Another bad idea. The Jet Ranger Corey was flying developed turbine trouble halfway to the rock and during the emergency Corey held a quick conversation with Spike about procedures if they crash landed, which they did. One of the Rotarians broke a hand and the other three were a little bruised and scratched up, though it would have been much worse if not for Corey’s expert handling of the situation. Unfortunately the injured Rotarians linked his conversation with the dog to the accident, even though shoddy maintenance work performed by one tub-o-lard Harry Kelsy was to blame.
Disaster didn’t strike until the Rotarians arrived back in Illinois. Instead of thanking his lucky stars it hadn’t been worse, the Rotarian with the broken hand tapped out a stern letter about the ‘crazy dog guy’ pilot and sent it to the travel agent who had booked their outback tour. It probably would have ended there except the travel agent was the largest operator in the Midwest and its CEO was a dyed-in-the-wool Rotarian.
Subsequently, Les Whittle and the other flight contractors were warned to keep ‘that crazy dog guy’ away from tourists in the future or they wouldn’t be hired again. The operators readily complied as they couldn’t afford to alienate the Americans who sent them over half their business.
So, just like that, Corey’s career flying tourists was done and dusted. Since then he’s had to scrounge for work wherever he could find it. At the moment that meant occasionally mustering livestock or moving hay bales for Clem Alpine on his cattle station, and he only had that job because no one else wanted to work for the cranky old coot.
Corey knows he could have made his life easier if he had lied when first asked about Spike. He could have kept quiet and hid it from view. The problem with that is that he didn’t like to lie, so on the rare occasion when he did it didn’t come naturally. He could never keep track of who he’d told what to and was inevitably caught out.
Spike barks.
Corey drags his eyes from the burning horizon and looks at the dog. ‘I know, mate. Apology accepted.’
The dog barks again.
‘Yeah, let’s go home.’ Corey works the controls and the Loach’s turbine screams to life. With a blast of red dust the little chopper rises off the desert and thumps towards that blazing horizon.
Corey glances at the dog. He’d lost his friends and his job and had been an outcast for three years because of this animal and yet he would never think of getting rid of him, the irony being that Spike was now the only one he could talk to who didn’t think he was crazy.
4
Henri is flying by ear. Before departure Kelvin had disconnected a series of circuits so the Galaxy would be invisible to commercial and military air-traffic controllers and couldn’t be tracked. Unfortunately that also means the jet is invisible to other aircraft. So, as it’s the middle of the night and pitch black outside, the Frenchman listens for the Galaxy’s Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System alarm.
The TACAS is set to its maximum range of 50 kilometres but even that will give Henri little time to react if the alarm sounds. The combined closing speed between the Galaxy and another jet will be approximately 1800 kilometres an hour and he’ll have less than a minute to disengage the autopilot and change course.
To minimise the chance of a midair collision the Galaxy is on a track 3000 feet higher than the regular commuter corridors. It’s not the commercial airliners that concern Henri, though. It’s the rich guys in their Lears and Grummans, flying their own routes. Slamming into Greg Norman’s G-V or John Travolta’s 707 as they tool around the Pacific is not how Henri wants this night to end. So he waits and listens for the alarm.
The Frenchman has the flight deck to himself as the others catch some shut-eye in the troop compartment behind him. They deserve the rest as they’ve had a busy few days. The Galaxy’s fifty-five-minute hop from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base across the border to Mexico was uneventful. With Davis-Monthan out of action and the Galaxy out of US airspace within forty minutes, the authorities had scant time to locate the jet, let alone attempt a shoot-down. Henri was happy to confirm that over a decade after 9/11, America’s air defences were as thin and porous as they’d ever been.
It was just past one a.m. when the Galaxy touched down in a remote area north-east of Nuevo Casas Grandes, the Sierra Madre Occidental looming to the west. The dusty, makeshift runway had been prepped perfectly and Kelvin parked the Galaxy near the fuel tankers Dirk and Nico had brought with them. For its next trip the big jet would be filled to the brim. As the Galaxy was juiced up Henri’s crew covered it with three enormous beige tarpaulins, camouflaging the shape of the aircraft to match the arid landscape as a precaution against a spy satellite identifying it from above. Fuelling the aircraft took almost three times as long as the flight from Davis-Monthan, but by sun-up it was done.
Henri then connected his MacBook to the internet via a satellite phone. If he’d been surprised by the non-existent air defences in the American south-west and the ease of their escape, he was stunned by the lack of media interest in the Galaxy’s theft. The story barely registered, and was greeted with an almost universal shrug of indifference. That the aircraft could be used as an instrument of mass destruction was raised on a handful of news websites, but it seemed to Henri that America had become complacent about the threat of another terrorist attack in the decade since 9/11. It didn’t help that the air force, to save their blushes, played down the explosion at Davis-Monthan, describing it as a fuel truck that had caught fire then exploded during the theft. In the name of base security all photography of the site was banned.
The story may have gained greater traction in the news cycle if Lady Gaga hadn’t crashed her Mercedes AMG into Rihanna’s Aston Martin while leaving the Viper Room that morning. Cameraphone footage of the fender bender dominated news websites. In comparison, the Galaxy’s theft just didn’t cut it. There were no photographs or videos of the plane being taken, or of the damage at Davis-Monthan. Without images, the story became just another military screw-up in a long line of screw-ups that would be investigated in due course by the relevant authorities. That was just how Henri wanted it.
After sundown they removed the tarpaulins and the Galaxy took wing with enough avgas in its tanks for the sixteen-hour journey across the Pacific. Now, through the windscreen, Henri sees flecks of light on the horizon that tell him the journey is drawing to an end. It’s the first time he’s visited this country. He’d always planned to take a holiday here with his wife, but, inevitably, something prevented it. Then she was murdered.
He speaks into his headset’s microphone. ‘Okay, everybody up. We’re here.’
Brisbane International Airport Security Officer Owen Solness has lost his keys. And they’re not just any keys, they’re the keys to the airport. He has no idea where he left them. He thought he may have locked them in his Hyundai, but no, they’re not there.
He retraces his steps from the car, every scrap of rubbish in the car park giving him hope they are about to be found, but, ultimately, no joy. At least he has plenty of opportunity to look for them. At this time of night Brisbane International Airport is a ghost town.
It’s the second thing that’s gone wrong tonight. Half an hour earlier his mobile phone battery up and died on him. That’s no great disaster. There’s only one person who’d be calling him. Deirdre. Wanting to chat. Recently his fiancée’s calls have ended with a verbal prod for him to work on his application to the Federal Police detective training program whenever he has a spare moment. It needs to be lodged in two weeks. She’s right, of course, he should work on it, but the application worries him. He’s better than he appears on paper but he doesn’t know how to show it. The training program is highly selective so he needs to find a point of difference, something that will really make him stand out. He just doesn’t know what it is.