Death is Forever (18 page)

“Up around Darwin they get at least sixty inches of rain a year. Most of it comes in a four-month stretch. Monsoon season. It gets plenty wet then.”

“Fifteen inches a month?”

“More in January. Less in other wet months. That’s when all the dotted lines on that map turn into huge muddy rivers and every little crease in the land runs liquid.” He watched the rearview mirror for three seconds and then forced his attention back to the road ahead. “The fords are impassable in the wet, and the few bridges that have been built are under water. The unsealed roads and station tracks are useless.”

“With all that water, why aren’t there dams to ensure a year-round water supply?” she asked. “Then they could at least irrigate hay to feed those poor cattle.”

“This is the wrong kind of country for dams. Too flat. Even if you could build a huge reservoir, the soil is too porous. The water would just soak in and vanish.”

As he spoke, he glanced into the side mirror and accelerated gradually, hoping Erin wouldn’t notice.

“Look at the map again,” he said to distract her. “The Fitzroy and the Lennard aren’t really rivers in the usual sense. They’re floodplain channels that are dry until the wet begins. The rest of the time they’re chains of year-round waterholes that you could throw a rock across without straining your arm.”

She gave him a startled look.

“It’s true,” he said. “The Kimberley’s savannah landscape is deceptive. You go through a gallon of water a day just sitting in the shade, if you can find any to sit in. This place will kill you almost as fast as a classic Saharan dune landscape. Maybe faster, because it’s so hard to believe what’s happening. But I believe it. This climate will grind you into dust.”

Erin turned and looked out at the empty land racing by. She tried to imagine inches of rain pouring down week after week for four months.

“What happens to all the water?” she asked finally.

Frowning, Cole checked his mirrors again, holding the inside mirror with his hand to reduce vibration. The clarified reflection left no doubt.

Someone was back there, keeping pace.

He pressed down on the accelerator harder and kept talking, not wanting Erin to get frightened. “Some of the water evaporates. Most of it just sinks in and slowly percolates to the sea through rock formations that hold water like a sponge. Limestone is one. Sandstone is another.”

She remembered the BlackWing maps she had stared at for hours. “Weren’t those blue crosshatches on your map limestone?”

He nodded, glanced in the rear and side mirrors, and saw no change in the relative positions of the two vehicles. The vague dust cloud far behind them had speeded up shortly after he had. Gently he eased off on the accelerator, slowing undetectably.

“Windjana Gorge is an ancient reef,” he said. “The Oscar Range is marine limestone. Old, old reefs, and the fossils to prove it.”

“But no water?”

“Sometimes you get springs and seeps where the limestone beds have been fractured. The water that flows up is fresh and probably thousands of years old.”

“What if there aren’t any springs? Does that mean the limestone doesn’t hold water?”

“Not necessarily. When conditions on land are right, water dissolves passages in the limestone and all the runoff water goes straight underground. Eventually you can have rivers slowly flowing through solid rock. That’s how you get cave systems like Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.”

“Do you think something like Carlsbad exists in the Kimberley, just waiting to be discovered like Abe’s diamonds?”

Cole heard the excitement in Erin’s voice and tried not to smile. “The odds are against it. Caves are short-lived. Most of them don’t last any more than six million years.”

“Is that all? Gosh, maybe we’d better drive faster.”

He glanced at the deadpan innocence of Erin’s expression and smiled despite the sticky heat and the persistent vehicle behind them. “In human terms, caves last forever, but they’re only mayflies compared to diamonds. Those rocks wrapped around your waist might well be the oldest things on earth.”

“What?” she asked, startled.

“It’s a long story.” He glanced into the mirrors.

“This is a long road,” she said, smiling.

Her smile made him wish that they were anywhere else, so long as it was safe. Because it wasn’t safe now. The vehicle behind them had shifted speed every time Cole had. Whoever was back there didn’t want to catch up or pass.

It might be that the traveler had unconsciously paced himself against the car ahead, or it might be something a lot less innocent. Either way, innocent or not, they were trapped. There was only one road for the next thirty klicks, and both vehicles were stuck with it.

He stared into the mirror, then glanced quickly at Erin, afraid that she’d notice his growing distraction. He didn’t want to tell her about the tail unless he had to. Adrenaline would exhaust her even faster than the brutal climate.

The terrain began to pitch up very subtly. Experience told him that about ten minutes ahead there would be long, rolling creases in the land. Then the road would fork. The spur would go to Windjana Gorge. The Gibb River Road would head on toward the King Leopold Ranges and an eventual dead end at the tiny settlement of Gibb River. Nearly all the Gibb traffic was to stations along the way.

No locals went to Windjana in the buildup. Nor were there any tourists in Derby. He and Erin were so unusual that they’d been stared at on the street. Which meant that if the dust cloud turned off at Gibb, everything was fine. If the dust cloud followed the Rover to Windjana, everything was fucked.

“Cole?”

He glanced away from the mirror. “Hmm?”

“How do diamonds get into volcanoes?”

“We used to think diamonds crystallized out of molten rock as it cooled,” he said. His voice was calm, revealing none of the tension rising in him as he drove toward the Windjana spur. “But the inside of a volcano is damned hot. Diamonds would melt there like chips of ice in fresh coffee.”

He paused and glanced aside to see if she was looking in her side-view mirror. She wasn’t. She was watching him, her beautiful green eyes wide and intent, unaware of anything else…including the dust cloud following them.

The first highway sign in fifty miles appeared just as the dirt road divided. The Gibb River Road continued straight ahead. The right fork led to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek national parks.

Cole turned right.

“Not too long ago,” he continued, “a bright lab boy looked at the dark specks caught inside a diamond and wondered what they really were.”

“I thought they were carbon,” she said. “You know, little bits of stuff that hadn’t quite made the grade to diamond.”

“That’s what everyone assumed. Then someone
looked.
The stuff is pyrope, which is a special kind of garnet. You can tell how old pyrope is by measuring its radioactivity. The diamond the lab boy was looking at had come from a kimberlite pipe that was a hundred and thirty million years old. The diamond and its garnet flaw should have been the same age as the pipe. Instead, they were
billions
of years old.”

“But then how did the diamonds get into the pipe? Wasn’t the magma hot enough to melt diamonds after all?”

“No one knows. My own private guess is that there’s a diamond zone somewhere, way down in the earth, past the point where steel pipe bends and melts and rock flows like wax left out in the sun, down where the pressure and temperature are so great that diamonds were squeezed out as the planet itself cooled more than four billion years ago.”

Unconsciously Erin’s hand went to the cloth belt beneath her shirt where twelve ancient pieces of crystal lay hidden.

“When the earth cooled beyond a certain point,” he said, “the conditions for diamond formation were gone. And I mean forever. But the diamonds remained in a thin crystalline veil over the inner face of the earth.”

She smiled, liking the image. “Then how do diamonds get up on top to a place where we can find them?”

“Most of the time they don’t.” He flicked a glance at the side mirror. “Yet every once in a while the crust shifts and a needle of magma explodes through that diamond zone so hard and fast the diamonds don’t have time to melt be fore the rock around them cools. But most of the time, they melt. Only one in twenty pipes have diamonds.”

Silently she tried to imagine a glittering diamond veil billions of years old, a fantastic crystalline residue of the birth of the planet itself.

“What a shame,” she said finally, sighing.

He looked away from the mirrors. “The diamonds that are destroyed?”

“No. The ones that survive to be worn by bimbettes and loan sharks.”

He smiled, but it was one of his old smiles. Bleak. The dust cloud had turned onto the Windjana road.

Everything was fucked.

Cursing steadily but too softly for Erin to hear, Cole rummaged in his kit bag on the backseat with one hand and drove with the other.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“See how fast you can put on your walking shoes,” he said. “Then steer while I put on mine.”

After one look at his grim expression, she didn’t ask questions. She kicked off her thongs and put her shoes on quickly. Then she held the wheel with one hand while he jammed his feet into covered shoes. Inevitably the Rover slowed.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the wheel again but holding the Rover to a slow pace. “Take the binoculars and see if there’s anyone behind us.”

She found the glasses, adjusted the focus, and scanned the road behind them carefully. “There’s a white car.”

“Is he overtaking?”

She waited for the space of a breath. “No.”

“Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

His hands flexed on the wheel. “We’ve been followed since we left Derby. He’s a real cute one. We speed up and so does he. We slow down and he drops back. How many are in the car?”

“It’s too far and too heat-wavy to tell.”

Cole reached beneath the seat, pulled out the short-barreled shotgun, and handed it to Erin. “Ever use one of these?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Keep it handy, but keep the safety on.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Run like bloody hell.”

With no more warning than that, he gunned the Rover up and over a shallow crest and dropped down into a long incline. The accelerator hit the floorboard and stayed there, held flat by his big foot. The vehicle picked up speed rapidly, its engine screaming at full revs. The speedometer needle swung across the dial.

Erin tried not to think about the assorted large wildlife that inhabited unfenced country.

The rust-red road flew beneath the Rover’s wheels. The vehicle flashed past the dry ravine at the bottom of the crease and started up the long incline on the opposite side. Gradually the incline began to win. The Rover’s speed dropped.

He kept the accelerator hard against the metal floor. With quick glances he kept track of the dashboard temperature and oil pressure gauges, found the smoothest part of the dirt road, watched the shoulders for wandering wildlife.

The Rover topped the second crest before the dust cloud reappeared in the rearview mirror. Cole kept the accelerator floored. The road flattened out, then ducked around a small outcropping of rock. It was the first thing Erin had seen in Australia that resembled a hill.

Cole had the Rover to the edge of its resources and held it there without mercy. The spur road to Windjana narrowed rapidly. Ruts appeared and the shoulder looked like a mixture of rust and sand. The spur snaked off into more sparse woodland and grass, but there were enough broad twists and variations in elevation that the Gibb River Road was soon out of sight.

Erin hung on to the shotgun with one hand and braced herself with the other. Like Cole, she watched the gauges on the dashboard constantly.

“How long will the Rover take it?” she asked.

“Not long enough. I’ll bet he knows it, too. He’s playing us like a bloody fish.”

“What are we going to do?”

Cole smiled grimly. “What fish have always done—grab the line and run with it.”

“What if it’s all a coincidence and he’s not really following us?”

“I’ll shave my legs and wear a tutu.”

The Rover jerked as he slammed through gears over a rough patch of road. She braced herself all over again as they rocketed along the increasingly rough route. Time after time she was sure that they were going to crash, but he pulled them through at the last instant.

The Rover hammered through dry ravines and skated eerily over sandy spots. For several miles the only sound was that of the laboring vehicle. She kept looking at the temperature gauge.

“We’re overheating,” she said finally.

“I know. If there are any tourists or campers around Windjana, we’re going to stick to them like a bad reputation.”

“Why?”

“Killing people is easy,” he said flatly. “Getting away with it is a lot harder, especially when one of the corpses is the daughter of a highly placed CIA officer. ConMin won’t want witnesses.”

He kept one eye on the temperature gauge and the other on the landscape. Both were hot. The ground was rusty. There were more trees here than near Derby, bigger trees, but still not a forest. There were a few very low hills with small outcroppings of rock at their crests.

Nothing was big enough to hide the Rover.

They burst from the sparse open woodland onto a sandy floodplain. Beyond it a ridge of rock rose like a dark wall into the sky. After the absolute flatness of the land they had come through, the limestone ramparts seemed unreal. The Lennard River had cut a wide slice through the limestone. The river itself was invisible, but the gap of Windjana Gorge was silent evidence of the raging power of the wet.

“Can you see any vehicles ahead?” Cole asked as they raced toward the gorge.

“No, but there must be someone. It’s a national park.”

“In the middle of bloody nowhere.”

“What about park rangers?” she asked.

“This is Western Australia, not the U.S. Out here, tourists are on their own.”

Erin shaded her eyes and looked harder as they flashed by a faded sign stating they had entered Windjana National Park. The park was deserted, as empty of people as the land around it. There was nothing but an ill-defined parking lot and a few open, sun-bleached outhouses.

No place to hide. No witnesses to carry tales.

The road forked. Cole followed a track that veered away from the gorge and the park entrance. The track paralleled the south face of the ancient reef. Fingers of water-eroded limestone fringed the cliff face and created deep, very narrow canyons. Tall trees grew in a true woodland that followed the shade and runoff line of the ridge. Smaller gums and spinifex grew in cracks and crevices on the cliff, wherever the wind had deposited seeds and enough debris to create soil. Cattle trails were everywhere.

The dirt track bent slightly, following an irregularity in the cliff, cutting off the view behind. Cole swung the wheel hard to the left, sending the Rover off the track and toward the cliff. He dodged the big trees even as he downshifted, letting the Rover skid and wallow just at the edge of going out of control. The trees closed in behind the vehicle, shielding it from the road. The ragged, deeply indented cliff face loomed with startling suddenness.

He braked sharply and shut off the ignition.

“Get a box of shells from my kit,” he said, grabbing the shotgun from her as he got out. “Run along the cliff face until I catch up. Move!”

A fitful wind slowly swept away the dust thrown up by the Rover’s frantic passage. Erin ran as fast as she could through the soft, sandy soil along the cliff face. Within seconds she was sweating from her scalp to the soles of her feet. After a minute she felt like she was breathing molten lead. By the time Cole caught up and pulled her into another narrow opening in the cliff, she felt wrung out and used up.

“I brushed out—tire tracks,” he said, breathing hard. “Stay down—out of sight.”

She handed him the shotgun shells and nodded, too winded to speak.

He turned and measured the rough, water-pitted rock that loomed around them. Without a word he hung the shotgun down his back from the leather sling and began climbing. He tested hand- and footholds carefully, pulling himself upward with the easy, unhurried rhythm of a man accustomed to climbing. In thirty seconds, he was high enough to have a view of the road. He wedged himself into a shaded crevice, unslung the shotgun, and waited.

Five minutes after he’d positioned himself, a dust cloud bloomed along the road. The erratic breeze from the gorge scattered the dust quickly. Absolutely motionless, partially concealed within the dense shade thrown by the cliff itself, Cole waited.

A vehicle shot into sight.

Cole could see only that the driver was alone and the car was a Japanese knockoff of a Jeep. Without a flicker of hesitation the boxy, enclosed vehicle roared past the point where Cole had turned the Rover into the trees.

Cole glanced at his watch and started counting. The next ten minutes would tell Cole whether his gamble had paid off, or whether he would have to stalk the man, kill him, and bury him in the sand—if the man didn’t kill him first.

Erin heard the vehicle pass by even though she couldn’t see it. She looked up the rock walls to the blinding blue sky and saw Cole wedged into a black slit. The predatory tension in his body was all the warning she needed. She flattened against the rough stone and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more, the land so quiet she swore she could hear herself sweat.

Finally Cole came back down the cliff. “He went by without a look.”

“Thank God.”

“It’s not over yet. We’re going back to the Gibb River Road. From there we’ll have to cut overland to the Great Northern Highway again. Right now the bastard is between us and Abe’s station. Assuming he has enough gas to get there—”

“Do we?” she interrupted.

“No,” Cole said, and kept on talking. “When he figures out he’s lost us, he has a choice. He can go on a shitty little dirt track to Abe’s station and wait for us there, or he can cut down to the paved road and hope he beats us to Fitzroy Crossing.”

“What’s at Fitzroy Crossing?”

“The only gas station for three hundred miles. We’ll just make it.”