Wildfire (16 page)

A lady in a T-shirt and a green apron came out of a side room, sweeping up dust that had fallen from the ceiling. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Is the café open?’ Ben asked her.

‘No, but I can open it for you if you just want sandwiches.’

‘That would be great,’ said Ben.

She leaned the broom against the wall. ‘I’ll get the key. We’ve got cheese and ham – is that all right?’

‘Fine,’ said Ben. ‘And do you have any water?’

‘Sure. I’ll give you a shout when it’s ready. You carry on looking around.’

He wandered back down the passageway and into one of the caves. It was filled with large photographs of Coober Pedy when the mines were being created. He went into another alcove, where there was an image painted directly onto the rock. A sign said it was a reproduction of a piece of aboriginal dreamtime art about the formation of opals, in which a stone in the ground was filled with fire and the colours of the rainbow.

Fire. Ben wished he could find a radio with the news on. He wanted to know what was happening in
Adelaide. He came out into the main gallery and saw a payphone. He went over to it, slotted some coins in and tried Bel’s number.

‘
Lines are busy. Please try again later
.’

He put the receiver down and spotted a newspaper on the shelf in the phone booth. Ben doubted whether the newspapers would have got an edition out in the short time since the fire had started, but still he unfolded it and scoured it eagerly.

It was a local paper, the
Coober Pedy Times
. The front page headline was:
MYSTERY ILLNESSES CONTINUE.
Underneath, a smaller headline said:
Tormented by noises
. There was a picture of the stationmaster Ben had spoken to earlier.

Ben looked down the corridor at the kitchen. The café owner was taking a packet out of the fridge. He turned back to the paper.

Monty Allen, Coober Pedy’s stationmaster, has enjoyed good health all his life, but in the past three weeks has been driven mad by an unexplained ailment. ‘I was hearing this humming in my ears,’ said Mr Allen, 63. ‘It went on for hours and I
couldn’t sleep so I went to the doctor. He said he’d had a surgery full of people with the same problem that morning and he didn’t know what had caused it.
’

There was another story further down the page: ‘
Farmer loses twenty calves in a week – is mystery illness spreading to cattle?
’

Ben turned the page. There was a story about bizarre weather patterns: sudden hurricanes and hail-storms. Hailstorms, thought Ben – in this heat?

‘Here you go. That’s four dollars seventy.’

The café owner was standing in front of him, holding out a bag and a four-pack of water bottles. Ben dug into his pocket for more change and peered at the unfamiliar notes. He worked out he hadn’t got enough and pulled some more out of his pocket.

As he did so, a roughly folded piece of paper fell onto the floor. The café owner picked it up and was about to hand it back to him when something caught her eye. ‘Oh, is this from here?’ She opened it out.

Ben recognized it as the photocopy the police officer had handed him, showing the charred leaflet.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I got it in Adelaide.’

‘
Depression,
skin
diseases,
strange
allergies, migraines
…’ She skim-read the page, muttering some of the words out loud, then handed it back to Ben. ‘My sister has had a migraine for three days and she’s sitting in casualty right now. Last week I had this terrible itching. I thought my skin was crawling with insects. I went to the doctor. He said he’d seen ten cases but he didn’t know what was causing it. So we’re making headlines in Adelaide now, are we?’

Ben had assumed that most of the text was crackpot scaremongering, but now he wasn’t so sure. He glanced at the photocopy in his hand. The headline he had noticed before leaped out:

STOP SECRET US EXPERIMENTS

In Adelaide the army had established base camps for firefighting crews all around the city. They meant that the firefighters could rest up, replenish supplies and refuel without having to go back to their station house.

Engine 33 was based at the golf course. Driving in
was like entering a military installation. There was a clearly defined perimeter, where soldiers in firefighting gear patrolled with water tanks on trolleys. They had already had to put out several minor blazes, ignited by sparks blown in on smoke from the burning town.

Inside the firebreak, the whole area looked chaotic: a mass of parked fire trucks and personnel in fire-fighting gear apparently milling about in all directions. But in fact it was tightly organized.

A soldier noted Engine 33’s identification number and told Petra where to park. She drove past a group of soldiers: some were tinkering about with an engine, others were replacing used breathing gear, checking rescue harnesses and testing hoses. Another engine bumped down the fairway towards them, its crew refuelled and ready for action again. The other crew waved as they went past and Wanasri watched them in the wing mirror as they reached the exit. Just then a glow of orange flared in the blackened bushes at the perimeter. The soldiers on duty immediately spotted it and dowsed it with water.

Even here, the firefighters couldn’t relax totally; the fire was never truly beaten. No matter how much
water they hosed onto it, everything dried out so quickly in the blistering afternoon heat.

Petra turned onto the fairway where Victoria and Troy had been playing that morning. The golfers would have been appalled to see it now – the parched grass worn bare by the tyres of heavy vehicles and streaked with soot. The woodland had burned down to a no-man’s-land of blackened stumps.

A soldier beckoned them into a space between two other trucks, as if he was guiding a plane into a terminal building slot. Petra heaved on the wheel, manoeuvred the engine into the space and stopped.

A soldier opened the door. ‘We’ll re-equip your vehicle while you get some rest. Fifteen minutes and you’re out again. Leave the keys in the ignition in case we need to move it.’

Wanasri followed Darren out, moving across the seat in slow motion. She had never felt so tired in her life. Her muscles were aching from moving about in the heavy turnout gear, and mentally, too, she felt exhausted. She was grateful to be off duty, but daunted by the thought that she had to be back on in fifteen minutes.

Andy prodded her. ‘Come on, lazybones. There’s a bottle of iced water with my name on it and you’re in my way.’

Darren put out his arms. He lifted her out as if she was a feather and set her down on the ground. ‘Come on, let’s perk you up.’ He knew how she felt. They’d all been rookies once.

Wanasri’s feet protested as soon as she started to walk. Her boots were stiff and new and she had been running about in them for so long that her feet were a mass of blisters. Her turnout gear still felt as stiff as a suit of armour. She longed to take it off so that she could move freely. Her head throbbed – probably from dehydration after spending so long in such fierce heat, breathing in hot gases. She wanted to take her helmet off but the peak shielded her eyes from the fierce afternoon sun.

Darren marched her through a row of parked engines to a big khaki tent. Water bottles were stacked in crates along a trestle table. Petra cracked one open and downed the whole lot in one go. Darren thrust one into Wanasri’s hands. She twisted the lid off with her teeth, spat the cap out and drank gratefully. The
water was warm, but she didn’t care. She just needed to sluice away the taste of cinders. The first bottle finished, she scrunched it between her hands and started on a second. Beside her, Petra, Darren and Andy were also gulping away.

It was only when Wanasri was on her third bottle that she was able to take it more slowly and look around. The tent looked incongruous in the middle of all these fire engines, like something from a genteel summer fete. The whole place stank of smoke. Firefighters walked around, massive as grizzly bears in their protective clothes. Everywhere she looked, reflective yellow stripes glinted in the sun. Wisps of steam rose off the engines and everything was coated in oily smoke. She tried not to think how much of that oily residue was from vaporized human remains.

Petra crumpled another finished water bottle and dropped it into an overflowing bin. ‘Come on, guys,’ she said. ‘We’d better make way for others.’

Wanasri, Darren and Andy followed her to the next tent. It looked like a jumble sale, with boxes of equipment laid out on tables. Petra went in, took her radio off her jacket, prised the cover off the battery
compartment and swapped her old batteries for fresh ones. Meanwhile a soldier with a clipboard came up to her with her instructions. Petra listened carefully, then returned to the others.

Darren gave Wanasri a pat on the arm. ‘Come on, time to get back to work.’

Wanasri couldn’t believe their fifteen-minute break had passed so quickly. She followed Darren and Andy back to the truck.

The soldiers were just finishing up. Two of them clipped the pike poles back on the side of the engine. Another rolled up a hose attached to a big water tank.

Petra got in the cab and started the engine as Darren, Andy and Wanasri climbed in the other side.

A soldier stood in front of the truck, beckoning Petra on. She put her hand out of the window and acknowledged him, then eased out towards the perimeter.

As they drove towards the exit, tongues of orange flame continued to flicker among the blackened stumps of trees. The fire was still stalking the camp, trying to get a hold. Once again, soldiers pursued it and smothered it, keeping the firefighters’ haven safe.

Petra took Engine 33 back onto the road, out into the fiery city again. Away from the bustle of the camp, they could hear the sounds of the sirens again. The sky glowered black with smoke, the sun blazing through it like a furnace.

Petra changed up to third gear and accelerated towards the town centre, her jaw grimly set. ‘We’ve got new instructions. We’re going for a big strategic push. The army are helping too. The teams on the outside are going to drive the fire inwards; the teams on the inside – that includes us – are going to drive it outwards. Hopefully we’ll meet in the middle. This is no longer about saving individual structures. It’s about putting this fire out once and for all.’

Ben picked up the jerry can, ducked under the wing of the microlight and unscrewed the big cap on the tank behind the cockpit. Kelly twisted round in her seat to watch him as he refilled the fuel tank. Her hands were encased in white mittens, and as Ben poured the fuel mixture in, she made little twitches, mimicking his movements. Ben got the distinct impression she would rather be doing the job herself.

‘When you mixed it,’ she said, ‘did you use a filter?’ The microlight ran on a mixture of two-stroke oil and lead-free petrol.

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Just like you said.’

‘Good. You don’t want dirt in the fuel tank or we might stall.’

Once the tank was full Ben stowed the jerry can on its hooks beside the petrol tank.

Kelly had some more orders for him. ‘Check the engine is securely bolted to the wing.’

Ben looked at her as though she was crazy. ‘Why? I haven’t touched it.’

‘You always have to check the engine mounts before you take off.’

Ben reached up to the wing, put his hands on either side of the engine and gave it a good shake. ‘Is that secure enough?’

‘Yes, now check the propeller. If it’s got any chips or nicks, it might snap off.’

Ben ran his hands along first one blade, then turned the propeller and did the same with the other. ‘Smooth as a baby’s bottom.’

Kelly looked affronted. ‘A what?’

‘As a toddler’s ass, I guess you’d say in America,’ said Ben, hiding a smile.

Next she made him check the wires that held the wings and the connections to the ailerons, the rudder
and the brakes. All of this was standard procedure before take-off.

Finally Kelly was satisfied. ‘Let’s eat and then we can get going.’

Ben scrubbed his hands with wet wipes, then picked up the bag of sandwiches from the floor and offered it to Kelly.

She stayed where she was, sitting back in the seat, the map on her lap. ‘You’ll have to feed me.’

Ben laughed, thinking she was joking. ‘You’re not serious, right?’

Two bandaged hands waved in front of his face. ‘If

I do it myself I’m gonna make a big mess.’

Ben fished out one of the sandwiches and looked at her dubiously.

Kelly sighed. ‘Ben, I’m starving. Just hold the darn thing up and let me take a bite.’

She really wasn’t joking. Ben tore the wrapper off and looked around warily. If anyone saw him doing this, he’d die of embarrassment. A big tow-truck was parked at the garage but the driver was occupied filling up with petrol. There was a building site a short distance away but no one there would be able
to see them. He held the sandwich out. ‘Go on then.’

Kelly took a bite, sat back and chewed thoughtfully. ‘This town is weird.’