Shah was soaked with both oil and water. He used a shirt sleeve to mop his face clean before positioning himself just behind the ambulance men, to help keep the dock clear. ‘Back, back,’ he ordered in a parade-ground voice, pushing the small crowd that had re-formed away from the stretcher. More stretcher-bearers ran by, heading towards the weeping man who still clung onto that headless corpse. Two Sandline troopers fought through the crush and began using batons to push the onlookers back towards dry land.
‘Miss Jules,’ croaked the Rhino. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’
‘I’m so sorry, Rhino,’ she said. ‘I should have stayed this morning until I’d warned you. But …’
He reached out one trembling hand to still her as the paramedics settled him onto the stretcher.
‘S’okay. A coupla scratches. Horn’s still attached. I’ll live.’
‘Move!’ shouted Dwyer before taking a grip on the stretcher handles and nodding to his colleague. ‘One, two, three - lift.’
They hoisted their giant patient with audible grunts. Shah moved quickly to take some of the weight himself and Jules took an awkward grip on the opposite side.
‘Cesky?’ asked the Rhino, looking into Jules’s eyes.
‘Who else?’ she answered. But he had already passed out.
*
She thought he’d be taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, which had developed an unenviable expertise in trauma surgery over the last few years. Hundreds of victims of the Bali Bombing in October ‘02 had been treated there, and later tens of thousands of evacuees from the fighting in Indonesia had fled to the city, many of them needing emergency care. The Rhino would have been well looked after up at Royal Darwin. Instead he was loaded onto one of the US Navy helicopters and lifted away.
‘They’ll take him out to the
‘He
‘There you go, then. He’ll be right at home.’
But it wasn’t his treatment she was worried about. Both Jules and the Rhino had reason for putting thousands of miles between themselves and the US after getting out of New York. She watched the chopper haul itself into the sky and turn south, heading for the Combined Fleet anchorage. She assumed the ship’s doctors had also gained a lot of unwanted experience at treating burns and blast injuries over the last few years. But the Rhino wouldn’t want to linger in the sick bay.
‘Miss Julianne.’
She was surprised to find Shah beside her again. He had a knack for appearing and disappearing at will.
‘Perhaps we should leave,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Before the police secure the docks and begin to search for witnesses. It would not be convenient.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Best not to get caught up with the wallopers.’
They allowed themselves to be swept along in the tide of people flowing away from the docks, where some boats still burned. A small, secondary explosion boomed behind them, possibly a gas canister, panicking the crowd, who started to push and move with greater urgency. Jules and Shah cut across the flow, emerging onto clear ground, or at least less crowded, on the road that ran around the bay.
The buildings here were all new, and very spare in their simplicity. Fibro-cement panelling and external metal joists, giant roller doors and huge rumbling air-con plants. The area was zoned for light industry, and unsurprisingly it had been colonised by marine engineering firms and suppliers servicing the trawler and naval fleets. A few weed- choked lots still stood empty, but even they had been marked off for development, and Jules could see earth-moving equipment in some.
Shah’s vehicle, a Land Rover of battered but rugged appearance, stood in front of one such lot, partially blocking a sign that announced development approval had been granted to erect a battery manufacturing plant on the site. A young, fit-looking Nepalese man, another Gurkha, stood holding the rear door open for them. Jules wondered if Shah might want to change to avoid getting oil and sea sludge all over the seating, but he waved her in and followed without delay.
Their driver - Shah introduced him as Ganesh - moved quickly and gracefully around the vehicle, into the driver’s seat. They pulled away before she was able to fit her belt.
‘If this was Cesky, it is best we not linger,’ said Shah. ‘He will have men watching the dock. They will not move openly with so many witnesses, but they will note our presence and Mr Ross’s survival. They will regroup and try again.’
She didn’t need telling. After blundering into the ambush Henry Cesky had set for them in Manhattan, they’d narrowly avoided another in Galveston, Texas, where they’d holed up to count their losses and plot the next move. Jules had hoped Cesky’s influence would be marginal in Texas, what with him being such a buttboy of the Kipper administration. But she’d been wrong. He didn’t need influence. He just needed reach.
‘I have a compound out near the airport,’ said Shah. ‘It is secure. We should go there. Ganesh, call ahead to Birendra. Have him send men to meet us as soon as possible.’
The driver acknowledged the direction with a very military ‘Yes sir’ and fitted a hands-free earpiece to his mobile phone.
‘Birendra is still with you?’ asked Jules. ‘The same Birendra?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. He is my second here. A good man. Now, do you have any idea who Cesky is using? Does he have his own men or just contractors?’
‘Cut-outs, I’m sure,’ she replied as they swept onto the ring road that encircled New Town. The crowd on the edge of the red-light district was heaving now, spilling out on the road. ‘The guys who tried to take us in New York were hired out of Mexico. Or, you know, what was left of Mexico. That freakish Commando Barbie chick who saved our arses said they were hitters from one of the old cartels. In Galveston it was a couple of cashiered army guys, and the chap who tried to shiv me in Sydney last week was a Romanian. A nobody, really. Just some hard man providing muscle for the Russian maf down there.’
‘Not so hard now, however?’
‘No. Not so much. Dumb, and dead mostly. What about the guys who tried to hit you, Mr Shah? Any luck tracing them?’
He frowned. ‘I am afraid the men who planted the bomb at my home did not survive their incompetence. One died on the spot, the other in hospital. Not by my hand, I assure you. I wished very much to talk with them, but they were under guard. I assumed a business rival hired them, perhaps even a PMC - Sandline or one of Blackwater’s franchise operators. They have been pressuring smaller security firms like myself to fold our business into theirs. There has been violence, but nothing on this scale. I do not think the police would stand for it, even as powerful as the private contractors are. Until you contacted me, Miss Julianne, I would never have considered this Cesky character. To be truthful. I had forgotten him. After all, he did not make the voyage with us from Acapulco.’
‘And that’s his issue,’ said Jules. ‘Hard to believe a bloke who’s done so well out of the last few years would faff around like this just to settle an old score. But that’s his nature as I understand it and …’ She paused, wondering how best to put this.
‘Yes?’
The Land Rover grunted as Ganesh took them onto the Stuart Highway, heading north, and picked up speed as they passed the headquarters of the Free Port Development Authority, the real power in the city. A huge, soaring structure of blue and gold glass that was somehow narrower at the base than up on its top floors, it reminded Jules of a rolled-up newspaper.
‘He lost a daughter,’ Jules began. ‘She didn’t make it to Seattle.’
‘I see,’ said Shah, his face unreadable. ‘Did she die in Acapulco, in the collapse?’
‘No. They were on a refugee boat with about a hundred or so other Americans. It wasn’t much of a boat. Not like the
‘I see,’ Shah said again.
‘Oh God, Shah,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘You remember what it was like. We
