A few shouts floated down.
Shaw ran out, called to Francis. “We can get up there — ahead there.” He pointed along the track. “It looks as though it slopes down to meet the road.”
Francis gave a quick glance, shouted an order. The troops streamed along the road for about a hundred yards with Shaw and the Major leading, then climbed the slope lifting to the high ground which formed a kind of plateau through which the cutting ran. Ahead of them four men were beating it, flat out, not stopping now to use their guns.
They were running towards a helicopter.
Francis roared out an order and automatic fire stuttered out, ripped across towards the running men. One of them dropped and stayed there; a burst of fire came from the helicopter, lead pumped into the body — presumably to ensure that the man wouldn’t talk. The machine was already off the ground and hovering low as they raced for it, and immediately they were aboard it was up, up and away quickly, rising high. As the Military Police hopefully maintained a now useless fire, the helicopter reared above them, turned, and flew off in the direction of Sydney, well out of range all the while.
Shaw felt sick at heart; after all his wonderful ideas about this fake crate, he’d gone and mucked it and now the game was given away. As he came to the man they’d hit, he knelt and turned him over. There was a pool of blood soaking into the ground beneath the man and he was quite dead. Shaw, noting that he was a European, ran through his clothing, looking for papers. But there was no identification, nothing beyond the usual, purely personal, stuff — stamps, a little money, a newspaper cutting of a girl in a bikini, another cut-out, this time from a colour magazine, also of a near-naked girl. Shaw examined everything carefully. On the back of the colour cut-out he found a scrawl which read: Ling’s 4.30.
He looked up, asked: “Ling’s. Could that mean anything special, I wonder?”
Francis frowned, scratched his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me, that’s certain.”
“Uh-huh…” Shaw rubbed his nose with a forefinger. “Could be a Chinese name, couldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Francis agreed, wonderingly. “So what?”
“Oh — nothing.” Shaw stuffed the papers back and stood up. The dead man had the appearance of a hobo, was probably just a strong-arm tough who didn’t amount to much, and the chances of identification would be about nil.
Francis said, “Hey, wait a minute, though.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s come back — only Ling’s I know, it’s a restaurant in King’s Cross, in Sydney. If you don’t know the Cross, well, it’s kind of the Soho of Sydney. And Ling’s is Chinese.”
“I see.” Shaw’s heart quickened. “This could be a clue, in that case.”
Francis stared, pushed his bush hat to the back of his head. He asked, “Clue to what? Why, it looks just like a note of a date, doesn’t it? Could be meeting a girl-friend there.”
The dead man didn’t look the sort who met girl-friends at restaurants of the kind Ling’s sounded like, but Shaw said, “Yes, could be. Perhaps that’s all it is.”
“Look, what really goes on?”
“Sorry, I can’t go into details. I dare say you’ll find out before long. Don’t ask me any more, there’s a good chap.” He clapped Francis on the shoulder. “Anyway, I was right about the attack! And now there’s only one thing to do— I’ve got to get to Sydney fast.” He nodded towards the spot where the helicopter had been. “That lot’ll have seen the crate — if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have gone so fast, you can take my word for that. So now they know — and so do you—"
“Know what, for Pete’s sake?”
Shaw snapped, “That REDCAP’s due for discharge in Sydney after all! So far no one else knows that, except the people immediately concerned of course. Now, can you get a message through to Bandagong with the truck’s wireless? I’ll have to warn them at once that we’re back where we started."
Francis said, “Sure. And I reckon Bandagong’ll give you a plane into Sydney if it’s that urgent, Commander. So we’d better just carry on for there in the truck.”
“Right. Let’s go, then.”
They ran back, down into the cutting, took a look at the wreckage. The lorry was obviously incapable of being righted without mechanical equipment and would have to be abandoned for the time being. Francis decided to get the crater filled in — there would be just room to squeeze the command truck through between the lorry and the side of the cutting. While the men got busy with shovels and bare hands, tearing down earth and stones to fill the hole and give the truck clear passage, Shaw got a wireless message passed to Bandagong asking the authorities to advise Sydney that any fresh attack would now either be switched back to the liner or would take place when the genuine REDCAP was en route from Sydney. There was no point now in keeping up the pretence and so, in the absence of any common code, the carefully-worded message went en clair.
Some three hours later the bodies of the army driver and the other man had been buried in shallow, rock-marked graves and the hole had been filled; the truck started up, squeezed through the gap over the rubble edging carefully past the articulated vehicle. After that they drove through the night, and in the light truck they were able to make much better speed; after seventeen hours’ almost continuous hard driving they came into the outer perimeter of the Bandagong area at 5 p.m. next day. And soon after that they rolled up sweaty and covered in a layer of dust and dead weary to an Australian sentry outside a post guarding the beginning of the final stretch of road into the closed area.
As their truck stopped, Francis leaned out through the window and showed his pass. He said, “Special party entering MAPIACCIND territory.”
“Right you are, sir.” The sentry waved them on, walked alongside as they started off slowly. “You’ll be checked again at the entrance to the station. Been there before, have yer?”
Francis shook his head. “No, son.”
“Go easy then, Major. They’re trigger-happy, those bastards.”
The truck drove on for another five miles, past an airfield of the R.A.A.F., past a radar station, and then came up to a heavily guarded gateway in a high barbed-wire fence. To Shaw, the place looked very like a prisoner-of-war camp, at least so far as its boundaries went. At intervals along the wire there were high enclosures manned by guards with automatic weapons slung from their shoulders, guards who constantly swept the boundaries of the vast station with field-glasses. There were searchlights in the boxes, seach-lights which no doubt would keep the whole area floodlit by night. Ahead of the truck was a large sign reading, in several languages: DEAD SLOW. Farther along there was a pole barrier across the road.
As they approached this barrier in bottom gear, a loudspeaker blared at them to stop.
Mindful of what the Australian sentry had said, the driver jerked on his brakes instantly. A sentry in the grey uniform of the MAPIACCIND Field Force advanced towards them, automatic weapon held ready. Behind him, a squad of troops under a sergeant piled out from a building beside the gate and formed up in the road. The first man told the truck driver to go ahead slowly, and as the vehicle started up again he walked along beside it, shouted a peremptory command for it to stop just before the barrier was reached. As they stopped again, they were surrounded. The Major’s party-pass was examined, handed back; and then all the men were ordered out for their own papers to be checked individually by the sergeant. The truck itself was searched rigorously. There was something of a Germanic air of thoroughness about the whole proceedings. Shaw thought, as he held his rising impatience in check.