She was ready for his feint, and did not commit her block until he had switched the arc of his attack at the last moment, turning a backhanded slash into an overhead stab, aimed at the base of her neck. She pivoted on her good leg, keeping the turning circle as small as possible, parrying the stroke, and whipping her elbow back into his broken cheekbone.
Crack!
He cried out in shock and pain. Caitlin reversed the flow of her defensive sweep, channelling her ki through her forearms and into a looping shield that landed concussive hammer fists on his face, shredding his lips and breaking his nose.
Holding her body close to his, jamming his knife between them so that he had no chance to use it, she raked the handcuffs down the length of his arm until she had proper control of the weapon hand. After keeping most of her weight off the injured leg until the last possible moment, she gritted her teeth and stepped through, absorbing the pain as she dragged his hand across the front of her body and down towards his hip. Reversing the direction of her attack as she brought the captive limb up, Caitlin fed Baumer’s arm into a figure-four entanglement. A downward sword-slashing move broke his arm in three places.
As he screamed, she pistoned up on her good leg, groaned as she transitioned briefly to the other, then leapt high, pulling him backward with the handcuffs as she swept them over his head and around his throat. Pivoting again on her good leg, she dropped into a half-hip throw, taking him over fast and hard. His spine snapped a fraction of a second before she twisted, screamed with her own pain one last time, and shattered the vertebrae in his neck. Caitlin came down on top of his limp, twitching body.
She was crying. Crying with pain, and rage, and relief, and horror, when the young woman appeared by their entwined bodies.
‘I know you,’ Caitlin said, expecting to die. ‘I knew of your father. A good man. I know what they did to your family.’
She waved a hand weakly back in the direction of Blackstone and his men. It was all she had.
Sofia Pieraro was shaking. She tried to smile, but her face was twitching and rubbery and the effect was perverse.
Caitlin awkwardly disentangled herself from Baumer’s body. ‘If you want to help me, you can give me a hand up,’ she said. ‘We still need to get out of here.’
She could hear sirens coming closer. Boots pounding up a gravel path.
‘Miss Kate. Miss Kate. Are you in there?’
A familiar voice. A Polish accent.
‘It is Milosz. Of GROM.’
‘Come with me,’ said Caitlin. ‘Come quickly, if you want to live.’
TWO MONTHS LATER
‘The big bastard? The Rhino? He’s about ten, maybe fifteen minutes up the track that way,’ said the park ranger.
‘You know him?’ asked Jules.
He grinned. ‘Everyone knows the Rhino. Up that way,’ he pointed along the track that crawled uphill, skirting the edge of the Noosa National Park.
It was crowded with tourists and locals. The latter were easy to pick in their bare feet and board shorts, most of them carrying short boards around the headland to a surf break that was far enough off the tourist trail to discourage daytrippers. The tourists were just as easy to spot. Pink-skinned English backpackers, Chinese tour groups, small pods of fair-haired Swedes and Germans. And Americans, of course. There was no missing them; the loudest, most colourful diaspora in the world.
Those who’d washed up here on the Sunshine Coast tended to be the wealthier, luckier ones. There was nothing like the big American ghettos of western Sydney or New Town anywhere near this strip of Queensland coastal heaven. Shah had even told her that the odious St John siblings, Phoebe and Jason, had bought themselves a family compound up in the nearby Glasshouse Mountains. She hadn’t seen those wankers since they’d left the Aussie Rules in Sydney and very much hoped that wouldn’t change while she was in town to visit the Rhino.
The park ranger had already gone back to pointing out a koala high in a gum tree to twenty or thirty squealing primary school children, so she didn’t bother thanking him for the directions. Jules craned her head back but couldn’t make out the animal within the clutter of the subtropical rainforest canopy. She didn’t think koalas lived in rainforests, even the dry subtropical kind, but there were plenty of gum trees salted in among the screw pine and raintree and bracken fern.
She took a swig from a water bottle and resumed the trek up the headland. ‘Not a bad day for it,’ she said to herself.
The coastline curved away in a series of scalloped bays, most of them home to easily surfed point breaks. Those closer to the seaside village of Noosa were crowded with holiday-makers. The further up the trail she climbed, through thick forests of beach lily and passion vine, the more challenging the surf conditions down below seemed to become, thinning out the crowds. Julianne was glad of the shade from the forest, even though the humidity beneath the canopy seemed much worse than it had back on the beach. After five minutes of climbing, her tee-shirt was stained with dark sweat patches, and she had finished most of her bottle of water.
Joggers ran past her in both directions, drenched with perspiration. Neither the heat nor the climb seemed to bother the surfers, at least those heading out for a ride. They ran nearly as quickly as the joggers.
Jules was in no rush. As far as she knew there was only one track in and out, so she wouldn’t miss him. She did her best to enjoy the walk. An easterly breeze pushed tentatively into the fringes of the forest, dappling the path with sunlight as the foliage hissed and swayed. Breaks in the vegetation afforded a view to the north, where the coast curved gently around to form what seemed to be a massive open bay. The main tourist beach was crowded with thousands of bathers playing in the gentle surf break. A couple of yachts and some smaller cabin cruisers, one of them hers, rode at anchor further out.
She found him standing on a sunny platform watching the surf crashing into the base of the rocky headland hundreds of feet below. There was no mistaking Rhino A. Ross. Even after a couple of months of enforced rest, and wrapped in bandages, he looked like a powerful if wounded pachyderm. Leaned up against a safety rail entwined with orchids and guinea flowers, his chin resting on his hands, he presented a lonesome, melancholy aspect.
‘Hello, Rhino,’ she said.
He stood and turned and the woebegone air that had hung around him was banished by smile and a roar.
‘Miss Jules!’
He wore an eye patch - always would now - and you could tell that half of one bandaged hand was missing, but it didn’t stop him wrapping her in a fierce hug and clapping her on the back with strength enough to wind her.
‘How are you, Rhino? I called in at Shah’s villa looking for you, but the guy at the front desk said you’d gone for your morning walk.’
‘Same time every morning,’ he said. ‘The best way to get your health back is just to get out of bed every morning and chase it. Although I’m not as fleet on the hoof as I used to be.’
One of his knees was still wrapped in a compression dressing.
‘And was that your fine vessel I saw at anchor in the bay this morning, Miss Jules?’
‘No, it’s Shah’s. I’m taking it down to Sydney for him. As a favour, you know.’
The Rhino smiled. During the last month or two, the favours had been a one-way street. The old Gurkha had looked after both of them very well.
‘Come sit yourself down in the shade, Miss Julianne,’ he offered. ‘Be a shame to ruin that peaches-and-cream complexion of yours.’
The Rhino retrieved a dark wooden walking stick from where he’d leaned it up against the fence, waving her off when she tried to lend him a hand.