Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (2 page)

‘Damn,’ I thought, ‘we’ve got some hard work ahead.’ But out loud I said: ‘We’ll have to move the whole lot.’

‘Where to?’

‘Towards Tailors Stitch.
We could get it halfway up the road tonight. That way we won’t have so far to carry it tomorrow.’

‘Which way is Tailors Stitch?’ the man asked.

‘North-east.’

‘You might want to take it in a different direction after I’ve talked to you,’ he said.

That brought me to a dead stop. Obviously these crates weren’t just full of Mars bars.

‘OK,’ I said, rethinking. ‘You tell us.’

The man suddenly looked cautious. ‘Anywhere in the direction of Stratton would be OK,’ he said.

But from the way he said it, I knew Stratton wasn’t the target.

I paused, mentally scanning possible places, like I was scrolling down on a computer, but rejecting each one. ‘I know,’ I said at last. ‘There is a safe place. But we’ll have to move.’

We loaded up. The New Zealander pulled out a couple of backpacks that he suggested we take to our hide-out. Everything else had to be carried away. With five of us we could do it in two trips, but we each had to take a fair bit of weight.

The place I had in mind was the wetlands; a swamp on the eastern boundary of our property. My grandfather drained the wetlands, paying for it with a government grant that they were handing out in those days. He turned it into pasture. Before I was born Dad brought in the bulldozers and dug it all out again. It was a radical thing to do. Most farmers wanted to turn every square centimetre into productive land, and to hell with the natural features or the natural vegetation. But trust my stubborn father: he was determined to bring back those wetlands.

Grandpa spat chips in a big way and the neighbours thought we were mad. But Dad reckoned it’d give us a good source of permanent water, and it’d bring back birds that keep the insects down, plus it’d be a huge firebreak.

He was right too, on all three counts. I remember how proud he was when the ibis started nesting on the islands in the middle of the swamp. The first season they came, there were eight or nine pairs, the next year twenty, and now we had a few hundred, returning every year.

It was quite good actually. Bit of a contribution to the environment.

The main reason I thought we should go there was that if a patrol brought dogs to chase us, the wetlands would stop them in their tracks. I didn’t know what was in the boxes, but the way this guy was acting it must have been important. So I thought it was worth going the extra couple of
k’s
to get the stuff onto the islands. The wetlands covered about eight hectares, so it’d take a few dogs a few days to search that little lot.

We got there pretty quickly. Grunting with relief I dropped the box I’d carried. In front of me, tied to a bolt in a tree stump, was an old yellow and green dinghy which I’d mucked around in when I was a kid. It only had one oar; I don’t know where the other one went, but it had been missing for as long as I could remember.

We all wanted to row the stuff to the island but Kevin and I got the job because I knew the best hiding place, and Homer had to navigate the others back to where the chopper landed.

We got into the boat with a bit of difficulty, mainly because Kevin tried to push off and jump in at the same time. But after some wild rocking, with me clutching both sides, we managed to get clear of the shore.

As the others went back along the shoreline they couldn’t resist. Lee had to chuck a handful of mud, and Homer bombed us with a rock. It was a very bad idea. The soldier went off like a car backfiring. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he snarled at them.
‘Mother of God.
Show a bit of sense.’

Kevin and I giggled at each other. But I didn’t really blame the man. He was probably wondering why on earth he’d been sent all the way from New Zealand to talk to a bunch of teenage dropkicks. He followed the two boys, watching them as he made his way through the grass. He sure didn’t pick up any mud or rocks.

Distracted by Lee and Homer playing silly buggers, Kevin and I had got into a 360, and by the time we recovered and looked around at the bank they’d disappeared. I just got a glimpse of Lee’s tall thin body disappearing like a shadow over the crest of the hill.

Suddenly it seemed awfully cold and dark and lonely, even with Kevin there.

We didn’t talk much, just rowed in a clumsy zigzag way till we grounded on mud. We carried the boxes and packs into the bushes, causing a riot among the birds,
who
probably hadn’t seen a human visitor since Homer and I stirred them up a few years ago.

Yes, that first trip was OK. By the end of the second trip I was so tired that when Lee picked up a handful of mud, glancing around guiltily to make sure the New Zealander wasn’t watching, I ripped off a string of words that convinced him to drop it back in the water.

‘OK, mud-mouth,’ he said sulkily, ‘I wasn’t going to throw it.’

The trouble was, I was already thinking of the trek into Hell. We were heading for another late finish. After dealing with Gavin and the other kids all day, then hauling this stuff, I couldn’t find my sense of humour at 4.45 in the morning. I tried to tie up the boat, but the rope was so thick and slippery that I kept losing one end, and then I couldn’t get the knot to hold. The boys were bringing branches and brush to camouflage the boat and cover our tracks. Everyone was slipping in the mud and swearing.

The man from New Zealand was over at the point of the wetlands, gazing into the distance, but I think watching us at the same time. Again I thought he would be less than impressed. Something about the attitude of these professional soldiers got so far up my nostrils it reached my sinuses. Oh well. I was past caring what anyone thought.

I’m not a big believer in instinct, but I felt weirdly anxious as we slogged our way up the spur in the last of the darkness. We didn’t talk much. We were too tired and strung out. When we stopped for a breather the man did at least tell us his name. Ryan was twenty-eight, he lived just outside Dunedin,
he
was an engineer. He wouldn’t say his last name.

‘Why won’t you tell us?’ I asked.

‘You’d never be able to pronounce it,’ he answered.

‘No, really, why not?’

‘Security.’

I stood there in the semi-darkness, leaning against a snow gum, wondering what he meant. I figured it out soon enough: if we were caught and forced to tell everything we knew – well, the less we knew, the better.

It scared me to realise he was thinking in those terms. It made me feel we were too casual sometimes.

Lost in my thoughts I’d stopped listening to the whispered conversation; when I paid attention again I found Homer was in the middle of firing a bunch of questions at Ryan. He got a few answers. Turned out Ryan was in a New Zealand Army group called the SAS, and he had the rank of captain, which I think might have been fairly impressive for a twenty-eight-year-old.

He had a growly sort of voice, very strong and firm, like a tractor engine. You felt he was reliable. He sounded the way I’d like to sound, always knowing what to do, never being flurried or flustered. ‘Flurry and fluster, they sound like a pair of puppies.’ That was in a book I’d read once. What was the name of it? I couldn’t remember. A year out of school and my brain was peanut butter.

Against Ryan’s reliable voice was the way he’d snapped at Lee and Homer. He was entitled to be angry at them, sure, but what worried me was that maybe he would be like that whenever there was pressure.
Fiery and unfriendly.

I got tired and stopped listening again. They were talking about conditions back in New Zealand. Ryan didn’t want to say much about that either, but for a different reason. He just wasn’t sure it was safe using our voices out here in the bush.

I wasn’t sure either. We were well away from the drop zone, there was no sign of the enemy, and at this time of morning we should be the only people stupid enough to be out and about. And yet my tummy was rumbling like
Rotorua
and I was as nervous as I’d ever been.

So I listened to the music of the soft voices around me, but I didn’t listen to the words.

We set off again. The hike up to Tailor’s Stitch seemed endless. I couldn’t remember it ever taking so long, even in the worst circumstances. The trouble was I hadn’t had any real sleep since Colonel Finley told us we were getting a visitor. Not much more than twenty-four hours ago, but it felt like a fortnight. I knew every tree, every pothole, every bend of that track, but I could swear someone had taken the road and stretched it out like a piece of chewie, till it was a hundred per cent longer.

The light gradually got grey rather than black, then that sort of fuzzy grey before dawn. Shapes started to appear. Suddenly I could see trees a hundred metres up the track. We were nearly at the top, thank God. Everyone had stopped talking. I guess we were all tired, and a bit puffed by the last steep bit of the climb. I glanced at the crest that we were toiling towards. I felt like I was watching a black and white movie. And there were new actors in this movie.
A line of them, three, then four, then five.

I was so tired that for a moment I didn’t believe what I was seeing. They were like a line of ghost soldiers. I stood still, in shock. My body tingled and burned. Ahead of me Kevin had seen them, and he stopped too. I guess that’s what convinced me they were real. Homer and Lee and Ryan plodded on with heads down. To my amazement, the soldiers on the ridge were still walking past in profile. Then Homer, now at the front of our group, suddenly saw them. He stopped like he’d been snap-frozen. That at last made the other two realise something was wrong, and they froze too.

The five of us were perfect targets. If the patrol went into attack mode we’d have to dive off into the bushes and hope we could find cover. But incredibly, the soldiers just kept walking. They looked pretty tired themselves. They were actually better targets than us, lined across the horizon like ducks in the shooting gallery at the
Wirrawee
Show. Maybe they’d been out all night too.

The last one moved across my line of vision and was gone. The bush was still and peaceful as though no humans had ever trodden through it.

We stared at each other in shock, then, without anyone needing to suggest it, we sidled like spirits into a patch of scrub on our left. We sneaked in about twenty metres,
then
gathered in a group. We were all
trembling
a bit I think. It had been so unexpected. There was just nowhere safe for us any more.

The first thing that was obvious was Ryan’s anger. I didn’t blame him. He’d put his life in our hands and almost lost it. I suppose we’d been too tired, not thinking things through enough. But in the middle of the night, so far from anywhere, with one patrol dead and buried just hours ago, and us certain no-one would come looking for them for days, we’d convinced ourselves that we’d be OK.

I always had the feeling that the New Zealanders weren’t sure that we really knew what we were doing. I just got the sense from talking to them that they thought we were a bunch of kids who’d done some crazy, wacky stuff and by a few lucky flukes got away with it. The first time I felt Colonel Finley finally, really, completely took us seriously was when we told him over the radio that we’d wiped out an entire patrol of enemy soldiers without getting a scratch. And now, such a short time later, it looked like we’d blown our reputation again. It was very aggravating.

Ryan said to all of us, ‘Well, that was a great effort’, then he said to me: ‘Good call, Ellie.’

Steam was coming out of every opening in his body – well, the visible ones anyway. He was flurried and flustered now. First he’d gone off at Homer and Lee for chucking mud, now his blood pressure was off the scale a second time. I was scared his moustache would catch fire.

It was funny having an argument in whispers, but we didn’t have much choice. And for once I didn’t buckle at this attack. I’d always struggled to cope with these army guys.
Major Harvey and even Colonel Finley sometimes too.
But now I looked Ryan straight in the eye and said: ‘We know these mountains backwards. In fourteen months they’re only the second group of soldiers who’ve been up here. It was totally unpredictable.’

All that was more or less true, although lately it seemed like the mountains had been swarming with as many enemy soldiers as a World War II movie.

OK maybe we had been careless. But they must have a lot more resources up here than we’d imagined. After all, not everything’s foreseeable. Not everything that goes wrong has to be someone’s fault. That’s why I stood up to Ryan, and that’s why I felt confident doing it.

He did gulp a bit. He literally swallowed his next words: I could see his Adam’s apple go up and down. After a pause he said: ‘Well, it’s no good having post-mortems. Let’s decide what we do from here.’

‘We have to go on into Hell,’ I said. ‘
Fi
and four kids are down there. Kids we’re looking after. I don’t want to leave them any longer, with enemy soldiers running around the mountains.’

Ryan didn’t look impressed by that either. ‘Four kids? How old are they? Mother of God, it’s a day-care centre. Where did they come from?’

He didn’t seem like he really wanted an answer, and this wasn’t the time or place anyway.

After another pause he said: ‘Do you all need to go on to – what do you call it? Hell? Maybe some of us could stay out here. I could go through what I need to and catch the midnight special out again.’

‘Is that the deal?’ Homer asked. ‘You’re only here for twenty-four hours?’

‘Absolutely.
Provided it’s safe for the chopper to come in, I’m gone. I’ve got another hot appointment the next night, and I’m not missing that. If I judge it’s not safe here I’ll use the radio to arrange a new pickup point.’

There was a sigh around the group. This was getting complicated.