She saw a tongue of flame flickering up the side of the building. The firefighters responded immediately: suddenly the water came out in a strong white jet and they lashed the walls. In less than a minute the flames were beaten back to smoke.
Then they reduced the flow to a gentle trickle once more and turned back to their patient work down in the basement.
‘Is there somewhere safe where I can go?’ said Bel.
Wanasri took her to the fire truck and opened a hatch in its metal side. She brought out the spare fire jacket and put it around Bel’s shoulders, then went back and fetched a bottle of water.
‘Wait here and you can ride back to the station with us,’ she said. ‘But it looks as though we’ll be here for hours yet.’
Bel felt the weight of the jacket and slipped her arms into the sleeves. She wanted to say thanks, but tears of relief welled up in her throat instead. She nodded and sat down against the chrome bumper of the engine. Wanasri hurried back to rejoin her colleagues.
Engine 33’s crew were working on the cinema as a break from active firefighting. The teams could only work in flames and smoke for so long, so they had been sent to work at a low-risk site — a job that was actually no less harrowing than fighting fires. They were recovering badly burned bodies.
Petra, Andy and Darren were gently hosing the bodies down to cool them off — stopping them from burning and deteriorating further, which would make identification impossible. Wanasri’s job was to prevent the public seeing the bodies.
They decided they needed to move a section of debris and Wanasri went back to the engine to fetch some lifting equipment.
The woman she had left sitting against the fender was on her feet.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asked Wanasri.
Bel fastened the jacket briskly. ‘I feel fine now, so I’ll be off,’ she said. ‘There are some trucks down at the end of that road — I’ll go down there and hitch a ride. It’s better than sitting here for hours — I’ll get in your way, and anyhow, I’ll go mad if I just sit here. Thanks again for your help.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Wanasri.
But Bel was already marching away, her arms swinging determinedly.
Chapter Eighteen
While Ben flew, Kelly pored over the map. She had taken a reading off the GPS — the global positioning system — and was lining it up with the grid reference on the map. Her big paw-bandages traced the grid lines.
While trying to get rid of the spider, neither of them had noticed the plane’s bearing. They had gone way off course.
When she found the reference, she wasn’t exactly pleased. ‘We are literally in the middle of nowhere,’ she said. ‘This place is just empty. It just says “Great Victoria Desert” on the map and there’s nothing else at all. No roads, no water features, nothing.’
Ben had done a bit of orienteering. ‘What about lining up on contour lines?’
Kelly waved a white fist in the direction of the window. ‘Do you see any hills? There are no hills so there are no contour lines. We are in the middle of a big empty space.’
‘Could be why they call it the outback,’ said Ben. ‘But we don’t need the map, do we? We’ve got the GPS.’
‘The GPS could go wrong or it could run out of battery power. You should always use a map too. I really don’t like it when I can’t see where I am on paper.’
Ben got the feeling that the real reason she was fretting so much was that she was worried about her father.
‘I’m trying to find the Ghan track,’ said Kelly after a while.
‘But the police stopped the Ghan. They weren’t on board.’
‘My dad wouldn’t make a mistake,’ said Kelly. ‘The kidnappers must have taken them off the train before the police searched it.’
‘If they were ever on it in the first place.’
Kelly sat in silence for a few moments. ‘They had to be,’ she said at last. ‘Otherwise they’d still be back in Adelaide. And the doctor at Coober Pedy told me that Adelaide’s on fire.’
‘What do you mean, Adelaide’s on fire?’
‘The whole town,’ said Kelly. ‘They think it spread down from the vineyards.’
‘The vineyards?’ repeated Ben. ‘But that was hours ago! It can’t still be burning. Why didn’t you tell me before? What if my mum’s still there?’
Kelly glared at him. ‘Listen, don’t start getting snippy with me. All I know is that it’s a big emergency. And there’s nobody there because the army is evacuating the place. Just chill.’
Ben seethed. He had just as much right to worry about his mum as she had to worry about her father. But he decided to keep his feelings to himself. Another argument wouldn’t help them.
‘We need to follow the track back to Adelaide,’ he said. ‘Maybe if they were taken off we’ll see some sign.’
‘They’re a couple of tiny needles in one mother of a big haystack …’ mused Kelly, looking down.
Certainly the terrain below was bleak — mile upon mile of featureless red earth like the surface of Mars. At least it should be straightforward to fly over, with no thermals from hills and valleys. All the same, Ben would have been glad to see a hill. All this Martian flatness was a bit unsettling. Nothing changed. It was as if they were hanging stationary in mid air.
Kelly looked at the instruments and tutted. ‘You’re taking us in the wrong direction. Turn in a big circle.’
Ben eased the stick over.
Kelly gave a weary sigh and looked down at the map again. ‘We’re never going to get back to Adelaide if you let us drift off course like this.’
Ben wasn’t finding turning as easy as he’d expected. The rudder didn’t want to work — yet the microlight was normally so responsive. Now it was like trying to steer a supermarket trolley.
‘Kelly,’ he said, ‘try your left rudder.’
He felt her press the pedal. That did nothing either.
‘It’s the wind,’ she said. ‘We’re in a really strong gale. More throttle!’
Ben increased the throttle. The engine noise grew higher and faster and he expected the airspeed indicator to climb quite quickly, but it hardly moved. ‘Nose down?’ he asked Kelly.
She nodded. ‘Absolutely.’
Ben eased the nose down, hoping a shallow dive would give them extra speed. The red dusty landscape filled his windscreen. Normally, if you were flying in a strong wind you could see its effects, but because there were no trees everything looked eerily still. The only sign was the red horizon blurring into the cobalt sky, as though it was being brushed vigorously.
Ben’s manoeuvre worked and the craft picked up a little speed. But as soon as he eased off the throttle or let the nose level out, they slowed right down, almost to stall speed.
‘That is some strong wind,’ said Kelly. ‘We are going to burn up a lot of fuel—’
Her words ended in a scream that made Ben jump in his seat.
‘Arghh! Get it off me!’ She looked down at her flying suit and scrubbed at her legs with her bandage-mittened hands. ‘Get it off!’ She jerked her leg like Ben had when he was trying to get rid of the spider.
Ben pointed the nose down into another shallow dive. The plane would keep that course on its own for a few seconds while he tried to help Kelly. She was wriggling frantically, jerking both legs up and down. But as far as Ben could see, there was nothing on her.
‘Kelly, I can’t see it — what is it? Another spider?’ She rubbed her hands furiously along her legs, as if trying to brush something away. ‘Get it off! Get it off me!’ She was becoming hysterical.
Ben still couldn’t see anything. He looked up and down her legs and in the foot well, expecting another set of spidery legs or some other creepy crawly. He remembered the leaflet he’d read in the hotel, which listed a whole army of deadly nasties. What else had got in with that spider? Had it bitten her?