“I got one,” someone yelled. Luckman finally lost his hold on the building and began to plummet toward the ground.
He was awoken by the surge of adrenalin that accompanied the rising fear of impact. He opened his eyes just as the people on the ground were close enough to touch.
Mel had joined the chorus of his nightmare.
He rolled over slowly and heard something crumpling under the weight of his body. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.
Her note. He unfolded the paper and read it again.
The answer you seek is highward firestone
It still meant nothing.
He heard a delicate tap on the door. It opened slowly and Pat popped his head into the room. “I heard you calling out. You OK?”
“Bad dream.” He showed Pat the note. “Does this mean anything to you?”
“Firestone. Father Clarence said that’s the old name for white gold.”
“The old name?”
“He said it’s what the ancient Sumerians called it.”
Gold. Was that the link? “The police post-mortem report said Father Paulson was consuming this white gold of yours. Any idea why he’d do that?”
Pat reacted with alarm. “No.”
“I’m guessing no-one else in Alice Springs sprinkles gold dust on their Weet-Bix. This has to be why Paulson thought he was immune to the Sunburst.”
“But it didn’t work,” Pat reminded him. “Clarence still lost his memory.”
“Yes but he later regained it, didn’t he?” said Luckman. “What if the gold isn’t a preventative medicine – what if it’s a cure?”
Pat smiled in understanding and ran to the study. He returned moments later with a white vial that glowed like it contained a sliver of sunlight.
Luckman held the vial close as he sat down beside Mel on the lounge. Pat sat next to her on the other side. Warrington maintained a safe distance, steeling herself to act if something went terribly wrong. Luckman removed the stopper from the vial, covered the mouth of the tube with his finger and tipped it upside down, coating the tip of his finger in a small glowing disc of white. He slowly brought his finger to Mel’s lips.
“Open wide,” he cajoled, poking out his own tongue as an example.
She did as he asked.
“For God’s sake no sudden movements,” he urged the others. “I don’t wanna lose a digit.”
He rubbed the gold across the surface of her tongue. She appeared to enjoy the sensation. Job done, he extracted his finger quickly.
Mel gasped urgently for air as if in surprise, then poked out her tongue.
“I think she wants more,” said Warrington.
Mel nodded, eyes alert now. She had understood.
“More,” she insisted.
It was the first intelligible word she had spoken since losing her memory.
Luckman and Pat stared at each other in amazement.
“So give her some more,” Pat urged.
They heard a heavy vehicle coming to a halt outside the house. Truck doors slammed as boots hit the ground.
There was a knock on the front door. Luckman stoppered the vial of white gold and handed it to Pat.
“You better make yourself scarce,” Luckman told him.
He opened the front door to find Major Brogan flanked by four soldiers, two of them with weapons in hand ready to fire.
Luckman’s heart sank. “What’s going on Major?”
“Captain Luckman, you’re under arrest. Restrain him,” Brogan told his soldiers. One of them flipped Luckman roughly against the interior wall of the front landing and bound his wrists behind his back.
Luckman heard Mel scream in fear and two more soldiers appeared from inside the house as they marched a struggling Warrington toward the front door. One of them purposefully grabbed her broken arm and she cried out in pain.
“Both of you under the one roof. That wasn’t very smart, was it?” Brogan hissed in Luckman’s ear.
“You need to call General Neil Shearer. He’ll sort this out,” Luckman told him.
“I doubt that,” said Brogan. “Shearer was arrested half an hour ago.”
Fifty-One
Luckman had lost track of whether it was day or night. His interrogators had asked the same questions so many times they were like a mantra. They had begun to mix up the order, presumably in the hope of catching him out. His answers had remained the same. He didn’t need to worry about being caught out because he had been telling them the truth, albeit with one slight historical adjustment. This in itself was not a lie, merely a reassessment. The readjustment had become his truth so that in this regard his answers had been as unwavering as the disbelief with which they had been greeted.
“There had been no communication with anyone on the ground at Pine Gap since the Sunburst. I had been tasked with destroying the base in order to save the town. A town of some 25,000 people, all living and breathing – all of them in full charge of their mental faculties. Upon determining the base was deserted I carried out the order to destroy the base because I was concerned for the welfare of the people in the town.”
Colonel Pat Maygar thumped the table so hard it made Luckman jump. He was dressed simply and elegantly in a white shirt and grey checked trousers. A man who still valued fashion as the world crumbled around him was not to be trusted. He was the third and the highest ranking of Luckman’s interrogators, most likely the man left in charge of Army Intelligence since Shearer’s sudden fall from grace.
Maygar’s voice was calm when he finally spoke. “You couldn’t have known of the existence of survivors before you landed. They were not the reason you destroyed the base.”
Luckman lifted his head slowly and stared back at his accuser with the untrammelled conviction of a man who knew he had done the right thing.
“Now you listen to me Colonel – those people were the only reason I destroyed the base. The Chinese were about to do it any day if I hadn’t beat them to it.”
“What nonsense,” countered Maygar.
“I’m not making it up. That was General Shearer’s assessment, based on all the intelligence at his disposal.”
“I’ve seen the intelligence. Shearer was guessing. Hasn’t it penetrated that thick skull of yours yet that standing by Neil Shearer won’t do you any good? He and Warrington have hung you out to dry. They say blowing up the base was all your idea.”
“Of course they do. That was their plan all along – to make me the sacrificial lamb. Answer me this – where’s the evidence I stole Shearer’s plane? Brigadier Martin hates my guts. He’d have wasted no time alerting Canberra if he thought I’d gone rogue. But he didn’t do that, did he?”
“So tell me again because I really want to know – how did you save the people of Alice Springs by destroying Pine Gap?”
“Are you really going to sit there and deny that China has been regarding this continent with envious eyes? That whole town had a big target painted on it because of that base.”
Maygar didn’t trouble himself with responding. He merely changed tack completely. “Why were you and Warrington holed up in the home of the murdered priest?”
“I’d been investigating his murder. It was linked to what went down near the base with the Alternates.”
“These are the people I understand you also refer to as ‘the Others’. You claim they killed Clarence Paulson.”
Luckman nodded slowly. He knew where this line of questioning ended up. Maygar shifted in his seat and regathered the papers that had scattered across the table in his earlier rage. He spoke calmly and quietly. “Captain, do you have any notion of how ludicrous that sounds?”
“You have the video.”