Bill grinned. “He just had to shut up and let me do the talking. It was the hardest thing he’s ever done, but it was the only way we could find out what they were up to.”
“I don’t understand. You mean there is no huia?”
Stan started laughing again, but at a look from his companion he stopped.
“Kevin’s one of them,” said Bill quietly.
This time Stan spoke. He seemed to have heeded Bill’s words for his voice was calmer. “Do you remember Stephen Deveney?”
“You mean the American military scientist who resigned during the Vietnam War?” said Tane. “I really admired that man.”
“He’s the chief scientist at the Hollow Mountain.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“The US Government were about to present him with a Congressional medal for his development of selectively targeted electronic strikes. But he resigned because they were being used to target and kill the Viet Cong in a very cruel way. Now he works for the Brotherhood and he’s devised a way to disable the power stations throughout New Zealand. They’ve got sleepers throughout the country to hack in to the key stations. They’re going to start at Rotorua. It’s not only the closest, but happens to have more Maori than other cities. Once the station is sabotaged the sleepers in the Cabinet and across the House will stage a coup by promising to restore power. If it doesn’t work with one, they’ll start on the others.”
“But isn’t Stephen a pacifist?” Kate asked. “How could he possibly work for a racist group like The Brotherhood?”
“He thinks he’s discovered a non-violent way of waging war. Otherwise he doesn’t know what’s really going on.” He glanced at Tane. “You see, he’s only a scientist.”
It was a cruel comment and she deflected it. “But I still don’t see. If it’s just the disabling of the power system, why must ten thousand people die?”
“Because the Chairman doesn’t think it will be enough and he’s changed the plan.”
“So he has a nuclear weapon?” said David.
Stan shook his head. “The process was impossible. They’re exporting the uranium secretly – underneath the cargoes of granite.”
It all fitted in, David thought. The loading by night without lights. The sound of railway wagons.
“They’re trading it for a weapon that’s far more effective for their purpose, something that doesn’t involve property damage.”
There was an eerie silence. The cicadas seemed to have stopped singing. The birds no longer sang or chirped or fluttered around them. Even the river paused in its gentle shrilling.
The voice continued, so detached now that it seemed hardly a part of its owner. “In the Hollow Mountain there are secretly stored the germs of a plague, a disease normally picked up in handling animals, which is fatal, and for which there is no known cure. It’s in the form of a white powder that’s dropped in canisters from a plane, and when it hits the ground the canister bursts and spreads as a cloud. The worst thing is that people don’t realise they’ve got the disease. They think it’s something like flu, and when it seems to turn to pneumonia, it’s too late.”
“What’s its name?” asked Kate.
“Anthrax.”
His listeners gasped involuntarily.
“Surely no one would ever use it,” Kate asked, but her voice faltered.
There was no reply.
“When will it happen?” asked David.
“After a twenty-four-hour warning to the members of The Brotherhood in Rotorua so that they can evacuate.”
“How will the warning be given?”
“By the sabotage of the Rotorua power station.”
“But when?”
“It may already have happened.”
Numbly Tane glimpsed the tragedy which was engulfing Stephen Deveney. “Surely a man like that would never agree with… genocide? He can’t be that naïve. He must have noticed.”
“He only knows half the story. He trusts his leader absolutely. In fact he studies the Bible with him. He thinks Dr Hawthorne is a Christian hero, the pioneer of non-violent war.”
“But who would trust such a man?”
“Didn’t you?”
Stan looked directly at him and this time those relentlessly piercing eyes told him that everything about his own past was known.
He buried his face in his hands.
Blind! Blind!
When Stan had finished his story, he was conscious of a dull ache throughout his body and of sharper pain in his hands and arms where the bandages covered the rock and rope abrasions. But it wasn’t only the physical pain that racked him. When he had hung over the falls and looked into the face of death, his whole life had flashed before him. He saw how stubborn he had been in pursuing his own ambitions. The valley that he sought was not forgotten at all. His search for it had been nothing but an ego trip, a senseless chasing after a figment of his own imagination.
Not only this. His anger at having his ambition thwarted had led him and Bill into the Waitoa, into captivity, then to a hopeless escape and almost to a terrible death. He saw that he was up against strange and frightening forces, where his once prized physical and mental energy was as effective as a pin against the hide of a rhinoceros.
The fair-headed young lecturer to whom he had once been so rude was looking towards him. “Thank you for trying.”
But he who had tramped the ranges for nearly thirty years could strive no longer. His head was shrunk into his shoulders, his body bowed. He felt old and tired. Before him he saw the futility of all he had been passionate about.
“I’ve been a bloody fool.”
Kate was already racing towards the helicopter. “We’ve got to get out and tell people, right now!”
“It’s no good, Kate,” David said. “It won’t work.”
“You coward!” she screamed at him. “Are you going to let all those people die?”
“It’s an impossible story. No one will ever believe it, especially when it comes from hijackers, huia poachers and kidnappers.”
“We tried to escape yesterday because the anthrax strike was about to happen,” said Bill. “It’s now a day later and what are we doing to stop it?”
“From what Stan and Bill have just told us the Hollow Mountain base must be impregnable, with sensors, radar and probably one of the most advanced systems of electronic warfare in the world, not to mention a fleet of highly armed helicopters and biological weapons?”
Kate took off her glasses and looked at him the same way as she had at the end of their conversation on One Tree Hill. “Really, David – aren’t you going to fight Goliath?”
CHAPTER 39
It was a mutiny. Kate had called him a coward. She was right in that he was placing his own and his party’s safety before the lives of the people of Rotorua. Could he and his party live with that?
There was a long silence. He looked around at them. Their faces, even the face of Tom the pilot, gave him their answer. “It’ll be safer after dark,” he said, “but do you think you can find your way there, Tom?”
“It depends on the moon. The route is as shitty as it gets.”
“We’ll guide you. Tane and Stan and Bill have been through the gorge,” said David. “And this time when you ring your boss, tell him that we’re going into the Waitoa but keep it to people he can trust.”
“How much do I tell him?” asked Tom.
“Tell him everything. We need all the help we can get.”
Tom managed to get his base from their ridge-top camp at 21:00 hours on Monday 24th January.
At ten o’clock that night the full silver moon rose over the fearsome horn of Devil’s Peak. In the great sweep of the Milky Way the stars twinkled brighter than any stars David had seen. The moonlight filtered through the trees, painting the leaves with a magical silver sheen and making ghostly luminescent patches in the forest clearings. In the unearthly stillness of the night the moreporks sounded and resounded. Far down in the valley he caught the low and distant roar of the Raukawa Falls.