Tomorrow When The War Began (21 page)

Chapter
Nineteen

It was dark, probably around midnight. We were
lying in a culvert, looking out over the edge at the dry black
highway. We’d just come within seconds of making a very big, very
fatal mistake. The way Robyn and the others had described it,
they’d bowled up to the road, sat there watching for an hour or so,
then shoved off again. So we’d taken much the same approach. We
were about fifty metres from the gravel edge. I was leading, then
came Lee limping along, then Fi, and Homer bringing up the rear. It
was just the slightest unnatural sound that caught my ear. I was
going to ignore it and go on, but my instincts took over, and I
stopped and looked to the right. And there they were, a dark solid
mass coming slowly down the road.

Now my instincts betrayed me: they told me to
freeze; they stopped me from going anywhere. I had to get rational
again, and fast. I had to activate that determined voice in my
brain: ‘If you do nothing, you’ll die. Move, but move slowly. Be
controlled. Don’t panic’ I started fading back, like a movie played
backwards, and nearly stepped straight into Lee. Luckily he didn’t
say anything; I felt his surprised hesitation, then he too started
stepping backwards. By then the patrol was so close that it became
dangerous to move any further. We stood still and pretended we were
trees.

There were about ten soldiers and they were in
double file, dark shapes against the skyline, higher than us
because we were in the scrub off the shoulder of the highway. I
didn’t know where Fi and Homer were but I hoped they wouldn’t
suddenly come blundering out of the bushes. Then my heart seemed to
stop at a sound away to the left, a startled rattle of movement.
The soldiers reacted as though someone had pressed a button in
their backs. They leapt around, spread out in a wide line and threw
themselves to the ground. They came shuffling forward on their
elbows, facing Lee and me, but with the nearest one just metres to
our left. The whole thing was frighteningly efficient. It seemed
like these were the professional soldiers Mr Clement had told us
about.

A moment later a giant torch, its light
burning a path through the night, began to search the bush. We
followed its traverse as though we were already caught in its beam.
Then the light hesitated, stopped, focused, and I saw what actually
was caught in its beam. A rabbit, very young, crouched low to the
ground, its little head searching to the left and right, sniffing
at the white shining around him. There was laughter from the road.
I could feel the relaxation. Men started standing. I heard a rifle
being cocked, a few comments, then a violently loud explosion. The
rabbit suddenly became little fragments of rabbit, spread over the
ground and rocks, a bit of fur splattered on the trunk of a tree.
No one came down the embankment. They were just bored soldiers,
enjoying themselves. The light switched off, the patrol got back
into its formation, and continued down the road like a dark
crocodile.

Only when they were out of sight and hearing,
and Fi and Homer had come forward, did I allow myself to get the
shakes.

When we did go on into the culvert we
travelled like snails rather than crocodiles or soldiers, crawling
silently along. I don’t know about the others but I could easily
have left a glistening trail behind me, a trail of sweat.

We stayed there about an hour, and in that
time we saw only one small convoy. There were two armoured cars in
the lead, followed by half a dozen jeeps, half a dozen trucks, then
two more armoured cars. We also saw a second patrol; a truck with a
spotlight mounted on the roof of the cabin and a machine gun in the
back. It wasn’t a very smart arrangement, because we could see it
from a long way off, the light combing the bush, backwards and
forwards. We had time to slide back into the scrub and watch from
behind trees. I wouldn’t like to have been a soldier in that truck,
because guerillas could have picked them off easily. Perhaps it
showed that guerillas weren’t so active around here. But as I
waited behind the tree for the truck to pass I was surprised and a
little alarmed to realise how much I was starting to think like a
soldier. ‘If we were up a tree with rifles,’ I thought, ‘and one
person shot out the spotlight and the others went for the machine
gunner ... Better still have one person out the front shooting
through the windscreen to get the people in the cabin ...’

Satisfied with our ‘time spent in
reconnaissance’ we withdrew further into the bush to talk. We
agreed that it was dangerous and probably pointless to stay there
any longer. We looked at Homer, for ideas on what to do next.

‘Can we just go up to the Heron?’ he asked. ‘I
want to have a look at something.’

The Heron was the local river, not named after
the birds but after Arthur Chesterfield Heron, who’d been the first
person to settle in the district. Half of Wirrawee, including the
High School, was named after him. The river flooded occasionally,
so that the bed was wide and sandy, and the water itself meandered
across its bed in a pretty casual way. A long old wooden bridge –
almost a kilometre long – crossed the Heron just outside Wirrawee.
The bridge was too narrow and rickety for the highway, and about
every twelve months there’d be a big ruckus about the need for a
new one, but nothing ever seemed to get done. To close it for any
time would have been a big inconvenience, as the detour into town
was a long and awkward one. In the meantime the bridge was quite a
tourist attraction – there wasn’t a big demand for postcards in
Wirrawee but the few that you could buy showed either the bridge or
the War Memorial or the new Sports Centre.

Under the bridge, along the banks of the
river, were the picnic grounds and the scenic drive. ‘Scenic’ was a
joke; it was just a road that went past the rotunda and the
barbecues and the swimming pool, and on into the flower gardens.
But that’s where Homer wanted to take us, and that’s where we went.
Three of us, anyway. Lee had done enough. His leg was hurting and
he was sweating. I realised how exhausted he was when we parked him
under a tree and told him to wait, and he hardly complained at all.
He just closed his eyes and sat there. I kissed him on the forehead
and left him, hoping we’d be able to find the tree again on the way
back.

We got very cautious once we were close to the
bridge, as we figured it might be heavily guarded. It was obviously
the weakest link of the highway, which I guessed was why Homer was
so anxious to see it. We came at it from a sideways direction,
across country, through the Kristicevics’ market gardens. I
wondered how my mate Natalie Kristicevic was doing, as I munched on
her snowpeas. It was good to have some fresh greens, even if Fi got
nervous at the noise I made crunching them.

From among the sweet corn we had a good view
of the bridge and the picnic grounds. We could see the dark
silhouettes of soldiers walking along the bridge. There seemed to
be six of them, four standing at one end while the other two
prowled around on a regular beat. Another convoy came through, and
the sentries gathered at the end of the bridge, watching it. One
held a clipboard and made notes, checking the number of vehicles
maybe. One talked to the drivers; the others seemed to search under
the trucks. It took quite a while. The bigger trucks then crawled
across the bridge with wide gaps between them. They obviously
didn’t have a lot of faith in Wirrawee’s mighty bridge.

At about 4 am we picked Lee up and retreated
to our hide-out, which was a tourist cabin on the Fleets’ property;
a little place that they rented to people from the city. It was
quite isolated and unobtrusive, so we figured it was safe. Fi
volunteered to be first sentry; the rest of us fell gratefully into
the beds and slept and slept.

It was midafternoon before we had the energy
to talk tactics. It was obvious that Homer had spent a good bit of
time thinking about the bridge, because he went straight to the
point.

‘Let’s blow it up,’ he said, his eyes
shining.

The last time I’d seen his eyes shine like
that was at school, when he told me he’d taken all the screws out
of the Principal’s lectern in the Assembly Hall. If blowing up the
bridge was going to be as big a disaster as that day turned out to
be, I didn’t want to be a part of it.

‘OK,’ I said, humouring him. ‘How are we going
to do that?’

With his eyes going to high beam, he told
us.

‘What Ellie did with the ride-on mower gave me
the idea,’ he said. ‘Petrol’s our easiest and best way of making
explosions. So I tried to think of how we could repeat what Ellie
did, but on a bigger scale. And of course the biggest version of a
ride-on mower is a petrol tanker. What we’ve got to do is get a
petrol tanker, park it under the bridge, on the scenic drive, then
blow it up. Should be quite a bang.’

There was a deadly silence. I wanted to ask a
lot of questions, but couldn’t get enough breath to do it. For a
start, I knew who’d be driving the petrol tanker.

‘Where would we get the tanker?’ Fi asked.

‘Curr’s.’

Curr’s was the local distributor for Blue Star
petrol They came round to our place once a month to fill our tank
It was a big business and he had quite a fleet of tankers. That
part was certainly possible. In fact it might be the easiest part
of the whole insane scheme.

Homer was asking me something, interrupting my
thoughts.

‘What?’

‘I was asking, can you drive an articulated
vehicle?’

‘Well, I guess. I think it’d be the same as
driving the truck at home when we’ve got the trailer on. The
question is, how the hell am I going to drive it under a bridge,
get out and blow it up while the soldiers on the bridge just watch,
wave and take photographs?’

‘No problems.’

‘No problems?’

‘None.’

‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘Now that’s settled I’ll
just relax.’

‘Listen,’ said Homer, ‘while you guys were
walking towards Wirrawee last night with your eyes shut, I was
noticing a few things. For example, what’s around the corner from
the bridge, going towards Cobbler’s Bay?’

Homer was fast becoming like the teachers he’d
always despised.

‘I don’t know sir, you tell us,’ I said
helpfully.

‘Kristicevics’ place,’ said Fi, a little more
helpfully.

‘And on the other side?’

‘Just paddocks,’ said Fi. We were all looking
at Homer, waiting for him to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

‘Not just paddocks,’ said Homer, offended.
‘That’s the trouble with you townies. One of the most famous studs
in the district, and you call it “just paddocks”.’

‘Mmm,’ I said, remembering. ‘That’s Roxburghs’
place. Gowan Brae Poll Hereford Stud.’

‘Yes,’ said Homer, emphatically. I was still
struggling to make connections.

‘So what do we do? Train the cattle to tow the
tanker into position? Or use methane for the explosion? If we find
a cow that’s been dead long enough to bloat, we can put a hole in
his side and light the gas. I’ve seen that done.’

‘Listen,’ Homer said. ‘I’ll tell you what I
noticed. That paddock right on the highway, Mr Roxburgh’s got a lot
of cattle in there, all in good nick too. It’s heavily stocked, but
it’s a good paddock and it can take it. Now suppose you’re a young
soldier in a foreign country and you’re guarding a long narrow
bridge and it’s late at night and you’re struggling to stay awake
and alert. And suddenly you hear a noise and you turn around and
there’s a hundred or so prime head of Hereford charging towards
you, flat chat. About fifty tonnes of beef travelling at 60 or 70
k’s, looming out of the darkness straight at you. What do you
do?’

‘You run,’ said Lee promptly.

‘No you don’t,’ Homer said.

‘No you don’t,’ I agreed, thoughtfully.
‘There’s too many of them, and they’re coming too fast for
that.’

‘So what do you do?’ Homer asked again.

‘You run to the sides. And then you probably
climb up the sides. Which happens to be pretty easy on that old
wooden thing.’

‘And which way do you look?’ Homer asked.

‘At the cattle,’ I said, more slowly
still.

‘Exactly,’ Homer said. ‘I rest my case.’ He
sat back and folded his arms.

We gazed at him, three people thinking three
different collections of thoughts.

‘How do you make the cattle do what you want?’
Fi asked.

‘How do you get away afterwards?’ Lee asked.
‘I can’t run far on this.’ He gestured at his bandaged leg.

I didn’t have any questions. I knew the
details could be worked out. It was a high risk plan, but it was a
brilliant one.

Homer answered Lee’s question first though
‘Motorbikes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking for some time that if we
wanted to be effective guerillas we’d get ourselves ag bikes and
use cross-country travel instead of roads. We could become very
mobile and very slippery. Now, I’ll get the cattle going by using
my superior mustering skills to get them into the road. I’ve
mustered before at night. It works well – in fact it’s better in
some ways. They’re not so suspicious then. If it’s a bright enough
night, which it should be, you don’t even use lights, cos it stirs
them up too much. So I’ll get them out and then Lee and I’ll fire
them up, if Lee’s fit enough. We can use an electric prod, for
example, and maybe an aerosol can and a box of matches. I got into
so much trouble for making a flamethrower from them at school, but
I knew it would come in handy one day. A blast of that on their
backsides and they’ll keep running till dawn. Once we’ve got them
blitzing down the road we’ll fade off into the darkness to the
motorbikes and make our getaway.’

He turned to Fi and me. ‘I always seem to get
out of things with the least dangerous jobs,’ he apologised. ‘But
it has to be this way, I think. Ellie’s our best driver, so we need
her for the tanker. And Lee’s too lame to run, which is hopeless
for the passenger, because they’ll both have to be quick on their
feet. And I’m the one who’s had the most experience with
cattle.’