Draw the Brisbane Line (29 page)

The wind and dust whipped up by the blades of one chopper had been bad enough.  Now there were three of them all combining their energies on the grounds of the Ekka in an effort to strip the skin from Jenny’s legs.  She kept her face covered as best she could, but she really wished Banksia had a spare pair of jeans for her to wear, the heat be damned.

She hadn’t been too pleased when Al told her she’d be flown down in a helicopter with Jim Templeton.  Of all the people Jenny could have chosen to travel with, Jim would be right down there with her most loathed childhood enemy.  His rationale for the pairing was both disturbing and, when she stepped back far enough from her irritation to see it, well-reasoned.  As conservative as Al was in his approach to leading the QTA, Jim was radical.  Even though the organisation had deep radical roots, Al didn’t want them showing in any potentially violent clash.  Especially one where the media had a presence.  Jim would lead the rear-guard defence, and from that vantage, Jenny would be far enough from the action to be safe, but close enough to be a witness.  So to ensure the safety of the pregnant lady, she would fly with the radical.

What really surprised Jenny was Jim’s reaction when Al told him the plan.  He seemed almost pleased to be taking a back-seat role, and gave Al a tight smile when he nodded in agreement.

Her spirits lifted when one of Jim’s men helped her up into the Blackhawk, and she saw Banksia and Tait sitting in there, waiting for her.  She ran to them both and hugged them tightly.  Even the shittiest of journeys could be elevated above merely tolerable, if it was taken with friends.

‘Did you find your uncle?’ Jenny said loudly into Tait’s ear.

He shook his head with a sad smile, and Jenny gave herself a mental slap on the side of the head.  If he’d found his uncle, would he have rushed back into the arms of the QTA?  She hugged him, and he gave her a gentle squeeze in return.

Soldiers began filling the seats around them.  They all carried assault rifles, but Al and his peers insisted they weren’t to be used.  They should, in fact, be left behind on the helicopters.  Their role was to be one of peace-keeping — a fatality at the hands of a QTA soldier would be a political and PR nightmare of epic proportions.  Al knew they were on the thin edge of tolerance with the authorities as it was, and he had no desire for his men to be labelled vigilantes or outlaws.  There were eight of them in there in total, a mix of angry youth and bitter experience.

Even though they were supposed to be leaving the weapons on board when they touched down, they were certainly gripping them tightly.

Jenny looked out the open door as one of the three helicopters began to lift off the ground.  It was about a metre off the grass when her view was suddenly blocked by two more passengers stepping into the small space.

She was too taken by surprise to catch her breath, or ask the obvious questions of
why
and
how
.  Her brain struggled to process the sudden arrival of these two men in the helicopter as they sat down in the two empty seats across from her, the older one cradling a shotgun and the younger one dangling a handgun between his knees.  The older guy looked like he’d been fighting the war with his bare hands, his face and the scalp under his close-cropped grey hair decorated with an array of black lumps and scabs.  His injuries did nothing to mitigate the menace he wore like a skin.

His younger companion though, he’s the one who’d tripped the circuit-breaker in Jenny’s brain.  He smirked at the three of them, then said something into the older man’s ear, and his coarse laughter carried to them above the din of the choppers.  How was this happening?  It was … it was the bastard who’d car-jacked them!  What was his name?  Beano?  Danno?  Sammo?  Sammo.

Jenny saw Tait move out of the corner of her eye, and caught a brief glimpse of the hate in his face before he crossed the short distance to Sammo, who seemed to expend very little energy as he reached up and drove his fist into Tait’s stomach.  Tait doubled over on the floor and visibly struggled to get air into his lungs.  Banksia was over to him immediately, helping him to his feet.  Both of the new arrivals were now laughing wildly, and despite the mirth in their faces Jenny looked again at the man with the shotgun and the panel-beaten face and silently begged Tait to leave it alone.

Banksia evidently had the same idea.  She looked back to Jenny with an apologetic scrunch of her eyebrows and led Tait back out through the door of the helicopter.  Jenny watched them stagger across the grass and step into the other still-grounded Blackhawk, and found herself unable to decide whether to follow them, stay where she was, or get off the mad whirly-bird and forget the whole thing.  She was still paralysed by confusion and indecision when Jim stepped through the door and closed it.  He nodded to Sammo and Big Ugly with that same tight smile he’d given to Al.  The two party-crashers were still laughing when the chopper began to lift off the ground.

By the time Dave was close enough to the railway tracks to see the cars and trucks being angled across the road as makeshift barricades, the crowd was as dense as a half-time crush at the bar of the MCG.  It began to compress, solidify, and he soon found it difficult to make forward progress without politely moving people aside.  One brave news crew was already set up on the beach side of the street, their own floodlight adding to the glare being put out by the police car.  It brought to mind memories of night matches: the tight-packed crowd, the murmuring of anticipation, the bright-lit night, the adrenaline.

‘This is tighter than …’ he started to say to Pia on his left, but when he turned to make sure she could hear him, she wasn’t there.  He searched the crowd but he couldn’t see her in the crush.

She must have already struck off for the motel.  What had Tino called it?  Overwatch?

Something heavy and hard bumped into the back of his calf, and Dave turned to face an apology from a young blonde girl with a deep tan and a baseball bat.

‘Sorry,’ she said, awarding him with a first-prize smile.  Her accent was, if he had to guess, Yorkshire, by way of London.

‘No bother,’ he said.  ‘Why do so many people all of a sudden have baseball bats?  I expected more cricket bats.’

The girl’s smile broadened as she hefted the bat in front of her and slapped it against her palm.  ‘Superior stopping power.  That’s what the guy in the sports store said.  He was handing them out like food samples.’

‘How does he even
have
so many baseball bats?’

She shrugged.  ‘He said because he wasn’t allowed to sell guns.’

‘You here on holiday or something?’

‘Working holiday.  Can’t say this was the kind of thing I had in mind, but I’ll not fucking stand by and let these pricks loot our town.’

Tightly-strung mutters of
you said it
and
fucken right
rippled through the crowd, and Dave felt it run through his body as physically as any electric current.  The crowd was pulling together in more than mere proximity; it was joining together, becoming something else. 
Our town
.  She couldn’t have been there for more than a year, and it was already
her
town. 

Dave let his gaze brush over the faces around him, picking out both the familiar and the unfamiliar, but he soon began to see the crowd as simply
Byron
, whether he knew them or not.  Because this was his town too — more so than anywhere else in the country, because the Byron house was the only property he owned free and clear of the banks.  He spent at least three months of the year in his house there, and had hoped to relocate there permanently with Jenny.  He always thought it would be the perfect place to raise a child.  It was his dream.  And what damage would that dream suffer if the town,
his
town, suffered such violence as these bastards intended?

He felt the energy of the crowd fuse with his hands and heart, and it suddenly didn’t matter that he was fatigued — adrenaline had come to the party.  Something else was there too, something he hadn’t felt before, but whatever it was it wanted him to keep moving forward, to the front. 

To the front line. 

The gun in the back of his jeans suddenly seemed impossibly large and warm, as if it was trying to tempt him to take it out.

He ploughed his way through the crowd, fingertips pressed tightly together to form the cleaving tip.  They parted for him without complaint, some recognising him and others just acknowledging that the guy wearing the body armour should be in the first row.

Big engines shut down one after the other, their diesel rumbles replaced by a chorus of something higher-pitched from further down the road.  Dave pushed through the last few lines of defenders and came upon Tino’s police car.  It was parked across the middle of the two-lane blacktop, flanked on either side by an ambulance and a front-end-loader from a nearby construction site.  Tino stood near the cruiser with two other policemen, all three of them holding shotguns and wearing vests like his — though theirs were black, not desert sand brown.  The scene was illuminated by small floodlights, some coming from the police and some from the TV crews set up either side of the blockade.  He recognised many of them, and he suddenly wished he had a baseball hat, or a ski mask.  Yvette Winterson was out in front.  What the hell was she doing out of the studio?  She had a house in Byron, maybe she’d been sent up to play the concerned local.

‘Couldn’t keep them away,’ Tino said when he saw Dave approaching.  ‘Nice duds.’

‘You like?’ Dave said, brushing a hand over the front of the vest.  ‘It’s
imported
.’

‘What isn’t?’ Tino said.  ‘Mate, you sure you want to be up here?  If any of those pricks recognise you, there’s a good chance you’ll become a prime target.’

Dave shook his head.  ‘You want Pia to stay focused on keeping the trouble away, this is the best place for me.’

‘Pia, huh?’ Tino said in a lowered voice, leaning in a little closer to Dave.  ‘What is the deal with that girl?  What do the Yanks want with you?’

‘Honestly, I don’t really know.  It has something to do with Tom.’

Tino frowned, and Dave realised as soon as he said it that he shouldn’t have mentioned Tom.  Dave could almost hear the cogs grinding as Tino’s mind tried to process this new information.  This, he realised, is why he was supposed to keep him mouth shut about where he was going with Pia, because Dave Holden plus the US military equalled odd, bordering inexplicable.  But Tom Holden plus US military equalled conspiracy theory.

Tino looked like he might be about to launch into an extended line of questioning, mental cue cards lining up in his cop-brain, when one of his colleagues stepped into their conversation space and said to Tino, ‘They’re coming.’

Dave looked past Tino, past the small barricade, and saw a steadily brightening glow as headlamps began to round a bend in the road.  Scores of them.  And the scores soon grew to dozens, and the dozens to hundreds.  He gave up trying to guess at the numbers when the combined effect of all those headlamps formed a singular glowing sun, bearing down on the town’s last line of defence and buzzing like an angry alien swarm.

Pia set herself up on one of the first floor balconies of the Outrigger Bay.  The hotel had been locked up tight, and rather than break in to get access to the rooms from the inside, potentially frightening or provoking a response from anyone who might be hiding inside, she simply scaled the front of the low structure.  The approach tested her upper-body strength, but it hadn’t been difficult.  She used a small power drill to open the sliding door to the room and then unlocked the front door beyond that, because if she was spotted and fired upon, the balcony offered zero cover.  At only one floor off the ground, it was a long way from a sniper’s nest, but she genuinely hoped she wouldn’t have to do more than observe.

There was one more threat she might need to retreat from if she was spotted: the media.  They were set up so close to the barricade they were either brave or stupid, but if Pia had to start shooting, their cameras wouldn’t take long to zero in on her muzzle flashes.  If they knew what they were doing.

She slid a small torch from a custom-made pocket inside the bag and used it to peer into the dark insides.  A ruggedised smart phone sat deep among the barrels and cartridge boxes like some terrified animal, and Pia swiped its screen to wake it up.  No messages.  No missed calls.

Sighing, she slid the black carbon fibre carrying case out of the holdall and flipped up the securing latches.  She assembled the sniper rifle in the time it took most people to send a text message.  ‘Good morning Harold,’ she said as she reluctantly added a sound suppressor to the barrel — it might hamper the accuracy of any shot she had to make, but the media camp-out below her gave her an added incentive
not
to be spotted.  At first, she just scanned the growing crowd through the scope, looking for Dave and soon spotting him.  Then she shifted her attention further up the road, where the looters were starting to arrive on their dinky little bikes.  And they came on, and came on, and came on.  Just when Pia thought the tail of the group had appeared, more came in to close the gap.  She conducted a quick visual assessment and decided the looters had the townspeople outnumbered by at least two-to-one.

They wouldn’t all have guns though.  If she could just pick out the ones with guns and focus on them, she might be able to keep the worst of the damage under control.

She genuinely believed that, right up until the point she heard the helicopters beating their way towards the town.