I drove along the first road I found that led out into the back country and kept driving, going at a steady pace for nearly two hours. The road took me southwest, across the rugged, green lands and then into drier, dusty country. I slowed down and turned off the road as I saw a ranch, the lights still burning in the windows. Dogs started barking as I approached and a floodlight went on to bathe the jeep and myself in a glare of brightness. A rancher and another man, each carrying a shotgun, came out of the house. I saw a woman's figure in the doorway.
"Sorry to bother you," I sang out. "I need a little help." The men lowered the rifles and came over to the jeep.
"Don't mean to be jumpy," the older man said. "But you never know what goes on these days."
I took the branding iron from the seat and gave it to the rancher. The iron had a circle with three points inside it.
"I'm looking to return this but I can't find where it belongs," I said casually.
"The Circle Three," the rancher said. "They're about fifteen miles west of here. They don't rig their cattle to market the way the rest of us do, but I've seen the brand on a few strays. They have a small herd, mostly for their own use, I guess."
"Much obliged," I said.
"This side of the fence," he called to me as I drove off. I knew what he meant and I went about ten miles more when I saw it, six feet high and a foot or more into the ground. Three thousand five hundred miles long, it had been built around Queensland's main sheep country and was designed to protect the major industry from the wild dogs of Australia, the cunning and predatory dingo. Until the "dingo fence" had been built, the wild dogs had taken a frightful toll of the sheep, draining the very lifeblood of the major Australian industry. Made of ware netting, it was high enough to discourage jumping and sunk low enough to discourage digging under. There were still raids and breakthroughs, but it had done remarkably well in keeping the marauding wild dingoes out of the heart of the sheeplands.
I cut off the road and drove south, paralleling the fence, and then I saw the dark shapes of a cluster of ranch buildings — main house, stables, barns, corrals.
I left the jeep and moved forward, coming down on the place along a gentle slope studded with brush. There were no sentries that 1 could see. I moved down to the corral and saw the brand on the rump of the nearest steer, the circle and the three dots inside it. The main house was dark and the place seemed closed down for the night.
I crept to the house, found a side window wide open, and swung myself inside. There was a moon outside and it gave a surprising amount of light through the windows. I made ray way past a living room, a kitchen, the comfortably furnished parlor. A large room, apparently turned into a study from a dining room, stood at the end of the hall at the foot of the stairs. I heard the sounds of snoring from beyond the stairs as I went into the study. A few chairs, a sturdy old desk and a collection of cases containing sea shells and marine objects lined the walls. The cases held a rare and magnificent collection. I spied a rare Melwardi Cowrie, a Marble Cone and two beautiful Cloth-of-Gold Cones. Giant sea-stars and huge bailer shells filled one of the big vases. A red-and-white reef octopus with its banded tentacles occupied another whole case. Sur hells, the little Warty Cowrie and hundreds of others made up the rest of the collection. On one wall I saw the top shell of a giant clam that must have once weighed in at about six hundred pounds. I turned my eyes from the collection to the desk. On top of it, in one corner, a woman's compact lay atop a note.
"Return this to her on next visit to town," the note read as I got enough moonlight on it to make out the scrawled handwriting. I let the compact lay in my hand, almost burning, as I stared at it. What woman did it belong to, I wondered? Someone who lived in town. Was that town Townsville? I hadn't expected this at all. Lynn Delba, with the sudden switch in her attitude? Had she been here, interrogated and let go? Or Judy? Did she know a lot more than she'd let on? Had she been working with them more closely than she'd revealed? Maybe her desire to get to the States was as much motivated by getting away from her friends as anything else. Or was it some woman I'd never met. Somehow, that didn't ring a bell. It was something I felt, not knew.
I was still thinking about it when the room exploded in light and I looked up into the barrel of a carbine and a service thirty-eight. The carbine was held by a tall, slender Chinese whose black eyes looked at me impassively. The thirty-eight belonged to a wiry-built man, sallow-faced with slicked-back hair and glittering, dark eyes.
"We didn't expect visitors," he said. "Rut look who's here. Put down the compact, please."
I did as he'd said. They had me covered very well and now I heard others approaching.
"We never post sentries," the sallow-faced man said. "But every entrance to the main house is wired electronically to a silent alarm. Any touch on the window frame or sill, or anyone opening a door, sets off the silent alarm."
The Chinese spoke up, his voice soft, almost tired.
"I will take the liberty of presuming you are the AXE agent who has been tracking down our contacts and attempting to find an answer to your suspicions," he said. "I suppose Raymond ran afoul of you in Townsville tonight."
"If Raymond is old hawk-nose, then you're right," I answered. "And as we're presuming things, I'll presume you are the one running the show."
The Chinese shook his head and smiled. "A wrong presumption," he said. "I am here only as an observer. Neither Bonard here nor myself are running the show, to use your quaint Americanism. You will never know who is. In fact, you have reached the end of the line, to use another of your American expressions. You have been most diligent in your pursuit, and very difficult to get rid of. Tonight, you were a little too diligent for your own good."
The way he said it told me he was telling the truth about being top man. Besides, he had no reason to lie about it. They had me in their hands. If he were top man, he might even be smugly pleased enough to tell me. He'd said he was an "observer." It didn't take a lot to guess for whom he was observing.
Suddenly the smell of the Chinese Communists had grown very strong. The dead Chinese scuba diver with the money and this impassive, tall Oriental were playing on the same team and engaged in the same effort. It was making more sense in its own way, too. It was no home grown effort, no bunch of zanies out to wreck the alliance, but a careful set of professionals, backed by the Chinese Communists. Perhaps they were more than merely backed. Maybe they were working for them, directly. I had already pretty much figured out how they operated — by buying dissatisfied men. And the ruthlessness that had marked this operation — The Executioner's savage touch — was also typically Chinese.
"Tell me, did you kill Lieutenant Dempster, too?" I asked, stalling for time.
"Ah, the lieutenant," the Chinese said. "An unfortunate problem. We had called him to tell him you would be after him. We told him exactly what to do. Of course, when he ejected you into the outback, we didn't expect you to survive. The lieutenant had been told to crash his plane at sea and a boat would be there to pick him up. Of course, the boat never did pick him up."
"So you were rid of us both," I smiled grimly. "Or you thought you were."
"This time we'll make sure of you," the sallow-faced one snarled. He went into the hallway, and I heard him giving orders to others while the Chinese held the carbine on me. He returned with two men — heavy-set hired killers by the look of them. They searched me, found Wilhelmina, and emptied the gun. They put the empty gun back in my pocket. They were professionals — they found Hugo too and, yanking my sleeve up, took the thin blade from its sheath. The one called Bonard grinned — a nasty, evil grin.