The Delta Chain (4 page)

There was very little daylight left and the
first visible stars were already twinkling in the inky blue of the
sky. But there was no peace, not with the constant, thunderous
babble that filled the air. The swamps were a vast nesting and
feeding ground for hundreds of species of birds. Their cries and
squeals made up a frenetic symphony that had at once both a beauty
and a savagery that can only be experienced in the wild.

‘How close?’ Greg asked. It was already past
time for them to find higher ground to set up camp.

‘North. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe
thirty.’

‘Are they setting up camp?’

‘Cannot say, boss. But most likely. They have
left it very late today.’

‘What about us?’

‘We should set up camp now. We’re close
enough to close the distance in the morning. Early, early start for
us, eh?’ Walter had been born and raised on the Aboriginal
settlement in the Northern Territory town of Settler’s Gorge. One
of the most skilled trackers in the region, he made a decent
living. He often freelanced for the local police, the emergency
services and the N.T. Wildlife Conservation Commission.

They pitched their tent and began cooking
tinned foods on the carbine bush stove. As they had the past three
nights, they rigged a kerosene lamp on wire over the camp to give
them a small pool of light. Walter wouldn’t allow the lighting of
even a fire. He wouldn’t allow anything that had the slightest
chance of alerting the hunters to his and Greg’s existence.

‘They travelled a bloody long way today,’
Greg said as they squatted on the patch of dry grass, digging into
the canned beans.

‘Bad day for them, Greg. No crocs. Who knows
why? I expect they wanted to get as far in to the swampland as they
could. They know that’s where the crocs are moving to this time of
year. I’d say that when they do stop, they want to catch as many as
they can in a short time and then head back. I think all the
stories about these men have been true. They are professionals.
They know their stuff.’

‘Who the hell are they?’ Greg wondered aloud.
He had been a Wildlife Conservation Officer with the Commission for
ten years. He and Walter had worked together many times, but never
on such a lengthy foray into such a desolate area of the Territory
as this. There had been reports of this mysterious gang, dubbed
‘the phantom hunters’ by Commission officers, for the past eighteen
months.

The first reports had trickled in to the
Commission at random – over a year ago a couple of trackers
reported a large boat on the Adelaide River, with several on-deck,
water submerged croc cages. The Commission’s light plane scanned
the area but the boat was long gone.

Four months later local rangers in the south
east, searching for a missing boy, had heard sounds that they
associated with men capturing crocs. Later on, from a distance,
they’d sighted a river craft that matched the one seen months
earlier.

The rangers hadn’t been able to pursue the
craft. They’d continued their search for the boy whom they found
alive and unharmed several hours later.

And on the Aboriginal settlement at Settlers
Gorge, the locals began to spread stories, heard from passing
jackeroos and bushmen, of an organised gang with a sleek boat and
sophisticated gear, traversing the waterways at staggered intervals
and capturing crocodiles.

Six months earlier, a small team of the
Commission’s rangers had spent five days flying over the area where
the boat had been reported. On one occasion they’d spotted what
appeared to be a boat. It was on a narrow, winding tributary of the
Adelaide River, difficult to observe for very long because of the
thick canopy of forest. They’d radioed the location back to HQ and
the Commission had organised help from the Northern Territory
police. They’d packed five armed officers into a four-wheel drive
and sent them into the region. The objective was to intercept the
craft whenever and wherever it banked first.

Once again the phantoms were long gone. All
the police found were the remains of a day old camp on the
bank.

There had been no further sightings or
rumours for five months, until just five days ago when a Flying
Doctors aircraft, diverting from its normal route to avoid a storm
centre, radioed the police with the sighting of a boat heading
toward the northern swamplands. The Flying Doctors, like all land
and air services in the region, had been asked to report any boat
sightings in the desolate outer-lying reaches of the Territory.

The Wildlife Conservation Commission’s chief
executive, Harold Letterfield, acted quickly. There was no point,
he decided, sending out planes or boats or a consignment of police
– not into country like that. Instead he teamed the best Aboriginal
tracker available with the fittest officer with the most field
experience. Their brief was to follow the riverbanks, on foot,
locate the hunters and keep track of them without being seen. They
were to radio through the hunters’ movements on a regular daily
basis. In the meantime, Letterfield had both rangers and police on
standby with land and river craft.

The moment these poachers were on their way
back and in more accessible areas, Letterfield’s combined forces
would pounce.

That night it was Walter’s turn to take first
watch. They’d been lucky thus far for the first two nights. No
crocs or wild bush animals had approached their campsite.

Greg couldn’t sleep. He listened to the
relative silence of the night – the birds were quiet – and despite
the humidity he felt an uncharacteristic shiver run through
him.

It was over twenty years since the Government
outlawed the hunting of crocodiles. The saltwater crocodile, facing
extinction at that stage, had become a protected species and in the
two decades since then, their numbers had flourished once more.

There had, of course, been isolated incidents
of hunters defying the Protected Species Act. But nothing like
this.

Despite the shiver that touched his spine,
Greg was looking forward to the morning. He had a love of all types
of wildlife and he held a passionate belief in the Act and in the
Commission’s role in upholding it. He knew that Walter felt the
same. They both wanted to see these hunters stopped, and brought to
justice.

But the shiver persisted, bringing with it a
strange sense of dread.

The mud flats were exposed on both sides of
the river: wide, sloping mounds with reeds eddying the water, the
river at low tide. The mangroves were swept by a brisk, warm wind.
Greg Kovacs opened his eyes groggily, uncertain at first of where
he was or what had happened. He blinked and looked about, taking in
the banks overgrown with bush and trailing vines, and the low,
swirling water. He was in an upright position, knee deep in the
water, his arms outstretched, something digging into his
wrists.

Rope. Thick coils of it, strung between the
overhanging branches of trees. He tried to move and couldn’t, and
the rope cut deeper into the tender flesh of his wrists. Slowly, he
began to remember: Walter had woken him before the dawn, whispered
to him to stay quiet. The tracker had heard sounds that he believed
were those of men. He told Greg to remain still and alert and to
wield the rifle in case of danger.

Walter then vanished into the shadows to
investigate. He told Greg he wouldn’t be long; he had an unnerving
suspicion that the hunters had become aware they were being
followed, and in turn were now looking for
them
.

Greg didn’t remember how long he’d been
crouched in the silent campsite. He knew he’d felt a sudden,
crashing blow to the back of the head. He recalled just an instant
of intense pain. Then nothing.

An hour must have passed because the sun was
over the horizon now, soft light filling the spaces of the
landscape. The heat was already strong and humid.

Who had attacked him? The hunters? If so,
where were they?

Even as those questions rolled across his
mind the reason became suddenly obvious. It was the eyes that Greg
saw first as the rest of the saurian body blended in perfectly with
the surroundings. Eyes that were the colour of gold, staring with
cold intent, devoid of emotion, boring into him from the riverbank.
Greg screamed out for Walter. Where was the tracker? Why hadn’t he
come back for him? And then another terrifying thought: had the
hunters found his friend as well?

The crocodile slid silently into the river.
It’s teeth, designed perfectly for catching and holding living
creatures, had spiky, crystal sharp edges. It’s jaws, powered by
massive base muscles, are able to close with lightning speed and
crushing strength.

Effortlessly it glided beneath the water
toward its prey.

Arriving early at the morgue, Adam was shown
through to the lab by the security guard. Brian Markham was
completing the final stages of the autopsy. He was writing on the
lab chart, the body lying flat on the metal slab. Adam hesitated at
the doorway. It certainly wasn’t his first time in the coroner’s
lab, or the first time he’d stood here as Markham performed one of
his post mortems, but Adam always felt the same creeping sense of
unease. Normally, he wouldn’t have called by until later. His
curiosity, and his sense of emotional attachment to this girl’s
drowning, had drawn him earlier.

Markham motioned for him to come closer.
‘You’re just in time to fill in for my assistant. Jones just took
off for the loo with some stomach virus.’

‘Great.’

‘No question the girl drowned,’ Markham said
as Adam moved beside him. ‘The classic symptoms are all there –
foaming at the nostrils and mouth, skin wrinkling on the palms and
the soles, distending of the lungs. Condition of the body is
consistent with its having been in the ocean for between twenty to
thirty hours.’

‘So why are you wearing your
something-isn’t-right face?’

‘Am I?’

‘I know that expression. It’s the way I’ll
remember you in years to come.’

‘Is that so?’ Markham allowed a brief
smile.

‘You think there’s something suspicious about
this drowning?’

‘Suspicious? Yes. With bodies found in lakes
and rivers, Adam, one of the many things we look for, to determine
drowning, is the presence of stones or weeds grabbed by the subject
and caught in the clenched hand by cadaveric spasm. There was
nothing caught in the hand or under the nails of this girl, which
is consistent with her being found in the ocean. However, both
hands were formed into tight fists. You certainly wouldn’t expect a
drowner to be forming
fists
if she drowned in the deep
sea.’

‘Fists?’ Adam pondered this a moment.

‘Totally unnatural. In drowning incidents a
calm is known to descend on the victim in the final moments – a
dream-like state, if you will. Despite that, this girl still hadn’t
unclenched her fists as she entered that fantasy state. Something
kept the adrenalin pumping.’

‘You think she was striking out at
something?”

‘
Yes, although in an advanced state of
drowning it would have been a slow motion movement. What’s more, as
I’ve already stated, there is bruising. On the fingers and knuckles
of both hands.’

‘It doesn’t fit an ocean drowning,’ Adam
said.

‘No. Now, having said that, it could be that
the fists are the result of a medical condition, known as abnormal
posturing. By that, I mean forming fists or forming something like
an arched back, any positioning known to be brought on by medical
trauma like a stroke or a brain haemorrhage.’

‘There’s no evidence of such trauma?’

‘Nothing conclusive, but I can’t completely
rule it out at this stage because such posturing could result
without any medical stimulus. It’s been witnessed, for a variety of
reasons, in near-drowning victims, though in actual drowned corpses
there would be very few, if any, examples.’

‘Okay. So, abnormal posturing aside, what we
may have here is a girl being held down in shallow water and
beating her fists against an attacker.’

‘Possible, but still unlikely. A drowning
person, held down in a near horizontal position, couldn’t put much
force behind such blows. Even if they did, punching an attacker
isn’t going to cause contusions like these.’

‘They’d have to have been smashed against
something harder.’

‘Much harder.’

‘Like the side of a pool or a bathtub?’ Adam
said.

‘Yes. But if we theorise that the girl was
drowned by an attacker, then she would’ve been hitting out at that
attacker, not striking out elsewhere.’

‘True.’ They stood silently for several
moments.

Markham’s P.A., a plain but bubbly
middle-aged woman named Maureen Gates, popped her head through the
doorway.

‘Mornin’ all. Any takers for coffee?’

‘Morning, Maureen,’ said Markham. ‘And yes,
please.’ He gave Adam a questioning glance.

‘For me as well.’

Maureen cocked her thumb and forefinger into
a pistol shape and aimed it at Adam. ‘White with one if I remember
correctly.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Marvellous woman,’ Markham said after she’d
left. ‘Always switched on, don’t know how she does it. Mind you,
it’s not a bad thing around a place like this.’

Adam nodded his agreement. He turned his
attention once more to the autopsy. ‘Lashing out at a hard surface
suggests the girl might have been trapped. A well or a cave?’

‘In which case I’d expect weeds or dirt or
tiny particles of rock under her nails.’

‘Okay, but putting that aside a moment, she
could’ve drowned somewhere else and then been dumped at sea.’