War Lord (10 page)

‘Be there in an hour,’ I said.

She gave almost no response other than the barest nod. I wondered what the Myers-Briggs type indicators for Ice Maiden were.

*

The boat surged forward briefly, picked up by its stern wave after Grubb cut the throttles. We’d been motoring south for at least half an hour, heading for the mouth of a dark green estuary. The banks on either side, lined with mangroves that appeared to float on the water, were gradually converging at a point somewhere before us. Black birds squawked into the sky, disturbed by the burble of the outboards.

Dead ahead, a large fish leaped clear of the water, disturbing the glassy surface.

‘Get ’im on the way back, Senior,’ the DI told Nolngu as the widening rings it left behind disappeared beneath our bow.

More birds, large white ones with long black legs, took to the sky in a panic above the mangroves. The place wasn’t used to humans. Or maybe it was and knew what to expect. The water soon lost its clarity and became a murky green, the air thick with insects as the banks closed in on either side.

We puttered through a one-eighty-degree bend, the river continuing to narrow and the hum of insects competing with the noise of our outboards. The boat got hung up on the bottom momentarily, clouds of billowing black mud rising to the surface behind our stern.

‘Shallow here,’ said Grubb. ‘Three feet, maybe less.’ He operated a control and the motors angled back, changing the exhaust note from muted burble to a throaty growl.

Petinski slapped at her neck, and Nolngu passed the insect repellent back to her. ‘Sand flies,’ he said. ‘Bad fellas.’

Petinski squeezed a long worm of the thick, foul-smelling repellent into the palm of her hand, passed me the tube, and started applying the worm to her exposed skin. Apart from the insects, the landscape seemed pretty benign. I hadn’t seen any salties, sharks or boogie men.

‘Nice country,’ I said to Grubb as I rubbed some repellent into my forearms.

‘Yeah, and it’ll bite you on the arse if you’re not careful, as your pilot mate found out,’ he said. He turned to Nolngu. ‘Senior, take the wheel. Let’s drift a little.’

Nolngu slid into the DI’s place behind the controls and cut the throttle to idle as Grubb stepped back toward the stern. He lifted one of the rods out of its holder and unhooked the lure.

‘A bibbed minnow,’ he informed me, holding the bright silver lure with three hook clusters in front of his eyes. ‘Barras love ’em.’

‘Barras?’

‘Barramundi. Gorgeous fish.’

Killing Spree
had come almost to a stop. The DI cast out toward the shade beneath the mangroves, plonked the lure in a hole just in front of them, and then reeled it in. Nothing. He cast out to the same place a second time. Nothing. He went for third time lucky and, as I was starting to wonder what point he was hoping to make, the rod jerked violently. Grubb whipped it back and began reeling in.

‘
Yeah
. . .’ he said, straining. ‘Fucken monster.’

The rod bent into an inverted U. Petinski came and leaned against the gunnel to get a better look. Grubb brought the fish alongside, its silver flanks flashing in the sunlight beneath the surface of the water.

‘You need the net?’ I looked down at it. The fish was seriously big.

But then a shadow stole over it like an eclipse on fast forward. A thrash and the silver was gone. Grubb grinned and lifted what was left of the fish out of the water, dropping a big head attached to some guts onto the deck.

‘What happened?’ Petinski asked.

‘Bull shark, luv,’ Grubb replied. He unhooked the head and tossed it overboard. Something moved just below the surface and took it. ‘Water like this is perfect for the buggers – shallow and shitty.’ He signaled to Nolngu, who put the engines into gear so that we idled forward. ‘Only a couple of feet deep here, but that’s all they need. And then, as I said, there are the fucken salties.’ He motioned at a tree trunk floating in the water over toward the opposite bank. On cue, the thing suddenly grew a tail, propelled itself forward and then slid below the surface. ‘Not so nice country.’

Okay, point made.

‘Boss,’ said Nolngu. He motioned ahead, another bend in the river approaching. A chunk seemed to have been taken unnaturally out of the wall of mangroves where the SC was pointing. Behind it was a rise in the ground – a hill about a hundred and fifty feet high, the only one I could see anywhere. The something unusual was halfway up the hill. It was white, and far too large to be a bird.

‘There,’ said Petinski, pointing.

The object was a wing partially obscured by the bush. The angle changed as we closed the gap and most of the rest of the broken aircraft came into view, lower down the hill slope.

‘No fire,’ I overheard Petinski say, commenting to herself.

A thin screen of mangroves lined the curve in the river, a mudflat behind them. Grubb steered for it and brought the Johnsons farther out of the shallow water, the exhaust note amplified by the natural amphitheater caused by the river bend. The hulls kissed the mud then, grounded more firmly, nosed straight into the mangroves. Nolngu climbed up onto the side of the boat with the Brno in one hand, and moved forward to a hatch. He pulled out an anchor, threw it onto the mud, and then jumped down after it, disappearing from view until I saw him lugging the anchor up the mudflats toward more solid ground lined with scrub, tugging occasionally on the attached rope, slipping once or twice in the mud.

Grubb came back and extracted the Remington from the opened tube. ‘Saltie tracks further up,’ he explained, pointing to a stretch of the mudflat twenty yards away and loading a magazine from his hunting vest.

‘You look worried,’ I said.

‘Nah, just cautious. Worry is the look I get when I’m firing repeatedly at point-blank range at the fuckers but the slugs don’t seem to make any difference. The crocs round here are fucken dinosaurs. The cunts don’t feel pain. The big ones are extra mean and unpredictable. They’ll jump right out of the water if they think they can get you.’

Hmm. The water was particularly murky here – black lagoon murky. Any kind of creature could live down there, and probably did.

‘Shall we, y’know, get off?’ I suggested, a little less cool about it than I intended.

‘Yeah. Move up the beach quickly,’ Grubb advised. ‘Away from the water’s edge.’

I had no intention of hanging around collecting shells. I shouldered a pack with built-in camelback. Petinski likewise had her gear and water supply in a pack slung over her shoulder.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

Grubb eyed the water behind our boat, standing his ground like he was covering our retreat. I climbed up onto the hull, went to the bow and jumped. My boots disappeared into the soft mud, which made farting sounds as I pulled one foot then the other clear of it, using the anchor line for support. When I reached the scrub, I stopped to catch my breath and sucked in some insects along with the oxygen, swarms of them buzzing furiously around my head. Gagging, I spat the things out. Ahead, Nolngu materialized from behind a screen of scrub and waved at me to come toward him. Easier said than done. The ground stopped being mud and had turned into a bed of rotting desiccated bush. Something snapped dully under my next footfall and I sank up to my knee in the bed of powdered twigs.

‘Can I get past?’ said Petinski impatiently as she pushed on by, stepping lightly on the rotting vegetation.

I dragged myself up and out of the decaying ground one step at a time and eventually found solid footing, my shirt and hat soaked with sweat, the repellent stinging my eyeballs. I drank a mouthful of warm water from the camelback, spat some into my hands and rinsed my eyes. Petinski and Nolngu had gone on ahead, tired of waiting. I caught up with them standing among the buckled, twisted remains of a largish twin turboprop Beech Super King Air spread around the side of the hill. The plane was broken into half a dozen large pieces, the T-tail ripped off the fuselage along with one complete wing, the fuse itself broken into three. Bits of gnarled aluminum skin and hunks of foam insulation and wiring were scattered everywhere. Petinski had a Canon in her hands, and she began photographing everything. Grubb came through the scrub behind us, the Remington slung over his shoulder.

‘Shit,’ was all he said, looking around, taking in the destruction.

I caught up with Petinski as she climbed the hill to get a view looking down on the wreckage. ‘Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said when she stopped climbing. Petinski ignored me and kept taking photos. ‘Where’s your team?’ It had gradually dawned on me. Would Uncle Sam send her all the way down here by herself to investigate the accident?

‘What team?’

‘The Aussies are sending a team. But the NTSB has sent just you. You don’t even have a partner. You must have a partner.’

‘I work on my own.’

‘What sort of Myers-Briggs indicators do I need to win that jackpot?’

Petinski stopped clicking away with her Canon to scowl at me. ‘Can I do my job here?
Please?
’

‘And what is your job, exactly?’

‘You’re watching me do it. Now, if you don’t mind . . .’

‘Seriously, who gets to work on their own?’

She kept up the scowl. ‘I’m the advance party, making initial observations before adverse weather sets in – document the scene, take photos. Working on my own, I can move faster. Be nimble, flexible.’

‘Right.’

‘The NTSB has some more investigators joining the Australian team. Teams take time to organize.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now, can I get back to work?’

‘Who’s stopping you?’

Petinski’s eyes flashed a couple of shades of blue at me, changing color the way a squid does when it’s angry, before returning to her viewfinder.

‘So what do you see?’ I asked her.

‘Cooper . . .’

‘Just asking.’

‘You’re not a good advertisement for partnership, you know that?’ Petinski swept the wreckage with her camera several times. ‘Okay, well, what I’m seeing that I
think
might be significant . . . the landing gear is up but the flaps are down. And see the engine on that wing?’ She gestured with her camera at the buckled stub of riveted aluminum still attached to the fuselage. ‘The propeller’s feathered. Same as the prop on the other engine. That says to me that Randy had no power but had enough time to get set up for a dead-stick landing. He made a decision to put it down here, rather than on dry land. I have no idea why he didn’t make a Mayday call. Maybe he did, but it wasn’t picked up. This aircraft had VHF and UHF radios, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t have been. Maybe by the time he got around to it he was too low. Looking at the physical evidence, he obviously tried to land on the river, gear up. But he might have misjudged it, maybe came in a little fast, skipped off the water like a stone, hit the mangroves followed by the trees and the hill.’

I took in the scene, looking back toward the river. The mangroves and trees were damaged pretty much in a line that joined up with the dark green river beyond. Petinski’s hypothesis fit. ‘And the cause?’ I asked.

‘That’s why they’re sending in that team you’re so hot for.’ Petinski brought the Canon back to her eye, peeled off a bunch of shots. ‘I’ll give you an educated guess when I’ve finished nosing around, okay? And
please
don’t touch anything. Think of this as a crime scene. Now, if you don’t mind . . .’

I could take a hint. We went our separate ways, Petinski continuing up her own ass, me down the hill toward the broken fuselage. The nose was punched in on the co-pilot’s side. Randy was lucky to have walked away from this one – albeit briefly. I stepped between the separated tubular sections of the fuselage, the one just behind the flight deck, the two sections still joined by umbilical cords of wiring, cables and hydraulic lines. The air smelled vaguely of jet fuel. I could see the backs of the pilot and co-pilot seats. Flies buzzed in the air, interested in black coagulated blood spatter on the smashed instrument panel and a splash of it on the shoulder area of the co-pilot’s seat.

Petinski arrived, ducked around me, stepped up inside the area behind the seats, and snapped away with her camera. Somewhere along the way, she’d put on a pair of rubber surgical gloves. Her camera dangled around her neck while she slipped blue crime-scene covers over her boots.

‘When you said don’t touch anything, I didn’t realize trampling was okay,’ I said.

‘I’m trained for this – are you?’ She climbed over the console between the seats and disappeared from view.

‘What do you see?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing.’

Abrupt, blunt, aloof, snooty, humorless, uncommunicative ice maiden.

‘This crate equipped with black boxes?’ I asked her.

‘Has a cockpit voice recorder as standard. Flight data recorder was an option and the registered owner has informed us that the option wasn’t installed.’

‘That’s Ty Morrow.’

‘Mr Morrow, yes.’

‘The recorder in the tail?’

‘That’s where they always are.’

‘You wanna go get it?’ I asked her.

‘No, I’m not touching it.’

‘You don’t want to get a photo of it, for the album maybe?’

‘Busy here, Cooper.’

I looked back toward the rear. More wires, cabling, crushed and twisted metal. Lashed against the side of the fuselage was a life raft canister, mandatory equipment for over-water flights. It could’ve transported the pilot safely down the river, and the survival gear that came with it would’ve come in handy too.

‘See any personal effects up there – a suitcase or sausage bag?’ I asked. ‘Randy would’ve had a change of clothes with him, toiletries.’

‘No.’

I supposed he could have taken his things with him when he left the scene. Maybe there was a bull shark swimming around, about to shit a Samsonite. The blood spatter indicated injury. Maybe the pilot had a head wound and he was dazed, disoriented, which might have explained why he didn’t use the raft. Whatever the reason, he’d wandered down to the water and decided to swim for it. Bad decision.

‘Bingo,’ said Petinski.

‘What you got?’