still and think like a bush, or lie flat along one of the tiny creases of land caused by the soft desert wind.

‘Stillness is the essence of camouflage,’ he would have told them, ‘it is very difficult to pick out something that doesn’t move.’

That is what Zimmerman would have told them had he been there, but of course he wasn’t. And so his four friends ran around in circles flapping their arms in panic shouting, ‘What the fuck are we going to do!! What the fuck are we going to do!!’

There was literally nowhere to run to. The chopper was approaching fast, making great sweeping arcs with its horrifyingly powerful search-light, covering hundreds of square metres of flat, featureless terrain and subjecting it to careful scrutiny.

Suddenly, for the four terrified commandos on the ground, it was day, bright bright day as they were swathed in the harsh light. Their shadows stretched out like deep black ditches behind them. They stared, blinking into the beam, frozen into momentary petrification. Four skittles waiting to be knocked down.

Then CD had a thought.

‘Scatter! I’m going to take out the light!!’ he shouted, and raising the automatic weapon to his shoulder, squeezed the trigger.

Considering that CD had never fired any form of gun before, and that he was starting out on a state-of-the-art machine gun that could have cut the front off a house, it wasn’t a bad effort. He missed the light but he was very close. As it happened, he hit the fuel tank, causing the helicopter to burst into a horrifyingly brilliant fireball.

The machines that Stark employed were police-designed craft, hence they were not armoured. Contrary to what cop shows would have us believe, most police helicopters are used for traffic surveillance and it takes a pretty vicious contra-flow system to provoke the average motorist to dig out an automatic rifle. The instant inferno hung in the air with its spinning blades hurling burning debris into the night. Strangely, and rather eerily, the search-light which emanated from the helicopter’s nose cone, remained on, although it no longer bobbed and weaved about. For a little while nothing further happened. The helicopter burnt in the sky and the four figures on the ground remained motionless, transfixed by what they had done, still casting their long black shadows in the light that shone from the dead aircraft. Then it crashed to the ground with the sort of noise that only a burning helicopter crashing into the ground can make, and gloom descended once more.

Still the four of them did not move. They just stood, trying to get their heads around the enormity of developments. The stakes had suddenly got a very great deal higher. Now they were killers, murderers. CD was vaguely surprised to note that the old cliche that ‘it didn’t seem real’ was true. It didn’t.

‘You should have let me do it, CD,’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘I’m the one who can shoot, remember?’

‘I forgot,’ said CD lamely.

‘You had to do something,’ said Rachel, her voice hard. ‘It was us or them.’

‘We hope it was us or them,’ corrected Walter. ‘Man, all I can say is that this whole situation had better be as serious as the paranoid Yank chick says it is, because if that chopper was just patrolling a building site we’re going to prison for ever.’

The terrible thing that had happened seemed to have driven the memory of their recent and stunning sight of the construction site from his mind.

‘Oh come on,’ shouted Rachel, ‘we know it’s serious, for God’s sake, Walter, they were shooting at you the other night with these very guns. They’ve taken Zimmerman and the police claim there wasn’t even a fight at the airport. And anyway Walter, what the fuck is that!! A retirement village!’ She pointed down towards the site. Now that the burning helicopter had ceased to light up the sky, the construction site had regained something of its awesome brilliance.

‘Chrissy has got to be right,’ Rachel urged. ‘Something utterly terrible is going on and CD was absolutely right to do what he did.’

‘Well, right or wrong, we’re in the shit now,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘so I say we press on as fast as we can and get away from that cemetery over there.’ She pointed at the wreck of the helicopter and CD wished that she had chosen a different phrase. He did not know how many people it took to crew a small helicopter, but however many it was, that was how many people he had killed.

They began to run; Mrs Culboon, as the slowest, setting the pace. They ran towards the glow of the building site, each pondering their own confused thoughts. They did not know what they were running towards, what they would find, or what they would do when they found it. They were just running away from a burning helicopter full of dead men.

As it happened, what they were running towards was, in their case, even worse than a burning helicopter full of dead men; it was a not burning helicopter full of live men. Men who did not take kindly to the sort of shock that CD had just given them. On the whole, people take jobs in private security firms in order to throw their weight about, not in order to get shot out of the sky.

After a minute CD, Rachel, Walter and Mrs Culboon stopped running. They could hear the helicopter coming, they could see the headlamps of the trucks and jeeps which were also hurtling across the sand towards them. There was absolutely nowhere to hide.

Mrs Culboon cocked her rifle.

‘Oh man,’ said Walter wearily, ‘I think we’ve done enough of that, you know? I mean, we are in a no-win situation here, you dig? Like, they are going to get us for definite, no way can we fight them all so I think maybe it would be wrong to just kill people for no reason, even if they are the bastards who are after us.’

As it happened Mrs Culboon had not really wanted to fight. She was just thinking of trying to defend her friends; acting instinctively that was all. None of them wanted to fight, they all wanted to go home to their mothers and be tucked up in bed with warm milk and vegamite soldiers. But they couldn’t, they would have to face the music.

‘Drop the weapons,’ a voice barked.

They dropped them and with a fair degree of unnecessary force, were bound and thrown in the back of a truck.

Mrs Culboon and Walter lived on the fringes of society, this was not for either of them their first experience of brutality and danger. They didn’t like it but they recognized it. For CD and Rachel, it was unknown territory, and hence utterly terrifying. All people who live in well-ordered societies harbour a secret dread of what would happen if order was removed. If suddenly they found themselves in a brutal human jungle without the protection of the social rules on which we all rely. It was happening to CD and Rachel. It seemed to them, lying face down in the back of a three ton lorry, that they were beyond action and beyond help.

CD would have given anything to see a copper. It wouldn’t have mattered how young or arrogant; seventeen-years-old and a face like a plate of rhubarb and custard, CD wouldn’t have minded. But there’s never one there when you want one.