As Anne-Claire ventured further into the cavernous room, the metallic clank turned to a noisy, jingling shimmer. In the dark, the small iPod light appeared like a ghostly apparition floating against the solid rocky walls and adding a green, ghoulish bouncing shadow to the antechamber. A towering rock pillar in the middle of the room reached from the vault floor, extending skyward and joined onto the substantial roof high above Anne-Claire’s head. Cautiously approaching the massive pillar, the metallic shimmer became more pronounced, forcing her to hold her breath in fright, pondering what strange thing was generating the unfamiliar sounds.
With unwise curiosity burning in her mind, Anne-Claire carefully stepped over the uneven cavern floor, slowly searching the enormous pillar and with each painstakingly placed footstep, more of the pillar’s hidden form came into view.
Anne-Claire gasped in a terrified breath and froze to the spot, staring at an unexpected sight as the metallic clank sharply chimed, shivering with abject fear. Before she knew what was happening, a harrowing scream erupted in haunted fright throughout the chamber.
But Anne-Claire could hear two traumatised screams.
Only one escaped her own throat.
*~*~*~*
Chapter 52
A dark and moonless flat, open expanse guarded by an impenetrable wall of secretive night time gloom languished beyond the Beechcraft Bonanza’s mirror-like windshield. Unable to see into the darkness beyond the aircraft’s clear glass, the anxious pilot and his passenger stared blindly at the black windscreen, searching the outside obscurity for any sign of light and held spellbound by the tedious tone of the monotonous engine. The cockpit’s illuminated digital flight instruments added an eerie green hue to the atmosphere and gave the only indication the small plane’s flight path did in fact have a purposeful destination.
Jim Strack’s attention focused on the aircraft’s colourful digital eyes: the instruments that divided the blinding night and confirmed his exact location; how fast the small plane was travelling; and most importantly, how far they were from the ground. The near new Bonanza carried the latest technology in aircraft avionics, its powerful electronics and satellite guidance allowing the aircraft the ability to see in the dark. Without it, the emergency dash to Pearl Springs might not have been possible. Stracky’s gaze absentmindedly diverted from the coloured weather radar display and settled onto the orange TCAS warning light, assuring the pilot the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System was activated and systematically searching the skies for any other unseen air traffic.
Meticulously checking the GPS coordinates against the Bonanza’s heading and confirming everything was in order, Stracky let his mind momentarily wander from the plane’s instruments and wondered how the desperate situation down on the ground at Pearl Springs had unfolded, convinced that whatever was going to happen had already happened. With a tense knot in his stomach and twenty minutes left of their emergency dash, Stracky stole a sideways glance at his policeman passenger. In all the years he’d known Bob Maxwell, Stracky had never seen him show any emotion and tonight was no different. Judging by the policeman’s blank staring gaze and an unobtrusive official box marked evidence recovery, he was expecting to fly into some kind of grizzly crime scene and maybe Butch, Mishy and their girls had already perished.
Stracky turned his attention away from the heavy policeman and tuned into his instruments once again, trying to deflect the growing apprehension but unable to shake the sick foreboding rising in his stomach.
*~*~*~*
Holding the tension against the trigger on Butch’s shotgun, Mishy’s finger ached, waiting, locked in a persistent ready-to-fire attitude. The hunted with an unseen equalizer, sighting the barrel over the bathtub sides and somehow sure the firearm would discharge with just a little more pressure from her small, trembling hand. Whoever was on the other side of the bathroom door had already taken Butch’s life and the thought stung Mishy with a pang of fierce debilitating grief and rage. Fighting hard to restrain the blackness washing over her mind, Butch’s smile and his loving presence flashed across her memory, causing a stifled moan to reverberate in a deep place of pain and tensing her trigger finger dangerously.
As the wrenching emotions swept over her, she wiped the flood of tears from blinding her gun sight, but she deliberately resisted the overwhelming urge to discharge the gun until she was sure of a perfect shot and permanently eliminating the threat.
Another debilitating wave of grief flooded over Mishy, her body convulsing violently in silent, stifled sobs as she tried to remain calm, but the pain took over and her teeth clenched in torturous rage. How dare this madman steal the only man I have ever loved and leave our girls without their loving father to guide and affirm their future!
Mishy deliberately breathed in and out and tried to compose herself, pushing down the desire to make a compulsive move and throw away any chance of survival. Now that her soul mate was dead she didn’t care much for her own life, but she would do whatever it took to protect her daughters from the same fate, making sure the right moment exacted the desired retribution from Butch’s killer.
The silhouette of booted feet, backlit by a vehicle’s headlights outside the homestead, gave a clear indication of someone loitering in front of the bathroom door and in a matter of seconds, life was about to change drastically in a violent confrontation for Mishy and the killer.
Unexpectedly, a familiar sound drifted into the tense atmosphere and confused Mishy’s highly stretched emotions, feeling as if she was about to go insane.
Her heart skipped. Dare she hope, trying to confirm the integrity of the call but there was no doubt as the sound reached her ears for the second time, and the protective wall she had erected around herself came crashing down in a confusing flood of pent-up relief.
“Mishy! Are you in there, honey? It’s Butch.”
Many moments went by without an answer, but it was Danica who finally stepped in front of her mother’s aim and threw the lock open. She’d recognised her father’s voice the first time and with an overwhelming need to feel his loving arms around her, she pulled open the door, crashing the protective barricade against its stops and launched into his arms.
Over Danica’s hysterical cries, a distraught and trembling voice erupted from the bathtub, melting into uncontrolled sobs. At the same time, the shotgun fell from Mishy’s grip and clattered against the tiled bathroom floor, realising how close she had come to killing Butch herself.
“I... I thought you were dead!” Mishy’s painful cries reverberated around the confining strongroom signalling the depths of her anguish.
Worried by the level of stress Mishy had been forced to carry, Butch kissed Danica’s brow and then eased into the bathroom and lifted his distraught soul mate from the tub and into his arms, holding her, kissing her and reassuring her while the trauma melted from her mind. “Ssshhh, honey! You know I would try to turn the tide for you and the girl’s, and it would take more than a breakdown to stop me getting back home.”
Mishy pressed her head against her husband’s chest, emotionally spent and listening to the strong and steady heartbeat, with her feet and arms hanging limp and heavy like lead in Butch’s embrace.
The homestead lights flickered and then burst into life, flooding the scene with consoling light and chasing away many of the fears lurking in the dark. Mishy’s attention diverted from listening to Butch’s heartbeat and her gaze rested on the light bulb above her head, asking many silent questions.
Butch saw the unspoken query and reassured her with his reply, “I’m sorry, honey, the lights going out amidst this whole debacle must have really freaked you out. Changing over the fuel tanks on the generator was supposed to be my first job after Bella Creek, and judging by the restored power, Eddie and the boys must have succeeded in getting the old power plant going again.”
The sound of a low flying aircraft circling above the homestead roof drew the family’s attention to the ceiling, as if by looking
up they’d be able to see the unidentified plane through the wood and tin cladding. Feeling exhausted and finding it hard to believe the past twenty hours, Mishy wiped her face with the back of her hand, realising Bob Maxwell would have responded somehow to her lack of communication and he was probably the cause of the circling aircraft. Butch had to strain to hear Mishy’s exhausted whisper.
“I’m sure that’ll be Bob Maxwell, honey. We need to light a signal fire so they can land safely.”
*~*~*~*
Chapter 53
High above the desert floor, the Beechcraft Bonanza buffeted on unseen cooling desert currents, shocking both pilot and passenger from their melancholy thoughts with a turbulent, pummelling ride. A pinprick of light in the distance cut through the night like a fire-tailed comet and added another dimension of foreboding to the solemn flight. Both men had spotted the unusual phenomenon together, but neither spoke their sober thoughts while the Bonanza, on autopilot, honed in on the light as if it was a honey bee locked onto the sweet scent of nectar, pointing its determined nose directly for it.
An abrupt crackling emanating from the Bonanza’s dark and empty rear passenger cabin made the two occupants jump at the sudden interruption to the morose, silent flight. The police communications’ radio had been stowed with the rest of Bob Maxwell’s hastily thrown together equipment but never turned off, a habit he had learnt as a young constable on the graveyard shift of a dangerous backstreet city beat.
“Alpha, Bravo, Tango... Black Devil is down! Repeat... Black Devil is down!”
The short, but direct transmission obviously meant something to the policeman but Stracky was none the wiser. To make things worse, Maxwell stared at Stracky with incredulous eyes, expecting the civilian pilot to comprehend its meaning, but Stracky returned a blank stare and left Maxwell to come to terms with what he had just heard on his own.
“So what does all that mean?!” Stracky chided, waiting impatiently for an explanation.
“They’ve got him! Alpha force has got him and he’s dead!” Maxwell’s radio continued to buzz with excitement as the police special forces’ communication blackout lifted and more coded detail became available. Eager for more understanding, Bob listened intently to the tangled messages and translated for Stracky. “Apparently he was spotted entering coordinate ‘D’ without lights about twenty minutes ago. He drove straight into an ambush and they took him down like a bunch of ants swarming all over a cockroach.”
“Coordinate D?! Where on earth is that?!” Stracky’s irritation bubbled over at the police jargon.
Bob Maxwell’s stocky frame shifted in his seat and his tired eyes concentrated on the lining of the aircraft’s interior roof as if he was attempting to read an unseen map. “Coordinate D would make it about an hour and a half from the northern boundary of Pearl Springs and he was heading south. If he hadn’t been stopped, the next logical place for a target would have been...“ the policeman’s face took on an unexpected confused expression, torturing the evidence in his mind and trying to piece together the unusual scene growing in the aircraft’s windscreen below them.
Before he could speak again, Stracky released the autopilot and took manual control of the aircraft, descending and flying low over the solitary focused light beam. Stracky cottoned on to Bob’s meaning and finished his sentence, “The target would have been the Slater’s and that can only mean they must be alive!”
As the small plane buzzed Pearl Springs, a single headlamp from a stationary vehicle illuminated the dark homestead’s external walls and behind that, another vehicle lay motionless and hidden in the darkness. The two occupants followed the peculiar scene as the aircraft banked and made a steep circling turn, but as they watched, the homestead lights blinked on, spilling light over the front yard and the strange vehicles. Stracky pulled the aircraft out of a steep bank and lined up the homestead roof once again to see if they could get a closer look and determine the threat level. The engine laboured as the pilot poured on the power just in case they had to make an abrupt break and avoid rifle fire, but as the craft skimmed the roof with a lawnmower-like intensity, the two occupants could see five figures on the front lawn huddling together in an intense hug and tiredly waving up at the plane.
As if someone on the ground had read Stracky’s anxious mind, four 205 litre drums—cut down the centre, filled with fuel oil and strategically placed hundreds of metres apart—lined the extremities of Pearl Springs’ emergency gravel landing strip. Lit by a shadowy figure, one by one the rusty steel drums burst into intense flame, billowing black diesel smoke into the air and marking out the length and breadth of the station’s only safe access for aircraft. Setting the flaps to full and dropping airspeed in a long banking turn, Stracky decreased engine power, flicked on the powerful landing light and lined up the dark space between the flaming sentinels and started a gradual descent. As the ground came up at the aircraft, Stracky finished the practised approach with a final flare and then a glass-smooth touchdown.
Finally, the throaty engine’s power dropped to idle and as the small craft bumped along the dark runway, it finally came to a stop in front of three tired but relieved faces squinting in the plane’s landing beam and turning their eyes away from an encompassing cloud of red dust kicked up by the plane’s propeller. Stracky and Bob recognised Eddie’s timeworn face and the two rescuers, Jackson Reynolds and Troy Anderson from Valerie Downs in an instant as the penny dropped immediately. The damaged vehicle with one headlight was the Valerie Downs’ ute and the one behind it was Butch’s.
*~*~*~*
The devastated human scene inside the homestead kitchen resembled a fallout shelter after some horrific nuclear event, but Bob Maxwell’s larger-than-life presence had an immediate rock star effect on the family gathering. Mishy’s eyes were tired and red and her shoulders slumped under the emotional weight she carried, however as the burly policeman entered her world again, a sense of relief and calm flooded her mind, momentarily breaking away from her family’s supporting embrace to show her appreciation with a fond hug. Returning Mishy’s tense and emotional hug, Bob recognised the telltale signs of trauma written across the Slater family’s shell-shocked expressions yet it was evident Mishy and the girls were being supported by Butch’s strength and love. Even though it was nearly 2 am and little Molly had fallen asleep in her daddy’s arms, Bob knew the importance of debriefing the family and letting them talk through their experiences, especially after hearing the hysteria in Mishy’s voice after her first phone call.
As the homestead kitchen filled to capacity with exhausted people, Mishy automatically moved into hostess mode and busied herself preparing something to eat for the large group congregated around her table, but she was running on pure adrenaline and after dropping a plate and smashing it, she burst into tears, prompting Bob to jump up and settle her back at the table.
“Okay, food can wait. I know it’s late, but we need to talk this through and get all the nasty business out in the open while it’s still fresh in our memories,” Bob’s baritone warble rasped over the group and easily took charge. In his career as a policeman he had seen many horrific tragedies and had been involved in numerous debriefing sessions, and although some police opted not to attend after a specific event, the internalised trauma soon took its toll, leaving deep emotional wounds bleeding and infected from lack of a listening ear.
With his official police notebook in hand and intent on taking statements to write in his formal report to police hierarchy, Bob opened the debrief with a statement he hoped would bring immediate healing. “I need to inform you of something important before we start debriefing,” Maxwell boomed. “On the way here, my police radio intercepted a transmission from the task force searching for this maniac and thankfully, they’ve secured him. Unfortunately for him, he attempted to shoot his way out and now the suspect is deceased. He will not offer the station people of the Channel Country any further threat.”
Maxwell left out the detail of where the kill
er was headed and the most likely outcome if the task force hadn’t stopped him.
The atmosphere inside the kitchen erupted into a carnival mood, with everyone talking over each other while Bob Maxwell searched the faces to see what effect his news had brought. Mishy’s expression beamed in relief and as the policeman’s eyes momentarily met hers, he could already see the old Mishy fighting through the trauma and determined to put the most unpleasant chapter of her life behind her. Once the kitchen had fallen silent, Bob no longer appeared concerned for the extreme mental status of the Slater family. The news had done its work, prompting the wily police officer to start the story at the beginning and implicate Butch as the hero and the villain.
With notebook in hand, Bob turned the attention of the group to Butch. “Why don’t you tell us what happened, Butch.”
*~*~*~*
Chapter 54
With his youngest daughter asleep in his arms and the rest of his family close by and pressed against him, Butch searched his tired memory and tried to piece together the events that had led to the bizarre, confused situation. Coincidence seemed to take a front seat in every turn of events, stretching a complex vehicle breakdown into a major family trauma and adding undue duress onto his beautiful Mishy. Butch knew she would be worried and with a manic killer on the loose it was only natural to assume the worst, but in his defence, Butch had tried every conceivable bush trick to patch up the radio and communicate with his family from the breakdown site at Bella Creek. When trusted technology fails, the breakdown might well have happened on the dark side of the moon.