Juggernaut

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'I'll tell you, if you promise first.'

'Be damned to that, Jones. Tell me or not as you please. But I make no bargains.'

He paused, thinking about this, and then said, 'It's about Bob Sisley. He's dead.'

'Dead? What the hell do you mean?'

'He's dead, I tell you. Mick McGrath shot him.'

Christ, I thought. I'd been right. All along I'd had an uneasy feeling about McGrath, and this news came as less of a shock than a grim confirmation of my thoughts. 'You'd better tell me all about it. Let's sit down.'

'But you really mustn't let on who told you,' Jones said again. He sounded terrified and I could hardly blame him.

'All right, I promise. Now tell.'

'It was like this. When we left we took as much of our kit as we could carry and went off towards Kodowa. Bob wanted to nick a truck but they were all guarded. Then he said we'd be sure to find transport in Kodowa. After all, there were lots of cars left behind there.'

He said nothing about the events which had led up to the mutiny, nor about his own reasons for going along with it, and I didn't ask. All that was past history.

'We didn't get very far. Walking, it's not like being in a motor, not out here especially. It was bloody hot and hard going. Those Nyalans, they're pretty tough, I found out… anyway we pushed on for a while. We'd nicked some food and beer, before we left. Brad Bishop didn't know that,' he put in, suddenly anxious not to implicate the cook in their actions. It was things like that which separated him from Bob Sisley, who wouldn't have cared a damn.

Then we heard a car and up comes Mick on his own. He tried to talk us into going back, but pretty soon it turned into an argument. He and Bob Sisley got bloody worked up. Then Bob went for him but Mick put him down in the dust easy; he's the bigger man by a long chalk. None of the rest of us wanted a fight except maybe Johnny Burke. But he's no match for Mick either and he didn't even try. To be honest, Barry and Bob Pitman and me, we'd had enough anyway. I really wanted to go back.'

He hesitated and I sensed that the tight wound resolution was dying in him. 'Go on. You can't stop now. You've said too much and too little.'

Then Mick took us off the road and — '

'How do you mean, took you? You didn't have to go anywhere.'

'Yes we did. He had a gun.'

'What kind of gun?'

'An automatic pistol. He took us off the road and down into the bush, where nobody else could see us. Then he said we had to go back or we'd die out there. He said he could beat us into agreeing, one at a time. Starting with Bob Sisley. Bob had some guts. He said Mick couldn't keep us working, couldn't hold a gun on us all the time. He got pretty abusive.'

'Did they fight?'

'Not again. Sisley said a few things he shouldn't and… then Mick shot him.'

'Just like that?'

'Yes, Mister Mannix. One second Bob was standing there, and the next he was on the ground. That bloody Irishman shot him through the head and didn't even change his expression!'

He was shivering and his voice wavered. I said, Then what happened?'

'Nobody said anything for a bit. Someone upchucked — hell, it was me. So did Barry. Then Mick said again that we were to go back. He said we'd work the rig, all right. And if any of us talked about what had happened he'd get kneecapped or worse.'

'Kneecapped — that was the word he used?'

'Yes. Bob Pitman got down to look at Sisley and he was stone dead, all right. And while we were all looking. Johnny Burke he took off and ran like hell, through the bush. I thought Mick would shoot him but he didn't even try, and Johnny got clean away.'

'Do you know what happened to him?'

'Nobody does.'

'What happened next?'

'Well, we said OK, we'd go back. And we'd shut up. What else could we do? And anyway we all wanted to come back by then. Christ, I've had this bloody country.'

'What happened to Sisley's body?'

His voice shook again. 'Mick stripped it and him and Barry put it down in a gulley and covered it up a little, not buried. Mick said the wildlife would get him.'

'He was right about that,' I said grimly. 'You did the right thing, telling me about this. Keep your nose clean and there'll be no more trouble out of it for you. I'll do something about McGrath. Go back to the camp now, and get a good night's sleep. You're out of danger, or at least that sort of danger.'

He went, thankfully, and I followed more slowly. I had one more lousy job to do that night. Back at camp I strolled across to the Land Rover and got into it on the passenger side, leaving the door open. There was still some movement here and there and as one of the men walked past I called out to him to find McGrath and tell him I wanted to see him.

I switched on the interior light, took the shotgun I had liberated, emptied and reloaded it. Previously, when I'd tried to put in a fourth shell it wouldn't go, and I had wondered why, but now I had the answer; in the States pump and automatic shotguns are limited to a three-shot capacity when shooting at certain migratory birds. To help remind hunters to keep within the law the makers install a demountable plug in the magazine, and until it's removed the hunter is limited to three fast shots. I guessed the gun makers hadn't bothered to take out the plugs before exporting these weapons.

Now I began to strip the gun. When McGrath came up I was taking the plug out of the magazine. He looked at it with interest. That's a fine scatter-gun,' he said easily. 'Now, how many shots would a thing like that fire before reloading, Mister Mannix?'

'Right now, three. But I'm fixing it to shoot six.' I got the plug out and started to reassemble the gun.

McGrath said, 'You've done that before.'

'Many times.' The gun went together easily. I started to put shells into the magazine and loaded the full six. Then I held the gun casually, not pointing at McGrath but not very far away from him, angled downwards to the ground. 'Now you can tell me what happened to Bob Sisley,' I said.

If I'd hoped to startle him into an admission I was disappointed. His expression didn't change at all. 'So someone told you,' he said easily. 'Now I wonder who it could have been? I'd say Ronnie Jones, wouldn't you?'

'Whoever. And if anything happens to any of those men you'll be in even more trouble than you are now — if possible.'

'I'm in no trouble,' he said.

'You will be if Sadiq strings you up the nearest tree.'

'And who'd tell him?'

'I might.'

He shook his head. 'Not you, Mister Mannix. Mister Kemp now, he might do that, but not you.'

'What makes you say that?' I hadn't meant the interview to go this way, a chatty debate with no overtones of nervousness on his part, but the man did intrigue me. He was the coolest customer I'd ever met.

He grinned. 'Well, you're a lot tougher than Mister Kemp. I think maybe you're nearly as tough as me, with a few differences, you might say. We think the same. We do our own dirty work. You're not going to call in the black captain to do yours for you, any more than I did. We do the things that have to be done.'

'And you think Sisley had to be killed. Is that it?'

'Not at all. It could have been any one of them, to encourage the others as the saying goes, but I reckon Sisley was trouble all down the line. Why carry a burden when you can drop it?'

The echo of Sadiq, both of them using Voltaire's aphorism so glibly and in so similar a set of circumstances, fascinated me against my will. 'I don't need lessons in military philosophy from you, McGrath,' I said. 'What you did was murder.'

'Jesus Christ! You're in the middle of a war here and people are dying all around you, one way or the other. You're trying to save hundreds of lives and you worry about the death of one stinking rat. I'll tell you something. Those other bastards will work from now on. I'll see to that.'