The young herdsman touched his hat: ‘Don’t see a lot of movies round here. You flown one of these before?’
Varese nodded. ‘Mother’s milk.’
‘Keep your eye on me when we’re in the air,’ Jim Jackson said, ‘and we’ll work it together. I try to anticipate where the cows might play up and give us trouble. You get to know what sort of move will be able to turn them. To guide them, you’ve got to get right down, almost to ground level. If your engine fails, you don’t have any time to react.”’
Varese nodded sagely. ‘You can’t autorotate out of trouble at that height.’
The two little helis took off and headed west. They had been in the air about ten minutes when they saw the first herd of cattle.
Through the headphones, Varese heard Jim Jackson’s voice: ‘There are about 500 in that herd. We’re looking to bring in about a thousand this morning. So we’ll fly past this bunch, round up another herd, bring it back here, and drive ’em both in.’
A minute or two later, they saw another large group of cows. As the helis dropped to tree level, the cattle began to stampede.
‘Get out behind them and turn them back,’ Jackson instructed. ‘I’ll hover here and stop them breaking south. Then we’ll drive them all back together.’
Jack Varese got the hang of it quickly. Sometimes he flew so low that he could actually touch the backs of the cows with the helicopters skis, forcing them to turn.
‘Watch out for the trees,’ Jackson shouted into the RT at one point, as Varese manoeuvred through the bush.
They brought about a thousand head of cattle back to Lazy-T that morning.
While the herd was still five miles from the station, Mickey Selkirk drove Ed Barnard and Melanie in the Land Cruiser out to meet them. Rosie Craig rode one of the station’s horses.
The two little red helis kicked up a cloud of dust as they landed beside the parked vehicle.
Selkirk, ever the gracious host, had brought a large flask of tea. ‘You guys must be thirsty.’
Jack Varese looked at Rosie Craig, holding her horse by the bridle, her face glowing. ‘Don’t you just look the part?’
After lunch, Selkirk took them off to the Bungle-Bungles. ‘Just wanted to show Jack I can fly a helicopter too.’
Of course, Mickey Selkirk was joking, but he was making a point as well. He wasn’t going to be out-flown by any young whipper-snapper.
It was short hop from Lazy-T to the Bungle-Bungles.
Selkirk flew the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger over the famous beehive domes in a figure of eight pattern. As the helicopter banked, Edward Barnard found himself staring into a series of steep-sided abysses, criss-crossing the mountain range, running for miles through the rock. He could even see tall, palm trees which seemed to sprout from the canyon floor.
Later they trekked though one of the canyons. Taking a break in the shade of a huge overhanging rock, Selkirk gave them a little lecture.
‘This is one of the finest rock art sites in the area.’ He pointed to the rock face. ‘The people who lived here were some of the world’s earliest inhabitants. The paintings here could be over 20,000 years old. See this figure here? That’s an echidna, a kind of anteater. The aboriginal people believe the hills were formed back in the dreamtime, when an echidna was attacked by a “galah”, that’s a large white and rather noisy bird. The echidna fights for his life. As he digs to escape, that’s how the beehives and gorges were formed.’
Listening to Selkirk talk, Barnard felt a surge of admiration. People were too ready to scoff at the man, he thought. Were they just envious of his success? What was it that drove him? Some elemental form of patriotism, perhaps. An urge to show that Australians too could rule the world.
They flew over Lake Argyle on the way back. Mickey Selkirk gave them a running commentary. ‘This is the largest lake in Western Australia. They dammed the Orde River back in the 1970s. Now the Chinese are here in a big way. They’ve bought twenty-thousand hectares of irrigated land, as well as the old Kununurra sugar mill. A Chinese company has taken over KAI, Kimberley Agricultural Investments. There’s a whole Chinese community up here now.’
Selkirk banked to the left. ‘Time to head back. I’ll get Ching to rustle up some tea.’
Later, back in the staff quarters of the Lazy-T homestead, Ching Ze-Gong heard snatches of Australia’s most famous song.
What fools they all were, he thought. Didn’t they know that the world had moved on? Who cared about billabongs? What the hell was a billabong anyway?
Thank God, thought Ching, the time was getting closer when Fung and he could return to the land of their ancestors, and to their beloved Wuxi, the prettiest of all China’s ancient cities. They had saved a lot of money working for Selkirk. And they had had a useful additional source of income. For the last ten years, he and Fung had served as undercover agents of the Chinese secret service. As Chinese investment in Northern and Western Australia increased, so did China’s network of agents. Hu Wong-Fu, the owner of Kununurra’s most popular restaurant, Kimberley Asian Cuisine, was his immediate superior.
That very afternoon Hu Wong-Fu had sent him a text with short and simple message. ‘Do it tonight!’
Li Xiao-Tong, sitting in his office in the Ministry of State Security, Beijing, reviewed the report he had received an hour earlier. Thank God for the Chinese Diaspora, he thought. There seemed to be almost as many Chinese living outside China as inside, and many of those were fiercely loyal to the motherland. Take Ching and Fung, for example. They had never actually lived in China but they still regarded Wuxi as their ancestral home and planned to return one day. What a splendid idea MSS Agent Hu, owner of Kununurra’s Kimberley Asian Cuisine restaurant, had had when he proposed recruiting Mickey Selkirk’s two live-in staff as part of the MSS network of secret agents in Western Australia.
You could hardly suspect Ching and Fung of being spies just because they innocently popped into town for a Chinese meal on their day off.
What a good job they had just done! He clicked on the recording which accompanied the email and heard Mickey Selkirk’s unmistakably Australian accent: ‘So you don’t need to tell me why you’re here. But let me say one thing. I want to be perfectly clear about this. I can’t be bought, but I can possibly be persuaded. So let’s look at a deal that’s good for both sides.’
If that’s wasn’t a smoking gun, Li didn’t know what a smoking gun was.
Good work, Ching, he thought, picking up that whole conversation. Advances in technology made eavesdropping so much easier nowadays. If you were waiting at table, for example, you could just carry your phone around in your pocket with the record button pressed. Or you could hide the phone in some convenient nearby vessel and leave it there for the duration.
He clicked on the photos Ching had sent. How good Rosie looked on a horse, Li thought. Pity Fung hadn’t managed to snap a few pics of Rosie in bed with Jack. They’d be worth a bob or two on the black market. You missed a trick there, Ching, he thought.
Or maybe Ching had other plans for this kind of hot stuff. There were plenty of takers out there, he knew. Photos of Jack Varese and Rosie Craig in bed, even if they were just drinking a cup of tea and reading the Sunday papers, would go viral in seconds.
Li made a mental note to ask Agent Fu to have a quiet word with Ching. If he was selling secrets on the side, somebody should be getting a cut.
MSS held the whip-hand there, he reckoned, as far as Ching and Fung were concerned. That little house in Wuxi, reserved for them as long as they kept the reports flowing, might suddenly disappear off the list of homes available for loyal cadre if it came to it.