‘Wait till you get to the big hairpin just short of the pass,’ Perry said. ‘You can see the whole coastline from there, all the lights.’ He waited till we were round the bend. ‘I was forgetting the power had been cut off.’
Steep, blast-hewn slopes of red earth and rock rose above us, lightly clothed by regeneration. ‘When we get to the top, how far to the mine?’
‘Not far. A mile, perhaps a little more.’
‘And the offices, where are they?’
‘They’re the first thing you come to, on a sort of plateau overlooking Paguna.’
‘Will the mine manager be there, do you think?’
He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t say.’ We were into a double bend now, and when we were round it and snaking out over a black drop, he added, ‘Normally he’d have left by now. Like the rest of us, he lives in Arawa. But with the power off, he’s probably still there. A power failure means the crushers, the concentrator, all the vital machinery comes to a standstill. That’s a major crisis as far as he’s concerned, so he’ll be around somewhere.’
As I went into a long curving right-hand bend, I was thinking that if I were managing one of the biggest mines in the world, and the power and telephone systems failed, I certainly wouldn’t be sitting in my office. I would be out making sure something was being done about it. The slopes to the right of us were so sheer they had been terraced. We were running out to the long buttress of an outcrop, another black void opening up below us, the outline of the tops very close, and as we approached the next backward loop, I slowed the car, stealing a quick glance to the left. Far below in the dark void I could see the road up which we had climbed, a tiny thread of tarmac lit by headlights. Two vehicles, a long way behind now.
‘They’re moving very slowly,’ Perenna said. ‘And they’ve closed up. They’re almost head-to-tail.’
I drove on round the loop. Old trucks, full of armed men — it would take them at least ten, perhaps fifteen minutes to grind their way up to where we were now. I slipped into bottom gear, my foot hard down as the road rose steeply to skirt an outcrop that faced to the right. We were almost at the top. Round the outcrop, we were into a defile, and suddenly we were on the level, our speed increasing as I went up through the gears, and Perenna’s voice behind me saying, ‘Strange, we haven’t met a single car.’
‘Not strange at all,’ Perry answered her. ‘A power failure causes a lot of problems. They’ll all be staying up here trying to cope.’ And then to me: ‘It’s downhill for about a mile, and then there’s a cut-off to the left. The offices are there.’
Lights glimmered in a great bowl in the mountains. Driving fast now, I couldn’t see any details, but I got the impression of a scarred and terraced crater, a sort of moonscape. The road dropped quickly, a glimpse of trees, and suddenly the cut-off was there, the shallow slope of roofs beyond. ‘Left now,’ Perry shouted, and I slammed on the brakes, tyres slithering as I made the turn, and then we were up on a plateau, and I had stopped at steps leading to the veranda of a long, low single-storey building.
‘This it?’ Perry nodded, his door already open.
We rushed in, the three of us, to be faced by a young woman looking cool and neat. But when Perry asked for the mine manager, she informed him that he had flown to Melbourne two days ago. ‘Then we’d like to see Mr Tooley.’
‘I’m afraid he’s busy right now.’
‘Is he in his office or not?’ I asked her.
‘No, I’m afraid-’
‘Just tell us where he is then. It’s urgent.’
‘I’m not sure. I know he was going down to the concentrator first. There’s a power failure, you see, and the telephone-’
‘Who’s in charge here?’
‘Well, nobody really. I think I’m the only one here now. They’re all down at the mine.’
The mine area, when we got down into it, was huge. It was an open-cast mine, a stupendous gravel pit of an area with huge drag cranes shovelling ore into the Euclids and Haulpaks that lumbered like mammoths over the dirt road. We spent an exasperating ten minutes wandering round the massive complex of the concentrator with its electrolytic tanks, driving from one dusty building to another, before we finally ran him to earth at the pit workshop.
He was a tall, rangy Canadian, and he didn’t take it in at first, his mind on other things. ‘Are you trying to tell me there’s been some kind of an uprising?’ That was after I had described what we had seen at police headquarters. Then he turned to Perry. ‘You’re one of the power station engineers. Why the hell didn’t you go down to Anewa and see what the situation was for yourself?’
Even with the power off and the telephone out, I don’t think he would have accepted our version of what had happened if I hadn’t told him about the arms we had trans-shipped off Shortland Island. That finally convinced him. ‘Christ!’ he muttered as he got into the car with us. ‘Bloody politics! We try to keep out of politics, but it’s there all the time, waiting to trip us up.’ By the primary crushing plant I had to pull in to let one of the Haulpaks past. ‘After all we’ve done for them, the work we’ve put into this place. Turn left here.’ We were on to the exit road then, climbing in zigzags up towards the Administration block. ‘Do you think they’ll be there now?’
I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes since we had stopped at the offices. ‘Bound to be.’
‘What do you plan to do?’ Perenna asked him.
‘Talk to them, I suppose. Find out what they want. What the hell else can I do?’ And he added, ‘If it had been trouble with those Highland labourers of ours, I could understand. The Administration has had trouble with them before.’
‘Have you any weapons up here at the mine?’ I asked.
‘Of course not. We run the mine, that’s all. This is PNG territory. They’re shareholders in it, and they look after the Civil Administration. It would happen when Bill is away in Melbourne. I’m just a mining engineer. I’m not interested in politics.’
At the cut-off to the offices I stopped the car, suggesting that he and Perry went in on foot. ‘We’ll wait for you here in case you want to get out in a hurry.’
‘Okay. If we find they’ve occupied the offices, I’ll send Fred back. See if you can get him down to the power station. I’ll be staying here.’ The two of them went off up the road, their figures blending into the shadows. Perenna and I sat there in the darkness waiting. Ahead the tree-covered outline of the pass was a black shadow against the sky. The murmur of the mine was just audible from the dust bowl behind us. There was no other sound.
‘Do you know where the transmitter is?’ I asked. But of course she didn’t. I was thinking about that, certain it must be somewhere up here where the radio mast would be clear of the mountains, when I saw a shadow moving down the road from the offices. I switched on the ignition, the lights showing Perry running towards us.
They had found the offices just as we had left them, the girl still there on her own. No vehicles had driven in from the coast. They had tested the telex, and it was still working.
‘Has he sent a message out?’
‘No.’
‘He doesn’t believe us, is that it?’ I started to get out of the car, but he stopped me.
‘He wants me to go down to Anewa and check on the situation there. He refuses to do anything until he knows for sure, but if I don’t report back by ten tonight, then he’ll send that telex.’ He got in beside me. ‘What do you think has happened to those trucks that were following us?’
‘We’ll soon know.’ I started the engine, then hesitated, wondering whether to go up to the office myself and get Tooley to send to Port Moresby while it was still possible. But what would he tell them? In his shoes I would be reluctant to stick my neck out on the hearsay of a young engineer and two strangers. Nobody likes making a fool of himself, and anyway, perhaps it wasn’t part of the plan to cut off all communication with the outside world. ‘Let’s see where they’ve got to,’ I said, and drove off up the road to the pass.