In his dying moment he rolled forward onto the thing he had grasped and the last thing he ever felt was the pain as it thrust against his stomach.
CHAPTER 44
“Rewi’s last stand, eh?” said Johnny as he looked at the fort desperately thrown up at the mouth of the Waitoa Gorge.
Tane had known the spot, and Stan and Bill had bitter memories of their recapture further down the gorge on their desperate attempt to escape and warn people. At the entrance to the gorge there was a grassy flat and above the flat a low mound rose above a high bank. Around most of this hillock the river curved in a wide arc. On the landward side, on the slopes of the mound, they had built a high barricade. A row of the trees which covered the hillock were marked and used as uprights where they stood. The gaps between them were filled with fallen trees and branches, and the remaining standing trees provided a sparse cover. The two Arawa helicopters had been flown up and stood inside the fort so that they could be used for aerial defence.
“Ake! Ake! Ake!” chanted the men with the tattoos as they made openings in the barricade for their 303s.
David looked at his watch. It was just after 12 on Wednesday 26th January.
“Look up there!” Kate called out. “It’s a helicopter and it’s heading away.”
David put down the log he was carrying and followed Kate’s pointing. There it was, about a thousand feet up, not coming towards them but flying away from the top of the Hollow Mountain,.
“It’s heading west,” said Tane.
“It’s a Black Hawk,” said Tom.
Stan joined them. His face was ashen. He looked towards Johnny and the possum hunters. “Have you told them?”
“Johnny,” said David “We think that helicopter is carrying anthrax. It’s a biological disease. It’s heading…” his voice shook “…we believe towards Rotorua.”
“Those blokes going on holiday?” said Dick.
“The bastards!” said Johnny.
Tom started to move towards his helicopter. “I’m going to give it a go,” he said.
Johnny called out. “Not fast enough to catch up. And it would be suicide too.”
“We must do something,” said Kate.
Johnny was grim-faced. “Tom, we’ll both go up. Follow me and cover me, but if I get shot down, will you ring Katarina and ask her to phone this fulla.” He took Tom’s hand and wrote a name on it.
High up above the Waitoa, Johnny did not follow the Black Hawk. Instead when he was high enough, he tried the radio, silently grateful that his system was not on National Grid supply. “Thank God you’re home. This is the most urgent call I’ve ever made. I want you to ring Sergeant Matthew Piriaka at the Rotorua Police Station. Don’t speak to anyone else. Now get a pencil and write this number down, please. When you’ve contacted him, please call me back.”
He thought marrying Katarina was the best thing he had ever done. He had told her the full story, but she had been calm, just as if he had asked her to put something on the shopping list.
“Johnny, I’ve made contact. He believes you. There’s only one person he can ring, and he’s ringing him now.”
“Thanks, sweetie.”
“Take care, Johnny.”
At 12.15 Johnny and Tom were back at the fort and Johnny looked serious. “Matthew Piriaka says there’s a man who may be able to help us and he’s ringing him.”
“Unless that helicopter is intercepted, they’ll all be dead in two hours,” cried Kate.
“I’ve done all I can,” said Johnny. He and Tom went over to Dick Burton and the possum hunters and they all stood with their arms around each other. “We’ve all got wives and families there.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kate.
Johnny broke away and shouldered a tree trunk. “Let’s get this pa finished.”
Tane looked out towards the Hollow Mountain.
Long magical caves plunging deep into the heart of the earth, glistening white vaults from which hung slender stalactites, floors which grew stalagmites in many-shaped sculptured artistry, soaring caverns fan-vaulted like medieval cathedrals, underground cataracts echoing unseen in deep chasms. A miracle wrought over thousands of years by the primeval forces of water and rock, a mountain whose soaring cone and verdant forest cover concealed a pristine beauty, an incomparable taonga.
Why did it now tower above him, dark, obscene, evil, mocking, defiling and terrorising the land from which it sprang?
Ravished the taonga, broken the tapu, trodden down the mana and the wei of the mountains.
Instead, the curse.
Why had he come back?
They were all going to die – and it was because of his discovery.
Behind him in the fort he heard a full-throated haka beginning. It sounded unbelievably heroic.
12.20 p.m. As David looked out from the fort, despair clutched him. The anthrax was on its way. They could not stop it. No one would believe such an impossible story.
Worst of all, it was his action in refusing to listen to Tane three years ago that had signed the death warrant of the people of Rotorua. But it was not just the people of Rotorua who would die. It was the people who were with him. Dick and Johnny Matiu and the possum hunters who had come to rescue them. Tane, his greatest friend. And Kate – she who had stood by him, encouraged him, and shared all the dangers with him.
It was strange, but he felt especially bad about Kate.
Why hadn’t he stuck to his research project? He would have achieved his ambition and become a professor. Now it was too late. His career was ruined, and so were Kate’s and Tane’s.
Why was he thinking about careers anyhow? Not only his career, but his life was almost over.
He looked over the shingle flat. A hundred metres away he saw the fringing trees alive with moving jungle green figures. He saw the flashes of the sun upon the metal of the guns which they carried. He wondered how many. Could be thirty or even fifty? He saw three Black Hawk helicopters hovering a few hundred yards back.
Two kilometres away loomed the Hollow Mountain, the perfect, the impregnable terrorist base. Its sides, its high bluffs could never be assaulted. Inside was an invisible honeycomb of caverns with down below an underground exit to the coast and above an aerial exit with hangar and launch pads and decks.
Kate approached him.
“We haven’t a hope,” he said.
She smiled. “That’s all right.”
“Should I surrender?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference.”
He shuddered. “I suppose not.”
“I should never have started on this thing.”
She smiled again. “Yes, you should.”
12:25 hours. The commander looked at his watch and stroked his ginger goatee beard impatiently.
Colonel Peter Van Ruyter had been Director of Army Intelligence working under the Government in South Africa. Because of certain incidents he and his particular army squad had found it advisable to depart the country. Since then his expertise had found a ready market among the unstable dictatorships and the ravaging revolutionary armies of warring black African states, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, depending on the money. At last his formidable reputation had attracted too much dangerous attention, and he had had to leave Africa altogether.
He had no illusions about the kind of men under his command. They had been cooped up so long that they were likely to go berserk when they came out of the Mountain. They would especially enjoy dealing again with those goddam trampers who had been strung up over the Raukawa Falls and who had somehow managed to escape.
“Calling Control Room, Colonel Peter here, awaiting orders.”
There was no reply. He listened carefully. In the background he could hear an unusual whining noise rising and falling.