ducked when the motor yacht exploded, dropping to the rough, non-slip pontoon deck, closing her eyes and breathing out as the blast wave ripped over them.
Julianne was too late. She retained a shutter-speed flicker of memory, an image of the Rhino consumed in the explosion; of a woman sitting nearby, filleting fish, beheaded by a chunk of bright steel shrapnel. But no more. Nothing that might give her any hope that her friend had survived.
She’d come such a long way to warn him, just to fail in the last moments. The thunder rolled on through the hot, muggy early afternoon and small pieces of fibreglass and twisted chrome rained down on the deck around her. A large cinder fell on her neck and burned the exposed skin. She yelped and swiped it away, the sudden pain jerking her back into the moment, after shock had threatened to numb and dull her responses.
‘Quick, we must hurry, Miss Julianne.’
She heard Shah’s rough voice as though muffled by many layers of cotton wool. His grip on her upper arm was firm enough to be uncomfortable, as he dragged Jules to her feet and back to reality. Acrid smoke stung her eyes and she could taste diesel fumes at the back of her throat. Hundreds of birds screeched and swooped overhead. She coughed as she tried to take a deep breath. Her head swam and she was afraid she might lose her balance and tumble into the oily water.
The Nepalese soldier urged her forward, pushing her past the grotesque scene of a man hugging a headless female corpse and wailing as if to call her back from the dead. Boats burned and the heat roiling off the inferno seemed to shrink the skin on Jules’s face. She squinted and raised a hand to her eyes. A useless gesture. She staggered on anyway, but Shah had left her behind - he was running into the conflagration now, leaping onto the deck of a blazing cruiser, bounding across and diving into the water. She heard the splash but nothing else, as a secondary explosion drove her back.
Voices. Some shouting. Others screaming in pain or horror.
She stumbled over the leg of the crying man. He had spooned himself into the back of the dead woman and they were lying as if in bed. He was moaning in a way she’d never heard before. It looked as though he was trying to bore his head into her back.
She apologised for tripping over him, immediately struck by the banality of her mumbled ‘Sorry’ when measured against the bloody ruin of the crater where the woman’s head had been separated from her body.
‘Oh God …’
She vomited, reaching for a hand-hold as the contractions doubled her over. Finding nothing to grab, Julianne hugged herself and set her feet to steady her balance while she grunted and heaved. She heard boots pounding towards her and men cursing. An outboard engine coughed and spluttered into life somewhere between her and the marina office, a small shed at the end of Gonzales Road. When she was certain she’d finished retching, she searched for the source of the noise.
A small, unpainted motorboat - ‘tinnies’ they called them here - shot out into the bay with two would-be rescuers on board. One steered while the other pointed ahead. They were moving quickly enough to lift the front of the boat well clear of a small bow wave.
Men and women appeared on the dock in small groups, most of them from within the cabins of their boats. There were a lot of Americans, she noted. A small refugee commune. Some ran off immediately, heading for shore. Others tried to prevent the fires from spreading, producing small hand-held extinguishers and battling the flames with whooshing plumes of white foam. A siren warbled very far away, then faded. Jules gathered her wits and moved back from the terrible scene of the man and his dead woman.
An empty berth allowed her an unobstructed view of the bay, where she saw the two men in the runabout helping Mr Shah wrestle the Rhino’s body into the boat. The former sergeant of the Gurkhas was a strong man, but the channel was deep and the Rhino was no midget. The tinnie rocked so far one way then the other she thought it might be swamped, but they managed to drag him on board after a struggle.
Jukes wondered about crocodiles - or were they alligators? She’d heard they were all over Darwin’s waterways. She peered into the mangroves on the far shore, imagining giant carnivores launching themselves into the murky water and speeding towards Shah.
An invisible fist squeezed her heart as the old Coast Guard chief raised his hand to grip the forearm of one of his rescuers. He was alive … Bloodied and burnt and probably broken in parts, but alive for now.
Julianne turned and ran for the marina office, dodging and elbowing past the gathering crowd. Some of them had mobile phones and she could hear the calls for emergency crews going out, but she had to do something herself. Perhaps irrationally, she figured that a call from the marina management might get fire crews and ambulances dispatched more quickly.
The small shed was empty, the door open and the last of the cool air pouring out into the sultry afternoon. There wasn’t much to the set-up. A counter, a chair, a very old computer and three metal filing cabinets. A map of Darwin Harbour covered one wall, and pictures cut from fishing and hunting magazines had been taped up to most of the other surfaces. An old land-line phone was off the hook and beeping on the counter. Jules hung it up and dialled emergency, having to think for a second of the number they used here. She half expected to hit an engaged signal but the call went through to the dispatcher.
‘What service please?’
‘Fire. And ambulance!’
‘Location?’
‘Oh …’ For an infuriating second her mind went blank. ‘The marina. Gonzales Road Ma -‘
‘Units are en route,’ came the clipped reply. ‘Please clear the line.’
The call cut off, leaving her with a dial tone.
She heard choppers a few moments before any sirens, and shading her eyes against the glare, she picked them out, flying up from the south. They were grey and looked very much like the helicopter that had lifted them out of New York.
Military then, she thought. Probably off that huge carrier in the port.
Although it was possible that one of the private military companies was responding. She knew they had contracts for emergency response as well as border and city security. The fierce glare made it difficult to pick out details, though, until one of the helicopters flew across the sun and she spotted the US markings on the other.
Fire trucks and a small fleet of ambulances arrived, horns blaring to clear a path down Gonzales Road. Behind them, she saw police cruisers and a couple of black SUVs she recognised as belonging to Sandline Security. The first responders shook themselves out, with the ambulances and fire engines pulling into two distinct laagers. Brown- shirted police officers in wide-brimmed cowboy hats threw open the doors of their vehicles as an amplified voice blared out of roof-mounted loudspeakers. Hundreds of spectators were now pouring in from New Town to watch the show, many of them holding drinks and food, taking shots with phone cameras.
‘Clear the area. Clear the area immediately. Go on - get out! This area is dangerous.’
Firefighters in yellow coveralls and heavy flame-retardant gear leapt from their bright red trucks and hurried to unload equipment with fast, practised movements. Jules ran to the nearest ambulance and collared the two men who emerged. One of them carried an old-fashioned stretcher. His name tag read Dwyer.
‘This way. Follow me!’ the Englishwoman ordered, inflecting her voice with the same command imperative her father would use for running off debt collectors. ‘There are casualties down this way. I was just there.’
‘Go on, then, love. We’ll follow,’ said Dwyer.
The brown-shirts and Sandliners were coordinating their efforts to clear the dock of gawking onlookers. The Sandline mercs, who stood out in their urban-grey camouflage coveralls, were no rougher than the cops, but Jules could see people moving out of their way with a far greater sense of urgency. She ignored them. She was safely associated with the paramedics now. For a moment she worried that she mightn’t be able to find the small motorboat that had gone out to get the Rhino, but as the crowds parted and began to move off the floating docks, she saw Sergeant Shah carefully manhandling the Rhino up on the decking. The American’s clothes were bloody and burnt and one arm was badly singed. Half of his hair seemed to be missing, but he was conscious and seemed to be trying to help his rescuers.
She bade the stretcher-bearers to follow her and led them down, ignoring the cries of any of the other injured. They weren’t her concern.
‘He got blown right off the boat that exploded,’ she said, as the paramedics moved swiftly to take over, thanking the civilians who’d pulled him out, but letting them know their work was done.
