At about 4 am we picked Lee up and retreated to our hide-out, which was a tourist cabin on the Fleets’ property; a little place that they rented to people from the city. It was quite isolated and unobtrusive, so we figured it was safe. Fi volunteered to be first sentry; the rest of us fell gratefully into the beds and slept and slept.
It was midafternoon before we had the energy to talk tactics. It was obvious that Homer had spent a good bit of time thinking about the bridge, because he went straight to the point.
‘Let’s blow it up,’ he said, his eyes shining.
The last time I’d seen his eyes shine like that was at school, when he told me he’d taken all the screws out of the Principal’s lectern in the Assembly Hall. If blowing up the bridge was going to be as big a disaster as that day turned out to be, I didn’t want to be a part of it.
‘OK,’ I said, humouring him. ‘How are we going to do that?’
With his eyes going to high beam, he told us.
‘What Ellie did with the ride-on mower gave me the idea,’ he said. ‘Petrol’s our easiest and best way of making explosions. So I tried to think of how we could repeat what Ellie did, but on a bigger scale. And of course the biggest version of a ride-on mower is a petrol tanker. What we’ve got to do is get a petrol tanker, park it under the bridge, on the scenic drive, then blow it up. Should be quite a bang.’
There was a deadly silence. I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but couldn’t get enough breath to do it. For a start, I knew who’d be driving the petrol tanker.
‘Where would we get the tanker?’ Fi asked.
‘Curr’s.’
Curr’s was the local distributor for Blue Star petrol They came round to our place once a month to fill our tank It was a big business and he had quite a fleet of tankers. That part was certainly possible. In fact it might be the easiest part of the whole insane scheme.
Homer was asking me something, interrupting my thoughts.
‘What?’
‘I was asking, can you drive an articulated vehicle?’
‘Well, I guess. I think it’d be the same as driving the truck at home when we’ve got the trailer on. The question is, how the hell am I going to drive it under a bridge, get out and blow it up while the soldiers on the bridge just watch, wave and take photographs?’
‘No problems.’
‘No problems?’
‘None.’
‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘Now that’s settled I’ll just relax.’
‘Listen,’ said Homer, ‘while you guys were walking towards Wirrawee last night with your eyes shut, I was noticing a few things. For example, what’s around the corner from the bridge, going towards Cobbler’s Bay?’
Homer was fast becoming like the teachers he’d always despised.
‘I don’t know sir, you tell us,’ I said helpfully.
‘Kristicevics’ place,’ said Fi, a little more helpfully.
‘And on the other side?’
‘Just paddocks,’ said Fi. We were all looking at Homer, waiting for him to pull the rabbit out of the hat.
‘Not just paddocks,’ said Homer, offended. ‘That’s the trouble with you townies. One of the most famous studs in the district, and you call it “just paddocks”.’
‘Mmm,’ I said, remembering. ‘That’s Roxburghs’ place. Gowan Brae Poll Hereford Stud.’
‘Yes,’ said Homer, emphatically. I was still struggling to make connections.
‘So what do we do? Train the cattle to tow the tanker into position? Or use methane for the explosion? If we find a cow that’s been dead long enough to bloat, we can put a hole in his side and light the gas. I’ve seen that done.’
‘Listen,’ Homer said. ‘I’ll tell you what I noticed. That paddock right on the highway, Mr Roxburgh’s got a lot of cattle in there, all in good nick too. It’s heavily stocked, but it’s a good paddock and it can take it. Now suppose you’re a young soldier in a foreign country and you’re guarding a long narrow bridge and it’s late at night and you’re struggling to stay awake and alert. And suddenly you hear a noise and you turn around and there’s a hundred or so prime head of Hereford charging towards you, flat chat. About fifty tonnes of beef travelling at 60 or 70 k’s, looming out of the darkness straight at you. What do you do?’
‘You run,’ said Lee promptly.
‘No you don’t,’ Homer said.
‘No you don’t,’ I agreed, thoughtfully. ‘There’s too many of them, and they’re coming too fast for that.’
‘So what do you do?’ Homer asked again.
‘You run to the sides. And then you probably climb up the sides. Which happens to be pretty easy on that old wooden thing.’
‘And which way do you look?’ Homer asked.
‘At the cattle,’ I said, more slowly still.
‘Exactly,’ Homer said. ‘I rest my case.’ He sat back and folded his arms.
We gazed at him, three people thinking three different collections of thoughts.
‘How do you make the cattle do what you want?’ Fi asked.
‘How do you get away afterwards?’ Lee asked. ‘I can’t run far on this.’ He gestured at his bandaged leg.
I didn’t have any questions. I knew the details could be worked out. It was a high risk plan, but it was a brilliant one.
Homer answered Lee’s question first though ‘Motorbikes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking for some time that if we wanted to be effective guerillas we’d get ourselves ag bikes and use cross-country travel instead of roads. We could become very mobile and very slippery. Now, I’ll get the cattle going by using my superior mustering skills to get them into the road. I’ve mustered before at night. It works well – in fact it’s better in some ways. They’re not so suspicious then. If it’s a bright enough night, which it should be, you don’t even use lights, cos it stirs them up too much. So I’ll get them out and then Lee and I’ll fire them up, if Lee’s fit enough. We can use an electric prod, for example, and maybe an aerosol can and a box of matches. I got into so much trouble for making a flamethrower from them at school, but I knew it would come in handy one day. A blast of that on their backsides and they’ll keep running till dawn. Once we’ve got them blitzing down the road we’ll fade off into the darkness to the motorbikes and make our getaway.’
He turned to Fi and me. ‘I always seem to get out of things with the least dangerous jobs,’ he apologised. ‘But it has to be this way, I think. Ellie’s our best driver, so we need her for the tanker. And Lee’s too lame to run, which is hopeless for the passenger, because they’ll both have to be quick on their feet. And I’m the one who’s had the most experience with cattle.’
Homer was being modest. He was a natural with stock. But he was still talking, ‘So, that’s how it seems to work out. What I thought was, if you steal a tanker and bring it down to the bridge by slow degrees, with Fi walking to each corner, checking the coast is clear, then signalling you on. You hide it round that corner near the bowling greens, nice and close to the bridge. We’ll wait for a convoy to go through, which seems to get the soldiers up to the right end of the bridge, and also gives us a good chance of a clear interval before the next convoy. Then we’ll move the cattle out into the road and stampede them. As the cattle hit the bridge at one end you bring the tanker down under it at the other – you might even be able to coast down with the engine off. There’s a good slope there. Jump out, run a trail of petrol away to a safe distance – one of you do it, so if she gets any on her clothes she can get clear before the other one lights it. Then light it and go like stink to a couple of motorbikes that we’ll hide around the next corner. And you’re out of there. How’s that? Simple, eh? Just call me Genius.’
We talked and talked for hours, trying to find the flaws, trying to improve the arrangements. There were endless ways it could go wrong of course. The cattle mightn’t move, another vehicle might come along the road at the wrong moment, the tankers might be guarded or empty – they mightn’t even be there. I thought the most dangerous part might be when Fi and I were getting from the tanker to the motorbikes. We’d be quite exposed then, for thirty seconds or so. If the sentries saw us we’d be in real trouble. But Homer was confident that they’d be occupied by the cattle.