Underground (23 page)

‘And if we get across?’ Harry wanted to know.

‘You’re on your own. The Murray Highway runs along not far from the other side. You can hitch a ride south.’

Harry thought a moment. ‘Can I use that phone of yours?’

‘Why?’

‘I want to call my superiors. Maybe they can arrange to have someone pick us up there.’

‘Government listens in on those satellite calls,’ she warned.

‘I know. But we got codes. I won’t give anything away.’

She acceded, and Harry went off with the phone. By the time he came back, Frieda had gathered four garbage bags, each full of processed marijuana.

‘You got it done?’ she asked.

Harry nodded. ‘Someone will be waiting.’

‘Good.’ She looked at us all. ‘Grab a bag each and follow me.’

‘You’re making a delivery at the same time?’

‘Two birds,’ she replied. ‘You’ll see . . . The way we always get the dope across, we’ll get you three across as well.’

We took the bags, hefted them over our shoulders, then headed off into the night. It was black out there, and although the old woman had a little torch with her, she did not use it, so we stumbled and tripped after her sure-footed shadow. Back up over the ridge and away from the lake, and then down through the scrub and the sand. There was a breeze blowing, giving the air a dangerous, chancy feel. It was heightened by the knowledge that all around us, waiting on the rim of a vast circle of wilderness, hundreds (or maybe thousands now) of searchers were manning barricades and watching for us to try to break out.

But Frieda led us on, unhurried, and after maybe half an hour we came to a knot of scraggly old trees, looming up in the dark. She flicked on the torch briefly, and we could see, secreted beneath the trees, the hulk of an ancient Landcruiser. Passing it by on any other night, I might have thought it was a wreck, but the old woman instructed us to load the bags in the back and climb in. And it started up fine, when she turned the ignition.

From there, we drove. Still in total darkness, no headlights, through scrub and over hills, down into empty creek beds and across sandy depressions that sucked at the wheels. At times it seemed that we were following one dirt road or another, but never for long, the old woman would always turn off again into the scrub, searching out some winding path of her own. We saw no other sign of life—except for once, when Frieda, staring intently through the windscreen, made an alarmed noise, then abruptly steered the vehicle into a deep gully, and switched off the engine.

‘What?’ Harry asked, beside her in the front.

She was leaning forward to gaze at the sky. ‘Another drone up there.’

Aisha and I were in the back. I craned my head out the window, but the sky was black ink. How on earth had the old woman seen anything?

‘It won’t be able to spot us, will it?’ I asked.

Frieda was almost whispering. ‘They got thermal imaging. But as long as it don’t go right over us, we should be hidden down here.’ We sat. And after a time, the old woman seemed satisfied. She started the engine again, reversed out, and we were on our way.

We travelled for several hours more, it felt to me, carving a painstaking route through the night. Sometimes we came to fences, but the old woman always seemed to find a gate through which we could pass. At another point she slowed the vehicle to a crawl, peering forward. ‘There’s a proper road up ahead that we gotta cross—runs between Robinvale and Balranald—before we hit the river. There’ll be patrols on it. But it’s a long bit of track. They can’t cover it all.’

She came to a stop. Minutes ticked by in silence. Then, in the distance, lights appeared to the right. Headlights, three vehicles, moving in convoy along the invisible road. Trucks, by the look, going slow, and full, no doubt, of soldiers. But they sailed steadily by, maybe five hundred yards ahead of us, then dwindled away, tail-lights fading, to the left. ‘Okay,’ Frieda muttered, and gunned the engine. We lurched forward, bouncing over the ground. I had a momentary glimpse of the road itself—black tarmac, white lines dimly glowing, an instant of traction for the wheels—and then we were over into the scrub on the far side.

And onwards still, the last miles now, seeing nothing, and seen by no one. Until finally the old woman braked, killed the engine, and instructed us to climb out.

‘We’re there?’ Harry asked.

‘Close. Grab the bags.’

We unloaded the marijuana, then hurried through the bush. Frieda risked a flash of her torch, and suddenly we saw the ground drop away before us, and the glint of water below. The Murray River. Half guessed in the darkness, no more than a hundred yards away, was the shadow of the opposite bank. The old woman dropped confidently down the embankment, and hunted around in the tree roots and bushes down there. At length she gave a grunt. ‘Here it is.’

She was dragging a small rowboat from its hiding place.

‘We row those bags across,’ she told us, looking up, ‘whenever we get an order. On the other side, there’s an old shack in the bush where we drop ’em. It’s not far from a rest stop that the trucks on the highway use.’ She slipped the boat into the water. ‘Now hand that stuff down.’

We let the marijuana slide down the bank. But just before we could follow, a beam of light sprang out from the darkness. Frieda froze, captured in it. The light wavered, moved on, returned to her. And with it, the sound of a motor. Staring back to the source of the beam, I could see now the low shape of another boat, just coming around a bend in the river.

‘You there,’ boomed a voice through a megaphone, clearly American, even with the amplification. ‘Don’t move an inch.’

Frieda stood upright, bag in hand.

‘Step away from the boat,’ the voice crackled again. ‘We have weapons trained and are authorised to use deadly force.’

The old woman bent to put down the bag. ‘Get under cover!’ she hissed to the rest of us, still concealed in the scrub on the high edge of the river bank.

We all dropped to the ground. I peered down through the bushes as the boat drew near. It was an inflatable dinghy carrying four soldiers—all heavily armed, and all in US uniforms. There must have been an American base somewhere in the area, and they’d been dragooned into the search. They ran up on shore next to Frieda and piled out, guns at the ready. And yet, like
the troops at the roadblocks back at Base Amberly, these didn’t look like top-line combat soldiers to me. Their uniforms were untucked, showing T-shirts and bellies, one wore thick glasses, and two of them were smoking cigarettes. And even in that moment of panic, it occurred to me how incredibly odd this must have seemed to them—a bunch of good ol’ boys patrolling some muddy Australian creek in the dead of night. The mighty Mississippi it wasn’t.

‘What you got there?’ one of them asked.

‘Yeah,’ drawled another. ‘What’s in the bags, lady?’

‘Nuthin’,’ replied Frieda, sounding sullen and slow.

They had torches with them, and were shining the beams about. The lights flickered across our hiding spot, but didn’t linger. And they really couldn’t have been top-line troops, because they didn’t bother with a physical search, nor were they equipped with night-vision goggles.

‘You alone out here, old girl?’

Frieda nodded, eyes downcast.

One of them was going through the bags now.

‘Whoa,’ he whistled to his comrades. ‘Check this out.’

They gathered around to leaf through the marijuana.

‘Holy Christ, woman, you gotta have over fifty pounds here!’

‘Primo stuff, too. Mother of mercy.’

‘You smuggling this shit? Are you crazy or what, tryin’ to pull this off on a night like tonight? Man, are you busted!’

But one of them, at least, was a little more serious. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Grace,’ she mumbled.

‘Where you from?’

‘Robinvale,’ she lied again.

‘You seen anyone else along the river tonight?’ he demanded. ‘Two men and a woman, trying to get across? You seen anyone else out here at all?’

‘I seen nuthin’. No one.’

‘No one, hey?’ He stared along the river, dissatisfied.

The others had gathered all the bags into a pile. ‘So what do we do now? We authorised to arrest someone for running weed?’

‘Christ,’ the leader sighed, ‘we can arrest whoever we like.’ He made his decision, nodded towards their boat. ‘Get the bags on board. We’re confiscating it. Contraband.’

The others got busy, exchanging glances.

‘And you,’ he addressed Frieda, ‘you get on home. An old lady like you, messing around with this stuff. It’s a damn shame. But we’ll let it go this time.’ He leant into her. ‘You were never here, right? And you sure as hell never met us either.’

‘Never here,’ repeated Frieda. ‘Never saw you.’

‘Get outta here then.’

The loading done, he stepped into his boat with the others and shoved off. The outboard spluttered into life, and the spotlight sprang out again. Turning in the current, they moved further on up the river, laughter and shouts echoing back behind them. In a few minutes, they were out of sight around the next bend. Harry and Aisha and I emerged from hiding, and crept down the bank. We found the old woman sitting on the bow of the boat, her shoulders rocking with silent laughter.

‘What did I tell you?’ She was wiping her eyes. ‘This whole world war we’re in, it’s fought on bloody
grass
!’

And when she had recovered, we climbed into the boat, pulled out the oars, and rowed silently across the muddy water of the Murray River, into Victoria.

The shack Frieda had mentioned—a tumbledown old thing, empty and overgrown—was hidden in the scrub not far from the southern bank of the river. The Murray Valley Highway was only a few hundred yards further away through the trees, and we could hear occasional trucks and cars passing by. Harry put in another call via the satellite phone, and arranged the pick-up. Then it was time for Frieda to bid us farewell. We were out of her country, and out of her hands.

‘We can’t thank you enough,’ Harry told her.

‘No, you can’t,’ she retorted. ‘Not unless you’re gonna bloody well pay for those bags they stole off me.’

‘Maybe we can, some day, if we make it through this.’

‘Huh. They’ll catch you sooner or later, I know that much.’ She scowled impressively at all of us. ‘But not a word about me and my crop, right?’

‘Right,’ we promised.

And with that, she clamped her beanie down over her crazy hair, then ambled away back towards the river, her bare feet silent in the dirt.

But of course, I’ve broken that promise, haven’t I, interrogators? I’ve told you everything about her, just like I’ve spilled my guts about everything else. And yet, you know, she’s the one person involved in all of this for whom I have no fears. That old woman was no fool. I don’t believe for a second that her name was really Frieda, or Grace, or that her real home was in either Robinvale or Menindee. She’ll escape all your reprisals. Even if you find the empty lake, amidst all the other empty lakes out there, and even if you find the right gully, under its camouflaged roof . . . Well, I’m betting that she and her sons and her crop will have long since moved on.

We spent the night in the shack, and then, about an hour before dawn, moved to the rest area at the highway’s edge. The stop was just a gravel clearing where weary truck drivers could pull over, with no facilities other than an overflowing rubbish bin and a tottering thunderbox toilet. But there we waited, secreted behind the bushes, until, just as the first hint of light was in the sky, a semitrailer came grinding in off the southbound lane. The cabin was emblazoned with the shapes of naked women, and the two trailers behind it were loaded with pallets of boxed fruit. The driver let the engine rattle down to an idle, climbed out, hitched up his shorts, and then, ignoring the derelict toilet, made for the bushes as if to relieve himself.

We stood up to meet him. Here was another unlikely member of the Underground—a wiry old truckie, smokes jammed under his T-shirt sleeve, and a sweat-stained cowboy hat on his head. I never did learn his name.

‘You,’ he said to Harry, ‘ride up front.’ He dropped a plastic bag on the ground. ‘I got one set of clothes, and one new ID. The ID is a bit dodgy, maybe, but it’s only gotta last until we get you to town.’

Harry took the bag. ‘What about Leo and Aisha?’

The man’s narrow gaze appraised us like a load of explosive cargo. ‘They’re far too hot. They ride in back.’

‘How tight is the security from here on?’

‘There’s a few checkpoints down as far as Bendigo, after that it’s plain sailing. They think you’re still north of the river.’

He led us over to the truck. ‘In back’ turned out to mean a hidden compartment. What looked like eight pallets of fruit boxes packed together was actually a facade. The outer boxes were real enough, but they were piled around a metal bin that formed a hollow interior. The inside was only a metre and a half square, and I assumed it was normally used for smuggling non-human OU contraband. Still, there was room enough for Aisha and me to climb in and sit, side by side. The truckie dropped two bottles of water in after us, and a bucket.

‘Five or six hours,’ he said, ‘and we’ll be in Melbourne.’

He shut the lid with a bang, leaving us in total darkness, breathing in the smell of oranges. We could hear fruit boxes being piled above us. A few more minutes passed, then the truck was lurching into gear, and we were under way.

Ever been locked in a metal box, interrogators?

Actually, you probably have. No doubt it’s part of your endurance training. And it’s not pleasant, is it? No way to stretch out or stand up. Hardly any air, the suffocating heat, the blackness that makes your eyes ache and your head spin. But add to that the swaying of the truck, and the noise, and the overpowering smell of fruit, and the exhaust fumes. . . Well, I’d thought that the bucket was there for the usual bodily functions, but after an hour or so in that sweating, stinking
darkness, my stomach heaving, I learnt what the bucket was really for.

‘Sorry,’ I said, as the sour stench of vomit flooded through the box. Aisha shifted next to me, but said nothing. ‘No fucking way to travel, is it?’ I added.