Authors: Keith Yocum
“Judy,” he said, shaking her head gently. “Wake up.”
Standing up, he switched on the TV and turned up the volume, then went back into the bathroom and soaked a hand towel in cold water.
Sitting next to her again, he patted her flushed cheeks and gently kissed her lips. “Judy, come on. Wake up. Come on.”
After several minutes of jostling and whispering into her ear, Judy opened her eyes.
“Dennis,” she said hoarsely. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the hotel room, but we have to get out of here. I need you to wake up. Can you do that?”
After five minutes she was able to sit up. Dennis cut her plastic binds off. As she began to explain what happened, he shushed her, pointing to the closet. He turned up the TV even louder so that their conversation could not be heard.
Dennis had found a black nylon backpack next to the bed. Inside was a small two-way radio, just like the ones he had confiscated from the ATV riders, several more plastic ties, a liter bottle of water, and a plastic medical syringe gun.
“We need to get out of here as fast as we can. I don’t want him hearing what we’re talking about. Can you walk?”
She nodded and tried to stand up but fell back on the bed.
“I feel so strange,” she said.
Dennis packed their clothes as fast as he could and put the two roll-on suitcases at the front door. He canvassed the room one final time and had Judy walk around the room to get her muscles moving.
He pulled a chair over in front of the closet, gave Judy his pistol, and whispered in her ear over the blaring TV.
“If he tries to get out, shoot him. He will kill you if you don’t shoot him. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
Dennis jogged to the car, pulling the roll-ons behind him. He felt more secure in the darkness and moved the Cruiser to a block behind the hotel.
Judy was still slumped awkwardly in the chair when he arrived.
“I think I fell asleep,” she said weakly.
“No problem,” he said.
Dennis picked up the agent’s backpack and took out the radio. He pried open the back and took out the nine-volt battery, dropping it into his front pocket. He held the syringe gun up to the light and saw it had a rotating cylinder he presumed equated to the number of injections. He rotated it forward one notch for the next shot, clicked off the safety button, and walked over to the closet. Removing the chair, he pulled the door open and stood back.
The agent sat on the floor in nearly the same position he had left him.
“I’m going to bleed to death if you don’t get me some help,” the agent said.
“Don’t be stupid; it’s a minor wound. You’ll be fine. But I do have something for you,” Dennis said, stepping forward and shooting the man in his thigh with the syringe. The ‘pop’ startled the agent, and he jerked awkwardly.
“You asshole,” he yelled.
“Sleep tight,” Dennis said, closing the door. He jammed the chair underneath the door.
Above the sound of the TV, he said loudly, “Now you stay in this chair, and if that bastard tries to get out, just empty the clip into the door.”
Judy looked at him, confused and still glassy-eyed.
He motioned for her to follow him out of the room, and they quietly closed the door.
Within ten minutes they were racing to the airport outside of Newton, the cool desert air rushing through the open windows mixed with the hot air from the heater as Judy held Dennis’s hand.
He canvassed the small airport lounge and saw only three surly, leather-faced men hunched in the corner. They looked like mining employees on their way to the big city. A SkyWest flight to Perth was scheduled in two hours. He went out and gathered up Judy.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“Sorry. It’s not an option. You need to exchange your missed flight for this next one to Perth and show up at work tomorrow. These guys won’t touch you. You’re an employee of Australia’s Federal Police service, and they’re running a black program that your government most likely knows nothing about. Or if they do know about it, they don’t want to bring it to anyone’s attention.”
“But what are you going to do?” she said.
“I’m going to Port Hedland to see if I can find a container that was shipped from the mine a couple of days ago. Or at least I hope it’s still there.”
“Dennis, don’t you think they’ll be looking for you?”
“Not sure. My hope is they’ll think they’ve scared me enough and that I’ll just stop.”
“So why don’t you come back to Perth with me? That would be the safe thing to do.”
“There’s just one more thing to do,” he said.
“If you go on to Port Hedland, I don’t know if I’m ever going to see you again,” she said, her eyes welling up. “What is wrong with you, Dennis? I just don’t understand why this is so important.”
Dennis held her hand and looked out the open window into the blackness of the desert. Except for two street lamps in the parking lot and navigational lights on the small airport tower, the sky was lit with a million stars shining through the smog-free atmosphere.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that this guy Garder and I are the same person. Well, not identical, of course, but the same kind of person. The harder they fight to keep us out, the more driven I am to find what they’re hiding. Whatever they’re doing, I just know it’s really bad. I’m not pretending for a second that any of this is logical, but there you have it.”
He looked at Judy in the darkened car, the side of her face lit by the parking lot light.
“That sounds hopelessly childish,” she said. “What is it about men that they justify the silliest things by resorting to concepts like honor and truth? The world doesn’t operate like that, and you know it, Dennis.” She closed her eyes again, and Dennis wondered if she was going to fall asleep.
“I’m telling you, this guy Garder wasn’t crazy, Judy.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Dennis,” she said quietly, her eyes still closed.
“Judy, you and I are going to be fine. Nothing bad is going to happen to us. You’ll see.”
“Right,” she said, her eyes blinking slowly several times. “There’s just too much going on around me. I don’t even know what I’m doing sitting at an airport in Newton trying to escape some bloody mad Yanks. I’m being assaulted by men everywhere.”
“Hey, listen to me,” he said, gripping her wrists. “It’s the drug that’s breaking you down. Go home and start back to work just like nothing happened. I told you they won’t dare mess with you, but they might tap your phone and hack your email. Don’t talk about me to anyone, either on the phone or in an email. I’ll contact you; don’t worry about that. Now go inside and buy a ticket.”
Judy did as she was told, sniffling and wiping at her smeared mascara as she got out of the car. Afterward they waited silently for the plane in the dark car, holding hands like teenagers.
Before the plane landed, he canvassed the airport one final time.
“See you soon,” he said, kissing her hard on the lips. “Get some rest.”
She put her arms around his neck, holding him tightly for nearly half a minute. Then she let go and walked away, dragging her roll-on suitcase behind her in a weak zigzag pattern.
***
Dennis watched the plane take off from the LandCruiser. The lights of the SkyWest jet disappeared into the desert air, and he finally relaxed. He was incredibly tired and his throat hurt, but at least Judy was no longer in harm’s way.
Dennis had perfected a method of compartmentalizing his life’s experiences and he anticipated—yearned for—the chance to put this day behind him.
One compartment included being chased across the desert by men in four-wheelers. One compartment included a man nearly strangling him to death. Those compartments were now closed and he would not open them again unless forced to.
Another compartment included shooting a man in the shin and putting Judy on a plane to Perth. That compartment was mostly closed, but he still experienced anxiety when he remembered looking at her bound on the bed in the hotel room. At that moment he feared she was dead. He had trouble putting a lid on that compartment. He missed her already.
Yawning loudly, Dennis started up the LandCruiser and pulled slowly out of the airport parking lot, looking for other problematic vehicles. He saw nothing and prayed the wounded agent was still drugged in the closet.
It was a five-hour drive to Port Hedland and would call for driving through the night on the two-lane highway. The airport was south of Newton, so Dennis drove carefully back through the town, avoiding the downtown stretch by cutting through the grid of neighborhood streets.
Outside of Newton though, the bleakness of the desert emerged and Dennis kept his foot on the accelerator, trying to get far away from the trouble in Newton. He played with the heater so that it wouldn’t overheat the car’s interior and soon found that by turning the fan to low and keeping his speed to about sixty miles per hour, the engine warning light would disappear.
The first hour went smoothly; he saw only an occasional vehicle coming in the opposite direction. A large truck once flew up from behind and raced past him, showering the Cruiser with grit and dust. By midnight he was halfway to his destination but was fighting exhaustion. He strayed onto the dusty roadside at one point, sending a shower of rocks and sand into the undercarriage of the car.
He sometimes forgot which side of the road he should drive on and wandered over the center line. With scant traffic, he was not worried.
At one a.m. he saw something large appear on the highway directly in front of him. Reflexively, he hit the brakes, but the object, which did not move, was on him in a flash.
The sound of the collision was deafening, and Dennis struggled to control the vehicle as it fishtailed, cutting into the dirt at the side of the road and spraying the car with pebbles and branches from shrubs. He fought the Cruiser back onto the highway, where he finally came to a halt fifty yards from the collision.
Dennis tried to reconstruct what had happened. He got out of the vehicle and used the light of the high beams to examine the bar protecting the engine compartment. A small smear of blood and fur clung to the left side of the roo bar. Dennis got in the car, slowly turned around, and drove back down the road to the scene of the crash.
At first he saw nothing, just the sparse spinifex clumps at the side of the road. Then he saw an animal’s huge hind leg emerging from behind a small hillock. Walking over, he saw a gray-colored kangaroo, perhaps six feet tall, lying on its side. A pool of black-red blood collected in the dust next to its open mouth.
Dennis stumbled backward.
“Jesus,” he repeated as he walked back to the car. “Jesus.”
He started driving again but kept his speed more moderate, concentrating on the highway ahead. It took him longer to get to Port Hedland, but he was determined not to kill or injure any other living creature this day.
It took him nearly an hour of driving around the town in the early morning hours to find a hotel with a view of the deep-water harbor. He found the Pier Hotel at the end of the Esplanade and checked in at 2:20 a.m., red-eyed and jittery with exhaustion.
He woke at 9:50 a.m. and pulled back the light-blocking shades. His room looked down over a portion of the huge port. Across a thin shaft of water he could see a long line of railroad cars brimming to the top with what he guessed was iron ore. To his right he counted at least six ships parked and waiting at sea to load up with the mineral bounty that Western Australia was churning up for the rest of the world.
After brushing his teeth and ordering room service, he took out Judy’s binoculars and scanned the horizon, looking for the telltale mounds of shipping containers piled high near the docks.
After nearly thirty minutes of eye-straining scans, Dennis found no containers. His concentration was interrupted by a knock on the door. A young, blond Australian man dropped off Dennis’s breakfast.
On a lark, Dennis said, “You know, I’m just checking out the sights here and am amazed at all of the mineral shipping. Does Port Hedland also have a container port?”
“Yeah, mate,” the young man said, pointing proudly to an area at least a mile past the railhead. “Big container port there. They’re piled high like building blocks. Can’t miss ’em.”
Sure enough, in the distance, Dennis could make out a pile of the universal twenty-foot by forty-foot shipping containers. He put down his binoculars and ate his breakfast.
Later, in the hotel lobby, he used the hotel’s complimentary computer and spent thirty minutes searching the web. After comparing a couple of products, he pulled out his Dennis Smith credit card and ordered a rush shipment to be delivered to him at the hotel. The shipper guaranteed arrival in forty-eight hours. Dennis prayed it was not going to be too late.
Later that day he took the LandCruiser to a service station and had them drain and replace the radiator fluid, as well as replacing the radiator hose that was being held together with tape.
“What happened here?” the mechanic asked.
“I ran over a rat,” Dennis said.
He had to circumnavigate the town to get to the container dock on the other side of a channel. He passed a train with what seemed like a hundred railcars filled to the brim with some sort of ore. After switching back several times, he finally found the entrance to the container port, blocked by a guard shack. He bluffed his way in by explaining he needed to discuss a shipment with the port manager.
The guard, a small Asian man with an oversize baseball cap nearly covering his eyes, finally waved Dennis through. He pulled to a stop about four hundred yards away from the massive pile of containers.
Using his binoculars, the lunacy of his quest became apparent as he worked his way through the containers. Even if the special container was still there, the task was daunting. The pile stood easily eight containers high and perhaps ten wide. Not only were the color schemes of the each box diverse, but the containers in the middle of the pile couldn’t be seen at all.
“Shit,” he said quietly as he scanned the mountain.